A Kind of Vanishing

Eleven

Isabel was annoyed with Mark. He had taken the lilo because he knew she wanted to lie on it. He had done it to get at her. He hated sunbathing.

There he was, sprawled across the silver plastic, his long legs still muscular and shapely; glistening with sun tan cream and droplets of water. He could have been fifty, not seventy-four. Her friends teased her that it must be like being married to Paul Newman, but better looking. Lucky Isabel, they said.

She hadn’t told anyone that she had started to suspect Mark was avoiding her. She believed that communicating this fear would propel it into being. Besides, sometimes she was convinced she was imagining it. Then a brief moment of comfort would be obliterated by her self-knowledge. She was too observant, much too watchful to be mistaken. In the last few months Mark never looked at her when they were talking, his eyes were restless and distant. Indeed right now she could see that Mark was busily paddling the water with his hands to prevent the lilo drifting in her direction. These things were paltry if described on their own, but added together they made Isabel uneasy. The one thing that had always made life tolerable was that they were a team.

She knew it was inconceivable her husband was having an affair, after all he had ignored countless opportunities over the last forty-six years; all those women queuing up in all those waiting rooms over the decades.

The lilo was extremely important to Isabel. It represented a vital comfort that recently, as her body succumbed to its late sixties, eluded her. She would have had it all to herself if Mark had driven into Lewes this morning as he usually did on a Saturday morning. His denying Isabel this crumb of joy infuriated her; not only did he shun her companionship, but he stole her tiny pleasures. To add insult to injury, Isabel’s luxury sun lounger, made to order in Florence, had so far failed to arrive. All she had was the lilo and now she didn’t even have that.

The lilo was the size of a double mattress and fantastically sturdy, so it didn’t fold up like an envelope or tip up unexpectedly if she twitched a toe or turned her head. She could float on it in the pool without getting wet as Mark was doing now. When Gina had brought it over, folded up tight in a deceptively small and childishly colourful zippy bag, Mark had scoffed, consigning it instantly to that place he was too lofty to inhabit: the world of soap operas, chunky holiday fiction, gossip and anything Isabel enjoyed. Mark had declared that Jon had wanted it to use in the pool when he and Gina visited, but as usual had to disguise his materialistic desires as fulsome liberality. It was like Mark to assume that others coveted what he claimed to despise. Then, like a wound he must worry, he would grumble that seeing how extravagantly rich his son-in-law was it was peculiar that he hadn’t built Gina a swimming pool. Mark insisted Jon was mean, preferring to use theirs for free. Typically Mark hadn’t blamed his eldest daughter for the frivolous present, assuming the idea was her poor husband’s, who Mark gleefully found a rich source of jokes. This meant that if for no other reason, Isabel was grateful to her son-in-law for inadvertently diverting her ever more gloomy and restless husband.

Mark remained unimpressed by the fortune Jon had built over the decade through the manufacture of plastic commercial products, mostly grey, although there was a health and safety line that was a jolly yellow. He called him Jon-the-Footrest – usually to his face like a title honourably bestowed – because of the chunky adjustable platforms Jon manufactured for under office desks. It cut no ice with Mark when Jon laboured the point that his success was only due to Mark’s wonderful daughter Gina supporting him through thick and thin. Isabel would hear these tipsy speeches, generally made after Sunday lunch, with a sinking heart because they sealed Jon’s death warrant. Later Mark would unleash a torrent of cruel wit that luckily Jon appeared to receive as complimentary. Once they had left, Mark would expostulate that it was the last straw for Jon to implicate Gina in his devotion to making mountains of money through flogging roadside grit bins and sand-weighted safety cones. Apart from these, the highly successful Ginaware range included wrist rests, inserts for commodes, baby changing platforms and bucket/wringer combination packs for public spaces. It financed the horse – indeed a whole stable of horses – that Gina’s parents had refused to buy her when she was a girl. Isabel would concede that it didn’t make her a proud mother to be confronted by Gina’s name on a sanitary napkin receptacle (she had picked up the terminology) while hovering over a loo seat in a motorway service station, or negotiating a splatter of spilt salsa sauce guarded by a garish multilingual caution sign near the frozen fish in Sainsbury’s. But you had to earn a living somehow and Isabel could think of far worse things a man could do.

Mark was wrong. The lilo had been Gina’s idea. She had genuinely expected her father to like it when a lilo was so clearly a more suitable present for Isabel. Yet as Isabel eyed Mark circling on the water, casually regal on his litter of silver plastic, she reflected that after all Gina had been right. He did like his present. Not that Mark would be the one to tell her.

Isabel would watch their children bringing Mark gifts the way Crawford had long ago deposited decapitated rodents on their pillows with doe-eyed expectancy. Mark’s grownup children were anxious for a smile, even a nod, as he fastidiously unwrapped them. He always took a long time, careful not to tear the paper, folding it up neatly before turning to the object itself. But as he examined the offering, with a contemplative frown, all they ever got was a gruff thanks drowned out by her own vacuous cries of delight. How much more miserable would they have been if they had seen Mark after they had gone, communing with the Judge, brooding into his whiskey at the dining room table, as he teased out incontrovertible evidence of his children’s betrayal in the guise of a Liberty tie or a tan coloured Filofax of the softest Italian leather. The years had turned Mark into a well-dressed King Lear, who read only dissent in his children’s pathetic acts of love. Isabel had become adept at spinning a new take on events to render the day-to-day experience that makes up family history palatable. She would hurriedly weave a plausible explanation, even inventing nice things the children had said about Mark to comfort their disgruntled father or vice versa. In her late middle age she had constantly to wield this skill:

‘He was absolutely thrilled with the tie, wears it all the time.’

‘Gina wanted to get you something special. Isn’t that reason enough?’

Yet Isabel had absorbed Mark’s dismal outlook. Perhaps he was right she decided, as Mark gracefully eddied in the middle of the pool, their time was up and their children were waiting in the wings to step into their shoes.

Love had nothing to do with it.

‘Mark, I’m getting a drink, do you want one?’ He was pretending to be asleep to stop her claiming the lilo. To keep her out. To such pettiness had their lives been distilled.

‘Bit early, isn’t it?’

‘Not for me.’ Fuck you!

‘I’m fine.’ With a flick, the lilo glided away.

‘When I come back, I want to lie on that,’ she warned.

He raised his head in mock surprise at her tone.

‘As you like. I have to go anyway.’

Mark must be going to Lewes after all. Despite her dismay Isabel refused to protest because it would be just the response he wanted. He knew perfectly well that Gina and Jon were arriving for lunch any minute, expecting him to be there. Indeed he had arranged it with Gina himself. Recently he had been acting perversely, leaving the house just before supper was served, going to bed early, setting off to the National Hospital in London where he still did consultancy, but instead driving into Brighton or Lewes. Or so he said when she’d told him she had rung the hospital and he wasn’t there. He didn’t care if he was caught out. Last Monday he had said he was working in his study, but when she had stuck her head round the door to tell him she was going out, he hadn’t been there. His car was still on the drive, but there was no sign of him. That afternoon Isabel had suddenly been reminded of herself as a young woman looking for Eleanor who had constantly concealed herself behind curtains, inside cupboards and under beds when she was wanted for anything. And on bad days Isabel’s memory would burrow even deeper to another search, one that most of the time she succeeded in forgetting about.

Two weeks ago, as she had stood by Mark’s immaculately tidy desk, careful not to touch anything because he laid tiny traps and would know if even a stapler had been moved, Isabel had found herself wondering if Mark was hiding from her. Despite the empty room, she had fancied she could hear breathing and had swept aside the curtain to see if he was standing stock-still behind it.

Isabel had once dreaded that Mark would end up like his father, but she had never really believed it possible. As a young man, Mark had been so different from the grouchy old codger who got pleasure issuing death sentences; she had been confident Mark would always be cheerful and charming. But once they were married things had changed and now Mark was every inch that grouchy old codger. Isabel smiled bitterly at this description as she crossed the garden to get her drink. She had managed the Judge. She would go on managing Mark.

The lawn had been mowed the day before. It was cut close like a carpet and was pleasingly springy under her bare feet. That was one thing: the garden looked the best it ever had.

Flowers were mere pixels in Isabel’s grand design. The Mondrian bed, the heady lavender borders, her small patch of wild meadow, and the sculpted busts she had made in her pottery class and mounted on red brick plinths in surprise places all created an enchanted space. She had resisted topiary, to the dismay of Toby, the new young gardener, who had done a course. Hedges were only boundaries, delineating each area and leading the visitor on to the next. A tall beech hedge framed the Rose Garden on one side and on the other, as well as the lawn with Uncle Jack’s tree. The swimming pool had been her achievement. She had reclaimed the meadow behind the house, where Gina had planned to graze the horse she never got. Mark hadn’t wanted the pool:

‘In this bloody climate, you’ll have six days’ use each year. It’s a crazy expense.’

‘Six days is better than nothing. It’ll be more than that anyway.’

‘The kids have grown up, what’s the point?’

‘They still like swimming. I like swimming. And we might have grandchildren.’

Of course he had relented and as with the lilo Mark now used the pool more than anyone. Ten white plastic loungers that Jon had foisted on them were crowded around the edge. A semi-circular set of blue and white tiled steps led into the shallow end. To one side of the pool stood a brick-built barbecue used only when Jon came, sleeves rolled up and tongs rattling at the ready. Mark didn’t ‘do’ barbecues. Large tubs brimming with bright flowers were placed along a gravel path bordered with railway sleepers that wound around the side of the garage to meet the old path along the side of the house, skirted the lawn and led eventually up to the back door.

A trellis, thickly woven with honeysuckle, was meant to screen the garages and Judge’s workshop from the pool, but the honeysuckle hadn’t yet taken off so Isabel tried to ignore the grimy stucco beyond. Mark had balked at building a brick wall between the pool and the garage and the cost had been too high for Isabel to argue. They had already spent a fortune on CCTV cameras posted high enough to cover the house and the garden. These were filled with real tapes, which Mark indexed and stored downstairs in the basement in a room next to his father’s trial transcripts. It had been Isabel’s idea, after a burglary ten years ago. Mark had quickly become enthusiastic, constantly checking to confirm the cameras were working and upgrading them regularly. Isabel had come to hate them. Sensors caught the slightest movement and directed the lenses accordingly. They eyed her as she dead-headed roses, cut flowers for the dining room or smoothed sun tan cream in upward strokes along her legs and across her stomach. If she homed in, she could hear the whirr as the camera swivelled, like the Judge’s eyes, following her wherever she went. Now Mark could spy on her even when he was in London. The growing library of tapes formed a staccato black and white film diary of the house. Hours and hours of brickwork, portico and lintel interrupted by strobe-puppets jerking through the garden, in and out the doors like characters in a Swiss clock. The only person who watched these interminable silent comedies was Kathleen Howland, the woman in the cottage next door to the village stores, who was still searching for her daughter after some thirty years and who many said had gone mad.

Afterwards, Isabel remembered that Saturday in June 1999 as a terrific convergence of events both cataclysmic and minor. She fixed on the small things like sun loungers and the lilo as lifebuoys in a tumultuous sea.

In a percussive flurry, the telephone bell pealed through the house, the doorknocker banged twice, and far above the attic hatch crashed open, as once again its bent catch gave way. Isabel had just found the cordless handset under a pile of medical journals in the downstairs lavatory and was heading to answer the door when she heard an engine revving right outside the kitchen window, louder and louder. She rushed back to the kitchen, forgetting about the front door and the telephone. Tyres squealed, and as she reached the kitchen door she felt the windows shake as there came a tremendous sound like an avalanche from the direction of the garden, involving glass and wood and metal and climaxing with a splash like a gigantic belly flop. Then there was an eerie stillness.

Isabel answered the phone.

‘Mum?’

‘Gina? Is that you?’

‘Of course it’s me. What’s going on? I was calling to say we are nearly there but you took so long that now we are here. What the Hell’s going on?’ It annoyed Mark that Gina and Jon would ring to announce their arrival only seconds in advance, which offered no practical advantage and was always disruptive. He said it was because Jon liked to show off his technology.

Without hanging up, Isabel hurried across the lawn, the telephone in one hand and her drink in the other.

Blinking in the glare of the sunshine, she made no sense of what she saw. The bottom of the garden was in ruins. She could only have been gone five minutes.

For a wild moment she thought a plane had fallen out of the sky. She reached the pool and later had no memory of placing her gin and the telephone down beside her book and sun tan cream.

‘Mark?’ There was no sign of him. He had gone to Lewes.

Piles of mud had come from nowhere, hundreds of splinters of wood and branches floated in the water and were strewn over the plastic furniture, which of course hadn’t moved an inch. Sheets of wet newspaper, a pair of nail scissors, a nail file and a sodden box of man-size tissues were scattered along the side of the pool. Isabel tripped over a face-down copy of the London A to Z at her feet and at the same moment recognised the scissors as her own. She had been manicuring her nails. The street atlas came from Mark’s glove box. There was something else, she bent down to read the words ‘What to do in an Accident’ on the bloated cover of a booklet with a ballpoint pen still clipped to the back cover floating at the edge of the swimming pool. She fleetingly observed that it was considerate to provide an advice manual with the mayhem. Spreading lake-like puddles on the patio reflected a cloudless blue sky. Perhaps it was this image that reminded Isabel about the lilo. She put a hand to her throat as she realised the shiny flaccid heap flopped on a platform of racing-green metal in the centre of the pool was her beloved lilo. There was a rip down its middle. Gradually, it seemed, although it must have been only a split second, Isabel took in the situation. It wasn’t a plane or the total collapse of the garage which was now in full view because the trellis was splintered to pieces at her feet. She jolted into action.

‘Mark!’

Gina heard her mother’s scream from the drive. Instantly she understood that it was all over. She went cold as if the sun had been eclipsed and stared uncomprehending as Jon dashed away up the side path of the house. As he leapt over the gate to the old tradesman’s entrance, he bellowed back to Gina over his shoulder:

‘Ambulance, police, fire brigade, get the lot!’

Gina fumbled with her new mobile phone, trying to unlock the keypad. She shook it furiously and then held it to her ear. Nothing but the sound of the sea. She glared at it. Where was the bloody asterisk key? She found it. Then flustered, she stabbed at the nought button three times. She had had nightmares like this when no matter how hard she tried, limbs moving in treacle, panic descending, she always dialled the wrong number. The person always died because her agitation woke her up in a shivering sweat before she could save them.

As Gina gave the police her parents’ address she passionately wished she had stayed at home. If she had kept indoors then nothing would have happened, because at home it never did.

Isabel skidded down the steps into the shallow end, wading out until the water was around her neck. She took a deep breath and dived down between the car and the tiled wall of the pool, knocking her knee against the bumper and grazing her bare thigh on the back door handle as she felt her way along. She couldn’t keep her eyes open for long because the high level of chlorine made them sting. Only that morning she had complained to Mark that he was pouring far too much in. Mark was cavalier about quantities of anything that wasn’t medicine.

All the windows were open and already the inside was full of water, but there was not enough room between the car and the side of the pool to allow Isabel to manoeuvre herself into the car or to open the door. She was by the passenger side and she didn’t have the breath or the time to get over the bonnet of the car to where Mark was. Besides she wouldn’t be able to open the driver’s door either. She pulled on the passenger door handle and managed to open it a little, but the gap was too narrow for her to squeeze more than her arm through. There was no way of reaching Mark. By twisting her body sideways she could just strain in through the passenger window. Isabel’s fingers were only inches from his leg, if she just could touch him, he might stir into action and help himself. She dared go no further in case she got stuck. Then she ran out of breath and explosively exhaled as she pushed up to the surface. Without waiting to recover, she took another gulp of air and ducked downwards again.

Mark’s head was tilted forward, his chin touching his chest, he might have been napping at the wheel. As usual he didn’t acknowledge her presence although his hair floated in gentle waves around his head as she flailed towards him creating undulations in the water. He had put on trousers and a blue shirt while she was in the house, and these ballooned at the sides where air bubbles were trapped making him look deformed. His eyes were shut and his cheeks trembled in and out because his mouth hung open and was full of water. How could he breathe with his mouth open? Isabel pushed against the water to slam her hand on the dashboard to get his attention. It made no sound.

There was no point.

Again Isabel screamed Mark’s name and a gush of water shot down into her windpipe. She felt strong hands grab her under the arms and suddenly she was being hauled up to the surface, away from Mark. Jon carried her up the wide steps at the end and carefully laid her on a sodden sun lounger where she curled on her side heaving and retching. Barely pausing and still in his precision ironed chinos Jon leapt straight back into the pool. Isabel winced as he overshot and fell against the car.

Action Man.

Later Isabel could only remember that she tried to follow Jon into the water. She had to speak to Mark before Jon did. She would remember that Gina had held on to her and that they had struggled violently in the shallow end as Jon kept bobbing to the surface gasping. Again and again he dived down to the car in a futile effort to pull his father-in-law free and to save his life.

Isabel had no words to explain that she had had to know that Mark had battled frantically to get himself out from the submerged car. She needed to believe he had wanted to stay with her but had got trapped behind the wheel. There was no way of saying any of this because she knew it wasn’t true.

Gina had been right; her mother’s shrill howl had signalled the end.

After the arrival of the emergency services, the violent attempts to resuscitate Mark on the slippery paving amidst a gaggle of garden furniture and sodden paraphernalia, the eventual removal of his body and the stolid arrival of Lucian from London, demanding the return of his father to life, someone had complained that a huge cardboard box had been dumped right by the front door entirely blocking the porch.

It was Isabel’s long-awaited luxury lounger.

Twelve

Alice traced the pattern on the lace curtain, as if trying to find a Braille message assuring her she wasn’t alone. She sank back into her chair, the message was prosaic: the lace was in need of a wash. In mounting despair, she looked around the room seeing other things that needed a good scrub, a thorough polish. Her despondency increased, for really the whole flat should be spring-cleaned, but spring had passed, it was a sweltering hot Monday afternoon in June, too hot to move, too hot to think.

Alice’s view through the greying curtain was much the same as James Stewart’s in Rear Window. Rows of windows, mostly like her own screened from prying eyes by net curtains or blinds, filled the frame. But there were still many tenants who were oblivious or unworried about creating a tableau of their lives for all to see. Their windows were flung wide and after dark were brightly lit. For these Alice was grateful. She watched the young mother, who had yesterday had her long black hair cut short, tend her window boxes or pace around the room pacifying her baby. Three windows along and one up was the woman with the iron-grey pudding bowl haircut who Chris said worked in the supermarket on the main road. When she was at home she sat motionless at her desk in the far corner of the room in a pool of angle-poise light working late into the night. Alice had to be careful not to be seen by her, as she would jump up without warning and come to the window where she would stand utterly still for a long time just staring out. Below was a wide concrete yard closed in on opposite sides by the two six-storey Victorian flats in the middle of which stood the new estate office. The other flats cut out most of the traffic noise from the Old Kent Road beyond, but also shut out the evening sunlight and curtailed her view. To her left was a twenty-foot brick wall topped with spikes upon which on her bad days Alice would impale the heads of her enemies. This wall segregated the estate from the Baptist church next door. Now, as on many days, Alice could hear the sound of a packed congregation singing.

‘…This is the day the Lord has made, that all may see his love displayed…’

To her right was The World Turned Upside Down from whose juke box Manchester United’s song ‘Lift It High’ mingled discordantly with the strains of the church choir.

Alice was forty, but today she felt eighty.

The lace curtains had soaked up London’s grime, the pattern of usually fluffy birds perched in repetition on twisty branches down its length – a design she had chosen more for company than appearance – had wind blown feathers. They too looked tired and old. Alice was an empty barn, with patches of her roof missing. Ravens flapped back and forth, wings smacking against the creaking rafters of her ribs. If she were ill, who would care? But if the ravens abandoned her, would that spell doom?

The obvious answer to the first question was Alice’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Chris. Nevertheless the cloud of self pity conjured up by this scenario enveloped Alice in deeper gloom.

On her bad days Alice would picture herself working through the tasks she had set herself in advance of doing them. She would sit as now, in her armchair looking out through the lace at the concrete quadrangle below, and plan her chores and activities, anticipating potential problems and contemplating how to overcome them. So detailed were Alice’s mental campaigns that when she came to do the tasks, she performed them perfectly with no extraneous elements or movement. This ruthless efficiency made her impatient when Chris made one small mistake. As a mistake could be that Chris had chosen a different way to achieve the same end, this meant Alice was frequently annoyed with her daughter. Their relationship was fraught with mutual frustration.

Sometimes Alice imagined completed tasks so vividly, she was bewildered to discover the washing basket full or, as in this case, the curtains dirty. Then her sense of control would slip and jerk through clenched fists. Alice had to breathe in and out, in and out until the panic passed, then struggle to her bedroom, brushing the walls for balance and reassurance and tapping the door frame an ever increasing number of set times before she could lie still and regain her composure. That morning she had told Chris she would have to go to the launderette after supper. Chris had been sulky, so that it was almost not worth asking. Except they both knew that Chris had no choice.

‘No one understands what it’s like not being able to nip down the shops for a pint of milk.’

‘No one believes I’m ill because I have a natural bloom to my skin.’

Everyone adored Chris. Chattering voices down the telephone, scribbled school reports and holiday postcards – Wish you had been able to come – told Alice how Chris was kind and always smiling. They all marvelled at how lucky Alice was to have such a clever, thoughtful daughter. Those who came into the flat, the doctor, the woman about agoraphobia, the community dentist, all of them said Chris was like her mother. Alice knew Chris was the spit image of herself so that much was true. She liked the notion that they could be sisters. The doctor had said Alice couldn’t be old enough to have such a grownup daughter. Although she had appreciated the comment, she had been anxious in case he was flirting or worse, judging. Alice wished she looked how she felt, because then people might be more sympathetic. She had no respect for the agoraphobic specialist because she had failed to spot the truth about Alice and must therefore be a fake too. Compliments about her wonderful complexion, or the lustre in her hair annoyed Alice because they meant people didn’t appreciate how it was for her.

But then Alice went to great pains to ensure they did not.

She imagined people beyond the archway of the flats leading to the Old Kent Road – the extent of her world – admiring Chris for caring for her sick mother. On good days Alice basked in the dreams where they praised her too, disbelieving that she coped with a chronic illness while running a home, being a mother and an expert at invisible mending.

Alice invented faces for the invisible people in her daughter’s life most of whom she had never met: teachers, bus conductors, friends and their parents who seldom rang now that Chris was older. There was one mother she had liked who if things had been different might even have been a friend. She was usually smoking when she called which would normally have revolted Alice, but the mellifluous speech punctuated by sucking and puffing was warm and caressing. Alice would see smoke rings rising around the woman’s head as she talked, the phone propped on her shoulder, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. When she had reluctantly to end a conversation with this woman, Alice would briefly be content, then filled with anguish at her fettered state. This was some years ago and now she couldn’t think of her name and anyway the woman didn’t telephone any more. It was the busy, fussy lady who wanted to take her daughter to France one half term who had riled Alice the most.

‘You must be proud, she is so witty, had us in stitches…’

Alice waited for the reason for her call, horrified that this stranger thought she knew her daughter better than Alice did.

‘… I know it will be hard while she is away, is there anyone who could stay with you? It will be lovely for the girls, Chrissie’s French will help us all! I can ask for things but once they start rattling back, I’m…Chrissie doesn’t know I’m calling, Rachael – my daughter, had her number. I wanted to put my pennyworth…’ Later Alice informed Chris, no, she could not go to France. How could Alice manage for a week by herself? Suppose she fell, suppose she ran out of food?

Suppose.

Chris had said she didn’t mind if she stayed at home and Alice convinced herself that Chris hadn’t wanted to go. That she had been happy to use her mother’s condition as an excuse. But still this was an uncomfortable memory.

This made Alice return to the photograph. Two years ago when she was sixteen, Chris had presented to her mother a framed picture of herself for her birthday. Alice had taken lots of photos of Chris as a little girl. She had lovingly slotted the prints between their mounting corners in a set of albums that made up a brand new history for her daughter. They supplanted the past Alice had been forced to abandon. But none of her photographs so accurately captured her daughter as this one.

Chris was doing a thumbs-up sign. Her hand was partially hiding her face so that the gesture, declaring that everything was all right, dominated the frame. It had been snapped by Emma, Chris’s best friend, while on a sailing holiday that this time Alice had agreed to. Chris had posed on the prow of a yacht like a conquering hero, and behind her there was only the sea and the sky. The photograph comforted Alice and she picked it up whenever she was upset or anxious. Chris’s laughing smile, the wisps of hair blown out from her face by the sea breeze and the way she looked through, and not directly at the lens, expressed her spirit. Chris was buoyant in the face of adversity. Alice kept her reflections to herself, although she would often tell Chris that the picture was the best present anyone had ever given her.

Late afternoon was Alice’s favourite time. She relished the anticipation of Chris’s arrival. It was like the start of school holidays. This feeling formed a link to a long lost childhood and she tried to snatch at the fading image of a little girl busily helping her Dad clean shoes on a back step, lining up each shoe to make a straight line of toes.

The little girl was always on her own. The fuzzy figure who was her Dad had gone, perhaps into the house, giving his princess time to make everything right for his inspection.

Alice carefully lifted up the black postman shoes with the metal toe-caps. She folded her rag neatly like her Dad did, and dabbed a corner into the tin of polish.

‘Don’t press too hard, you don’t need much.’

The shoe was too heavy to hold in one hand, so she wedged it between her legs as she pummelled the heel with her cloth. After a few minutes she hadn’t made much difference. She began to panic. Breathe in. Breathe out.

‘You just put me out of a job!’ He was leaning in the kitchen doorway, slurping a mug of tea her Mum had made.

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Long enough. Keep going.’ He bent and kissed the top of her head and laughed from deep inside. He smelled of aftershave. No, he smelled of apples and tobacco.

Alice couldn’t think what he smelled of. She had only a fragment from which to build her story, which was fading through lack of telling.

Chris would be moody and probably slope off to her bedroom, but still Alice counted down to the sound of her key in the door.

When Alice watched Chris march briskly across the quadrangle each morning, a young confident woman now, she wanted to open the window and call her back.

‘Don’t leave me! Take me with you.’

The words lost power before she could form them, and she let the stranger stride off under the archway to the busy street.

Alice took refuge in blurry memories of a small child skipping or spinning in ballet pumps. No matter what, the innocent schoolgirl who was always top of the class was still safe inside her.

Chris was now twenty minutes late. Alice patted her chest. Chris must have gone off with her friends without telling her. Alice wanted Chris to have friends and in one of her better states she would see her at the centre of a gaggle of girls chatting and giggling, with no responsibilities. But they had an agreement that Chris phoned if she was going to be late. Alice had spent a fortune on Chris’s mobile phone.

Alice hated that Chris was so laden down with cares and she longed to protect the little girl who even in summer was pale, her bag full of books, her head full of revision and dreams of a degree at university that would lead to a career in forensic science. Alice would have preferred that Chris wanted to be an artist and paint live creatures rather than take apart dead ones. On bad days Alice felt dissected herself as she tried to ward off the strident, deriding child who daily sucked the life out of her mother, leaving her like a discarded beetle case, turning and shifting listlessly in the draught under the door. On her bad days, Alice’s sorry images of herself were never mundane.

‘By the time I was your age…’

‘Were you ever my age? Your story changes every day. One minute you talk about horse riding, the next you say you were scared of them. Which is it today?’

‘There was a girl I knew when I was young. She could ride the way you and I walk. I get mixed up between dreams and reality, that’s all. I’m not well. It’s natural.’

Alice had hoped having a child meant always having someone who would stick up for you and love you come what may. The way Alice had loved her mother. It seemed a minute since Chris was born and she had held her, appalled by the lump of screaming flesh. Then Chris had stopped breathing and a flock of doctors and nurses snatched her away and left Alice alone. When she saw her next, under plastic like a takeaway sandwich, she was overwhelmed by the intensity of her love. This love could exhaust her with its strength and she had known then it would never release her.

Here she was now!

Alice started to tug the lace aside to wave then just in time remembered Chris would pretend not to see her. Instead she twitched the material like the fugitive she was and shrank back into her armchair.

As she watched her daughter return home in the afternoons from school, Alice would know that what she most dreaded had already become reality: Chris had moved on from her. Yet the sight of her nearly grownup daughter living a life in which she could be herself, free of a painful past, always filled Alice with joy.

She believed that this justified everything.

Thirteen

Over time the Old Kent Road had become no more than a stretch of the busy A2, lined with boarded up shops, forgotten patches of scrubland, supermarket car parks, generic takeaways and fly-by-night outlets flogging tired and tawdry goods. The flyover was a brief escape for drivers from the barren road beneath it, which was fogged with choking fumes and overshadowed by high-rise flats whose rows of doors opened on to balconies meant to copy the communal streets they had replaced. Young municipal trees with their spindle trunks encased in protective mesh were planted along the kerbside. Most of the saplings had been twisted and broken, while others had simply died. Many of their cages were crammed to the top with litter; the colourful columns making a pithy statement about inner-city decay.

Far away up in the sky, intermittently blotted by the blazing sun, a passing aeroplane left a white trail of exhaust. There were no clouds, no birds. The noise was continuous: heavy traffic, horns, and the snarl of motorbikes revving off from the pelican lights. The road was busy with people with grim demeanours, their shoulders dragged down by heavy bags or the cares of life. A warm breeze lazily lifted and dropped sweet wrappers and torn sheets of newspaper collecting in the gutters, and brushed hot skin without relief.

A figure was moving in the no-man’s land under the flyover: a young woman running fast, unhampered by the rucksack on her back. She ran without apology, her arms pelting the air for balance and speed, as she jumped over a discarded exhaust pipe and swerved out of the way of broken glass. She was dressed in jeans, blue Converse boots and a grey shirt patterned with skyscrapers against a background of wavy lines. Her clothes betrayed an alternative taste, and ensured that she stood out from those around her. In contrast to her dress her hair was conventional, parted at the side and just touching her shoulders. It was soberly immaculate, though thin strands soaked in sweat stuck to her forehead. She was clearly someone who could toe the line if required to.

She vaulted over the central barrier, and hop-hopped with one foot on the kerb and the other on the camber, waiting for a gap in the traffic; then she dashed across the path of a double-decker bus and leapt on to the opposite pavement. By the time the bus shuddered to a halt at the stop twenty yards further on, the young woman had veered off left under the archway of a block of Victorian flats and disappeared.

Chris was eighteen in 1999 and everyone said what a marvellous age it was. She was so lucky to be in the right place at the right time – the turn of the century – with her life before her. Just now, as she sidestepped a wheelie bin that kids had taken for a walk, and tried to catch her breath without inhaling the sour stench of refuse, this luck seemed a long time coming.

She was late and she had to go to the launderette.

Her Mum would say she should have rung if she was going to be late just as Alice had always called her mother. Other times her Mum talked of how the family didn’t have a phone so she had to get home on time. Chris usually tolerated these inconsistencies, content to listen to her Mum’s bedtime stories of loving relatives, long dead, particularly of the Postman-Dad who let Alice stand on his feet while he took big strides across the living room. As a young child Chris had demanded with gory relish that her Mum tell the tale of the car accident in which her grandparents had died. Alice had been nine. She would say that her life had ended then too. She had only come alive when Chris was born; a point in the story Chris looked forward to. As a young teenager, this tragic incident gave her extra cachet with her friends. No one else had a fatal car crash in their family. During breaks, in response to repeated requests and in a suitably elegiac tone, she would retell her version of the event to a thrilled audience of thirteen-year-olds huddled by the school kitchens.

It had happened outside the Fuller’s brewery on the Chiswick Roundabout. Her Mum told her this was ironic because Fuller’s brewed London Pride, which was her father’s favourite tipple – her mother’s word – so he would have enjoyed the coincidence if he had lived. Chris was hungry to learn more about her grandparents, but much to her frustration, her Mum had lost all the photographs or documents just as she lost or forgot many things. Alice would declare that her parents’ dying had freed her to carve out her own life without being hampered by the past. This was putting a brave face on it; really all it had done was to make her Mum too frightened to step outside and take part in such a cruel world.

Today had proved her Mum right. Chris wouldn’t tell her what had happened; it would only worry her.

Half an hour earlier Chris had squeezed out of a packed tube train at Elephant and Castle. Although it wasn’t yet five o’clock, the rush hour was underway and she had filed at the rate of a shuffle along the subway to the exit. Halfway up the passage she heard shouting. She was wedged between two city-suited men, and could see nothing. They wore identical black-framed spectacles and made her think of Gilbert and George. Chris did not exist as they chatted to one another over her head:

‘It’s some West Indian bloke causing a fracas.’

‘What’s new?’

‘It’s all we need.’

The crowd became more congested as people edged across to the left side of the tunnel. By staying on the right Chris was able to break free of Gilbert and George and soon reached the source of the commotion.

A tall black man, a few years older than her, perhaps in his early twenties, was heading in the same direction as herself. He was dressed in jeans, with a loose silk bomber jacket over his tee-shirt, and wore a red baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. Dogging him a few paces behind was a decrepit old man in a filthy parka, the fur around his hood mangled and greasy and his tracksuit trousers ripped and stained. He shambled after the young man with a drunken swaying that was surprisingly efficient. Chris cupped her hand over her nose. He stank of sweaty, unwashed skin laced with alcohol fumes and rotting teeth. His yellowed hair straggled around a swollen face that was the colour and texture of a ripe strawberry. He intoned an incantation of abuse:

‘I know your sort. What you looking at? Hey nigger, stop while I’m talking to…’

Chris assumed the young man had decided to tough it out because he could have run away. He repeatedly reached up and adjusted his cap, tipping it down over his eyes and then raising it: a giveaway that he wasn’t cool about it. Chris gave a little skip to keep up with him. To her left the crocodile of commuters processed slowly, their eyes firmly elsewhere with the absolute accord of film extras whose role is to be the mute, unseeing crowd.

Chris despised them.

She was trying to come up with the most effective insult, when without warning the black guy whirled around and confronted his chaotic abuser.

The stream of invective and abuse from the depths of the parka ascended to a plaintive whine:

‘You can’t touch me. I’m a blind old man. You filthy…’

Chris was at one with the man, as with a graceful upward sweep of his leg he hefted a kick at the blind man’s chest sending him toppling backwards, his arms raised in clumsy surrender. Chris heard his body thump against the tunnel wall. He slid down to the ground where he sat lifeless, with his head resting against a ripped and peeling poster for the film A Bug’s Life.

The disembodied litany rambled on without pause:

‘Piss off Monkey-man, picking on a defenceless old gentleman minding his own business. Your sort belong in…I said piss off Mo…’

The young man tilted his cap and closed in. He kicked him again, this time hard in the thigh; the impact pushed the tramp a few inches to the right. The voice persisted:

‘I’m blind. Help. I’m blind…’

Chris grabbed the young man by the arm. She took him by surprise and so was able to pull him away.

Behind her commuters tensed, terrified of being forced to intervene in a violent situation because of some girl’s reckless heroics. She could be knifed; she might get them all killed.

The man was taller than Chris, who at five foot six was not short. Her slight and wiry figure was diminutive against his larger, stronger frame. He could have snapped her ribs like wish bones. She rubbed his arm and leaned against him, pressing her cheek to his chest. She had little time to weave a spell of her own:

‘He’s scum. Don’t get nicked for rubbish like him. He’s dog shit on our shoes. He’s scum…’

She held her body against his, and made herself a dead weight and in an awkward dance they inched crabwise towards the exit. All the while she repeated the same phrases to let him know that she was on his side. As they reached the foot of the steps, she dared to relax. She turned the man around and keeping behind him talked in a lighter tone now that they were out of earshot of the tramp, as they trudged up the last flight to the street.

‘You’re worth ten of him…’

When they were on the pavement, without looking back the man broke away from her and darted across the road towards Newington Butts and out of sight. Chris wasn’t offended. There was nothing he could have said or done.

Despite the heat, she shivered and a dribble of cold sweat like melting ice ran down between her shoulder blades. She was still holding the copy of the Evening Standard she had bought earlier. At some point she had rolled it tightly into a baton and the ink had stained her palm and fingers. She took off her rucksack and stuffed the paper into a side pocket. Then shrugging the bag back on to her shoulders and oblivious of the heat, she too started to run.

As she neared home, keeping under the shadow of the flyover, it occurred to her that if the old man was blind, how had he known the other guy was black?

That morning Alice had announced that Chris must go to the launderette after supper. Chris hated doing the washing there and the chore had grown more onerous over the day so that now, fizzing with adrenalin from the encounter in the underground, she imagined killing her Mum. Not quickly with a gun, but slowly, giving time to explain to her exactly why.

She would tell her in measured tones that she could not forgive Alice for not asking the full name of the Renault car mechanic who Alice had said was Chris’s father, so that one day, when Chris wanted a new and better parent, she could find him. All she had to go on was that he was called Gary and specialised in fitting automatic gearboxes. Most days Chris didn’t need Gary. She got on with her life, but at night as she clarified her ambitions and formed resolutions it was Gary she told them to.

Chris had left the house that morning without kissing Alice and had run to the bus stop, chased by her mother’s snapping hounds. Once in the street, a wet sheet of misery assailed her as she saw her Mum pottering around all day with nothing to do but clean and wait. If a bus hadn’t come, Chris would have gone back to her.

She had stared out at Elephant and Castle from the top deck. A man in cycling shorts and a black vest kept pace on a racing bike. The veins on his legs and arms were like thick string. She tried to forget her Mum, but all she could think was that the bus was taking her far away from the woman she loved more than anyone else in the world.

The last time she had been to the launderette was a month ago, when her mother had taken it into her head to do all the bedding and needed two machines; Chris had taken Pride and Prejudice with her to read. For once she had done everything correctly, tipped the soap into the right compartment, and she had even found a rogue tee-shirt tangled in a duvet that would have stained the cotton pale blue.

Only when she had settled into a bucket seat and prepared to read, did she realise Jane Austen had gone in with the washing and was now well into the ‘agitate’ section of the cycle. She cupped her hands to see through the glass. The book was there. Every now and then the spine made a dull thump as it hit the drum.

All week they had picked out snatched words and sentences from their clothes.

‘…“How strange!” cried Elizabeth. “How abominable!”’

‘Next time do the washing yourself!’

‘Her mother only scolded her for being nonsen…’

This was the worst thing Chris could have said. Both of them knew her Mum couldn’t do it herself. Chris believed it must now be years since she had left the flat and had only dim memories of seeing Alice in the open air. Her Mum could get muddled between her dreams and what had really happened. Chris too, would wonder if her memories of being in the park with her Mum were just wishful thinking.

She wanted to go out with her Mum. Perhaps to the park, or they could take a train to the seaside. She might wander around the supermarket picking out treats with her Mum, like other girls did. Some nights she lay awake horrified by the prospect of her Mum dying alone in the pokey flat on the Old Kent Road. If Chris was to see her own dreams of becoming a forensic scientist come true she had to rescue the Alice of the bedtime stories from her rabbit hole and return her to the safety of the riverbank. At other times Chris would be in dread of her mother’s hidden self. The sexy monster had had nothing to do with being a Mum.

Chris had seen this monster a few months earlier when she had come home unexpectedly right after lunch. A teacher had been ill and her chemistry lesson was cancelled. She had heard the music from the landing, and assumed it was the people in the flat above with whom Alice had regular run-ins. Chris sighed. Her Mum would have scribbled an embarrassing note and expect her to take it upstairs and wait for a response. Chris had called out in a cheery voice as she shut the front door.

The music was coming from the living room. It was so loud her greeting was drowned out. The door was open three inches and she saw movement in the full-length mirror on the wall in the living room. Her mother had fixed it there to make her feel she had company when she walked towards it. Now it gave Chris a view of the whole room and she was brought up short. Keeping back in the gloom of the darkened hallway, she gaped dumbfounded. Her mother had kicked back the rug, cleared aside furniture and was dancing. Not the sort of dancing Chris would have expected: the clumsy clumping back and forth accompanied by contorted air guitar playing, but proper dancing. Her body was moving in perfect time to ‘Rebel Rebel’ by David Bowie, a song Chris did not imagine Alice had heard of.

The woman in the mirror spun around, sashayed back and forth, her movements fluid, her timing exact, as she echoed the rhythm of the guitar riff and with consummate understatement mimed the words. She exuded sex and vigour. Chris blushed, and tentatively touched her hot cheek with the back of her hand. She had never had to undergo the agony of seeing a parent lumbering hopelessly to sounds they were too old for. Her mother’s agoraphobia had spared her that. This was worse. This was a woman Chris was not meant to see. This woman was a stranger evoking feelings Chris was not meant to feel for her own Mum.

Chris’s mouth had gone dry, and feeling sick she had sneaked away. As she ran out of the flat into the street, gulping in the cold winter air to stop herself throwing up, she felt orphaned. Her Mum had abandoned her. As she could not belong with the bold, statuesque woman upstairs, with whom did she belong? Gary in his oil stained overalls was no last resort.

She clattered up the stairs to their flat on the second floor, her thoughts past and present stuck to the dingy walls and appeared half soaked on the staircase, like the washed fragments of Pride and Prejudice. She fumbled in her bag for the door key and at last found it swaddled in the tissues her Mum gave her every Monday. The half-empty packet was her Mum. Whenever Chris pulled a hanky out to blow her nose she was both reassured and annoyed.

She had to lean hard on the door to get it open. Her mother had jammed her brown velvet sausage dog against it. Sometimes the dog stuck, so like now, Chris had to squeeze through the gap. Alice’s stuffed emissary greeted her with an expression of lumpy resignation. Not for the first time Chris inwardly fumed at her mother’s insistence at using a draught excluder in the height of summer. She complained of being alone, but spent most of her time stopping people getting in.

Chris paused in the hallway. Since the David Bowie nightmare, she’d been entering with trepidation. She also savoured the illusion of being on her own. How different this flat would be if it were hers. She had never been alone in it.

The short corridor had no windows and depended on one of its five doors being open for light. They were always shut. Chris sniffed. The hall smelled of air freshener and washing and was pleasantly cool despite the heat outside. It was a relief now, but in the winter the hall was a place to avoid. There was no central heating. That was Stage Three of the modernisation of the Victorian estate. Stage Two had been security doors and a bench manacled to the estate office with a dedication plate to a dead councillor around which the information: ‘WP liKEs it up thE aRsE’ had been carved. Also included in Stage Two was a brick trough of dusty soil now populated with browned-eared shrubs and dotted with colour from drinks cans and food packaging. Stage One had been the Norwegian double glazed windows that could be cleaned on both sides without ladders or risk of death by falling. The third stage was on hold because the housing association had run out of money.

Chris tossed her bag on to her narrow single bed, registering with a stab of fury that it had been made. Now it was a pretend bed, with no creases or folds, a series of straight lines like a prison. Her mother always tucked the duvet in at the sides. How many times had she asked her not to?

‘Mum! No one tucks in a duvet!’

‘It’s neater, otherwise it’ll slip off the bed.’

‘How? Is the bed on a slope?’

‘Why do you have to contradict? You have to have the last word.’

‘No, you always have the last word.’

‘See what I mean?’

Now Chris snatched at the duvet and wrenched it out from the wall. Discarded and rejected clothes had been folded in reproachful piles on her desk, covering papers and pens.

Chris lay down, her arms outstretched.

After a bit she felt between the wall and the mattress and hauled up a square of crocheted wool and clamped it to her nose. Contentment crept through her like a paper slowly catching fire, licking and lapping: spreading heat. The room was hers again. Her mother had knitted the small pink blanket for her cot. She sniffed it, breathing right in. A kind of peace descended.

The walls were dark red with shiny black skirting. Chris had done the gloss four years ago when she was supposed to be doing her French homework. Nothing had been greater than her buzzing excitement as she left the shop with the tin of paint, a brush and the bottle of turpentine secreted in her bag. Chris had paid for everything with money from her Saturday job at the library. Her Mum had brushes and cleaning fluids, she was an expert on decorating and home improvement. But she would not have let Chris use her brushes, even if she cleaned them thoroughly afterwards. As it turned out, the borrowing of brushes might have been a small crime in comparison with the much larger one of painting her skirting boards black.

Streaks of cold tea had dribbled down the woodchip wallpaper, mingling with black paint. Even years later, Chris still found flakes of china tucked into the edges of the carpet. She liked this, preferring to think of her bedroom as a preserved crime scene. The next day she had bought her mother a new mug. It seemed her Mum, normally so fiercely tidy, always had to make a mess when she was cross.

It had been worth it. Now Chris knew every inch of her bedroom, the places where there were cracks and indentations and ominous bulges. She had painted like the bloke in the shop had advised, following the grain of the wood in rhythmic sweeps. Now though Chris regretted the black. But she kept this secret from Alice.

‘You’re late. Was the traffic bad, darling?’

‘Same as usual.’

‘The sun has left the quadrangle.’

‘Do you have to use that pretentious word. Yard. It’s a crappy old yard.’

‘So what?’ she retorted and too late berated herself; despite the launderette, they might have a nice evening. Chris repeated her usual resolution.

‘I will be nice. I will be kind. Just do as you’re told.’

Leaning against her Mum’s big old armchair, she glanced out of the window at the shaded yard. She wanted to see her Mum laughing with her own friends in some crowded restaurant or sipping a glass of wine in a pub garden decked out with lanterns like other people’s mothers did. Sometimes when Alice tapped her feet to a tune on the radio, Chris spied the girl in the stories, who skipped and pranced and wore her hair in bunches. More recently she was reminded of the woman in the mirror.

At two in the morning, listening to the flat flexing its limbs: the whimsical trilling of the fridge, groaning water pipes, and the other indefinable sounds of her home, Chris would whisper a wish to the darkness that one day her Mum would be able to go outside and feel the warm sun on her face. She would turn Alice into the carefree girl she was before her parents were killed. She would restore that happy child spinning a figure-of-eight on the ice rink watched by proud parents up in the stands. Then Chris would hear her Mum cough through the thin wall and despair that she would ever get better.

‘How was your day?’

‘I’ve made you bœuf en daube. With extra wine the way you like it.’

Chris loved her Mum’s cooking; it was their private language. Alice didn’t cook according to the seasons, but by mood or priority. She had defrosted the fridge, and was working through the contents and then gave her dishes fancy names enunciating the French with guttural enthusiasm. This was a joke they shared. Alice had spent three days over the dish. Chris was impressed that Alice was expert at cooking without going anywhere. She never picked up flavours and smells or ate other people’s food and swapped recipes and tips.

This flash of good feeling prompted Chris to bring on another high spot in her Mum’s day. She went to get the newspaper.

‘Hey Mum, you sit and read. Let me set the table and serve up. Then we can do the crossword.’

‘I’ll take you up on that.’ Alice started out of her chair to hug her daughter, but she had gone.

Chris opened the kitchen door and entered a world where only good things happened. The rich herby smell laced with garlic triggered another burst of love for Alice. As she lifted the lid from the pan and stirred the reddish-brown mixture, Chris called to the living room in a chirpy voice:

‘Mind you the news is weird. Some doctor bloke drove his car into a swimming pool and drowned himself at the weekend. Probably killed a patient and couldn’t admit it! There’s a great photo.’

There was no reply, but Chris was too preoccupied choosing especially tender pieces of meat for her mother to notice.

The kitchen was warm and bright. The surfaces were gleaming. It could have doubled as an operating theatre. No mistakes were made here. No crimes either. Her Mum rarely left traces of herself in a room, wiping down cupboards and polishing handles after cooking. She left no chance for mould to grow anywhere.

Alice had put out a tray with plates and cutlery so there wasn’t much for Chris to do. She was surprised her mother had let her serve the food. Alice liked recognition and presenting her culinary feats was part of the ceremony.

Chris handled the ladle Alice had put out with clinical care, lifting out meat and vegetables without splashing. She made sure to give her mother a bit more potato and lots of juice. She hummed to herself as she lowered the brimming plate on to the tray. She would come back for her own. She manoeuvred with care, concentrating on each step, keeping the gravy from slopping as she walked back through.

‘Mum, this looks delic…’

Chris staggered backwards as Alice shoved against her. The plate slithered across the tray. Chris tried to get her balance, but couldn’t stop gravy and bits of meat splashing to the floor. The room vibrated as Alice slammed the door behind her.

The settee was still warm where her Mum had been. Chris plonked the tray on the floor and sat motionless. At her feet the rug was a limp animal with gashes of gravy for open wounds. What had she done now?

After about ten minutes she went into the kitchen and filled the washing up bowl with soapy water. The gravy disappeared as she scrubbed. Then she took the tray with the rest of her mother’s supper back to the kitchen, tipped the food back in the pot and washed the plate. Her own plate had not been used. She put the lid back on the casserole dish and switched off the light. She had no appetite.

The Evening Standard was on the settee. She looked at the picture of a car hanging from a crane over a swimming pool of some posh country mansion. When she had scanned the paper earlier before getting off the tube, Chris had found the picture funny despite the story. It was a surreal sight. She considered whether her mother was going mad. She would not know how to check, for she was used to her odd ways. Alice would touch five things on entering a room and talk to her draught excluder dog as if he was real. The estate didn’t allow proper pets. On good days Chris even loved Alice more for these eccentricities. The doctor said her Mum was marvellous, coping so well in the circumstances. What would he have said about her tonight? Her Mum had ruined the evening for no reason.

She read the story properly. It put off doing anything about Alice.

Chris didn’t know anyone with Parkinson’s Disease but swiftly concluded it was obviously suicide and that the son was kidding himself. Children knew less about their parents than anyone. Although she could be sure that Gary would never kill himself using a car.

Chris admitted that the professor was okay looking for an old man, with no grey hair and a dimple in his chin. She remembered her Mum saying newspapers always had pictures of dead people smiling to show they had been nice when they were alive and to make readers care that they were dead. Apparently the professor had everything, good looks, a successful career, children and a wife described as a ‘glamorous sixties socialite’. Chris reflected that, even dead, Mark Ramsay looked happier than she was at that moment. Wealth might not bring happiness, but it provided better places to kill yourself or be miserable in.

Whatever his son said, Chris guessed something must have upset the old professor. Parents were unpredictable. Not that she knew about fathers. Her father would be unlikely to ruin a perfectly good car in order to kill himself. She remembered the man in the subway and closing her eyes, she felt the warmth of his tense body against hers. Her body’s memory was better than her own. Chris could not remember what the man had looked like. Only then did she realise that she had not seen his face.

She left the paper on the glass coffee table. Her Mum might still read it. She would be better tomorrow.

Fourteen

Isabel climbed out of bed as soon as Gina had left the room. Her whole body was stiff after the business in the pool and when she stood up her temple throbbed. It was a relief to be alone as long as she knew it wouldn’t last. She had read somewhere that people felt closer to death after both their parents had died, when the buffers shielding them from mortality were removed. Her own parents had died when she was too young to remember them so she had never had that feeling. She felt it now. With Mark’s death Isabel had been shunted forward in the queue, suddenly old, a widow, a dowager.

Her turn next.

Isabel’s arms ached as she drew back the curtains and leaned out of the open window into the warm dusk. A pale square of light from the kitchen was like a sheet spread over the grass in the growing gloom. The ghostly outlines of the table and empty chairs under the willow tree were both emblems of the past and finger-posts to a bleak future. The thick bushes and the trees that were now grown as tall as the house rustled in the late evening breeze. She stared hard, but no amount of looking changed anything. Mark was not there now.

There were voices, distant enough for her to feel held in a private silence. Did other people have these thoughts, inconsequential, yet integral to one’s self? In a drunken conversation after making love before they were married she and Mark had once confided their most trivial experiences to each other. They discovered for instance that they touched the end of a biscuit with their tongues after biting, to stop crumbs dropping. Tiny expediencies they had seldom acknowledged since, yet she had believed those shared assumptions were always there. Now it was all over.

The intruders had gone for the day. All afternoon there had been a policeman posted at the gate. He was back there after thirty years. His presence should form a direct link to a lost time, as a blanket of snow can level changes to a landscape, and precipitate the recall of forgotten events. But Isabel felt only disintegration and heavy limbs. A hand clasped her waist. She opened her eyes and preparing her face, gave in to its pressure, turning round ready to speak; she must sound patient and try not to snap at him.

There was no one there except the half-drunk glass of water on Mark’s bedside table and his reading specs.

Now only the children were left in the house. She could hear them through the window, talking in hushed conspiracy downstairs, presumably the kitchen. They would have formed a committee around the table, drinking cocoa made by Lucian who had the sensible answer for everything. Lovely, dependable Lucian: boiling the milk to precisely the right temperature, lining up the cups like soldiers, dispensing the exact measurement of powder. He would leave enough milk for the morning in case the milkman failed to deliver. It had never happened yet. Lucian the Pharmacist spent his life working through a computerised list of instructions and descriptions. Isabel had always languidly assumed his work was limited to doling out pills and potions into receptacles; pouring powder into delicate sachets from larger packets, dripping from small bottles on to spoons, slipping syringes into plastic bags, coaxing blobs on to petri-dishes, and tweezering on to microscope slides. All day long, he transferred something to somewhere else, when he had wanted terribly to be a doctor. Isabel knew her son had grown up into a disappointed man. She despised him for his blinkered ambition, so inappropriate for a boy who might have been artistic and created works that changed the world. Isabel sometimes found the sight of her son, so imperturbably stoical in the face of his substituted life, quite unbearable.

She was livid with Mark for leaving the police entirely to her, literally leaving them. She had told them she had been lying in the sun reading, and even described how the heat was somewhat mitigated by a refreshing cool wind and how her blue and white umbrella positioned to the left of her lounger shaded her face and book while allowing the rest of her to tan. Police liked detail.

‘Oh, and it was factor fifteen, in an orange squeezy thingy. No idea what’s happened to it. I’m sure I had it outside. Mark was lying on my lilo which my daughter, this one here, my eldest, gave to me last year.’

She turned to Gina for confirmation. They needed corroboration. Statements backed with hard evidence:

‘It was last year, wasn’t it? Or the year before?’

‘It doesn’t matter, Mum. They don’t care about the lilo.’ Gina had glowered at her toes. She blamed it all on Isabel, of course. Even today it was not Mark’s fault.

‘We went to the Caribbean the year before, so yes, it was last July.’ Gina’s commitment to accuracy got the better of her.

Gina had gone to the hospital with Mark’s body, hovering possessively close as they zipped him up in a shiny black body bag and loaded him on to the gurney before wheeling him round the side of the house to the drive. Absurdly the wheels rattling over on the gravel reminded Isabel of a supermarket trolley and she had stifled a shout of laughter. She had expected Gina to be squeamish – as a girl she had been unable to contemplate her dead hamster – but she had been devout in her attention to her drowned father. She had even tried to make Isabel come in the ambulance too.

‘I’m not ill. There’s nothing the doctors can do for either of us, me or your father.’ She had already disowned him.

‘You’ve had a shock, they could sedate you.’

‘A large gin could do that.’ Isabel was shapeless in Jon’s gigantic pullover and Gina’s jodhpurs, which hung loosely on her thin legs. None of them had thought of going upstairs for her clothes, but had grabbed what they could find in Jon’s car. Her hair had dried in clumps but now there was no Mark to care. Or so she had said to Jon when he offered to find her a brush. She could see the dismay in her son-in-law’s chlorinated eyes, and knew that he saw Isabel’s abandonment of her appearance as a sign of madness. Perhaps it was. It was a long time since she had lived in the real world.

Finally Isabel had upset Gina over the sun lounger. Her eldest child had never been good at relaxing.

‘What are you doing?’ Isabel had found Gina in the hall filling out a label on the side of the cardboard box containing the luxury lounger.

‘I’m sorting this out. It’s not like anyone will want it.’ Gina gave the cardboard a thump.

‘I want it. I’ve been waiting absolutely ages for it. It’s come from Italy.’

‘Isn’t there enough to deal with? Police, forms, questions; a frightful mess?’ Gina continued to write, then she looked up and spat out: ‘There’s going to be a post mortem.’

‘What’s going on?’ For a brief moment, it was Mark. Isabel had never properly noticed how much Lucian resembled him. Had the quality of likeness changed now there was only Lucian?

‘Nothing.’ Gina had screwed up the address label and stood close beside the box.

‘We have to be a team on this one.’ Lucian was brisk.

‘On what one? No we fucking don’t.’ Isabel had snapped. ‘We just have to get through without ballsing up.’ Her children instantly became a team.

‘I’ll get scissors.’ Gina had moved towards the kitchen, but Lucian produced a blade from the key ring in his pocket and slid it precisely along the rim of the box.

‘Where do you want this? It’s um, rather busy at the pool.’ He grinned quickly and for a second she had back her young son.

‘Oh, stick it out the back. I can lie on the lawn at least.’

Gina had elbowed Lucian out of the way and set to unpacking the bed and studying the cleaning instructions.

In the hours after his death Isabel had been intent that Mark’s death should not stop her living as he had during life. But he was stopping her. Isabel’s lifestyle was being raked over and awarded marks. She wasn’t doing very well. She had told the police:

‘I went inside for some orange juice and when I came out my husband had gone.’ Gina had been beside her on the swinging Jack and Jill seat with frilly blue and white canopy a little way from the pool. The police had wanted to interview Isabel in the house, but she had said she couldn’t bear to be indoors on such a sunny day. Gina was holding her arm in a show of emotional support although it was Gina who needed it, so Isabel held her hand. The double seat swung if they moved only slightly so this arrangement kept them stable if nothing else.

‘So was that your husband’s gin and tonic by the side of the pool?’ The young man knew it wasn’t. Isabel was glad she had made him sit on a stool at their feet.

‘It was lunchtime, my daughter was due any minute.’ At this she had felt Gina stiffen as if unwilling to be implicated and Isabel became momentarily flustered.

‘Did I say orange? No the gin was mine.’ Silly old bag, he was thinking. Out of the corner of her eye, Isabel caught Gina biting her cheek, doing that dreadful face, pulling her mouth across like rubber. She already had lines around her mouth and now it might make her look unreliable. Isabel only just stopped herself from slapping Gina’s hand. The seat swayed, making the policeman teeter backwards to avoid being kicked.

‘Mark drinks whiskey,’ she added for good measure. Mark was not getting off scot-free.

‘So Mark had been drinking?’ The young man was sure of himself. He had soon dropped ‘Professor Ramsay’, no doubt the result of communication training. Use first names to make them feel at ease. Isabel remembered the detective talking to Eleanor when Alice Howland went missing. He had been deferentially polite, and never gave away what he was thinking. Perhaps he had been cleverer than she had given him credit for. He had never found Alice so he wasn’t that clever. She wondered if he was dead too, policemen died young, they worked such terrible hours.

She had roused herself:

‘No, my husband said it was too early.’ She hadn’t meant to say that and quickly offered: ‘He was driving into Lewes. He never drinks if he’s driving.’

Drank. She wasn’t in denial. She knew Mark had gone and was not kidding herself, saying ‘we’ because she couldn’t bear ‘I’, but it was too soon for past tense and besides she needed Mark to be in this with her. Later she caught a young constable – a boy – looking at her. She knew the expression, and felt a frisson of triumph that she could still inspire that look in the opposite sex.

‘Was he in a funny mood recently? Low, distracted, uncommunicative?’

‘Oh yes, always!’

‘Mum’s joking.’ Gina squeezed her arm. ‘You’re in shock, Mum. Is this okay? They can stop for now.’

Isabel thought of Eleanor over thirty years ago, refusing to take Richard Thingummy’s questions seriously. Perhaps she was entering her second childhood.

‘Mark was the same as ever. There was nothing different about him.’ But there had been. Suddenly she knew what it had been like; Mark had behaved as if he was being hunted.

‘Is there anything special about today? The 6th of June, is that significant?’

‘Not remotely.’ She held his gaze. What could she say? There was no sense in mentioning Robert Kennedy, then they really would think she was mad.

‘You had no idea he was going to do this?’

‘Are we assuming he knew he was going to do it?’ she had replied archly.

The interview by the side of the pool was punctuated by a bubbling sound that might have been relaxing had it been a water feature. It was the car shifting in the water. Actually it was a water feature. She had snorted with sudden laughter, startling the police and making Gina squirm, which in turn rocked the swing seat and unsettled the policeman.

‘You think your husband accidentally drove his car into the swimming pool?’ The man would have been openly sarcastic if death and status hadn’t been involved.

‘Of course.’ She thrust out a long jodhpured leg. The policeman flinched. ‘He was on the lilo when I left the garden. He had to hurry, to get to Lewes and be back in time for lunch.’

‘Strange time to choose to go out, with guests due any minute, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘They weren’t guests, they were family. We don’t stand on ceremony.’

‘How long were you in the house, Mrs Ramsay?’

Gina was watching her.

‘How long does it take to make a gin and tonic?’

The policeman had raised his eyebrows in a ‘you tell me’ way, probably relieved his own mother didn’t drink gin in the day.

‘Minutes, I suppose, I don’t know, maybe five, maybe ten? I took my time, I had no…’

She stopped mid-sentence. She could read his mind: ‘Strange woman, not shed a tear, drinks at all hours, lies about it, keeps laughing at odd moments. The minute she’s out the way, husband slams his car into the pool and drowns and she doesn’t bat an eyelid.’ Isabel was crying inside but that didn’t count. She wanted to go back to lying in the sun with Mark doing graceful circles on the lilo. She wasn’t ready for this phase of her life.

Now she trailed across to their bed and, finding Jon’s jumper folded on Mark’s side, hauled it over her head and rolling up the sleeves, prepared to go downstairs. She didn’t want to be on her own any more. There would be enough time for that.

Fifteen

Just as Isabel had guessed, her children and their partners were in a tight group around the kitchen table vainly trying to weigh up the consequences of what Jon had dubbed with transparent enthusiasm ‘a total fuck up’. It was not that Jon lacked feeling, he had always been intent on gaining the admiration of his father-in-law, but he was at his most congruent full tilt in a crisis. This was his chance, now they would see him come into his own. The pity was that the one Ramsay he most wanted to impress was dead. In the hours after Mark was taken to hospital, everyone had vied for supremacy in practical prowess as lists were drawn up and then ripped up, and scenarios of the future were described and dismissed. Everything led back to the big question: what had really happened?

‘I doubt very much it was an accident.’ Jon had forgotten the emotional implications, so carried away was he with vaunting specialist knowledge and infinite capability. ‘There might have been time to get out of the car, if the windows were up. But he had wound them down. Besides what was he doing there? He’d had to drive out of his way to be in the pool.’

‘Of course it was an accident. That’s not up for debate.’ This from Lucian. ‘It’s summer, do you drive with the windows up in this heat?’

‘Well, I’ve got air-con so…’

‘That old car was knackered and Dad was tired, he works harder than you and I put together.’ He glared at Jon who failing to heed the beady scowl cantered on happily.

‘Hey, but you know, the great thing is that those camera tapes will tell us. Funny how we all banged on at the old man about them, and now he’s been proved right. We’ll have the whole thing on film. I’ll tell the police first thing tomorrow.’ Jon persisted in referring to Mark Ramsay as ‘the old man’, thinking it made him sound rakish and one of the family.

‘That film is none of their business. Besides, let me be the judge.’

Then Caroline, Lucian’s girlfriend who had never felt the precarious nature of her relationship with him more than now, and spurred on by Jon’s seeming disregard for Lucian’s authority, chose this moment to mention Mrs Ramsay’s ‘problems’. Alliances solidified. Lucian and Gina closed ranks and closed down the discussion.

The two out-laws made mumbled exits:

‘Check the garden, lock up the house, run baths…’

Soon after this Isabel appeared in the doorway. Her wispy and hesitant demeanour, one hand on her stomach, the other on the door jamb, brought their whispered conspiracy to a stop just as a little girl’s unwanted presence had done in the same room years before. Lucian screeched back his chair as he leapt up to pour his mother the last of the cocoa from the pan on the Rayburn into the mug that Gina snatched up off the dish rack.

After Isabel had returned to her bedroom with her drink, unable after all to bear the company of her children, Lucian and Gina stayed sitting at the table like statues keeping vigil in stony bewilderment, as the sun set on the last day in this world that included their father.

Sixteen

When Chris had opened the bedroom door, Alice snapped shut her eyes, and pretended to be asleep until at last she heard her go away. Chris had not gone to the launderette, but Alice could hardly blame her. Her behaviour earlier that evening would have seemed peculiar, and in the morning she must make up for it. Alice lay on her back and tuned into the sounds of the building. The creaks, hisses, bangs and whines orchestrated the lives of residents as they did her own. The woman upstairs had gone to the lavatory five minutes ago. She had heard the intermittent trickling followed by a rushing of the waste pipes in the wall behind her head. Alice hated having such intimate knowledge of her neighbours, although perversely her distaste provoked a prurient obsession with these secret existences and she would listen out for them. Alice was the possessor of facts that no one else knew.

Then she heard Chris’s radio: a thin chattering interrupted by music emerging into a track she recognised, ‘London Calling’ by The Clash. She had once remarked that she liked it. Perhaps Chris would remember this and might now be thinking fondly of her. Alice wanted the music to do the work of reconciliation for her. It was unlikely. Finally there was nothing but thoughts inside the gothic Victorian tenement as it fell into uneasy night silence.

At one o’clock it was safe to get up.

Alice shrugged on her dressing gown, a size too big: a peril of mail order. Her feet fished around in the dark for slippers. Amber light from the lamppost in the quadrangle gave the living room an uncanny appearance, filtering out vitality, memories; all specificity. Alice crept in with the spatial unfamiliarity of a visitor.

She saw immediately that the casserole stain had vanished, and kneeling down she ruefully touched the damp rug in front of the fire. The gas fire was where she always heard the voices. This was how Alice knew they were real. If they had been inside her head, they would be everywhere.

At first she had assumed it was a television in one of the other flats. But then getting so close to the blue and orange flames that her cheek stung, she had worked out that they came from behind the heater and were too unruly and spasmodic to be scripted. Arguing. Shouting. Soothing tones of making up. There was a child crying, a voice that might be a man interrupting. Sometimes the voices weren’t talking to each other, but speaking in isolation, like a bedtime story or a stern lecture and then the boy or girl laughing or perhaps crying. Alice rarely caught actual words although she was certain they were speaking in English from the inflections. If Alice did hear words, like exceptional, beautiful, special, they were like her own thoughts.

Alice hadn’t yet told Chris about the voices but did wonder if she had heard them too. Chris would be matter of fact and say they’d come from next door. But there was a stairwell on the other side of the chimney and the voices were constant, not those of passers by. At other times she liked to imagine they were the inhabitants of the world inside the mirror. Now she put out her hand and touched the wall above the fire. Perhaps they had been trapped inside the wall. Was she hearing their ghosts forever calling, pleading, destined never to be heard or believed? Perhaps it was the people who had lived here a hundred years before. Or was it that all rooms were busy with the palimpsest natter of past conversations that the living were mostly too preoccupied to hear? Mostly Alice couldn’t think of the place beyond the gas fire as a brick tomb. She preferred it to be a room with pools of lamplight and filled with easy companionship. There were no voices tonight.

Alice had not got up to hear the voices; grabbing the newspaper she settled on the sofa, and less cautious, switched on the light.

The White House had been at its best in the summer: draped in laburnum and lilac, lattice windows flung wide, hanging baskets shapeless with so many frowsy blooms. But in the photograph the line of the diving board led the eye away from this backdrop to a large green car hanging from a crane over the water.

The word suicide was not used in the article. Lucian Ramsay insisted his father was happy. Mark Ramsay loved his family. She frowned at the gas fire; did loving people make you happy? It seemed that he had rammed his car through a fence into a swimming pool. She knew he was a strong swimmer. He had taught all his children to swim. All the Ramsays knew how to get out of their pyjamas and up to the surface in less than a minute. Alice had always been mocking. She had asked Eleanor what the point of it was. If you were in bed, why would you be likely to drown? She had argued that getting out of daytime clothes would be more realistic. Alice thought this now.

She knew how to escape from a car underwater. She had heard Dave Allen explaining it on the radio. She knew to wait until the car was almost full of water and the pressure inside the same as the pressure outside, then push open the door and swim out. Simple.

Suddenly Alice heard a voice. This time she was certain it was a girl. She was like a conspirator, hissing out words. Alice hitched up the sleeve of her dressing gown and wrapped smartly on the wall. Three times. ‘Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me…’ The voice stopped.

It wasn’t until Alice was back in bed that she found she was hugging the newspaper to her chest. She didn’t let go and during the remainder of the night was partially woken by crackling as she turned over. Never asleep, yet not properly awake, her thoughts were tall and thin like evening shadows.

They would look for her again. Mark Ramsay’s death would have reminded them about her. Now more than ever it was important to stay hidden. But if she didn’t want to feel forever a fugitive she must take matters into her own hands. In the middle of this, she fell into fitful sleep.

When she awoke in the morning, Alice decided that despite the risks she would go to Mark Ramsay’s funeral.

Seventeen

Kathleen nearly lost her in Marks and Spencer’s. She was cross with herself, there was no excuse, she had been distracted for the pettiest of reasons. Spitting muttered admonishments she scoured the store. The sign had been practically waving to get her attention.

Everything 60% off!

Kathleen looked this way and that. Now she saw that the sales notice had been a test, thrown like a smoke bomb into her path, luring her to be taken in and lose the little girl. One glance at the blouses on the rack, their silky tendrils cool to the touch, and she had been caught in the spell. She had been doing so well, snaking adroitly between islands of clothes carousels, and towers of crockery, and CD racks. Now, she looked desperately about her for long fair hair and that bouncy step that had always put them in mind of a pony.

Always helpful, always cheerful; never in a bad mood. Always.

The shop was busy with rush-hour adults pushing and shoving, and amidst all this the child had vanished. Kathleen should not have taken her eye off her for a second. Normally she was so good. But today her heart was not in it. Indeed for once it wasn’t her reason for being in the store. She had made herself go out, if only for Doctor Ramsay’s sake, he had always been so encouraging about not giving up.

Kathleen had learnt to ignore what wasn’t important. She blinked, trying to read a placard suspended from the ceiling by thin wire, but couldn’t make out the words. She ought to get her eyes seen to but there was no time. Each morning was taken up with preparations and making sure she left the house with everything she needed for the day. In all this she had neglected herself. Her sight was a vital tool of the trade. She could not afford to ignore it.

Practise by walking down the street, fixing your focus on a point in the distance. Anything will do: a postbox, a leaf. Begin with objects yards ahead, then move on to further away. It would be ideal to begin with a flat place, perhaps the horizon where the earth meets the sky or lines converge. The vanishing point. At no time let your attention stray. If your point of focus is a leaf, do not look anywhere else until you are upon that leaf. You will find this harder than you expect. Small things will conspire to distract you. You will distract yourself. You are your worst enemy.

The blouse was too good to miss. Reduced by so much and with one in her size. Clothes usually went by the board, there was never time to buy things. Kathleen was size ten now. How her younger size-twelve-self would have envied her.

No one envied her.

Kathleen ran the material through her middle finger and wedding ring finger. It was so soft, like butterfly wings, soft like the snippet of baby hair in her locket. Then she lifted the blouse from the rail and held it away from herself. She had to provide her own objective view. She had no shopping companion.

It would look lovely on you, Mum. Try it on.

The buttons were as delicate as shell, although they would be too fiddly for her. The slate blue was her shade: the colour of her eyes a teacher had once said. She had a skirt and an old navy pair of trousers it would go very well with. Surely, at sixty-four she wasn’t too old. The shirt might make her feel young. This put Kathleen off; she had a fear of becoming a grotesque parody of herself thirty years ago. When she put on her make-up she sometimes had to quell the urge to trace the cracks on her face with her eyeliner pencil. Stark, black curves, implacable dashes would criss-cross her face, then she would colour the jagged shapes inside the lines with bright red lipstick and green mascara to make a component face held together by her determination to get through each day.

She must be alive when Alice came back.

It was at this point, the blouse scrunched up soft against her face, that Kathleen had remembered the girl. Where had she gone? Darting forward, she changed her mind and stepped back down the aisle she had come along. Which way? Her tufted head pecking back and forth, her slate blue eyes trained to the honed skill of a store detective.

The little girl was nowhere to be seen.

She shoved the shirt back on the rack, and hurried in the direction she had last seen her.

When you have nothing to go on, rely on logic.

Kathleen had learnt to bank on predictable behaviour. If the girl had doubled back then she would never find her. All the time she grumbled childlike substitutions for swearing. Flip. Sugar. Drat! Fool! Idiot! Tissue-wrapped words kept along with the carefully cleaned toys arranged in greeting for the wanderer returned.

How could she have let herself be side-tracked? It was out of character. The second time in two days.

Doctor Ramsay’s death had set her back.

Kathleen’s battery was draining away. Sometimes as she followed the pre-ordained paths, the red biro routes she plotted out in her A to Z each morning, she agreed with the newspaper readers, the train travellers, brick dusted builders and ungenerous housewives who all judged her delusional. Yet they would be there to shout and throw eggs in her name if there was a grey-blanket covered culprit to whisk from car to courthouse.

With no body, there was no culprit. Perhaps, just perhaps, no crime.

As Kathleen pushed past a group of women examining a maypole of bras, she caught her ankle on a buggy parked between nightwear and swimwear. The child had pulled one of the nightdresses over itself, and was hiding patiently, waiting for its mother to find it under the lacy tent. Kathleen caught hold of the buggy’s rubber handle to stop herself toppling on to it and the mother tore stormy-faced out of the scrum, bras dangling like exotic fronds, as the toddler – nightie snatched off with magician swiftness to reveal a boy – embarked on an obligatory howl. There was no time to explain, so holding her bag to her chest, Kathleen ploughed on to the food section. It was her last hope. The girl could already have left the shop.

There she was.

Kathleen stopped and gathered her breath. A girl of about eight was standing on one leg by the prepared salads, singing peacefully to herself. Her blonde hair was newly washed and beautifully brushed. It was much too short. Her dress was a lovely pink, but spoiled by a thick stripe of black that went like a sash over her back and over her shoulder. Sidling closer, Kathleen could see it was just a giant tee-shirt and looked cheap. Her black sandals had thick soles like bricks and were too high for her age. They were really quite ugly. If Kathleen had been with her when she chose them she could have talked her out of buying them.

If you want to have pretty feet when you’re older, look after them now.

She drew nearer to the girl. There were tattoos on her wrists. She supposed they would wash off, no one was allowed to tattoo an eight-year-old. These days they could make them so life-like. She would tell her, tattoos were for fat old men.

‘Tut tut.’

The little girl whirled around, whipping her hands away from the bags of watercress with which she had been idly playing shops. She stared up at Kathleen. She had freckles on her nose and her mouth was wrong, too wide, too mocking. There was no recognition in the defensive glance, only puzzlement and worse: fear.

She was not Alice. Nothing could make her Alice.

Kathleen stepped into the space made by the girl, who had dashed off to become a limpet on her mother’s trolley and was wheeled away with kicking heels. Kathleen picked up the bag of watercress the girl had dropped and joined the nearest queue. She would soak her feet in a bowl of water with Friars Balsam when she got home, and sip a lovely hot cup of tea.

For The Best Mum in the whole world with lots and lots of love from your Alice.

With extra sugar as today she was more tired than usual.

A young man leaning on the rail of his heaped trolley noted the elderly woman lost in a zipped up waterproof clutching a bag of salad with both hands, like a kid with a prize. The idea of his Gran shopping on her own, her list lost along with her direction, flitted like Reuters ticker-tape across his busy mind. It was a humiliating fate for the fantastic woman who twenty-five years ago had plunged into teeming traffic to snatch up a runaway three-year-old from the wheels of a bus. Her newspaper photo was framed in his mother’s kitchen. ‘The Have-A-Go-Granny’. As the thought-tape fell in coils among the rich pickings of his hectic life, it conjured up his brushed, tightly-coated, clean-eared self teetering on the kerbside for her to return and take hold of his hand. He straightened up and shifting the heavy trolley aside, motioned the old woman through. To his astonishment, she assumed he was telling her off and hesitated before making sense of his gesture. A packet of watercress shuddered its way up the belt to the cashier. They both stared at it as if tacitly agreeing that even her shopping testified against her. He wanted to cry as she handed the cashier her money, the coins dipped for from a chunky leather purse. As he watched, her right hand began to shake while she waited for her receipt and shopping. Suddenly she stretched forward and lifted up one of the boxes of meringue nests he had stacked next to three chardonnays for the price of two. Surely she wasn’t going to nick it?

‘They love these, don’t they! My Alice can eat a whole box, you have to keep an eye, don’t you.’

‘Ah. Yes. Way too much sugar, but for a birthday…’ He breathed as she replaced the box exactly where she had found it, handling it cautiously as if it were a pet mouse.

‘I make my own. Once Steve got me the Kenwood, there was no going back! No use with a hand whisk, you can’t get the stiff peaks.’

‘I don’t do desserts. My Gran…’ Later he had no idea why he felt the need to introduce his dead grandmother into the conversation: perhaps she was his passport to credibility. A woman of the same species.

The old woman wasn’t listening, she retrieved her shopping and melted out of his vision as he was forced to dive into the frenzy of keeping up with the cashier and defend his personal challenge that they never had to wait for his money.

Months later the man would linger over a picture in the Independent on Sunday, unsure why the old woman’s face was familiar, before shaking out the business section and moving on.

When she got home Kathleen stuffed the watercress in the salad compartment of the fridge. She didn’t eat watercress. Not being an adventurous salad maker she stuck to the islands of lettuce, a spoonful of cold baked beans, a halved tomato and small blob of salad cream she had always made for Alice. She frequently came home with unwanted purchases bought to mask disappointment or explain strange behaviour.

Kathleen Howland was aware that people thought her unbalanced. Children in the village treated her warily, even adults who knew her well avoided her if they could, crossing streets, or leaving shops when they saw her coming. She helped them by looking away as they pretended to have forgotten something, patting pockets, rootling in bags, in exaggerated mimes before excusing themselves. She saw through these charades and wanted to assure them it was fine. She might do the same if things were different. If, as the saying went, the boot was on the other foot. She had read about women like herself in the papers so she knew she wasn’t alone.

Finally Kathleen did not care what anyone thought and this was one thing that was better than before. Now she could do what she liked without worrying if it was the right way, the right colour or the right accent. She was beyond right and wrong. Her life sentence had set her free.

She shut her ears to the chorus of public opinion of gaping mouths and simple minds.

Move on, it’s what she would have wanted. Start a campaign. Work for a charity. Change the world so that it doesn’t happen to other mothers.

Kathleen would start by explaining, if she had the chance, that she knew quite well that Alice was not eight any more. Alice had been missing for thirty-one years and four days. Kathleen would be the first to agree that to stalk a little girl through a shopping precinct because she looked like Alice, was the action of an unbalanced mind.

Two months after Alice disappeared in June 1968, Kathleen had been sure she would find it impossible to survive in a world without her. There were no floors or supporting walls. With no meal times or baths to run, no clothes to wash and iron, no school bag to pack or spelling tests to take, daily life had collapsed. She could not carry on without gravity, with the clocks stilled as time slipped stealthily past uncleaned windows, leaving only dust as proof of progress.

Kathleen did not see Alice all the time. She did not follow every child who might be Alice. For example, she no longer hung around outside the school or sat in the spectators’ gallery at the local swimming pool where there were plenty of young girls laughing and shouting. Alice didn’t like swimming. She loved school, but Kathleen knew the staff would ring if she came back. They had rung Kathleen at the surgery when Alice broke her arm. Teachers could tell when children weren’t right even when the children themselves made no fuss. She trusted them with her child. Alice had not cried with her green stick fracture; not wanting to miss maths, she had sat for two hours white with the pain. As a girl, Kathleen would have welcomed any excuse to miss maths. She had admired her daughter’s stoic efficiency, her easy intelligence and had stood helpless listening as Alice instructed her teacher how much food to give the fish – relinquishing her post of Pet Monitor – her face pinched and white as she clasped her limp arm. In that moment Kathleen had seen the woman Alice would one day be: a cleverer, calmer, more competent adult than herself. It was an exciting, yet disturbing, vision and Kathleen had been deliriously happy when Alice burst into tears that evening and asked for hot chocolate Nesquik. As she watched Alice take sniffing sips she had secretly welcomed her small daughter back.

It was that little girl Kathleen was determined to find. Somewhere, in a competent adult living out her life, the little girl who was Alice must exist.

Alice would have been forty on the 25th of March. Seventy-five days ago, Kathleen knew exactly, she didn’t delude herself.

Over three decades on and Kathleen had refined her search. She now looked for an essence with edges polished smooth by time and embellished with wistful properties, like generosity and limitless kindness. Kathleen knew the girls she was trailing would not be Alice. She had seen their faces, heard their voices, yet the way a girl would skip along beside her Mummy or put her arms out against the wind could be enough to bring Alice back. Then Alice’s soul would gain clarity and Kathleen would feel the back of her neck tingle and be convinced she was near. Once she had gone to the bottom of the stairs and called up to Alice in the empty cottage:

‘Can’t you give me a sign?’ The lights fused. She had been unafraid of the darkness, she was no longer alone. If he had been alive, Steve would have questioned why a soul would signal its presence through the electricity circuit just as once he had refused to apply for a transfer on the basis that she was convinced someone had died in the cottage. But perhaps her deep feeling of unease had been the premonition of a terrible event just around the corner, not divining of the past.

The quality of ‘missing’ had altered; Alice’s presence in the cottage had become another prop for alleviating the pain of her absence. It managed Kathleen’s grief and fought her conscious desire to die.

Kathleen Howland’s life had changed again the day, eight years earlier, when she collapsed in Boots in Canterbury, falling against a life-size cut-out of a woman gaily brandishing a deodorant. As she went down Kathleen’s eyes conveyed apology to the brightly smiling image. Her chest refused to breathe. Later she tried to explain it was less a blacking out, more of a greying, a steady diminishment of sight and sound. She had been rushed to hospital. After many white-coated questions they told her what she already knew because she had seen the same symptoms in her mother. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. She confessed that the tremor in her hand had been going on for over a year. As she lay on a trolley bed while they tapped her arm for blood, Steve’s sheet white face appeared like the moon between hospital curtains glaring accusingly at her. This too was her fault.

That day, Alice had got away.

After that, Kathleen had been forced to recognise her limits and adapt her methods. For some time there had been plenty of time between tablets, when she was almost herself, but had to be mindful of her energy. Too much excitement and she trembled visibly, jerking involuntarily and attracting attention. Then she developed low blood pressure in the mornings, and had to lie still, her feet propped on pillows until she could rise without feeling faint. They gave her steroids, but these drained her of potassium and she had an angina attack. This time no one turned up in Accident and Emergency to claim her. She told them there was no ‘Next of Kin’. After they cut back on the steroids, Kathleen’s symptoms got worse, and she couldn’t go until the mid-morning. She was informed that her Parkinson’s was advancing fast.

One night five years earlier, as Kathleen was writing up her activities for that day, she had flipped back through her notebook and was upset to see how her handwriting had changed: it was tighter, smaller and crabbed, only just decipherable. Like an old woman’s. Except that she was not yet out of her fifties.

Time was not on her side.

In the first months after he died in the summer of 1992, Kathleen would see Steve in the street too. She didn’t try to follow him, knowing how much it would annoy him. Steve was a private man whose feelings were his own business. She kept in the shadow of an awning as he stared in at the window of a hardware shop or strolled out towards the fields to merge with the sky. Although she had let Steve go, she missed him. She had howled like a wounded dog with its stomach ripped wide open to reveal a mash of ribs and spleen. She was scared of the noise, a giving birth sound that was death. Nothing could stop it as it rose up, rushing out of her, to roar about her ears like a typhoon. Steve had left without saying goodbye or leaving a note. His dying had been a subtle creeping away, a sick animal first curled irritably in a corner, then one day the corner was empty.

With Steve dead, Kathleen was alone with the loss of Alice. She was by herself with the knowledge of what it was to have a way of life wiped out, one sunny afternoon. The police had informed her that her precious little child was missing and all they could offer her in return was a nice warming cup of tea with extra sugar in.

The isolation was her choice: she had resisted joining groups or answering sympathy letters. She had passed up the chance of conversations with other bereaved parents or with a counsellor that might have sanitised her state. To utter barely formed fears and possibilities gave them the credibility of fact. Kathleen preferred the fluidity of fiction.

In June 1968 there had been Steve. Without speaking, they had clung to each other, sheltering in a shared language. Then, as hours and days slipped by unacknowledged, they had let go finger by finger until they were awkward strangers sharing a kitchen, hovering with polite reticence to use the bathroom. Then Steve left Kathleen by herself to hold the creaking, ticking quiet of the cottage in hands clumsy with tremor. Gradually as the palpability of his absence waned, Kathleen gave herself up to an undertow of relief: it was easier to look for Alice alone.

When Alice went missing, they had been besieged by reporters. Kathleen had welcomed them, grateful for their interest, confident they could help. Her numb disbelief was awakened by the flow of words; the flickering phantoms of her home and her daughter on the new Radio Rentals television were an impression of life. She had grasped at every opportunity to talk and keep talking.

Steve sat in Alice’s bedroom, in the chair he used for bedtime stories, holding the book they had been reading when she vanished. It was Alice in Wonderland, Alice’s favourite. He opened and shut it, a thumb inserted at the place they had left off – ‘A Caucus Race and a Long Tale’ – rubbing the words perhaps to make them vanish too. He only came downstairs if the police asked to speak to him. He would have nothing to do with the journalists. After a while he did not even talk to Kathleen, but retreated into silence. She understood, for silence was where Alice was.

Kathleen wondered how her husband would have coped if Alice had gone missing today. The media interest had been less then, or perhaps it was just not so polished. Having learnt the importance of what was called the ‘oxygen of publicity’, she now regretted that Robert Kennedy had been shot dead in the same week and that there had been riots at some university in Paris in the days after. She had learnt the importance of keeping the story in readers’ minds. She knew that it was the public that caught criminals, or found missing people, hardly ever the police. People soon forgot. One missing child becomes another missing child: their fresh faces forever smiling in spotless school uniform generic as sheep.

As the weeks went by and there was no sign of Alice, the aftermath of the death of Kennedy and the American election eclipsed the disappearance of a small girl in Sussex. In return, Kathleen forgot about most of the journalists. She did keep the newspapers, although she could not bear to read them. She had been frightened by the lack of intimacy in the black and white picture of her daughter in the papers. Alice’s face was made up of hundreds of dots. Her daughter had become a story like the ones Kathleen had read many times while drinking coffee and taking the weight off her feet. The same portrait had been in pride of place on top of the television since Alice brought it home from school the previous September, but in the newspaper it made Alice unfamiliar. Kathleen had stacked the newspapers in a cardboard box and got Steve to put it in the loft. He wanted to throw them away, but however alienating they were, she said it was like throwing away Alice. Kathleen didn’t tell Steve that she hoped one day, perhaps when Alice was about thirty, around the same age as Kathleen had been then, she would haul them down and show them to her. Then they would fall about at the pictures of Kathleen and Steve, in his postman’s cap with his stiff old-fashioned face. They would not talk about how awful it had been, but just how long ago it was. It would be a past life and they would be relieved that like in fairy stories, everything was ‘happy ever after’. Outside, Alice’s children would be playing with their grandad in the sandpit, and he would be explaining to them that he had made it for his princess in the olden days.

But thirty-one years and four days later Alice had not come back. Thirty had passed and this year Alice would have been forty. The papers were still in the loft, probably turned to ash by mice and moths, and Steve was dead of a broken heart at the age of fifty-eight.

One reporter had stayed in Kathleen’s memory. Jackie Masters looked twenty, with blue eyes and fair hair. Over the years Kathleen had looked out for her name, but had never seen it. Until recently Jackie Masters had vanished as completely as her daughter.

At the time she had been very present. Arriving with a big ‘Hullo!’, she would march in treating the cottage as her home: filling the kettle, mashing the tea, getting out the milk bottle and flicking off the foil top with such confidence. The place was her own. Kathleen had relinquished everything, her home, her habits; her life. Jackie learnt which cup Kathleen preferred, and washed up and dried and wiped down the draining board. Kathleen found she could talk to Jackie without crying, and say exactly what she meant. The words came out right, not like when she was with the police or with neighbours, when she was unable to speak or move. Jackie could nearly have been Alice’s big sister, she tossed her hair in the same way and, like Alice, she had come top in her schoolwork and had wanted to be a ballet dancer but was too small. They discussed the length of Alice’s hair, would it look good up, did she have a boyfriend? (Kathleen had not liked the question. No.) Which Beatle did she like best? Or did Alice prefer the Monkees? As they chatted Kathleen could hear Alice in her bedroom upstairs, small feet mousing about as she dressed up her dolls or rearranged her glass animals. Jackie was encouraging when Kathleen confessed she had started leaving the porch lamp on and the back door unlocked at night so Alice could get in. She told Jackie that when they were coming home after dark from her father’s in Newhaven, she would insist on putting the light on before they left, so that it would be shining if Alice turned up while they were out. Alice had called the light the ‘beacon’. Until then they hadn’t known she knew the word. Steve had put this down to the Ramsays who he didn’t like. Remembering this stopped Kathleen telling Jackie. She had wanted her to like Steve, although he never came down when she was there.

‘Such a grownup word for a little girl, she must have been good at reading.’ Jackie Masters had written ‘beacon’ in her notebook as if it was a new word to her too.

Oh she was. She loved her books. She always came top at spelling. She knew so many words.

Alice would know the beacon was a message for her. Kathleen had assured Jackie that Alice would come round to the back. They never used the front door except for special occasions. Although of course, her return would be a special occasion.

One night Kathleen took Jackie to the kitchen door and pointed timidly at the packet of sandwiches placed next to the empty milk bottles and yoghurt jars. In case Alice was hungry, she explained. Strawberry jam, her favourite. It had felt wonderful making them, she had whispered not wanting Steve to hear. He would say sandwiches were going too far. She had almost been her old self as she laid the slices out on the board exactly square, then smeared a thin layer of butter on each one. You see she doesn’t like too much, but she likes jam right to the crust. She doesn’t like the crust, but she must have it, for her teeth. Jackie had squeezed her hand and given such a nice smile. She had no children of her own yet, but said she understood exactly.

Alice liked Robertson’s Jam, and was collecting golliwog tokens. Kathleen had helped her send off for a brooch the Tuesday she went missing. Jackie was writing busily as Kathleen recalled Alice skipping and jumping next door to the village stores to post the tokens. Kathleen leaned on the gate, to wait for her, just as excited. Years later, Kathleen still ran this scene like a film. Sometimes it had a different ending, where Alice came home in the evening, hungry and so full of things to tell her, sliding on to a chair at the kitchen table going on and on, like a canary let out of its cage.

After lunch Alice had gone off to play with Eleanor Ramsay; Kathleen had not watched her leave and try as she might, she could not think what the last words Alice had said to her were, however many times Jackie asked.

The golliwog brooch had arrived two weeks after Alice disappeared. Jackie was there and opened the envelope self-addressed in Alice’s pretty writing to save Kathleen. Jackie had behaved like a child, clapping her hands and exclaiming ‘What a surprise!’

‘Oh, she’ll love this.’ By now they had both forgotten that Jackie had never met Alice. Jackie had become a family friend who Alice would be so pleased to find waiting for her when she came home.

‘When she comes back, I’ll give it to her.’

‘Yes, make things normal again as fast as you can.’ Jackie was wise before her time.

Kathleen had forgotten that Steve was in the house as she told Jackie how she spread out her treats, the sandwiches, switching on the beacon, changing the sheets on Alice’s bed, preparing her school bag for the new term; different tasks spread throughout each day.

‘That’s lovely.’ Jackie had sighed, as she noted everything down.

Jackie had a way of listening, she looked right at Kathleen, letting her know that what she said mattered above everything.

It had been a mistake to put the sandwiches in a paper bag.

One morning a fox or a cat ripped it open and ate most of the contents. Kathleen had gone round the garden picking up the last scraps of bread, soil had stuck to the jam and the bag was in shreds with strips of sticky paper all over the grass. Steve had been angry. Had she gone off her head? It was when he read about the food left outside his back door by his wife in his Sunday paper that Steve stopped speaking to her.

For some weeks Kathleen worried that Steve had upset Jackie because she didn’t come round. Kathleen kept lifting the receiver of their new telephone to check if it was working, or if the other people on the party line were making a call; this would explain why Jackie hadn’t rung. In the end she dialled the number Jackie had given her. She had said to ring if something occurred to her or of course if she just wanted a chat. After Kathleen explained who she was and that she only wanted to say ‘Hello’ and that no, there was nothing new to say, the man on the other end went away. He came back to say Jackie was out. Kathleen hated to be a nuisance and as she was rather scared of the telephone, she didn’t call again. However, even without Jackie there, Kathleen continued to talk to her. She told her how she was each day, she chatted to her as she cooked, cleaned and tidied. At first Steve would come in to see who she was talking to.

Just thinking out loud.

Kathleen couldn’t have said when this invisible listener stopped being Jackie and became Alice. Perhaps when Alice reached the age of her missing friend. Perhaps she had always been Alice. Certainly for as long as Kathleen could remember she had been talking to the wise and competent woman she had glimpsed on the evening of the green stick fracture. There was now a reason for getting up in the morning. Kathleen had someone who wanted to know how she spent her day and she must have something to tell her.

Steve never approved of her searching for Alice. He was a man who called a spade a spade. Once a thing is done it’s done. He wouldn’t talk about Alice and eventually stopped going into her bedroom. He had never had a daughter. This meant they had truly lost the greatest thing they shared. Once she had overheard him telling the landlady in a bed and breakfast in Wales that no he didn’t have children, he hadn’t wanted them. After that they didn’t go on holiday.

One night Kathleen had woken up alone in the bed. She got up, not turning on the light, finding her dressing gown and slippers with the dexterity of a person used to sneaking around in the dark. Steve was talking.

Someone was with him.

She had to steady herself as she reached the top of the stairs. Like Alice, Kathleen knew to avoid the creaky step, but feeling ill with hope she hardly dared admit to, she had had to cling to the banister to prevent herself pitching headfirst. Halfway down she stopped to listen to the murmuring from the living room.

Steve was speaking to Alice. How she had cherished that voice he used – caressing and wondering – describing a miracle to Alice. The voice that had made her love Steve even more after Alice was born. Kathleen would gaze contentedly as her young husband led Alice along the edge of the beach at Newhaven or bent down with her to look for tiny creatures in the pools of shallow water at the foot of the cliffs. At barely two years old Alice could imitate his words. Caterpillar. Grasshopper. Spider.

It was years since she had heard that voice.

Kathleen nearly screamed. Alice is back!

She had been right all along when she asserted Alice was alive and not buried in some hastily dug grave like everyone privately thought. Steve was a father again.

Daddy.

She had run down the rest of the stairs, and then as she touched the doorknob something made her stop in her tracks. Steve wasn’t saying anything.

There was no one else talking. Then she heard it.

The silence was broken by a low moaning like the wind. She knew the sound. Steve was crying but Alice wasn’t comforting him. She would have tried to make him better the way she had when she was just three and Steve’s father had died suddenly of a heart attack. He had been briefly enchanted out of grief as his little princess reached up with a tea towel, and pushed through his criss-crossed fingers to dab at his face. Kathleen had prided herself on not being jealous of the way he looked at Alice. She had assured her sister that she didn’t mind that Steve never saw anyone else if Alice was there. She loved the Steve that doted on his daughter.

‘Daddy. Please don’t cry.’

So why wasn’t she handing him a towel now?

Then she heard him:

‘Alice. Where are you? My little Alice…’

Kathleen had rushed back upstairs. She lay rigidly, wide-awake for the rest of the night. Steve didn’t return to bed and he left for the sorting office without coming to wake her with a cup of tea. When he had clicked shut the front door, quietly so as not to disturb her, it struck Kathleen that he hadn’t brought her a cup of tea in bed for a long time.

After that Kathleen understood that they were lost to each other. They had taken bits of Alice away into separate places to examine and treasure. If Alice had come home she would have found it occupied by two people who didn’t know each other.

So when Steve died Kathleen was no more alone than she had been before. She also had the comfort of knowing that for Steve at least, the gnawing pain was over.

Thirty-one years and four days later Kathleen still kept the kitchen door unlocked with the beacon burning brightly, although she no longer tried to work out what had happened to Alice. She had gone over so many possibilities for years and had exhausted them. Was she abducted? Did she run away? Did she bang her head and lose her memory and wander off into the house of another family who took her in and brought her up as their own? Had Alice been imprisoned in someone’s basement and over time become attached to her kidnappers like Patty Hearst? Kathleen didn’t dwell long on the option of murder. She had read that statistically it was the most likely. She now knew that most abducted children are killed within hours of their kidnap, for few people want to be caught holding a child captive. She knew that whatever the police said, after a fortnight they are looking for a body. They keep that to themselves. She had also read that the more time that passes the less chance there is that the child will be found alive. Over time the clues grow fewer and the trail gets colder.

Nowadays she noticed there were big rewards from newspapers and celebrities appeal for missing children to come home, assuring them they are not in trouble. Their favourite music is played on the radio and later, if there is a funeral, it is piped over loud speakers to silent crowds. Hollow-eyed parents, like herself and Steve, stare into the camera begging their child to come home, pleading with their child to come back, or with an anonymous abductor to release them. Kathleen would snatch hungrily at the snippets of these shattered lives to add something to her own jig-sawed world.

Now that Doctor Ramsay had drowned, life would change again.

Kathleen had never told anyone how important the doctor was to her. (To Kathleen he would always be Doctor Ramsay.) It would have confirmed opinions that she was not stable. Doctor Ramsay had been kind to her after Alice went. He had told her to keep hope alive and said something about hope being a flame of life. She should have written it down. He continued to make an effort with her, going out of his way to speak to her if they met in the village. Kathleen guessed that some people only talked to her because they saw that he did. He had never treated her as if she was mad. Years ago he had become an expert on her illness, although neither of them discussed this coincidence. Of course he wasn’t her doctor, he was far too important, but he always asked how she was and really seemed to want to know. Kathleen took any comment Doctor Ramsay made about health seriously. The Ramsays had sent flowers when Steve died. She knew they were really from Doctor Ramsay.

Doctor Ramsay had volunteered to join the line of men in the second search at the Tide Mills. Half the village had taken part in the first one, but for this one they wanted only men. When she heard this, Kathleen had passed out. She had guessed it was because they expected to find her body. She had urged the Chief Inspector not to bother. Alice never went there, Kathleen had told her it was too dangerous. Then Steve had pulled her up off the floor and together with the detective helped her on to the settee:

‘Let them get on with their job.’

‘I was only putting them right.’

‘They don’t need putting right.’

‘She never went there.’

‘Yes, she did.’ Steve was steely and brutal.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She went there last Saturday with that Eleanor Ramsay.’

‘But she was last seen on Tuesday afternoon in the lane near the Ramsays’ house.’ Kathleen robotically spoke in a newspaper phrase.

‘So, it means she knew about the place.’ He had kept close to her, perhaps already concerned that the police should guess how disturbed she was. Maybe he thought they would try less hard to find Alice if they thought her mother was unbalanced. Or was it that he worried that seeing this, the police might blame Kathleen, as Steve already blamed her, for their daughter’s vanishing?

‘She went the day after you first took her to meet those Ramsays.’

‘Alice would have told me.’

‘She told me.’

‘She what? Did you tell her off?’ Kathleen had hoped that Steve was nice to her. Her anguish for every harsh word either of them had ever said to Alice, however mild, was still unbearable now, decades later.

His face had gone strange, twisted, tight. He wasn’t Steve.

‘I was never cross with her.’

‘On the last day, she promised me to behave.’ She could only repeat: ‘They played hide and seek by the White House. Chief Inspector Hall told us that Eleanor said…’

‘Like I said, let them get on with it.’

That was when Kathleen had learnt that Alice had been closer to Steve than she was to her. For the first time since Alice was born, Kathleen had minded about the strong unspoken love they shared. Only in life is the heart a bottomless pit. Alice’s love was now finite and Kathleen wanted more than half her share of it.

With the doctor dead, Kathleen assumed she would get no more tapes. So she had lost another chance of finding Alice. He had delivered them to her every Saturday on his way to Lewes when he would also collect last week’s batch. She had the tapes ready by the door in a plastic bag. He never came in and they always went through the same routine:

‘Here’s another week’s worth. You keeping well?’

‘Can’t complain. I’ve put these back in date order and rewound them. How are you?’

‘Tired and I do complain, but no one listens!’

‘You must treat yourself properly.’ Kathleen didn’t like to delay him, he was still a busy man. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you next week then.’ She never liked to presume.

‘Same time same place!’

Doctor Ramsay never asked if she had found anything on the tapes. He was too sensitive. He trusted her to tell him. Whatever she said he would believe her.

She knew this for a fact.

The tapes recorded all the comings and goings at the White House. Initially Kathleen had ignored anything that was outside the remit of her search. She was poised, intent, because this might be the week when Alice would materialise: a sneaking image skipping past the pool, dodging out of sight of the windows, cutting across the garden on her way back home.

But Kathleen had observed that the Ramsays had a lot of visitors. She could not help becoming familiar with the man who came to see Isabel for several months on Wednesday afternoons when Kathleen knew the doctor was in London. But she didn’t notice the day he stopped appearing on the film. Kathleen tried to forget most of what she saw because she respected the Ramsays’ privacy; she was looking for Alice, everything else that went on was irrelevant. Yet despite herself, Kathleen got to know all the routines of the house. The video counter recorded the times of arrival of those who delivered: groceries, chemicals for the pool, furniture and of course the post. In the early tapes Kathleen would see the figure of Steve going up and returning down the drive, the film making him look like a character in the Woodentops. Then Kathleen would have to wind back and look more closely. This was a Steve she had never known, after he left the house in the mornings. In the past she hadn’t needed to know this other Steve for she had her own one. But as she watched the blurred black and white figure jerk across the screen over and over again, she felt miserable in a new way to the constant ache of Alice. This out-of-focus monochrome image was all she had. When Steve died the figure changed. First there was a relief postman, an elderly man, who would pause on the path to smell the lavender and here and there to dead head a flower, and then the permanent replacement – a woman young enough to be Kathleen’s daughter, who didn’t look in the least like Alice.

Kathleen had begun by taking notes, partly to help her concentration, but as her Parkinson’s got worse, her writing became harder to read, and it was harder to write. So she gave up and kept no notes on her thoughts about the woman who she saw lingering behind the Judge’s shed every Friday morning when Doctor Ramsay was out and which, Kathleen also knew, was the gardener’s day off. She didn’t mention her for a long time because the woman always had her back to the camera and, besides, the film quality was very poor. Kathleen didn’t want to risk her relationship with Doctor Ramsay by bothering him with stupid fancies until she was absolutely sure.

Last Saturday Doctor Ramsay hadn’t appeared. Kathleen waited in, confident that he would come. He was so reliable. She hadn’t liked to ring, they didn’t have that kind of relationship. The tapes were a big favour. Perhaps after what she had told him he had decided to stop letting her see them. Perhaps he had decided to use the same tape, erasing the previous week’s worth. Kathleen had tried not to panic. She relied on the tapes.

Kathleen had not believed Iris when she told her, and she had wanted to get out of the shop. She wished she had not gone there, perhaps if she had stayed at home, she could have prevented his death. But she had gone for precisely that reason, worried as the time went on and Doctor Ramsay did not come. If there was anything to know, she had known that Iris would know it. As she struggled back and pushed open the front door, which these days she used all the time, she had caught her foot on the bag of videos still by the hat stand in the hall. Now Kathleen would have to find a way of returning them that wasn’t rude.

Doctor Ramsay’s death made Kathleen think again about Alice. If he could die, with his big smile and his sparkly eyes, perhaps Alice could die too. She wouldn’t believe village rumours that the doctor had killed himself. He was a doctor; he gave life. She didn’t go out all of the Sunday. But on the Monday morning she remembered what he had said about the flame of hope and when she felt well enough she ventured next door to the stores and bought a sympathy card for Isabel Ramsay. She had planned to send roses too, until Iris informed her they had specifically said no flowers.

Since Alice vanished Kathleen didn’t go to funerals, but she decided she would make an exception for Doctor Ramsay, as she had for Steve. She would buy herself a new outfit especially. So this was why on the Monday afternoon following Mark Ramsay’s death, Kathleen was in Marks and Spencer.

That night Kathleen told Alice what she was doing, certain she would approve. Alice had liked Doctor Ramsay. Kathleen would always be grateful to him, because busy as he was, in those last few days that Alice spent with his family, Doctor Ramsay had given up some of his precious time to her.

Eighteen

Alice leaned her forehead against the front door and counted down from ten. Somewhere, perhaps on a quiz programme, she had heard that the Russians considered it good luck to sit for a moment on their travelling bags before embarking on a journey, and contemplate the expedition ahead. Today she needed all the luck she could get.

…four, three, two. One.

The door made no sound as she opened it. Once on the landing she used the key to close it. She was taking no chances.

She had planned her journey, calculating travelling time, including delays and unforeseen events. Two weeks ago, when she had decided to go to the funeral, Alice had lain awake mentally mapping out the churchyard, working out where she would stand during the burial. She couldn’t risk going into the church. She must be vigilant and not make assumptions about people’s focus of attention being on the coffin. There would be interest in a stranger.

She was not a stranger.

She would make sure to blend in, and meet any glance without looking away, as that attracted more suspicion. She would stay by the bank of nettles under the oak tree where the graveyard dipped away towards the downs. If necessary she could nip over the wall there. When it was all over, she would hurry away and come home. She had been taken aback to see the square-headed detective, grizzled with age and frustration, on the evening news. Of course, very quickly the media had made the connection with Doctor Ramsay and June 1968. Richard Hall ought to have been dead, but these men never let unsolved cases go. The police saw funerals as an opportunity, and from his interview the other night she knew he was still looking for Alice. She would have to be extremely careful.

She had been shocked to see the photographs of the two girls in the papers. She had not followed the story from an adult’s perspective before and it jolted her to see how many people were involved in the search. It had been the biggest manhunt on record. A gruesome record that Alice was sure would be broken one day.

She had felt winded when she read the Punch and Judy roll-call of participants: the Hanging Judge, the Kind Doctor turned Dead Professor, the Jackie Onassis look-alike, the Reckless Tomboy and the Innocent Schoolgirl who liked playing with dolls and might have been a ballet dancer if one day she hadn’t vanished off the face of the earth. Her eyes swam with tears as Alice read of the loving Dad who had died of grief. And last of all: long shot footage of Kathleen Howland combing the beach with a metal detector in the eighties, and more recently trawling through a black and white CCTV tape, or patrolling the Churchill Square shopping centre in Brighton while daily eroded by Parkinson’s Disease. Alice had folded up the paper unable to read more. The papers made the story seem real.

The press had got a perfect summer story.

Charbury had not changed. On the BBC news the reporter had broadcast from beside the red telephone box where Eleanor had called Gina, pretending to be a boy that Gina fancied, with the deep and panting voice she used for singing ‘I was born under a wandering star.’ She had sounded stupid, rasping into the phone, that he was desperately in love with Gina and had to see her at once. How could she have thought Gina would be taken in?

I will kill you! Gina had promised in a matter of fact voice when they got home. She had been taken in. She told Alice and Eleanor that the boy’s mother had just died of cancer, which ruined the joke. Then the report had cut from the Ram Inn, bathed in sunshine, to pan out over undulating countryside – a natural home to Shredded Wheat or butter adverts – where cows pranced in unison upon green, green fields and people laughed in ceaseless mirth and slipped farm-fresh strawberries between white, white teeth.

Paradise. Lost.

Alice tried to tackle the ironing as the voices went on about what a lovely man Doctor Ramsay was.

How did they know?

Later she had cut out the articles about Professor Ramsay from the papers and spread them out on the living room table.

Alice had thought all the games Eleanor wanted to play were silly. She didn’t approve of pretending.

Just before Chris was due home, Alice gathered up the cuttings and shoved them under her pillow in an old envelope. She had become practised at flourishing sewing materials or watercolour sketches as alibi activities to avoid suspicion of her secret self. She couldn’t afford to arouse the attention of her ever-curious daughter. Alice had already pushed the bounds of normality by asking Chris to get three different newspapers for several days in a row. There hadn’t been that much coverage; the Ramsays were no longer important. Out of habit she still peered out through the lace, but he wasn’t there crouching behind a wheelie bin or sitting in the snug at the World Turned Upside Down. As she leaned against the front door, preparing after so long to leave the flat, she reflected that now she need never look to see if he was there. Now he would never come again.

Finally in The Independent she had found what she was looking for:

The date of the funeral rang a bell. Alice had simply written the number: ‘11’ in her diary. She did not need the address. The service was well timed; she could be home by the afternoon. It was just possible that Chris would return early; now that she had finished her exams she came and went as she pleased. That was a risk Alice had to take.

The funeral would be a huge risk, but now Alice was used to pretending, so wedded to her fabrications she mistook them for reality. Now a real event had interrupted her complex weavings.

As Alice reached the ground floor and trod lightly past the door of the last flat, a latch clicked. In a second the door would open.

It was over.

She prepared herself for the neighbour’s amazement that the recluse-lady from upstairs was out and about, for the supposition that she had escaped. Call her daughter, call an ambulance. Alice had time to run, but she couldn’t move. Then she realised the door hadn’t opened. Instead, someone had double locked it from the inside. Footsteps receded.

As she was going to step out into the quadrangle, Alice saw Jane arriving for work. She couldn’t believe her stupidity: how had she not considered Jane?

One morning last November Alice had been gazing listlessly out of the window when her attention was caught by a woman striding towards the estate office. The woman was smartly dressed, in a dusky blue suit, and carried a slim brown leather briefcase. She looked too well heeled to be one of the housing association’s tenants and Alice watched keenly as she put her case on the ground while she jangled through a large bunch of keys to open the door.

Suddenly and quite inexplicably the woman looked up at Alice’s window. Alice was astounded and jumped back from the glass bashing her hip against the dining table. She had been seen through the curtain.

The next morning Alice had waited for the woman to arrive. Once again, with her brandished keys catching the winter sunlight, the woman – Alice had realised she was the new estate manager – glanced at Alice’s window and this time she smiled and made a slight movement with her hand that could have been a wave.

By the end of the week, against her better judgement, Alice was waving back and even dreading the end of the working day, once her favourite time, when the manager would go home leaving the office dark and empty.

When a Christmas card was put through her door, Alice had found out the woman’s name was Jane. Alice thought the name suited her. Nevertheless the card disturbed her. It was too informal, presuming too much. Alice didn’t want to place Jane in the midst of life and she couldn’t afford to be placed there herself. She had stared at the card, trying to guess what Jane’s second name might be. There must have been a letter of introduction when she took over from the dowdy man with dandruff shoulders and plastic shoes who had always behaved with Alice as if he doubted her. Alice had probably thrown the letter away unopened. She avoided the post. This propelled her into the admission that she knew nothing about Jane. Everything she knew she had made up. Alice didn’t want to think of Jane having a life beyond the archway; beyond her control.

She had chucked the card in the bin.

Halfway through the morning Alice had found a reason to retrieve it. Just as she was about to toss her used tea bag away, she pretended to spot the card as if thrown there by someone else, propped against a crushed milk carton. She lifted it out and wiped it down with the dishcloth. Then she read the message properly:

‘Have a lovely Christmas with your daughter. Perhaps in the New Year we could meet for coffee in the office. I could come and fetch you, if you liked. Best wishes Jane.’

Alice analysed the words. She appreciated the fact that Jane hadn’t said ‘my office’ which would have put her off. She must know about the agoraphobia, but she was tactful. This disturbed Alice who tried so hard to be private. She decided not to reply. She would not go for coffee. There was always the chance that he had got to Jane. It made perfect sense as a first step. He would guess how to get to her.

One January morning Jane didn’t turn up. After she had been absent four days, and just as Alice was weighing up the consequences of calling the head office of the housing association with a query about her rent, a postcard arrived from an island in Greece.

‘Taken the flu bug with me! But being ill in Athens beats being ill in Bermondsey! See you soon, all best Jane.’

Alice had tucked the card into the frame of her pin board under the brochure for a new Chinese takeaway.

A week later on the morning when Alice had guessed that Jane would return to work her anticipation had reached a ringing pitch of visceral anxiety.

Chris had mixed feelings of relief and dismay when Alice wasn’t at the window to wave her off, but stayed at her dressing table, laboriously applying make-up as if she did so every morning. As she saw her mother soften the blotches of blusher with upward flicks of face powder Chris had hung about seriously considering staying off school to look after her until Alice got annoyed and shooed her out.

Alice was at the window long before nine.

When Jane didn’t appear, Alice began to worry that she had been wrong about the date. It was twenty past nine and the office remained shut with the blinds down. Alice grew angry, and abandoning caution she went away to find the number of head office. This meant she nearly missed her. She was carrying her briefcase under her arm, already getting her keys out of her coat pocket by the time Alice returned to the window with the telephone directory under her arm. Jane had a suntan. Alice dropped the book and in a burst of excitement was about to pull back the lace curtains and wave to her. She had unlocked the window in advance because today she had planned to pluck up the courage to lean out and suggest she came down to the office and accept Jane’s offer of coffee. She couldn’t let him rule her life. But as Alice took hold of the lace she had heard a distant tune: a crude snatch of Mozart playing on a child’s toy. She let the curtain drop and getting well back out of sight checked the quadrangle. There was no one else there. Then Jane fished into her bag and pulled out a mobile phone. Alice wasn’t used to mobiles. She never had need of one. She had bought Chris one for security reasons, but had been annoyed when it became a way for people to bypass her when they communicated with her daughter. Few of Chris’s friends called on the home telephone any more. Because of this Alice viewed mobile phones with antagonism. Her body had turned to sand as she saw Jane laughing and smiling, her head cocked to one side, wedging the handset on her shoulder while she opened the office door. She had not looked up at the window for Alice. The door swung shut behind her with a bang.

Later that morning Alice’s own telephone had rung. Jane had invited her to coffee. Again she offered to fetch her. She did know about the agoraphobia, it was in Alice’s tenant file. No, it wasn’t common knowledge. Everything was on a ‘need to know’ basis. It was simply that Alice had been marked down as requiring help leaving the flat in case of fire. At first Alice had refused, she was still smarting from the phone incident, which she had taken as a personal slight. Then she had pulled herself together. Jane had sounded genuine. Her allusion to the housing association’s confidentiality policy must mean Jane hadn’t been talking about her. Perhaps she could trust her.

The estate office was only about twenty steps outside the flat. She told Jane she could manage the distance by herself, but made sure to sound sufficiently hesitant. She would check that the coast was clear beforehand so there was surely no risk.

After she replaced the receiver, Alice imagined Jane’s rich, deep voice and reflected that talking to her had been easy; they might have known each other a long time.

After that the two women met in the office about twice a week. Alice hadn’t told Chris. She couldn’t think how to. She was ambivalent about a friendship with Jane. It was dangerous to get close to anyone. If she confessed to Chris about leaving the flat to see Jane it would commit her to continuing. At the moment she could stop at any time. If Chris knew, she would try to make Alice go out with her too and she might even guess that Alice wasn’t agoraphobic at all.

When Alice read about what happened to Doctor Ramsay, Jane was the only person she had to talk to about it. But she must keep silent. If anything, his death confirmed that she had been right to keep her distance. In the end, because she was sure Jane would see something was wrong, Alice said her uncle had died, but that she hadn’t seen him since she was eighteen; he lived in New Zealand so she wasn’t grieving. Jane behaved, as she always did, with sensitivity and kindness. Then Alice worried that Jane would mention it to Chris who knew there was no uncle and would say so. So she had to tell Jane to keep quiet because Chris hated talking about death. It was getting complicated; Alice began to wish she had stayed in her living room.

Despite all the deception and fabrication, Alice was herself with Jane. After so many years, she had forgotten her real self.

So when Alice saw Jane outside the office a moment before she was about to step outside the flat, she was furious with herself. Only a few minutes longer upstairs and she would have been there if Jane had rung. She could have given herself an alibi, should she need one. She could have said she was ill and would be asleep all day and so would not answer the telephone. She ought to go back and call Jane now, but there wasn’t time. Now Jane would be worried if she rang and got no answer. When she had made her meticulous plans Alice had not included Jane because she belonged in a different part of her life. Now it was too late.

Alice felt her way in semi-darkness down the last flight of steps to the basement and heaved open the back door. She was in a concreted area across which was slung a line of colourless washing. This sign of life took her by surprise. Someone might come out at any minute. Alice ran over to the door in the high wall she had seen from her bedroom; once upon a time it had run along the railway tracks but now it bordered an industrial park. She tugged desperately at the bolt. It was rusty and wouldn’t budge. After hitting it several times, she shifted it and, rubbing her bruised palm, plunged into a filthy alley, littered with syringes, used condoms, beer cans and crisp bags and slippery with dog shit and vomit. The bolt had held the door shut so now she had to leave it ajar. She felt guilty – the washing might get stolen – then it dawned on her that this was her only way back as she couldn’t use the front entrance. Alice had not planned her return journey. She had to hope the owner of the washing wouldn’t notice.

The alley came out on the main road. Alice was blasted by the heat and the sound of traffic thundering down off the flyover on to the Old Kent Road. She shuddered at the engines roaring, gears grinding, coughs of exhaust, blaring horns; and shrank from the gigantic tyres of articulated lorries that could crush a life in moments and missed her by inches. She retreated to a convenience store with windows protected by metal grills. The shop had been a general store when she was last on the street years before. Then its produce had been displayed in abundance on the pavement, with more goods on show easily visible through the gleaming glass. Now piles of packets and tins bricked up the windows that were in turn behind the grill so she couldn’t see inside the shop. Alice nearly gave up and longed to scuttle back to the sanctuary of what now seemed like home. Maybe after staying indoors for so long she actually did have agoraphobia. She sat down on a yellow plastic grit bin to get her breath. The words Another day in Paradise had been sprayed through a template several times on its side partially hiding the manufacturer’s name and telephone number. -inaware 01273 622. Shading her eyes, she could see the archway to the flats a few yards down the street and was overwhelmed with exhilaration that at last she was on this side of it. She was free.

Although she had lied about her health, there had been a genuine reason for staying in the flat. Alice began to imagine that just possibly today’s expedition might mark a change to her life. Today might let her draw a line under her stolen past.

With renewed determination Alice stepped out into the road, and flagged down a taxi to take her to Victoria station. As she slid into the corner of the cab, out of sight of the driver’s mirror, the years Alice had had to bury began to surface and she remembered what was special about the 28th June.

Today was Eleanor Ramsay’s fortieth birthday.

Nineteen

Kathleen had been disappointed not to get an invitation to Doctor Ramsay’s funeral, but was not surprised. The only Ramsay likely to think of her was Mark Ramsay himself. Although only family and close friends were allowed to attend the service, Iris had said that most of Charbury would turn out to watch the cortège and see him buried. Kathleen was sure there would be no harm in going up to the church to pay her respects.

She was the first to arrive at the churchyard, having left her cottage an hour early to be sure of getting somewhere to sit. She found a bench about thirty yards from the gravesite. From here she could see the whole length of the path up to the church but she would not be conspicuous. Iris had also informed her that the hearse would start from the White House and go at walking pace along the main street as it had for the old Judge and every Ramsay before him. Iris had shooed her two Persian cats out to the back of the shop and bustled around the counter to confide in Kathleen’s ear that Isabel Ramsay had been keen to avoid fuss; rumour had it that she had wanted a cremation, but she couldn’t argue with Ramsay tradition. Iris had been strident in her defence of Doctor Ramsay’s right to a proper send off, but Kathleen privately felt sorry for Isabel. She too knew that Mark Ramsay would not have wanted so much bother. When Steve died, her sister had organised his funeral. Kathleen had not known where to begin and had even considered going away until it was all over, while knowing that such an idea was impossible.

The organist was practising scales, which made Kathleen anxious; he was cutting it fine if he wasn’t perfect by now. She didn’t want Isabel to be offended by a wrong note; today would be hard enough for her. Kathleen was also uncomfortable with the position of the bench she had chosen. Perhaps after all it was too prominent. She didn’t want the Ramsays to think she was drawing attention to their omission of her name from the guest list. The day was heating up and, unlike the other seats, this one wasn’t in the shade. But the other benches would give her no view at all, so there was no choice but to stay here.

Then more people began to drift into the graveyard and soon Kathleen was less obvious. The ones who had invitations held them conspicuously and took up sentry positions around the church door entrance, their expressions stern and distant. She didn’t recognise any of them and guessed they were friends and colleagues from Doctor Ramsay’s London life; the women in discreet black hats, the men in funeral suits that didn’t look hired or years out of date. This group showed no interest in their surroundings and, seeming to Kathleen cold and aloof, struck her as the opposite to Doctor Ramsay. If he had been here, he would have made everyone talk to each other regardless of who they were. But of course if he were here then no one else would be.

There were many people who Kathleen didn’t know. Whole families, making a day of it, milled up the path through the lych gate, while locals used the side entrance. A gang of youths tumbled over the wall at the back, initially laughing and joking. Then they were quiet as they formed a tight bunch on a rise near the old rowan tree, cowed by the gravestones, the sonorous tones of the organ and the sombre dress of the gathering crowd. Then she saw them; the kind who wrote her long rambling letters supposedly to help but really as cries for help. They were the pilgrims come to be healed by the kind doctor who even in death could provide solace. Men and women, their movements erratic, some clutching carrier bags, some dressed in dark corduroy jackets or trousers, worn overcoats and puffa jackets inappropriate for summer. Kathleen reflected that in their own way they would be genuine mourners.

Of course there were the reporters, behaving with self-conscious discretion, some laden with recording machines, others wielding cameras with long lenses. Kathleen prayed without hope that no one would recognise her. She could not talk about Doctor Ramsay, today of all days. A group of middle-aged men, who looked like councillors and bank managers, stood to attention under the yew trees, shuffling their feet, with their hands behind their backs. While other people, mostly women, had settled on the grass or had perched on larger tombstones, making a show of brushing off invisible leaves before lowering themselves with exaggerated care. Everyone kept a respectful distance. Soon Kathleen reckoned there were over a hundred and fifty people.

Then over the cemetery wall she saw movement far up the lane. A black hearse followed by five limousines and a straggle of cars had appeared from over the rise and was passing the village shop and her cottage before processing down the hill towards them. It was escorted on foot by Harry Norton in a top hat, the funeral director who had been one of Steve’s coffin bearers. Both Harry and the tall car behind him appeared to shimmer and warp in the heat, making the sombre procession look ethereal. For what seemed like an age, the cortège seemed to get no nearer and Harry was pacing on a giant grey conveyor belt that moved in the opposite direction to the steady pace of his black boots. Then the hearse was outside the church gates.

It was greeted by an uncanny hush. No one spoke or moved. Kathleen’s right hand began to tremble violently and she stilled it with her other. Her drugs were wearing off with the upset of it all. Luckily she had thought to bring a container of water with an emergency tablet already dissolved and, trying to make no noise, she fumbled for it in her bag. It nearly spilt as she unscrewed the top with ineffectual fingers. Finally she managed to swig the medicine down, dabbing the crumbly white sediment from her lips with her hanky. She mustn’t spoil things by being ill.

For a moment the ceremony was halted as the guests climbed out of the cars and assembled into line, hanging back for the family who had not yet emerged from the first limousine. The eerie quiet was interrupted by just the odd cough, or the clearing of a throat, thumps of car doors closing and the crunch of leather shoes on the shingle path. Kathleen did not take her eyes off the coffin. It was majestic and like Doctor Ramsay, beyond question. Mark Ramsay had been a tall man, an athlete in his youth, so she had expected it to be large, but it was very big indeed. She felt a flash of love for the man who had been so good to her daughter, so good to her, and who she would genuinely miss.

In the face of this loss, Kathleen found it mild compensation to see that Lucian was so like his father. The clock was wound back thirty years as she studied the strapping, dark haired man walking behind his father’s coffin with Isabel Ramsay on his arm. Isabel was smaller than Kathleen remembered, and moved stiffly. Kathleen felt no satisfaction at seeing that she was not the only person ageing. Then she recalled Iris describing how Mrs Ramsay had bruised her leg trying to rescue Mark Ramsay from his car. It was at least a year since Kathleen had last seen Isabel, who seldom came into the village.

Gina Ramsay looked beautiful. Kathleen had a soft spot for Gina because she had been Alice’s favourite, although Kathleen had been drawn to Eleanor who had such a lovely nature. Iris had said Gina had taken her father’s death very badly.

‘She cried like a baby, I heard. It’s her that’s organised it all. Just goes to show, it doesn’t matter what age you are, when your Dad goes, or your Mum, it hurts as if you was a little girl again.’ Then Iris had stopped and floundered around for another subject. Kathleen had got used to people’s dismay at uttering anything that hinted at Alice. They did not realise that for Kathleen, everything was to do with Alice.

As the Ramsays filed into the church under the shadow of the porch, Kathleen was consoled once again by thinking that Alice had not had to mourn her parents. Her child had been saved that pain.

But unlike Doctor Ramsay, there had been no funeral for Alice.

Steve had stopped believing in God after Alice went, but Kathleen had found excuses for God’s actions and looked harder than ever for the good in everything and everyone. Doctor Ramsay’s quiet kindnesses had shored up her faltering faith. Kathleen shut her eyes and relaxed as the warm sun played gently on her stiffened features, willing the dopamine to give her back some life and, with it, hope. The doors and windows of the church were open and as the service began, the mourners outside were able to hear the service:

It was only when the Ramsay family was trooping out of the graveyard, after the coffin had been lowered into the ground, that Kathleen caught sight of Eleanor about ten yards away. Eleanor was looking right at her. She must have been watching her for some time. Kathleen hoped she hadn’t appeared to ignore her and been assumed rude. Her Parkinson’s could make her seem distant, as her face refused to smile, or words were uttered with sharpness in her determined effort to get them out. Now Kathleen struggled to her feet buoyed up at the prospect of speaking to Eleanor. But by the time she felt steady enough to walk, Eleanor had gone. She must want to be alone. Kathleen didn’t feel offended by this; she expected that for all the Ramsays she was the last person they wanted to see. That was why they hadn’t asked her to the funeral. When Alice vanished it had been awful for the Ramsays too.

‘Hello Mrs Howland.’ The voice made her jump.

She would have known him anywhere, although he had filled out and looked like he drank too much, but perhaps he was just the outdoors type.

‘Chief Inspector Hall.’

She couldn’t think what to say. She wasn’t pleased to see him.

‘Rick, please.’ He took her hand in both of his like an old friend. ‘I wondered if you’d come.’ Then he too had nothing to say. The words: Have you found my daughter yet? hung between them. He let go of her hand.

‘Have you spoken to the family?’ Kathleen hoped he had left them alone.

‘Only a nod to Mrs Ramsay. Not sure she recognised me, but there we are…’ For a fleeting moment he looked disapproving, reminding Kathleen of the reason she hadn’t liked him. He had not been nice about Eleanor when she was a little girl, once comparing her unfavourably with Alice, assuming it would please her. He would have gone further if she had encouraged him, but she had stopped him. Kathleen said nothing as he stepped away from her and let himself be carried along with the queue of people heading for the lane.

It was then she saw her.

Kathleen lurched forward, her hand fluttered towards the back of the bench to catch herself. She missed it and toppled against a man and a woman cutting across the grassy plots to the path. The woman caught her by the arm and held on to her. She looked impatient but when she spoke her voice was concerned as she asked Kathleen if she was all right. Recovering, Kathleen tried to laugh it off, but her mouth wouldn’t move and her reply was incoherent. The couple helped her around to the front of the seat and stood over her as she sank down. Kathleen was so distracted that it was all she could do to be polite to them. They were in the way. She needed to get to her and they were blocking her view. She summoned up all her energy to urge them to leave her. Eventually she convinced them that she was fine and with thinly disguised relief they went.

The sunlight was so strong it was hard to make anything out in the glare. Kathleen scoured the churchyard. She was still there. She was standing on her own by the church wall bending over to read an inscription on one of the headstones behind the buttress. Her hair fell forward across her face the way it had when she had first spotted her. It was why it took a while to recognise her. She stood out from the other women because she was wearing trousers. Kathleen kept her eyes on her as she shakily made her way over the clumpy ground, between the graves, her fingers brushing worn limestone and cool marble for balance as every step brought her closer. This time she wouldn’t let anything distract her. Kathleen’s progress was painfully slow and she dreaded losing her because she had to keep checking where she put her feet for fear of tripping. Any minute she would mingle with the crowd and vanish for a second time. There was nothing Kathleen could do to stop her, she couldn’t risk drawing attention to either of them by waving.

She had tipped her sunglasses up on to the top of her head as she examined the worn lettering on the headstone and didn’t look up as Kathleen approached, her shoes catching slightly on the gravel.

‘Hello.’ Kathleen was surprised at the strength in her voice.

The woman stared at her.

‘It is you, isn’t it?’ It wasn’t a question, Kathleen was certain. The last time she had seen her was in black and white, but it had been enough to know for sure.

‘Mrs Howland.’ She avoided looking at Kathleen.

‘Oh, don’t call me that. It’s Kath, please.’

Kathleen took a couple of steps nearer and then she could see her properly. A fine mesh had been thrown over her face making it puckered and lined. There were dark bags under her eyes and tiny red marks flecked her grainy cheeks, which sagged, softening her jaw line. Thick grooves on each side of her mouth appeared to pull it down at the corners despite her efforts at a bright smile that did not extend to her eyes. Her blonde hair was dry and brittle and dark at the roots.

Jackie Masters must be about fifty-five, but she looked older. ‘How are you, love?’ Kathleen touched Jackie’s sleeve.

‘I shouldn’t have come. But I couldn’t resist…’ Jackie abruptly adjusted her glasses back over her eyes and retreated a couple of steps towards the gate. Kathleen gave a slight nod.

‘I’m sure he would have been glad.’ If only the dead could know how much they were cared for in life. Kathleen started to tell her about Doctor Ramsay’s CCTV film but Jackie interrupted:

‘Oh, I didn’t…’ Jackie tailed off suddenly curt. ‘Actually, I’m in a tearing hurry as always.’

Just as Jackie raised a peremptory hand in farewell, she hesitated and Kathleen was looking at the young woman who she had last seen in her kitchen three decades earlier, fussing with a dishcloth over the draining board. Jackie relented and said:

‘I’ll ring.’

This time Kathleen knew enough to understand that Jackie would never ring. But now she didn’t need her to. It was a chapter closed. What she had seen in the film was none of her business.

Kathleen turned to the gravestone Jackie had been reading. There was nothing special about it. A man called Leonard had died aged eighty-one, two years after Alice had gone missing. The inscription read that he was reunited with his wife who had ‘fallen asleep’ over forty years before him. The name rang a bell, but as with so many things, Kathleen couldn’t place it.

She was tired and could do with falling asleep herself. She leaned against the warm buttress and waited until everyone had left and she was alone, listening once more to the organist, and shutting her eyes to better hear the bell tolling for the doctor. Then before her drugs wore off and her feet already beginning to stick to the ground, she made her way out to the lane.

If Kathleen had trusted her balance enough to turn round and look behind her, she would have seen an inconspicuous figure in dark clothes climbing over the low wall under the oak tree, and then keeping their head down, make off across the triangular field towards the station.

Twenty

Eventually, far off in the future, Chris would come to think of Tuesday 29th June as the start of her new life. But most of the day had been the same as any other. The only difference was that she had to go home on foot because two cars had collided under the Eurostar Bridge at Waterloo and traffic was snarled up right to the Old Kent Road. She had jogged most of the way, passing eight stationary buses as she raced along. Carbon monoxide fumes made her eyes smart and every few paces she slapped dribbles of sweat from her cheeks and forehead. She invented tricks and games with herself to ward off the distance, dividing the route into gaps between lampposts and the numbers of idling cars as she dodged between them. She promised herself the manageable target of ‘just to that office furniture shop’, ‘only around this bend’ and ‘seven steps times three into the subway and up again’. At last she reached the archway to the flats, spurred on by the promise of an imminent cold shower.

As Chris unlocked the door, the cool passageway was almost reviving and for once she didn’t bemoan the lack of light in the flat. She faintly registered the ease with which the door opened. There was no draught excluder.

‘I’m back!’ She swung her bag on to her bed and had the usual brief inner tussle: bathroom or living room. Pushing back a sweat-soaked fringe Chris went to her mother.

The living room was empty.

Chris frowned at the armchair and clasped her hands in quelled disappointment. Alice must be ill. She hurried down the passage and paused outside her Mum’s door. No sound as she turned the handle.

She gasped.

The curtains were tied back and the window was open. This in itself was extraordinary; her Mum kept her bedroom window shut, disturbed by any noise, with the curtains closed because the view of the storage units depressed her. When Chris was small, there had been a disused goods station on what had been a railway line from London to Dover. Chris could just remember how the orange-pink of the setting sun picked out the castellated roof canopy, and how she had imagined making up a bunch from the wild flowers widening the cracks on the deserted platforms.

Her Mum had said it reminded her of a place she had once been to when she was a child, but the way she told it made Chris think it was one of her made-up stories. They had sat at her dressing table imagining the trains waiting at the platforms. Sometimes her Mum would press a finger to Chris’s lips and, cosy conspirators, they would pretend to hear the sneezing of a far off steam engine.

Then the station was pulled down. They couldn’t bear to watch as the great stone ball pendulumed into the sides, and slabs of wall tumbled away from twisting metal supports in huge clouds of dust. Soon in its place there was a warehouse of corrugated aluminium that gave the bedrooms a thin, insistent light. The silver cladding with its featureless surface had no magic to offer. Now, as Chris scanned the stunted view, somewhere on the industrial estate beyond the warehouse she could hear voices. Men were shouting to each other, a lone instruction reaching her above the scrambled sound of a distant transistor radio:

‘…find the hole, and pump it with mastic…’

Her Mum’s bed was unmade, a corner of the duvet flung back; she must have got up in a hurry. Chris became aware of the bedside clock ticking and heard a quick succession of car horns from the street on the other side of the building.

There was no sign of her Mum.

Although she knew she was alone, Chris checked every room, banging doors open and shut, kicking up the mats as she stormed up and down the passage in rising distress. Now she was looking for a note, a clue, any sign. If her Mum had got ill surely someone would have tried to call her, at the school, on her mobile? Why hadn’t a neighbour appeared at the front door to tell her? Chris dashed back to her bedroom, and shook her bag until everything was on the floor. She checked her mobile. The battery was charged. There were no missed calls, no messages.

Chris gravitated back to her Mum’s bedroom. With her hands on her hips, she took stock as she willed the room to yield an explanation. The objects around her had acquired a vibrancy emphasising the emptiness. Alice’s procession of Russian pottery animals on the dressing table mocked Chris. The tortoise was in the lead, speaking for her Mum’s belief in the strength of the apparently least able. The glass fronted box holding a tableau depicting a sea-battered groyne with a seagull stuck on the third strut and string coiled around the base of the second, was testimony to her Mum’s model making abilities. She had made it for Chris ten years earlier, and it had returned to her, not so much rejected as reclaimed. This was flanked by a London bus commemorating the Silver Jubilee, a red paint-chipped Citroën DS 19, and a 1930s model of the Eiffel Tower. Chris lifted up the mouse-size, furry cat dressed in knitted pantaloons and sniffed it. Her Mum.

Never before had Chris come home to an empty flat. Her Mum was scared of the traffic, and of crowds. She had once said she was terrified of the height of the sky. She hadn’t been out for years. Now, when her Mum had needed Chris’s help, she wasn’t there for her. Chris slid to the floor, still holding the cat to her nose. She leaned against her Mum’s bed and stared at the wall, following the meandering line of a crease in the wallpaper until it petered out halfway up.

She should call the police and the local hospitals, but this was too drastic, it would make all the fear-pricking possibilities real. What did she and her Mum have to do with police? The reassuring familiarity of the bedroom had to be proof that things were normal? What did this peaceful room, with its picture by Wintz, of a village street leading to the sea, have to do with an intensive care unit, or worse, the hygienic silence of a morgue? Chris knelt over the bed and buried her face in the cotton. After a few minutes she slipped her hand under the pillow, groping for respite from her mounting dread in her Mum’s bedding.

Mum!

Where are you?

Chris realised that all her life she had known this moment would come. Sometimes she had wished for it to happen. To come home and find her Mum gone and herself released. Even in sleep, the idea was there, in the repeated images of rooms without doors. She burrowed into the bed clawing in anguish and atonement. The pillow smelt of the cream her Mum used and faintly, her perfume, so familiar it made her stomach uncoil.

There was something under the pillow.

Chris pulled out a padded envelope. It was addressed to herself, which made no sense. Then she recognised it as the envelope that had come with the copy of To the Lighthouse she had ordered off the internet a couple of weeks ago on the recommendation of her English teacher. Her Mum must have got it out of the dustbin. Her bloody mother was always in her wake, righting and retrieving things, getting her own way.

Not always.

Inside was a wad of cuttings. Chris saw they were from the newspapers her mother had recently asked her to buy. A creeping foreboding came over her. The stories were all about the Parkinson’s Disease specialist who had killed himself. She felt a clutch of terror and her insides became sand. Her mother was ill. She was at the hospital.

She was already dead.

Chris sat down on her Mum’s bed. Something stuck to her palm. She peeled it off. It was a return ticket to a place called Charbury, dated yesterday. The words meant nothing. It had been clipped. Chris tried to think of anything her Mum had done recently that might show that she was ill. She knew nothing about Parkinson’s Disease.

She became a ruthless detective, as she speed-read through the articles, some nine or ten in all once she had unfolded them. She went back to her bedroom and got a pen and notepad. She worked quickly to subdue her panic. Chris had always taken refuge in her work. Her talent for meticulous research and examination of the most insignificant clues would one day soon bear unwelcome fruit. Now she recorded the names that came up most often, although she didn’t think them important as proof her mother had something seriously wrong with her. At this point she dare leave nothing out.

Mark Ramsay, Isabel Ramsay, Jon Cross, Gina Cross…

Then she reached a cutting about a little girl who went missing in June 1968 and had never been found. Much later Chris described this moment as an epiphany. It seemed that time stopped still, there were no more noises outside, and the text before her eyes was subordinate to the pictures it conveyed to her. She heard her mother’s story-telling voice as she read:

The missing girl’s name was Alice, and if she had lived she would have been forty on the 25th of March 1999. This year. But one afternoon in June 1968 she had disappeared while playing hide and seek with a friend and had not been seen since. The article said that nowadays DNA would probably solve the thirty-year-old mystery, but no body had ever been found. Apart from a tramp who had been seen in the vicinity and was found drowned in the River Ouse a few days later, there had been no solid leads. Now it was a cold case.

Chris had made her mother’s card, using magazines, cutting up old birthday and Christmas cards, bits of newspaper and packaging to create a collage based around the numbers of her age. Alice had never liked celebrating her birthday, so she had been especially sulky about forty. Her birthday was on the 25th of March.

Chris didn’t hear the front door so she was nearly sick with shock when a voice called out ‘Goodbye’ to someone outside on the landing.

It was her mother.

Chris sprang to life. She shovelled the papers back into the envelope, tearing some, creasing others then pushed it back under the pillow. As she was getting up off the bed, her foot catching in the duvet and ripping the material, she saw the train ticket on the carpet. She slipped it into her jeans pocket just as Alice shut the door and crossed the hall to Chris’s bedroom. Chris beat out the indentation where she had been sitting, and forgetting the original unkempt bed, straightened the duvet. She leapt to the door. An expression of agitation can easily be translated into concern.

‘Where have you been? I’ve been really worried.’ It sounded like a lie.

‘I went down to the estate office!’

Alice made only a hollow attempt to express her sense of achievement about a phobia miraculously vanquished. Rendered cunning and so playing for time, Chris was determined to show no surprise. Alice would expect her to believe anything she told her, and clearly didn’t think she needed to make an effort. Now that she was watchful, Chris could tell the excuse was feeble, her Mum’s manner too relaxed.

Chris had been robbed of the life she had taken for granted only fifteen minutes earlier. Already the existence in which Alice’s announcement would have made Chris euphoric was a foreign land. Now she didn’t have any connection with the new Alice in the hallway confidently clinking door keys she had supposedly never used before and smiling like a mental patient.

Alice kicked the door shut behind her, oblivious of the bang. Chris felt no happiness at this joyful new being; lost and found. She was winded by a treachery without precedent. Yet her mind was busy and already a plan was forming. Until that moment, she hadn’t known what it was to truly hate someone.

Twenty-One

Chris walked round the side of the station and set off down the lane in the direction signposted to Charbury. She was the only person in the street. The absolute stillness was unsettling. She was further perturbed to find the village was oddly familiar. She knew it in the way she remembered places during dreams, with no association, just a tremulous familiarity. This must be because of the pictures in the newspaper articles she had found yesterday.

The lane was lined on both sides by detached cottages or larger houses, behind manicured gardens some fronted by neat hedges, or low whitewashed walls. Chris stopped by the steps of one house to examine a selection of blue plastic strawberry punnets and milk crates in which were jumbled weird looking vegetables, oversized cucumbers, misshapen potatoes. A pint mug had a label stuck on it offering ‘flowers for fifty pence’. These must have sold out, for now there were no flowers and the glass was filled with nasty brown water. A felt-penned notice next to an empty tray for duck eggs read ‘Egg Boxes Are Welcome’. Chris wondered dubiously whether this welcome would be extended to long-lost relatives. She regretted her spontaneous decision to find Kathleen Howland and tell her that her daughter was alive and living under an assumed name in London. It had initially been prompted by the desire to punish Alice. Now she was ashamed of this; she should have been thinking what it was like to be Kathleen, scared all these years that her daughter had been murdered. Now that she was in Charbury Chris didn’t feel equal to the task she had set herself.

At several points in her journey she had considered turning back, overcome by the violence of her mood, the temerity of her idea; everything. But then she had contemplated the prospect of going back to Alice and behaving as if everything was normal, and this was even worse. Her mother had left her with no choice. There was no one else to talk to. Chris was more cut off from her friends for she couldn’t tell them any of this. Her mother had always said action spoke louder than words. So now she was taking action that would speak bloody loud. She was capable of anything; she would put everything right.

The village could not have changed much since Alice’s childhood; there were few signs of the twentieth century. Gaping stone faces above doorways, the diamond patterns in the brickwork were like the deepest patterns of life, Chris knew them without words; they were within her. This must be déjà vu. Chris halted in the middle of the road.

She had been here with Alice.

Until she found the cuttings, Chris had paid scant attention to the story about the professor. She had always been unforgiving about suicide, arguing with her friends that it was a cruel thing to do to people you loved. She had shouted at Emma for saying it was fair enough if you were very unhappy. Chris had been unable to confess to Emma her morbid fear of coming home to her Mum’s body suspended from the drying rack pulley wheel over the bath. She would have been horrified to know that her friends had guessed as much.

As the train left London, Chris had peered out of the railway carriage’s dirty windows at a shantytown of car breaker and rolling stock yards, disused offices and factories with broken windows. Even the flourishing bursts of buddleia growing between the buildings were unnatural and ugly. The Escher-tangle of viaducts and bridges, the boarded-up arches, some patched with corrugated iron, reminded Chris of the constructions she had made as a child, piling on extensions, roofing in enclosures with coasters, playing cards, and bits of cereal packet to make a warren that covered the carpet. Lying on her front, Chris would peep inside, longing to enter these labyrinths. Then it was bedtime and she was never allowed to keep them and would have to dismantle them and tidy everything away. On the train it occurred to Chris that grownups were no different, their buildings were haphazard, created without care, extensions added at random with no concern for design or beauty and then left neglected and forgotten. They were not told to clear them away before bedtime. Maybe that was the thing about growing up, you could create whatever mess you liked.

Her journey to Victoria station had been jaundiced with crazed examples of humanity. All the commuters were paltry and mean, raddled and reptilian, clammy and lantern-jawed. She could see why Alice wouldn’t go out.

Except it wasn’t true, Alice had been out of the flat many times. She had gone to the man’s funeral the day before yesterday, the train ticket proved that. Chris had been scared of how murderous she felt. Yet underneath still, like an Achilles heel, was the insidious threat to this new will power: Chris could not help speculating wistfully about what her Mum might be doing at that moment, sitting by herself in the living room, spying on the neighbours in the windows of the other flats and making up lives for them because she didn’t have one of her own.

The train had rumbled above ragged strips of back gardens, many devoured by geometric conservatories with matching patios and dotted with primary coloured children’s slides and swings, others by piles of tyres and rusting shapes heaped amidst a confetti of litter. Shaking off the city’s suburbia – a mishmash of less coveted Victorian housing, and new-build cul-de-sacs – the train had left London behind. At last clattering out of the tunnel that cut through the South Downs, her carriage had been flooded with sunlight as it raced through lush green pastures, alongside a river lit by dancing darts of light.

Chris had jumped down on to the platform into a place where nothing had been left to chance or erected with cold pragmatism. She was incredulous to see immaculate hanging baskets and octagonal tubs on a station platform.

She had been the only person to get off at Charbury and there was no ticket collector. She had faltered yet again as the train receded to a flat shape and vanished under the bridge, leaving her with an unremitting click replacing the clunkety-clunk of the carriages. The clicking had grown louder as she became aware of it, hesitating and entirely bereft on the deserted platform in the baking heat. For a ridiculous moment Chris had assumed it was her heartbeat. Two enormous digital clocks hung from the canopies. The time on both was identical and completely wrong: ten past eleven when it had been nearly one. Nothing was as it seemed or as it should be.

As she had paused outside the shuttered booking office unconsciously seeking some small interaction, it dawned on Chris that Alice would never have killed herself. All along she had only been concerned with concealment. Chris had to reassess every part of her life. Alice was not agoraphobic; she didn’t go out because she was hiding. Her parents had not been killed in a car crash on the Great West Road in Chiswick. It made a joke out of Chris’s conviction, while peeping through the wrought iron gates of the brewery, that her grandparents were present. There had never been anyone who loved her keeping watch over her. All the time Alice’s real mother was living in a cottage miles away in some village and her Dad had died only eight years ago, thinking his daughter was dead and never knowing he had a grand-daughter who would have loved him.

For some insane reason, Alice had fooled everyone.

Chris was crushed by the weight of the pretend years, she was overwhelmed by layers of fake memory, made-up names and made-up places. Her past was quicksand into which solid events like birthdays and Christmas, happy stories of her Mum’s early childhood, of her own childhood and every cherished assumption had sunk without trace. She couldn’t even trust her own experience. As the fables that had moulded her were swallowed in eternal stasis, Chris was a blank page. The terrible enormity of Alice’s deception and its far, far-reaching repercussions had made it impossible for Chris to be near Alice. It was a deception beyond her imaginings. Now she knew that there were more chilling ways of absenting yourself from those who love you than committing suicide.

A young woman who survived by taking action, Chris was doing the only thing open to her. She would find Alice’s mother and put everything straight.

At Lewes where she had changed trains, Chris had bought a map covering Newhaven to Eastbourne, but now saw she wouldn’t need it. It would be easy to find Alice’s cottage. She could already see the church spire with its perky cockerel weathervane, over grey slate rooftops and a clump of silvery, green trees at the bend in the road. Halfway down the lane she spotted a sign attached to a lamp-post for the post office and church. Nothing was left to chance. She had noted down that the cottage was next to the post office from a newspaper interview with Kathleen Howland. There was a big chance that Mrs Howland wouldn’t be in, the article had described how she went out regularly searching for her missing daughter. Over the years she had been to all the cities in Britain, sticking posters to tree trunks and on to walls and lamp-posts, getting them displayed in shop windows, and tirelessly handing them to shoppers in malls and high streets up and down the country.

Missing. Can you help?

Chris recalled the words with mounting anger. Alice could have helped.

Mrs Howland had scoured districts in London, ridden the Circle line in both directions, even struck up conversation with beggars in the streets. The reporter had hinted that her searching was indiscriminate, driven by Mrs Howland’s certainty, ‘call it a mother’s instinct’ that Alice was alive. She would not rest until she found her. It was clear to Chris that the man who had written the story thought Alice Howland was dead and Mrs Howland in need of medical help.

Alice was not dead.

An Evening Argus headline outside the village stores declared ‘Death Crash: Car was Flying’. There were more flowering tubs outside the shop, Chris was hemmed in by flowers, fresh and sweet smelling. She had never seen so much trouble taken in a street before. She crossed the road and went up to the shop window. Now that she was here, she was cowed by what she was about to do and keen to put off arriving. It had been the hardest thing Chris had ever achieved, to smile, to help with tea, and to appear to share in Alice’s supposed triumph in leaving the flat for the first time in at least ten years. It was only later in bed, her body thrilling with inchoate fury at her Mum’s betrayal, that Chris reached her decision. Indeed it was less of a decision than a viciously inspired impulse for revenge.

Now Chris was the one who knew the facts. Now she knew more than Alice. Except that once she was here in the village where Alice had lived, she was overawed by the mundane actuality of the deserted lane, the tidy cottages and of Charbury Stores with its adverts for first day covers and a jaunty poster for the summer fête. Chris pressed her nose to the glass to read the postcards slotted in a plastic holder dangling from a rubber sucker. The items advertised were eclectic and eccentric: a motorised mobility buggy with waterproof shopping basket for £900, hardly used; piano lessons at £10 per half hour; domestic help required for six and a half hours at £40 plus travel expenses; purple bunk beds hardly used.

An elderly woman with a florid complexion emphasised by her sixties-style make-up, tightly clad in a bright blue overall, bustled out of the shop and shut the door behind her making the bell inside jangle discordantly. She stopped in surprise when she saw Chris:

‘Oooh! Did you want something, dear? Post office counter’s shut, but anything else?’

‘No, that is…’

‘Only I’m closing for lunch. Back in an hour, but if you’re quick…’

Chris cast around for something trivial to explain her presence. Whatever she came up with would inconvenience the postmistress who was moving away from the door. All Chris could think of were the bunk beds.

‘I’m fine, thank you. Just looking.’ The cliché fitted her new counterfeit self.

The woman appeared satisfied and muttering words that sounded to Chris like ‘two Russians flats’ vanished around the corner of the building. Chris put her hands to her cheeks. She had so nearly given herself away. One of the articles had said that since Alice Howland had disappeared, the village had been ‘overrun’ by the media and sightseers, many with teddy bears and other stuffed animals, on anniversaries, on Alice’s birthday, when Mr Howland had died; or when another child went missing. So the villagers were less friendly to outsiders, they no longer welcomed them as allies in the search for Alice. They guarded their privacy, and were frustrated by invasions from as far away as America and Australia.

Would Mrs Howland guess her connection to Alice? Chris knew she looked like Alice. She had been proud of this when she was little; with no other family, at least she belonged with her Mum. When she became a teenager the idea had horrified her. Did she too have that grim expression and do that stupid thing with her mouth when she was thinking? Did she roll a sweet wrapper into a tight ball between two praying mantis hands? Chris wanted to break the news to Kathleen in her own time and not have her uncanny resemblance to the missing girl do it for her. Although she was twice the age that Alice had been when she went missing, still Mrs Howland might see her little daughter in her. Chris was the only person who knew Alice’s hair had darkened and was cut into a short bob that didn’t suit her. She was the only person who knew that Alice was smaller than might have been expected, since one of the articles had said she was tall for her age. Chris was the only person who knew what Alice looked like now.

She sensed a holding of breath in the air and glanced up and down the lane. It was lunchtime in the middle of the week, which could explain why there was no one around. Few cars were parked, which added to the timeless impression. An old motor scooter by the kerb was padlocked to a bucket of set concrete. So they did expect some crime here.

Apart from Charbury Stores there were only houses on this stretch of the lane. Chris knew from the map that the road went past the church. It was a village, but she would have expected to see at least one person driving or perhaps walking from the station. Chris began to suspect she was being observed, but all the windows were blank. She thought of Alice behind her lace curtains but the image had no substance. She didn’t know Alice, so she couldn’t imagine her.

Still feigning interest in the cards in the post office window, Chris turned furtively to look at the cottage next door. It was a compact little house on two levels with sash windows, one up, one down, to the right of the front door. There was yet another hanging basket outside the door, but this one was full of dead stuff, pale withered fronds fringing the rim, the chain rusting. In contrast, the privet hedge was trimmed so neatly that individual leaves were not apparent. As this blended in with the one next door, Chris guessed the neighbours had lumped it in with theirs. The cottage was at the end of a terrace of four. Chris remembered from her notes that they had been workers’ houses, part of an estate owned in the nineteenth century by the Ramsay family, and now almost all of them sold off. All the doors were painted green. Chris had read that the Ramsays still owned a large house just outside the village, with about ten acres of the original land. She had also read that the friend Alice had been playing with that afternoon was called Eleanor Ramsay, and was the youngest daughter of the dead professor.

Chris panicked. She didn’t have a number. This might be the wrong house. It might be the one at the other end of the terrace, or it might be none of them. She had trusted her memory, reluctant to write too much down in case Alice caught her. She shut her eyes. The house in the picture had been to the right of the shop.

It was a hot summer’s day in 1968 and Chris was Alice hurrying home from her brilliant game of hide and seek, tired, contented and ready for tea. As she pushed open the warped, wooden gate and tried unsuccessfully to latch it back, she imagined skipping up to the front door, or up the side path to go in through the kitchen as she had read Alice usually did. She could call out: ‘I’m back!’ to her Mum and Dad. Chris had scribbled down that Alice’s Dad had died of a broken heart, which was a bit far-fetched. Chris didn’t know what having a father was like. She doubted Gary would die of a broken heart, or that he even had one. Her mother had said she didn’t know much about him, just as she had hardly known her own father. As if the fact that she had done without a Dad meant that Chris should do so too without complaining. Alice’s deprivations always had to be greater than her daughter’s. When Chris questioned her about the man who had got her pregnant, Alice would shrug her shoulders and explain it away: the sex with different men, drunk at parties, a bathroom floor, a bed piled with coats. What’s in a name? The main thing was she had been happy at the time. So Chris could be happy too. Besides she had been young, it was easy to make mistakes when you were too young to know better.

Everyone made mistakes.

Chris would stop her Mum, furious at Alice’s stupidity for letting facts escape, and not bothering to find out more about the man who she had known for about an hour at a party, but who Chris would not know for the rest of her life. At eighteen Chris already knew better. Now it occurred to her that perhaps the man on the bathroom floor was made up too. After all why had Alice disappeared when she was nine? What had she been doing all those years? Who was she hiding from? Chris was dizzy with questions. There was too much she was scared to know.

The scrap of grass in front of the house had dried yellow. Weeds had forced their way between the terracotta bricks on the path and around a cracked pot of woody lavender and thistles. The paint on the front door and on the soffits under the eaves was peeling and there were tiles missing from the roof. Alice could have kept it looking lovely if she had cared to. As Chris hesitated before lifting the doorknocker she was surprised that a house in Charbury was allowed to be so neglected; the locals must disapprove. She supposed Mrs Howland was excused.

Chris gave two tentative taps, she would go home if there was no reply. She was sure now there wouldn’t be. The house showed no sign of life. As she waited, flicking back her hair, and very nervous, switching her bag to her other shoulder, she hoped Mrs Howland was out.

From inside the house came a muffled ringing, Chris became nervous as the ringing grew louder and louder. The sound came from her bag. She rummaged furiously in every compartment before finding her mobile in the outside pocket.

‘Chris, is that you?’ Her mother always asked the same question, which Chris took as an admonition that she was not with her since it would obviously be her. Now she added a more sinister interpretation. Alice could not afford to have her daughter roam free doing what she pleased. She would probably have liked to have prevented her leaving the flat at all.

‘Of course it is,’ Chris snapped.

‘Where are you?’

There was a noise on the other side of the door, a scuffling, a sliding of bolts. The door creaked open. Chris was looking down, the phone clamped to her ear and first saw sensible shoes with light coloured soles, fixed with velcro straps, then a creased trouser leg hanging loosely around a thin bony ankle.

‘I can’t talk now.’

‘What do you mean? Just tell me where you are.’

She was guided inside. She had no sense of walking. Objects floated past her, as a hand lightly caressed her shoulder. A dark wooden hat stand laden with garments – a red anorak, a man’s trilby, a walking stick, a plastic mac, a canvas shopping bag. She was Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, a barometer pointing to Rain floated by, followed by a print of a dewy-eyed boy in a straw hat, hands in the pocket of baggy trousers. A gas meter screwed to a thick board above a doorway looked like a school metal work exercise. Chris hissed into the mouthpiece:

‘I’m with your mother!’

She snapped shut the telephone and turned it off. She was confronted by a tan sofa facing an upright chair with wooden arms. On a hearse-like television with spindly legs a framed photograph of Alice Howland smiled right at her. Chris recognised the smile only too well.

‘Sit down. Can I get you tea, a glass of water? Here, let me take your jacket, you must be sweltering.’

Chris allowed herself to be led to the sofa, which received her with a sigh.

‘A cup of tea would be nice.’ She remembered her manners. ‘…but please don’t go to any trouble. Can I help?’

‘You’ve taken the trouble to come all this way, it’s the least I can do.’

As the woman walked out of the room Chris noticed she didn’t pick her feet up properly, which would have annoyed Alice, who constantly nagged Chris about her posture. The backs of Mrs Howland’s heels dragged on the carpet and for a moment, in the doorway, she acted like she had forgotten something. Chris expected her to turn round and she put on a bright face in readiness, but then Mrs Howland continued with a more confident step and soon Chris heard the roar of a boiling kettle and the clinking of tea things.

The room was dim, its small windows were covered by net curtains. Despite the scrubby front garden the room was tidy and a smell of polish lingered in the air, so it must have been cleaned recently. Chris noticed that the carpet was worn around the sofa and the chair and in a path out of the door. She hoped it was the same carpet that Alice would have played on, and then recalled something about her mother playing on floorboards and complaining it hurt her knees. Perhaps they had thought putting carpet down would entice her back.

There were no books, newspapers, or even a clump of knitting in the room. No evidence of how Mrs Howland spent her time. A silver tankard had been placed on one side of a tiled mantelpiece and above, ranged along the wall too high and too far to the left, were three bronze plates embossed with ships in full sail. On the other side was a remote control for the television, the size of a brick. The room could have belonged to anyone.

But pride of place was given to the photograph. Chris shifted along the sofa and examined it. It was taken slightly from the side, with a fake backdrop of the sea and the sky behind it, still effective in black and white. A flick of fringe nearly reached one thin eyebrow, otherwise her hair was in two plaits held by elastic an inch from the ends. The plaits just reached her shoulders. She wore a cardigan and under this the brilliant white collar of her shirt was marginally too big for her, leaving a shadow at the back of her neck and increasing the appearance of frailty. She had never grown into it.

Yes she had.

Chris rushed over to help as Kathleen Howland came back carrying a tray. She was moving more easily than before, and without effort placed the tray on the sideboard. As she handed Chris a cup and saucer her hand shook, making the crockery rattle dangerously. Chris took it off her before the tea was spilt, and mumbled a mixture of thanks and helpless protest, as Mrs Howland lifted out a folding table from behind the armchair and set it up beside the settee.

As the two women sipped tea and nibbled on homemade fairy cakes topped with lemon icing, they looked at each other properly for the first time.

‘So, what can I tell you?’

‘I had to come. Once I knew. I had no choice.’ Chris blurted out the words.

‘Did you?’ Mrs Howland dabbed at her mouth with her serviette. Chris had forgotten about hers and picked it up, at once putting it down again without unfolding it.

‘I used to think it must be interesting doing what you do, meeting people, writing down what they say. Hearing their stories. Every day is different. But you all say it’s a job like any other. You could stay at home, but you wouldn’t get paid. So here you are!’

‘Oh, no I didn’t mean…’

‘Don’t worry, I understand.’ But she didn’t.

Chris shook her head impatiently as Mrs Howland offered her another cake.

‘I’m more thick skinned than they think. Also dear, let’s be honest, I need the publicity.’ She spoke in a quieter voice, almost a whisper: ‘I don’t want people forgetting. There’s a chance someone will read what any of you write, and, I don’t know, listen to their conscience and come clean.’

Chris scalded the roof of her mouth as she gulped her tea. Mrs Howland had been expecting her. She had assumed Chris was a journalist doing a piece on Alice. She didn’t know she was an eighteen-year-old who had come without her mother’s permission. Any minute now the real journalist would turn up and she would be exposed. The gushing scene that featured herself as the rescuer, the restorer, evaporated. Her own hand began to shake and she hastily put down the cup in case Mrs Howland thought she was making fun of her.

‘So, you’ll want to see her room? We kept it the same.’

‘I ought to be goi…’

The words trailed off because Chris had no intention of leaving. She would see the room, then tell Mrs Howland the truth and they could be out of the house before the real journalist arrived. She traipsed behind Mrs Howland up a steep dark stairway. Her shame at her duplicity increased as she saw Alice, running up and down these stairs, waiting on the landing outside her parents’ bedroom door in her new Brownies outfit or to wake them up on Christmas morning. Chris had adopted the stories Alice had told her and made them her own memories. Her mother had done what good liars do: she had kept as much to the truth as possible. So she had said her Dad was a postman and Chris knew the weight of his huge postman’s cap as the peak slipped over her eyes. Her arms ached, and her stomach swooped as they swung her high into the air between them with a one-two-whoaaghgh!

Chris had no better idea than Kathleen Howland what had happened to Alice after she failed to return home that afternoon. But she did know where to find her.

Alice’s mother didn’t open the bedroom door immediately and from the way she hesitated Chris thought for a wild second that there was someone in the room. She steeled herself in readiness. Then Mrs Howland let the door swing slowly open and stood aside.

Chris recoiled. ‘You go first.’

‘No dear, it’s better if you do. It’s not a big room.’

Chris practically stormed in to show Mrs Howland she wasn’t afraid.

The room was indeed small. There was just enough space for a child’s dressing table with a chair, a built-in cupboard and the bed. A beam of sunshine, thick with motes of dust, slanted across the faded candlewick bedspread and a white fluffy rug beside the bed. On the other side of the alcove to the cupboard was a set of shelves on which books – Enid Blyton, Winnie-the-Pooh, Alice in Wonderland and another called Ballet Shoes – were stacked neatly. On the shelf above were three Sindy dolls, propped up against the wall in symmetry. They looked brand new, but had been in her Mum’s stories so couldn’t be. Chris nearly made a sound as she spied the neat parade of shoes: brown sandals with crepe soles, silk ballet pumps, small Wellington boots, yellow woollen slippers with ladybird buttons. Two top shelves were empty. Alice had not stayed long enough to fill them.

There were no pictures on the walls, the dressing table was bare save for an ebony hairbrush and matching hand mirror that were unlikely possessions for an eight-year-old. Chris was disappointed: the room yielded no secrets. The things in it looked new, so obviously bought recently and never used. She realised that what she had most dreaded and most wanted were clues, a trail of signs that would link her to the Alice she had grown up with. Yet if Chris had believed in ghosts, or indeed had believed Alice was dead, she would have been convinced the house was haunted, for Alice’s presence filled the room.

‘What’s in the cupboard?’ She adopted the blunt curiosity of a reporter. One more minute and she would tell Mrs Howland the truth.

‘I’ll show you.’ She was used to showing people around her house, anticipating their questions, managing their responses. She tried twice to raise herself off the soft bed where she had been sitting, then with the air of a confident owner, sure of the verdict of the potential buyer, she opened the cupboard doors. Lavender talc clouded into the room and made Chris sneeze four times in quick succession.

‘Bless you.’ Mrs Howland had a kindly voice. So far Chris could see no resemblance between this calm, sensible woman and the neurotic obsessive described in the articles. ‘Sorry about that. The powder keeps the must at bay. Funnily enough I got that tip from dear Doctor Ramsay. Doctors have to deal with a lot of unpleasant odours, of course.’

Chris nodded sagely as she gazed at the open cupboard. It was crammed with clothes. At the bottom were plastic bags out of which Chris could see folded garments peeping: jumpers, tee-shirts, some with labels still attached. At the top was a charnel house of soft toys, beige, fawn and brown.

‘Most of this is new,’ Chris exclaimed, before she could stop herself.

‘I see things she’d like, dresses she’d look so pretty in, tops and such. I can’t resist them.’

The cupboard, packed with toys and clothes, was a shrine to a well-dressed, well-loved child. Chris recognised a shirt identical to the one she had worn about six years ago. Her mother had got it out of her catalogues. As a child Chris had learnt to submit to keeping things because they fitted, for it was she who would have to take them to the post office if they were too big, too small or just too horrible. Nowadays, she bought her own clothes, scouring charity shops or spending hours in Red or Dead, and dressing just how she wanted. Chris had always suspected that Alice bought her the clothes she would have liked to wear herself. Here was the living proof. A whole bloody wardrobe awaited her.

‘There’s something you should know…’ But Mrs Howland was speaking:

‘It’s not that I don’t know how it looks. I know she’s gone. I like, just for a little while, to feel what it’s like to choose something for my daughter. I get such pleasure, you know, well you will know. The cashier thinks I have a little girl, and so we can share the experience. Now I tell them she is a grandchild, a godchild. I’m too old to be her mother. Just to stroke the cloth and agree how hardwearing the cotton is, shake our heads at the scrapes they get into. I let myself be that person for a little while.’

‘My Mum still gets cross if I stain my clothes, she still treats me like a kid,’ Chris replied without thinking as she knelt before the mound of plastic bags.

‘The sales people are happy to go along with you. They only say what you want to hear. They are meant to make the customer comfortable, so that we enjoy what they call the buying process. I did a course on selling, for a job in Hanningtons, oh, this was years ago. Before Steve died. My back couldn’t take the standing…besides I didn’t like leaving the house empty every day.’

‘Did Alice wear any of these clothes?’

‘All the things on this side.’ Mrs Howland seemed anxious to prove the truth behind what Chris could see was only a stage set. ‘The skirt I found in Exeter, and the blouse too, we went there when Alice was six. This cardigan was hers too. She loved pink.’ Mrs Howland shook her head as she straightened the limp woollen sleeve. Then rousing herself: ‘I don’t keep all the new things. I take them to charity. Or return them, saying it’s wrong on her or doesn’t fit. They understand, children grow quickly, and they’re so fussy these days.’ Kathleen sat down heavily on the bed. Her tablet was wearing off. She would take another one after the girl had gone. She wanted her to leave now, but she owed her a proper time for coming all this way. But then there would be another visitor. Kathleen was alone a lot less than people knew.

She didn’t tell the girl that Steve had broken the mirror in Alice’s dressing table.

‘That’s seven years bad luck.’ She didn’t get cross with him often, just that one time.

‘We’ve had our share, what’s another ruddy seven years?’

Kathleen clasped her hands to prevent the girl seeing the tremor.

‘I know she’s dead.’

Chris was beside her.

‘Dead? No, she’s…’

‘After all this time, I don’t kid myself. If she were alive, she would have come back, wouldn’t she? I don’t really think she’s stuck at nine years old. People think I’m not quite the full… If Alice were alive she’d be a grown woman. She could come home if she wanted. Even if she treated me as a stranger, she’d have to at least visit.’

Chris hadn’t thought of that. Why hadn’t Alice come home?

‘You told the papers you knew she was alive!’ This was another betrayal. Chris was out of her depth; nothing was going according to plan. She should have told Alice to come herself instead of being so intent on getting all the glory. Mrs Howland wouldn’t believe Alice was alive. She must get a lot of weirdos knocking on her door claiming to have seen her daughter.

‘Papers print what they like. Besides, I say different things on different days. Depends on my mood. Since Alice went, I get asked all the time how I am coping. I say whatever comes into my head.’ Mrs Howland clicked shut the cupboard with a gesture of finality.

Chris longed to stay in the bedroom, to lie on the bed and read one of the books and listen to the seagulls.

She had expected they would return to the living room. Perhaps they would have another cup of tea, but Mrs Howland stopped in the hallway.

It was time to go.

‘You didn’t have a coat, did you?’ She stroked the collar of a girl’s anorak on the coat stand absently.

‘Just a jacket.’ Chris lifted it down because Mrs Howland wasn’t listening.

‘Forgive me saying so, but you are young. You seem…’

‘I’m eighteen.’

‘You’re not a journalist, are you?’ How did she ever think she could fool this wise old woman? Chris flushed crimson. She had treated Kathleen in just the way her Mum had treated Chris; as a pawn for her own ends.

Long, blonde hair. Blue eyes. Thin legs. Tall. Skin pale as a ghost.

Alive and living in South London.

Before Mrs Howland could speak, Chris heard herself speak:

‘I want you to come to London with me. I know where…’

Her head was in a vice and the breath was being squeezed out of her. Everything was convex and then concave. Chris smelled the sea and saw the word:

Alice.

Then everything went black.

Twenty-Two

Isabel lazily stroked more sun tan cream into her ankles and up her calves, rubbing it in with lingering strokes, noting with satisfaction how smooth her skin was, with no surface veins, which would be remarkable in a woman of over fifty let alone sixty. This comforting observation was straight away eclipsed by the sharp pains in her thigh and at the base of her spine as she stretched. She could not get Mark’s car out of her mind for long. Sunbathing helped. As she submitted to the heat, the watery image would be evaporated by the scorching sun, but every time she moved, her leg hurt and there it was again as if she was under water, her lungs bursting, groping desperately towards Mark.

Shifting about on the wonderfully soft mattress of her new lounger, Isabel applied circles of cream around her eyes with Impressionist dabs and kneaded it into her neck, wiping away the wrinkles. Finished. For a fraction of a second she was calm and content. Then an engulfing wave washed off the good feeling, leaving her old and shivering. She set the bottle on the table, next to her book, radio and empty coffee mug. Was the rest of her life going to be like this? One long to-do list marked off by a series of ticks.

Spots of sunlight flashed on the surface of the freshly filled pool: yellow and gold segments like exotic fish whose progress Isabel tried to follow across the rippling surface until they vanished. She had heard somewhere that gazing at sunshine on water made you happy. Something to do with serotonin, but she hadn’t listened to the medical bit.

Perhaps she did feel a bit better.

Isabel tried to build on this tenuous impression. They were almost back to normal, the pool had been restored, and she had got through the funeral. Now she might believe that nothing had happened. It was a Wednesday afternoon when Mark was usually in London. She told herself he would be home tonight as usual.

Only recently the garden and the house had been teeming with strangers. After the frenzy of trying to save Mark was over and they had driven off with his body, it seemed to Isabel a more measured, calmer crowd took over.

First more police: some in white jump suits like spacemen. One was a woman, which had irritated Isabel, who was more conventional than she preferred to think. They had told her that only when they had completed their measuring and photographing and questioning, could the car be taken out of the pool. Until then it had lain there, bubbling away like a hookah. Isabel had been frantic to right everything to how it had been before Mark drowned. But she had lost the impetus to do it herself. She had bullied Lucian to get on to Mr Bunting and his son to come and clean the pool right away. Lucian had argued, unconsciously imitating the police, which before she might have enjoyed.

‘They will be impeded by the presence of a motor vehicle.’

‘You can be such a prat!’ Isabel found giving her children unconditional love exhausting. ‘They’ll have lots of bookings at this time of year, we need to get in or it won’t happen. I’m not looking at this cesspool for the rest of the year.’

‘Do we actually need the pool?’ Now Lucian was Mark without the good bits.

‘I’ve called them. The police say that the car’s going this afternoon. Mr Bunting will be here in the morning at eight and the fence people on Saturday. Everything will be ready in time for Dad’s funeral.’

Gina was carrying a tray of tea out to the white overalls and didn’t stop.

As the car was winched out of the pool Isabel had stood beside Gina to watch. She identified all the colours of the rainbow, and was saddened rather than outraged at the streams of oily water cascading out of the quarter lights. The bonnet tilted upwards and the car was once more inching up the steep hills of family holidays, as they all sang out in anthemic glee Breathe in, don’t move. First one to speak has to get out and walk! The radiator grill flashed as it caught the sun: a paean to

Mark’s polishing. Mark would have understood Gina’s need to witness everything. He too would have been rapping out instructions, warning them to treat his car with care. Shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare, Isabel had gazed up at her husband’s most coveted possession dangling uselessly. A twisting shadow darkened the patio, the car revolved slowly before swinging away from the pool as the crane chugged past the garage and up the drive. Although Mark’s body had been removed, Isabel didn’t feel he had gone until the crane disappeared round the bend in the lane. She walked back to the house, keeping pace with Gina, neither of them able to speak.

In lots of ways, Isabel reflected, as she let the sun take her over, Lucian and Gina were like herself; they got other people doing things, whether it was compensation for a faulty service, getting a price down or organising a funeral. Isabel twitched a hand to bat away the image of Lucian gazing forlornly at her whenever she was impatient with him. He was too sensitive. He and Eleanor were like Mark in that respect. Gina was made of sterner stuff. Mark had said it was apt that after marrying Jon, Gina took his name to become Gina Cross, because she so often was. But Mark had been crosser, that she wasn’t Gina Ramsay any more. He had taken her decision to change her name as a snub.

Of course he had been right.

When they were little, Isabel had felt powerless when her children bickered and had always relied on Mark to sort them out. Then she had hated to see their faces, white and staring, as he shouted and stamped. Each word was a bullet fired with precision, while Mark appeared to thrill with an electric current. She would feel she had let them down.

She had let them down.

No, it was Mark who had let them all down. Isabel closed her eyes.

Mark’s death, a phrase that she wasn’t ready to use, was like a power cut. Although it is easy to grasp the fact of no electricity, in practice it is still a surprise when no light comes on or the kettle fails to boil at the click of a switch. It is the last straw when the television stays blank at the wand-wave of the remote. As Isabel lay on her treasured luxury lounger, she reflected on the yawning future.

That morning she had walked around the side of the house, past the thick bushes of fuchsia and hydrangeas that grew beneath the study and dining room windows, gingerly raising branches, even checking in the old outhouse by the pantry. She had stopped quickly when she realised she was searching for Alice as she had when the girl first went missing.

If she had told them, the family would have called it the Raleigh complex, named after Gina’s stolen bicycle which was cut from its chain outside the Chiswick open air swimming pool when Gina was nine. The police had said it would be local kids having a lark and to keep a look out for it. After that, the whole family stopped to examine every chipped blue bike they came across, looking for the tell-tale dabs of mismatched paint on the cross bar. This habit haunted them for years, long after Gina could have ridden the bike had it been recovered. Now Isabel was doing the same thing, except Alice’s worth hadn’t diminished in the same way as a battered old bike. Her mother, at least, would want her.

At the time Isabel had been desperate to prove that Alice had got herself trapped somewhere. Houses were complicated structures, she had insisted, particularly this one. Alice could be anywhere. She had never told Mark that she had encouraged the police to search their house. There would, she had assured Richard Hall, be a good explanation. She suggested they try the basement.

‘It’s a warren down there, lots of little rooms, great place to hide.’

Isabel had made repeated journeys into the cavernous basement herself and, careful not to be heard by anyone above, called out to Alice. She was cajoling, tempting, luring: Don’t be frightened; we’re not in the least annoyed with you. The police had been down there the day before, but Isabel had suspected that Alice would have been too scared to respond to men she didn’t know, however kind they appeared to be. You had to gain the trust of a girl like that. Then she would do anything for you.

But years went by and still Alice had not been found.

More than once, Isabel had sneaked off through the orchard to the Judge’s disused workshop – now filled with bikes, old lawn mowers, tins of paint and bits of broken garden furniture – and cupping her hands, peered through its grimy windows. In the cobwebbed interior, the disused contents kept their counsel.

One evening when Mark was in his study, she made up her mind to tell the police about her dream. It was five years since Alice had gone missing and she had just watched a programme about the Kennedy shooting, which had happened the day after Alice disappeared. After some flicking back and forth she found Detective Inspector Hall’s number in the back of her 1968 diary. Making sure she wouldn’t be interrupted, she started dialling the number. Then common sense had prevailed. How absurd to tell them about a dream. They would section her. Instead she went down to the basement and methodically searched it yet again. As she moved aside boxes and shelving units, felt her way through the cold dank cellar where the ice had once been stored, she whispered Alice’s name, as she often did when she was on her own.

Even after so many years Isabel could not stop looking for Alice although now, more than ever, she was terrified of finding her.

Isabel wriggled her toes, and lay so that her body was aligned, as she had learnt at her transcendental meditation class. She breathed in and out with her palm on her abdomen. While doing this exercise she was supposed to recite the personal mantra given to her by her teacher. For maximum effect she was meant to keep it secret and not share it with anyone else. But these days unless Isabel wrote things down or told other people she forgot them. She had quickly forgotten her mantra and was unwilling to confess this. Instead she would recite as many titles of Thomas Hardy novels as she could remember. This worked just as well. Although the effort of recalling them made her tense, it did at least take her mind off things.

Today the temperature was ideal: a breeze had got up, so it was not too hot, but warm enough to let go. Isabel did find it extraordinary that the sun could shine and that she could feel its warmth while Mark was lying buried under a mound of cold soil up by the church. She closed her eyes, not daring to think what else was possible.

She was aroused from the first driftings of a dream in which she was lying in Mark’s arms, cushioned on his shoulder, by the sound of familiar footsteps.

She was in the car Mark used to drive before they got married and started a family. He was young with bristly short-back-and-sides, and eyes that glittered. His white coat with the stethoscope slung around his neck was too safe an image for a man who she had discovered was so unsafe. She tried to grab his leather-clad hand but it slipped away leaving her with a floppy glove. His scent faded as she struggled to reach him, to rest her hand on his thigh; to attract him. But his attention was on the road; he was gripping the wheel of his sports car, a laughing mouth refusing to say where they were going. White teeth bared, lips taut like a fox. She cried out, but made no sound.

The dream had dwindled and Isabel was awake.

The footsteps stopped. Already smiling, already knowing, Isabel opened her eyes and reached out her hands to greet Eleanor, her favourite child.

Twenty-Three

Alice’s mother helped Chris on to the settee. She was now the stronger of the two as she snatched up cushions and tucked them in behind her, plumping them smartly, easing her backwards with the economic efficiency of a nurse. A warm dry hand stroked Chris’s forehead, tidying back her hair, brushing her cheek. Chris blinked as her eyes stung with sudden tears; it was just how her Mum would have been. She couldn’t think of that now. She gave in as her legs were gently lifted, so that she was lying full length on the settee, her feet propped on another cushion. If only she could stay here. The village was no longer a science-fiction nightmare; she wanted to live here and start again. But of course once she was better she would have to go. When she had gone Mrs Howland wouldn’t care because she would have Alice.

‘Have a few sips.’

As she took the cup and saucer Chris noticed there was no trace of the earlier shake and that Alice’s mother walked without catching her heels on the carpet.

‘What happened?’ Chris gave a groan.

Alice would have the right to stay as long as she liked. Her mother would be newly alive. Upstairs a fluffy hot water bottle would once again warm the immaculate bed. On an impulse Chris decided it could not happen. She wouldn’t tell Kathleen Howland about Alice and she wouldn’t tell Alice where she was. She too could start a new life, with a new name and story and see how Alice liked it. Mrs Howland would be her new mother.

Chris could be Alice. She could fill her space and stay with this kindly woman, who was after all her grandmother, lulled by the cluck-tock-cluck of the old clock on the mantelpiece. There was nothing to stop her. She needed a mother and this mother needed a daughter. This was the ‘grandma’ she had gone looking for outside Fuller’s Brewery.

Chris could not know that she was one of a long line of women, and some men, who, claiming reasons of research or detection, had come to Alice’s cottage wanting to occupy the vacant role of the nine-year-old child. If only for an hour. There had been many ‘orphans’ drawn like magnets to this mother going spare. With the callous vigour of the cheated and betrayed, Chris reasoned that if a life could be invented for her, populated with phantoms she had been taught to love like kindred spirits, she could take a loving mother and hot sugary tea and make up a new life for herself.

‘You fainted, that’s what happened. Down like a nine-pin. Lucky you didn’t hit your head.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be daft. It’s the heat. Abroad apparently they have thick walls and tiled floors. That’s better, you’re looking more yourself now.’

Chris sipped the tea and settled further into the cushions. Already she loved this woman with soft hands, adorned only with a gold band on the wedding finger, who talked with quiet confidence. When she had brought in the tea, she had sat on a footstool next to the settee, her hands gathered around her knees like a girl.

‘You came out with something a bit odd before you keeled over.’ Alice’s Mum took the empty teacup off Chris and set it on the coffee table. ‘About going to London.’

Chris could say she felt ill again, but this would mean more pretending. Despite the perfectly placed cushions and caring attendance, Mrs Howland was going through the motions. She was not Chris’s mother, nor did she want to be. No amount of fainting would change that. Chris would have to make her come to the flat and let her see Alice for herself.

In her bafflement at Alice’s terrible deceit, Chris had viewed Mrs Howland as no more than a catalyst, a prompter of events that would blast apart Alice’s world in the way Alice had shattered her own. Her trip to the eerily deserted village baking in hot sunshine and her arrival at a dark cottage had been for Chris part of a plot to make her Mum very sorry. She had been so intent on knocking down the tower of cards that her mother had painstakingly erected that she hadn’t taken on board the stark truth that there is no knowing how people will react.

‘It is a bit much. The heat.’ Chris didn’t know what to do next. ‘The bedroom…the dolls.’

‘You’re not the first. They think I don’t know how it looks, but it’s not possible to be normal. No parent should outlive their child. It’s normality turned on its head.’

‘I think I’ve found…’ Chris heaved herself into a sitting position. She would sort this thing out and put everything back in its place. She could do that, no problem.

‘Found what, dear?’

It was the second time she had asked the question.

‘It’s best you come with me and see for yourself.’

‘Now? To London?’

‘I’ll explain when we get there.’

Kathleen got up unsteadily.

‘I’d have to book a bed and breakfast. There was a good one in Hammersmith.’

Already Kathleen was arranging the expedition with no trace of indecision. She thought nothing of getting on a train and being in a different city by nightfall. No one understood that for her nowhere was home, so it didn’t matter where she was. It was a relief to be kept busy. All these years the one thing she had learnt was to keep an open mind and trust that anything was possible. She would go wherever this young girl wanted to take her.

Kathleen’s practical willingness emphasised the flimsiness of Chris’s own intentions.

‘Hammersmith is miles away. You could stay with us.’

‘Who is us, dear?’ Alice’s mother was rifling through her purse, a bus pass between her lips as she flicked through the credit card section, zipping and snapping, opening and shutting compartments.

‘Me. And…my Mum.’

‘Your Mum?’ Kathleen looked up. ‘Have you asked her?’ She looked at Chris as an adult checks the story of a child, respectful yet doubting.

‘She won’t mind. She’ll be pleased.’ Chris nodded firmly. Everyone would be pleased.

On the train down, Chris had watched a little girl sobbing and being mopped up by her Mum and decided that nothing was certain. The child believed that her mother was protection against the world. Just as Chris had once assumed her own Mum was, until at three years old she had first seen her cry. She had not explained why she was crying, and would not stop. Chris got her tissues and patted her shoulders, repeating, ‘there, there’, but she had gone hollow inside and after that she had not felt safe.

The mother on the train was troubled and tired, and embarrassed that her daughter was wailing loudly in a quiet railway carriage. Earlier Chris had helped her load a suitcase on to the rack above their heads. The shared effort hadn’t opened up further interaction. Chris hated knowing that the child’s sense of safety was an illusion. Yesterday she had discovered that all certainty was illusionary.

Once thought, she could not unthink it.

‘I’ll be ready in two ticks, my bag is packed, just need to check I’ve got my pills, water, bits and bobs.’

Chris wandered to the window.

A blue Range Rover was parking outside the cottage. Its glass reflected the sun, so she couldn’t see the occupants. A door opened slowly, sending a lighthouse beam around the living room. Chris went up to the pane, interested now to see who would get out. So far the village had been devoid of life.

Two women emerged, one from each side of the car. Although they were dressed differently, and one had short hair, the other shoulder length, there was a similarity that contributed to an impression of choreographed symmetry. The woman nearer the cottage had her back turned as she bent back inside the car and then, standing up, she slung a handbag on to her shoulder. The other woman held a bulky plastic bag in her arms. The doors slammed shut at the same time, and the woman who had been driving strode around the bonnet, a hand trailing over it as if staying an animal. As she came into view something fell out of the carrier bag on to the road. Chris stepped closer to the glass. It was a video tape. The woman who had been driving fumbled for it, and finally picked it up. Both women paused and examined it briefly. Then the woman with the short hair and the handbag turned to face the cottage and this stopped being a play in which Chris had no part.

The woman was Alice.

Her companion lifted the latch on the gate. Chris bounded across the room to get to the door before they rang the bell. Already they were coming up the path. In the hall, she collided with Mrs Howland, nearly knocking her over.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I was going to tell you…’

‘Calm down, you’ll be ill again.’ Mrs Howland was in slow motion. Chris held on to the wall as the hallway reeled and dipped.

A shadow fell across the porthole of moulded glass in the door and the barometer needle trembled on Fair as the knocker thundered down.

Already Mrs Howland was far away as Chris pitched forward trying to stop her getting to the door. Too late. The front door opened with a deafening creak over which Chris was shouting. Later she wasn’t sure she had made any sound at all.

‘It’s Alice. I’ve found Alice!’

Sunlight flooded the hallway. In the glare, two figures on the doorstep loomed – shapes with no features. Chris was helpless as Kathleen stepped forward and all the while in the background, a voice was talking.

‘Mrs Howland, we’ve brought Dad’s camera tapes. Quite a collection, over two weeks’ worth, but what with…’

Kathleen Howland gave a cry, of pain or joy, Chris couldn’t tell, and grabbed Alice’s hands, grasping them, intertwining them, and jigging them up and down. She drew the other woman in too, pulling them to her.

‘It’s Eleanor Ramsay! And Gina too. How thoughtful of you both, with all that’s happened…oh, come in, come in! You can meet my new friend.’

Kathleen ushered the Ramsay sisters into the living room. There was no one there. The young woman whose name she had already forgotten had vanished. Kathleen wasn’t surprised. She was almost used to it. They got what they came for and went.

Nevertheless she was disappointed. This girl had seemed so different.

Twenty-Four

Chris wasted valuable seconds fumbling with the back door key before realising it was already unlocked. A raised step tripped her up and she tumbled out into the garden sending a plastic box, like the one she used to take to school for her lunch, spinning over the path, white bread spilling. She dashed down the path between the cottage and the post office, and stopped at the corner of the cottage. The front door was shut, but the car was still outside. Chris bowed her head, then taking a deep breath, hands shielding her face, she ran out down the path and, leaving the gate swinging, she set off up the lane.

The pavement rushed beneath her, cracks passing faster and faster as she quickened her pace up the hill. Her lungs were bursting, sweat soaking her shirt, but still she kept going.

Since Chris had discovered the articles under her mother’s pillow, her landscape had been demolished. It was years since that morning when she had banged out of the flat without saying goodbye to the woman who was supposed to be her Mum and supposed to be called Alice. Hours and minutes had dragged, shot forward, wound back, and now in a benign country churchyard on a warm summer’s afternoon, they halted altogether.

Storming between the plots, tripping on the uneven ground, Chris was an agitated figure to anyone who might see her.

There was someone.

She caught a movement by the corner of the churchyard. In this horror-film village Chris hadn’t reckoned on meeting anyone. There was a woman, maybe not much older than herself, standing in the dappled shadow of a silver ash. She hadn’t seen Chris. She was looking at a grave and writing, supporting a notebook with one hand, her blonde hair falling forward. At first Chris assumed she was some mourner come to spend quiet time with her loved one. She must have made a sound because the woman looked up and saw her. She snapped shut her book, dropped her pen in the bag slung on her shoulder and marched swiftly over the grass back to the path. As she came towards Chris, a smile already prepared, Chris saw she was much older than her hair and clothes had made her think. Not actually old, but worn-out looking. Chris was also taken aback by her expression. Far from behaving as if Chris had interrupted a precious moment, she was embarrassed and the quick nod of greeting as she hurried by was apologetic.

After the woman had left the churchyard, Chris decided to find out which grave had so interested her.

She was not prepared for what she found. The grave was recent, a long low mound of soil flecked with bits of white chalk with nothing else to distinguish it, no flowers or messages of love. The thick clods of earth were rudimentary and raw while a makeshift wooden cross at its head undermined the permanency of the place and the significance of the grave itself. Chris imagined the body buried below, it probably still had eyes, and a lolling tongue turned colourless by death lying inert in its mouth. She read the name on the metal strip screwed to the wood.

Mark Henry Ramsay

20th November 1925 – 6th June 1999

The Dead Professor.

Chris knew nothing remarkable about this man except the bizarre way he had died. The mass of this ignorance, literally a body of uncharted facts, lured her closer. What had the woman been writing? Who was she? This man might have given her answers. He might have consoled her. They might have consoled each other. But she had arrived too late.

Mark Ramsay’s grave was but a marker for the magnificent marble headstone with forbidding lead lettering that stood next to it. The marble was pristine, unblemished by the years, which Chris calculated dated from when the first name was carved on it – Rosamund Ramsay – in 1934. The shiny stone contrasted with the state of the grave itself, a rampant weed bed entirely merging with the surrounding grass. The neglect was callous. Yet the leaden words said that Mrs Ramsay and her husband Judge Henry Ramsay, who had died in 1958 and was buried beside her, were ‘greatly missed by their children, Virginia and Mark’.

Chris was familiar with graveyards. Before they’d graduated to pubs, she and her friends would sit on a bench in the cemetery behind the school, passing round Red Bull and vodka in a plastic toothmug and spinning preferred realities. Pock-marked angels with spread wings cast gravity on teenage sagacity, as they made up torrid lives for the dead surrounding them from scant tombstone information. One woman had lost her husband in the First World War and all her sons in the Second. Another had ten children and died aged thirty-eight. There had been no words engraved for Pauline Davies who had died aged twenty-one in 1972, just the glazed image of a happy face, with a dreadful hair-do. They had let this pass as they searched for signs of her impending doom in Pauline’s too-red lips and bright brown eyes, looking for what made her different and would ensure their own immortality. There had been no clue except the awful hairstyle. The group would straggle on by, eager to put death behind them.

Chris had always gleaned reassurance from the brevity of the words on the headstones. People were born, they were related to other people and then they died. The facts of life.

Now she sat down on a bench beside the Ramsay plot and from a comparatively safe distance stared at the graves, willing them to yield their secrets. She felt a tickling on her cheek and reaching up to scratch it, her fingers came away wet; she was crying, maybe that was why the lady with the notebook had been weird with her.

The sun was dropping down behind the downs, and Judge Ramsay’s headstone cast a long shadow across his scrubby plot. Between the inches that separated Mark Ramsay from his parents there were over forty years. The child who had ‘greatly missed’ his father was now dead himself, with his own children to miss him. Or not. Where were the years? Were they in the rustling leaves of the ash, the chunks of soil, the lichen-covered stone? Were they around her now, the hundreds of minutes experienced, the birthdays, the family holidays or Sunday lunches? Moments like this, when sitting still she could hear the engines and gears of all the lived lives? The woman who wasn’t Alice had said there was no Heaven and Chris had thought this idea reasonable. But what happened to all the seconds that amounted to a life?

‘That’s your grandfather.’

The whispering voice made Chris start. Then with a rush of delight and relief she put out her hands. Her Mum was here. The next instant white heat urged her to smash Alice to pieces.

‘What do you want?’

‘I came to find you.’ Her reply was addressed to the freshly dug grave. She was holding a twig in one hand and flicked it over the fingers of her other hand, leaves fluttering and tearing.

‘Well, you found me. So piss off!’ Chris was tugged with vicious insecurity at the sight of her Mum, baffled and vulnerable, looking with such desolation at the flimsy cross. There was no one to step out of a crowd and save Chris from kicking, stamping and smashing her mother’s face into silence with a chunk of flint.

‘Haven’t you seen a grave before?’

‘Not this one.’

‘Couldn’t even be arsed to get a proper headstone. Like that ugly bastard of a mausoleum.’ She waved impotent arms at Judge Ramsay’s tombstone. ‘Is that false too? Going to take it away as soon as I’ve gone, are you?’

‘Apparently it’s being carved, this is temporary. And the ground has to settle.’ Eleanor had not meant to point out Chris’s ignorance and reveal her knowledge of the Ramsays’ affairs. ‘Oh, Chris.’ She turned to her, not bothering to dash away the tears that trickled down her cheeks. ‘He’s your grandfather!’

‘Whatever. Until the next lie.’

‘I know you’re cross.’ Eleanor could see that Chris sniffed insincerity in her clumsy choice of words. Sometimes the truth didn’t speak for itself.

‘I don’t think you do.’ Now Chris too addressed Mark Ramsay’s grave.

‘I never meant to hurt you. Quite the reverse.’

‘‘Quite the reverse’ oh, lah de dah. She’s got new words to go with the new name. Who do you think you are to lecture me!’ Chris gulped for air and added with self-conscious triumph: ‘In fact who do you think you are? Does anyone know? Or was it just me you lied to?’

‘Chris, please…’ Eleanor couldn’t sound as upset as she felt. She had grown too adept at being someone else.

‘It’s only stupid-git-features here, who thought her Mum was Alice Kennedy, the Agoraphobic of Bermondsey…doh! So who are you today? Elea-nor-Ram-say!’ She put on an upper class intonation, as she spat out the syllables.

Eleanor shrank back, unable to disguise her fear of her own daughter. Chris realised with a jolt that she couldn’t remember when she had last seen her Mum out of doors. Eleanor was dazzled by the sunlight. Chris pictured her Mum behind the partial screen of the lace curtains or with her kindly features softened by the light of the gas fire. She was still holding the strange handbag that had confused Chris earlier. She was an indecisive figure, the dainty handbag incongruous because Eleanor wasn’t collected enough or tidy enough for its understated elegance.

Eleanor’s legs were unsteady and her attempts to hide this were pathetic. Of course, her Mum was frightened to be outside. It must be torture to her to be so exposed.

No, that was another story. Yet anger briefly ebbed as Chris saw her Mum did genuinely seem to be upset. She would part her hair, numbering the different coloured flecks – brown, gold, blonde, no silver at all.

You’ll never be old to me.

‘I will go if you want me to. I could wait for you at the station.’

‘Where did you get that?’ Chris spoke evenly.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’ Nasty now.

‘My mother…Isabel Ramsay gave it to me, just now. Your grandmother.’ A futile placation. The bag incriminated her. She couldn’t tell her daughter she had accepted it only because she had seen that Isabel hadn’t known what to do with her. She couldn’t explain that it had touched her that her mother had tried so hard to make a maternal gesture. Neither of them had been able to talk properly because they never had.

She had not told Isabel she had only come to fetch her daughter, after which she was going to leave again. Her mother had been so happy to see her, so that when she hadn’t found Chris at the White House, Eleanor had lost volition and had submitted to Isabel’s uncharacteristic stream of hyperbolic chatter that had culminated in the handbag. Isabel had snatched it off a pile of jumble in the utility room and thrust it into her hands. None of this could she explain to Chris.

Chris knew Eleanor tossed in the word ‘grandmother’ as stale bread to a duck and had noted her mother’s snap decision to stand her ground as Chris advanced towards her. She didn’t even flinch as Chris tore the bag off her, wrenched it open, ripping the gold clasp from the flap, and tipped it upside-down. The contents spilled on to the grass. Chris’s arm described an arc as she prepared to smash the bag down on her mother’s head, but at the last moment she hurled it over the top of the gravestones. It smashed through the branches, and in a shower of leaves landed in the wheat field behind the churchyard wall.

Her mother didn’t react and Chris was afraid of the blatant misery in her face. There was no satisfaction in defeating the defeated.

Who was this well-spoken stranger?

‘So are you just going to stand there?’ Chris demanded.

Eleanor scuffed a toe in the ground, kicking up dust.

‘I hate the bloody thing anyway.’ Eleanor did not sound convincing. After so long doing a good imitation of Alice, she had forgotten how to do herself.

‘Yet, you were happy to be given handouts by Mummy, and forget about me. Go there a lot do you, while I’m at school, or doing the shopping or the washing.’

‘It was for you.’

‘You got a stupid cast-off from your mother for me?’

‘No, I mean all of it. The going into hiding and changing my name. It was all for you.’ Eleanor regretted the trite words – too Alice. Except there was no Alice.

Chris sat up unnaturally straight on the bench, the muscles in her temples and jaw twitching. Eleanor desperately wanted to comfort her. She was moved by her child’s valiant effort to be unaffected. Chris had been thrown into the situation by her own mother.

Eleanor was stunned by what she had done. It had been a minute-by-minute thing with extraordinary consequences. With a dull and crushing recognition like a glimpse of death, Eleanor saw she had lost the right to Chris’s love the day she went to the Tide Mills with Alice. The soon-to-be-nine-year-old was too young to know she was stepping into Hell.

‘Let me get this right. I’m on a train going to Alice Howland’s mother to tell her that her missing girl was very much alive and living near the Elephant and Castle, and you’re sneaking out and running back to your real mother when she’s meant to be dead in a car crash!’ She finished with a strangled shout: ‘You were never Alice! You’re a liar. You fucking bitch!’ Chris had only ever spoken to Alice this way in her head. How good it would be to go back to the time when the only problem she’d had was how to tell her Mum that she’d had sex with a supply teacher and not had a period for five weeks. How innocent she had been to think that the arrival of her period signalled the end to her worries.

‘That’s not right,’ her mother protested.

Chris snapped her head round and Eleanor froze.

Chris looked down at the clutter of objects scattered in the rough grass. She loved them for the picture of Alice they eloquently portrayed. A nail file, a packet of tissues, a used foil of aspirins half hidden by a blue plastic packet with ‘Handy Shopper’ printed in slanting writing. Her diary had landed half open, its spine broken by the fall. Chris had given it to her for Christmas. She must have grabbed all this stuff before leaving, as usual thinking of every eventuality. Chris hadn’t thought of buying her a handbag, because she never went out.

They both knew Alice wanted the bag. They both saw Alice leaning over, pulling it up, and methodically replacing her things. Tidying up. She would want to check if the clasp could be saved and give the leather a buff with a tissue.

Eleanor didn’t care. The bag was too small and ladylike to hold anything useful.

They both knew that if Alice got the bag sorted, they could go back to Bermondsey and carry on as before.

But there was no such person as Alice.

‘So how was it then?’

‘When I rang you, you said you were with my mother. You have no idea what that did.’ Eleanor stole a furtive glance at Chris and emboldened by her stony silence continued:

‘I didn’t think of Mrs Howland. I assumed you were with Isabel Ramsay, I came to get you.’

‘So how come your name is Alice?’ Chris’s voice quavered.

‘People change their names. It’s normal.’ As soon as she heard the words, Eleanor saw her mistake. Unless she told the truth without excuses or expecting sympathy, Chris would go. Already it was probably too late.

‘Don’t patronise me!’ Chris was on her feet. ‘I know people change their names! What I want to know is why you did. You changed your whole life, don’t tell me that’s ‘normal’. You pretended to be a missing schoolgirl and lied to me, your own child. That’s if I am yours.’ She held up her hand. ‘There’s nothing you can say. I thought my grandparents died in a car accident. Me and Emma even went to that brewery where you said they were killed and put flowers there. I’ve always thought you were all the family I had.’

‘She wasn’t just a schoolgirl. Nobody knew what Alice was really like.’ Eleanor was talking to herself. ‘She could be so cruel.’

‘I don’t care about Alice.’ Chris stalked over to her mother, and coming up close like the boys in the playground, she jabbed her hard on the chest.

‘You were my Mum. Have you ever thought of that?’ She pushed her roughly. ‘You’ve taken my whole life away by pretending to be a girl you didn’t even like?’ Her speech was blurred with sobbing. ‘And you call that being a mother? You’re mental.’

Chris was breathing through her teeth, a gulping hissing.

‘Chrissie, I have nothing in my life other than you. You’re the point of it.’

‘I’m so grateful!’ Chris punctuated the exclamation with another push, rougher this time, even though she guessed her Mum was telling the truth. She saw her wince, then hide it. Her Mum would stand there taking it. Chris punched her hard on the shoulder, knocking her backwards.

‘Why?’ Her voice was low and grating.

‘What do you mean?’ Eleanor would not cry. She knew what Chris meant.

‘Why did you call yourself Alice?’

A small plane buzzed high overhead, and on the other side of the church a car engine purred into a rev as it drove up the lane; there was the bass boom of a snatch of ‘Baby One More Time’. The village was coming to life, but neither woman noticed.

‘I’ve done my best to make it up to Alice.’

‘Make up for what?’

Eleanor stepped away and with her back to Chris she gazed far into the distance at the point where the downs became the sky where she wished she could be:

‘For killing her.’

Twenty-Five

Kathleen was worn out. She had been astounded to find the Ramsay sisters on her doorstep. People said children were resilient and being young they didn’t feel things. Kathleen had always doubted this. Alice had been very sensitive.

Eleanor Ramsay had barely spoken and, with a shake of her head, had refused tea when her sister had just accepted, which made Gina change her mind. The girls had looked no more at ease with each other than they had when Kathleen had first met them that fateful summer. When Kathleen told them that a young lady who had said she was a reporter had turned out to be yet another sightseer, Gina had said she was appalled and wanted to call the police, while Eleanor had said nothing. Then just as Kathleen was reassuring Gina that she didn’t think the girl had meant any harm, Eleanor had announced she had to leave and fled the house before Gina could go with her. It was a long time since Kathleen had recalled the suspicion that the detective had confided to her in the garden where Steve couldn’t overhear. After the Ramsays had left it came back to her clearly.

She hadn’t cared for Detective Inspector Hall and for this reason made more effort with him. He was like a cat, drawn to her because he sensed her dislike. Most people took Steve to one side if they had something unpleasant to talk about, like the search of their cottage or of the Tide Mills and the day they dragged the river. They supposed Steve was the stronger one and could absorb bad news. But after a while Richard Hall realised this wasn’t the case, or maybe he preferred to talk to Kathleen.

He led her out into the little garden, guiding her with a cupped hand on her elbow, which she had resented for its suggestion that she had lost so much she couldn’t walk unaided. Over time Kathleen came to see that this insistent protection was more complicated. While Isabel Ramsay intrigued and disturbed him, Kathleen Howland was Richard Hall’s ideal woman. In the first few days after Alice’s disappearance, she too was bathed in an innocence that over time, as she failed to fit people’s expectations of a grieving mother, eroded. At the time her maternal mimings with her arms flailing in an empty embrace, made sense to him.

Like Jackie Masters, he said he had understood about the sandwiches and the freshly ironed nightie on the freshly washed pillow.

As their feet sank into the soft soil around Steve’s vegetable plot, Richard Hall’s proximity, so close she could sniff waves of minty breath, revolted Kathleen. She remembered noticing that one of the canes for the runner beans had snapped under the weight of the plant and thinking she must tell Steve. Then in the same thought she had known not to bother. Steve had lost his love for the garden and let his plants and flowers run wild or die. He too had broken under the weight.

‘I don’t know how to say this.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t like the attitude of the youngest Ramsay girl.’ He seemed to suppose Kathleen shared his contempt for the Ramsay family and their privilege. Once upon a time this privilege would have earned them automatic respect from men like Richard Hall.

‘Eleanor Ramsay?’

‘Her story doesn’t add up. She isn’t one bit bothered by any of this. I gather she’s a handful at the best of times, but now she’s too clever by halves. The idea beggars belief, but we have to keep our minds open.’

‘What idea?’

‘I’m giving mileage to the theory that this Eleanor had a bit of a run in with Alice and things got out of hand.’

‘For pity’s sake, don’t waste your time bothering Eleanor Ramsay. What you’re really saying is my Alice is dead.’ She had been frightened by her words.

‘I’m just trying to keep you up to date with the investigation. I wanted you to be the first to know.’ He had bent down and fiddled with the runner beans, using a nearby cane to lend support to the broken one and tying them together with a bit of loose twine that he found lying on the grass. Richard Hall was free to do this; he still had both his daughters.

‘Eleanor’s upset.’ She had tried to be nice. He was only doing his job; they had to leave no stone unturned.

‘I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else. I know reporters hang around you. If you want me to get rid of that young woman…’

‘They’re only trying to help. ‘At the time she had believed Jackie Masters really was a friend. ‘They’re no different to you, Inspector.’ Then, for he had looked hurt by this, she had let him lead her back into the house and make her a cup of tea.

So after the Ramsay girls had left as suddenly as they had arrived, Kathleen had sat motionless in Steve’s armchair raking up old memories. The dopamine had drained away and she had to wait for the tablet to give her some movement again. Her ‘off’ times, when along with the dopamine, her serotonin levels plummeted, were her bleakest. She was overcome by an eerie stillness that froze her features and all hope. As far as Kathleen knew, Richard Hall had dropped his suspicions of Eleanor. The main suspect had become the tramp whose body was found tangled in the river weeds under the bridge near Southease by the police divers.

Seeing her today, Kathleen wondered if Eleanor had known more then she had told the police.

So later that evening when someone knocked on her door, Kathleen only struggled to her feet to answer because she guessed it must be Eleanor returning.

But it wasn’t.

This time she didn’t offer refreshment. Jackie knew where to find the tea things.

They sat on either side of the fire, Jackie in Kathleen’s chair and Kathleen in Steve’s. Jackie gripped her notebook like an insurance salesman.

She was businesslike:

‘After all this time, I think we both know she’s not coming back.’

‘Eleanor?’ Kathleen’s mind was still on the Ramsay sisters.

‘Alice.’

‘Oh.’ Kathleen’s body began to tremble and she held her right hand tightly in her left. Jackie noted this down. She was like an artist doing a quick sketch, darting looks at her subject before scribbling busily.

‘It’s certain that Alice is dead. I wanted you to be the first to know.’

Why did they always say this? What difference did it make if she were the second person to know?

Kathleen was floating; her feet were sliding out from under her, pulling her down towards the floor. She needed an emergency tablet, but couldn’t move.

Doctor Ramsay had advised her to take care of herself.

Her face had stiffened to a mask, and her skin colour drained to a pasty grey as, in her head, Kathleen called out to Eleanor. She knew why Eleanor had gone. She must go after her. But her feet were lead and with Jackie here, she could not go anywhere.

Jackie Masters drew a perfectly straight line in her notebook and tapped the page peremptorily with her silver pen:

‘I’ve been doing some digging. I know who killed Alice.’

At the same moment, Kathleen realised that so did she.

Twenty-Six

The Judge’s tombstone dwarfed his son’s makeshift cross. The bench was now in shade, but it had not cooled down, the eiderdown air was still and heavy. Eleanor was in the dock, knees together, humble, before the stark lettering.

‘How did you kill her?’ For the moment her anger had gone, leaving a silt of bewilderment. It didn’t even matter who her mother was. These doubts were the luxuries of a lost life. Her mother’s confession had extinguished any glimmer of hope.

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You must remember.’

‘I hid. There was counting. Alice cheated.’

‘She cheated?’ Her Mum was mad, she ought to be kind to her. ‘If you can’t remember anything, how do you know you killed her? Why would you?’

‘She said terrible things.’

‘So you killed her?’ Chris would tame the word. Kill time, kill off the germs, stop it, you’re killing me, kill two birds. She could keep meaning at bay and save her Mum. Last week Chris wouldn’t have thought her Mum could murder anyone. But now…

‘She was an innocent schoolgirl. Always in a good mood, always willing and always top of everything. I worked it out. If Alice was so good, I must be bad because I was the opposite of her. She sneered at me and said everything I cared about was rubbish. She said my Dad didn’t love me.’

‘She said those things?’

‘Maybe I made it all up.’

As she talked Eleanor’s mouth relaxed, her lips were fuller and wider, the lines around them smoothed away; she was no longer Alice. Chris supposed her confession had relieved her of a burden. She forced herself to listen:

After the night of the smashed mirror when her Mum went off in the ambulance, Eleanor had invented a new story. Her real parents were a poor couple living in Friston Forest who had left her on a blanket in the car park when she was a baby. They wanted her to have a better life than they could give her. They took pleasure in seeing her grow up from a distance. They kept watch as she went to the sweet shop to buy bubble gum or played secretly at the Tide Mills. This meant Eleanor was never alone because the kind couple – the woman a spit image of Mrs Jackson – were always there, they would even take her back if things got too much.

After Alice had gone, her parents really were the strangers who had found her on the rug deep in the forest. They became silent and separate and stern except at night when she heard their voices talking long after their bedtime. Then as everyone finally went to sleep there would be the banging and knocking as Alice sneaked back from hiding. But only Eleanor saw her.

One night Eleanor had crept to the window to find Alice on the other side of the pane. She was on the sill trying to shelter from the fine rain, tapping with scratchy nails to be let in. Alice was like the lady in the bit from Wuthering Heights that Gina had once read to her and Lucian to stop them pestering her. It was pitch black outside, but Alice was lit up like the Christmas tree angel with a light bulb stuffed up her skirts.

Alice had menaced Eleanor with secrets that made Eleanor’s eyes prick with tiny needles. She had tried to make Eleanor cry.

That bruise on your mother’s neck is a love-bite. Like a vampire.

Your Dad said I was the daughter he wished you had been.

Still in the dream, Eleanor had been disappointed to see Alice carried in through the front door of the doll’s house in Mr Howland’s hairy arms. She hoped she had gone for good. Eleanor was in the doll’s house. The front was open so that the windows were suspended in mid-air like the fireplace at the Tide Mills. Mr Howland had cuddled Alice like a doll. She had been bath-time-cosy in a rabbit dressing gown and fluffy slippers. Alice was completely dry, which Eleanor thought was strange because it was pouring outside. Eleanor felt a cold draught as Alice sneaked up on to the green sofa beside her. While the grownups were in the kitchen making cocoa, she explained in a fast whisper how she was sorry for cheating. She had learnt her lesson. From now on they could play whatever game Eleanor suggested and she would pretend it was real. Eleanor told her it was too late. Alice had used up her last life.

‘I can’t hear you?’

Alice’s voice had been like a radio, with the volume getting quieter. Yet she was still sitting beside her making Eleanor as cold as ice.

She had nearly gone. Finally, like the Cheshire cat, there was just her mouth, smiling like a good girl.

‘The Mill Owner. You were right about him. I didn’t believe you.’ The Alice-mouth had no voice. Eleanor had to lip read.

‘He doesn’t exist. I made him up. He’s dead in the churchyard. He died of Apo-plex-ey on a train from Seaford.’ Eleanor had yelled, but the ears had faded away long ago.

In the morning, Alice was still missing and Eleanor’s Dad was furious when she told him Alice had come back in the night. She showed him the marks on the bedroom window frame as proof. But he accused her of making them herself. Eleanor had not confessed that when she had tonsillitis last year, she had tried to carve her name in the wood with her penknife. But he had known. She wanted him to understand that the point was Alice had come back. She had thought he would be pleased.

Long days crawled by, stretching into weeks and soon years were laid down like paving slabs with no secret animals or messages scratched in the stone. Alice never returned and after a while she wasn’t mentioned in the Ramsay household.

Aged sixteen, Eleanor was expelled from her expensive central London school for stealing a teacher’s purse. Her last year of education was at a crammer in Kensington where to everyone’s incredulity she got three ‘A’ levels. She was befriended by one of the teachers, a man with corkscrew hair whose boyfriend was an oboist in the Covent Garden Orchestra. She bunked off lessons to go to rehearsals of operas and ballets, lounging in the stalls of the empty auditorium, knees propped up on the seat in front, munching sweets and desultorily revising The Duchess of Malfi with an usher’s torch in the boring bits.

When she was not much older than Chris was now, Eleanor had sex with a boy called Gary on the bathroom floor of a squat in Shepherd’s Bush. He was head mechanic at the local Renault garage and she had fancied him because he looked like Paul Weller. Eleanor told him she was engaged when he asked to see her again. She never told him she was pregnant.

By the time she had the baby – a girl she called Chris after the oboist who she had loved more than anyone – Eleanor was getting flashbacks. Her memories were like dreams and at first she could dismiss them. But they began to make too much sense. Eleanor had seen Alice near the halt at the Tide Mills and was outraged that she wasn’t looking for her. She would get her.

She told Chris that as the unbidden pictures came more often, she hadn’t been able to go on seeing her family. She had found a room in Holloway. At twenty-one, Eleanor had inherited a trust fund set up by Judge Henry for his heirs and this small allowance was paid straight into her account. This income coincided with giving birth to Chris. So as the truth of what happened on that June day was pieced together out of the fragments of a sunsoaked past, Eleanor changed her name to Alice Kennedy after the Senator with the dimple in his chin who had been shot the day after Alice vanished, and with her small baby, she too disappeared.

‘I took away her life. If I became Alice, she would not be dead.’

‘You didn’t actually think you were her, did you?’ Chris had thought her Mum was intelligent, despite her illness. ‘An eight-year-old might just believe it, if they were a bit bonkers, but you were a grownup. Mrs Howland was searching for her, you hadn’t brought her back at all. What did your parents say?’

‘I was Alice. They weren’t my parents. Until today I hadn’t seen my mother since you were a baby.’ Eleanor appeared just to register this, she went on with less energy: ‘I had to be punished.’

‘So we should all be grateful.’ Chris snorted.

Eleanor had found the flat in Bermondsey and, keeping her address a secret, cut herself off from everyone she knew. This wasn’t difficult; after Alice vanished, she only had one friend – the oboist – and she assumed he wouldn’t miss her.

‘You have never known Eleanor Ramsay. You knew Alice Kennedy. You made Alice real.’

‘But how real did it make me?’

‘You’re my daughter. I love you more than anyone. That’s all that matters.’

‘You think?’

‘You said that an eight-year-old would have thought it possible to become someone else. I was eight when I became Alice. Everyone wanted me to be Alice. No one wanted Eleanor. Mrs Howland was stunned after Alice went. Not eating, not talking, and then she got this obsession about seeing me. She livened up. No one could talk her out of it. So I had to go there a week after Alice went.’

The day before the Ramsays were to go home to London, Mark Ramsay came to tell Eleanor that Alice’s parents wanted her to come to tea. He had stomped into the playroom more like a doctor than her Dad and stood over her. She was shielded from him by the open frontage of the doll’s house. They avoided looking at each other. One huge foot was planted against the drawing room window, trampling on the fuzzy felt lawn. It snapped off the window sill, and when he lifted his foot the green material stuck to the sole of his shoe and ripped away. Before Alice vanished Eleanor would have protested, even pushing him, directing his attention to her sign: Keep off the Grass. She had rubbed the felt in a pile of grass cuttings behind the garage so it smelled real. But as her Dad had not spoken properly to her for days, she decided not to make things worse by pointing out the rule about the grass. Alice would have said it was because Eleanor was bad. She said bad things happened to bad people.

Who are you to tell him off? He’s a doctor; he knows best.

I don’t know, who am I?

Doctor Ramsay took Eleanor to the Howlands’ cottage for tea. Neither of them said a word on the very short journey from the White House to the tidy cottage by the village stores. Eleanor had sat in enforced primness in the back, Jeremy Fisher-feet dangling over the leather seat. Although she was alone, Eleanor sat where she always sat when the family went anywhere, in the middle. Gina and Lucian had the window places, Gina because she got car sick, and Lucian because he was going to be a doctor. Usually if she went anywhere without the rest of them, Eleanor would clamber gleefully over to one of the windows, wind the glass down and stick her face into the wind. That day she kept quite still like a good girl and waited to arrive with clean hands and an unclear conscience. She could see her Dad’s eyes in the driving mirror. They flicked back and forth like a cat as he reversed the car round at the front of the White House then roared out of the gates. Then they whizzed up the hill to where Alice lived.

Everyone became bothered about Eleanor before she left for the tea. Her mother had brushed her hair so hard she made her eyes sting and she sneezed five times, which made her brush harder. She had to put on the disgusting fairy dress they had made her wear to a recent wedding. It scratched under the arms. Gina had been instructed to lend her black, patent leather shoes with poppers. Gina could no longer fit into them, but normally she never let anyone else wear her shoes even when she couldn’t wear them herself. She had done so only on the whispered condition that Eleanor kept them clean. This was the first time Gina had properly spoken to her since her furious return from the stables.

‘How can I get them dirty? Is their house muddy?’ Eleanor had forgotten to whisper back, so her mother heard and snapped:

‘Eleanor! This is not a joke.’

Eleanor had not been joking. She had given up making jokes.

Instead she shouted things inside her head so they could not guess where it came from. All the while she sat neatly with her mouth tight shut. She would not look over at the kitchen clock, where instead of the hands telling the time there was Alice’s white face smiling virtuously.

The Howlands were waiting on the doorstep as the car drew up. She had expected them to be cross like everyone else and glumly assumed she was going to be told off about Alice. They were like two matching vases placed on each side of the front door with hands clasped together and to her surprise they acted pleased to see her. Suddenly Eleanor knew they were the couple who had left her in Friston Forest. These people were her proper parents and seeing that she was unhappy, they had claimed her back. She felt a rush of joy that was like the start of crying and the start of Christmas all at once.

She grabbed the fruit cake Lizzie had baked – that she was to say was her present – from the front seat, and trotted up the path holding it out in front of her like one of the three kings bearing a gift. This image was so vivid to Eleanor she had to resist dragging each foot the way the boys who played the kings in the play did. It was giving in to an impulse such as this that always got her into trouble.

Instead of answering her when she said ‘Hello Mr Howland’, as she had been told to, Alice’s Dad, who Eleanor rather liked, did a strange clucking thing with his throat, and pulled a funny face with his mouth halfway up his face. She laughed – he was good at faces – but glancing back saw her own father’s face darkly forbidding and stopped as if he had slapped her.

Her father was staring at Mr and Mrs Howland, who he obviously thought were frightening creatures. For a minute Eleanor expected him to scream with terror because cords stood out on his neck like they did to people about to be murdered in scary films. She prepared her fingers to block her ears.

Later, she decided she had made this bit up.

‘Come in, Eleanor, tea’s all ready.’ Mrs Howland bent towards her and putting out a hand, stroked the top of her head with short sharp pats the way boring guests did with Crawford. ‘And you too, Doctor Ramsay. Stay. The more the merrier!’

The two men stood with the gate between them looking back at the little girl in the immaculate party dress as she skipped obediently into the house holding hands with the nice woman. They watched Mrs Howland as she snatched up the role of mother and hostess with eager fervency.

Eleanor pinpointed that moment on the doorstep as the sloughing off of her life and the first steps towards resurrecting Alice. As she unwittingly took part in a crude rehearsal for a reunion that could never be, she had decided to make it come true. She would be Alice living her life somewhere in the world, just as Mrs Howland came to hope she was. Yet even Eleanor was impotent to undo a tragedy. She had read enough fairy stories to know that an evil deed once done cannot be undone. Eleanor’s childish chatter that day could only be one of the cruelties of everyday life.

Both men were unequal to their parts, they could only stand helplessly until Doctor Ramsay snapped into action, talking like a telegram.

‘Have work to do. Back to London tomorrow. All go!’ He promised to be back in an hour.

Steve Howland leaned on the gate as the doctor’s car roared away, tyres screeching. He had not said a word and stayed where he was looking down the street in the direction that Alice had walked that last afternoon. He had thoughts he could not share, crude inventions about what had happened that Kath would be right to dismiss as jealous and even rude. So he said nothing. At last his wife called him inside to join in the tea with Doctor Ramsay’s daughter.

Eleanor was disappointed that, unlike the other time she had visited, Mr Howland did nothing during the tea without Mrs Howland prompting him. She had been looking forward to another tour of the tools in his garage and the go on his soldering iron he had promised her the time before to make up for Alice spoiling the tea.

She had pattered after Mrs Howland into the kitchen with wary steps, mindful of this first visit. Suppose Alice had been hiding brilliantly and had planned the tea as another surprise. Then she reminded herself that Alice reappearing could not happen. She relaxed at the sight of the neat, empty kitchen. Of course there would be no chocolate covered Alice lying in wait. This meant Eleanor had the opportunity to see the room properly and she admired the six plates propped up on shelves above the fridge. There were cat faces on them, a fluffy ginger with flourishing whiskers made her think of Crawford, so she told Mrs Howland about her cat and her visits to Mrs Jackson. The table was hidden beneath plates of cakes and jelly with a gigantic jug of orange squash right in the middle. Eleanor gaped at the mountain of food and swallowed. This time, she had no appetite. She was pushed firmly towards the chair that Alice had been sitting on when they found her coated all over with food that day.

‘Would you like some of your own cake, dear?’

‘No, that’s for you, thank you.’ Then remembering her lines. ‘It’s a present from me.’

‘Aren’t you lovely!’

It was finally growing cooler in the graveyard. The sun had left it altogether, but neither woman noticed as Eleanor recalled that she had forced herself to eat a large number of cakes and two bowlfuls of jelly, only by thinking of one mouthful at a time, chewing then swallowing, chew-swallow, chew-swallow. The trick was not to look at what was on her plate. This became her approach to life. A minute at a time and don’t look down.

When she left, Mrs Howland gave her the Crawford plate. This was a nice surprise, for although Mrs Howland had smiled and nodded as she talked, Eleanor had been sure she was not listening. Nor was Mr Howland because he nodded in the wrong places and mostly never spoke at all. Mrs Howland made him wrap the plate in newspaper, and then because he went into a trance she took over. There was a gap on the shelf where the plate had been. Eleanor saw Alice’s father notice this too.

As they got to the door, Mrs Howland rushed upstairs. Eleanor stayed in the hall with Mr Howland. She had tried smiling up at him, but he was like her clockwork sparrow and couldn’t strut or peck without Mrs Howland to work him. He had tapped at the barometer, which was pointed at Rain and Eleanor was just thinking that this was her chance to mention the soldering iron, when Mrs Howland came down again. She had held out her fist to Eleanor and then splayed out her hand to reveal a small purse. It was Alice’s purse. It had her name inside. She had tried to write all of it but had done ‘Alice’ in such big letters that there was only room for an ‘H’ and an ‘o’, which Eleanor had thought made her sound more jolly than she was. It was brown leather, patterned with gold spirals laced with blue and maroon flowers. Inside there were two threepenny bits.

‘Don’t give her that.’ Mr Howland had stopped examining the barometer.

‘She should have it.’

‘No. When she comes…’ He ran his hand down his face as if a different face would be there when he had finished, like the conjuror at Christmas.

Mrs Howland had hold of Eleanor’s hand and she pressed the purse into it. ‘Don’t be spending it on sweets, especially bubble gum. That’s very bad for you.’ She had stopped smiling, and was looking at her closely. Eleanor wanted to get away.

She slipped the purse into the pocket in her dress meant for tissues and dashed down the path to the car at the gate. Her father was sitting stiffly at the wheel like Parker in Thunderbirds and didn’t look round when Eleanor got into the back. She hadn’t thanked Alice’s Mum and Dad or said goodbye. She had forgotten they were her real parents and now it was too late. She only just remembered to look back to wave as she was driven away. The cottage door was shut. Eleanor was only eight, but with perfect understanding she divined it wasn’t Eleanor Ramsay that the Howlands had invited to tea, but Alice. From now on it would always be Alice.

Once Eleanor turned into Alice she tried to blot out Eleanor and what she had done or failed to do.

‘He knew though, didn’t he?’ Chris tripped over to Mark Ramsay’s grave. She stood unsteadily beside the mound. ‘He couldn’t bear what you’d done any longer and so he killed himself.’ Chris grabbed a handful of the soil and cupped it in her hands the way she made snowballs. They had done this together. She had made a snowman in the park with her Mum, she was sure of it. Until now she had totally forgotten this.

A moped puttered past on the lane and on the other side of the church a gate squeaked, followed by the clink of the latch.

‘It was an accident. ‘

‘There’s no such thing as an accident.’

‘Please come home.’

‘You’re mad. We can’t go home. It’s all over; can’t you see that? You’ve smashed things up for me as well as you. You’re sick and you need help but you have had all you’re getting from me.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘She’s going to come back with me.’ The voice was reedy but firm.

Kathleen Howland was on the path a few yards away. Her frailty augmented her aura of command.

When Jackie Masters had left, Kathleen had sat still in Steve’s chair looking at the empty grate. This time there was no offer of sugary tea; no attempt to shield her from exactly how it was.

Kathleen tilted her head and there was Alice’s photograph on the television. As the evening closed in and the living room grew dim, Alice’s eyes and nose, her pigtails and the painted seascape background faded to shades of grey. But for Kathleen her bright and cheerful smile remained just the same.

And at that moment Kathleen saw what she could do.