A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  Eleanor spent little time in the flat. After years of being cooped up like a prisoner she could not bear to stay indoors longer than was necessary. She had to be out and she had to keep moving. She left early each morning to tramp miles through London, never returning until the evening. She would cross and re-cross the Thames, pausing on Hammersmith Bridge by a plaque in memory of a man drowned one Christmas in the freezing waters below while rescuing another man. She would climb the steps of Hungerford Bridge and wait in the gloom for a smile without a face that she now saw only in her dreams. Often she veered impulsively down side streets, hurrying as if chased, down alleyways, into subways, cutting corners off palatial Victorian squares to emerge on to busy rushing streets. She strode along the Euston Road, and faltered on Eversholt Street at the point where one day a woman would be killed trying to stop thieves stealing her handbag. She stayed at the kerbside through several traffic light changes on a corner of Wood Lane, where a woman cyclist had been crushed by an articulated lorry. She trudged through the oozing green river mud that slimed the shoreline at the Bell Steps in Hammersmith, where on Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding day a young mother had been murdered and her killer not found. Eleanor stepped on pavements trodden yesterday by people who were dead today or would die tomorrow in a distracted bid to join up the dots and become whole.

  Each night she traced the day’s route in her London A to Z with a red biro. Soon she had covered most of the pages with the crouching creature shapes of her journeys, each one a fine thread leading through a dark forest. She would open the book at random and retrace the ink line of a day’s route. As her pen flitted along each high road, detoured around each crescent, or moved with precision down a broad tree-lined avenue, she recalled her walking thoughts: the weather, the passers by. Eleanor’s life was recorded in the London street atlas. It was her secret diary written in a code that was impossible for others to crack. Until one evening, forced into the Underground by a flash storm, Eleanor would accidentally leave it on a westbound District Line train, where it would be found by someone with a mind like her own.

  On Fridays, Eleanor would came back early to catch Jane before she left the estate office. Jane made bearable the teeming, screaming traffic along Newington Butts and the urine-scented lift in Wood Green shopping centre. A good genie, there to make the most modest of wishes come true. Jane hadn’t cared if Alice was Eleanor. She liked her whoever she was.

  During the day, Eleanor imbued her private London with her unarticulated hopes of their new friendship. After Alice vanished, Eleanor had found it impossible to keep up her existing friendships and, burdened with secrets, made few new ones. When she had absented herself from her old life, she cut off all contact with the people she knew. Now she was terrified she had forgotten how to have a friend of any kind.

  As her pen completed the shape of each day and ended back at the Old Kent Road, Eleanor would dare imagine that their cups of coffee in the estate office, and more recently glasses of wine after work in her flat, were inching her back to sanity. She knew Chris had been right. She must be mad.

  At weekends Eleanor returned to Isabel at the White House. The two women watched television, cooked elaborate meals and shopped in Brighton. In between, they played end-to-end games of Scrabble and Racing Demon.

  After the trip to the Tide Mills, Chris was willing to go to the White House but, to Eleanor’s disappointment, would insist on returning to Kathleen’s cottage at night. To everyone’s astonishment, Chris embarked on riding lessons with Gina. She agreed to learn to drive with Gina’s husband, who her new grandmother called ‘Jon-the-Footrest’ without humour or apology. Chris planned to save for a car and take Kathleen out for day trips. Kathleen no longer searched for Alice. She stopped watching the tapes. Chris knew there was something Kathleen hadn’t told her.

  It was only that morning, when Kathleen had brought her a cup of tea and stayed sitting on the side of her bed while she drank it, that Chris had found out what.

  Until tonight, despite her secret intention to find out the truth about Alice, Chris had never explored the White House. She had become immersed in university work and when she visited she preferred to stay in the warm kitchen with her Aunt Gina, with whom she had formed a bond that puzzled them both. This was the first proper opportunity Chris had had to examine the room that had been her mother’s childhood sanctuary. Besides, she had tired of the Millennium Eve party her grandmother had impulsively decided to hold and craved some quiet.

  She was diminished by the implacable walls of the model house topped with its brutish chimneys. She blanched, with the same sinking feeling as once when she had to wait for the Queen, being driven down Museum Street in a glass-topped car with a crest on the front, preceded by a fanfare of outriders blowing whistles. Chris had stood on the kerb, spare-parted by such significance. The doll’s house was as grand, proud and sure as royalty. And like the Queen, Chris knew its face intimately although she had never seen it before.

  She moved in a circle away from the house, edging towards the salt-streaked windows, the back of her neck crawling like sifting sand. As an old woman, when it was too late to change anything, she would think back to this last night of 1999, the detail still sharp, and identify it as the last point when she might have turned back and left everything alone. Then she would remind herself that it was already too late.

  It was the largest doll’s house Chris had ever seen, over four feet high and as deep. A mass of boxes jumbled to the brim with toys, wooden bricks, a plastic truncheon, cricket bats, tennis rackets, tennis balls, footballs, straggling dressing-up clothes nudged at the house walls. A bicycle wheel with a flat tyre had been propped against a sagging space hopper with a rip in the side; broken spokes had caught under the eaves of the house, lifting up part of the roof. Circles of plastic from an old Spirograph set littered the floor. A child’s black patent leather court shoe poked toes first from beneath a crate filled with scratched and dented cars, bits of Lego and racing green Meccano. Shelves piled with books and games climbed the alcoves by the fireplace. A tired one-eyed bear with moth-eaten fur had retreated to the top shelf with an Action Man, khaki legs doubled up to his chin, collapsed on the bear’s lap. They were crumpled refugees from a happier land. The broken and tawdry state of the toys and books, sprinkled with a shading of dust and scattered with dead leaves (how did they get there Chris wondered), signalled not a room abandoned by children since grown up, but the debris of a childhood dumped without notice.

  Chris felt uneasy. She was sure no one had seen her leave the party, but she was equally convinced she wasn’t alone. She scanned the room, her head pounding with rising panic. There was nowhere to hide. No curtains on the windows. No furniture to creep under. It was the alcohol.

  She backed into the windowsill. Daunted by the stillness, she was fearful of making a sound, and from the spurious safety of the wide seat she studied the replica of the White House. The ‘real’ house was her family home, although she wouldn’t admit kinship. Peace after the noise downstairs was like the intense presence of someone holding their breath and keeping very still. Chris wished she hadn’t come upstairs. The doll’s house glared back at her, its sharp lintels and gaping windows arched and callous.

  The Ramsays never stopped talking, declaiming their opinions on food and cars, in brash tones, glugging wine into glasses, breaking into songs from musicals – Oliver!, The Sound of Music – with Lucian conducting and Eleanor singing the loudest. They kept conversation going with a myriad of petty subjects; their words leapt and jumped like fish in a net, slippery and shiny, a mass of possibility. It seemed to Chris, armed with the perspicacity of the young adult, that not much moved on: each time she went there they said and did much the same things. At meals she was put next to her mother, yet despite their lavish attentions she remained an outsider. Chris thought it peculiar that neither Mark Ramsay’s death, nor the fact that her mother hadn’t been back there for years, was ever discussed. Mark Ramsay’s inquest had ret
urned a verdict of ‘death by misadventure’, because, coupled with the fact that he had no history of depression, the master cylinder in his Rover had failed and this would have disabled the brakes. Chris dared not say what she thought about it to Eleanor because until today Kathleen wouldn’t discuss it.

  Now she knew why.

  Chris was fascinated by her Uncle Lucian, who would spring out of his seat and dash away to open wine, shine glasses with a cloth, and clatter around in the cutlery drawer for a bottle opener. Her Aunt Gina was trapped in a loveless marriage, so Chris felt a bit sorry for her. Lucian should be good looking, but he wasn’t, his nose was too large and his chin too prominent, yet he compelled the eye. Jon-the-Footrest, in pink socks and garish bow tie to make him more exciting, actually was attractive, his features even and clear; but Chris found his looks instantly forgettable.

  In the Ramsay world Chris was a determined foreigner who had unwillingly picked up the basic language but refused to learn the idioms and colloquialisms to enable her to understand it. She made only feeble bids to decipher signals. She didn’t want to belong. She realised that they must think she fitted in when she observed how the Ramsays were with true outsiders. They closed ranks and despite snapping each other’s heads off and betraying no signs of affection to one another, they did look after each other. It was with solicitous care that Lucian gave Gina a glass of wine or Eleanor followed Isabel into the dining room bearing an enormous dish of mashed potato, a tea towel slung on her shoulder in a way that declared: we do it this way and nothing will stop us.

  That night a breeze from the garden had flickered the flames in the giant candle holder at the centre of the table, the low light making the group seem to converge and conferring on them an impression of camp fire camaraderie that found echo in the boisterous chatter. Chris looked askance as they lapsed into votive silence while Isabel plunged her ladle into a steaming cauldron of Boeuf en Daube. Each Ramsay sniffed the air appreciatively as she released the rich smell of herbs and garlic laced with red wine that whirled Chris back to the flat in the Old Kent Road.

  Home.

  She was sickened. So it was an old family recipe. The rush of love was saturated with betrayal. Her appetite was deadened as she studied her mother brimming with wit and chat that must be further signs of mental illness. Chris had seen only too clearly that Eleanor was more at home here than she had been with her, and hardened her heart. Bit by bit the Ramsays had hauled Eleanor back in. With a stab of jealousy Chris imagined the juices, whose subtle flavours they were all going mad about, slicking the dining room walls and dribbling down the face of the dead Judge and oozing between triangles of shattered china and a smashed existence.

  As she chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, Chris issued a silent warning: when she had finished with them, there would be nothing but bones.

  If she gave in and reached out to her Mum, maybe accepted a drink, or asked for more potato, Eleanor would have her back. Sometimes Chris considered it might be worth it if only to prove she was the grand puppeteer nimbly twitching her mother’s strings. But she resisted, knowing it would only make her misery worse.

  Now she knew what she had to do.

  The Ramsays did not extend their brand of affection to ‘Jon-the-Footrest’. Chris felt oblique sympathy for Gina’s husband, despite the incredibly stupid things he came out with. She winced at his ponderous explanations of boring subjects (load bearing beams, hi-fi speakers, or his earnest and sonorously dull deeds for the Rotary Club). She perceived that despite his ever-busy efforts, Jon would stay an outsider. He talked and laughed as loudly as the Ramsays, but in the wrong places. He fussed around his wife, when it was obvious Gina hated fuss of any kind. He shadowed her with outstretched coats, or staggered after her in garish weekend jackets, weighed down with huge new gifts for the kitchen, when Chris knew Gina hated cooking. He drove too fast up the drive with horn-tooting panache in a churn of gravel, the chrome on his Lexus gleaming. As he whistled his train-signal arrival, the family sighed and braced themselves.

  The Ramsays guffawed at jokes that flitted as invisible moths around the room, every word brushed by fluttering wings of private meaning. As Chris spied on Jon over a skyline of wine bottles and candles at the dinner table, she divined with a wash of sadness from the way he sat forward humming ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’ under his breath, that he too knew the family would never accept him. She felt his anguish, as she knew full well the Ramsays couldn’t be dismissed as irrelevant.

  She worked out that the Ramsays dealt with the big things by devoting themselves to the small things. In this way they had dealt with Mark Ramsay, who although dead was not gone. His presence was more pervasive than that of the Judge. Mark Ramsay wasn’t just in the dining room, he was everywhere. Chris guessed that everything they did was done in the way Mark Ramsay would have approved.

  She sat with her knees under her chin on the windowsill in the playroom. It was deep enough to curl up in with a cushion and a book, but solid vertical bars clamped to the outside wall rudely extinguished this idea. She gazed out into the darkness. A thick swirling fog had enveloped the house earlier that evening, turning the newly arrived guests into spectres gliding out of the inky darkness with freezing wispy trails clinging to their clothes. Now she could see nothing except her own ghostly reflection. She remembered watching scary films with her Mum at home. They would be cuddled up on the sofa and protest in fake terror when someone excused themselves from the brightly lit room and went off alone with a candle down a corridor lined with suits of armour and wood panelling. No wonder they ended up strangled in a cupboard or sprawled over a roll top desk with a knife in their back. Her Mum joked that the music always gave it away and the change in tempo should have warned them. Now Chris had done the same. Here she was alone, in a cold dark room at the top of a creaky old mansion. She could have stayed at the party with her Kathleen and her Mum. Perhaps by now she had been missed, perhaps downstairs her Mum was asking where she was.

  Beneath her feet a Turkish carpet, ruckled and shredding, was spread over black painted floorboards. Wallpaper, probably once chosen with excitement and optimism, drooped limp and peeling, and was patterned with brown stains edged with lines like the gradient marks on a map. The design of flowers intertwining in vertical rows had all but gone, the original colour was impossible to tell. Between the skirting board and the floor was a gap wide enough for a child to slip its hand in. Chris fleetingly thought it a good place to secrete a diary, letters, private thoughts. She should check it. Puffing out a wistful sigh, she breathed in a smell of damp, and shivered.

  She smacked her hands together and marched with ‘coming-to-get-you’ purpose over to the doll’s house.

  Getting warm…

  She hurled away the bicycle wheel and kicked the space hopper; it flumped on to the rug and with a hiss resumed its exhausted pose. Shoving up her sleeves, she heaved aside crates and boxes, clearing a space on each side of the house. She insinuated herself between the wall and the house, easing the house further out into the room. It snagged on the carpet and there was a ripping sound. She had torn some threads on the Turkish rug. Who would mind?

  She grudgingly admired fine detail on the model house, the tiny lion above the porch, and unable to resist, crouched down to peep through the windows into rooms with doorways offering a partial view of dim passages. Cutting through the centre of the house like a spinal cord was a replica of the intricately constructed staircase that wound up to the top of the real house, complete with the banister snaking atop spindly balustrades. Minute gold stair rods gripped thick carpet. Leaning in closer, unwilling to open the front and lose the illusion, Chris saw that the pile on the stair carpet had been flattened by a heavy or constant tread. Eleanor had been right, people really had lived here.

  The house was nailed to a sheet of hardboard streaked at the front with scraps of felt that speared between islands of dried glue. This was all that was left of the lawn that Mark Ramsay h
ad accidentally destroyed. A detective verifying personal statements as fact, Chris also noted the missing dining room windowsill. It was all exactly as her Mum had described. Chris had never seriously believed such a house could exist. It was a toy within a toy, reducing her to a doll.

  Finger-sized dolls dressed in clumps of velvet and cotton – the material stiffened with globules of glue – lay strewn in the rooms like victims of a gassing. There was one in the dining room and three on a bed in the room that had once been Gina’s. Only the lady doll had ‘died naturally’ and was covered with a blanket in the master bedroom that in real life overlooked the lawn with the willow tree.

  Chris went through the house with forensic care. The miniature playroom had the same wallpaper as its life-size counterpart, which turned out to be eggshell blue with pink flowers clustered around dark leaves. This version of the playroom was furnished with only a cradle, three marbles – giant glass spheres – next to the fireplace and a set of crudely made books, each on a different alcove shelf. There was the same number of shelves as in real life. Chris was daunted by the acute replication; she almost expected to see a tiny version of herself. Then it came to her. There was no doll’s house in the tiny playroom. This Judge, who was meant to be so clever, had missed an opportunity.