By the time she had the baby – a girl she called Chris after the oboist who she had loved more than anyone – Eleanor was getting flashbacks. Her memories were like dreams and at first she could dismiss them. But they began to make too much sense. Eleanor had seen Alice near the halt at the Tide Mills and was outraged that she wasn’t looking for her. She would get her.
She told Chris that as the unbidden pictures came more often, she hadn’t been able to go on seeing her family. She had found a room in Holloway. At twenty-one, Eleanor had inherited a trust fund set up by Judge Henry for his heirs and this small allowance was paid straight into her account. This income coincided with giving birth to Chris. So as the truth of what happened on that June day was pieced together out of the fragments of a sunsoaked past, Eleanor changed her name to Alice Kennedy after the Senator with the dimple in his chin who had been shot the day after Alice vanished, and with her small baby, she too disappeared.
‘I took away her life. If I became Alice, she would not be dead.’
‘You didn’t actually think you were her, did you?’ Chris had thought her Mum was intelligent, despite her illness. ‘An eight-year-old might just believe it, if they were a bit bonkers, but you were a grownup. Mrs Howland was searching for her, you hadn’t brought her back at all. What did your parents say?’
‘I was Alice. They weren’t my parents. Until today I hadn’t seen my mother since you were a baby.’ Eleanor appeared just to register this, she went on with less energy: ‘I had to be punished.’
‘So we should all be grateful.’ Chris snorted.
Eleanor had found the flat in Bermondsey and, keeping her address a secret, cut herself off from everyone she knew. This wasn’t difficult; after Alice vanished, she only had one friend – the oboist – and she assumed he wouldn’t miss her.
‘You have never known Eleanor Ramsay. You knew Alice Kennedy. You made Alice real.’
‘But how real did it make me?’
‘You’re my daughter. I love you more than anyone. That’s all that matters.’
‘You think?’
‘You said that an eight-year-old would have thought it possible to become someone else. I was eight when I became Alice. Everyone wanted me to be Alice. No one wanted Eleanor. Mrs Howland was stunned after Alice went. Not eating, not talking, and then she got this obsession about seeing me. She livened up. No one could talk her out of it. So I had to go there a week after Alice went.’
The day before the Ramsays were to go home to London, Mark Ramsay came to tell Eleanor that Alice’s parents wanted her to come to tea. He had stomped into the playroom more like a doctor than her Dad and stood over her. She was shielded from him by the open frontage of the doll’s house. They avoided looking at each other. One huge foot was planted against the drawing room window, trampling on the fuzzy felt lawn. It snapped off the window sill, and when he lifted his foot the green material stuck to the sole of his shoe and ripped away. Before Alice vanished Eleanor would have protested, even pushing him, directing his attention to her sign: Keep off the Grass. She had rubbed the felt in a pile of grass cuttings behind the garage so it smelled real. But as her Dad had not spoken properly to her for days, she decided not to make things worse by pointing out the rule about the grass. Alice would have said it was because Eleanor was bad. She said bad things happened to bad people.
Who are you to tell him off? He’s a doctor; he knows best.
I don’t know, who am I?
Doctor Ramsay took Eleanor to the Howlands’ cottage for tea. Neither of them said a word on the very short journey from the White House to the tidy cottage by the village stores. Eleanor had sat in enforced primness in the back, Jeremy Fisher-feet dangling over the leather seat. Although she was alone, Eleanor sat where she always sat when the family went anywhere, in the middle. Gina and Lucian had the window places, Gina because she got car sick, and Lucian because he was going to be a doctor. Usually if she went anywhere without the rest of them, Eleanor would clamber gleefully over to one of the windows, wind the glass down and stick her face into the wind. That day she kept quite still like a good girl and waited to arrive with clean hands and an unclear conscience. She could see her Dad’s eyes in the driving mirror. They flicked back and forth like a cat as he reversed the car round at the front of the White House then roared out of the gates. Then they whizzed up the hill to where Alice lived.
Everyone became bothered about Eleanor before she left for the tea. Her mother had brushed her hair so hard she made her eyes sting and she sneezed five times, which made her brush harder. She had to put on the disgusting fairy dress they had made her wear to a recent wedding. It scratched under the arms. Gina had been instructed to lend her black, patent leather shoes with poppers. Gina could no longer fit into them, but normally she never let anyone else wear her shoes even when she couldn’t wear them herself. She had done so only on the whispered condition that Eleanor kept them clean. This was the first time Gina had properly spoken to her since her furious return from the stables.
‘How can I get them dirty? Is their house muddy?’ Eleanor had forgotten to whisper back, so her mother heard and snapped:
‘Eleanor! This is not a joke.’
Eleanor had not been joking. She had given up making jokes.
Instead she shouted things inside her head so they could not guess where it came from. All the while she sat neatly with her mouth tight shut. She would not look over at the kitchen clock, where instead of the hands telling the time there was Alice’s white face smiling virtuously.
The Howlands were waiting on the doorstep as the car drew up. She had expected them to be cross like everyone else and glumly assumed she was going to be told off about Alice. They were like two matching vases placed on each side of the front door with hands clasped together and to her surprise they acted pleased to see her. Suddenly Eleanor knew they were the couple who had left her in Friston Forest. These people were her proper parents and seeing that she was unhappy, they had claimed her back. She felt a rush of joy that was like the start of crying and the start of Christmas all at once.
She grabbed the fruit cake Lizzie had baked – that she was to say was her present – from the front seat, and trotted up the path holding it out in front of her like one of the three kings bearing a gift. This image was so vivid to Eleanor she had to resist dragging each foot the way the boys who played the kings in the play did. It was giving in to an impulse such as this that always got her into trouble.
Instead of answering her when she said ‘Hello Mr Howland’, as she had been told to, Alice’s Dad, who Eleanor rather liked, did a strange clucking thing with his throat, and pulled a funny face with his mouth halfway up his face. She laughed – he was good at faces – but glancing back saw her own father’s face darkly forbidding and stopped as if he had slapped her.
Her father was staring at Mr and Mrs Howland, who he obviously thought were frightening creatures. For a minute Eleanor expected him to scream with terror because cords stood out on his neck like they did to people about to be murdered in scary films. She prepared her fingers to block her ears.
Later, she decided she had made this bit up.
‘Come in, Eleanor, tea’s all ready.’ Mrs Howland bent towards her and putting out a hand, stroked the top of her head with short sharp pats the way boring guests did with Crawford. ‘And you too, Doctor Ramsay. Stay. The more the merrier!’
The two men stood with the gate between them looking back at the little girl in the immaculate party dress as she skipped obediently into the house holding hands with the nice woman. They watched Mrs Howland as she snatched up the role of mother and hostess with eager fervency.