Three Things About Elsie Read online

  When I went to pay, the man had taken his earphones out, but he still shouted, ‘One pound seventy-four pence.’ I shouted, ‘Thank you,’ back again. I was putting the change in my purse when I said, ‘Would you like me to go round and give everything the once-over?’ He stared at me.

  ‘Would you like me to give the shelves a clean?’ I said.

  ‘We have a cleaner, thank you.’

  ‘You don’t have to pay me,’ I said. ‘I’m free now, as luck would have it. I could soon get started.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he said.

  I was about to point out a few things to him, and explain how necessary it actually was, when the girl with the plait came in. She wasn’t wearing her uniform, but she was wrapped into a scarf and wearing a coat that was at least two sizes too big for her.

  ‘Are you looking for me?’ I said.

  She frowned and shook her head, and put three bars of chocolate on the counter.

  ‘Hungry?’ said the man. He didn’t shout this time.

  ‘I just fancied something sweet,’ she said.

  I smiled at her. ‘I’ve just bought a lovely Battenberg. Why don’t you come over. I could put the kettle on. Cut you a slice?’

  She looked at me over the scarf. ‘No thank you, Miss Claybourne,’ she said.

  ‘You’d better hurry,’ I said, ‘before it all goes.’ I gave a little laugh, but she didn’t answer.

  I waited a bit, but they started talking about something they both watch on the television, and I couldn’t really join in, so I left them to it. I took the long way around the courtyards. I sat on one of the benches for a while, and looked up at the windows of my flat. I’d left the lights on, but you still couldn’t really see much from the outside, even when you stood and craned your neck. I was going to go up there, but then I thought I should call in at the residents’ lounge. Check the noticeboard. I hadn’t looked at it since I’d had my hair done, and they might have pinned up something important.

  When I walked in, Jack was laughing at some television programme he had on at full volume, and Elsie was sitting in the corner and watching the birds through the French windows. I went over to the noticeboard, although nothing had changed, but neither of them spotted me. They wouldn’t have seen me at all if I hadn’t gone to the coffee table to find a magazine I wanted to take home.

  ‘Florence!’ Jack shouted over all the canned laughter. ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’

  I didn’t bother looking up. ‘I’ve had my hair done.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ he said. ‘Of course you have. Very fetching.’

  ‘I just wanted a magazine. I’ve got lots to do, I need to be on my way.’

  ‘Why don’t you take your coat off? Stay here a bit?’ he said.

  ‘No, you’re busy.’ I nodded at the television.

  I’d got as far as the door when he shouted to me. ‘Florence,’ he said. ‘You’ve forgotten your magazine.’

  When I went back, he reached for the remote control and turned off the television programme. ‘Do me a favour and keep me company for a bit?’

  ‘I thought you were watching that,’ I said.

  ‘Only until someone better came along.’ He pointed to the other armchair.

  Elsie shouted from the corner, ‘For heaven’s sake sit down, you’re making the room look untidy.’ And she shook her head and laughed.

  ‘Just for a bit then,’ I said. ‘But I can’t stay for many minutes.’

  I told them both as I was taking my coat off.

  ‘He found out where I was,’ I said, as I pulled at one of the sleeves. ‘He researched me.’

  ‘He was probably just talking about tracing his family tree.’ Elsie looked at me over the top of a cup. ‘It’s easy to get the wrong end of the stick in a hairdressers. All those strong smells and running water.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he came looking. He wanted to find me.’

  ‘And why would he want to do that?’ Jack said.

  I thought I saw Elsie shake her head very slightly.

  ‘Because of what happened,’ I said. ‘Because of what happened to Beryl.’

  Elsie was definitely shaking her head now, but I decided I wasn’t forced to take any notice.

  Elsie says I can’t help myself. She says I’ve always been the same. She says my mouth runs away with me, and before anyone realises, I’ve said everything there is to say.

  ‘Some things are better left in the past,’ she says, ‘but all you want to do is dig them up again and show everybody.’

  ‘Beryl was Elsie’s sister,’ I said to Jack. ‘Something happened to her. Something terrible.’

  ‘Jack doesn’t want to hear about that,’ Elsie said. ‘Why don’t you tell him about the factory instead? We had some good times there, didn’t we? Despite everything?’

  ‘I never wanted to work in the factory,’ I said. ‘Neither of us did.’

  It was true. We didn’t. But sometimes life takes you along a path you only intended to glance down on your way to somewhere else, and when you look back, you realise the past wasn’t the straight line you thought it might be. If you’re lucky, you eventually move forward, but most of us cross from side to side, tripping up over our second thoughts as we walk through life. I never used to be like that. I always knew exactly what I wanted to be, even when I was a child.

  ‘Did Beryl work at the factory?’ Jack said.

  I shook my head. ‘Apparently we mustn’t talk about Beryl.’

  Jack frowned. ‘What about the factory, then? If you didn’t want to work there, what did you want to do?’

  ‘I wanted to be a scientist,’ I told him. ‘I wanted to make a difference with my life.’

  I did. The first time I announced it to the world, we were sitting at my kitchen table. The house smelled of warmth and pastry, and my dog, Seth, lay at our feet, his tail beating a tune into the carpet. Elsie said she sometimes borrowed my family, just to taste what it was like for a while. She said it was the only time she ever saw cutlery arranged around a placemat.

  ‘I’m going to invent something.’ I moved my schoolbooks from the path of a dessert spoon. ‘Something that will change the world.’

  ‘And what about you, Elsie?’ my mother said.

  Elsie reached down and stroked Seth’s head. ‘Beryl says we’ll both end up working at the factory, and I’m not sure you can really change the world from there.’

  ‘Beryl doesn’t know anything,’ I said. ‘Beryl talks too much.’

  It was true. Beryl did talk too much, and talking too much would eventually be her downfall, but of course none of us knew that then.

  ‘You can change the world from this kitchen table if you want to.’ My mother reached down into the dresser and lifted out an armful of dinner plates. ‘All you have to do is make wise decisions.’

  Jack is listening to the story. ‘She was right,’ he said. ‘Your mother was right.’

  My mother was always right. My mother looked like the kind of woman who had made wise decisions her entire life. Her hair was always pinned, her clothes always ironed. Whenever I walked through the front door, she would appear from a corner of the house, wiping her hands or carrying something interesting. It was as though she was a template for motherhood, cut from one of the dressmaking patterns Elsie’s sister always left on their dining-room table. I think a mother was all she’d ever wanted to be. Florence’s mother. It was how she always introduced herself to people, and it made me feel as though by being born, I’d accidentally swallowed up everything else she used to be.

  I turned to Jack. ‘I wanted us to go to university,’ I said. ‘I had it all planned, but Elsie wouldn’t come with me.’

  There was a softness at the edges of Jack’s voice. ‘She wouldn’t?’

  ‘It’s not that I didn’t want to,’ Elsie said. ‘You know how things were. You knew exactly why I couldn’t go.’

  We had sat on the lawn later that evening, watching Seth chase moths.
He could never quite manage to catch one, and so he barked at them in a temper fit instead. A lopsided bark. A sound filled with a strange sense of urgency that dogs always feel when no one else is able to. Not ready to give up on the summer, Elsie and I had wrapped ourselves up into cardigans and curled into abandoned deckchairs. The evenings had grown cold and inevitable, and I could feel the seasons turn in the air.

  I sat up straight in my deckchair. ‘How do you know you’re not the university type?’ I said. ‘We’re only fourteen. We don’t even know who we are yet.’

  In the far corners of the garden, an autumn evening had stolen away the light. We might only have been fourteen, but I knew Elsie had more than managed to discover herself already. In her mother. The violent rages. The way she refused to eat for days at a time. The way she had to be coaxed from her bed like a child. Elsie had discovered herself when she found her mother cleaning the house in the early hours of the morning, and when her mother gave away her father’s clothes, only to stand on doorsteps and beg them back a few hours later. In the way Elsie’s sisters, one by one, seemed to be escaping. Gwen was training to be a teacher. Beryl had started looking at wedding dresses without even the slightest hint of a man in her life, and Dot had moved to the Midlands and married an obnoxious little fool called Harold, who put all his energy into telling other people what they should be thinking. Elsie’s mother said she did it to spite them all.

  ‘There’s always a choice, isn’t there?’ I said. ‘Every situation has an alternative waiting for you by the side of it.’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ I said, ‘we can change everything, just with the small decisions we make?’

  She still didn’t reply. I knew for Elsie, looking into the future must have felt like re-reading a book she’d never very much enjoyed in the first place.

  ‘You never know what life has in store, do you?’ I said. Seth settled down between the deckchairs and looked up at us both.

  Elsie stared at the trees, where autumn rested on the branches, waiting for its turn. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you do.’

  My mother died the following January.

  ‘Lungs,’ Elsie’s mother said. ‘They run in your family.’

  I wanted to say that lungs ran in everyone’s families, along with kidneys and livers, and hearts, but after Elsie’s father was killed, her mother became strangely fixated with death. The more violent the end of someone’s life, the better. She once walked three miles in the pouring rain to stare at a tree where a motorcyclist had been decapitated. ‘It’s important,’ she said. ‘To look.’ At first, I couldn’t understand why she would want to do something so intensely morbid, but then I realised it was a comfort to her. She liked to remind herself that God hadn’t just singled her out for tragedy alone. It happened to other people, too. It somehow helped her to think we were all hurtling towards our destiny without having any choice in the matter. When I tried to explain it, Beryl said, ‘She needs her head read, if you ask me,’ without even looking up from her magazine. Elsie’s mother probably did need her head read, but no one ever managed it. There were so many stories in there, I doubt even she could find all the words.

  We started at the factory that summer.

  ‘It’s just temporary,’ I said, as I slid on to the chair next to Elsie’s. ‘Until my father gets back on his feet.’

  It was a chair I would sit on for the next forty years.

  ‘So neither of you went to university?’ said Jack.

  I shook my head. ‘We worked at the factory instead, for that horrible little man. The one who marched up and down, and shouted at everybody.’

  ‘Mr Beckett,’ Elsie said. ‘The supervisor.’

  ‘Mr Beckett. You don’t give me enough time to think. You rush me too much. I would have got there myself if I’d had a minute.’

  Elsie arched her eyebrow, but I chose to ignore it.

  Jack reached over for his tea. ‘What did you make at the factory?’

  I laughed. ‘Corsets.’ He laughed along with me. ‘They were all bones and panels,’ I said. ‘When you tried to sew one, it was like holding on to a hostage.’

  ‘You were very good,’ Elsie said. ‘Mr Beckett’s star pupil.’

  I looked across the lounge, and into the past. It was more useful than the present. There were times when the present felt so unimportant, so unnecessary. Just somewhere I had to dip into from time to time, out of politeness. When I came back, Jack was waiting for me. ‘There was a girl,’ I said. ‘Sat next to me and Elsie. She couldn’t get the hang of it at all. Shook every time she tried to thread a needle.’

  ‘You mean Clara?’ Elsie said.

  I nodded. ‘Said Beckett was just like her father. She was terrified of him.’

  ‘What happened to Clara?’ said Jack.

  I whispered, ‘She hanged herself.’

  ‘She did not!’ Elsie put down her cup, and it argued with its saucer. ‘Wherever has that come from?’

  I ignored her and turned to Jack. ‘Elsie’s mother said Clara was still swinging when they found her.’

  ‘No one hanged themselves.’ Elsie hadn’t got anything else to put down, so she raised her voice instead. ‘You’re getting all mixed up again. Why on earth would she do that?’

  ‘She was afraid,’ I said. ‘Mr Beckett used to bully her.’

  ‘Surely they did something about him, after that?’ said Jack.

  Elsie leaned forward and tried to find my eyes. ‘But you helped her, Florence. Don’t you remember? You taught her how to thread and how to stretch the corset. She got really good at it.’

  I stared at her. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You spent hours teaching her. She started coming to the dance with us on a Saturday night. Married the boy who worked in the fishmonger’s. Moved to Wales, I think.’

  I began to say something and swallowed it back.

  ‘Try to remember, Florence. The long second. What did you do with it?’

  ‘Take your time,’ Jack said. ‘Don’t worry about it. We all get in a muddle.’

  I turned over thoughts like a game of cards, trying to decide on the ones that matched. The coat still rested on my knees, and I felt the material twist between my fingers. After a while, I said, ‘I can’t find a memory I trust.’

  ‘I’ll bet you can.’ Jack reached for my hands. ‘Tell me something clear. Tell me something you’re absolutely sure of.’

  I stopped twisting the material, and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Ronnie Butler worked in the factory,’ I said.

  ‘When did you last see it?’

  It was the girl in the tangerine overall. Of all the pointless questions you could ask a person who has lost something, this has to be the one to win a prize.

  ‘If I knew that,’ I said, ‘I’d know where to find it, wouldn’t I?’

  She was an unusual-looking girl. Small eyes. Small ears. Wears a crucifix. Although if she’s ever seen the inside of a church, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs.

  ‘What does it look like?’ she said.

  ‘It’s a book.’ I closed my eyes. ‘It’s book shaped. It has words in it.’

  ‘But what colour is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Blue. Green, perhaps. I don’t remember. I don’t take any notice of the outside, it’s the inside I’m interested in.’

  ‘My mum says things are always where you least expect them to be,’ said the girl. ‘Why don’t we try looking there?’

  ‘The refrigerator, then? Or maybe the lavatory cistern?’

  The girl smiled. ‘Yes, exactly!’

  I closed my eyes again.

  The book should have been exactly where I left it. On the little table next to my armchair. Each night I leave it there when I go to bed, and each morning I pick it up from where I left it, and read until Elsie comes over.

  ‘You must have put it somewhere else last night.’ The girl poked around behind the cushions. ‘Perhaps you were a bit absen
t-minded.’

  ‘My mind isn’t absent,’ I said. ‘It’s very much present and correct, thank you. It’s just old.’

  The girl stood with her hands on her hips in the middle of the room. ‘Well, it’ll turn up,’ she said. ‘When you least expect it.’

  Which, I believe, means ‘I’m tired of looking.’

  ‘It’s not the first thing, either.’ I sat in the armchair whilst she unpacked her little basket of dusters. ‘Last week, a pint of milk vanished from the fridge – and I know it was there, because I’d only started it that morning – and the week before, I found the Radio Times underneath my pillow.’

  The girl didn’t say anything.

  ‘It was one of you, wasn’t it? It must have been. I’d rather you told me you’d done it, then I can stop worrying.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘If this carries on,’ I said, ‘I’m going to have to have a word with Miss Ambrose.’

  The girl carried on rubbing Pledge into the sideboard.

  ‘Or even Miss Bissell.’

  The girl’s duster became very still. ‘Why don’t we make you a nice pot of tea, Miss Claybourne, and we’ll have another look.’

  I knew the mention of Miss Bissell would rouse the troops. I have my routines. I read my Radio Times by the window, and my book in the armchair. I buy one pint of milk on a Monday, and it lasts me five days. I live my life around habits. When your days are small, routine is the only scaffolding that holds you together.