If she balanced on her toes like Gina she could take a beaker down from the kitchen cupboard next to the shelf where her Mum had arranged the cat plates that were a present for Alice’s last birthday from her Brighton Nana. Alice could easily reach that high as everyone marvelled that she was tall for her age. She didn’t need to get on a chair. The cupboard door would creak, first low then high, as she pushed it shut. The tap would splash and splutter, wetting her face as she turned it up to make a waterfall thundering into the sink. If no one was there she could drink the water in great gulps not caring about cold liquid on her tummy. She had done it before and nothing had happened to her. She would tiptoe into the hallway, and give the barometer a tap to see if it was going to rain so she could stay at home and not go back to the Ramsays’. Then she would run quickly up the steep staircase and hide in her new bedroom. Eleanor would never find her.
It would be the first place that Eleanor would look.
Alice nearly didn’t hear the car. At first she thought the soft purring was an aeroplane, then remembering Tufty Club rules, she hurried to the side of the lane, as close to the hedge as she could be, without tipping into the ditch. She stood stiff and still, to face the oncoming traffic and be visible to the driver. A green car shot around the corner and its big silver bumper drove right at her.
She froze. As it got nearer, Alice saw there was plenty of room for it to pass and it was only the way the road looked in the heat that made it seem as if it was coming to run her down. She didn’t know if she was pleased that the driver was Doctor Ramsay.
Alice was wary of Eleanor’s family. If she had been able to be honest, or had more confidence, she would have recognised dislike but it was a fact in the village that everyone liked the Ramsays. It was impossible for Alice to articulate an opposite feeling even to herself and so she sought other reasons for her dread as she nibbled her Shreddies each morning that half term, before going up to the big house with the tall iron gates to play with Eleanor Ramsay.
It seemed to Alice that the Ramsays were everywhere at once, making loud jokes she didn’t understand in funny voices. Back at home, she told herself she would do a funny voice when she next went, but when she was at the White House, she could hardly speak. It was quite impossible to do something that might make Gina laugh or cause Lucian (who she dare not call Luke) to say ‘affirmative’ in a slow American accent. Alice would croak ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and her cheeks burned as Eleanor’s Mum told Eleanor to behave more like Alice in a voice that might have been joking. She expected Eleanor to be angry later, but she never was. In fact Eleanor didn’t look at her at all and spoke to the doors and windows beyond which she insisted there were spies and murderers. It made Alice worried that there were things she didn’t know, or worse that no one cared about what she did know. Alice had nerved herself up to refuse exploring a jungle that was a settee or fly to the moon in funny plastic chairs that looked as if they had come from the moon in the first place. By the end of two days of playing it seemed impolite to keep saying no, so on that Sunday afternoon, with home time on the horizon, Alice had felt bound to agree to do hide and seek.
As Doctor Ramsay got nearer, Alice considered hiding, but it was too late. The great car slid up to her, filling up the lane, blocking her in. Her face glided to a stop in the reflection of the window, pigtails sticking out like ears in the gleaming glass. Then the window was wound down and inch by inch she jerked out of sight. Eleanor’s father leaned across the passenger seat, with his white teeth lined up in neat rows, and his lips stretched back as he strained to hold the window winder. Alice fixed on the long arms, brown and smooth like a woman’s, with no hairs. These were doctor’s arms. Everything – his very deep voice, his big car and his black sunglasses – were to do with being a doctor. She eyed the outstretched arm. There were some freckles speckling the wrist and twisting blue veins criss-crossed up around the arm, and along the fingers. She imagined them hard to the touch like string. Her own Dad didn’t have veins and his arms were thicker and covered in hair that she stroked and patted as he held her tight around the waist and ordered her to climb off his lap, their words a wellworn ritual.
‘Hop off now.’
‘I can’t move!’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why. You’re holding on to me so I can’t escape.’
‘Stuff and nonsense. Shelves don’t put themselves up.’
‘Alice!’ Doctor Ramsay spoke to the road, like Eleanor did. She looked where he was looking but there was nothing. The strong sunlight made everything wobble. Surreptitiously she steadied herself on his car. The door was burning hot. She let go and rubbed her fingers in her other hand.
‘Yes, it is me.’ She straightened her dress and put her feet together with ankles touching. She must be on her best behaviour: the doctor was a busy man. His time was precious. Her Mum had said there was no such thing as ‘time off’ for doctors. Alice pictured Doctor Ramsay, always awake, always curing people with glasses of water and ice-lolly sticks on the tongue like the doctor at her Mum’s surgery who wouldn’t take out her tonsils because he said they were valuable.
‘Do you need a lift? Or are you on some big adventure!’ He laughed at an invisible joke. Learning now, quick as a flash, Alice laughed too.
‘I’m with Eleanor. We’re playing.’ She was intrigued at the prospect of riding in his green car. Doctor Ramsay could rescue her from Eleanor. Then Alice’s manners got the better of her. It wasn’t fair to leave her hiding. Alice imagined clasping the silver handle, and pulling open the door. It was so close. She’d tell her Dad she had ridden like a princess on the magnificent seats. Through the window came a smell that both scared and lured her: a mix of cigarette smoke, leather and a sharp scent she had smelled on the doctor before. Her mother had said it was aftershave. When she had asked her Dad why he didn’t smell like it, he snorted that it was a stupid expense and what was wrong with smelling like a man?
Alice furtively scratched the back of her calf with her foot, balancing perfectly on one leg. The Ramsays scared her. It was not fear like ‘murder in the dark’ or the fluttering dread of waiting for her turn to read in class. These were bad enough, but she could deal with them. Nor was it the disappointment of a hope shattered as the high jump bar clattered to the ground when she failed to jump three feet, seven inches at the heats for the county championships. The way Alice felt when she saw the Ramsays was worse because the Ramsays were supposed to be great fun.
This was a world where although people talked in English they made no sense, and where they saw nothing wrong with drinking milk straight from the bottle, smoking cigarettes in every room and calling people rude nicknames.
At home, as Alice vigorously brushed the nylon locks on her Sindy dolls before bedtime, she imagined helping Gina with her horse, polishing the tack, carrying her things, mucking out, sweeping up, brushing down. She would hold clever conversations with Lucian, so detailed that she was disorientated to find she was still in her bedroom and not walking through the village on his arm, or helping him catch fish by the river. She whispered to the Sindys that Lucian was in love with her and that every morning she lifted a letter off the mat that implored her to marry him and be the next Mrs Ramsay. She told them he came past her house each night and blew her secret kisses over the dining room table at the Ramsays’. She practised her name in the back of her diary with the Cliff Richard on the cover: ‘Alice Ramsay, Alice Ramsay, Alice Ramsay’ in intricate coloured letters with her Christmas felt pens. If she were married to Lucian she wouldn’t stay in bed all day like the other Mrs Ramsay.