Free A Kind of Vanishing by Lesley Thomson Page A

relented and commissioned a craftsman. He told no one that the work was not his own, but was given away by an obsessive commitment to administrative order. He had filed the invoice and Eleanor found it after his death. This was proof to her that Henry Ramsay wasn’t the great man Mark insisted he was. The Judge had lied. Isabel’s dislike of the Judge dated from before she met him, in jealous response to Mark’s uncritical devotion to ‘Henry’, which seemed far stronger than for herself. She rationalised her emotions into principle and on their visits to Charbury she would rashly engage the Judge in fierce arguments about capital punishment until Mark ushered her away. However, Mark assured Isabel she had misjudged the Judge. Mark explained to his family that the invoice had been the Judge’s clue.
    Judge Ramsay left the White House and its replica to his son on his death. The Judge had used the White House as a country retreat for weekends and holidays. It was after the sudden death of his wife that he began work on the doll’s house. He told himself he was granting Rosamund her dying wish that he take good care of the children, but he knew he was building the house for his own reasons. Had she known of this promise, his daughter would not have considered it fulfilled.
    Virginia Ramsay was astonished that her brother had forgotten the stolid meals round the dining table, the compulsory evening recitals of poems, the tiptoed silence that enabled the Judge to work in his study and his fury if one of them mentioned their dead mother. Once she was old enough to leave home, Virginia shunned all opportunities to return to the White House and only came back when she was old and could be sure that everything would be different.
    Mark exorcised his father by whipping up a hectic family life involving dizzying sessions of charades, Scrabble, Monopoly, and Racing Demon, and long striding walks along the coast towards Brighton or up into the South Downs. He hated it when Isabel had a headache and the children had to be quiet, sneaking around like prisoners, careful not to slam doors, for then his childhood returned as if it had never gone away.
    Mark Ramsay did not impose his father’s numbing laws of ‘playing with the house’ on his own children. Perhaps he unconsciously hoped it would disintegrate through hours of hectic attention. It did not. The outside grew as weathered as the original, paint peeled and the plasterwork under the eaves chipped and powdered, as each child made it their own.
    At first Eleanor could only touch the house under Gina’s stern direction, occasionally being ordered to move a doll or a chair. She was never allowed to do any of the dolls’ voices, because Gina said she got them wrong. Now Gina, like her Aunt Ginny before her, thought the doll’s house stupid, and spent most of her time at the stables, or sticking horse posters up around her room and reading books in which horses featured heavily. Eleanor was frightened of horses, a secret only Gina knew, but had so far not made use of. So only a few months before meeting Alice, Eleanor became sole custodian of the doll’s house. She had taken possession with a flourish, installing her Matchbox cars in the bedrooms and initially interring the dolls in a shoebox, although she did later exhume them and give them minor parts.
    The furniture had been copied from furniture still in the big house. The long green velvet sofa and rickety rocking chair were identical to ones in the living room. Only the table and chairs in the kitchen were from a shop, the originals lost or broken, even the tiny plates and cups were exact versions of the crockery piled in teetering towers in the church-like wooden unit in the kitchen.
    Out of her Box of Secrets came postage stamp pictures of Crawford and pencilled family faces split by joyful laughter. Singing and chatting to herself, Eleanor hung them from threads of cotton in all the rooms.
    Minute bedspreads had been