When she was with the Ramsays, Alice was a standard lamp stuck in the corner, her limbs wooden and her neck stiff, so that easy things like drinking orange juice became difficult and daunting. Lucian never noticed her. He once passed her in the street without returning her tentative greeting. She guessed he didn’t remember who she was and was mortified.
It seemed to Alice that Eleanor’s family was constantly doing things. They were important people always expected somewhere: opening the fête, captaining the cricket team, winning the gymkhana, climbing trees and walls and driving off in their car with a bang of doors and a tooting horn. With Gina as her sister, Alice would go riding and Gina would stick up for her in squabbles. When he wasn’t her husband, Lucian was her brother, getting into fights for her and letting her carry his rods.
The foundation for Alice’s dreams about Lucian were built around the day he gave her a bubble gum after they literally bumped into each other in the village store. Lucian stepped backwards on to her foot. She had been nonplussed as he shot out a grubby hand and, opening his fingers, revealed the gum. Bazooka Joe: the neatly wrapped block that smelled sweetly delicious that she never dared to buy. She thanked him properly and accepted it. Instantly she was stunned. Bubble gum would kill her. If she swallowed it, her Mum said it would tangle itself around her intestines until she died. She gasped:
‘Thank you very much, Lucian. I really love bubble gum.’
‘Yeah, well. I’ve got lots.’ Lucian pushed a pink covered tongue briefly out of his mouth as if there was no such thing as rude.
Alice said she would save it as it was nearly lunchtime. Lucian shrugged and told her that it was up to her. Alice saved it for a day, taking it out after her parents had said ‘good night’ and closed her bedroom door. At first she was careful to keep it hidden, but then she was worried it would give her away, so sugary-pink smelling with the coloured paper that concealed a shiny comic strip. The bubble gum was a gift from one of Eleanor’s demons and she had been tricked into accepting it. Finally Alice couldn’t sleep for the guilt. Even if she buried her face under the blankets the heavy sickly smell seeped out from the bottom of her toy cupboard. That morning she had thrown it in the bin, burying it under bits of rubbish to stop it rising to the surface. She could not forget the noise Lucian had made in the road when they came out of the shop. A barking that was not funny, though she had laughed. Alice hadn’t known what to do as he staggered backwards with his arms sticking out like a sleep-walker, balancing on the edge of the kerb. At last he had run off without saying goodbye.
Alice laughed when the Ramsays laughed, but never knew why. They made up words for things and spoke in peculiar accents like foreigners. They called her names like ‘Alicia’ and ‘Allegro’ and said it was ‘splendid’ and ‘fabulous’ that she had moved into the village. When the doctor and Mrs Ramsay left the room, Lucian and Eleanor would chuck sweets or grapes at each other, and dance around calling out rude words. Fruit Salad chews flew like bullets across the lounge, pinging against windows, disappearing under the stained sofa, and once hitting Alice on the side of the head so that she had to laugh louder. She had been miserable when Lizzie told them all to calm down, especially Alice who should know better. Alice had ogled at Lizzie, like a prisoner straining behind a gag, desperately trying to convey with her eyes that it was nothing to do with her.
The Ramsays’ house was messy and muddled, and from the first day Alice had felt sorry for the doctor, who must hate it. There was dust on the window seats in the playroom, and piles of books on the floor in the living room. She had thought they were moving out and had started packing. Alice had begun writing her name in the dust, but stopped. Her mother said it was better to leave a room as if she had never been there, with everything put back in its place. The kitchen table had criss-cross scratches all over it because they had no tablecloth. The Ramsays didn’t mind about scorches from hot pans or the dents from knives and forks. Her Mum would have been upset for guests to see these marks, but they didn’t care. Yet her Mum was surely right, guests did notice dents and had opinions. Alice was a guest and she had noticed them. The Ramsays never bothered with what guests thought. As she had tucked down to sleep the night before, Alice recognised, in a scalping of innocence, that her parents were wrong. This revelation overturned her world.
Alice longed to get into the doctor’s car. What stopped her was knowing that Doctor Ramsay might not like her if he was told the truth about her. The afternoon before she had upset his daughter by talking about cheese and now she would be doing it again by leaving Eleanor hiding.
‘So, what are you up to?’ The doctor jerked the gear stick forwards and backwards and pulled up the handbrake with a clicking sound. Three clicks were enough, her father said, or you ruined the brake. The doctor did loads of clicks and didn’t care. The car’s noise went deeper. He looked around him, which made Alice look too. If he spotted Eleanor, she wouldn’t have to pretend to search for her. Alice was surprised he wasn’t in a hurry.
‘Where is my daughter, anyway? You two are inseparable. Left you on your own, has she?’ He nodded. So it happened to him too. Then he looked Alice full in the face and made a sucking noise on his teeth with his tongue like her Dad did at the end of meals, which her Mum said was a bad example.
There were too many questions at once, Alice didn’t know which to answer first. It was so easy to be impolite. She had rehearsed the words: Please, take me home, but now she had said she was playing with Eleanor he wouldn’t take her anywhere. He was a doctor and must know she ought to be at home playing in the square of sunlight in the lounge. Sunlight was good for you. The figures grew clearer in the hedge behind the doctor’s head. Her Mum making rock cakes and singing ‘Please Release Me’ through the hatch; her Dad fixing something in the garage, whistling bits of her Mum’s tunes out of order till she stopped him:
‘The cat sounds better!’
Alice liked the way her Mum and Dad said the same things to each other.
‘We’re playing hide and seek, it’s my turn to look. I don’t know where Eleanor is.’ She raised her voice. ‘She’s very good at hiding.’
‘I see.’ He glanced around again. ‘Have you tried all her hidey holes? There’s the tree house and the barn. Failing that, you could come back with me and leave her! It’s nearly four, isn’t that meant to be teatime?’ He rolled his eyes like Gina. Alice brightened.
She was about to accept, and then it dawned on her that all along he had been joking. He wouldn’t want to give her a lift; indeed he was already preparing to drive away. Five minutes ago she would have been relieved to see him go, but now playing with Eleanor was worse than talking to the doctor, which wasn’t so bad after all. As he released the handbrake Alice tried to stop him.
‘How is Mrs Ramsay?’
She was horrified to see it was the wrong question. Lines appeared above his eyes as he banged the steering wheel. He turned his head, looking out for Eleanor, or perhaps for Mrs Ramsay. ‘As good as ever!’ Then he smiled right at her and Alice saw it was all right. After that the conversation went much better and Alice found she had lots of things to tell him and forgot that he was a doctor because he said she should call him Mark. She tried it in bed that night, but it felt like the name of a stranger so she went back to ‘Doctor’. She told him about her flower collection and that was when he kindly offered to help her with it, although at the time she hadn’t believed he meant it. It seemed there were lots of flowers her parents hadn’t told her about. She had forgotten all about Eleanor until Doctor Ramsay exclaimed: