‘Whatever. Until the next lie.’
‘I know you’re cross.’ Eleanor could see that Chris sniffed insincerity in her clumsy choice of words. Sometimes the truth didn’t speak for itself.
‘I don’t think you do.’ Now Chris too addressed Mark Ramsay’s grave.
‘I never meant to hurt you. Quite the reverse.’
‘‘Quite the reverse’ oh, lah de dah. She’s got new words to go with the new name. Who do you think you are to lecture me!’ Chris gulped for air and added with self-conscious triumph: ‘In fact who do you think you are? Does anyone know? Or was it just me you lied to?’
‘Chris, please…’ Eleanor couldn’t sound as upset as she felt. She had grown too adept at being someone else.
‘It’s only stupid-git-features here, who thought her Mum was Alice Kennedy, the Agoraphobic of Bermondsey…doh! So who are you today? Elea-nor-Ram-say!’ She put on an upper class intonation, as she spat out the syllables.
Eleanor shrank back, unable to disguise her fear of her own daughter. Chris realised with a jolt that she couldn’t remember when she had last seen her Mum out of doors. Eleanor was dazzled by the sunlight. Chris pictured her Mum behind the partial screen of the lace curtains or with her kindly features softened by the light of the gas fire. She was still holding the strange handbag that had confused Chris earlier. She was an indecisive figure, the dainty handbag incongruous because Eleanor wasn’t collected enough or tidy enough for its understated elegance.
Eleanor’s legs were unsteady and her attempts to hide this were pathetic. Of course, her Mum was frightened to be outside. It must be torture to her to be so exposed.
No, that was another story. Yet anger briefly ebbed as Chris saw her Mum did genuinely seem to be upset. She would part her hair, numbering the different coloured flecks – brown, gold, blonde, no silver at all.
You’ll never be old to me.
‘I will go if you want me to. I could wait for you at the station.’
‘Where did you get that?’ Chris spoke evenly.
‘What?’
‘You heard.’ Nasty now.
‘My mother…Isabel Ramsay gave it to me, just now. Your grandmother.’ A futile placation. The bag incriminated her. She couldn’t tell her daughter she had accepted it only because she had seen that Isabel hadn’t known what to do with her. She couldn’t explain that it had touched her that her mother had tried so hard to make a maternal gesture. Neither of them had been able to talk properly because they never had.
She had not told Isabel she had only come to fetch her daughter, after which she was going to leave again. Her mother had been so happy to see her, so that when she hadn’t found Chris at the White House, Eleanor had lost volition and had submitted to Isabel’s uncharacteristic stream of hyperbolic chatter that had culminated in the handbag. Isabel had snatched it off a pile of jumble in the utility room and thrust it into her hands. None of this could she explain to Chris.
Chris knew Eleanor tossed in the word ‘grandmother’ as stale bread to a duck and had noted her mother’s snap decision to stand her ground as Chris advanced towards her. She didn’t even flinch as Chris tore the bag off her, wrenched it open, ripping the gold clasp from the flap, and tipped it upside-down. The contents spilled on to the grass. Chris’s arm described an arc as she prepared to smash the bag down on her mother’s head, but at the last moment she hurled it over the top of the gravestones. It smashed through the branches, and in a shower of leaves landed in the wheat field behind the churchyard wall.
Her mother didn’t react and Chris was afraid of the blatant misery in her face. There was no satisfaction in defeating the defeated.
Who was this well-spoken stranger?
‘So are you just going to stand there?’ Chris demanded.
Eleanor scuffed a toe in the ground, kicking up dust.
‘I hate the bloody thing anyway.’ Eleanor did not sound convincing. After so long doing a good imitation of Alice, she had forgotten how to do herself.
‘Yet, you were happy to be given handouts by Mummy, and forget about me. Go there a lot do you, while I’m at school, or doing the shopping or the washing.’
‘It was for you.’
‘You got a stupid cast-off from your mother for me?’
‘No, I mean all of it. The going into hiding and changing my name. It was all for you.’ Eleanor regretted the trite words – too Alice. Except there was no Alice.
Chris sat up unnaturally straight on the bench, the muscles in her temples and jaw twitching. Eleanor desperately wanted to comfort her. She was moved by her child’s valiant effort to be unaffected. Chris had been thrown into the situation by her own mother.
Eleanor was stunned by what she had done. It had been a minute-by-minute thing with extraordinary consequences. With a dull and crushing recognition like a glimpse of death, Eleanor saw she had lost the right to Chris’s love the day she went to the Tide Mills with Alice. The soon-to-be-nine-year-old was too young to know she was stepping into Hell.
‘Let me get this right. I’m on a train going to Alice Howland’s mother to tell her that her missing girl was very much alive and living near the Elephant and Castle, and you’re sneaking out and running back to your real mother when she’s meant to be dead in a car crash!’ She finished with a strangled shout: ‘You were never Alice! You’re a liar. You fucking bitch!’ Chris had only ever spoken to Alice this way in her head. How good it would be to go back to the time when the only problem she’d had was how to tell her Mum that she’d had sex with a supply teacher and not had a period for five weeks. How innocent she had been to think that the arrival of her period signalled the end to her worries.
‘That’s not right,’ her mother protested.
Chris snapped her head round and Eleanor froze.
Chris looked down at the clutter of objects scattered in the rough grass. She loved them for the picture of Alice they eloquently portrayed. A nail file, a packet of tissues, a used foil of aspirins half hidden by a blue plastic packet with ‘Handy Shopper’ printed in slanting writing. Her diary had landed half open, its spine broken by the fall. Chris had given it to her for Christmas. She must have grabbed all this stuff before leaving, as usual thinking of every eventuality. Chris hadn’t thought of buying her a handbag, because she never went out.
They both knew Alice wanted the bag. They both saw Alice leaning over, pulling it up, and methodically replacing her things. Tidying up. She would want to check if the clasp could be saved and give the leather a buff with a tissue.
Eleanor didn’t care. The bag was too small and ladylike to hold anything useful.
They both knew that if Alice got the bag sorted, they could go back to Bermondsey and carry on as before.
But there was no such person as Alice.
‘So how was it then?’
‘When I rang you, you said you were with my mother. You have no idea what that did.’ Eleanor stole a furtive glance at Chris and emboldened by her stony silence continued:
‘I didn’t think of Mrs Howland. I assumed you were with Isabel Ramsay, I came to get you.’
‘So how come your name is Alice?’ Chris’s voice quavered.
‘People change their names. It’s normal.’ As soon as she heard the words, Eleanor saw her mistake. Unless she told the truth without excuses or expecting sympathy, Chris would go. Already it was probably too late.
‘Don’t patronise me!’ Chris was on her feet. ‘I know people change their names! What I want to know is why you did. You changed your whole life, don’t tell me that’s ‘normal’. You pretended to be a missing schoolgirl and lied to me, your own child. That’s if I am yours.’ She held up her hand. ‘There’s nothing you can say. I thought my grandparents died in a car accident. Me and Emma even went to that brewery where you said they were killed and put flowers there. I’ve always thought you were all the family I had.’