A Kind of Vanishing by Lesley Thomson Read Free Book Online

room, hoping Isabel would appear and take her in. She could not know Eleanor had been told to go to bed. But the knocker banged again, so she gave up.
    It was all over.
    Tomorrow her mother would stay in bed refusing to be touched. Tomorrow things would go back to usual, except Isabel was crosser after parties.
    Eleanor did not want tomorrow.
    Things were different after the business with Alice. Eleanor’s parents never allowed her downstairs when they gave a party. Nothing was actually said, certainly Alice was never given as the reason. Eleanor just knew she must keep to her bedroom. At first she would sit on the top stair listening to the muffled music and laughter. Through the landing window she would count the double-decker B.E.A buses going back and forth to London Airport on the Great West Road. The noise swelled each time the drawing room door opened and she hoped it was her Mum coming to fetch her. It never was. Instead she had to be ready to rush back to bed when Gina floated up the stairs, walking like Isabel.
    After Alice vanished, Eleanor dreaded parties. She wished that, like Crawford, she could escape out the back door until everything was over.

Three
     
     
    A lice was there. No matter what Eleanor did. Alice was there, smiling.
    As soon as Eleanor clicked off the bedroom light Alice arrived and would not go. Eleanor tried everything to make her disappear. She jammed her knuckles into her eye sockets to shut out Alice’s smile, but as her eyes began to ache and sting, Alice’s disembodied head still hung in the spangled darkness like a Chinese lantern, her face swollen and peculiar. Now Alice had new powers. She made shadows glide around the room. Her skin was translucent white, the eyes a grey see-through jelly. The hair was solid like the bust of Beethoven on Lucian’s piano. Eleanor tried opening her eyes and staring hard to make Alice vanish again. This almost succeeded, but then Alice returned bit by bit, in the carved pattern over the wardrobe mirror. First two eyes, then the nose and finally the curly bit in the corner became a ghastly grin. Other times Alice floated like an escaped balloon outside the window where the moon should have been. Her bloated, gloating face lit up the room with a bluish light like Mark Ramsay’s surgery at the hospital where Eleanor believed she had once slept, although it may have been a dream.
    Then things got worse. Alice came in the day too. She was there when Eleanor’s father shut the curtains in the evening, hovering in the fabric. Earlier, Eleanor had found her lying under the sofa, her face cupped in chubby hands. She was using all Eleanor’s secret places. Alice was spying without taking turns, which was not fair. She was hiding really well, for only Eleanor had found her.
    After Alice didn’t come back from hide and seek, Eleanor’s parents kept the newspapers away from her. If Eleanor pattered into the sitting room when the news was on, they leapt up to switch off the television. Yet they didn’t work as a team. They disagreed about what to shield Eleanor from. They wanted to see the news themselves, so were unreasonably infuriated with her for causing them to miss it. Finally Mark took to ordering Eleanor out of the room. In the midst of this, both Mark and Isabel underestimated the resourcefulness of their youngest child. Simply by remaining single minded and alert Eleanor learnt to pick an erratic course through the fog that descended on the Ramsays after Alice went, to find out what she needed.
    Alice’s disappearance forced the Ramsays to stay on in Sussex while the police interviewed Eleanor. The press got wind of this and so Isabel had barred her from going into Charbury and even from being at the front of the house where she could be seen from the window. She could go in the back garden because it was screened by a high wall, reinforced by holly bushes and trees planted by the Judge, a private man and, as the executions mounted, a paranoid one.