Her Mum and Eleanor had reached the kitchen door. Eleanor was telling her about her cat with the mad name, chatting away as if they were friends, although she had only met her Mum last Friday. Alice envied Eleanor, she did not dare be so friendly with Mrs Ramsay. Then she remembered the doctor and felt better.
Kathleen Howland would later forget what greeted her as she tripped lightly into the kitchen. The scene would be erased as if it had never been. She was very much looking forward to Eleanor Ramsay’s reaction to her table display. She loved to see pleasure in children’s faces.
She screamed and was distantly aware of stepping backwards heavily on to Eleanor’s foot and not saying sorry.
Eleanor peered around from behind Alice’s mother and, forgetting her carefully rehearsed manners, swore out loud.
There was food everywhere. Serviettes were shredded and stuck all over the table and the floor, where squelchy stuff lay in soggy mounds. Orange squash had soaked into the tablecloth and dripped slowly on to the lino making a brightly coloured puddle that Eleanor found pleasing. Inching further into the room Eleanor nearly toppled on to the bin. It lay on its side, surrounded by squares of cheese stabbed with sticks pointing this way and that. There were globules of jam everywhere, on the chairs, slithering down the sideboard, even hanging from the ceiling. In the middle sat Alice smattered with red jelly, smeared with chocolate, with her hair decorated with scraps of Victoria sponge.
She leapt up, flinging her hands above her head and standing right on the tips of her toes, she yelled at the top of her voice:
‘Surprise!’
Ten
That evening, alone in her room, gazing down the empty lane in the direction of the White House where Doctor Ramsay would be eating supper in his dining room, Alice was determined to be friendly when Eleanor saw her the next day. After her behaviour at the tea table she was frightened by the girl she was turning into. She gave herself one last chance to change back.
As she had helped her bewildered Mum clear up the chaos in the kitchen after Eleanor had been sent home, Alice promised Kathleen Howland faithfully that she would do whatever the Ramsays said and that no, she would never play up strangely again. Her mother couldn’t bring herself to use the word ‘naughty’ about her daughter, usually so well behaved. But ‘strangely’ was to Alice far worse, because it proved her fears were true. Her Mum was so horrified that she couldn’t even be cross. This time Alice knew for certain that her Mum had not told her Dad. It only made things worse.
But he would soon find out. Everyone would. Already people were beginning to see what Alice was really like. As she watched Mrs Carter from the post office come out of her flat above the shop and trot off down the lane in her slingback stilettos towards the station, Alice knew that from now on she must make a real effort to be nice and good or it would be too late.
They didn’t meet up until after lunch on the Tuesday because Mrs Howland took Alice into Lewes to get new shoes. When they did, Alice quickly told Eleanor that it was entirely up to her where they went to play because she honestly truly didn’t mind what they did. When Eleanor promptly suggested that they go and play hide and seek down at the haunted Tide Mills, Alice, determined to be good, had no choice but to agree.
Part Two
June 1999
Eleven
Isabel was annoyed with Mark. He had taken the lilo because he knew she wanted to lie on it. He had done it to get at her. He hated sunbathing.
There he was, sprawled across the silver plastic, his long legs still muscular and shapely; glistening with sun tan cream and droplets of water. He could have been fifty, not seventy-four. Her friends teased her that it must be like being married to Paul Newman, but better looking. Lucky Isabel, they said.
She hadn’t told anyone that she had started to suspect Mark was avoiding her. She believed that communicating this fear would propel it into being. Besides, sometimes she was convinced she was imagining it. Then a brief moment of comfort would be obliterated by her self-knowledge. She was too observant, much too watchful to be mistaken. In the last few months Mark never looked at her when they were talking, his eyes were restless and distant. Indeed right now she could see that Mark was busily paddling the water with his hands to prevent the lilo drifting in her direction. These things were paltry if described on their own, but added together they made Isabel uneasy. The one thing that had always made life tolerable was that they were a team.
She knew it was inconceivable her husband was having an affair, after all he had ignored countless opportunities over the last forty-six years; all those women queuing up in all those waiting rooms over the decades.
The lilo was extremely important to Isabel. It represented a vital comfort that recently, as her body succumbed to its late sixties, eluded her. She would have had it all to herself if Mark had driven into Lewes this morning as he usually did on a Saturday morning. His denying Isabel this crumb of joy infuriated her; not only did he shun her companionship, but he stole her tiny pleasures. To add insult to injury, Isabel’s luxury sun lounger, made to order in Florence, had so far failed to arrive. All she had was the lilo and now she didn’t even have that.
The lilo was the size of a double mattress and fantastically sturdy, so it didn’t fold up like an envelope or tip up unexpectedly if she twitched a toe or turned her head. She could float on it in the pool without getting wet as Mark was doing now. When Gina had brought it over, folded up tight in a deceptively small and childishly colourful zippy bag, Mark had scoffed, consigning it instantly to that place he was too lofty to inhabit: the world of soap operas, chunky holiday fiction, gossip and anything Isabel enjoyed. Mark had declared that Jon had wanted it to use in the pool when he and Gina visited, but as usual had to disguise his materialistic desires as fulsome liberality. It was like Mark to assume that others coveted what he claimed to despise. Then, like a wound he must worry, he would grumble that seeing how extravagantly rich his son-in-law was it was peculiar that he hadn’t built Gina a swimming pool. Mark insisted Jon was mean, preferring to use theirs for free. Typically Mark hadn’t blamed his eldest daughter for the frivolous present, assuming the idea was her poor husband’s, who Mark gleefully found a rich source of jokes. This meant that if for no other reason, Isabel was grateful to her son-in-law for inadvertently diverting her ever more gloomy and restless husband.
Mark remained unimpressed by the fortune Jon had built over the decade through the manufacture of plastic commercial products, mostly grey, although there was a health and safety line that was a jolly yellow. He called him Jon-the-Footrest – usually to his face like a title honourably bestowed – because of the chunky adjustable platforms Jon manufactured for under office desks. It cut no ice with Mark when Jon laboured the point that his success was only due to Mark’s wonderful daughter Gina supporting him through thick and thin. Isabel would hear these tipsy speeches, generally made after Sunday lunch, with a sinking heart because they sealed Jon’s death warrant. Later Mark would unleash a torrent of cruel wit that luckily Jon appeared to receive as complimentary. Once they had left, Mark would expostulate that it was the last straw for Jon to implicate Gina in his devotion to making mountains of money through flogging roadside grit bins and sand-weighted safety cones. Apart from these, the highly successful Ginaware range included wrist rests, inserts for commodes, baby changing platforms and bucket/wringer combination packs for public spaces. It financed the horse – indeed a whole stable of horses – that Gina’s parents had refused to buy her when she was a girl. Isabel would concede that it didn’t make her a proud mother to be confronted by Gina’s name on a sanitary napkin receptacle (she had picked up the terminology) while hovering over a loo seat in a motorway service station, or negotiating a splatter of spilt salsa sauce guarded by a garish multilingual caution sign near the frozen fish in Sainsbury’s. But you had to earn a living somehow and Isabel could think of far worse things a man could do.