Alice’s disappearance forced the Ramsays to stay on in Sussex while the police interviewed Eleanor. The press got wind of this and so Isabel had barred her from going into Charbury and even from being at the front of the house where she could be seen from the window. She could go in the back garden because it was screened by a high wall, reinforced by holly bushes and trees planted by the Judge, a private man and, as the executions mounted, a paranoid one. Now his paranoia would have been justified, for journalists outnumbered inhabitants in the lane beyond his wall. Vans and cars were parked nose to tail along the verges leading from the station right to the church, ploughing up the village green.
Lean-eyed men lounged against the counter in the village stores and queued outside the telephone box beside the Ram Inn. They perched on the church wall to scribble frantically in notebooks, or prowled around the narrow streets, lifting dustbin lids, parting branches and peering through windows and questioning everyone like pretend police. From her lookout post high above them all, Eleanor, spying out of the playroom window with a notebook of her own, was rewarded by the sight of a line of constables in white shirtsleeves, poking long poles into hedges and ditches, the way her father checked the oil in his car.
With Alice gone, Eleanor had no one to play with and there was no more talk of suitable local children. Lucian and Gina could go out but must not speak to anyone, even people they knew, like Iris Carter, the new lady at the stores who looked like Lulu. This ban effectively stopped them buying sweets. Gina might go to the stables if accompanied by her father, which made her furious. Lucian went to the river, returning in the evenings smudgy and cross with no fish. The rules made no sense to Eleanor; she knew they would never find Alice by stopping her leaving the house. Yet she kept to the regime with a devotion that went unnoticed. Their self-imposed curfew put the Ramsays in a sour mood.
Isabel stopped having headaches and was possessed with the organisational energy associated with parties. She learnt the names of the police, fended off reporters, deciding who to give interviews to and how best to present her family, as she always had. Mark and Isabel’s friends would have been astonished to hear that it was Mark who crumpled. Although he was of no interest to the police because he was a doctor, Mark was irritable, shouting at objects, and swearing when the telephone rang.
On the morning after Alice disappeared, Eleanor was making her way along the passage from her bedroom to the stairs, hoping to overhear something useful about Alice, when she came upon her Dad on the landing. He was staring at Crawford, who, unaware of his rapt audience, was very slowly crawling along the carpet, his nose up close to the skirting board, his tummy touching the floor. He began sniffing the wood, pausing now and then to give a scratch at it with his paw. He was following a mouse trail. Eleanor wished that Alice would return just to see this. Alice hated mice. Then Mark Ramsay, unaware that he in turn was being watched, gave Crawford a hefty push with his boot making the animal yelp and shrink back in a snarl of fur. At the same time Mark caught sight of his daughter at the corner of the passage.
‘Scram!’ He growled at Crawford who, pausing briefly to spit at him, lolloped awkwardly away down the stairs, obviously in pain. Eleanor was perplexed. How she had treated Crawford during the Mrs Jackson campaign was her terrible secret. Perhaps it had not been so bad. Yet if she had kicked Crawford with pointless cruelty just for being a cat, her Dad would have been livid. She didn’t think it fair.
Mark and Eleanor eyed each other, as if a long held enmity was now being laid bare before Eleanor obediently trudged on up the stairs to the playroom.
In the days that followed Eleanor slunk about feeling like an unwanted guest, pausing outside rooms, loitering on the landings, always retreating to the playroom. At meals she chewed dainty mouthfuls ten times, persisting though no one praised her as they had Alice. The Alice-Head hovered, invisible to the others, demanding Eleanor saw through its eyes. Eleanor became ruthlessly tidy and forced to ignore fanciful possibilities, her life shrank to a tedium. Alice had made Eleanor a fugitive in her own home.
Later that Wednesday Eleanor had succeeded in sneaking into the sitting room, and was building a tower with playing cards in the corner while her parents fluttered restlessly about the room. Her mother held a book, but wasn’t reading it, while Mark had given up on the newspaper, saying that since the Kennedy shooting it was full of old news, and was pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace. Eleanor, who had been keeping quiet in the hope they would fail to notice her, was startled into attention when he blurted out to Isabel how absurd it was that one child got so much attention when there had been an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. Isabel said it was an awful thing to happen twice, and that if the Senator died there would be no hope for America. She mumbled something about Alice going missing being the last straw and looked so upset that Eleanor did not like to ask how the Senator could die twice. She reconsidered her hide and seek rule of having three lives. Maybe two would do.
‘The world is falling apart and they are wasting their time on this.’ Mark drew the curtain to cut out the view of the gates, where a straggle of journalists had been camped since the previous evening when news of Alice’s disappearance became public.
‘What’s the matter, worried because Kennedy’s your twin so you’ll lose half your self? I thought you weren’t superstitious.’ Isabel sneered.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Eleanor meant to keep quiet to avoid annoyance, but she couldn’t resist speaking. Until now she had only known about her Dad’s younger sister, she didn’t know he had a twin brother, let alone one that had been shot. No wonder he was so cross.
‘What twin? Is he your brother, this Senator?’
‘Now look what you’ve done.’ Mark rounded on his wife.
‘She doesn’t understand.’ Isabel always took the time to explain things when it was to make a point to Mark and she turned to Eleanor now with exaggerated patience: ‘Robert Kennedy, this man who has been shot, is exactly the same age as Mark. It’s always given him a power complex. Except today it’s given him a headache!’ She laughed and rubbed her face. No one was meant to find anything funny since Alice had gone.
Eleanor was grateful for being noticed so she nodded sagely.
‘It’s a damned sight more important than a girl going AWOL.’ Addressing the gap in the curtain, Mark added: ‘She’s missing. Until they find her, what more is there to say? I’m being practical. We hardly even knew her so why don’t they leave us alone?’
‘You know why.’ To Eleanor’s alarm, her Mum had started crying and she spluttered in horrible jerking sobs. ‘What if one of your children disappeared off the face of the earth?’ Isabel shifted around so she could see Mark, who was now standing behind her, and kicked over the Bagatelle board that Eleanor had left propped against the sofa. It fell with a crash spilling ball bearings all over the floorboards. Isabel carried on:
‘Her parents don’t have any other children. It’s over for them if Alice isn’t found. I feel for her poor mother.’ She fished up her cardigan sleeve for a tissue and blew her nose loudly at Mark Ramsay’s implacable back, the material tightening around his bottom as he shuffled change in his trouser pockets.
Eleanor was anxious to stop her mother crying – her Dad hated crying – so she asked why ‘it was over for them’? He scowled at Eleanor as she scuttled around the room retrieving ball bearings.