Lesley Thomson - A Kind of Vanishing

The banging shook the house. Isabel shuddered at the noise then snapped into action, stubbing out her cigarette in a huge speckled marble ashtray and checking her face in the mantelpiece mirror. She left the room, smoothing her stomach with fluttering hands. Eleanor chased after her, only remembering as she was about to take the stairs two at a time, to adopt her mother’s languid indifference.

When Eleanor reached the hall Isabel was giving what her children privately called her ‘too hot to touch’ hugs to a woman with dark hair in a green mini dress, who had the skinniest legs Eleanor had ever seen. Her Dad wore the saggy tweed suit her mother hated because it made him look ‘stodgy’. The suit meant he was in a bad mood and Eleanor felt helpless as she watched him shake hands with a man in a flowery shirt and tight yellow trousers who had a mass of long curly hair, making Eleanor think of an exotic bird. Her mother presented her face to the man to be kissed. They kissed on the lips and then Isabel briefly touched the man’s cheek, as if correcting a mistake.

Eleanor stayed on the bottom stair, hanging from the newel post. The man obviously didn’t know her mother hated to be kissed like that when she had her make-up on. She pulled a face and glancing at her Dad saw that he too had seen the other man’s mistake.

Soon Gina would appear, tottering like a doll on stilts in her new pointy shoes and there was a danger they would send Eleanor to bed. She kept still and hoped no one would notice her. Then Isabel beckoned to her:

‘Harry, you’ll have to say hello to my youngest. This is me at seven. To a tee. I’ll have to find a picture. Elly is the ghost of me as a girl, the others take after Mark.’

Years later, flicking through photographs, Eleanor would see quite plainly that she took after her father. The likeness was striking. Yet Isabel had always insisted that Gina had Mark’s eyes and that Eleanor had hers. It made her suppose that Isabel had perhaps loved her after all. But by then too much had happened.

‘I’m nine in thirty-one days.’ The words were lost as her mother’s voice soared, she was holding the man’s hand which was all right for crossing a road, but looked stupid indoors. She signalled urgently to her:

‘Darling, come here. Now! Come and meet the next poet laureate!’

Eleanor didn’t want to go near the man who in any case was staring at her mother. Isabel pulled her forward with a jerk and held her by the shoulders.

‘This is my last baby. She’s growing up far too fast. Don’t you hate the way they lose that puppy look? The best bit is over so soon.’

Eleanor tried to smile but his eyes were on Isabel so it didn’t matter. She kept still, in case her mother let her go. The man remarked that she had grown. Eleanor was about to say he had grown too, she had planned this would be a good answer for a question she was sick of, but the man was speaking to her mother so clearly their chat was over.

Isabel led the way up the stairs. The yellow-plumed birdpoet followed. Her Dad gave a slight bow to let the stick-lady walk in front, then without looking told Eleanor to go to bed, reassuring her that he would tuck her in. Eleanor looked to see if her mother had heard; if she had, she might let her stay up longer. The banishment was too early tonight. She was not to be at the party at all. She got the sick feeling that came the day after parties, so couldn’t answer when the lady commented how lucky she was to have such a kind daddy.

Eleanor loitered around on the landing outside the drawing room, hoping Isabel would appear and take her in. She could not know Eleanor had been told to go to bed. But the knocker banged again, so she gave up.

It was all over.

Tomorrow her mother would stay in bed refusing to be touched. Tomorrow things would go back to usual, except Isabel was crosser after parties.

Eleanor did not want tomorrow.

Things were different after the business with Alice. Eleanor’s parents never allowed her downstairs when they gave a party. Nothing was actually said, certainly Alice was never given as the reason. Eleanor just knew she must keep to her bedroom. At first she would sit on the top stair listening to the muffled music and laughter. Through the landing window she would count the double-decker B.E.A buses going back and forth to London Airport on the Great West Road. The noise swelled each time the drawing room door opened and she hoped it was her Mum coming to fetch her. It never was. Instead she had to be ready to rush back to bed when Gina floated up the stairs, walking like Isabel.

After Alice vanished, Eleanor dreaded parties. She wished that, like Crawford, she could escape out the back door until everything was over.

Alice was there. No matter what Eleanor did. Alice was there, smiling.

As soon as Eleanor clicked off the bedroom light Alice arrived and would not go. Eleanor tried everything to make her disappear. She jammed her knuckles into her eye sockets to shut out Alice’s smile, but as her eyes began to ache and sting, Alice’s disembodied head still hung in the spangled darkness like a Chinese lantern, her face swollen and peculiar. Now Alice had new powers. She made shadows glide around the room. Her skin was translucent white, the eyes a grey see-through jelly. The hair was solid like the bust of Beethoven on Lucian’s piano. Eleanor tried opening her eyes and staring hard to make Alice vanish again. This almost succeeded, but then Alice returned bit by bit, in the carved pattern over the wardrobe mirror. First two eyes, then the nose and finally the curly bit in the corner became a ghastly grin. Other times Alice floated like an escaped balloon outside the window where the moon should have been. Her bloated, gloating face lit up the room with a bluish light like Mark Ramsay’s surgery at the hospital where Eleanor believed she had once slept, although it may have been a dream.

Then things got worse. Alice came in the day too. She was there when Eleanor’s father shut the curtains in the evening, hovering in the fabric. Earlier, Eleanor had found her lying under the sofa, her face cupped in chubby hands. She was using all Eleanor’s secret places. Alice was spying without taking turns, which was not fair. She was hiding really well, for only Eleanor had found her.

After Alice didn’t come back from hide and seek, Eleanor’s parents kept the newspapers away from her. If Eleanor pattered into the sitting room when the news was on, they leapt up to switch off the television. Yet they didn’t work as a team. They disagreed about what to shield Eleanor from. They wanted to see the news themselves, so were unreasonably infuriated with her for causing them to miss it. Finally Mark took to ordering Eleanor out of the room. In the midst of this, both Mark and Isabel underestimated the resourcefulness of their youngest child. Simply by remaining single minded and alert Eleanor learnt to pick an erratic course through the fog that descended on the Ramsays after Alice went, to find out what she needed.

Alice’s disappearance forced the Ramsays to stay on in Sussex while the police interviewed Eleanor. The press got wind of this and so Isabel had barred her from going into Charbury and even from being at the front of the house where she could be seen from the window. She could go in the back garden because it was screened by a high wall, reinforced by holly bushes and trees planted by the Judge, a private man and, as the executions mounted, a paranoid one. Now his paranoia would have been justified, for journalists outnumbered inhabitants in the lane beyond his wall. Vans and cars were parked nose to tail along the verges leading from the station right to the church, ploughing up the village green.