Each night she traced the day’s route in her London A to Z with a red biro. Soon she had covered most of the pages with the crouching creature shapes of her journeys, each one a fine thread leading through a dark forest. She would open the book at random and retrace the ink line of a day’s route. As her pen flitted along each high road, detoured around each crescent, or moved with precision down a broad tree-lined avenue, she recalled her walking thoughts: the weather, the passers by. Eleanor’s life was recorded in the London street atlas. It was her secret diary written in a code that was impossible for others to crack. Until one evening, forced into the Underground by a flash storm, Eleanor would accidentally leave it on a westbound District Line train, where it would be found by someone with a mind like her own.
On Fridays, Eleanor would came back early to catch Jane before she left the estate office. Jane made bearable the teeming, screaming traffic along Newington Butts and the urine-scented lift in Wood Green shopping centre. A good genie, there to make the most modest of wishes come true. Jane hadn’t cared if Alice was Eleanor. She liked her whoever she was.
During the day, Eleanor imbued her private London with her unarticulated hopes of their new friendship. After Alice vanished, Eleanor had found it impossible to keep up her existing friendships and, burdened with secrets, made few new ones. When she had absented herself from her old life, she cut off all contact with the people she knew. Now she was terrified she had forgotten how to have a friend of any kind.
As her pen completed the shape of each day and ended back at the Old Kent Road, Eleanor would dare imagine that their cups of coffee in the estate office, and more recently glasses of wine after work in her flat, were inching her back to sanity. She knew Chris had been right. She must be mad.
At weekends Eleanor returned to Isabel at the White House. The two women watched television, cooked elaborate meals and shopped in Brighton. In between, they played end-to-end games of Scrabble and Racing Demon.
After the trip to the Tide Mills, Chris was willing to go to the White House but, to Eleanor’s disappointment, would insist on returning to Kathleen’s cottage at night. To everyone’s astonishment, Chris embarked on riding lessons with Gina. She agreed to learn to drive with Gina’s husband, who her new grandmother called ‘Jon-the-Footrest’ without humour or apology. Chris planned to save for a car and take Kathleen out for day trips. Kathleen no longer searched for Alice. She stopped watching the tapes. Chris knew there was something Kathleen hadn’t told her.
It was only that morning, when Kathleen had brought her a cup of tea and stayed sitting on the side of her bed while she drank it, that Chris had found out what.
Until tonight, despite her secret intention to find out the truth about Alice, Chris had never explored the White House. She had become immersed in university work and when she visited she preferred to stay in the warm kitchen with her Aunt Gina, with whom she had formed a bond that puzzled them both. This was the first proper opportunity Chris had had to examine the room that had been her mother’s childhood sanctuary. Besides, she had tired of the Millennium Eve party her grandmother had impulsively decided to hold and craved some quiet.
She was diminished by the implacable walls of the model house topped with its brutish chimneys. She blanched, with the same sinking feeling as once when she had to wait for the Queen, being driven down Museum Street in a glass-topped car with a crest on the front, preceded by a fanfare of outriders blowing whistles. Chris had stood on the kerb, spare-parted by such significance. The doll’s house was as grand, proud and sure as royalty. And like the Queen, Chris knew its face intimately although she had never seen it before.
She moved in a circle away from the house, edging towards the salt-streaked windows, the back of her neck crawling like sifting sand. As an old woman, when it was too late to change anything, she would think back to this last night of 1999, the detail still sharp, and identify it as the last point when she might have turned back and left everything alone. Then she would remind herself that it was already too late.
It was the largest doll’s house Chris had ever seen, over four feet high and as deep. A mass of boxes jumbled to the brim with toys, wooden bricks, a plastic truncheon, cricket bats, tennis rackets, tennis balls, footballs, straggling dressing-up clothes nudged at the house walls. A bicycle wheel with a flat tyre had been propped against a sagging space hopper with a rip in the side; broken spokes had caught under the eaves of the house, lifting up part of the roof. Circles of plastic from an old Spirograph set littered the floor. A child’s black patent leather court shoe poked toes first from beneath a crate filled with scratched and dented cars, bits of Lego and racing green Meccano. Shelves piled with books and games climbed the alcoves by the fireplace. A tired one-eyed bear with moth-eaten fur had retreated to the top shelf with an Action Man, khaki legs doubled up to his chin, collapsed on the bear’s lap. They were crumpled refugees from a happier land. The broken and tawdry state of the toys and books, sprinkled with a shading of dust and scattered with dead leaves (how did they get there Chris wondered), signalled not a room abandoned by children since grown up, but the debris of a childhood dumped without notice.
Chris felt uneasy. She was sure no one had seen her leave the party, but she was equally convinced she wasn’t alone. She scanned the room, her head pounding with rising panic. There was nowhere to hide. No curtains on the windows. No furniture to creep under. It was the alcohol.
She backed into the windowsill. Daunted by the stillness, she was fearful of making a sound, and from the spurious safety of the wide seat she studied the replica of the White House. The ‘real’ house was her family home, although she wouldn’t admit kinship. Peace after the noise downstairs was like the intense presence of someone holding their breath and keeping very still. Chris wished she hadn’t come upstairs. The doll’s house glared back at her, its sharp lintels and gaping windows arched and callous.
The Ramsays never stopped talking, declaiming their opinions on food and cars, in brash tones, glugging wine into glasses, breaking into songs from musicals – Oliver!, The Sound of Music – with Lucian conducting and Eleanor singing the loudest. They kept conversation going with a myriad of petty subjects; their words leapt and jumped like fish in a net, slippery and shiny, a mass of possibility. It seemed to Chris, armed with the perspicacity of the young adult, that not much moved on: each time she went there they said and did much the same things. At meals she was put next to her mother, yet despite their lavish attentions she remained an outsider. Chris thought it peculiar that neither Mark Ramsay’s death, nor the fact that her mother hadn’t been back there for years, was ever discussed. Mark Ramsay’s inquest had returned a verdict of ‘death by misadventure’, because, coupled with the fact that he had no history of depression, the master cylinder in his Rover had failed and this would have disabled the brakes. Chris dared not say what she thought about it to Eleanor because until today Kathleen wouldn’t discuss it.