A Kind of Vanishing

One

‘One… two… three… four… five…’

Later Eleanor would describe to the Scotland Yard detective how it had been her turn to hide and she hadn’t had long. Now that the counting had stopped Alice would come at any moment.

She heard a crack, a twig or the sound of plastic breaking. Someone was there. She squeezed through a gap in the bushes and plunged recklessly into the tangled undergrowth, wincing as thorny tentacles scratched her skin. Finally she nestled into a space, concealed deep in the branches.

Eleanor was glad to have got away from Alice, even for a few minutes. She was not enjoying playing with her. Eleanor usually invited friends down from London where her family lived, but that Whitsun all possible candidates had been quick to say they were doing other things. She wouldn’t have minded being on her own, but her parents were convinced that Eleanor, the youngest Ramsay and officially designated as a ‘problem’, would benefit from calm and mature companionship. The perfect solution had been Alice, the daughter of Steve Howland, the village of Charbury’s new postman. Alice’s family had just moved to Charbury from Newhaven, ten miles away, and she knew no one. She was understood to be sensible and well behaved, the kind of girl who would stop Eleanor being a nuisance or getting into scrapes. In the Ramsay family, Eleanor was the benchmark against which her brother and sister measured their behaviour and took their allotted roles. Gina was the eldest; at nearly thirteen already loftily occupying a different world to her siblings. Lucian was the only boy; he would be a doctor like his father, a self-imposed destiny, for his mother wanted him to be an artist. Then there was Eleanor, who talked too fast, got red and hot after playing, with a foghorn voice that heralded a slipstream of chaos wherever she went.

Eleanor Ramsay would be nine years old in 1968, although that day, Tuesday, the fourth of June, she was eight and counting the days – a vast twenty-four more – until her birthday. Her sister Gina had said Eleanor was too old for hide and seek, which ensured that Alice, who had been nine for three months and who always agreed with Gina, was a grudging, even obstructive participant.

Although Eleanor had hidden, she was upset at Alice’s treachery in stopping counting. Balanced on her haunches, she fulminated at the injustice. Eleanor set huge store in playing fair. She was reluctant to admit something bad in someone else, so it was with dismay that she silently formed the words.

Alice had cheated.

With her chin resting on bony knees, Eleanor crouched low and waited.

Since they’d met, only four and a half days earlier, Alice had tried to keep things ordinary. Eleanor was speechless when Alice said there were no robbers or ghosts, no dragons or kings and insisted they play hopscotch. She watched, dumbfounded, as Alice marked out squares in coloured chalk on the concrete by the swings in completely straight lines. After Alice had won five times in a row, she had made Eleanor watch her skip a hundred skips non-stop. She had put out a hand like a policeman barring the way when Eleanor quickly whispered, for someone might come, about the dangerous mountain ranges waiting to be explored and the child-eating monsters they must fight and vanquish. Alice’s voice came through her nose as she declared Eleanor’s scary jungle was a dirty green sofa and that she had done a project on Sussex and there were no mountains. Eleanor gaped uncomprehending when Alice had screamed ‘yuk!’ at the cat hairs on the cushions and the crumbs underneath. She would only sit on the sofa after Gina had flounced in and flung herself into a corner hugging a cushion, scoffing at her younger sister. Later Alice said she hated dirt and mess, implying Eleanor was to blame. Now as Eleanor stared up through the roof of criss-cross branches, half closing her eyes so that the shapes of light became a fuzzy kaleidoscope, she decided Alice didn’t know anything, whatever she said.

Eleanor had brought Alice to the Tide Mills village the day after they first met. Four and a half days was a lifetime to the nearly-nine-year-old, and now while she lay in wait for Alice to come looking, Eleanor could barely remember her life before she knew her. She pictured the many-levelled stretch of time, packed with evil witches, gnarled branches, and dark hiding places lurking with mythic murderers and strutting Sindy dolls with hairdos like Alice’s mother, with growing despondency. It was only Tuesday; she had at least four more days of Alice before they went back to London. Eleanor didn’t know how she would bear it. Her whole half term had been wasted. The Tide Mills village had been her last resort: a place where the ghosts of children now old and dead might lure Alice away from skipping and talking about dresses and dancing. It had been a big sacrifice for Eleanor to reveal her most secret place.

Eleanor would come to think of this decision as a mistake.

Every time Eleanor visited the deserted village, which was a quarter of a mile from the White House, she found something new: a 1936 sixpence, a perfume bottle, and one Christmas a great triumph, the discovery of the name ‘Herbert’ scratched into a wall in the communal wash and mangle house. The squat building had no roof, and rotting rafters let blocks of light slant across the walls, still lined with chipped and cracked white porcelain tiles. At the far end, in the shadow of a twisted pear tree – evidence of an orchard – were two bent and rusting mangles appearing to grow out of the chalk. Alice had hung back, arms folded, as Eleanor fervently related the tale of Prince Herbert’s four straining stallions. The magnificent beasts were, she informed her hoarsely, even now tethered to a huge ring fixed to the granary wall, eager to canter to far off corners of his kingdom. Alice had retreated out into the sunshine with a shrug as Eleanor paced out the scene, talking rapidly and raising her voice as her audience drifted away. In the end she decided to skip the story and get straight to explaining the rules: each time a hiding place was discovered they lost a life. They each had three lives and after that they were truly dead. The first one to die must give up.

The one thing that Eleanor would never forget was that she had described these rules quite clearly to Alice. When they had first played hide and seek last Sunday afternoon, in the lane near her home, Alice had spied on her while she was still counting to see where Eleanor hid. This had made Eleanor very doubtful that Alice would play properly this time. But that last morning, as they did exploring and excavating, because Eleanor was practising to be an archaeologist, Alice had been quite obliging, at least for the first couple of hours.

Whenever Eleanor talked, Alice ogled the sky with saucer eyes, doing peculiar things with her mouth. After only two days, Eleanor had spotted that when this happened, Alice was being Gina, using the same voice her sister put on to talk to her horse, where words did a kind of swooping. This gave Eleanor an uncomfortable feeling. A phantom Gina was there too. Most people tried to be like Gina. A fact that absolutely baffled Eleanor, who found nothing in her older sister worth imitating.

There was no further sign of Alice coming to find her. Eleanor pushed and patted loose soil into a comfortable hillock, as she considered how there was no point to skipping. Alice would get ready for what was in effect a Skipping Show with the studied care of the famous: tossing her long hair back Gina-fashion and tugging at her skirt to keep her stupid frilly knickers hidden. Eleanor wondered why Alice breathed so noisily: taking huge breaths as if she was suffocating.

‘I like coffee, I like tea…’

The matchstick legs in white socks had blurred, as the rope whirred round and round, slapping the ground. Alice never let Eleanor use her rope for anything except skipping, and certainly not for tying up bandits. It was new and clean and a present from her Dad. As she had dutifully watched Alice perform skipping feats in the village playground, Eleanor waited on the baking asphalt for a rescue party that never came.

Someone watching the two girls as once more they prepared to play hide and seek on that Tuesday might have guessed that apart from their age, they had little in common. One stood stiffly sentinel with reedy arms folded across her budding chest. Her pinafore dress was a primrose-yellow cotton column, while white socks with no wrinkles were strapped to the cut out figure by their paper folds. The other girl was recklessly boyish in a huge grass-stained shirt, with short sleeves that reached to her wrists. An observer might have frowned at the cropped haystack hair which stuck up at one side, imagining a mother’s neglect. It would be hard to make sense of this child’s erratic behaviour. She darted back and forth around the other girl, gesticulating urgently like a director allotting actors their strict space and choreography: leaping, jumping, pointing. An onlooker might have marvelled at the poise of the cleaner, party-dressed child, pale skin rendering her ghostly against the tumbledown buildings, as the goblin creature cavorted indefatigably. The pose of suffering tolerance endowed this child with calm maturity beyond her years.

Then the boy-girl belted away over the hill towards the sea leaving the Angelic One alone. Abruptly, she put hands to her face, an action that was heart rending until she began to count in a cooing voice with quavering tones that lacked conviction.

Eleanor could hear the echo of Alice’s voice in her head, although it must be ages since Alice had stopped. There was still no sign of her. She had pronounced each number with the hesitant chant of an infant class still learning to count. Eleanor pictured Alice’s words as jewels that – like Alice’s three Sindy dolls – she kept stored in a cupboard for special occasions. Eleanor always knew what Alice was going to say because her sentences had belonged to other people first.

‘My favourite colour is pink, what’s yours? My best dinner is roast pork. I hate girls who climb trees. When I grow up I want to be a nurse, who do you want to be?’

Eleanor had not known who she would be. Alice had made it clear she didn’t believe her by tutting and sighing. Eleanor was telling the truth, but to please her she finally lit upon Mickey Dolenz, which had disgusted Alice.

Eleanor never knew the right answers to Alice’s questions. She pondered now, one foot wedged against a tussock. How could Alice hate girls who climbed trees when she didn’t know all of them?

Eleanor stopped breathing and jerked her head up.

There was the unmistakable sound of someone walking on the path, treading quietly so as not to be heard. Eleanor shut her eyes to better hear the click of Alice’s shiny shoes on the flints. She could have seen her if she had lifted the branches, but with her eyes shut, Eleanor was cloaked with invisibility. The footsteps crunched past and faded away.

One, two, one, two.

Eleanor’s ears were pounding and to stop the sound she clapped her hands over them and pummelled away the memory. She slumped against a bush, relaxing into its armchair comfort, shifting until the springy branches stopped poking into her back.

She felt guilty for bringing Alice to the empty village again. They were playing illegally because their parents had forbidden them to go there. It was overgrown with tall weeds and overblown with untold dangers. Eleanor’s father had said the ground was subsiding and that eventually the whole lot would fall into the sea. There were rumours in the village of an attack there after the war, a child’s strangled body found at the bottom of the cliff and no one caught. Eleanor had taken all her friends there.

On the first day Alice’s mother had told them to play nicely on the village green where there were swings, and a lumbering roundabout that was hard to push and hard to stop. Eleanor hated the square of tarmac surrounded by yellowed grass, with no hiding places, dotted with benches for dead people whose names Alice said she knew off by heart. Skipping and hopscotch were the only things to do there, since Alice didn’t play football. Eleanor couldn’t skip, her legs caught up in the snaking rope, but Alice’s mother had said Alice must stay clean and tidy and not crumple her lovely new dress. This meant she refused to move around much. While her Mum was giving instructions, Alice had smoothed the cuffs and stroked her fancy dress with pointy pink fingers and, doing what Eleanor considered a stupid smile, had turned into the ancient Mrs Mahey warbling nursery rhymes with the infants in their school play.

‘…six, seven, eight, nine, ten, then I put it back again…’

Eleanor heard her holiday clang shut.

When she was at home in London, Eleanor would make up stories of perfect afternoons at the White House. Everyone would sit together in the shade of great-uncle Jack’s willow tree, planted after he was gassed in the trenches in the First World War. The sound of her father pouring tea, as she traced jigsaw patches of sunlight on the stained tablecloth – in her fantasies always piled with cakes – made her stomach buzz. Shutting her eyes and lifting her arm slowly, Eleanor could feel the weight of the jug of freezing lemonade, and the smooth curvy handle on her dead grandmother’s bone china teapot that was more like a friendly person than crockery. She knew her Dad felt the same way about it, although he never said. Instead he would tell her Mum they shouldn’t use it because one day they would break it. This would make her mother use the smile she could snap off suddenly like a trick.

‘This is supposed to be a home not a museum stuffed full of your dead relatives.’

Mark Ramsay was right, for one day the teapot did get broken. By that time, a morning over thirty years later as the sun shone brightly on a new century, so much was different that while the Ramsays stared dumbstruck at the smashed china scattered across the kitchen tiles, they felt nothing at all.

As Eleanor lay in bed back home in Hammersmith she would wander around the White House’s large garden, smelling the lawn just mowed by Leonard, the very old man who also did the grass in the churchyard where his wife had been ‘sleeping by the west buttress for forty years’. Tripping between the long rectangular beds, past the caged sweet peas, the nets weighed down by fallen leaves from the oak tree above, she would bury her face in her pillow to muffle the silence from the floors below. She would think of the newly dug soil and the scent of roses that her mother loved and by concentrating, conjure up the clinking of cups with chipped lips and knives with blotches like snowflakes on the blades. The windows were always open wide, tattered curtains ballooning out in the breeze like sails. Her parents would be laughing, her sister snorting like a horse, and her brother sprawled back on his tilting chair in fits at Eleanor’s jokes. By concentrating hard, Eleanor could give these vaporous figures substance.

The Tide Mills ruins belonged to Eleanor. She had never seen children from the village there and only once a grownup. Last holidays she had come across an old tramp in a torn donkey jacket, with long grey hair combed over his head like Bobby Charlton, waiting by the disused level crossing for an approaching train. It was because of the tramp that her parents had absolutely forbidden her to play at the Mills.

Last year when they were in Sussex for the summer, Eleanor had rushed straight down there while everyone was unpacking and unaware that she had gone. She trotted round checking on the state of the buildings. Once a grand house with a porch and three storeys, only a section of the ground floor remained of the Mill Owner’s home. There was one corner of the upper floor, as if someone had pared away the rest with a knife. A complete tiled fireplace was attached to the snatch of wall, the paper long gone, the dado had rotted to a stain.

Eleanor had traced the disgusting smell to a half eaten cat on the floor of what had been the kitchen. It nestled on terracotta tiles with coarse tufts of grass pushing between them. The lower half of the cat’s furry face was missing. As Eleanor knelt down, its eye sockets blinked and she tumbled backwards as a cloud of blowflies rose up around her. The carcass buzzed like a gigantic bee. A doctor’s daughter, she had meticulously examined the stiff matted body, poking into the dried fur with a stick, quite free of emotion. The floor was encrusted with oyster shells and tiny bones, coke tins, beer bottles, jagged bits of coloured plastic, cigarette ends and suspicious gobbets of tissue – several generations of rubbish that formed clues to lives long dead or now lived elsewhere.

Honeysuckle and goose grass grew up one wall forcing the remains of a window frame further from the brick. A low wall was all that was left of a row of workman’s cottages opposite the mill. Eleanor had run along the top, leaping over gaps for windows and doors. The cottage furthest from the sea, in the shelter of the granary wall, had survived. It was a Hansel and Gretel house with its little windows and low doorway. Someone, perhaps Bobby Charlton, had been in the front room. There were squashed triangular milk cartons and leathery banana skins all over the floor. The staircase was missing, so there was no way up. She heard skittering and scurrying as she crept inside. The glass had long gone from the windows. She thought of the house as a skull, a vacant home gaping out at the countryside. During that summer Eleanor had begun weeding, pulling at the stalks that thrust through cracks in the sun-baked flagstones. Her efforts at restoration were slow and haphazard. One evening she had picked out the prettiest weeds. Mrs Jackson had said that nothing was a weed if you liked it. It all depended where it grew. As Eleanor hopped and jumped along irregular railway sleepers in the track that used to run up to the Seaford and London line, she had paused to add scabious and red clover to a sweaty bunch of nodding dandelions and daisies to present to her Mum.

She had planted seeds at the back of the Mill House in a bit of soil she had cleared, unaware that a hundred years earlier a portly widower had taken as much pride in dahlias growing in the same spot. The next time she visited the ruins, Eleanor hurried to see if the seeds had sprouted and was greeted by a tangle of red and orange nasturtiums. She had never grown anything before and was ecstatic, but she had to keep quiet about it because she wasn’t meant to be there. Until Alice she had never shown anyone.

The tiny garden was her secret.

When Alice had seen the long thin mound with its straggling nasturtiums she had shuddered dramatically and pronounced it was like a grave. There was, she had crowed, absolutely no point in having flowers in the middle of rubbish. Also she had done nasturtiums at school. Whatever that meant.

Eleanor preferred the Tide Mills to anywhere because it was full of places to hide and make dens. She was never alone. As she sat on the worn front step of the cottage or trailed along the old railway line, she saw the shadows of what, until the extension of Newhaven harbour at the end of the nineteenth century, had been a thriving community of several hundred people.

Eleanor would hear the clanging bell warning of a train and then a fantastic silver locomotive would steam by, sneezing and puffing, with a handsome name like Alexander the Great or The Flying Horseman. There would be Summer Holiday trains, hammock racks bundled with suitcases and a rainbow jumble of beach things smelling of warm, soft plastic. The train would stop at the halt, with ‘Bongville’ painted in uneven sloping letters on a large concrete sign, breaking the country silence with a clattering of doors and bundling of cases, as the ticket barrier framed a parade of faces sporting a deathly London pallor.

Eleanor seldom reflected that she invented the most exciting bits of her life. The whimsical world in her head was real, the life she lived a dull perseverance in comparison. When Alice had insisted she was lying, Eleanor hadn’t understood.

Eleanor had in fact rarely been on a train. In June 1968, Doctor Ramsay drove his family down to Sussex in his brand new racing green Rover, which Alice had said made her feel sick when he had brought them home from the swings the second time they played together.

Until that June, when everything changed, the Ramsays had spent every holiday at the White House, a three-storey detached house fronted by a sweeping circular drive that was reached by entering through two huge wrought iron gates. The house had been built by Eleanor’s great-great-grandfather with money her mother said he got through slavery, just as Mark’s father, Judge Henry Ramsay, whose scary portrait hung in the chilly dining room at the White House, had made his money through hanging people. That made her Dad go on about how James Ramsay was rich because of his share in the Tide Mills and investment in Newhaven harbour and that Henry (he always referred to his father by his first name) had wanted to create a better world through the rule of law. The children would sigh and exchange looks because the history lesson about James Ramsay and the stained-glass-lamb-window in the church was coming next. To make the story friendly, Doctor Ramsay’s youngest daughter pictured James Ramsay as a white woolly lamb with her cat Crawford’s fluffy front paws.

This year seagulls had splattered the outside walls of the only remaining cottage at the Tide Mills with gashes of berry-red and scattered fluffy feathers on the rubbled floor, which had also made Alice feel sick. Fat pigeons jostled and clattered in the larder of the cottage, their wistful voices amplified in the enclosed space. Gorse and blackberry bushes, nettles and dandelions made it hard to walk along the pathways between the buildings. Lichen and moss had moved like a tide over the worn stone, which peeped out like bone through tissue in places where the ground dipped away. Once, ferreting in the undergrowth, Eleanor had discovered an iron key as big as her hand and, easing and tugging at it with a patience no one knew she possessed, had got it out from between the stones without disturbing the tiled floor of the Mill Owner’s hallway. It fitted the rusted lock of the outhouse door, but would not turn. She put it in her Box of Secrets.

The Box of Secrets came from South Africa, and was an unwanted present to her mother. The cedarwood was always warm and smelled of Saturday mornings perched on her Mum’s bed listening to snippets from Vogue or Nova and examining pictures of beautiful women. This image greeted Eleanor as she slipped the gold catch and opened the lid, and cheered her whatever her mood.

The secrets included three train tickets found in the waste paper basket in her father’s study, an ivory compact still with traces of rouge that had been given to her by an actress friend of her parents. A Victorian Bun penny, two farthings and the sixpence from the Tide Mills were wrapped in tissue paper and kept in a soft leather bag with a drawstring. Tucked in next to this was a silver case shaped like a plump cushion. It was lined with a nest of red velvet on which rested a tuft of grey fur from her rabbit, killed and mostly eaten up by a neighbour’s cat when Eleanor was seven. She had snipped off the fur from the leftovers. After this Eleanor promised herself never to mind things again.

Eleanor acquired her most cherished treasure a few days before meeting Alice. The brand new penknife had a sharp blade, and a fan of gleaming tools. She had stolen it from the gun shop where they had gone to buy a new riding hat for Gina. Eleanor had not known she was going to take the knife. Her hand whipped out when the man went to get more hats from the stock room. Once she held it, cold and heavy, she could not put it back. No one was looking as she slipped it into her pocket. Eleanor believed that the knife made her capable of anything.

Later she told the police she had the penknife with her the last time they played hide and seek. She realised too late that she shouldn’t have mentioned it because when they asked to see it, she couldn’t find it.

Eleanor kept the Box of Secrets under a floorboard in her Sussex bedroom; and when she couldn’t sleep in London would make a mental inventory of its contents. After the light was switched off, she waited for the hunched ghouls to become the chest of drawers, the toy cupboard and the wardrobe. Sometimes they never did. Then she composed a spell to lift her bed over London, and fly away across the Sussex Downs to Charbury where it was always summer. There she could lie and listen to the push and hush of the waves, tucked up safely. Eleanor never got back to London; she was already asleep as her bed landed by the sea.

That Tuesday Eleanor had said Alice could hide first. She had hidden ridiculously. As Eleanor reached ‘ten’ and started to search, she straight away spotted Alice peering round from behind the crumbling wall of the Mill House. Eleanor was relieved. She preferred hiding to seeking.

As warm breezes brushed the brambles of Eleanor’s hiding place, they carried the scent of lavender, wild roses and blackberries and bluffed around her like her Mum’s best hugs. She rubbed her nose to stop the tickle. She mustn’t sneeze and give herself away. She didn’t want Alice to find her.

Then after a few moments it dawned on Eleanor that there was no point in hiding. Alice wasn’t looking for her any more. That much was clear. Eleanor pushed aside brambles, and slithered along the floor of the leafy tunnel on her stomach, moving further away from the path. Thorns tore at her skin; soon beads of blood dotted the scratches. Eleanor’s mouth was dry. She was miles from civilisation. It could be days before she found drinking water. She had signed a pledge in blood. My mother will die if I fail. She had a new task and would return – like Odysseus (or was it Hercules?) – to the darkened room where Isabel Ramsay lay only when it was completed.

Isabel Ramsay was unaware of the swollen rivers crossed or mad monsters vanquished by her small daughter in her name. Eleanor would tiptoe into her bedroom against her Dad’s instructions and kiss the creamy, scented cheek. In Eleanor’s story Isabel was always glad to see her and leaping out of bed would tug back the curtains and gasp at the bright sun making elongated shadows across the lawn.

‘What is the time? It was morning when I went to sleep.’

‘You have been asleep over a hundred years, under a wicked spell.’

She would explain about spells.

‘After much trouble I have released you.’

‘That long? It seems like a minute. Thank you, darling!’

Then her mother would see the tea table with the white cloth under Uncle Jack’s tree. Her handsome husband and two other children would wave all together in a row. Hearty family waves like rainbows; a collection of cheery hats and bright summer clothes. Eleanor would lead her Mum out into the sunny garden, doing the slow, traily walk practised in her bedroom. She would give her Darjeeling tea in her favourite cup with the wafer thin edge.

After a few minutes Eleanor crawled into blinding sunlight. She was only inches from a drop of six feet to the beach. With a moment’s hesitation, she scootered around to face the other way and inched over the edge on her stomach, feet first, feeling for toeholds. She found one. As she trusted her weight to it and felt for the next one, it gave way in a spray of chalk and she shot down, and crash-landed on 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 she had to fulfil. Her palms were stinging. But she was alive. She wiped her forehead with her handkerchief, dashing the cloth across her face, the way her Dad did.

The beach was enclosed by a chalky outcrop at one end, and a towering pile of rocks at the other that few people climbed. When the policeman asked her to recall details of that day, Eleanor said 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 finger of wet sand at the shoreline. She told him it was a cloudless day full of colours: yellow, blue and red.

Chief Inspector Hall did not appreciate these vivid observations; the little girl’s stream of words made the stiff-suited man shuffle about uneasily on his chair. He thought that there was something strange about her and got stern when Eleanor told him she liked to paddle in the water, and wasn’t frightened of the tide returning because she had a tide-table book. He didn’t know any other little girls like her, and was especially irritated when she took this comment as a compliment.

Eleanor collapsed back on the stones, keeping her knees bent to avoid the scorching pebbles, with one hand flung over her heart, as the wound from the sword grew worse. She was badly hurt, but must keep going, she had a long journey ahead to find the Indian Amulet stolen from the King’s crown. She must return with it or her mother would die of the curse.

This last bit was based on reality. The day before, Eleanor had searched her bedroom and the playroom for the amulet given to her by Mrs Jackson, who used to live next door in St Peter’s Square. Without it Eleanor knew she too would be cursed. She had begun to suspect that Alice stole things. She had to find it. She had better find Alice first.

Eleanor particularly hated the way Alice said her name: in a sing-song voice not as a real name tripping off her tongue well worn and well loved, but like a thing held in delicate and disgusted fingers. Most people called her Elly; until Alice, no one had called her Eleanor unless they were cross, or a teacher.

The tide was coming in so she couldn’t go on to the beach, instead, she tramped back up the cliff path. She would go home through the Tide Mills.

The distant hoot of a train on the London line sounded across the fields. Now there were no birds in the sky and nothing moved. The day they arrived, there had been swifts but Lucian said they had gone to Africa. Eleanor wished she could fly to Africa whenever she wanted. She aimed powerful, accurate kicks at stones as she dodged and skipped back up the track. She was Georgie Best as she scored the winning goal.

If Alice was hiding, Eleanor considered it was really unfair. It wasn’t her turn. She chased up the six wooden steps to the short village street and began pacing from one end of the ruins to the other. She knew she was being watched, so she walked with her hands behind her back, like the Mill Owner checking the great wheels were turning in the deep pond under the arches of the bridge before going in for his tea in the big house behind the high wall.

She could forget about Alice and go on playing.

Eleanor tiptoed around the cottage and kicked open the back door. It swung inwards and crashed against the wall. Someone had oiled the hinges. A pigeon flapped down from a hole in the ceiling and flew past her, its wings breezing near her face. She kept perfectly still, listening to the silence. There was no sign of Alice.

She stepped back outside. Then she saw her. A figure was standing near the halt, half hidden behind the Bongville sign. Everything shimmered in the blistering heat so that at first the person and the tall thistles appeared to be doing a strange swaying dance. One minute they were all thistles, the next people. As she got nearer, Eleanor forgot that to be quite fair she should give Alice one more chance. She forgot that Alice had two more lives to go as she crept forward on grandmother’s footsteps, clasping her penknife. All she could think of was the huge task she had to accomplish if she was to save her Mum and release everyone from the curse. She began to count, in a voice loud and low:

‘Five… four… three… two… one… COMING!’

Two

Crawford disappeared at parties. As people came in through the front door he rushed out the back, leaping over the garden wall and out of sight. He never returned until it was over. Only Eleanor minded. She longed to show him off to the guests, more for the reflected glory she presumed being seen with him would lend to her, than for Crawford’s personal attributes. Once she had tried to make him stay by enticing him with food, but when he heard the door knocker he tore out of her bedroom and she was caught chasing down the stairs after him, her footsteps thundering, her face too red. Her parents particularly hated it when their children went out of control. Looking back at her childhood, Eleanor later decided that as children they had been expected to play the same role for Mark and Isabel Ramsay at parties as Crawford had for herself. They must shed different and flattering lights on their parents, the younger ones decked in Kids in Gear corduroy, Gina in her first Biba dress. Isabel had declared one party utterly ruined when she was forced to send Eleanor to bed in front of the guests.

When Eleanor blocked the cat flap, Crawford wriggled out through the small window in the downstairs lavatory. As each strategy failed, Eleanor got less scrupulous about her methods of keeping him indoors. One evening she trapped him inside a washing basket in the utility room, but felt ashamed, so let him go. It was fortunate for Eleanor that her efforts were unsuccessful. The production of Crawford, with his tendency to bite, at one of Isabel’s intricately orchestrated events was too terrible to contemplate. If she had not become so engrossed in the challenge of getting him there, Eleanor would have been the first to warn others off the idea. Few of the people invited to a Ramsay party would have enjoyed hearing the story of the shredded ear, or of the headless mice and dead birds regularly left beside the morning cornflakes on the kitchen table.

Crawford was a sturdy orange and white cat sporting a red leather collar and an attitude of outrage. The only person whose lap he would grace was Isabel Ramsay. The rest of the family had given up on him. Only Eleanor kept trying.

When Eleanor was seven, Mrs Jackson moved in next door to their house in St Peter’s Square. She lived in the dark basement flat in the house of her son who, to Eleanor’s indignation, had refused to let her bring her cat because his wife was allergic to it. So a few weeks after Mrs Jackson arrived, Eleanor, taking the advantage of surprise, had snatched up a preoccupied Crawford, and lugged him, paws spilling over her bare arms, to visit her. He had struggled, growled and spat as she hopped from one foot to the other, waiting for Mrs Jackson to open the door, and in another minute would struggle free. But once inside the flat he became a different cat. He shrank and felt softer, he stopped spitting and clung to Eleanor, even climbing with silent intent further up her shoulder. When she placed him on the rug in front of the gas fire, he leapt up onto her lap, purring noisily, then curled up close to her. She was enchanted. At Mrs Jackson’s, Crawford was the cat Eleanor had dreamed of.

After this she always took Crawford when she went to see Mrs Jackson. Eleanor went more often. She looked forward to the warm weight of him as busy paws kneaded her jumper and a hot rough tongue licked her hands. In the green subterranean light of Mrs Jackson’s living room, she gazed down at him over her glass of orange squash and worked her way through a plate of Jaffa cakes that did not have to be shared with anyone.

Eleanor found she could talk to Mrs Jackson about what was important and instead of being told not to be silly or having the way she pronounced things corrected, Mrs Jackson listened to her. She even laughed at her jokes. Eleanor promised Mrs Jackson that she would take her to the Tide Mills and asked her advice about the secret flowerbed. She related the story about the wicked Mill Owner who locked little girls in the Granary, dressing them out in the finest ball gowns and making up their hair, so that they became a collection of secret princesses. Then one day he had fallen down dead on the train to Brighton, which meant his ghost could not rest but must keep haunting although never arriving and the girls were released and allowed to go free and live happily ever after. Mrs Jackson was genuinely concerned about ghosts and took the matter just as seriously as Eleanor who had seen him pacing the bridge over the millpond.

One day Mrs Jackson gave Eleanor a small cardboard box daintily wrapped in silver cigarette paper. She had placed it beside the biscuits on the spindly-legged table. A present! Eleanor was nervous and her hand trembled as she lifted the lid. She wanted to like it. She did not want to have to pretend to be pleased. She need not have worried, for lying on a wad of cotton wool was a round lump of green glass. She put out a finger and gently touched it. It was cool and smooth and shone like a jewel. Glancing at Mrs Jackson and receiving an encouraging nod, she took it out and cradled it in her palm. She looked up and was taken aback to see Mrs Jackson smiling like a young girl. Overwhelmed, Eleanor practically flew at Mrs Jackson and hugged her tightly, telling her truthfully it was the best present she had ever been given. No one had ever given her something so special. She called it an amulet and swore she would keep it always.

For a moment Eleanor divined that Mrs Jackson, as if by magic, knew just who she was. Then the moment was gone and the empty plate, the glass and the ransacked present box returned to normal. Only years later, staring out of a lace-curtained window, would Eleanor briefly allow herself to return to that afternoon, and see that Mrs Jackson had known her even better then she had known herself. By then it was too late.

But each time they got home, Crawford would be worse. When Eleanor scooped him up, he would fight more fiercely to escape. He was harder to catch because he bolted as soon as she approached. The guilt Eleanor would feel when she did finally recapture him was always obliterated by her blind indignation that Crawford had forgotten who she was. Once she had chased after him, grabbing him by the tail as he raced past, dragged him back and smothered him in a towel to stop him struggling. She noted clinically how his high-pitched cry of pain as her hand gripped his hind leg was like the sound of seagulls.

‘What have I told you, Crawford?’ The words fizzed through clenched teeth. ‘Now you are making me very cross indeed. This is an incredible waste of my time. Your co-op-er-ation would be appreciated.’ She shook the towelled bundle in time to her words and squeezed him, telling herself as well as Crawford how this treatment was for his own good. ‘Behave!’ she hissed at the whimpering inert lump.

Then one day as Eleanor reached up to ring Mrs Jackson’s bell, Crawford freed a paw and lashed out, gouging her neck. She yelped and hurled him across the paving slabs. For a second a shapeless mass seemed to fly, four limbs and tail spreading like ragged wings, then he thumped heavily against the dustbins, knocking a lid to the ground with a terrible clang, and vanished over the wall. She stared after him dizzily as she nursed her wound. She was scared that the Jacksons had heard the noise and she wanted to run away too, but couldn’t move. There were marks in the patches of moss on the flags. Eleanor traced one with the toe of her sandal – making a coded sign of contrition for anyone who could decipher it. After a while, when it was clear no one was coming, she was disappointed. She wanted Mrs Jackson to open the door and take her in, but with Crawford gone there was no point in pressing the bell. Mrs Jackson would ask where he was. She wouldn’t like Eleanor if she found out what she had done. She would tell her never to come again. Behaving as if this scene had actually taken place, Eleanor staggered home with tears dribbling down her cheeks and blood from the cut on her neck staining her shirt. She reached her room without being seen and curled up on her side on her bed, her face to the wall. As she lay with lavatory paper clamped under her collar to stop the bleeding, visceral emotions set hard as lava. No one would be allowed to get close to her again.

Crawford was missing for three weeks. His absence threw the Ramsay family into frenzy, and a rare state of unity. Gina drew posters and stuck them to trees and in the windows of as many shops in King Street as would let her. Lucian was at boarding school, but used up his pocket money ringing every night to check on progress and give painstaking advice to whoever answered the phone. Mark Ramsay patrolled the square every night whistling and calling. Sometimes Isabel joined him. Only Eleanor appeared not to care. She slunk about the house, wearing a series of polo necks to hide the nasty scratch on her neck. She bore the less tangible secret of how evil she was like a rucksack of rocks. Inside her head, sentences of explanation, speeches of atonement, of love and confession evaporated before a judge as harsh as her grandfather had been. She was certain that despite being a cat and unable to talk, if he came home, Crawford would give her away.

Then one Saturday morning while they were all in the kitchen eating breakfast, Crawford tipped open the cat flap with his nose, waited briefly then eased himself in and things went back to normal. Except that Eleanor avoided him, even leaving a room if he padded in, and she never visited Mrs Jackson again.

Mrs Jackson eventually plucked up the courage to ask Isabel if she had offended Eleanor. Isabel, barely aware that Eleanor knew the old lady in the basement next door, dismissed the possibility with strident politeness. She reacted with such astonishment that an old woman, reputed to be going senile, could imagine she had any sort of relationship with a chaotic seven-year-old, that Mrs Jackson abandoned the idea of sending Eleanor a small note. A few weeks later Mrs Jackson accidentally left the gas on. It was a mistake anyone could have made, her mind was on other things, but her son decided she could no longer live on her own. For her own sake he put her in a residential home in Woking and let the flat to a young actress with a crush on Vanessa Redgrave and a small part in The Newcomers.

The Ramsays were celebrated as gifted hosts able to put guests at their ease. They lavished undivided attention which, though fleeting, still bathed the recipient in a rapturous glow of self worth for the duration of the evening. People drifted down the worn stone steps of the tall Georgian house convinced they had seen more of the Ramsays than they had and were more valued than they were.

The parties were noisy, crowded affairs packed with people from every sector of public life: top financiers and famous actors, prize-winning novelists and emerging landscape designers were mixed strategically with primary school teachers, nurses and riding instructors. No one was allowed to latch on to familiar groups, they were guided by gentle hands, beckoning looks, floated on wafts of Isabel’s light perfume, or seduced by Doctor Ramsay’s lilting brown voice into life-changing decisions – new lives. Isabel styled herself a thoroughly modern Ottoline Morrell, although she hoped she attracted greater respect from those she helped than her private role model. Business and romantic partnerships were forged against all odds, deals of international importance were struck, diffident geniuses unmasked, promotions enabled, while lucky breaks came to those who had given up or given in. Old friendships were rekindled from damp ashes of long held enmities and life long relationships were toasted to the clink of glasses of sparkling white wine from the ripest Italian summers. Decades later Ramsay parties would be remembered as interludes from life, or as rare glimpses of true life where conversation knew no limits and the dancing was wild and free. The walls in the St Peter’s Square house were hung with the latest discoveries: a Hockney in the drawing room, a Jim Dine over the drawing room fireplace, and an early Warhol in the downstairs lavatory. As young men and women emerged into the sleeping square in the blue hours before dawn, they were baffled to find themselves on drab streets in a drizzling Hammersmith, looking in vain for taxis or a stray 27 bus in the chill morning air. Only those too ill to get out of bed, or too naïve to know what they were missing, refused an invitation to a party at 49 St Peter’s Square.

Eleanor loved it when her parents gave a party. She knew nothing of the social and political machinations running like well oiled engines beneath the surface of the chatter and champagne, and believed parties were thrown for fun. She soon learnt the signs of one approaching. Her mother would get excited and talk very fast. She would insist she must see Clara, she had to catch up with Tarquin, oh! and of course, Charles, whose conversation she absolutely craved. She adored his latest book, so clever, so true! She must see them all. She ruffled and pulled at Eleanor’s hair and caught her up into a rapid jig around the table. They must have a party.

When her mother was organising an event it seemed to Eleanor that Isabel Ramsay became a new person. She stayed out of bed all day, cuddled her children impulsively and even appreciated Eleanor’s jokes. She ran up and down stairs, calling orders to Lizzie, their live-in help, all the while singing and doing different voices as she juggled with a variety of lists, pausing only to draw neat lines through completed tasks with a flourish. Revising and devising, with gimlet eyes and pen poised, she plotted the evening from start to finish. She did not stop talking: making and taking telephone calls from her bedroom in a low voice with the door shut, or chatting in a small girl’s voice into the wall mounted telephone in the kitchen. Her voice rang out across the square as she called imperiously to deliverymen from the doorstep. She muttered to herself as she planned and barked orders to Mark, and yet again rewrote the guest list, impatient at his response, or concerned for his opinion. She scribbled the latest developments and tiniest reminders on a white plastic notice-board hanging by the fridge in bold black felt marker. The spikes and loops in the words reminded Eleanor of the purple graffiti daubed high up on the stage doors of the Commodore Bingo Hall on the corner of King Street. She developed the hazy assumption that her mother was responsible for both. Isabel would absently stretch the telephone cord across her children’s heads as she reached for her wine, or a mug of tepid coffee. She chain-smoked, pacing the kitchen, ripping open envelopes of acceptance, slamming drawers and rummaging in cupboards, in search of the one thing that would make the party perfect.

Gina was willing assistant, finding things that were lost, filing letters, appeasing shop owners, fending off phone calls from over-eager guests. Lucian was usually away at school. Eleanor tried to make the most of this time when her mother was out of bed, so friendly and nice. She was desperate that each party should be the best ever. This time the food would be truly scrumptious, her mother’s favourites would come, with no one to bore her or get on her nerves and make her cross. Everyone would be happy. Afterwards, her mother would never be sad again. Eleanor imagined hearing the shouts of laughter as she lay in her bedroom, lulled to sleep by the dips and peaks of music and voices, waiting for her Mum to come and tuck her in and leave butterfly kisses on her forehead. On party nights Eleanor would not have to lie rigid to fool the monsters into thinking she was dead because her Mum would be there to keep them out.

After the party, Eleanor promised herself that everything would be better.

Mostly Eleanor didn’t let herself think of afterwards.

She was allowed to help Isabel dress because just before the party Gina disappeared into her bedroom until she was called. Eleanor scoffed inwardly at her sister who would emerge, stuck up straight like a brush handle in a trance to hang limply on their Dad’s arm. Or Gina would parade around holding a glass of watered down wine, peering at the pictures on the walls as if she hadn’t seen them every day of her life already. Eleanor would stump after Gina – clop, clop, clop – up the stairs to be introduced to the early guests. She couldn’t believe that Gina bothered to spend ages putting on stupid make-up so she could look like a lunatic.

With Gina out of the way, Eleanor could sprawl contentedly on her parents’ bed, creeping amongst the squashy pillows, sniffing lungfuls of her mother’s scent that mingled with the smell of cotton sheets, and watch her get ready.

Isabel sat on the edge of a low Victorian nursing chair to put on her stockings. She leaned back into the chair, raising one thin, shapely leg then the other as she unfurled each stocking along the length, pointing her toes upwards like the ballerina she should have been.

Eleanor stared at her mother’s hands as her fingers tipped with pink nail varnish swept up with a swoosh along the calves and around the thighs, smoothing out the silky wrinkles. She held her breath for the snap of the suspenders, as her mother dipped down to clip her stockings into place.

Isabel moved with precision and elegance. A fleeting frown betrayed a woman rehearsed in every gesture and action, and conscious of everything she did. Isabel could not afford spontaneity. She might have been gratified, yet disbelieving, to know she had long succeeded in appearing the woman she wanted to be. Her bosoms (a word Eleanor could not say out loud) pushed up over the black lace bra. Eleanor knew the skin was soft and warm, and as she glanced furtively at the dark space inside the bra she would picture the battles she had fought, the creatures she had slain mercilessly to save her mother’s life.

Eleanor would stroke her forehead and tell her everything was all right.

‘Soon your headache will go and you’ll be happy.’

Isabel turned this way and that as she tried on different outfits. She never planned her dress in advance. Even if asked, Eleanor dared not say she liked something. If her mother didn’t feel right, she would be cross with Eleanor and might send her out of the room. She watched with trepidation as Isabel yanked clothes off their hangers, discarding rejects on the bed and shoving others along the rail to find what she wanted. Eleanor knew that all the days of preparation could fall to ruin if her mother wasn’t wearing clothes that made her happy.

Finally Isabel was ready. She stood with one hand on her hip in front of the wardrobe doors and ran her hand over her stomach, stroking it downward, over and over, in the way that made Eleanor’s father angry. Eleanor recoiled at the crushing sensation in her tummy at the sound of him shouting in the White House garden last summer. It was the first time her mother had been out of bed the whole holiday.

‘For pity’s sake, Isabel, take your hand off your fucking stomach!’

‘And where do you suggest I put it?’

He had snatched at her wrist and held it, shaking it as if it didn’t belong to her, staring wildly at the thin flapping thing. There were white marks on her mother’s skin when he let go. The children had played statues until it was over. Isabel got up from the table as if nothing had happened, and Eleanor watched her go across the lawn in her short white dress and vanish into the house. Everyone chewed and swallowed in silence until it was all right to get down.

Isabel was unaware of her human shadow as she studied her reflection, making reparation for perceived flaws with restless hands. Eleanor traced her own hipbones through her pinafore dress with the flat of her palm. With a faraway look, Isabel put her hand to her nose and sniffed the tips of her fingers and thumb as if confirming her own existence. Eleanor sniffed her own fingers, the smell was comforting: a mixture of her guinea pig and the tuppenny lasting lolly she wasn’t allowed because her Dad said it was pure sugar.

As she copied her mother, Eleanor learnt how easy it was to be someone else.

That night, for the party vaguely intended to celebrate the departure of the Ramsays to Sussex for Whitsun, Isabel had chosen a black shiny dress with no sleeves and a zip up the back. She let Eleanor do it up. As she balanced on the bed to reach, Eleanor dreaded her father coming in and taking over. She could hear him next door, striding about in the ironing room where he kept his clothes. She clutched her mother’s bare shoulder to steady herself.

‘Eleanor! Get off, you’re cold!’

Eleanor briefly nursed her hand, blowing hard on it. The shape of Isabel’s body appeared as the zip pulled the slippery fabric together and it tightened over her hips and waist, to reveal contours of muscle and bone. She lingered over the fastening of the hook and eye at the top.

Now the make-up.

Eleanor had prepared the dressing table while her mother was in the bath. She lined up what her mother called her ‘condiments’ including the tiny bottle of scent the children had bought for her birthday that was still full. An expert assistant, on these occasions Eleanor never got it wrong.

Her mother handled the brushes like an artist, shading in colour with deft flicks of soft sable. She pouted at the three-way mirror as with a magician’s sleight of hand, she drew an accomplished bow with a lip pencil, and filled in fleshy lips with glossy lipstick. She took a tissue from her daughter without acknowledgement and stained the paper with a crimson kiss. Taking another bottle of perfume from her handbag, she squirted it behind her ears, on the inside of each wrist and between her breasts. She dropped the bottle back in her bag and snapped shut the clasp.

Isabel was ready to meet her guests.

Eleanor studied Isabel, anxious to miss nothing. It was one of the facts of life that her mother was clever, witty and beautiful. She had overheard a woman say Isabel Ramsay could turn men to stone. It was obvious to Eleanor that the tall woman adjusting her bra through the neck of her dress as she stepped into high heels was capable of everything. Her mother was a project Eleanor could have got top marks in. She knew her better than anyone. Better than Gina who went on the shopping trips, better than Lucian when her mother rubbed his back after cricket and told him he was her favourite man. As Eleanor followed her out of the bedroom, she swiftly pocketed the crumpled hanky. Later she hid it in her Box of Secrets with the others.

After Alice disappeared, Eleanor was not allowed to help her mother dress.

The doors dividing the drawing room in half were thrown open to make a space the length and breadth of the house. The furniture had been pushed back to the walls or removed. Her mother prowled the room, her stilettos clicking on the polished floorboards, rearranging chairs and repositioning ornaments. She touched surfaces and looked tetchy, but Eleanor knew Lizzie had done a good job.

Isabel was never happy.

Eleanor took up position by the French doors, and peered through a pane of warped Georgian glass. The road was fragmented by the swirly shaped gaps in the wrought iron balcony. She would spot the first cars. She loved the start of parties as the house filled up with excited, colourful people, their faces flickering in candlelight. Yet it was with mixed feelings that Eleanor anticipated the first knock at the door. It signalled her countdown to bedtime.

Suddenly her mother was upon her, stroking her hair, adjusting her dress and wrenching up the socks with the horrible flowers Eleanor had purposely rolled down. Clawing nails grazed her skin. Eleanor sniffed her mother’s hair: apple blossom and warm spring although outside a cold, spotting rain marked the end of May. Her breath caught as Isabel squeezed her round the waist, bending so far over her that Eleanor could not see and her tummy hurt. She didn’t want to cry out or it would end.

‘You’re my very own darling! My gorgeous, delicious little baby. You love me best, don’t you? You love your Mummy… so, so…’ Her voice grated in a half whisper. Eleanor was unable to respond.

Then it was over.

Her mother strode over to the coffee table and snatched up a cigarette from a silver box placed at an acute angle on the glass. Mark and Isabel’s initials were engraved on the lid: a chunky ‘I’ and ‘M’ fitted around each other like building blocks, a shape so familiar to Eleanor that it had nothing to do with letters or with her parents. Isabel lit the cigarette before Eleanor could do it for her and stood with one hand on her hip as she sucked on the filter, tossing her head back to exhale smoke rings that broke into ribbons above them.

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.

Three

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.

Lean-eyed men lounged against the counter in the village stores and queued outside the telephone box beside the Ram Inn. They perched on the church wall to scribble frantically in notebooks, or prowled around the narrow streets, lifting dustbin lids, parting branches and peering through windows and questioning everyone like pretend police. From her lookout post high above them all, Eleanor, spying out of the playroom window with a notebook of her own, was rewarded by the sight of a line of constables in white shirtsleeves, poking long poles into hedges and ditches, the way her father checked the oil in his car.

With Alice gone, Eleanor had no one to play with and there was no more talk of suitable local children. Lucian and Gina could go out but must not speak to anyone, even people they knew, like Iris Carter, the new lady at the stores who looked like Lulu. This ban effectively stopped them buying sweets. Gina might go to the stables if accompanied by her father, which made her furious. Lucian went to the river, returning in the evenings smudgy and cross with no fish. The rules made no sense to Eleanor; she knew they would never find Alice by stopping her leaving the house. Yet she kept to the regime with a devotion that went unnoticed. Their self-imposed curfew put the Ramsays in a sour mood.

Isabel stopped having headaches and was possessed with the organisational energy associated with parties. She learnt the names of the police, fended off reporters, deciding who to give interviews to and how best to present her family, as she always had. Mark and Isabel’s friends would have been astonished to hear that it was Mark who crumpled. Although he was of no interest to the police because he was a doctor, Mark was irritable, shouting at objects, and swearing when the telephone rang.

On the morning after Alice disappeared, Eleanor was making her way along the passage from her bedroom to the stairs, hoping to overhear something useful about Alice, when she came upon her Dad on the landing. He was staring at Crawford, who, unaware of his rapt audience, was very slowly crawling along the carpet, his nose up close to the skirting board, his tummy touching the floor. He began sniffing the wood, pausing now and then to give a scratch at it with his paw. He was following a mouse trail. Eleanor wished that Alice would return just to see this. Alice hated mice. Then Mark Ramsay, unaware that he in turn was being watched, gave Crawford a hefty push with his boot making the animal yelp and shrink back in a snarl of fur. At the same time Mark caught sight of his daughter at the corner of the passage.

‘Scram!’ He growled at Crawford who, pausing briefly to spit at him, lolloped awkwardly away down the stairs, obviously in pain. Eleanor was perplexed. How she had treated Crawford during the Mrs Jackson campaign was her terrible secret. Perhaps it had not been so bad. Yet if she had kicked Crawford with pointless cruelty just for being a cat, her Dad would have been livid. She didn’t think it fair.

Mark and Eleanor eyed each other, as if a long held enmity was now being laid bare before Eleanor obediently trudged on up the stairs to the playroom.

In the days that followed Eleanor slunk about feeling like an unwanted guest, pausing outside rooms, loitering on the landings, always retreating to the playroom. At meals she chewed dainty mouthfuls ten times, persisting though no one praised her as they had Alice. The Alice-Head hovered, invisible to the others, demanding Eleanor saw through its eyes. Eleanor became ruthlessly tidy and forced to ignore fanciful possibilities, her life shrank to a tedium. Alice had made Eleanor a fugitive in her own home.

Later that Wednesday Eleanor had succeeded in sneaking into the sitting room, and was building a tower with playing cards in the corner while her parents fluttered restlessly about the room. Her mother held a book, but wasn’t reading it, while Mark had given up on the newspaper, saying that since the Kennedy shooting it was full of old news, and was pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace. Eleanor, who had been keeping quiet in the hope they would fail to notice her, was startled into attention when he blurted out to Isabel how absurd it was that one child got so much attention when there had been an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. Isabel said it was an awful thing to happen twice, and that if the Senator died there would be no hope for America. She mumbled something about Alice going missing being the last straw and looked so upset that Eleanor did not like to ask how the Senator could die twice. She reconsidered her hide and seek rule of having three lives. Maybe two would do.

‘The world is falling apart and they are wasting their time on this.’ Mark drew the curtain to cut out the view of the gates, where a straggle of journalists had been camped since the previous evening when news of Alice’s disappearance became public.

‘What’s the matter, worried because Kennedy’s your twin so you’ll lose half your self? I thought you weren’t superstitious.’ Isabel sneered.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

Eleanor meant to keep quiet to avoid annoyance, but she couldn’t resist speaking. Until now she had only known about her Dad’s younger sister, she didn’t know he had a twin brother, let alone one that had been shot. No wonder he was so cross.

‘What twin? Is he your brother, this Senator?’

‘Now look what you’ve done.’ Mark rounded on his wife.

‘She doesn’t understand.’ Isabel always took the time to explain things when it was to make a point to Mark and she turned to Eleanor now with exaggerated patience: ‘Robert Kennedy, this man who has been shot, is exactly the same age as Mark. It’s always given him a power complex. Except today it’s given him a headache!’ She laughed and rubbed her face. No one was meant to find anything funny since Alice had gone.

Eleanor was grateful for being noticed so she nodded sagely.

‘It’s a damned sight more important than a girl going AWOL.’ Addressing the gap in the curtain, Mark added: ‘She’s missing. Until they find her, what more is there to say? I’m being practical. We hardly even knew her so why don’t they leave us alone?’

‘You know why.’ To Eleanor’s alarm, her Mum had started crying and she spluttered in horrible jerking sobs. ‘What if one of your children disappeared off the face of the earth?’ Isabel shifted around so she could see Mark, who was now standing behind her, and kicked over the Bagatelle board that Eleanor had left propped against the sofa. It fell with a crash spilling ball bearings all over the floorboards. Isabel carried on:

‘Her parents don’t have any other children. It’s over for them if Alice isn’t found. I feel for her poor mother.’ She fished up her cardigan sleeve for a tissue and blew her nose loudly at Mark Ramsay’s implacable back, the material tightening around his bottom as he shuffled change in his trouser pockets.

Eleanor was anxious to stop her mother crying – her Dad hated crying – so she asked why ‘it was over for them’? He scowled at Eleanor as she scuttled around the room retrieving ball bearings.

‘You are only a mother if you have a child.’ Isabel massaged her tears into her face with a forefinger because, as she had once told Eleanor, tears were good for the complexion. ‘If Mrs Howland hasn’t got Alice, she has no one to mother. At her age it’s probably too late.’

‘Stop talking bilge!’ Mark closed the curtains entirely. They were in the dark until he snapped on a light. ‘She’s only about thirty! She has at least five child-bearing years yet.’

Eleanor dropped a ball bearing. It hit the side of her tower of cards bringing the whole lot down. She hovered over the cards making comic gestures of powerlessness to mitigate the mess and disown the pettiness of her game. Mark Ramsay rounded on his wife:

‘Whatever happens she’s still a fucking mother!’

Alice had said swearing was rude. Her teacher had told her it was a lazy use of language.

‘It’s irrelevant whether your children are dead or alive! Since when did you care about Alice Bloody Howland? You hardly bother with our lot. It’s me who ferries them about and is driven bonkers by the inane chatter of them and their friends!’

‘Oh and a few car rides makes you the perfect father, does it? If you think she’s dead, why did you insist last night she was probably just hiding or had wandered off? Make your mind up!’ Isabel caught Eleanor gaping at her and slumped back in her chair, adding too wearily to convince, ‘Daddy doesn’t mean it’, before subsiding into silence.

Eleanor spoke fast to ward off more tears:

‘Is the man going to be okay?’

‘What?’ Mark Ramsay stared at his daughter.

‘The Senator Man. Is he going to get better?’

‘No.’ Doctor Ramsay pronounced a death sentence. Eleanor shuffled the pack of cards. She had boundless confidence in her father’s powers, medical or otherwise.

‘You don’t know that.’ Isabel pulled a face at him. She assumed it must be bad for her children to hear unpleasant news even about people they had never heard of.

‘I do.’ Mark was firm.

‘They said on the radio earlier that Senator Kennedy saved his son from drowning days before he was shot. He managed to grab him as he was being swept away and get him to shore. He was a good man.’

‘What would you expect him to do, let him drown?’ Mark was impatient.

Isabel pursed her lips and turned away from her husband.

‘Does that mean if he dies then his son will die now too?’ Eleanor couldn’t conceive of the consequences of a person’s actions remaining intact after they had died. If after saving him, his Dad died, wouldn’t the son die too? Surely all trace of a dead person having lived vanished when they died.

Like footprints in the sand washed away by the tide.

Eleanor dared not admit, even to herself, that she wished very much that this was the case.

‘Where do you get these ludicrous ideas, Eleanor?’ Isabel glared at Mark.

‘But what about all of his children?’ Forgetting her resolution to be neither seen nor heard, and that she wasn’t meant to have seen any news, Eleanor was overtaken by her fevered curiosity. Hiding behind the sofa when The World At One was on the radio, she had been particularly impressed by the information that the man who had been shot had ten children. ‘If their Dad dies, does that mean they’re not children any more?’

‘That’s not amusing, Eleanor.’

‘I only meant is he going to get better?’ Mark’s small daughter countered lamely. This was the best question she could have asked a doctor.

‘It’s astonishing what punishment the human brain can take. Actually there are large tracts of the brain that can pretty much be dispensed with. But he’s suffered damage to major blood vessels.’ Mark Ramsay smiled pleasantly, an expression Isabel knew he wore beside a sick bed. The look still made her want to have sex with him: ‘From the bulletins we’re hearing this afternoon, I’d say he’ll be brain damaged if he does survive, the right cerebral hemisphere is destroyed. The likelihood of any kind of recovery is remote. If he lives he’ll be a vegetable. But I doubt he’ll make it.’

Eleanor was reminded of the moment on her eighth birthday last year, when the tin mould was removed and she had held her breath in case her mother’s raspberry cat flopped into liquid as it usually did. It must set, or there would be no birthday. Eleanor had dug her fingernails into her palms willing it to work. With a brief wobble it had stayed upright. She had been so relieved, she had accidentally joined in singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and Gina had called her big-headed. She had the same dread of collapse now as her father warned:

‘The next twenty-four hours are critical, the bullet was a massive shock to his brain.’

Twenty-four hours was a day. It was the same length of time that Alice had been hiding. Eleanor arranged the cards in suit order. It would look unfeeling to actually play anything with them. In another day, Robert Kennedy might get well and Alice might come back nicer.

She began to build another tower.

That evening Eleanor formed a plan. She banged her head with some force on the wall by her bed six times before going to sleep. The next morning, Thursday 6th June, she woke promptly at six, in time to catch the newspapers at a quarter past. Her Mum had reacted swiftly to the crisis and insisted they order The Times as well as the Guardian to get what she called ‘a comprehensive picture’ of how Alice’s disappearance was being reported, so as to ensure things did not get out of control.

In the deathly quiet of the sleeping house, with only Crawford for company, Eleanor found Alice’s fixed smile on the hall mat, folded inside The Times. The head was slightly tipped to the side like a good girl. There were two small photographs on the inside pages, the one of Alice and, to Eleanor’s surprise, one of herself next to writing about the missing schoolgirl who had vanished leaving no trace. Eleanor was a confident reader and she scanned the text easily, pausing over ‘excavation’ and ‘interfered with’, which baffled her, but didn’t stop her making sense of the story. She hadn’t thought of Alice as a ‘schoolgirl’. School didn’t have much to do with Alice since they had met in the holidays and Alice behaved so old. Eleanor didn’t think of herself as a schoolgirl. Alice had been different, perhaps being a schoolgirl had been the difference.

The writing said Alice was pretty and innocent. Eleanor couldn’t see why she was innocent and wondered if it was to do with being good at ballet. Lizzie had said ‘poor little mite she wouldn’t hurt a fly’. Eleanor knew this wasn’t true. As she knelt on the doormat, the stiff brush pile stinging her knees, Eleanor wondered if the story said she too was innocent. She scoured the inky words with a stubby finger, but found no mention of herself as an innocent schoolgirl. But then after the incident with Judge Ramsay and the bambi, Eleanor she knew she was not.

Isabel Ramsay was vague about checking whether her children had done their homework. She might forget entirely until a letter came from a teacher. Then she would lurk around them making the work last twice as long with relentless questions and corrections. Despite this they preferred their mother’s scrutiny to their father’s. Mark Ramsay was impatient and irritable, reducing them to blank and panicky beings, whereas Isabel’s wafty presence did sometimes provide room to think and even learn. A hidden Ramsay fact was Isabel’s acute grasp of maths and music theory. She could spot a mixolydian or locrian scale after a few notes and whip through a simultaneous equation, slashing out numbers with dazzling speed and accuracy, her calculations a mouse’s tail down the page.

No one in the family could do needlework.

Last Christmas, six months before Eleanor would meet Alice, she had been sent home with the template for a brown and beige felt bambi, to be completed in the holidays. Eleanor not only hated stitching, she despised the whole idea of sewing. She wanted to do woodwork, but girls were not allowed. While the boys made useful, interesting objects like chairs and boxes, the girls had a choice of gonks or bambis. Eleanor had sulkily agreed to the less silly of the two options, privately planning to do neither. But when at the end of the holidays, the folded pieces of felt were discovered still in their paper bag, Eleanor had been exiled to the austere dining room in the White House where she was given three hours to produce a fully fledged bambi. The Ramsays were going back to London that evening after the rush hour. In a burst of maternal authority, Isabel laid out cotton, thimble, scissors, buttons for eyes, and old stockings for stuffing. Eleanor had to cut out felt in the shape of the cardboard template, then sew up the two halves, leaving a hole to stuff the stockings through. She accidentally attached the back legs to each other with uncharacteristically neat blanket stitch and then, in a fury of unpicking, undid all she had achieved. Needlework was really stupid she growled, as at last she managed to guide the sodden end of cotton through a needle with the biggest eye her mother could find. Then she pricked her finger. She stifled a scream of rage. It was then Eleanor had realised she wasn’t alone.

She was being watched. The oil portrait of Judge Henry Ramsay eyed her grimly, his judicial wig giving him the advantage. The gilt framed painting hung over the gigantic marble fireplace and at night was lit by a tarnished gold down-light. The Judge sat in a high backed chair, with his arms folded. He held a thick blue book, his bony hands obscuring the title. Mark Ramsay had told his children this was Aeschylus’ Oresteia, his father’s favourite, while Isabel said it was the telephone directory. On the first day when Eleanor had been made to give Alice a tour, she had taken the time to explain that the Judge’s book was about justice and that the man who wrote it had changed drama by using the chorus in a different way, although in response to Alice’s persistent questioning, Eleanor was hazy about the details and couldn’t say how or why because it was Lucian who listed facts. Alice had come alive at the mention of a chorus and informed Eleanor that she had been placed at the front of the chorus for her school production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat so she understood exactly how important one was. Eleanor had nothing to add to this, and had instead pointed out to Alice how the Judge’s eyes swivelled so that wherever a person was in the room he was always staring right at them. To her satisfaction Alice had not liked this.

Judge Henry saw everything.

The Judge had watched her struggling with her embryonic bambi. She wanted him stopped.

Eleanor had climbed off her chair and lugged it over to the fireplace. She retrieved the bambi from the grate where it had landed, and mounted the chair, the needle in her left hand, the bambi dangling from the knotted thread. Standing on tiptoe, she could just reach the Judge’s face. She pushed the needle firmly into one eyeball then the other. She eased it around to widen the holes. Then she abandoned method and began stabbing the pupils, piercing the canvas over and over.

He was still staring; now his eyes had a blank quality that was much worse. Perhaps the Judge was as mad as her Mum said. With wild criss-cross stitches, Eleanor had then hurriedly assembled the bambi, shoving in the silk stocking stuffing and scampering from the room.

The bambi and the Judge knew Eleanor was not an innocent schoolgirl.

Eleanor was briefly ashamed of the buzz of excitement she felt at seeing her own face in the newspaper. She had got this feeling when she was The Narrator for the Nativity play, aged only six and a half. She had been the youngest child to do narrating in the school’s history so was made a fuss of. The headmistress told her father, who had arrived when it was all over, that Eleanor ‘had embraced the responsibility with unbridled enthusiasm’. With her hand pressing on Eleanor’s head, she had told Doctor Ramsay that Eleanor had vocalised with confidence and clarity.

‘What a shame Mrs Ramsay couldn’t get here either. Eleanor said that you were very busy, but she insisted to me that her Mummy was coming.’

‘My wife gets headaches.’

‘Oh, Doctor Ramsay!’

Eleanor had known, by the way her Dad fiddled with his watch, that he sniffed a criticism. Good doctors should be able to stop headaches. Her mother had been well enough to go out for a meal that night. As The Narrator, Eleanor sat next to her and was allowed to choose her own pudding.

In the photograph, Alice was in school uniform. Her hair was bunched in pigtails with bows neatly tied. The crisp newspaper without tears and creases made Eleanor forget that Alice couldn’t have posed for her picture after going missing. Alice gave a big smile for the camera, showing off clean white teeth that Eleanor knew she brushed every morning and every night. Up down, up down, not too hard so they are pearly white. Her own face was above the words ‘The tomboy who courted danger and excitement’.

Alice had said Eleanor looked like a boy in the photo they had found in a packet at the back of a drawer in the games cupboard, and left out on the sideboard in the dining room. This was the clumsy snapshot that Mark Ramsay snatched up when the police asked for one of his daughter. Lucian had only taken it to finish the film. Few pictures of Eleanor were taken on purpose. She was a liability, likely to squirm and be smeared with dirt as well as pink and sweaty from getting over-excited. She had cut the crooked fringe herself with unwieldy kitchen scissors, and tufts peeped out of the sides of her beloved denim sailor cap, pushed jauntily back. People examining her over their breakfasts assumed the sun-dazzled scowl was evidence of ill temper and waywardness, and formed the toast-crunching opinion that she was not the kind of girl they would let loose on their own children.

Eleanor’s boisterous presence was in stark opposition to Alice’s angelic absence. Eleanor was placed in a different species category to Alice.

The previous night, after the police had been, Eleanor had overheard her mother telling her father off. Isabel Ramsay had an acute sensitivity to the importance of public perception. She was adept at constructing a potent and plausible story with little scenery and scant characterisation. As she berated her husband for his careless choice of picture, Isabel knew exactly the damage he had done to her family.

Alice had flipped through the photographs and made a gurgling sound at one of Gina leaning against a stable door with Prince, her horse. Eleanor clutched her stomach for the giggles they would share, for it appeared that Gina had a horse’s head growing out of her neck. Instead, Alice had said Gina was beautiful in a strangled voice. When she saw the snap of Eleanor she had sniffled into church-steepled hands, saying her cap was too big and she looked like a boy.

So, Alice wasn’t laughing now.

Eleanor remained on the chequered tiles in the hallway, hidden by the coat stand, her skin tinted red by the dawning sun coming through the stained glass fanlight. Blurred back to front sentences like a crudely coded message were imprinted on her bare arms from the newsprint where she had leaned on the paper, but she was too engrossed to notice. She turned back to the front page and read the thick black words about Senator Kennedy. ‘Kennedy Clings To Life After Brain Operation.’ She didn’t know what a Senator was, but now discovered that apart from having ten children he had another on the way.

He might die without ever seeing his baby.

She peered closely at the picture of the man lying on the floor with his hands resting on his chest. He looked asleep in the sun like her Dad except he had on a suit and tie and wore polished black shoes. His jacket was twisted and crumpled. His eyes were like the Judge’s and stared at something frightening on the ceiling. Eleanor ran a finger along the words: ‘They rested his head on a plastic boater hat, with a band that said: “Kennedy Will Win”. The blood from his wound ran down over the hat, and mixed with the pool on the floor.’ He had been shot at twenty minutes past midnight, Los Angeles time. She blinked and rubbed her nose with a grubby fist. There was another picture of Robert Kennedy making a speech minutes before he got shot. He looked happy with his wife Ethel beside him. Eleanor thought he must be a nice dad to have and wished she was one of ten children with one on the way instead of three with no one else expected. Then Eleanor knew with a certainty beyond her years and outside the bounds of rationality that if Robert Kennedy were to live it would be all right. Alice would come out of her hiding place, all of her not just her head and her hands and her smile, and this time they would play properly. They would even be friends.

It was just as she thought this and was turning the pages of the paper so as to leave it neatly that Eleanor saw the small headline. She froze.

‘“Alice” Grave To Remain. The grave of Mrs Alice Hargreaves who was the model for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is safe.’ The story was about a council saying it would ‘level all graves and remove headstones’ to make space for more bodies. Eleanor wondered where it planned to find these bodies. People had complained and stopped them. It hadn’t occurred to Eleanor that Alice had a grave. Up until now it had been a game that ended happily with Alice no longer here to bother her. Eleanor conflated the smiling face on page two with the item about the grave and went cold.

How could a grave ever be safe?

She heard a sound, a tiny creak from one of the many rooms above her head and hastily arranged the newspaper on the mat to look like it had fallen there. This minute action was the start of a policy of disguise and concealment that would seal fates and change lives. No one heard Eleanor scamper back to bed on small, soundless feet.

Eleanor lay facing the open window, gradually warmed up by the morning sun slanting on her pillow, and in a bid to banish thoughts, she whispered a story to herself about her real father, the handsome Senator with the crack in his chin. ‘He was shot eight times at close range and lay injured by the freezers in the kitchen. He moved a little; once he licked his lips slowly,’ she hissed hoarsely, demonstrating a photographic memory unrecognised by her teachers or family. ‘The kitchen was “boiling with people” but “Senator Kennedy and three other wounded lay terribly quiet in the midst of the uproar”.’ She propped herself up on one elbow. ‘They think he spoke, he asked everyone to move back to give him air!’

As Eleanor knelt beside him she stroked the Senator’s hand, he smiled up at her and squeezing her fingers he muttered:

‘I’m so proud of you, Alice.’

‘It’s Eleanor!’

After that Eleanor formed the routine of checking the newspapers each morning. Then every night after everyone was asleep and it had become too late to make anything better, she would tiptoe down to the kitchen, and as her eyes grew used to the dark, she would skitter across the stone flags, to pull the newspaper out from the pile under the sink and stuff it up her pyjama jacket. She was astute in her assumption that the rackety habits of the Ramsay household carried on despite everything. Used to her home as a harbinger of secrets, Eleanor had learnt to keep her own while negotiating the repercussions of others. Her pyjamas crackled as she marched stiffly up to the playroom at the top of the house. Scissor blades flashed in the shimmery light from a rubber waterproof torch balanced between the chimneys of the doll’s house as she snip-snipped around the article, leaving neat windows in the paper.

She would lay her growing collection of images out in a row on the floorboards. Robert Kennedy sitting on a carpeted staircase in smart shoes that must squeak when he walked. He looked tired. Eleanor’s favourite was a close-up of his face with the dent in his chin that she had invested with magical significance. Finally, smoothed flat, the three she had found of the Senator sprawled between freezer cabinets in the Los Angeles hotel kitchen, a still shape glimpsed between shoving bodies lit by a frenzy of flash bulbs. In the last, his shirt had been undone exposing a hairy chest. Her Dad’s chest was hairless. As an afterthought, Eleanor had cut out the story about Alice with both their pictures in it. She had left the one about the grave.

After scrutinising her private gallery, she would slip everything into the space between the floor and the skirting board behind the doll’s house. When they returned to London, Eleanor intended to take them all out and put them in her Box of Secrets. But when the time came she forgot and later, as often happened with her secrets, she forgot what they were or where they were hidden.

Four

Eleanor had been introduced to Alice one sunny Friday morning on the last day of May that year. The Ramsays had arrived from London late the night before intending to spend the first week of June at their house in Sussex. For all of them the day they got there was always the best, rich with hope and anticipation. The hope dissipated even as Lizzie opened all the doors and windows to chase out the damp. By the next morning everyone had gone their separate ways: Gina to the riding stables; Lucian to the river; Mark retreated to his study with the door locked and Isabel was planning the food with Lizzie in the kitchen. Eleanor had been called downstairs just as she started sorting out the doll’s house. On the way down to Charbury, squeezed between her older brother and sister, she had planned to rearrange the furniture to give the inhabitants a new lease of life. She would draw new pictures for the rooms and paint the front door bright red. With this in mind, she had packed her box of enamel paints. The doll’s house was a loyal friend awaiting her. She told herself she had no need of other friends ever again.

Eleanor’s grandfather had made the doll’s house, an obsessively faithful replica of the family mansion called the White House, over thirty years before for Mark Ramsay and his younger sister, Virginia. It was an uncharacteristic act of paternal attention from the adamantine high court Judge, who enthusiastically donned the black napkin until prevented by the demise of capital punishment itself. The loss of so final a tool of retribution had made Judge Henry permanently peevish. In 1957, the enactment of the Homicide Act effectively curtailed his power to propel a man or woman to meet their maker and drove him into brooding retirement. He clung to his memories and to the almost permanent seclusion of his workroom, a shed in the orchard, which like his study was acrid with the smoke of the ‘Regency Segars’ he received every month in a brown paper parcel from Fribourg and Treyer in the Haymarket.

When Judge Ramsay died on 13th July 1958, exactly three years after Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain, a month before his seventieth birthday and too soon to know about the birth of Eleanor, no one had the courage to clear out his den. Isabel had turned up at the door of the shed, clanking with cleaning materials, intent on sweeping away the last vestiges of her hated father-in-law and transforming it into an artist’s studio with which to tempt Lucian with its chalky light. She had quailed at the sight of the immaculately laid out bench, the labelled shelves stacked with tools, and books on architecture and model building. Towers of wooden cigar boxes were filled with tiny objects: drawing pins, nails, screws and pen nibs. Isabel’s nerves were finally shattered as her cheek brushed against the Judge’s black wool jacket hanging lifeless from the door, and as she jumped back the metal bucket clipped the doorjamb with a fearsome clatter. Defeated, she had abandoned the shed to become an inadvertent shrine. Over the years people claimed to have caught glimpses of the Judge through the grimy windows, a giant concentrating crow perched on his high stool, shrouded in his jacket.

Deep among the plum and apple trees where the Judge couldn’t hear the incessant squall of children, and – before she died when her eldest child, Mark, was nine – the high pitched call of Rosamund his wife, he would work into the night. At last with reluctance, he had presented the doll’s house to two catarrhly bemused children whom he had expected to be semaphorically appreciative of his gift. His son’s reaction particularly enraged him. Mark walked around the butcher’s block on which the house was placed, his hands behind his back, the nonchalant pose actually a desperate demonstration that he recognised its significance. At last Mark had gleefully pointed out the clue. There was always a clue. The Judge didn’t approve of unfettered generosity so every present he gave them was a test. In each of the two playroom windows in the big house there were six bars giving the long wide room the oppressive air of a prison cell. But in the doll’s house playroom windows there was none.

Mark Ramsay never forgot the look of contemplative fury his father gave him for revealing his mistake. The Judge had not imagined the playroom with bars on the windows because he had avoided the room once his parents had made the gardener install them, thus making them pointless for the rest of his childhood as he was the only surviving child. Now his own son had unmasked his father’s apparent labour of love as a labour of atonement. Although only ten years old, Mark Ramsay knew utterly that an irrevocable severance had taken place. From that moment, until his own death, he was the Judge’s greatest champion. His defence reached evangelical fervour in the face of Isabel’s scorn.

Mark and Virginia could only play with the house under the Judge’s supervision; they did so with the highly tuned attention of bomb disposal experts. Soon they dreaded the sight of it standing on its grisly plinth in the playroom like a body on a slab.

Judge Ramsay had constructed each storey separately to slot into the frame of the house like a shelf into a fridge. He spent days reproducing the fretted stonework that hung like a web between octagonal pillars to recreate the geometric shadow on the wall of the actual house. The Ionic pillars supporting the pediment of the front porch were particularly hard to get right, and took him months. The front and back were effectively large doors, and he saw that his first idea of using hardboard was impractical, for it would quickly deteriorate with constant opening. In the end he chose pine, with fascias of oak where dark paint wouldn’t do. He became skilful on a lathe despite a discouraging start, which included severing an Ionic column in half along with the top of the middle finger of his left hand. One obituary incorrectly attributed this injury to a letter bomb sent by a relative of a man who had been hanged. Thus did myth become truth.

The Judge was most proud of the priest hole that ran from the minute study on the second floor to emerge behind a wood panel on the landing. It was operated by pushing a knob in the centre of a Tudor rose to the right of the mantelpiece exactly like its real counterpart. It comprised a tiny chamber behind the study wall with a narrow airless passage leading away from the study along to the landing. It had been particularly complex to construct, but after several weeks the Judge had achieved it. He didn’t tell Mark and Virginia. This well-kept secret was his big test. He hadn’t known of the existence of the priest hole until finding the plans. He would reward whoever discovered his clue.

If one of them did, they never confessed.

Until his son exposed his error of the windows without bars, the Judge had considered the plasterwork his one failure. Time was lost as he wrestled with tiny renditions of the intricate mouldings for the ceilings on the ground floor. Eventually he relented and commissioned a craftsman. He told no one that the work was not his own, but was given away by an obsessive commitment to administrative order. He had filed the invoice and Eleanor found it after his death. This was proof to her that Henry Ramsay wasn’t the great man Mark insisted he was. The Judge had lied. Isabel’s dislike of the Judge dated from before she met him, in jealous response to Mark’s uncritical devotion to ‘Henry’, which seemed far stronger than for herself. She rationalised her emotions into principle and on their visits to Charbury she would rashly engage the Judge in fierce arguments about capital punishment until Mark ushered her away. However, Mark assured Isabel she had misjudged the Judge. Mark explained to his family that the invoice had been the Judge’s clue.

Judge Ramsay left the White House and its replica to his son on his death. The Judge had used the White House as a country retreat for weekends and holidays. It was after the sudden death of his wife that he began work on the doll’s house. He told himself he was granting Rosamund her dying wish that he take good care of the children, but he knew he was building the house for his own reasons. Had she known of this promise, his daughter would not have considered it fulfilled.

Virginia Ramsay was astonished that her brother had forgotten the stolid meals round the dining table, the compulsory evening recitals of poems, the tiptoed silence that enabled the Judge to work in his study and his fury if one of them mentioned their dead mother. Once she was old enough to leave home, Virginia shunned all opportunities to return to the White House and only came back when she was old and could be sure that everything would be different.

Mark exorcised his father by whipping up a hectic family life involving dizzying sessions of charades, Scrabble, Monopoly, and Racing Demon, and long striding walks along the coast towards Brighton or up into the South Downs. He hated it when Isabel had a headache and the children had to be quiet, sneaking around like prisoners, careful not to slam doors, for then his childhood returned as if it had never gone away.

Mark Ramsay did not impose his father’s numbing laws of ‘playing with the house’ on his own children. Perhaps he unconsciously hoped it would disintegrate through hours of hectic attention. It did not. The outside grew as weathered as the original, paint peeled and the plasterwork under the eaves chipped and powdered, as each child made it their own.

At first Eleanor could only touch the house under Gina’s stern direction, occasionally being ordered to move a doll or a chair. She was never allowed to do any of the dolls’ voices, because Gina said she got them wrong. Now Gina, like her Aunt Ginny before her, thought the doll’s house stupid, and spent most of her time at the stables, or sticking horse posters up around her room and reading books in which horses featured heavily. Eleanor was frightened of horses, a secret only Gina knew, but had so far not made use of. So only a few months before meeting Alice, Eleanor became sole custodian of the doll’s house. She had taken possession with a flourish, installing her Matchbox cars in the bedrooms and initially interring the dolls in a shoebox, although she did later exhume them and give them minor parts.

The furniture had been copied from furniture still in the big house. The long green velvet sofa and rickety rocking chair were identical to ones in the living room. Only the table and chairs in the kitchen were from a shop, the originals lost or broken, even the tiny plates and cups were exact versions of the crockery piled in teetering towers in the church-like wooden unit in the kitchen.

Out of her Box of Secrets came postage stamp pictures of Crawford and pencilled family faces split by joyful laughter. Singing and chatting to herself, Eleanor hung them from threads of cotton in all the rooms.

Minute bedspreads had been fashioned out of squares of material. Her Mum had stitched them one winter afternoon earlier that year. The house was freezing and they had huddled together in the kitchen, close to the Rayburn like conspirators. As a surprise, Isabel had embroidered Eleanor’s initials in the middle of one square: ‘E.I.R’ – Eleanor Isabel Ramsay. Eleanor had laid it on the huge double bed in the main bedroom.

‘One day you’ll show this to your children and tell them their grandmother made it,’ Isabel had pronounced briskly. ‘They’ll treasure it.’ She was always mindful of leaving footprints for the future. Eleanor didn’t choose that moment to tell Isabel she didn’t want children.

Soon Eleanor’s replica White House had been transformed into a cosy home welcoming in plenty of sunshine and quite safe from intruders. Her cars were content there.

That Friday morning, Eleanor had been eager to finish breakfast and embark on her proposed changes. She insinuated herself into the gap between the playroom wall and the house and inched the heavy structure across the painted floorboards until it was about four feet from the wall. A happy rush of anticipation galloped through her as she cleared out every room and gathered the contents in a heap on the rug by the fireplace. She would spend the afternoon painting new pictures for the walls; the main bedroom could also do with a chest of drawers. She knew how to make one out of matchboxes with paper studs for handles. Her Mum might help again.

Then Lizzie called out that she had a visitor, ‘a surprise person’, she would say no more. A selection of perfect people paraded through Eleanor’s mind, starting with Aunt Ginny who only ever visited when they were in St Peter’s Square because she hated the dead Judge and who always brought wild adventure, perhaps a ride in her Austin van with Aunt Ginny’s friend Maggie, all of them singing songs by Cilla Black in shouty voices and swearing at other cars without being told off. After this the list tailed off for it couldn’t be her best friend, Lucy. Perhaps it was the girl at the village shop yesterday afternoon, who had blown pink bubbles with her gum until one burst covering her face like a mask. She had left it there, plastered over her cheeks until her Mum noticed, just as Eleanor would have done.

But the surprise was none of these.

What Eleanor saw from the top of the stairs was a ghost with chalky-white skin in a yellow dress, fair hair fanning out over its shoulders so that Eleanor thought its head was a triangle. Then she saw it was a girl standing to attention in a patch of sunlight outside the porch, smiling with the tops of her cheeks. She had on what Eleanor soon discovered was her new favourite dress; the flimsy frilly frock adorned with lacy bits filled Eleanor with foreboding. The girl was entirely still, her bony knees close together, her feet in black patent leather pumps with no specks of dirt, proving she had flown to the White House without touching the ground.

Like her grandfather, Eleanor wasted no time drawing conclusions, and she instantly wished that she had hidden when Lizzie called. She slowed down for the last few stairs but had inevitably to reach the bottom one.

Mark Ramsay lounged in the porch rocking back and forth on his heels, hands in the pockets of his favourite country trousers. Eleanor was sure he was trying to keep a straight face as he listened to the girl’s mother, who talked very fast then stopped with a hiccup to give way to bursts of cockerel laughter. His genial doctor’s voice kept saying, ‘I see’ and ‘Is that right?’ Then she saw that he didn’t laugh when the woman laughed which meant he wasn’t listening. This was normal. Eleanor relaxed.

‘Ah, Elly, there you are. What kept you?’ He scrumpled up her hair, gently urging her forward out of the shadow of the porch towards the ghost girl. ‘Well, now you can stop sulking around the place moaning. We’ve found Anna.’

‘Alice actually. Nearly right!’ Eleanor was impressed that the woman could move her neck like a pigeon. She splayed her hands in the direction of her daughter as if introducing a circus act.

‘Like Alice in Wonderland! Your favourite book, isn’t it, Alice!’ She gave a squeal.

At this Alice moved her head, which startled Eleanor, as she had grown used to the idea that she wasn’t real. She guessed, without forming the words, that her father made Alice’s mother scared. A lot of people behaved strangely with him. The glistening lady with damp hands, who had tried to teach Gina the flute, got a blotchy neck after encountering him in the hall. Her mother had said it was because he was a doctor and they were idiotic enough to think he could see them without their clothes on.

Suddenly Eleanor remembered hearing about Alice. She was the girl who had moved into the cottage next to the village shop. Her Mum was receptionist at the local surgery, and her Dad was Charbury’s new postman. The bubble gum girl had confided to Eleanor that there was an Alice who could stand on her head for over fifteen minutes. It must be this one. For a moment Eleanor’s unalloyed admiration for this supposed feat overcame her objection to the proposed arrangement.

She was astonished to find her mother outside too. Isabel was walking up and down outside the dining room window, her arms folded tightly as if she was cold; her high heels crunched small holes in the gravel. She was dressed for going out in her turquoise trouser suit and full make-up. Eleanor had thought she was in bed and, although pleased she was up, she was disheartened that she would soon be gone.

Isabel’s two eldest children were too grown up for the ruthless tactics they had adopted four years earlier when Lucian and Gina, aged six and eight with a tearful Eleanor in tow, had hidden their mother’s jewels in seed trays stacked in the potting shed to stop her leaving. The plan had failed. The jewels were found and the gardener was dismissed on the basis that he had boasted to Lucian about stealing a car when he was a boy. The children said nothing, not even to each other and the secret grew like a deadly plant. Gradually they stopped playing together and only formed expedient, if uneasy alliances. These were fluid at first; any two of them might side against the third or close ranks against outsiders, but as they got older Gina and Lucian sealed an unspoken pact, freeing them of guilt and adroitly placing amorphous blame on their little sister. Isabel was smoking, eyes hidden behind sunglasses that reflected the group clustered around the porch. She addressed no one, her voice husky from smoke and hours of silent darkness:

‘She’ll stop my daughter getting into mischief. Gina’s too old to play, although she’ll keep an eye. I am sure Alice is a sensible girl.’

Eleanor’s heart sank as her mother gave one of her very short smiles, which made the girl in the dress shimmer with lacy trembles. She glared at Gina, leaning triumphant against an Ionic column, acting too old to play. They avoided looking at each other in case it was all too clear what was really in their minds.

The four years between the sisters was beyond argument, but this chasm, usually represented by Gina’s devotion to horses, had been widened recently by new differences in their experience. The past week had seen Gina clamped to a hot water bottle with period pains and the failure of a boyfriend (who her family said didn’t exist) to appear at the Hammersmith Wimpy as arranged. Eleanor and her friends’ only interest in boys was around how to win back Eleanor’s champion marble from Chris Thornton who had unfairly refused to risk it in further games. The sisters had little to say to one another.

It was proposed that the friendship between Eleanor and Alice start immediately. Eleanor’s mother had her ‘out-of-bed’ voice: higher than usual, with one ‘darling’ every minute,listing rules like other Mums. She made Eleanor promise not to do anything foolish and to make sure that every day they were back in time for tea.

Every day? Was Alice going to be there from now on? Eleanor’s spirit was dampened. In resigned tones she enquired: ‘What time is tea?’

‘Four. Same as always, darling!’

Eleanor had flinched as hands tugged at her hair, straightened her collar and smacked invisible flies off her chest and arms. Looking up she could see herself reflected in her mother’s sunglasses: a dark shape with no face. She mechanically took Alice’s outstretched hand and glumly led her upstairs to where they were to play, properly like good girls, until Alice’s mother, who was called Kathleen, came to collect her.

Alice and Eleanor were only months apart in age and with the odd logic that people apply to everyone but themselves, this broad commonality identified them as like-minded and inevitable soul mates. Alice quickly established she was born three months and three days before Eleanor and this fact became the basis of a discussion, in which they quizzed each other vigorously, gleefully unearthing differences with no inclination to find shared ground. Alice archly informed Eleanor that the age gap meant that she was already on solids by the time Eleanor was born. By the time Eleanor was walking, Alice was winning prizes for dancing.

The two girls hoisted markers that, besides their material worth, set important basic cornerstones. Both of them were seasoned experts at judging the social implications of owning three Sindy dolls with full wardrobe, versus a scratched pick-up truck complete with a winding handle and a dirty length of string which could lift cars right up into the air. Alice led the way on primary facts, rapping out questions and nodding with pursed lips at Eleanor’s garbled answers, or providing the answers herself while Eleanor cast about for a hilarious response.

Alice had smaller feet than Eleanor, which she declared an advantage for ballet. She had just won a prize at school, presented only yesterday, for her dance to ‘Up, Up and Away in my Beautiful Balloon’. Eleanor knew that things were beyond hope when Alice began swooping around the doll’s house singing in a high-pitched reedy voice. She was especially unsettled, but dared not look away as Alice did a circle with her hands above her head for the balloon. There was more: last year Alice had received nine commendations for tidiness and clean hands. (Eleanor’s school did not give commendations.) Alice had been presented with her Sindy dolls on her eighth birthday, three months and three days before Eleanor’s birthday, which that year Isabel had forgotten. Eleanor announced that all dolls were sissy and that she preferred cars. She did not tell Alice that Gina had a Sindy doll with a cracked tummy from where Eleanor had bicycled over it by accident. Gina would be cross to be mentioned at all. All Eleanor’s cars had names, and were boys or girls with ever-changing relationships. Alice laughed at the names. Eleanor was incredulous as Alice assumed a starey-eyed expression and covering her mouth, sniggered through her fingers. This stopped Eleanor from telling her about the Citroën called Sophia who was married to the flat bed lorry called Desi, after Lucille Ball’s son, Desi Arnaz Junior. She had been bursting to tell Alice that Sophia’s family cut her off without a penny because Desi was half Cuban. It was so thrilling but she was confounded when she realised that Alice wouldn’t understand.

Eleanor knew the difference between each day because of their colour and feeling. Monday was thick and yellow like cheese, which she didn’t like. Tuesday was orange with netball and piano lessons, which she sometimes enjoyed. Best of all was Friday: toffee flavoured and deep red with a story before home time. She would rest her head in her arms on the cool pencil-smelling desk, and listen to Miss Galliver. She wished Fridays would never end, and wondered what happened to Miss Galliver at the weekends. She didn’t say any of this to Alice.

Alice liked yellow best except in sweets when she preferred strawberry. This was one thing they agreed on. Alice let Eleanor have a red Opal Fruit from an unopened packet as soon as they were upstairs, which gave Eleanor a burst of hope. After that it was always lime or lemon at the top when Alice reluctantly waved the sweets at her. Eleanor hated these two flavours but said yes to be friendly. When she suspected Alice of rearranging the sweets, she got the pain in her ribs like when her mother didn’t join them for supper.

Alice pulled a face when she saw the doll’s house, insisting it was scruffy and dirty; but admitted she liked the green sofa. She wouldn’t help put back the furniture because everything should be washed and cleaned, or they would just be rearranging the dirt. Like a surveyor, she pointed out scratches all over the front of the house, and showed with the bat of a hand how the top of the porch was splintered, the dining room windowsill was hanging off, and with the prod of another finger, drew attention to a crack in the staircase. When Alice rubbed a window ledge, and thrust her finger under Eleanor’s nose, Eleanor nodded meekly at the grey fluff. She never thought about keeping things spotless. She got on with playing.

After that, Eleanor had to answer Alice’s searching questions about Gina, whom Alice had seen at the stables. Alice said she wished Gina was her sister, and with a tired sigh, breathed that Gina was so-o-o very pretty. Eleanor decided that it was the way Alice popped a strawberry sweet in her mouth and screwed up the paper between fussy palms, that made everything she said true. She tried it after Alice had gone, exactly mimicking Alice putting a sweet between pouting lips, using a wrapper Alice had left in a neat ball on the window seat to round off the effect. Immediately Eleanor was Alice.

‘She looks so different to you. I can’t believe she’s your sister. She’s just like a princess. I heard one of the riding instructors say she will be a beautiful woman when she grows up.’

Eleanor shrugged. She was revolted at the idea of Gina being any kind of woman. She was especially irked to hear that Gina had astounding poise on a horse and would be a famous equestrian one day. Alice pronounced each bit of the word ‘eck-wes-tree-an’ so that it took ages and put Eleanor off asking what it meant.

Alice wouldn’t play with the doll’s house, nor would she touch the cars or be spies. There was no game that suited them both, so after a tour of the house they had ended up each end of the wide seat in one of the playroom windows, looking down on the garden through the metal bars. Eleanor leaned forward, drumming her heels against the seat. Alice sat up straight. They avoided looking at each other as they dissected the differing merits of their teachers, the children in their class, and compared school dinners and favourite pets. It was a lifetime later when Lizzie called out that Alice’s mother had come to take her home.

Everyone said what a great success the visit had been, so Alice would just go home for lunch and come straight back afterwards. In fact it was decided that Eleanor would play with Alice every day. In those brief four and a half days Eleanor got to know every expression, every gesture: every little thing that made up Alice. Yet after Alice disappeared Eleanor didn’t give the police any clue as to where she might be, or think of anyone she might have gone off with. Eventually, to please them Eleanor had decided to let the policemen see two of her dens, knowing Alice would not be there.

Eleanor didn’t tell the policeman he was wrong when he said she must miss her friend. Nor did she confess that she was relieved she no longer had to play with Alice. But she wanted to get the answers right because then he gave her sweets. She wanted him to be kind because he had a crack in his chin like the Senator. She didn’t admit that when she thought of Alice she got a pain in her ribs. Alice’s words hurt like the chunks of flint hidden at the Tide Mills that were sharp enough to cut up Crawford’s horsemeat:

‘I know a secret about you.’

Alice had been sure she knew everything, but she was wrong about the secret.

It had rained on the Saturday afternoon so, after their illicit trip to the Tide Mills that morning, the girls had ended up in the dining room, at the long oval table, doing pictures with oil pastels and the pencils that Eleanor loved because they went like paint when the ends were wetted. The mess created by the boxes of crayons emptied on the green baize tablecloth, the crumpled sheets of discarded efforts strewn around the chair legs, was at odds with the chilly formality of the room. Over the years Isabel had redecorated most of the White House but Mark had not allowed her to touch this room, presided over by the thickly daubed oil portrait of Judge Henry Ramsay.

They had come close to their first argument during a debate about whether it was better to be deaf or blind, a subject brought up by Alice and on which she had, as usual, a firm opinion. Although later Eleanor couldn’t think what Alice had replied. She did remember that Alice had refused to answer when Eleanor asked if it was better to be alive or dead. Just as Eleanor had wondered if they could get away with being silent until it was time for Alice to go, she had spoken so quietly that Eleanor nearly didn’t hear:

‘I know a secret about your family.’

‘Secrets are stupid.’ Eleanor leaned closer to her picture: the Tide Mills from a small plane. She was the pilot, in goggles and a leather helmet.

‘I don’t care if you do.’ But she did care because she knew what the secret would be. It was what the secret always was and so really no secret at all. This time though, because she had been careful never to leave Alice on her own or with Gina, Eleanor had thought the secret was safe.

‘Not all secrets are stupid. If this was my secret I would care.’ Alice had on her teacher’s voice: stern and disappointed. She pulled her bubble-gum pink cardigan tighter around herself, implying that, as well as dusty, the dining room was cold.

‘So what is it?’ Eleanor hadn’t meant to ask. She snatched up an orange crayon to make the sun as hot as possible, and busily colouring, she pressed too hard and snapped the crayon. She felt disloyal, but was unclear who or what she had let down.

‘Guess! I’m not going to make it easy.’ Alice hovered over her drawing of a stick girl with a bunch of flowers. She gripped the pencil like a dart. The figure took up one corner of the paper leaving an expanse of white space. Abruptly putting down her pencil, she sat back in the chair with folded arms. She was smiling with unblinking eyes. Later all Eleanor could think of was that when they had been out in the garden before the rain, Alice had refused to have a staring contest in case it was bad for her eyes. She hadn’t told the policeman this.

Four days after this conversation, as Eleanor leaned over to dip into the policeman’s paper bag, feeling his fingers through the paper, she heard Alice’s voice and saw her face staring up from the sweets.

‘Wings off the table!’

It was rude to slouch, she had hissed at Eleanor over lunch before their painting session, darting a look at Mark Ramsay, who had smiled back, which meant he liked her. Up until then Eleanor had been sure her Dad felt sorry for her for having to play with Alice. The shock of realising that along with everyone else, he too liked Alice had made her drop her fork on to the floor. As she reappeared above the line of the tablecloth, she caught the forbidding glare of Judge Henry reading her thoughts. That day Eleanor had realised that, contrary to family tradition, the Judge had no power at all. He could not stop anyone liking Alice.

‘Is it about Gina?’ Most things Alice talked about ended up with Gina. Eleanor considered it impossible that a secret about Gina would be interesting, but it might be useful.

‘No! Warm though.’ Alice picked up her pencil again and softly touched the rubber end with her tongue. Pink-red flesh whipped in and out. Alice always finished ice creams after Eleanor, taking small sippy licks to make them last. Her eyes would half close like Crawford’s when tucking into a lamb bone, content yet wary.

‘I give up.’ Eleanor purposefully gave the sun sharp fins: the heat was burning up the fields and evaporating the sea, and scorching the grass on the lawn. She picked light green and brown crayons, making the paper thick and slippery with colour. The rays of light fired like laser beams at the wings of her plane, as she soared into the distance beyond the horizon line, where the earth met the sky. Far away from Alice.

‘No. Guess! It’s really funny.’ Alice made the snuffly noise behind her cupped hands, glancing quickly at the closed dining room door. Eleanor looked too, hoping someone would come, even Gina would do. The house was quiet. Alice tucked her hands under her legs as if they might give her away, she wriggled with suppressed glee, making a show of forcing herself to look serious. Eleanor did not think any of Alice’s expressions were real. Alice was always being someone else. She wanted to tell the policeman with the crack in his chin that Alice had pretended all of it. This pretence was odd because Alice wouldn’t play spies or spacemen, saying they were not real.

‘If it’s about my Dad breaking the club house window with the cricket ball, I know, I was there.’ Relief made Eleanor exhilarated. It would be all right. ‘He doesn’t care, a cheque will sort it, I heard him telling my Mum.’

‘Cold again! We were all there, how could that be a secret?’

Later Eleanor remembered birds’ wings rushing by her ears and then complete stillness before she heard Alice’s voice down a long pipe:

‘It’s about your Mum!’ Alice pulled a face pretending the words had slipped out by accident and clapped her hands to scare them off. She leaned on her elbows, resting her witchy chin in her hands, watching Eleanor, with the Judge behind her left shoulder. The table creaked under her weight.

‘It’s stopped raining.’ Eleanor began shovelling up the crayons. Gina was upstairs with Lizzie, she could hear their voices and footsteps through the ceiling. Her father was working in his study and Lucian had gone fishing. Her Mum was in her bedroom lying down.

‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’ Alice snatched up her own drawing and screwed it up, tossing the paper ball back and forth in her hands.

‘I said I don’t care.’

The crayoned sun stung her cheeks, yet her body was crammed with ice, aching cold spreading into her legs. She couldn’t move.

‘I’m not letting you go until you answer the question.’ Alice rose up from the table. She threw off her cardigan and grasping a wooden ruler, sidled towards the door.

‘If it’s a secret, that’s the thing.’ Eleanor was briefly pleased with herself. Originally she had planned to draw a metal frame around the picture to make the edges of the aeroplane window. But now she had packed the grey away. She must not be scared. Outside a watery sun lifted the greenish light of the storm.

‘We can go out in the garden now. Or, if you want, you can go home.’

‘So is it true? You must know.’

‘What do I know?’

‘Your Mum tried to kill herself by eating cheese with her medicine!’ Alice made a shrill noise and still she paced in front of the closed dining room door, smacking the ruler across her palm in time to her words: ‘Is it true?’

Slap. Slap. Slap.

‘What do you mean?’ Eleanor made the question part of a hearty guffaw. She went on packing up the crayons, drawing out the activity. Light colours at the left, getting darker to the right. Black at the end. Where was the black? She shoved the paper around, and lifted the heavy baize cloth. She must find it, or someone would tread on it and blame her.

‘Is it true that your mother would be dead now except Doctor Ramsay saved her life by pumping out the inside of her stomach?’

‘No!’ Eleanor slammed shut the lid on the crayons and tried to get up, but sank down. She couldn’t leave. ‘That’s stupid. You can’t die from cheese. We had some for lunch.’

‘Well, that’s what my Mum said and she’s not stupid.’ Alice bit back tears.

‘She was wrong.’ Eleanor didn’t see what Alice had to cry about.

‘That’s rude. How could she be wrong?’

‘She is. That’s all.’

‘The whole village knows. She said that’s why your mother stays in bed. It’s called dee-presh-shon.’ Alice was speaking faster, and it seemed to Eleanor that Alice’s mother – the source of this secret – was in the room too, in step behind her daughter, nodding all the while to show how right she was. ‘She tried killing herself by holding her breath until she was dead. That didn’t work so she ate cheese and then drank her medicine.’

‘She’s not always in bed.’ Eleanor’s hands were limp and dutiful in her lap.

‘She’s in bed now!’ The ruler cleaved the air with a swipe. ‘How do you know she’s not dead right this minute?’

Eleanor saw the black crayon. It lay inches from Alice’s feet. She addressed it in a whisper:

‘She’s tidying her bedroom. She’ll be down soon.’

These were the ‘open sesame’ words. At the possibility of the approach of Mrs Ramsay, Alice laid down the ruler and said she had to leave; she was already late. She was supposed to be staying for tea under Uncle Jack’s tree. Eleanor was not keen to remind Alice of this and willingly watched her go. Alone with the Judge, Eleanor rose unsteadily to her feet and picking up the black crayon she slotted it into the gap in the box.

After Alice had gone Eleanor had run up to her Mum’s room. Isabel hated to be disturbed, especially when she had a headache. Eleanor stopped outside the door and, with her ear pressed to the wood, listened.

There was no sound.

Downstairs Lizzie had started dinner, singing lustily to a tinny Tom Jones on her transistor. These were noises in her home that Eleanor loved, but now she required silence. Gina must have gone to muck out her horse and Lucian was still out. There was no sound from her father’s study further down the corridor. She inched the doorknob round. With a loud clunk she fell forwards into the room. She had forgotten it was impossible to go into her parents’ bedroom quietly, the door was warped and could only be banged shut or shouldered open with a clatter. Her mother complained every time they came down, but nothing that was broken or faulty at the White House was mended unless it brought things to a halt.

‘For God’s sake. Who’s that?’ The voice groaned from beneath the bedding. The mound moved slightly.

‘Only me.’

‘Who’s “Only Me”?’

‘Elly.’ Eleanor just stopped herself from saying ‘your daughter’. The Cheese Secret had made her mother a stranger. ‘Just came to see if you were ali…if, if, you wanted anything…’

‘Can’t you all leave me alone, must you all constantly barge in?’ Her mother always said this even if she had been left alone for hours. ‘First Gina, then…’

‘What did Gina want?’

‘Oh, Eleanor! What do you want?’

‘Do you need a cup of tea or a drink? It’s nearly after the Yard Arm.’ Their special joke, but her mother groaned and, extracting her hand from under the blanket, flapped feebly at the door.

‘It’s the afternoon, Elly. Push off!’

Eleanor wandered disconsolately up to the playroom, thumping a rhythm on the banister as she climbed. She swung open the front of the doll’s house. It made a snapping sound and stuck half way. Alice said the hinges were rusted and the door was wonky. The dusty furniture had been tossed back into the rooms any old how. She had not touched it since she met Alice. Now she picked up each piece and returned it to the right room. She straightened the tiny bedspread and laid the sitting room rug beside the bed. She hated stepping on the freezing floor in the mornings during winter holidays. She dragged the bed over to the window so the sun would shine on the pillows first thing. Her mother said sunshine made her happy and, when she didn’t have headaches, she loved sunbathing best of all.

Eleanor had lied when she told Alice they had eaten cheese for lunch. They had beans and fish fingers. Alice must have realised this because she had eaten lunch with them.

Eleanor had shunted the green sofa against the sitting room wall. In the big house the sofa was in front of the fireplace and was the best place to be in winter apart from by the kitchen stove. Her mother always lay on it when she was out of bed. Eleanor would sprawl on the thick rug in front of the fire and lean back against the sofa as she watched figures dance and leap in the flames. Sometimes her Mum would run spider fingers on the back of Eleanor’s neck, tracing messages that made her shrug and duck. Isabel liked to torment. She would nudge Crawford with her foot until he spat at her and blow on the back of Eleanor’s head until her skin tingled, while singing made-up songs that made them all laugh uneasily.

Isabel Ramsay had been on the rug the night her family returned from the Lewes fireworks last November. Eleanor had been overjoyed to see her downstairs.

Isabel lay sprawled on her side, an arm across the carpet, and the other bent underneath her in a way that Eleanor thought must give her pins and needles. She didn’t get up when they burst in whooping and shouting, pink cheeks stinging from the icy winds. Lucian and Eleanor were jumping like the mad firework that had zipped and dipped and made them giggle for ages after. Gina had been appalled. Her siblings were embarrassing. It was rare for Lucian to side with Eleanor and this had added to her joy.

When she saw her Mum, Eleanor mouthed to the others shut up and did giant hopping steps towards her.

One side of Isabel’s face was flushed purple from the fire, which although only glowing, was still boiling hot. Her jumper had pulled up at the back revealing a strip of white flesh and the black strap of her bra. As Eleanor got closer she discovered her Mum wasn’t asleep. An eye was open and watched something horrible in the fire without blinking, like one of Crawford’s birds. She was about to speak to her when there was a roar like a tornado whirling in from the garden. The living room door crashed against the wall shattering the convex mirror behind. A shower of splinters glittered and flashed in the firelight.

Eleanor could think only of how her father never let anyone near the mirror, which was his dead mother’s. He acted like even looking in it wore it out. She had gazed down at the broken glass. It would be impossible to put it back together. Then she was spun off her feet as a great creature blundered past her shouting something about room to breathe. She grabbed at the mantelpiece to keep her balance. It was then she saw the puddle on the floor in front of her Mum’s face. A thin thread of sick hung from her lips, from which all the colour had gone.

Her Dad was suddenly there, kneeling down on the floor beside her Mum, but Eleanor knew it was too late. She was dead. Later she would merge the memory of her mother sprawled on the floor with the grainy black and white image of the dying Senator. As her Dad bellowed at the children to get out, Eleanor had wanted to assure him none of them had broken the mirror or done anything to their mother. But before she could form the words an arm went around her, warm hands guiding her away as a soft whispering in her ear said things she couldn’t hear properly but that made her feel better.

They had ended up in Gina’s bedroom and sat close together on her bed. Gina clasped them both to her in a huddle, and stroked their hair, telling Eleanor not to cry. Until then Eleanor had not realised she was crying, but her cheeks were wet so she let Gina blow her nose with Lucian’s handkerchief. She stole a glance at Lucian and saw that he was trembling like Crawford when he used to visit Mrs Jackson. They could hear their Dad calling out their Mum’s name so that Eleanor decided she had hidden and he was looking for her. He kept repeating: ‘Darling Izzie, it’ll be okay now. It’ll be okay.’

After what seemed like hours the room filled with blue light going on and off, and they shuffled like a sack race across to the window, and gasped. A huge white van had crashed into their father’s brand new Rover. Then they saw it was just parked as close to the door as possible and not actually touching his car. Eleanor had saved up enough for a Red Cross ambulance with a detachable stretcher and doors that opened at the back and at the sides. She had been going to buy it at the weekend. This occurred to her as she stood between her brother and sister, and with a gossamer touch Gina stroked away Eleanor’s fringe. Now there would be no weekend.

‘An ambulance,’ she breathed, then flinched, waiting for Gina to reprimand her.

‘It’s for Mum.’ Gina spoke like their mother, low and certain.

Eleanor was reassured. Gina knew what was happening. They kept out of sight as two men carried a stretcher through the front door beneath them. When the men came back there was a bundle on the stretcher like the Guy earlier that evening. The men loaded it into the back of the ambulance. Then just for a moment Eleanor glimpsed her Mum’s face, the eyes looked right at her, before her Dad jumped in and the doors were slammed shut.

‘She’s not dead.’ Lucian stated in his doctor’s voice.

‘Luke!’ Gina pointed at Eleanor, and hugging her tighter, clamped a hand over her ear, which made no difference to what she could hear.

‘If she were dead, they would have covered her face. That’s all.’ Lucian detached himself from his sisters with a shrug.

The children watched impassively as the ambulance followed the circular drive in front of the house and glided out through the gateway. It gathered speed on the lane, and they saw the light flashing, a fallen star moving at speed at ground level, outlining the winding road across the downs to Brighton. Then it plunged into the woods and vanished.

For the first time in their lives the three children had to spend a night alone in the White House because Lizzie was in London until the next day. They had slept in a tangle on top of Gina’s bed, their dreams punctuated by the dull booms and stuttering cracks from firework parties echoing over the dark downs. The three children were woken by their father charging into the room the next morning, demanding help with breakfast. It was past ten o’clock, the longest they had ever been allowed to sleep in.

After that everything returned to normal. Their mother came home a week later in new clothes implying she had been shopping. It was dealing with such incidents that taught the Ramsays to treat big things as small things. Her week away became food poisoning. It was not a secret because no one was keeping it.

Eleanor knew that Alice was wrong. No one died from cheese. But it made her admit to herself that she hated Alice. She did not miss her one bit, although at the end of his visit she decided to tell the detective that it was no fun without her.

Her mother smiled as he gave her a sweet so it had been the right thing to say.

On Thursday lunchtime, after the police had left for the day to continue their investigations, Lucian sauntered past Eleanor as she sat cross-legged on the patio at the back of the house ruminatively weeding out blades of grass from between the cracks in the flags, and laying them out in a neat and tidy row. He called out to his father, who was reading The Lancet on a camp bed under Uncle Jack’s tree:

‘Robert Kennedy’s dead.’

Eleanor’s hand went to her mouth. Her father lowered the magazine just briefly before continuing to read. Eleanor shuddered as Lucian let the side gate bang on his way to the river, whistling a tune on one note. She got to her feet and wandered aimlessly around the side of the house to the meadow.

She walked to the centre and stood in the long grass looking up at the blue cloudless sky, her cheeks warmed by the sun. The handsome Senator in the suit, with brushed hair and squeaky shoes, did not exist any more. Two wasps crawled busily over a rotten apple by her foot. Now the man with the crack in his chin would never save her from drowning.

Eleanor understood with a profundity beyond her nearly nine years that she was truly alone. After that afternoon on the 6th June 1968, this recognition never left her.

Five

On the following Saturday morning, when Alice had been missing for three days, Eleanor had finished a clandestine bowl of cornflakes and was creeping back upstairs when she heard voices coming from the dining room.

She ran nimbly down again. The door was slightly open. This was unusual; another change since Alice went was that doors were mostly shut. Since they had been coming to the White House, Isabel had railed at the creaking doors and windows, left to swing to and fro despite her constant requests to keep them closed, for draughts, she insisted, were definitely responsible for her headaches. After Alice, the White House was quiet.

Eleanor peered in. Her father sat in his chair at the head of the table ready waiting for food. Her mother craned over him from behind perhaps straightening his napkin. Although this in itself was odd, what astonished Eleanor was the way her mother was talking. She was half speaking, half singing like she did with Crawford and her favourite men friends.

‘It’s boring, darling but it’ll soon be over. Like Richard said, it’s routine. I think myself that she could simply be trapped in a cupboard here in the house, those children were getting everywhere, I even poked about in the chest freezer.’ She gave a strange laugh.

‘What would he do?’

Eleanor squinted at her father through the space made by the hinges, as he indicated Judge Henry behind him.

‘Oh, Mark!’ (Eleanor wished her Dad hadn’t mentioned the Judge. It wasn’t the way to get her Mum’s sympathy.) ‘He’d get rid of these damned police, for a start. He was their boss, wasn’t he?’ Eleanor shut her eyes, but her father only made a mewing noise and put his head in his hands.

Her parents had been closeted in the living room most of the morning, watching Robert Kennedy’s funeral on the television. This must have upset her Dad who had lost his twin.

There was a scraping step at the front door and a massive silhouette filled the frosted glass panels. Now accomplished at deception, Eleanor bolted back to the kitchen, then marched out again with stamping steps, before running full tilt up the stairs as someone gave three loud knocks which caused the loft door on the top landing to swing open and smash against the wall. The bangs got quieter and quieter like the ball bearings in a cat’s cradle. She knew that now her Dad would never fix the catch and her Mum would be even more cross.

Then Eleanor realised what had really upset her Dad. Chief Inspector Richard Hall had told her mother at the end of their talk yesterday that the police wanted to search the house in case Alice had hidden in a childish prank as he called it. He told her that they had already searched Alice’s house and found nothing. Although he kept saying ‘Mrs Ramsay’, he looked at Eleanor, so that when her mother said she supposed it must be done, Eleanor nodded heartily in agreement. She was Mrs Ramsay. She wished Gina had been there to see.

If things weren’t bad enough, for the last few days Eleanor had not been able to find Mrs Jackson’s glass amulet. Its disappearance worried her more than what had happened to Alice. She was certain it had last been in her Box of Secrets. This loss was the culmination of a land shift that had altered her perceptions. Wardrobes and wallpaper were different. They were angular and unfriendly, stripped of memory or association. Trees cast menacing shadows across the overgrown lawn and the milk on her cereal that morning had been slightly sour. Nothing was the same.

She had overheard Lizzie telling her mother that the police had opened an Incident Room in the church hall on the high street so today there would be no Bring and Buy sale. Instead most of the village helped in a search across the fields and along the riverbank. Gina and Lucian had been allowed to join in. Gina found a crisp bag that she was told might have a bearing on the case. Lucian hadn’t found anything so said the whole thing was a waste of time. At night Eleanor lay watching the creeping shapes on the ceiling made by sweeping headlights and dazzling film lamps. Intermittent rifle-fire of numerous car doors failed to penetrate the cotton wool quiet hanging over the Green. It reminded Eleanor of the muffled stillness inside her father’s car as outside he chatted on the busy pavement inches from the closed windows.

All day policemen and journalists consulted in hushed murmurs, perhaps because they knew they were getting in the way of everyday life. A life now deemed precious and lost to an age already passing. Then a reporter would aim a camera lens at the White House windows and, diving to the floor out of sight, Eleanor was her old self.

The house search did not produce Alice, but it did yield a packet of Gauloises in Gina’s knicker drawer and a welcome if momentary return to family responsibilities for Mark and Isabel. After administering a telling-off for which neither of them could muster up much remonstrative stamina, Gina was released to make only her second trip to the stables since Alice had hidden. That evening she stormed home in tears and standing in the hall, hurled her riding hat to the floor, where it bounced and rolled on the tiles, as she sliced the air with her crop. Seeing Eleanor strolling out of the kitchen munching on a ham sandwich, Gina had levelled the crop at her and screamed:

‘I ab-so-lute-ly hate you!’

Mark had come up behind Gina, car keys jangling, and grabbing her shoulders, he propelled her into the dining room, kicking the door shut behind him. The sandwich turned to sticky dough clogging Eleanor’s mouth. What was the matter? There was plenty of ham left, and loads of bread; in fact recently, along with cheese, Gina had stopped eating meat, so what did she care? She swallowed hard and trotted swiftly across to the forbidding dining room door. Squinting into the keyhole through which she could see nothing because of the key, Eleanor listened. Gina was shouting:

‘It’s not fair. I hate her. She’s ruined everything!’

Her father cajoled in a continuous rumble so that Eleanor could not make out separate words. She pulled a face as Gina carried on: ‘… and she gets away with it!’

The hatred in her voice made Eleanor hiccup on her sandwich.

She backed away from the door and told herself it didn’t matter about Gina, because her Dad had proved he was on her side. Whatever happened, Eleanor knew for certain that he loved her. This might make everything bearable. When she had got up the nerve to hear more they were talking calmly, although her Dad sounded like he was putting Gina to sleep as she made baby sounds, which should have been funny, but wasn’t.

A chair leg screeched and Eleanor dropped her sandwich. She moved fast, scooping up the scraps of bread, scooting to the kitchen, where she threw them in the bin, scuffling them under a damp wad of rubbish in case she was told off for wasting food with people starving. This made her realise that since Alice went she hadn’t been told off at all. As Eleanor retreated to the playroom – now the extent of her world – she wished they would be cross with her. Gina’s outburst had been a relief. Since Alice had gone, Eleanor had vanished too.

She settled on the floor and went on with her picture. Despite her gloomy mood, Eleanor was pleased with it. Two small spies creeping through thorny bushes followed by a tall murderer in sunglasses and a denim cap. She drew him, in thick black mixed with streaks of burnt umber and gashes of grey and brown, crawling over leaves and branches like a beetle. The spies were meant to capture the Mill Owner and hand him over to Richard Hall. She put in tumbles of gorse and brambles to rip his clothes and scratch him. Along the top of the paper she added the Tide Mills in the distance, and looming at the forefront, the Mill Owner’s house. Then she changed her mind about the thorns and coloured over them. She livened up as she filled the orchard with juicy, ripe pears that she decided the murderer should be allowed to eat because one of them was poisoned by the Chief Spy.

No mention of Gina’s explosion was made at supper. Usually Eleanor would have said something, but instead she chewed diligently, her elbows tucked in. Gina did not shout again, Lucian didn’t talk about logic and reasoning with cutlery acting the parts. Everyone stared at their plates and munched. As the meal wore on Eleanor propped herself on her elbow, her forehead leaning heavily on her hand, and loudly slurped reluctant spoonfuls of custard. No one told her off.

Isabel had set up camp in the dining room, smoking and talking to visitors, emerging only to take a phone call or get another coffee. The dining room was where Eleanor was asked to go and talk to Richard Hall. Isabel sat beside her, as Richard the Chief Inspector explained how she would be helping them with their enquiries. He was trying to make her feel special. Eleanor was suspicious.

The first time they talked, which was the afternoon after Alice went missing, Richard had asked her to think about playing hide and seek with Alice. He was sure that a clever girl like Eleanor could guess where Alice might be hidden. Eleanor had already informed him it was Alice’s turn to look, but he had forgotten. She decided Richard really was bonkers when he asked: ‘Elly, do you remember where you hid Alice?’

His mistake made her snigger: as if she could hide Alice! Eleanor imagined her, smooth and white and clean and hard to lift. It was easy to hide from Alice, because she wouldn’t look in dirty places. Alice, sharp as a pencil, sat bolt upright, asking impossible questions, always demanding the right answers. Alice was very difficult to hide.

She stopped counting before getting to ten.

Richard the Policeman had rubbed his chin, making Eleanor think of Robert Kennedy, at that point still alive and presumably lying on a hospital bed in America with his head in a bandage. This distracted her so that she jumped when her mother smacked her hand down on the table. Everyone stared at it. Eleanor was sure Richard liked the nails, polished and long, and she hoped he liked the rings, the sparkling diamond, and the gold signet on her mother’s little finger that made her father cross because it was from a ‘former life’.

‘Eleanor, bloody well pay attention. I’m sorry Chief Inspector.’ Eleanor knew the man didn’t like her mother swearing. His eyes stopped blinking like Alice’s. She clutched the sides of her chair as the room bent like the Hall of Mirrors on the Palace Pier. She didn’t remember saying anything. She was sure she hadn’t. She must have.

In an interlude of truce during tea after the Cheese day, Alice had confessed to Eleanor that she had failed her Underwater Proficiency test and had to be rescued by the instructor from the shallow end. She didn’t care that Eleanor had got her life saving certificate and had once swum a mile in a freezing pool covered with dead flies. She said Eleanor shouldn’t have pretended to drown by staying under because, she had explained, drowning was not funny. She told her it was rude that Eleanor had waved around in the air the stripey pyjama trousers she had just escaped from, when she finally bobbed to the surface. Eleanor had assured Alice that drowning was like going to sleep.

You close your eyes and let the water go over you. It won’t hurt. It’s better that you can’t swim, you die quicker. Sailors don’t learn to swim in case their boat sinks, Luke said.

‘Let’s hurry this along, shall we, Eleanor?’ The chin came closer; unlike the ‘Stricken Senator’s Chin’ it was full of holes and a funny pink colour. ‘Where have you hidden Alice?’

‘It’s not amusing, darling.’ Isabel glared at Eleanor. ‘You’re not normally like this.’ Isabel smiled hopelessly at the Chief Inspector. It was obvious that Eleanor was normally like it.

‘He said where had I hidden…’

‘Be quiet!’ Isabel grabbed her by the shoulder, pinching her skin under her shirt, pushing her sharply away and then yanking her closer, so that Eleanor nearly toppled from her chair. ‘Just answer Chief Inspector Hall’s questions properly. For the last time: this is no time for fun and games.’

Eleanor felt tears well up, like an enemy stalking. She was frightened of the woman with the tin voice and jabbing fingers and now she was frightened of the policeman with the red sweets and the red chin. He had stopped smiling.

‘When did you last see Alice?’ He had no idea he had asked things before. Eleanor decided that if it was a game she could pretend. She relaxed.

She told the story of the last day. She made the snap decision to put Alice outside the blacksmith’s, which was now a garage, at the bend in the lane leading to the White House. Eleanor told only of the first game of hide and seek which they had played in the village on the Sunday afternoon before tea. She pretended they had played it on that last Tuesday afternoon. She could not say the second game had been at the Tide Mills as they shouldn’t have been there and although Alice had agreed to come, it had been Eleanor’s idea.

It was best not to mention the Tide Mills at all. Eleanor wasn’t going to allow Alice to spoil anything.

The detective’s face was a gritty mask, as Eleanor elaborately outlined how she had hidden in her den on the edge of the ten-acre field behind the old blacksmith’s. It was a secret place that Eleanor didn’t think Alice knew about. If Alice had been in the room she would have said Eleanor was lying and told him they were at the Tide Mills not in the village.

‘You know we have to tell, don’t you.’

She would say the game in the village had been on the Sunday and give them accurate times and dates. Alice would have confessed the truth even if it got Eleanor into trouble. She would simper and whimper about how their feet had slipped on the bridge over the millpond and they had nearly drowned. She would say how Eleanor forced her to walk along the crumbling arch over the gigantic wheel underneath. Alice would pop a strawberry sweet between her moist lips and, being allowed to smile, she would assure him that honestly, she had asked Eleanor not to walk there, but Eleanor had forced her to.

It was very good, concluded Eleanor, that Alice was not there.

She did tell the policeman about her special trick, but was annoyed when he wrote it down because it was a secret. It wasn’t cheating. She explained how she spied on the person looking, and once they had checked one hiding place and found no one there, she would choose her moment and rush over to hide in it. This way Eleanor could be hiding for days if she wanted to.

She had not done this on Sunday.

Richard Hall noted down that Eleanor Ramsay talked like a boy as she boasted about taking apart dead animals and vaulting across furrows in the triangular field with an old farm cart in one corner. Once she reached the other side she said she had turned back to see if Alice was following her. Chief Inspector Hall prided himself on his ability to be objective, but in this case he was not. He didn’t like this child; she wasn’t a proper girl or a proper boy. He vaguely blamed it on the mother who was very attractive.

Eleanor did not mention that Alice had cheated in the first game because now she was pretending to the policeman that there had been only one game. In the first game Alice had sneaked a look while she was counting. She did tell him how on the last day Alice had stopped counting too soon.

Eleanor soon found the talks with the policeman boring. So must he, for on the Thursday morning he had suggested they go out and that Eleanor take him to her hiding places. A gang of tall men loped after the diminutive expedition leader, as she marched them up the lane, and showed them her den through a hole in the hedge of the triangular field. She stood back proudly, arms folded as, one by one, they stuck heads into the gap and made ‘Ah-yes’ noises. In a burst of inspiration she took them to the very petrol pump she had told them Alice had been standing next to when she last saw her. By now Eleanor had forgotten she wasn’t telling the truth and waited with hands on hips, while the police measured the exact distance between the spot where Alice had supposedly been standing and the gap in the hedge that led to the hiding place with a wheel on a stick. It was forty-four feet and eight and a half inches. Eleanor had done measuring in the playground, and knew how many inches to a foot and how many yards to a mile if they asked.

Richard had marks on his cheeks like a potato. Eleanor addressed these marks when she answered the question about hearing a car while hiding in the hedge. Patiently she reminded him that she had swapped hiding places so was not hiding in the hedge the whole time. Later she wished she had put in a car. She could have used the one with silver hubcaps that she saw driving on the Thames by the Hammersmith yacht club. She had thought it was a dream until Lucian talked about the car that could go on water one breakfast time. She made up her mind that if Richard asked her about a car again, she would grab the chance to tell him about it.

By Friday, Eleanor had grown used to the questions and could answer them promptly and consistently.

‘Why did Alice stop counting?’

‘To find me sooner.’

‘Is that what you do?’

‘No, it’s cheating.’

‘Where were you when she stopped counting?’

‘Hiding in the bushes.’

‘What bushes?’

There were no bushes in the triangular field or on the footpath. The bushes were by the Mill. But he accidentally helped her:

‘Do you mean the hedge?’

‘Yes. I ran very fast across the field and down the zig-zag path to the beach. In the opposite direction to the Mill.’ She drew breath and grinned inadvertently. She lost two lives if he guessed about the Tide Mills.

‘Why wasn’t it fair to stop counting?’

‘There was no time to hide. If I hadn’t known exactly where to go, I would have been cross.’

‘So you were cross with Alice.’ He was friendly again.

‘No, I didn’t ’specially mind. Except I didn’t have time to hide.’

‘But you did hide.’

‘Not properly. If I hadn’t known about my den…’ By now Eleanor knew for certain he had something wrong with his memory. She had a game called Memory that Alice had agreed to play. Each person had to turn up two cards in a go and hope to remember where the other part of a pair was. Alice always knew and always won. When she had gone Eleanor found faint pencil squiggles on the backs of the cards.

‘How far did Alice count before she stopped?’

‘Five.’ He wasn’t listening. Eleanor doubted that anyone ever told him off.

‘You recall exactly. That’s smart.’

‘It was meant to be ten, she stopped halfway.’

‘Good at maths too!’ He made a lopsided smile, with his lips showing his teeth and cracks appeared on his face that made the marks on his cheek move.

‘It’s likely, isn’t it, that you were out of earshot, too far away to hear Alice, and she was in fact still counting, but you could not hear?’

‘No. I heard her stop while I was still on the path, I mean… while I was in my den in the hedge. I was only forty-four feet and eight and a half inches away. Sound carries that distance.’ If he never remembered anything, they could be there in the dining room forever saying the same thing. He was writing it down, but didn’t look at what he had written so it didn’t help. Eleanor could put up with it, but she knew her mother would get fed up.

‘The point is, you were able to hide, so it didn’t matter that Alice stopped counting. No need to get cross, was there?’

‘Cheating always matters.’

‘It certainly does matter. I expect that made you very angry, didn’t it?’ The Chief Inspector reached into his pocket and pulled out another bag of sweets, the paper rustled as he spilled them out on to the table between himself and Eleanor and her mother. Eleanor and Isabel stared at the pile. Isabel didn’t usually like her children buying penny sweets.

‘Have one, Eleanor. What would you like? You choose.’

‘Strawberry, please.’

‘Yes, of course it’s your favourite, you told me. Mrs Ramsay, can I tempt you?’ His eyes hovered for a moment on Isabel Ramsay, who had the looks he had never expected to meet in real life. Her mother barely shook her head. Any minute Eleanor hoped she would invent an excuse to go. It would mean they could stop, because her Dad was in Lewes and she had found out that the police couldn’t talk to her without one of her parents present. Eleanor spread the wrapping paper out into a square, neat and flat, pressing and smoothing out the folds. Suddenly her mother snatched it away and screwed it up, frowning at her.

‘You were saying how cross with Alice you were.’ He tilted back in his chair. The chairs had belonged to the Judge and they were supposed to sit sensibly in them.

‘It wasn’t fair. When she hid, I counted all the way to ten and particularly didn’t do it fast to give her time. It was easy to find her because she hid badly.’ Eleanor tucked the chew into the back of her cheek, so she could speak clearly. ‘Actually, I expect that’s why she stopped counting.’

‘What do you mean?’ The chair creaked.

‘She must have wanted to do hiding, she didn’t want to wait ages for her turn, because I’m expert at hiding, so she hid anyway. She had loads of time, because I was hiding too. She knew in the end I would look for her.’ She pushed out her lips and furrowed her forehead to deliver her diagnosis. ‘It is far more fun hiding.’

‘Don’t you think she was upset after your argument?’

‘We didn’t have an argument.’

There was silence. Her mother gazed out of the window, the backs of two fingers stroking under her chin over and over again. The next time Eleanor dared to glance at the Chief Inspector he was looking at her mother’s fingers. He caught her looking at him and started shuffling his papers, squaring the edges with sharp taps on the table.

‘All little girls have fights. I have a daughter the same age as you and she squabbles with her sister all the time. I expect you do! Changes her best friend with the weather!’

‘Gina and me do fight sometimes,’ Eleanor agreed, moving her hand so that her thumb and forefinger rested on her collarbone like her mother was doing. She tried smiling with the corners of her mouth. She hadn’t meant to say that. Her mother would be annoyed later. So would Gina.

‘You mean Alice and you fight?’ He pushed another strawberry chew towards her. It was at this point Eleanor saw that there were mostly strawberry ones. He did remember some things.

‘No, Gina. She’s my sister, not Alice.’

‘We are talking about your fights with Alice.’ He spoke like Lucian fishing out facts. Any minute he might say the Lord’s Prayer backwards in Latin without stopping.

‘We didn’t fight.’ Eleanor couldn’t say Alice was not a person you had fights with. She wanted to say she wasn’t a friend either. When Alice refused to play spaceships, Eleanor could not argue. At least with Gina there were things to say back.

It dawned on her that the Chief Inspector must know about the flower-pressing expedition. All his questions, the sweets, the smiling: everything had been to get her to talk about it. She would not.

She had been so happy when, at tea last Sunday, her Dad had announced they were all going on an expedition after they had finished eating. After only two days Eleanor was at her wit’s end with Alice and was even longing for the holiday to be over, which had never happened before. It had turned out that her Dad had been talking to Alice about her flower collection and the reason for the expedition was to find new flowers to add to it. To make things worse, Lucian and Gina were told they didn’t need to come. Eleanor had tried to get Gina’s attention: if she came Alice would be distracted, but Gina had ignored her frantic signs, probably because Eleanor had egged Lucian into doing the Dance of the Fork with her at tea. Gina had got Alice a fork for her cake then disappeared off to her room without once looking at Eleanor.

The expedition was as nightmarish as Eleanor had expected. Alice had known the names of every flower. She had flitted to and fro like a fairy, then acted like it was private as she crouched down, gripped the flower head between her fingers and confided its name in a whisper to ‘Doctor Ramsay’, as she called him, though he kept telling her she could say ‘Mark’. He then told her the Latin and helped her to pronounce it. Eleanor got crosser as he sliced the stalk with the shiny blade of his sharp knife and slipped the severed flower into a plastic folder for Alice to press.

‘Red valerian. Now I love this one, it’s sooo pretty.’ Alice said she loved every flower they found, in a tinkly voice that Eleanor hadn’t heard before.

‘Centranthus ruber.’ Her father was doing Judge Henry. He let Alice use his knife, steadying her hand as they parted the stem from the main plant. Alice was breathing in her sucking-up, wheezy way. Doctor Ramsay knew how to treat Alice like a grownup.

Eleanor snatched up a flint and threw it with all her might. It bounced down the bridleway. Alice shook her head. Her father was too busy fumbling with Alice’s flower folders to notice.

Later that night when Alice had gone home and everyone was in the living room, Eleanor had sneaked outside. The sun was going down and it was cooler. Her Dad’s study door had been left unlocked, although there was no sign of him so she had hurried in and taken a large envelope from his stationery cupboard. Then armed with her secret penknife she rampaged off down the lane in a private race, charging through the thin gap in the wheat growing in the triangular field. She savagely tore and cut whatever flowers she could find in the hedges and verges. The colours were more vivid now in the gathering twilight and were easy to find. When everyone was in bed, Eleanor sat on the floor of the playroom slapping an example of each flower into an old notebook and belting it in with a bit of sticky tape. She wrote the name in biro followed by jerky printed Latin, got from the battered Collins Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers that her Dad had left out on his desk after their outing.

‘I’ve already got a book of flowers, actually,’ she had remarked airily after Alice had been in the house about five minutes the next morning. Eleanor had meant to take the book with her to tea at Alice’s house later that afternoon when she had planned to produce it like a rabbit out of a hat, catching Alice unawares. But she couldn’t wait. As things turned out this was just as well because she wouldn’t have got a chance.

‘What are you talking about?’ Gina trotted into the hall, and executed a petit jeté as she reached high up for her riding hat from the shelf above the coat hooks. Alice got there first and thrust it into Gina’s arms eagerly. Gina was glaring at her sister and simply put out a hand for it.

‘Oh, just pressed flowers. I’ve been doing them for ages, in my spare time,’ replied Eleanor carelessly. ‘There’s a book I use. It’s nothing, just flowers, you know. And some Latin.’

‘Have you had a bash on the head, Elly?’ Gina had looked at Alice and rolled her eyes. Alice rolled hers too making her head go like a duck. Normally this would have enraged Eleanor but she had been fortified by the pressed flower book, which she produced from under her tee-shirt with a flourish.

The small notebook was swollen and bulging with damp, dying flora. She dumped it on the hall table fully thinking it settled all arguments. For a moment no one moved, obviously taken in by the magnificence of her achievement. Then Alice came over and lifting the warped cardboard cover with just the tips of her fingers, flicked open the front page and stepped back revolted. Gina’s interest had passed and she was on her knees rummaging through the shoe rack.

‘You haven’t pressed them properly.’ Alice had rattled the page holding a flower named ‘Yellow Toad Flax’ in tottering capitals that had stained the paper a nasty brown. ‘You can’t put them straight in. They need to dry. You need a special book.’ She paused for Gina to agree, but Gina was struggling into her boots. As Alice flipped through the notebook, the page heavy with a fistful of Nipplewort (Lapsana communis) fell out at her feet. Apparently without realising it, Alice moved her foot, crushing the head of the flower beneath her sandal.

Gina had got up, inches taller in black riding boots, her hat swinging from her arm, and clopped over to give a final verdict. Eleanor was enraged to smell the scent they had given Isabel. Gina was always stealing things.

‘It’s a shame to press flowers. They should be left where they are for everyone to enjoy. If we all pulled them up willy-nilly and carted them home there’d be none left. Besides it’s a form of murder.’ Gina tossed her head and stalked out of the open door, vanishing in a blaze of sunlight like the lady in Star Trek. She didn’t see Alice gazing at her from the porch until long after she was out of sight.

‘Can you think of anything else to tell us, Eleanor?’ Richard the Policeman began dropping the sweets back into the bag one by one with precise movements. Isabel and Eleanor followed each sweet. Last of all, he put the lid back on his pen with a click and stabbed it into the breast pocket of his jacket. Eleanor made a mental note to practise this later with Lucian’s school blazer.

Was there anything else? She furrowed her brow. There was the old railway line that led from the Mill to the halt where the grain was picked up. There were the remains of the Mill Owner’s house, with its empty rooms and flying fireplace. The sand at the end of the beach was dotted here and there with polished pebbles that were engulfed by the incoming tide. But these and other things were secrets she could not tell them. At another of their meetings she did say that when she went down to the beach to see if Alice was there, it was empty, adding quickly that of course she couldn’t say for sure. For good measure she emphasised that no cars passed by the triangular field while she was hiding and that she suspected Alice of interfering with her den because it was very tidy.

Eleanor said nothing that helped him find Alice.

Chief Inspector Hall told Eleanor she could go and play, and that they might talk again.

Eleanor’s bare legs were stuck to the leather chair, and stung like nettles as she climbed down. She mooched into the garden and sat on the camp bed left under Uncle Jack’s tree. She couldn’t think what to play. This disconsolate feeling was unfamiliar. Anyone looking down from an upstairs window would have seen a small girl robbed of spirit, thin shoulders bowed under a bewildering weight. The house was at its best in the late afternoon sunshine, its leaded windows were blocks of molten gold and its white stucco translucent.

Eleanor did not think of her stories as lying, they were true to her and she made them true to others too. She had written a piece for Miss Skoda on the summer holidays last year. She had said how she and Isabel found shells on the beach and picked flowers for the sitting room mantelpiece. Miss Skoda said it was wonderful how she had remembered every detail. Miss Skoda did not know that Isabel had been away on one of the trips when she never sent a postcard. She didn’t know Isabel hated collecting things like shells and flowers. She didn’t know that Isabel hated dawdling and she hated clutter. If she had known, perhaps Miss Skoda would have guessed Eleanor had made it up.

Eleanor often returned to that story about the beach. It made her happy.

Mummy found a shell buried deep down in the sand and washed it clean in the sea until it was pink and white and shiny. She kissed it three times for luck and held it to my ear for me to hear the sea. She said it was a potent spell and to feel the magic. She put it in my pocket and told me to keep it forever.

Eleanor hid the shell in her Box of Secrets.

The story about Alice would be easy to write.

Alice and Eleanor had played hide and seek. It was Eleanor’s turn to hide so she had hidden. With the dragons and robbers and magic spells there was plenty to put in. She need not mention the Mill; or the Mill Owner; or what happened if villagers got home late from the pub. She need say nothing about the chatting voices of the workers in the Granary that made her think of pigeons. She would leave out the sharp scream of the seagull and how she knew that Alice had stolen her amulet. None of this made a happy story.

When Eleanor gazed up at the sky laced with speeding wispy clouds, the house appeared to be falling on top of her.

Six

‘…six… seven… eight… nine… ten!’

At each count Alice inched further round, taking care to let her hair fall forward so Eleanor wouldn’t see her eyes were open. When she was facing the other way, she could see Eleanor running towards the hedge by the triangular cornfield. Alice felt no qualms about looking. It was unfair of Eleanor to choose such difficult hiding places. Alice wouldn’t have known where to start if she had not seen which direction she went in. Besides this, she could not admit she hated shutting her eyes, even to sleep. She could not confess the terror that had closed in on her as she counted. After Eleanor had vanished into the hedge there were crackles and snaps like a fight going on in the bushes, and through strands of hair Alice saw the branches sway. Then they stopped and it was quiet. It was always quiet in the country. More than ever she wished they had stayed in Newhaven where even at night there would be dogs calling to each other over the gardens, footsteps on the street and the bleak mooing of the foghorn for the ferry.

The little girl remained in the lane, enervated by heat and immobilised by the misery of playing with someone she didn’t like. Eleanor would say she was mad if she started counting again, but Alice could think of no other way to put off looking for her. She knew exactly where to go and she didn’t want to find her. Eleanor would be cross to be found so quickly and might even accuse her of cheating. All she wanted was to go home and play with her Sindy dolls who were proper friends.

The sun burned the back of her neck, as she gazed absently at the web of cracks in the ditch: an earthquake for ants. The cracks widened and she realised she was swaying in the intense heat. She slapped the itchy prickles of sweat on her forehead. She was tired and messy which would upset her Mum. How far away her home seemed, even though there were the roofs of the cottages peeping out from behind the trees where the lane bent towards the village, ending with the church. She could walk, one step at a time, towards the beckoning chimneys and find her house. Then she would be safe.

If she balanced on her toes like Gina she could take a beaker down from the kitchen cupboard next to the shelf where her Mum had arranged the cat plates that were a present for Alice’s last birthday from her Brighton Nana. Alice could easily reach that high as everyone marvelled that she was tall for her age. She didn’t need to get on a chair. The cupboard door would creak, first low then high, as she pushed it shut. The tap would splash and splutter, wetting her face as she turned it up to make a waterfall thundering into the sink. If no one was there she could drink the water in great gulps not caring about cold liquid on her tummy. She had done it before and nothing had happened to her. She would tiptoe into the hallway, and give the barometer a tap to see if it was going to rain so she could stay at home and not go back to the Ramsays’. Then she would run quickly up the steep staircase and hide in her new bedroom. Eleanor would never find her.

It would be the first place that Eleanor would look.

Alice nearly didn’t hear the car. At first she thought the soft purring was an aeroplane, then remembering Tufty Club rules, she hurried to the side of the lane, as close to the hedge as she could be, without tipping into the ditch. She stood stiff and still, to face the oncoming traffic and be visible to the driver. A green car shot around the corner and its big silver bumper drove right at her.

She froze. As it got nearer, Alice saw there was plenty of room for it to pass and it was only the way the road looked in the heat that made it seem as if it was coming to run her down. She didn’t know if she was pleased that the driver was Doctor Ramsay.

Alice was wary of Eleanor’s family. If she had been able to be honest, or had more confidence, she would have recognised dislike but it was a fact in the village that everyone liked the Ramsays. It was impossible for Alice to articulate an opposite feeling even to herself and so she sought other reasons for her dread as she nibbled her Shreddies each morning that half term, before going up to the big house with the tall iron gates to play with Eleanor Ramsay.

It seemed to Alice that the Ramsays were everywhere at once, making loud jokes she didn’t understand in funny voices. Back at home, she told herself she would do a funny voice when she next went, but when she was at the White House, she could hardly speak. It was quite impossible to do something that might make Gina laugh or cause Lucian (who she dare not call Luke) to say ‘affirmative’ in a slow American accent. Alice would croak ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and her cheeks burned as Eleanor’s Mum told Eleanor to behave more like Alice in a voice that might have been joking. She expected Eleanor to be angry later, but she never was. In fact Eleanor didn’t look at her at all and spoke to the doors and windows beyond which she insisted there were spies and murderers. It made Alice worried that there were things she didn’t know, or worse that no one cared about what she did know. Alice had nerved herself up to refuse exploring a jungle that was a settee or fly to the moon in funny plastic chairs that looked as if they had come from the moon in the first place. By the end of two days of playing it seemed impolite to keep saying no, so on that Sunday afternoon, with home time on the horizon, Alice had felt bound to agree to do hide and seek.

As Doctor Ramsay got nearer, Alice considered hiding, but it was too late. The great car slid up to her, filling up the lane, blocking her in. Her face glided to a stop in the reflection of the window, pigtails sticking out like ears in the gleaming glass. Then the window was wound down and inch by inch she jerked out of sight. Eleanor’s father leaned across the passenger seat, with his white teeth lined up in neat rows, and his lips stretched back as he strained to hold the window winder. Alice fixed on the long arms, brown and smooth like a woman’s, with no hairs. These were doctor’s arms. Everything – his very deep voice, his big car and his black sunglasses – were to do with being a doctor. She eyed the outstretched arm. There were some freckles speckling the wrist and twisting blue veins criss-crossed up around the arm, and along the fingers. She imagined them hard to the touch like string. Her own Dad didn’t have veins and his arms were thicker and covered in hair that she stroked and patted as he held her tight around the waist and ordered her to climb off his lap, their words a wellworn ritual.

‘Hop off now.’

‘I can’t move!’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why. You’re holding on to me so I can’t escape.’

‘Stuff and nonsense. Shelves don’t put themselves up.’

‘Alice!’ Doctor Ramsay spoke to the road, like Eleanor did. She looked where he was looking but there was nothing. The strong sunlight made everything wobble. Surreptitiously she steadied herself on his car. The door was burning hot. She let go and rubbed her fingers in her other hand.

‘Yes, it is me.’ She straightened her dress and put her feet together with ankles touching. She must be on her best behaviour: the doctor was a busy man. His time was precious. Her Mum had said there was no such thing as ‘time off’ for doctors. Alice pictured Doctor Ramsay, always awake, always curing people with glasses of water and ice-lolly sticks on the tongue like the doctor at her Mum’s surgery who wouldn’t take out her tonsils because he said they were valuable.

‘Do you need a lift? Or are you on some big adventure!’ He laughed at an invisible joke. Learning now, quick as a flash, Alice laughed too.

‘I’m with Eleanor. We’re playing.’ She was intrigued at the prospect of riding in his green car. Doctor Ramsay could rescue her from Eleanor. Then Alice’s manners got the better of her. It wasn’t fair to leave her hiding. Alice imagined clasping the silver handle, and pulling open the door. It was so close. She’d tell her Dad she had ridden like a princess on the magnificent seats. Through the window came a smell that both scared and lured her: a mix of cigarette smoke, leather and a sharp scent she had smelled on the doctor before. Her mother had said it was aftershave. When she had asked her Dad why he didn’t smell like it, he snorted that it was a stupid expense and what was wrong with smelling like a man?

Alice furtively scratched the back of her calf with her foot, balancing perfectly on one leg. The Ramsays scared her. It was not fear like ‘murder in the dark’ or the fluttering dread of waiting for her turn to read in class. These were bad enough, but she could deal with them. Nor was it the disappointment of a hope shattered as the high jump bar clattered to the ground when she failed to jump three feet, seven inches at the heats for the county championships. The way Alice felt when she saw the Ramsays was worse because the Ramsays were supposed to be great fun.

This was a world where although people talked in English they made no sense, and where they saw nothing wrong with drinking milk straight from the bottle, smoking cigarettes in every room and calling people rude nicknames.

At home, as Alice vigorously brushed the nylon locks on her Sindy dolls before bedtime, she imagined helping Gina with her horse, polishing the tack, carrying her things, mucking out, sweeping up, brushing down. She would hold clever conversations with Lucian, so detailed that she was disorientated to find she was still in her bedroom and not walking through the village on his arm, or helping him catch fish by the river. She whispered to the Sindys that Lucian was in love with her and that every morning she lifted a letter off the mat that implored her to marry him and be the next Mrs Ramsay. She told them he came past her house each night and blew her secret kisses over the dining room table at the Ramsays’. She practised her name in the back of her diary with the Cliff Richard on the cover: ‘Alice Ramsay, Alice Ramsay, Alice Ramsay’ in intricate coloured letters with her Christmas felt pens. If she were married to Lucian she wouldn’t stay in bed all day like the other Mrs Ramsay.

When she was with the Ramsays, Alice was a standard lamp stuck in the corner, her limbs wooden and her neck stiff, so that easy things like drinking orange juice became difficult and daunting. Lucian never noticed her. He once passed her in the street without returning her tentative greeting. She guessed he didn’t remember who she was and was mortified.

It seemed to Alice that Eleanor’s family was constantly doing things. They were important people always expected somewhere: opening the fête, captaining the cricket team, winning the gymkhana, climbing trees and walls and driving off in their car with a bang of doors and a tooting horn. With Gina as her sister, Alice would go riding and Gina would stick up for her in squabbles. When he wasn’t her husband, Lucian was her brother, getting into fights for her and letting her carry his rods.

The foundation for Alice’s dreams about Lucian were built around the day he gave her a bubble gum after they literally bumped into each other in the village store. Lucian stepped backwards on to her foot. She had been nonplussed as he shot out a grubby hand and, opening his fingers, revealed the gum. Bazooka Joe: the neatly wrapped block that smelled sweetly delicious that she never dared to buy. She thanked him properly and accepted it. Instantly she was stunned. Bubble gum would kill her. If she swallowed it, her Mum said it would tangle itself around her intestines until she died. She gasped:

‘Thank you very much, Lucian. I really love bubble gum.’

‘Yeah, well. I’ve got lots.’ Lucian pushed a pink covered tongue briefly out of his mouth as if there was no such thing as rude.

Alice said she would save it as it was nearly lunchtime. Lucian shrugged and told her that it was up to her. Alice saved it for a day, taking it out after her parents had said ‘good night’ and closed her bedroom door. At first she was careful to keep it hidden, but then she was worried it would give her away, so sugary-pink smelling with the coloured paper that concealed a shiny comic strip. The bubble gum was a gift from one of Eleanor’s demons and she had been tricked into accepting it. Finally Alice couldn’t sleep for the guilt. Even if she buried her face under the blankets the heavy sickly smell seeped out from the bottom of her toy cupboard. That morning she had thrown it in the bin, burying it under bits of rubbish to stop it rising to the surface. She could not forget the noise Lucian had made in the road when they came out of the shop. A barking that was not funny, though she had laughed. Alice hadn’t known what to do as he staggered backwards with his arms sticking out like a sleep-walker, balancing on the edge of the kerb. At last he had run off without saying goodbye.

Alice laughed when the Ramsays laughed, but never knew why. They made up words for things and spoke in peculiar accents like foreigners. They called her names like ‘Alicia’ and ‘Allegro’ and said it was ‘splendid’ and ‘fabulous’ that she had moved into the village. When the doctor and Mrs Ramsay left the room, Lucian and Eleanor would chuck sweets or grapes at each other, and dance around calling out rude words. Fruit Salad chews flew like bullets across the lounge, pinging against windows, disappearing under the stained sofa, and once hitting Alice on the side of the head so that she had to laugh louder. She had been miserable when Lizzie told them all to calm down, especially Alice who should know better. Alice had ogled at Lizzie, like a prisoner straining behind a gag, desperately trying to convey with her eyes that it was nothing to do with her.

The Ramsays’ house was messy and muddled, and from the first day Alice had felt sorry for the doctor, who must hate it. There was dust on the window seats in the playroom, and piles of books on the floor in the living room. She had thought they were moving out and had started packing. Alice had begun writing her name in the dust, but stopped. Her mother said it was better to leave a room as if she had never been there, with everything put back in its place. The kitchen table had criss-cross scratches all over it because they had no tablecloth. The Ramsays didn’t mind about scorches from hot pans or the dents from knives and forks. Her Mum would have been upset for guests to see these marks, but they didn’t care. Yet her Mum was surely right, guests did notice dents and had opinions. Alice was a guest and she had noticed them. The Ramsays never bothered with what guests thought. As she had tucked down to sleep the night before, Alice recognised, in a scalping of innocence, that her parents were wrong. This revelation overturned her world.

Alice longed to get into the doctor’s car. What stopped her was knowing that Doctor Ramsay might not like her if he was told the truth about her. The afternoon before she had upset his daughter by talking about cheese and now she would be doing it again by leaving Eleanor hiding.

‘So, what are you up to?’ The doctor jerked the gear stick forwards and backwards and pulled up the handbrake with a clicking sound. Three clicks were enough, her father said, or you ruined the brake. The doctor did loads of clicks and didn’t care. The car’s noise went deeper. He looked around him, which made Alice look too. If he spotted Eleanor, she wouldn’t have to pretend to search for her. Alice was surprised he wasn’t in a hurry.

‘Where is my daughter, anyway? You two are inseparable. Left you on your own, has she?’ He nodded. So it happened to him too. Then he looked Alice full in the face and made a sucking noise on his teeth with his tongue like her Dad did at the end of meals, which her Mum said was a bad example.

There were too many questions at once, Alice didn’t know which to answer first. It was so easy to be impolite. She had rehearsed the words: Please, take me home, but now she had said she was playing with Eleanor he wouldn’t take her anywhere. He was a doctor and must know she ought to be at home playing in the square of sunlight in the lounge. Sunlight was good for you. The figures grew clearer in the hedge behind the doctor’s head. Her Mum making rock cakes and singing ‘Please Release Me’ through the hatch; her Dad fixing something in the garage, whistling bits of her Mum’s tunes out of order till she stopped him:

‘The cat sounds better!’

Alice liked the way her Mum and Dad said the same things to each other.

‘We’re playing hide and seek, it’s my turn to look. I don’t know where Eleanor is.’ She raised her voice. ‘She’s very good at hiding.’

‘I see.’ He glanced around again. ‘Have you tried all her hidey holes? There’s the tree house and the barn. Failing that, you could come back with me and leave her! It’s nearly four, isn’t that meant to be teatime?’ He rolled his eyes like Gina. Alice brightened.

She was about to accept, and then it dawned on her that all along he had been joking. He wouldn’t want to give her a lift; indeed he was already preparing to drive away. Five minutes ago she would have been relieved to see him go, but now playing with Eleanor was worse than talking to the doctor, which wasn’t so bad after all. As he released the handbrake Alice tried to stop him.

‘How is Mrs Ramsay?’

She was horrified to see it was the wrong question. Lines appeared above his eyes as he banged the steering wheel. He turned his head, looking out for Eleanor, or perhaps for Mrs Ramsay. ‘As good as ever!’ Then he smiled right at her and Alice saw it was all right. After that the conversation went much better and Alice found she had lots of things to tell him and forgot that he was a doctor because he said she should call him Mark. She tried it in bed that night, but it felt like the name of a stranger so she went back to ‘Doctor’. She told him about her flower collection and that was when he kindly offered to help her with it, although at the time she hadn’t believed he meant it. It seemed there were lots of flowers her parents hadn’t told her about. She had forgotten all about Eleanor until Doctor Ramsay exclaimed:

‘Good luck finding Elly!’ Alice pulled a face to show that she didn’t expect to. Really she meant she didn’t want to and she was sure now that Doctor Ramsay understood this. He turned on his radio and mimed along to Tom Jones singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’, her Mum’s favourite. This time it was fine to laugh. Alice could still hear the music as Doctor Ramsay’s car whizzed out of sight round the corner of the lane to the White House. After that she forgot about Lucian. He was childish in comparison to Doctor Ramsay.

Alice shivered. The sun had gone in as dark clouds crept across the sky from the coast. Soon it would rain, like her Dad’s barometer had forecast. Doctor Ramsay hadn’t mentioned the cheese. She dared to hope Eleanor hadn’t told him what she had said, although it was worse not to be told off. Alice would definitely have told her Dad if Eleanor had been mean to her. She heard a rumble of thunder. She should get inside. She decided that next time it was her turn to hide she would slip away. Eleanor would be watching from the hedge so she made a feeble play of looking elsewhere, even checking the ditch in case Eleanor was lying there. Then thinking of Doctor Ramsay and dropping all pretence, Alice trotted up the lane to where she had last seen Eleanor. It was time to end the game.

The branches were knotted together with bindweed and brambles so she couldn’t find the hole. She was sure she was being spied on. Alice didn’t understand why Eleanor had to spy all the time. She hid behind cupboards, under tables, behind sofas, and wrote down what people said in a notebook. Apart from Gina no one said anything worth recording.

‘I can see you,’ Alice told the hedge. ‘I said, I can see you.’ She smiled to cover her discomfort: she had promised herself to be nice to Eleanor after yesterday. She nodded firmly to a twig with three leaves that hid Eleanor’s eyes.

The twig didn’t move.

‘About what I said about your Mum and the cheese.’ She spoke to a small bluish beetle that scurried from one leaf to the next on the twig. ‘I’m sorry.’ The beetle stopped.

Silence.

Alice felt better. It wasn’t polite to ignore an apology. Now it was evens. Now Eleanor had upset her in return.

Then Alice saw the hole and made a snap decision. She picked her way down the clumps of grass into the ditch and dragged the branches aside. She ignored the nettles that stung her ankles to come out on all fours in a space between the bushes, completely hidden from the road. By her nose was a wooden crate with French writing on the sides. It was draped with a faded red velvet curtain on which was placed a blotchy canvas cushion. The surprisingly homely feel was emphasised by a mess of comics and two empty bottles of Coke. The ground was carpeted with dried leaves and dry twigs. It was soft and spongy. Alice tentatively turned the cushion over, checking for insects and spiders, rather comforted by its fusty smell. She perched on the homemade seat. Now she had the perfect look out, through a natural window in the hedge. She would see anyone coming down the lane, but no one would see her. Eleanor must have sat here spying while she talked to Doctor Ramsay then got out when she saw Alice coming. Alice reflected that if she had been Eleanor, she would have waited until Alice had left the den and hidden there again. Eleanor would assume that Alice wouldn’t come back there.

She would be wrong.

Alice smiled to herself and hugged her knees tightly. She liked her own company and seldom felt lonely. In fact she resented having to play with other children, a resentment that had reached a conscious pitch with Eleanor. But as the minutes wore on, she began to feel lonely. She couldn’t dismiss this comfy little hole with its nice things to read. She wished Eleanor would stop hiding, and then they could sit together and spy on people going by. Alice would do the notes because her writing and her spelling were better. She bent down and rearranged the leaves and crushed branches to hide patches of soil and rubbed away at a mark on the box until it went. As she shuffled the comics into a straight pile, Alice made up a story for Eleanor.

There was once a magic cave heaped to the ceiling with treasure where for hundreds of years there had lived a wizard who cast spells on the people of the kingdom. He cured the sick and made miserable people happy. All the children loved him because he treated them like real grownups and cared what they thought. If they were upset then with a whoosh of his wand everything was made better.

Alice was sure Eleanor would like the story and became so absorbed in her narrative that it was a shock to remember that she was an intruder and that Eleanor would be angry to find Alice in her den without permission. She saw that her hands were dirty, and there was a tear in her dress.

Alice scrambled out of the ditch back to the road and ran towards the White House.

Eleanor was by the gates, singing Young Girl loudly with the wrong words and out of tune while slashing the hedge with a stick. Leaves ripped off and flew up in a shower. She was making no attempt to hide and seeing Alice waved the stick above her head like the Red Indian with a tomahawk she had been all yesterday morning. Alice thought Eleanor must be in a bad mood, but as she got nearer she saw that Eleanor was smiling. So she smiled too. They would sit in the garden and have tea. Alice would whisper to her about the wizard and offer to get some pretty material from her Mum to make curtains for the den. They could hang them from the branches, she would show Eleanor how. On another day they might even go back to the Tide Mills. Alice was dizzy with a torrent of bright ideas as she hastened up the lane towards the scruffy little girl dawdling along the hedgerow.

‘I gave up hiding as you took so long coming.’ Eleanor tossed her stick up in the air.

‘Careful, it might hit me.’ Alice jumped back as Eleanor failed to catch it and the stick clattered at Alice’s feet, just missing her head. Alice’s good feelings evaporated.

‘Doctor Ramsay said to wash your hands and come in for tea, I just saw him.’ Alice was safe because she knew for certain that Eleanor would never talk to Doctor Ramsay about her. If she did, Doctor Ramsay would never believe her because now he was Alice’s friend. Alice folded her arms over her chest and stalked past Eleanor up the circular drive to the big front door. Outside the gates Eleanor continued to hurl the stick and after the fourth time to catch it with easy precision.

Seven

When Gina offered Alice a slice of Lizzie’s fruit cake she, without thinking, still imbued with courage after her talk with Doctor Ramsay and now excited by the flower-pressing expedition he had promised that they would go on after tea, asked for a fork to eat it with. This had made Lucian and Eleanor hysterical with laughter. They tried to hide it. Alice stopped being hungry as she pretended not to see them gasping for breath. When they finally exploded, they said it was about their cat. She had wished Doctor Ramsay would stop them for after their chat earlier that afternoon she knew he would agree with her about the fork. It would even be all right if Gina gave her a friendly smile, but, one by one, Mrs Ramsay, Gina and finally Doctor Ramsay had gone away. Lucian and Eleanor played hunt the fork, doing mad dances on the lawn, around the table and climbing into the branches of the tree above making crow-noises that sounded like ‘fork’. Gina had gone after her mother, striding away in her bright white plimsolls, her hair flying out like a mane. Alice silently pleaded with her to come back. Through brimming eyes, she stared at the fearsome lump of cake on her plate, unable to leave the table without permission even though there was no one to ask or to mind. Gina had actually spoken to Alice when she and her Mum had first met the Ramsays on Friday morning. She had asked her if she liked her new home. Alice wanted to tell Gina how she missed their house in Newhaven, but that she loved her new bedroom and hearing the village shop bell tinkle when a customer opened the door. Instead she had managed no more than a nod.

Alice had sat tight in her chair, hands trapped under sticky bare legs, knees clamped together, holding a smile that made her cheeks ache, as Eleanor and Lucian hurled the stick Eleanor had been thrashing the hedge with earlier back and forth to each other. Everyone had forgotten they were having tea. Alice’s slice of cake sat implacably on her plate admonishing her for needing a fork. She wanted to squish it up and scatter the crumbs in the flowerbed. She waited. Cups of tea and half-drunk glasses of orange juice waited with her. Everyone else had been eating with fingers. Broken chunks of cake, a spattering of sultanas and cherry lay on the plates and were scattered on the tablecloth. The Ramsays were messy eaters. Alice’s mouth was dry, and she shivered despite the warm sunlight. Her shaking hand would not lift her glass without spilling the juice. She bitterly wished she had gone home earlier while Eleanor was hiding in the hedge. Now the thought of looking for wild flowers was further punishment.

Alice dimly recognised it would be better if she could join in and crawl along the grass like a snake, or swing like a monkey from the tree, but she was a crumpled doll with sticks for arms and legs, and a torn dress clean on that morning.

Doctor Ramsay was coming.

He trod quietly across the grass, his white shirt ballooning out over his jeans, and sank back down into his cane armchair with a loud sigh saying something about Mrs Ramsay having sunstroke. Alice didn’t know whether to respond, he wasn’t looking at her. Then she reeled in a hot wave of alarm. He had forgotten the fork. She had been relying on it to save her. Now she didn’t know what to do about the cake. She should have gone home in his car while she had the chance. It was ruder to have asked than to have eaten with fingers. It had showed up the Ramsays and spoiled their tea party.

Alice pulled her hands out from under her legs and furtively examined them under the table. White and red creases ran across her skin as if she was old. She pretended her thumbs were her friends, curling her fingers into a fist. Two thumbs: two friends. She wasn’t alone. Suddenly Gina was back. Something flashed in her hand. Alice breathed out and thanked her three times which made Doctor Ramsay glance at her with a look of concern. Although Alice had been happy that Gina had brought the fork, she was terribly frightened now of what it might do to Lucian and Eleanor, who were seeing who could throw the stick highest in the air. They could both catch it easily, which made the fork become heavy in her hand and she forgot momentarily how to hold it properly. Without turning round, Gina yelled at them to come back. Alice was impressed when they raced over and collapsed into their chairs. She had come to think of them as untameable animals.

As Alice nibbled her cake in manageable forkfuls, dabbing her mouth with her handkerchief because they had forgotten serviettes, she was hemmed in by fingers. Fingers licked by smacking tongues, fingers picking noses and scratching rude bits, fingers wiped across shorts, flicking sultanas off the table with clicks and taps and dabbling in wet saucers. Eleanor and Lucian got the giggles again. This time Alice joined in until she breathed in crumbs and was nearly sick. Doctor Ramsay rubbed and patted her back and made her sip water from a glass that he held while talking, although she couldn’t catch the words. Alice was sorry for Doctor Ramsay and Gina for having to be in the Ramsay family. Afterwards, she told her parents about choking and the kind Doctor Ramsay coming to the rescue. But she didn’t mention about the fork. She knew they would have been pleased that she had asked, because it showed the Ramsays she was well brought up. This thought made her hot with shame for good manners shrank to nothing in comparison to playing jazz music on the piano, doing funny voices or curing people. Her mother was no more than a polite and tidy stranger as Alice assured her that yes, she had thanked Doctor Ramsay properly for looking after her and she did realise how lucky she was that he was there.

Eight

When he ruffled her hair, Alice felt a lurch of sickness and closed her eyes. The jelly teddy bear lay patiently: a sacrificial lamb that she must eat limb by limb, sucking slowly, eye by chocolate eye, crunching his sugar teeth and marshmallow ears without mercy. He was her long promised treat for being in the chorus of her school play. But after tea at the Ramsays’ followed by her Mum’s shepherd’s pie, Alice wasn’t hungry and she was angry that her mother hadn’t expected this and saved it for a better time. Besides Alice had only been in the chorus and it was all over now.

‘How’s my princess?’ He bent over and kissed the top of her head with a loud smacking sound and moved his hand over her scalp in crawly circles. She smiled weakly as he smoothed her hair in case by touching it he had messed it up. Leaning over he examined the bear.

‘Is that all for me?’ He smacked his lips. She studied the tick-shaped mark on his chin. It showed up more in the afternoons when his face was scratchy. ‘Mmmm. Yum, yum.’

‘It’s not yours.’

She trotted out words. She didn’t want jokes today. She didn’t want the bear either.

‘’Course it is.’ His finger got ready to pluck out an eye. ‘Raspberry, my favourite.’

‘It’s strawberry.’ She was properly cross. ‘Have it if you want to.’

‘All right, keep your hair on.’ He scrabbled it roughly. She imagined him snatching it off like a wig and shied away.

‘Alice!’ Now her Dad was annoyed. He liked her to be nice. ‘What do you say?’

Her mouth went upwards, her lips tightened and she made herself smile. ‘You can have some if you like.’

‘You know that’s not what I meant.’ But he was nicer again.

‘Sorry.’

‘That’s better. Don’t get spoiled with all these treats. Spending every day with that Doctor Ramsay and his family. Don’t get ideas.’ Her Dad’s voice reminded her of his new car, shiny metal with sharp edges. Only it wasn’t really new. Uncle John had owned it first.

Alice couldn’t tell him she had already had ideas. She had lost the girl who would have loved a strawberry jelly bear and taken ages to eat it, making each mouthful last. The treat was for the wrong person. Her grandad was coming over from Newhaven later. He would be angry if she left any. He hated waste. Once she had refused to eat her supper when he was visiting because her head ached and her skin tingled. He had shouted so loud that his eyes bulged like gobstoppers. Her Dad had shouted back at him. Alice had sat and listened as her grandad scraped the food off her plate on to his own and ate it with a loud clicking.

She made an investigatory split in the bear’s chest with her spoon. It did not cry as she scooped out its heart and slipped it between her lips. She squashed the mixture against the roof of her mouth with her tongue and closing her eyes, willed herself to swallow. She assessed her plate and decided that if she could do the same thing – maybe fifteen times – it would all be over and she could go to bed.

Alice started to eat when she heard her Dad clonk his shoes down on the newspaper in the hall, ready for cleaning. She felt in the pocket of her dress for the jewel. It was still there. She felt better. It was the nicest present she had been given by anyone. Perhaps it was possible for them to be friends. Now she really was a princess. She would keep it secret as she had promised. Already she had planned to hide it in her ice-skating boots at the bottom of her toy cupboard. She was concentrating on ballet now so there was no chance that her Mum would touch her boots.

While he took off his postman shoes, her Dad was whistling a tune she didn’t recognise. His whistling normally made her hopeful. Today the long drawn out notes made her sad. She looked round the kitchen, usually so reassuring. It was full of enemies. She gloomily eyed the teacups on the shelves above the sideboard and the row of grinning cat plates propped up behind. The shelves were lined with flowery paper smelling of lemon. The teapot, in its woollen hat with the bobble on top, could read her mind.

‘So, did you have a nice day?’ Her Dad sat down opposite her. She wished he would go into the lounge and read the evening paper, or out to his lean-to to mend something. Her Mum had popped back to the surgery where she had left her purse. Alice could have had plenty of time to chuck the bear in the rubbish bin. Now her Dad could see right into her head and take out her thoughts with a spoon. She tried to think ordinary things: school…ballet…subjects it would be okay for him to find. Then she remembered the precious glass jewel and closed her mind. The teddy bear would take more than ten swallows. She was sure she had eaten more of its left cheek, but now its whole face was leering at her. If Doctor Ramsay delved inside her head he would discover she had taunted Eleanor about Mrs Ramsay and the medicine. No one knew what Alice was really like. Except for Eleanor who was biding her time.

‘Yes, it was a lovely day. Thank you.’ This was mostly true.

‘Is that all? Where are all your stories? Your Mum said you picked flowers.’

Alice’s mouth went dry. ‘Yes, we looked for flowers for my collection. Doctor Ramsay helped.’

‘Did he? You know your flowers. I expect he was bowled over. Bet you could hold a candle to any of his kids.’

‘Eleanor didn’t pay attention. Gina knows about flowers, but she was with her horse.’ While her Dad was there Alice had to keep eating. She got another spoonful ready and readied herself. He was watching.

‘That Eleanor’s a bit of a wild one.’ Steve Howland looked through his daughter as he considered the truth of his remark. Despite this, he rather liked the girl. She had spirit.

‘Mum’s asked her to tea tomorrow.’

‘Did you bring them home?’

‘Who?’

‘The flowers you picked. A nice bunch for your Daddy?’

Alice gulped down some jelly and sprawled her arms out around the plate. It was more comfortable than sitting up straight. ‘It wasn’t like that.’ She had been told to chew her food ten times before swallowing, surely that didn’t mean jelly. It had gone by chew five.

‘Oh-oh, so what was it like? What about what’s her name, Lady Muck?’ He gave a roar of laughter.

‘Mrs Ramsay. I wish you wouldn’t, Steve.’ Her Mum hurried into the kitchen on an urgent mission. Alice saw that her mother didn’t do anything calmly; she was always rushing and going out of control. She grew hot with impatience as her Mum filled the kettle, crashing it down on the stove and waving the gas lighter at it inaccurately so that it took longer to light than it needed to.

‘Did you tell Dad about Doctor Ramsay’s lesson on photosynthesis? Wasn’t he kind to take the time, Steve? So busy and with three of his own. He sat her down and went through it. Normally it’s not done until they get to the big school.’

She turned from the stove pointing the gas lighter at Alice, ‘Make the most of it, love. You’ll have a lovely head start.’

‘She said he took them on a jaunt to get flowers!’ Steve Howland remained unimpressed.

‘Doctor Ramsay works harder than you and I put together.’ Kathleen Howland wrapped a tea towel around her hand and pulled open the oven door. Warm air wafted around them.

‘You should see the state of their drive, cracks, bumps. Needs seeing to.’ Steve judged everyone by the route from the street to their letter box. He gazed fondly at his daughter, she smiled back and collected up some more jelly.

Steve and Kathleen tried not to spoil their only daughter. But at times like this they thought she was perfect. Steve took pleasure in everything his Alice did. He loved the way she held her spoon, daintily like a lady, not in her fist like other children. She was beautiful with her soft eyes, sitting there so straight, with her hair falling down past her shoulders. He often told himself she was the point of his life, the apple of his eye. Despite his sarcasm, he was proud she could go to tea with the Ramsays and be like them. Even if it meant she’d change beyond all recognition he would fight tooth and nail to prevent anything holding her back.

Alice was sure her parents must have heard about her imprisoning Eleanor in the dining room on Saturday. Her Mum would have been astonished and told the doctor it wasn’t like Alice to behave unkindly. She would have looked for an explanation, but have been too polite to blame Eleanor. She would have promised to have a quiet word with Alice over tea, perhaps even told Doctor Ramsay about the bear treat and how that would be a good time to choose. She would say Steve would be there to ensure a firm hand, hoping that, as a father himself, Doctor Ramsay would appreciate that. So Alice guessed this was why they were both there, waiting for the right moment. She felt sorry for them. They were so sure there must be a perfectly good explanation. They would say she wasn’t naturally mean.

They were wrong.

Alice could not have explained to anyone what had made her torture Eleanor with the Cheese Secret. She couldn’t talk about the sniggering, the put on voices, cat hairs, bowls of vegetable soup like sick, and finally the matches in the toilet. Alice could not explain that she hadn’t thought Eleanor would mind because she didn’t believe Eleanor loved her Mummy as much as Alice loved hers. She had seen no recognisable signs. The Ramsays were not like ordinary people.

‘You’re clever when it comes to flowers. You’ve got a gift.’ Steve turned to Kathleen for back up, but she was draining potatoes over the sink. ‘You could be a florist.’

‘Doctor Ramsay said I’d make a great botanist and should get a job at Kew Gardens.’

‘Ah well. He should know.’ Steve Howland puffed out his cheeks with an explosive sigh.

Alice wanted to tell him about the picture in her head. She could see a face, eyes sparkly like diamonds with trying not to cry. A crayon snapping in her fist as she made the sun bright yellow. The big room with wooden walls was caving in on her. She wished there was someone she could tell the truth to about the sort of girl she really was. She wasn’t the Alice everyone thought she was.

After rushing out of the White House last Saturday afternoon, Alice had stuffed her screwed up picture in the bin when she got home. Her Dad could have seen it, if he had looked inside.

Her Mum put a plate with two chops, four potatoes and a map of peas down in front of her Dad. He went off to wash his hands, like he always did exactly when the food was ready. Her Mum tutted at the delay, like she always did. But still she filled his silver tankard with frothing London Pride, his favourite.

‘Hurry up with that, Alice.’ Mrs Howland flitted from one task to the next without stopping. She began washing the pans, clinking and clattering as she loaded the rack with steaming dishes. Alice saw her chance.

She kept her eyes on her Mum and, stepping around her chair, guided the remains of the bear into the hole at the top of the stove. The rubbish bin was too far away. For a second his face looked at her before it slathered over the unlit coals. Her father returned just as she sat back down.

‘What’s up, Fannackapans?’ Steve was puzzled by Alice’s expression. She was gaping at him as if she didn’t know him. For a moment he dreaded her growing up more than anything and wanted time to stand still.

‘I was taking my plate to be washed.’ She glanced down and saw a smear of jelly up to the rim where she had pushed it off and covered it with her hand. She looked at her father, divided now by more than a tea table.

After her Mum and Dad had gone to sleep, Alice crept down and lifted the latch on the kitchen door. She flinched at the loud click of the light switch. Had it woken her parents? There was no movement from above. The lino was cool on her bare feet. All evening she had dreaded her Mum and Dad looking in the stove. She knew that in the height of summer it was very unlikely, but her guilt skewed her judgement. She imagined they knew and as with everything else had agreed to say nothing. Alice was persecuted by their silence. Her crimes were mounting up. She had to show them the person she had become.

She eased open the lid of the stove. Button eyes stared blindly from the coals. She felt into the dark hole and one by one picked up lumps of coal from the sides and laid them over the jelly until the bear was buried. Her hands were soon smeared with sticky black dust. She was about to wash them under the tap when she remembered how the pipes would hiss and clank. She was not allowed to pull the chain at night for this reason. There was a small puddle of water around the plughole, she dabbled her fingers in, rubbing them together and dipping them again until the stains had gone.

She went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. She lay in the dark, thinking of Mrs Ramsay trying to kill herself. Alice had doubted the truth of the story even as she was quizzing Eleanor. Just as she could not imagine Mrs Ramsay going to the toilet, so she couldn’t imagine her killing herself. Eleanor had been right, no one could die from cheese.

Nine

It had been arranged that Eleanor would go to tea with Alice on the Monday afternoon. Mrs Howland was up at dawn that morning making sure the house was spotless. She unwrapped the pink china and shooed Alice off the settee to vacuum the cushions. Alice knew Eleanor wouldn’t care about clean cushions or eating off the best plates. She hated her mother for her mistake. In despair Alice had set off for the Ramsays’ where she was to spend the morning and have lunch. Unlike the other two days, she had to be back in time to get ready for the special tea and Eleanor’s arrival at four o’clock.

The Ramsays floated through space: Lucian slid down banisters sideways, Gina did perfect horse jumps and cantered like the Virginian. Eleanor vaulted over walls like a man while Alice walked sensibly round to the gate. Mrs Ramsay floated the most, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, in and out of rooms and across the garden, trailing in flowing robes. Her own parents made everything difficult and Alice was crushed by the weight of their efforts. After her talk with the doctor, she saw the world like a bicycle wheel with the Ramsays at the centre, while her parents were at the end of a long spoke. The home she longed to escape to when she was caught in a Ramsay storm wasn’t real. It wasn’t where proper things went on. There was no need to wash already clean tablecloths and polish already gleaming cake forks, for no one noticed except her Mum, and she didn’t matter.

At the sound of the doorbell her Mum snatched off her apron. Alice stayed in the kitchen, reluctant to see Eleanor. She eyed the table piled high with triangular fish paste sandwiches, jelly, fairy cakes, tall beakers of orange juice, and glittering with the best cutlery. The Ramsays didn’t eat this much between them. Through the half open door she saw her Mum greet Eleanor. Never had the cottage looked so dark and small. Eleanor’s playroom was bigger than the whole ground floor. She grimaced as Eleanor let her cheek be kissed and, shrugging off her anorak, hung it on one of the hooks, before Alice’s Mum could take it.

Alice glared at the table, bright white and stupidly waiting. She wanted to be Gina, wandering in late from horse riding to find a game of hide and seek or Monopoly going on, free to leave or join in if she wished. Gina was the White Witch in her sleigh heaped with furs, making a lashing remark before gliding away. In Alice’s house no one interrupted her games, except her Mum to ask her to lay the table or her Dad to take her ice-skating. If she had a friend to stay, she had to play with them. She couldn’t go off and read a book like Gina. Alice sat down on the chair reserved for Eleanor and picking up a geometrically folded serviette, twisted it into a ball and scowled at the door.

Last week Alice had believed in God. He was a kindly third parent, rather like her Brighton grandad had been. God was pleased when she did a hundred skips in a row or was pencil monitor for a whole term. He helped her get best marks for her arabesques, a reward for cleaning her mother’s china animal collection. She believed that if her Mum was pleased with her, God would be too. He was behind the rare tick in green ink that Mrs Bird, the head mistress at her old Newhaven school, sometimes put beside her teacher’s red one, for neat writing or punctuality. Until Alice met the Ramsays, God had kept watch over Alice all the time, taking notes like Eleanor. Now she was certain that, like Father Christmas, God had never ever been there. He was one of the Ramsays’ jokes she didn’t get, but laughed at until her stomach hurt. He was the stern old Judge whose eyes could see you wherever you hid.

Alice hoped there was not a God to see the fluffy dolls that doubled as covers for the toilet rolls, the toilet brush, the bread bin, hot water bottles, the teapot. Dolls in pink, dolls in blue staring out of every corner, seeing much more than God.

When Eleanor had pointed out that God couldn’t be watching everyone at once, Alice had tried to explain:

‘He’s not like you and me, he sees everything. If he was like us he wouldn’t be God.’

‘You made that up. Every time I ask how he could do something, like have your dead grandad there with him along with my grandparents and all the other grandpas and grandmas, and heaps of dead people, you say he’s special and not like us.’ Eleanor was swinging headfirst round and round a railing behind the cricket pavilion. As she returned to a standing position, leaning on the bar, she panted: ‘If he is different from us, how come he has a beard and two feet and hands like an ordinary man? He could be your Dad or my Dad. Perhaps he is!’ She launched herself over again, legs flying. As she spun round, her head nearly touched the concrete; Alice believed Eleanor would die if one hand slipped, but like everything else Eleanor did that was dirty or dangerous, nothing like that happened.

Alice picked up another serviette and opened it out. As she glowered uncomprehending at the pattern of a sunflower, she remembered Mrs Ramsay saying that Doctor Ramsay was ‘playing God’ when her Mum had asked her where he was yesterday morning. Her Mum had laughed, but Mrs Ramsay hadn’t even smiled. Her Mum didn’t understand the Ramsays’ jokes either.

It seemed that Alice had found a joke of her own when, just minutes before she mentioned the cheese, she had spotted a box of matches in the Ramsays’ downstairs toilet. She had taken Eleanor to see it, chortling loudly all the way, pleased to find something funny at last. How had it got there? Did her parents make fires indoors to keep warm? Eleanor had not laughed.

‘Oh that. It’s to get rid of the stink after a shit. Feel free to use it.’

Alice was shocked. She couldn’t speak as Eleanor drew open the box, picked out a match and struck it. She held the flame up to Alice’s face, staring at her with wide eyes, like a wicked witch trying to put her under a spell. The fire had burned right down to her fingers before she tossed it into the toilet. The flame went out with a psst as it hit the water and the blackened wood turned into a live insect swimming around at the bottom. Alice flinched as, with both hands, Eleanor yanked the metal chain above their heads.

The children had peered down like perpetrators of an awful crime, as the water thundered around the toilet sending droplets over the sides. Alice shrank back as splashes landed on the wooden seat. They were the splashes she had previously misunderstood when using the toilet. She had cleaned them up with wads of toilet paper and pinched lips before being prepared to sit down on the yawning wooden seat. The match-insect shot up and down and was still there when the water was quiet. Eleanor made them stand there until the iron cistern had filled so they could try again. They were squashed together in the cramped room smelling of smoke, waiting as the hissing got higher and higher and fizzled to a stop.

As Eleanor pulled the chain a second time, Mrs Ramsay appeared. Alice had thought she’d heard her going out. She had not heard footsteps although she had been listening out. Alice had paid no attention to Eleanor’s explanation about the matches. It was one of her stories.

‘What are you girls up to?’ Mrs Ramsay rubbed the sides of her nose with her hands. Alice started explaining the smell was nothing to do with her, that she had not been to the toilet or set fire to the toilet, but Eleanor was speaking:

‘I was showing Alice the matches, so she knows what do to when she does a poo. She was asking.’ Eleanor slid the box shut and put it back on the windowsill beside the pile of Harper’s Bazaar magazines that Alice never touched because of germs.

‘Oh, I see.’ Mrs Ramsay behaved as if she didn’t recognise Alice, but must have for she went on: ‘Do go ahead, Alice, just don’t be stupid with them.’ Alice couldn’t get out because Mrs Ramsay blocked the doorway. ‘Elly, come out. Let’s leave Alice to do her poo.’

‘Oh, I don’t do that. I mean, I don’t need…’ Alice nearly fainted with misery at the way things were turning out. ‘I don’t need to be in here.’ Alice ducked past Mrs Ramsay. Her voice squeaked like one of Lucian’s animal characters, but no one laughed. She couldn’t say she only went in the mornings after breakfast. She had been told it was rude to talk about toilets.

To Alice’s amazement, Eleanor’s mother then went into the lavatory and left the door slightly open. They could have seen her on the toilet if they had stayed to look, but Eleanor led the way back to the dining room, far more interested in her stupid picture.

Alice hadn’t thought Mrs Ramsay went to the toilet. She was so beautiful it wasn’t possible that either she or Doctor Ramsay ever needed to go. She tried not to think of Mrs Ramsay sitting in the spider-webbed room with the cracked walls and the smoky smell. She blushed as, despite herself, she imagined Mrs Ramsay with her knickers down with a snatch of whiteness followed by a darkness impossible to contemplate. Alice had been angry. Eleanor should not have made Mrs Ramsay think she wanted to do Number Twos in the middle of the day. Her Mum kept an aerosol of fresh pine trees in their toilet under a Spanish dancer with a wide skirt. Surely her Mum was right? Surely there was a God?

‘I know a secret about you.’

The effect of her words had been better than she could have hoped for. Alice snatched up the packet of serviettes her mother had left out on the sideboard. She could hear Eleanor chattering on in the hall. Someone called her name, but Alice pretended not to hear. Then she heard Eleanor giggle. She wished her Dad would come home and be on her side. There would be no one on her side if they heard what she had said to Eleanor about Mrs Ramsay. She had only said it because of the matches and the poo.

When they had got back to the dining room table, Alice had sneaked a look at Eleanor as she leaned over her picture. Her nails had green rims and her hands were always scratched and rough. Her hair needed a proper brush and that day there had been a grey smear across her forehead as well as a bruise on her arm from climbing on to the conservatory roof to fetch a tennis ball earlier in the day. Alice had been relieved when it landed there, the game would be over. But Eleanor had worked her way up the drainpipe, pulling with her hands and pushing with her feet and thrown it down. She never kept still, but must always whizz about. Even in the dining room when they were drawing, Eleanor was bouncing about on her chair. She never walked properly. She had to do cartwheels and handstands. She kept on at Alice to do a handstand, knowing perfectly well that Alice couldn’t bear being upside down, not even to have her hair washed.

Alice knew she could draw better than Eleanor, whose pictures made no sense and used up too much crayon. That day the room had been littered with bits of oil pastel and curls of peeling paper torn off to free more crayon. Alice was glad they weren’t her crayons. All she could think about after the matches was how to hurt Eleanor.

Eleanor’s feet had been tucked up under her and she was very worked up about her picture, which she said was of herself as a pilot in an aeroplane. She didn’t even paint properly. She had gone on and on, saying the sun she was drawing was scalding hot, even touching the paper and acting burned. She hadn’t answered when Alice asked if it was her best picture.

Now her Mum was showing Eleanor the barometer in the hall. This infuriated Alice, her Dad’s barometer was nothing to do with Eleanor. Alice went over to the table and poked the side of the jelly with her finger, and nicking a hole in it, quickly licked her finger.

‘I know a secret about you.’

She had stared hard at Eleanor’s face, but Eleanor had carried on with her drawing. Say it again, louder. Then Eleanor had lied, saying secrets were stupid.

‘Not all secrets are stupid.’

‘What is it then?’

Alice had been worried that Eleanor really wasn’t bothered. She had to make her bothered. The jelly was soft and cool, lapping over her fingers.

‘If it was me, I would care about it, because it’s a huge secret.’

She had wanted to pull Eleanor’s hair and punch her. Eleanor went on colouring as if she was alone and Alice had gone. Alice might have said her three-year-old cousin could draw better. The sun wasn’t that big and Eleanor was a girl so she could not be a pilot.

The kitchen clock struck four. Eleanor had arrived early. Zebedee tipped out into the roundabout clock face four times. Alice had loved the clock when her Dad brought it home. Now she picked up the plate with the cubes of cheese stuck on to wooden sticks, and thought of smashing it into the clock, pushing the cheese into the hole for the characters and gumming up the hands. Instead she tipped them on to the floor. The cheese scattered across the lino. They wouldn’t be eating cheese. Her fingers were sticky from the jelly and the plate slipped out of her hands and landed with a thump on top of the bits of cheddar.

Eleanor had tried to pretend she was looking for a black crayon on the floor. Alice had not let her leave the room and enjoyed swishing her ruler like the cruel supply teacher they had last term. For a moment Alice had been happy, then she had seen her own picture. It no longer looked so good, with tiny pencil lines scribbling off the page. She had crumpled the paper into a ball, which she tossed back and forth in her cupped hands as Lucian did with a cricket ball. Eleanor had not dared look for the crayon and with some shock Alice saw Eleanor was trying not to cry. Then Alice wanted to leave and she said she must get home even though she was meant to be staying for tea. There had been no sign of Mrs Ramsay and the toilet door was firmly closed as Alice rushed away, abandoning her favourite pink cardigan to the wolves.

Her Mum and Eleanor had reached the kitchen door. Eleanor was telling her about her cat with the mad name, chatting away as if they were friends, although she had only met her Mum last Friday. Alice envied Eleanor, she did not dare be so friendly with Mrs Ramsay. Then she remembered the doctor and felt better.

Kathleen Howland would later forget what greeted her as she tripped lightly into the kitchen. The scene would be erased as if it had never been. She was very much looking forward to Eleanor Ramsay’s reaction to her table display. She loved to see pleasure in children’s faces.

She screamed and was distantly aware of stepping backwards heavily on to Eleanor’s foot and not saying sorry.

Eleanor peered around from behind Alice’s mother and, forgetting her carefully rehearsed manners, swore out loud.

There was food everywhere. Serviettes were shredded and stuck all over the table and the floor, where squelchy stuff lay in soggy mounds. Orange squash had soaked into the tablecloth and dripped slowly on to the lino making a brightly coloured puddle that Eleanor found pleasing. Inching further into the room Eleanor nearly toppled on to the bin. It lay on its side, surrounded by squares of cheese stabbed with sticks pointing this way and that. There were globules of jam everywhere, on the chairs, slithering down the sideboard, even hanging from the ceiling. In the middle sat Alice smattered with red jelly, smeared with chocolate, with her hair decorated with scraps of Victoria sponge.

She leapt up, flinging her hands above her head and standing right on the tips of her toes, she yelled at the top of her voice:

‘Surprise!’

Ten

That evening, alone in her room, gazing down the empty lane in the direction of the White House where Doctor Ramsay would be eating supper in his dining room, Alice was determined to be friendly when Eleanor saw her the next day. After her behaviour at the tea table she was frightened by the girl she was turning into. She gave herself one last chance to change back.

As she had helped her bewildered Mum clear up the chaos in the kitchen after Eleanor had been sent home, Alice promised Kathleen Howland faithfully that she would do whatever the Ramsays said and that no, she would never play up strangely again. Her mother couldn’t bring herself to use the word ‘naughty’ about her daughter, usually so well behaved. But ‘strangely’ was to Alice far worse, because it proved her fears were true. Her Mum was so horrified that she couldn’t even be cross. This time Alice knew for certain that her Mum had not told her Dad. It only made things worse.

But he would soon find out. Everyone would. Already people were beginning to see what Alice was really like. As she watched Mrs Carter from the post office come out of her flat above the shop and trot off down the lane in her slingback stilettos towards the station, Alice knew that from now on she must make a real effort to be nice and good or it would be too late.

They didn’t meet up until after lunch on the Tuesday because Mrs Howland took Alice into Lewes to get new shoes. When they did, Alice quickly told Eleanor that it was entirely up to her where they went to play because she honestly truly didn’t mind what they did. When Eleanor promptly suggested that they go and play hide and seek down at the haunted Tide Mills, Alice, determined to be good, had no choice but to agree.