He might die without ever seeing his baby.
She peered closely at the picture of the man lying on the floor with his hands resting on his chest. He looked asleep in the sun like her Dad except he had on a suit and tie and wore polished black shoes. His jacket was twisted and crumpled. His eyes were like the Judge’s and stared at something frightening on the ceiling. Eleanor ran a finger along the words: ‘They rested his head on a plastic boater hat, with a band that said: “Kennedy Will Win”. The blood from his wound ran down over the hat, and mixed with the pool on the floor.’ He had been shot at twenty minutes past midnight, Los Angeles time. She blinked and rubbed her nose with a grubby fist. There was another picture of Robert Kennedy making a speech minutes before he got shot. He looked happy with his wife Ethel beside him. Eleanor thought he must be a nice dad to have and wished she was one of ten children with one on the way instead of three with no one else expected. Then Eleanor knew with a certainty beyond her years and outside the bounds of rationality that if Robert Kennedy were to live it would be all right. Alice would come out of her hiding place, all of her not just her head and her hands and her smile, and this time they would play properly. They would even be friends.
It was just as she thought this and was turning the pages of the paper so as to leave it neatly that Eleanor saw the small headline. She froze.
‘“Alice” Grave To Remain. The grave of Mrs Alice Hargreaves who was the model for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is safe.’ The story was about a council saying it would ‘level all graves and remove headstones’ to make space for more bodies. Eleanor wondered where it planned to find these bodies. People had complained and stopped them. It hadn’t occurred to Eleanor that Alice had a grave. Up until now it had been a game that ended happily with Alice no longer here to bother her. Eleanor conflated the smiling face on page two with the item about the grave and went cold.
How could a grave ever be safe?
She heard a sound, a tiny creak from one of the many rooms above her head and hastily arranged the newspaper on the mat to look like it had fallen there. This minute action was the start of a policy of disguise and concealment that would seal fates and change lives. No one heard Eleanor scamper back to bed on small, soundless feet.
Eleanor lay facing the open window, gradually warmed up by the morning sun slanting on her pillow, and in a bid to banish thoughts, she whispered a story to herself about her real father, the handsome Senator with the crack in his chin. ‘He was shot eight times at close range and lay injured by the freezers in the kitchen. He moved a little; once he licked his lips slowly,’ she hissed hoarsely, demonstrating a photographic memory unrecognised by her teachers or family. ‘The kitchen was “boiling with people” but “Senator Kennedy and three other wounded lay terribly quiet in the midst of the uproar”.’ She propped herself up on one elbow. ‘They think he spoke, he asked everyone to move back to give him air!’
As Eleanor knelt beside him she stroked the Senator’s hand, he smiled up at her and squeezing her fingers he muttered:
‘I’m so proud of you, Alice.’
‘It’s Eleanor!’
After that Eleanor formed the routine of checking the newspapers each morning. Then every night after everyone was asleep and it had become too late to make anything better, she would tiptoe down to the kitchen, and as her eyes grew used to the dark, she would skitter across the stone flags, to pull the newspaper out from the pile under the sink and stuff it up her pyjama jacket. She was astute in her assumption that the rackety habits of the Ramsay household carried on despite everything. Used to her home as a harbinger of secrets, Eleanor had learnt to keep her own while negotiating the repercussions of others. Her pyjamas crackled as she marched stiffly up to the playroom at the top of the house. Scissor blades flashed in the shimmery light from a rubber waterproof torch balanced between the chimneys of the doll’s house as she snip-snipped around the article, leaving neat windows in the paper.
She would lay her growing collection of images out in a row on the floorboards. Robert Kennedy sitting on a carpeted staircase in smart shoes that must squeak when he walked. He looked tired. Eleanor’s favourite was a close-up of his face with the dent in his chin that she had invested with magical significance. Finally, smoothed flat, the three she had found of the Senator sprawled between freezer cabinets in the Los Angeles hotel kitchen, a still shape glimpsed between shoving bodies lit by a frenzy of flash bulbs. In the last, his shirt had been undone exposing a hairy chest. Her Dad’s chest was hairless. As an afterthought, Eleanor had cut out the story about Alice with both their pictures in it. She had left the one about the grave.
After scrutinising her private gallery, she would slip everything into the space between the floor and the skirting board behind the doll’s house. When they returned to London, Eleanor intended to take them all out and put them in her Box of Secrets. But when the time came she forgot and later, as often happened with her secrets, she forgot what they were or where they were hidden.
Four
Eleanor had been introduced to Alice one sunny Friday morning on the last day of May that year. The Ramsays had arrived from London late the night before intending to spend the first week of June at their house in Sussex. For all of them the day they got there was always the best, rich with hope and anticipation. The hope dissipated even as Lizzie opened all the doors and windows to chase out the damp. By the next morning everyone had gone their separate ways: Gina to the riding stables; Lucian to the river; Mark retreated to his study with the door locked and Isabel was planning the food with Lizzie in the kitchen. Eleanor had been called downstairs just as she started sorting out the doll’s house. On the way down to Charbury, squeezed between her older brother and sister, she had planned to rearrange the furniture to give the inhabitants a new lease of life. She would draw new pictures for the rooms and paint the front door bright red. With this in mind, she had packed her box of enamel paints. The doll’s house was a loyal friend awaiting her. She told herself she had no need of other friends ever again.
Eleanor’s grandfather had made the doll’s house, an obsessively faithful replica of the family mansion called the White House, over thirty years before for Mark Ramsay and his younger sister, Virginia. It was an uncharacteristic act of paternal attention from the adamantine high court Judge, who enthusiastically donned the black napkin until prevented by the demise of capital punishment itself. The loss of so final a tool of retribution had made Judge Henry permanently peevish. In 1957, the enactment of the Homicide Act effectively curtailed his power to propel a man or woman to meet their maker and drove him into brooding retirement. He clung to his memories and to the almost permanent seclusion of his workroom, a shed in the orchard, which like his study was acrid with the smoke of the ‘Regency Segars’ he received every month in a brown paper parcel from Fribourg and Treyer in the Haymarket.
When Judge Ramsay died on 13th July 1958, exactly three years after Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain, a month before his seventieth birthday and too soon to know about the birth of Eleanor, no one had the courage to clear out his den. Isabel had turned up at the door of the shed, clanking with cleaning materials, intent on sweeping away the last vestiges of her hated father-in-law and transforming it into an artist’s studio with which to tempt Lucian with its chalky light. She had quailed at the sight of the immaculately laid out bench, the labelled shelves stacked with tools, and books on architecture and model building. Towers of wooden cigar boxes were filled with tiny objects: drawing pins, nails, screws and pen nibs. Isabel’s nerves were finally shattered as her cheek brushed against the Judge’s black wool jacket hanging lifeless from the door, and as she jumped back the metal bucket clipped the doorjamb with a fearsome clatter. Defeated, she had abandoned the shed to become an inadvertent shrine. Over the years people claimed to have caught glimpses of the Judge through the grimy windows, a giant concentrating crow perched on his high stool, shrouded in his jacket.