A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  Without hesitation, and by now brimming over with joy, Alice grasped it. She couldn’t believe how things had turned out. She had made the doctor better.

  ‘Now, the quickest way is down here, but it’s very steep with lots of loose bits of chalk, so keep your eyes peeled. We’ll be very quiet in case Madam is spying. Stay close to me.’

  ‘But this is the way Eleanor went.’ Too late Alice remembered that she wasn’t supposed to know. ‘I think.’

  ‘Be very quiet. We don’t want her to hear us,’ he whispered. ‘And I mean, if she appears, I’m only taking you home. She can’t be cross.’

  Mark Ramsay and Alice descended sideways down the steep winding track between the thick bushes of gorse and blackberry. They passed only a few feet from where Eleanor was crouching, deep in the undergrowth. As she heard their footsteps she shut her eyes and held her breath. But as they went by, she dared to lift a branch to see where Alice was going. What she saw made no sense.

  She slumped back against a bush, settling into its armchair comfort, shifting until the springy branches finally stopped poking into her back. She didn’t know what to do now.

  One, two, one, two.

  She told herself the steps had surely been one person walking, and this is what she would later tell the policeman. She also said she had kept her eyes tight shut so she hadn’t actually seen Alice. If Detective Inspector Hall had realised that Eleanor was lying to him about hiding in a hedge by the lane, he might have guessed she was making up other things too. As it was, although he didn’t trust the scruffy little girl who was more like a boy, he had nothing concrete to go on.

  Eleanor’s ears were pounding and to stop the sound she scrubbed at her hair and shifted about. After a few moments it dawned on her that there was no point in hiding. Alice wasn’t looking for her any more. That much had been clear. She came to her senses; there was no time to waste.

  Thrusting aside brambles, she slithered along the floor of the leafy tunnel on her stomach until she reached the path. She stood for a moment, unsure whether to go down or up. Either way she risked being seen. Did it matter?

  Then movement to her left caught her eye. There was a white shape like a giant flower on one of the bushes some yards back up the path to the Tide Mills. As she got nearer she saw it was a giant butterfly fluttering hopelessly in dying throes, too weak to disentangle itself from the blackberry thorns. Eleanor stumbled towards it, tripping on chips of chalk and nearly falling; her feet had pins and needles from sitting for so long.

  The butterfly was a white handkerchief. She pulled it off and put it to her nose. The familiar sharp tang turned her stomach. There was embroidery on one corner, and Eleanor knew without looking what the letters were. The handkerchief might have been a coded instruction because it galvanised her into action. She knew what she had to do. In Eleanor’s mind she was doing it to save her mother’s life. In reality Isabel, at that moment curled in a light doze on her bed, was in no danger.

  Eleanor plunged back into the dense bushes on her hands and knees, pushing deep through the small tunnels in the undergrowth. To prevent herself from hurtling down the steep slope, she held tight to the stronger branches and skidded downwards. Eleanor was reckless as thorns ripped at her skin. Soon bright beads of blood dotted the scratches. After a few minutes of shoving along, with her face close to the dry baked earth, she came out into blinding sunlight. She was yards from a sheer drop of about six feet down to the beach. Efficiently she scootered backwards on her bottom, then rolled on to her stomach and inched over the edge feet first, feeling for toeholds. There was one, but as she trusted her weight to it and searched for the next one, it gave way in a spray of chalk. She shot down and crash-landed on to the shingle, bruising her knee and jarring her ankles.

  She heaved herself into a sitting position, relishing the pain as part of the massive task of slaying the monster. Her palms were stinging. She fought the urge to cry without being able to articulate what had made her miserable. It was what had always made her miserable. At the time, she thought she was alone with her pain, but over thirty years later she would see, without words being exchanged, that Gina had also suffered. What might have unified the sisters, drove a wedge between them. They stopped inviting friends to stay if the friends had not already stopped wanting to come. Eleanor had always thought Gina was okay; she had her horses.

  She wiped her forehead with the handkerchief and frantically cast around as she tried to recapture the heady feeling of one of her imaginative games. But she could not. This game was real.

  The beach was enclosed by a chalky outcrop at one end and a pile of rocks at the other, that few people ever climbed. When the policeman asked her to recall details of that day, Eleanor had assured him the beach was empty. A rusting boat, slouching dark and sulky against the sky, interrupted a stretch of pebbles that dropped in terraces to a thin slip of wet sand at the shoreline. She told him that it was a cloudless day full of colours – yellow, blue and red – and didn’t mention seeing anyone. But by then she had said they had been playing hide and seek in the lane, so it would have made no sense to mention the beach. Eleanor would say she’d gone to the Tide Mills after Alice had been missing for about an hour. She told the police she had decided to look everywhere since Alice wasn’t in the usual places.

  This meant of course that Eleanor couldn’t tell the policeman that the beach was the last place she had seen Alice alive, nor could she tell him that Alice had not been alone.

  Doctor Ramsay took Alice along the sand where it was wet but the ground was firm. The seawater frothed up close to their feet. She wanted to suggest they go higher up where the sand was dry and there was no chance of getting wet. But he knew what he was doing. Glancing back she noticed that the sea was already where they had been walking, and the lapping water had washed away their footprints.

  He told her that soon the tide would come in and the old ship they had passed, with its hull stuck deep in the shingle, would vanish because water would pour in through the portholes and engulf it. He said they were getting out just in time. Alice hoped that Eleanor hadn’t chosen to hide inside and this made her enquire:

  ‘What about Eleanor?’ She was worried. It was wonderful to be free of playing daft games, but even Doctor Ramsay had said the Tide Mills was dangerous and so although Eleanor could swim in pyjamas she might not be safe.

  ‘Oh, she’ll be fine. It’s you I’m concerned about.’ He let go of her hand for a moment to stroke the back of her neck. His fingers were warm and they tickled up and down the way the nice post office lady’s did. Her Dad would have been rougher. Once again, Alice unconsciously compared her parents with the Ramsays and was frustrated with her Mum and Dad for falling far short of them.

  They reached the steep mountain of rocks at the far end of the beach and Alice was dismayed at the prospect of climbing them. Jagged boulders with sharp corners and few places to hold on to piled high against the sky. Doctor Ramsay would expect her to be as nimble as his daughter. Her mouth was parched and the hot sun pressed down on her head, burning the back of her neck where his hand had been.

  ‘This is where I carry you. Let yourself go limp.’

  Doctor Ramsay came towards her and, putting his hands underneath her armpits and clasping her tightly, he hoisted Alice up easily into the air like a rag doll. She hung over his shoulder, her head dangling downwards, her arms swinging, nervous of touching him. She could only think of her skirt riding up and blush at the awkwardness of being so close to him as his hand gripped her thigh.

  ‘Hold on to me, it’ll be easier then,’ he gasped.

  Alice dared to place her arms around his neck and then to clasp his hips with her knees. She began to relax as it became clear that he wouldn’t drop her on to the rocks and let her get hurt. He jumped quickly and easily back and forth as he found a way up that wasn’t obvious from the beach. When they got near to the top she dared to lift her head and look around.

  In the distance, on the bushy hi
llside that led to the Tide Mills, just where there was a chalky ridge that dropped to the beach, she was sure she saw a figure. It was hard to focus and the person melted into the background when she tried to make it out.

  ‘Don’t move, we’ll lose balance,’ Doctor Ramsay gasped.

  She held him tighter. If the movement on the hill had been Eleanor watching, then this was Alice’s moment of triumph.

  Once they were on the other side of the rocks, he lowered Alice down with great care, making sure that her skirt was straight and that her hair was spread out around her shoulders.

  ‘Not far now. But we must make sure no one sees us, so be ready to hide if I tell you and keep very, very quiet.’ Alice was overjoyed. This game, although similar to most of Eleanor’s as it involved spies and hiding, was much more fun.

  They made their way along a track beside the flint wall that marked the northern boundary of the Tide Mills village and was parallel to the railway line. Most of the wall had crumbled away and was only about a foot high, but in stretches it was still the original six feet, topped with rounded terracotta bricks. With the tall brambles on the other side of the track, at these points they were in a cool damp tunnel. They had to walk in single file because the foliage had encroached up on the path to the wall. Doctor Ramsay went in front and every now and then he would pause to hitch branches up, so that they didn’t flick in Alice’s face or lash her knees the way they had when she had been out with Eleanor. Her Mum was right. He was kind and thoughtful.

  If the wall had been lower, they would have seen the tramp before he saw them. As it was, ducking around a tangle of branches they almost fell over him.

  He was worse than in Eleanor’s descriptions of him, which at the time Alice had assumed she’d invented. He was exactly like one of Eleanor’s monsters. He was taller than Doctor Ramsay, with clothes so filthy and ragged that Alice couldn’t make out where they began or ended or what colour they had ever been. His head and face were covered in matted hair: long grey straggling strands fuzzed around his shoulders and were draped over a bald patch on his head, not like hair at all. He was blocking their path, with his flies undone, peeing against the wall. Alice had only ever seen a man doing this once before when she had accidentally gone into the toilet when her Dad was there. But he had had his back to her and they had never talked about it. The tramp was practically facing them and Alice stared at the arc of bright yellow liquid splashing against the flints and running in a rapid stream over the ground towards their feet.

  ‘What the Hell do you think you’re doing?’ Doctor Ramsay’s voice was no longer kind. Alice shrank back as the two men confronted each other. The tramp didn’t move until he had finished, his eyes on Alice throughout. Alice had expected him to be frightened but he started to laugh, his cracked lips curling back over blackened stumps.

  ‘Get out of the way, you bastard.’

  When Alice’s Dad got really cross he went red, which until this minute Alice had thought was the most frightening it was possible to be. To her dismay, the tramp carried on wheezing. He turned from the wall, shaking something in his hand as he advanced on them, all the while talking in a long growl that didn’t make sense. Doctor Ramsay gave him a shove in the chest that sent him reeling against the wall and he sank in a heap into the nasty liquid puddling at their feet. He didn’t move or speak. Grasping Alice’s hand in his, Doctor Ramsay guided her past what now looked like an old Guy waiting for a bonfire. Alice noticed with relief as she stepped around him that he had stopped smiling. Soon they had left the tramp behind, and there was no one but them on the path.

  ‘Are you all right, Alice?’ Doctor Ramsay was irritated and not so nice.

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘Now we do really have to be careful that no one else sees us. We don’t want that happening again, do we?’ Alice presumed from this that the tramp had been her fault and nodded firmly. She didn’t know what else to do to make amends except to go on being herself, which he had seemed to like before.

  Mark Ramsay was leading Alice back to Charbury along a route that few people had used because it went only to the White House. Because of this, it would be a couple of days before the police got round to searching it. By the time they did, the tramp had gone.

  Ahead they could see the high garden wall of the White House. Then Doctor Ramsay stepped off the path and pushed his way through some bushes.

  ‘Come this way.’

  He brought her to a rusting gate in the garden wall. It was cloaked in tangles of thick green ivy. Alice was astonished. As she came nearer, she saw that the wrought iron depicted an idyllic rural scene with all the animals of the countryside. At the base of a spreading tree she spotted a badger, and a hedgehog, while up in its branches was a tiny wren and a goldfinch. Doctor Ramsay bent down to her and made her follow very carefully the direction of his pointing finger.

  ‘No, up a bit, D’you see? To the right of the butterfly.’

  Right at the top, looking out at the hills that formed the curve of the gate was a little man crouched over an easel.

  ‘He’s fixed forever painting the landscape. Look carefully. What he is painting hasn’t changed over the last two hundred years.’ Doctor Ramsay straightened up. ‘Let me show you properly.’ Very gently, making sure her dress was straight, he lifted her high up, past the level of the gate, past his shoulders so that she was looking down on to the top of his head. Then she looked beyond the gate, at the thick canopy of the trees. There was a hole not much bigger than a dinner plate through which Alice could see the downs veined with white streaks of chalk exactly like the shapes wrought into the gate. Sloping light green grass was spotted with darker green blobs for trees. Doctor Ramsay lowered Alice back to the ground.

  ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ She sighed. Invested with Eleanor’s imaginative powers, Alice knew the gate was the entrance to a magic land visible only to those with the password. Doctor Ramsay’s next words proved her right:

  ‘This is the secret way into my garden. I have the only key.’

  He slipped his hand into his trouser pocket and brandished a bright silver key. Alice came closer to him as, still smiling into her eyes, he inserted it in the lock. It turned easily and the gate swung open. He ushered Alice through. They were in a small clearing, sheltered from the blazing sunlight by the tall trees growing around the edges of the garden. It was cool and damp and quiet except for the occasional echoing chirrup of a blackbird far above them. There was a rustle – a baby rabbit broke cover and hopped quickly off into the undergrowth. Alice was overjoyed; she had stepped into Bambi. Doctor Ramsay had transformed her life.

  ‘I’d like to live here for ever and ever,’ she confided to him.

  ‘Be as quiet as a mouse. I know you can.’ He was being nice again.

  They tiptoed around the tree trunks following a zig-zag route. Beneath their feet the ground was soft. It was carpeted with pine needles, chips of bark and spongy moss all draped in snaking tendrils of ivy that had crawled around the base of the trees.

  A heavy scent made Alice drowsy and filled her with a rush of optimism. She gave in to a succession of happy associations: building a snowman with her Mum and Dad; piggy backs on her Dad’s shoulders; making fairy cakes with her Mum on a cold winter afternoon. And most of all: the flower expedition with Doctor Ramsay.

  Then she saw it. It was the most exquisite rose she had ever seen. A brilliant white, it reminded her of a giant snowball. Even her Dad didn’t grow such big ones. Doctor Ramsay pulled the branch with the rose down towards her and standing on her toes, Alice buried her face deep into it.

  ‘Boule de neige,’ he murmured in her ear.

  ‘Snowball,’ Alice returned promptly. She had come top in French last year. Suddenly she knew she wasn’t a bad girl after all. She closed her eyes. The rose’s petals were cool and firm on her cheeks like a cat’s ear. She filled her lungs with the insistent smell as she imagined it really was a snowball, cold and thirst quenching
on this boiling hot day.

  As she opened her eyes, she gasped. There were roses all around them, great nodding white flowers like beacons in the dark, secret place where Alice was positive that Eleanor had never been. Their branches intertwined with the ivy to form an impenetrable wall of foliage; untrimmed and untamed. This was a proper garden.

  Alice saw where they were. Up until now, being with Doctor Ramsay had shed a different light over everything, rendering it strange and exciting. Now Alice recognised the Ramsays’ lawn, although she had never seen it from this angle before. To their right was the willow tree where she had sat through several horrible tea times, and beyond that the gate to the river where Lucian tried in vain to catch fish. The house was on their left, and now Alice could acknowledge its close resemblance to Eleanor’s dirty old doll’s house. Now that she had Doctor Ramsay, Alice could admit to herself that she was jealous of the doll’s house. She had never seen anything so magnificent. So when Eleanor had proudly explained that it was exactly the same as the real White House, Alice had assumed an air of indifference. So she had never fully appreciated that it was indeed a precise replica. Now as she stared up at the solid grand house, three floors high not including the attics above, standing proudly on a sprawling lawn, it seemed less forbidding. With Doctor Ramsay there beside her, the White House was nothing but a toy.

  ‘Thank you very much for bringing me to your secret place. It’s the best I’ve ever been to.’

  ‘Oh, this isn’t it. Just wait and see. There’s more.’

  Alice gazed up at the windows. Apart from the ones on the top floor with the bars, which she knew were the playroom, all the windows were open. Then Alice saw that the middle window on the second floor was shut, with the curtains closed. Alice guessed this was Mrs Ramsay’s bedroom and assumed she must be having one of her lie-downs. As they were about to venture out across the lawn, Doctor Ramsay put his hand on Alice’s shoulder, keeping her still. Not that she would have gone anywhere without him. Lucian was running out of the back door and was struggling across the lawn hampered by all his fishing equipment. The Ramsays were always in a hurry.