‘What’s up, Fannackapans?’ Steve was puzzled by Alice’s expression. She was gaping at him as if she didn’t know him. For a moment he dreaded her growing up more than anything and wanted time to stand still.
‘I was taking my plate to be washed.’ She glanced down and saw a smear of jelly up to the rim where she had pushed it off and covered it with her hand. She looked at her father, divided now by more than a tea table.
After her Mum and Dad had gone to sleep, Alice crept down and lifted the latch on the kitchen door. She flinched at the loud click of the light switch. Had it woken her parents? There was no movement from above. The lino was cool on her bare feet. All evening she had dreaded her Mum and Dad looking in the stove. She knew that in the height of summer it was very unlikely, but her guilt skewed her judgement. She imagined they knew and as with everything else had agreed to say nothing. Alice was persecuted by their silence. Her crimes were mounting up. She had to show them the person she had become.
She eased open the lid of the stove. Button eyes stared blindly from the coals. She felt into the dark hole and one by one picked up lumps of coal from the sides and laid them over the jelly until the bear was buried. Her hands were soon smeared with sticky black dust. She was about to wash them under the tap when she remembered how the pipes would hiss and clank. She was not allowed to pull the chain at night for this reason. There was a small puddle of water around the plughole, she dabbled her fingers in, rubbing them together and dipping them again until the stains had gone.
She went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. She lay in the dark, thinking of Mrs Ramsay trying to kill herself. Alice had doubted the truth of the story even as she was quizzing Eleanor. Just as she could not imagine Mrs Ramsay going to the toilet, so she couldn’t imagine her killing herself. Eleanor had been right, no one could die from cheese.
Nine
It had been arranged that Eleanor would go to tea with Alice on the Monday afternoon. Mrs Howland was up at dawn that morning making sure the house was spotless. She unwrapped the pink china and shooed Alice off the settee to vacuum the cushions. Alice knew Eleanor wouldn’t care about clean cushions or eating off the best plates. She hated her mother for her mistake. In despair Alice had set off for the Ramsays’ where she was to spend the morning and have lunch. Unlike the other two days, she had to be back in time to get ready for the special tea and Eleanor’s arrival at four o’clock.
The Ramsays floated through space: Lucian slid down banisters sideways, Gina did perfect horse jumps and cantered like the Virginian. Eleanor vaulted over walls like a man while Alice walked sensibly round to the gate. Mrs Ramsay floated the most, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, in and out of rooms and across the garden, trailing in flowing robes. Her own parents made everything difficult and Alice was crushed by the weight of their efforts. After her talk with the doctor, she saw the world like a bicycle wheel with the Ramsays at the centre, while her parents were at the end of a long spoke. The home she longed to escape to when she was caught in a Ramsay storm wasn’t real. It wasn’t where proper things went on. There was no need to wash already clean tablecloths and polish already gleaming cake forks, for no one noticed except her Mum, and she didn’t matter.
At the sound of the doorbell her Mum snatched off her apron. Alice stayed in the kitchen, reluctant to see Eleanor. She eyed the table piled high with triangular fish paste sandwiches, jelly, fairy cakes, tall beakers of orange juice, and glittering with the best cutlery. The Ramsays didn’t eat this much between them. Through the half open door she saw her Mum greet Eleanor. Never had the cottage looked so dark and small. Eleanor’s playroom was bigger than the whole ground floor. She grimaced as Eleanor let her cheek be kissed and, shrugging off her anorak, hung it on one of the hooks, before Alice’s Mum could take it.
Alice glared at the table, bright white and stupidly waiting. She wanted to be Gina, wandering in late from horse riding to find a game of hide and seek or Monopoly going on, free to leave or join in if she wished. Gina was the White Witch in her sleigh heaped with furs, making a lashing remark before gliding away. In Alice’s house no one interrupted her games, except her Mum to ask her to lay the table or her Dad to take her ice-skating. If she had a friend to stay, she had to play with them. She couldn’t go off and read a book like Gina. Alice sat down on the chair reserved for Eleanor and picking up a geometrically folded serviette, twisted it into a ball and scowled at the door.
Last week Alice had believed in God. He was a kindly third parent, rather like her Brighton grandad had been. God was pleased when she did a hundred skips in a row or was pencil monitor for a whole term. He helped her get best marks for her arabesques, a reward for cleaning her mother’s china animal collection. She believed that if her Mum was pleased with her, God would be too. He was behind the rare tick in green ink that Mrs Bird, the head mistress at her old Newhaven school, sometimes put beside her teacher’s red one, for neat writing or punctuality. Until Alice met the Ramsays, God had kept watch over Alice all the time, taking notes like Eleanor. Now she was certain that, like Father Christmas, God had never ever been there. He was one of the Ramsays’ jokes she didn’t get, but laughed at until her stomach hurt. He was the stern old Judge whose eyes could see you wherever you hid.
Alice hoped there was not a God to see the fluffy dolls that doubled as covers for the toilet rolls, the toilet brush, the bread bin, hot water bottles, the teapot. Dolls in pink, dolls in blue staring out of every corner, seeing much more than God.
When Eleanor had pointed out that God couldn’t be watching everyone at once, Alice had tried to explain:
‘He’s not like you and me, he sees everything. If he was like us he wouldn’t be God.’
‘You made that up. Every time I ask how he could do something, like have your dead grandad there with him along with my grandparents and all the other grandpas and grandmas, and heaps of dead people, you say he’s special and not like us.’ Eleanor was swinging headfirst round and round a railing behind the cricket pavilion. As she returned to a standing position, leaning on the bar, she panted: ‘If he is different from us, how come he has a beard and two feet and hands like an ordinary man? He could be your Dad or my Dad. Perhaps he is!’ She launched herself over again, legs flying. As she spun round, her head nearly touched the concrete; Alice believed Eleanor would die if one hand slipped, but like everything else Eleanor did that was dirty or dangerous, nothing like that happened.
Alice picked up another serviette and opened it out. As she glowered uncomprehending at the pattern of a sunflower, she remembered Mrs Ramsay saying that Doctor Ramsay was ‘playing God’ when her Mum had asked her where he was yesterday morning. Her Mum had laughed, but Mrs Ramsay hadn’t even smiled. Her Mum didn’t understand the Ramsays’ jokes either.
It seemed that Alice had found a joke of her own when, just minutes before she mentioned the cheese, she had spotted a box of matches in the Ramsays’ downstairs toilet. She had taken Eleanor to see it, chortling loudly all the way, pleased to find something funny at last. How had it got there? Did her parents make fires indoors to keep warm? Eleanor had not laughed.
‘Oh that. It’s to get rid of the stink after a shit. Feel free to use it.’
Alice was shocked. She couldn’t speak as Eleanor drew open the box, picked out a match and struck it. She held the flame up to Alice’s face, staring at her with wide eyes, like a wicked witch trying to put her under a spell. The fire had burned right down to her fingers before she tossed it into the toilet. The flame went out with a psst as it hit the water and the blackened wood turned into a live insect swimming around at the bottom. Alice flinched as, with both hands, Eleanor yanked the metal chain above their heads.