Three Things About Elsie Read online

  I could hear the girl filling the kettle and rummaging around in a drawer.

  ‘Put everything back where you found it,’ I shouted. ‘I know where it’s all supposed to be.’

  I heard her open the fridge.

  ‘There’s three quarters of a pint left in there.’ I could hear my voice tremble, even though where it came from felt firm. ‘And don’t think I don’t know it.’

  The refrigerator door didn’t close.

  ‘And shut the door properly,’ I said. ‘Or we’ll have an operation on our hands.’

  The door still didn’t close, and after a few minutes, the girl walked back into the sitting room.

  ‘Is this your book, Miss Claybourne?’ she said very quietly.

  I took it from her. It felt cold.

  I made them change the locks. There was such a performance. They were two hours trying to talk me out of it, but I wouldn’t be budged.

  I just said, ‘Security,’ when they asked why. I didn’t mention Ronnie, but only because Elsie spent the whole morning explaining to me why I shouldn’t.

  ‘I’m as frightened as you are,’ she said, ‘but I’m also frightened he’s going to get us sent to Greenbank. One of us has got to stay calm.’

  ‘You don’t care. You don’t care what he’s doing.’ I must have pulled the cushions off the settee, because when I looked, they were all across the floor. ‘No one ever cares about me,’ I said.

  ‘It was my sister, remember? It was my sister, not yours.’

  Elsie shouted. Elsie never shouts. I stopped worrying about the cushions and looked at her instead, and then I began to shake. When she held me, I felt smaller somehow. As though all her kindness made me shrink.

  ‘Let’s just leave, Elsie,’ I whispered into her cardigan. It smelled of wool and reassurance. ‘Let’s go. Let’s go somewhere he’ll never find us.’

  We stood together, and our beige life slotted around us. It was a holding place. A waiting room. ‘Where would we go, Florence?’ she said. ‘We have nowhere to run to.’

  ‘Then what are we going to do?’ It was me who shouted then, but the room was so small, there was nowhere for the shouting to go.

  She stepped back, and took hold of my shoulders. ‘We’re going to do what we have always done, and we are going to stand firm,’ she said. ‘Don’t let him win. It’s a game.’

  ‘I’m not sure I even know how to play.’

  Her grip tightened, until she held the very bones of me. ‘Don’t let him know you’re afraid. Don’t give him the satisfaction.’

  ‘But I am,’ I said. ‘And I don’t care who knows it.’

  She looked right into my eyes. ‘Why do you think he’s doing this to you, Florence? What happened that you’re not telling me?’

  I started to answer, but the words fell into a thought, and disappeared.

  Jack arrived, and all of us waited together for the locksmith. When Jack was in the room, it seemed to help, even if he didn’t say a word. He drew the curtains and switched on the lamp, and he put a cup of tea on the table next to me. Every so often, he looked over and reminded me to drink it.

  ‘They’ll be here soon,’ he said. ‘The locksmiths. We won’t have to wait long.’

  ‘I wish we could all be as calm as you, Jack,’ Elsie said.

  I looked over at him. ‘It must be the army. Old soldiers are always unflustered.’

  He looked back. ‘I expect so. Although I had my moments.’

  ‘At least you returned,’ I said.

  ‘I almost didn’t.’

  We both heard the full stop.

  ‘You could see it at the town-hall dance,’ I said. ‘All the missing men. We used to have to partner each other, me and Elsie.’

  Elsie looked over at me. It was true. Like Elsie’s father, young men were disappeared by the war, and instead of choosing between a foxtrot and a tango, they were carved into cool stone in a park memorial, and serenaded by the music of other people’s lives. I wondered how many stopped to read their names.

  We walked through the park one day, Elsie and I. It was not long after the war, and we stood in front of the memorial in a faded light. ‘Do you think they felt brave?’ I said.

  ‘Bravery means you have a choice, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘It means you could have turned away but you chose not to.’

  I looked at the names. There were so many, we had to lift our heads to see the people at the top.

  ‘I don’t think any of these men had a choice,’ she said.

  ‘No.’ I read their ages as I spoke. ‘I don’t think they did either.’

  ‘Brave is just a word we use about them to make ourselves feel better,’ she said.

  There were holes in everyone’s lives after the war. There were gaps in the landscape long after it had ended, gaps where young men should have been. We did our best to close the gaps, to rearrange ourselves and shuffle along, and become different people, but the space stretched beside us as a constant reminder. It was never more obvious than on a Saturday night. A town hall filled with women, dancing amongst themselves, searching for a mend-and-make-do partner in a world everyone was trying to adjust to. They didn’t realise in old age they would mirror their younger selves, and waltz out their lives together again, thieved of their husbands, and searching once more to make sense of it all.

  ‘You used to dance?’ said Jack.

  ‘We did,’ I said. ‘Elsie liked the foxtrot, but I preferred the tango. You know where you are with a tango. Foxtrots can end up all over the place.’

  ‘That’s half the fun.’ Elsie sat back, and sunlight from the window marched on to her face and found all the wrinkles. ‘Although you wouldn’t always dance with me. Sometimes, you refused point blank.’

  Jack tapped his stick on the carpet. ‘I used to do a mean foxtrot,’ he said, ‘before this got in the way.’

  ‘It’s important, to know when to sit a dance out,’ I said.

  The locksmith arrived. Elsie said I asked him too many questions. Jack made another cup of tea and tried to draw me away. I knew what he was up to. I’m not daft. There were things I needed to know, though. Where the locks come from, how many keys there were, and if the locksmith people kept a copy. The locksmith stopped answering after a while, and when he drank his tea, he stared at the same page in the newspaper without ever moving his eyes.

  ‘I wasn’t overly fond of him,’ I said, as soon as the front door closed.

  Jack watched the man make his way down the steps. ‘He had all the right paperwork. I checked.’

  ‘He’ll hear you!’ Elsie said.

  ‘I don’t much care if he does,’ I said. ‘And he’s made a mess of the carpet.’

  He hadn’t, but I couldn’t think of anything else to pick on. Jack gave it a brush anyway, and started a conversation about how there are no craftsmen left in the world any more, so at least we all had something to agree with.

  The three of us sat back down and watched the key, which waited in the middle of the dining table, not realising the huge amount of trouble it had caused.

  Miss Ambrose arrived at a quarter to. She peered at the new lock for a good few minutes before she spoke.

  ‘Are you happy now?’ she said. ‘All this effort to convince you, when no one is actually getting into your flat in the first place.’

  I didn’t shift my eyes from the radiator.

  ‘This isn’t helping your case, you know. I hope this will be an end to it?’

  The words curved into a question, but I decided not to reply, and Jack just stared at his hands.

  Miss Ambrose left, and I looked up from the radiator just as the door clicked shut.

  ‘It won’t make any bloody difference,’ I shouted.

  Elsie pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes.

  ‘You know what he’s like,’ I said. ‘When he was younger, he could pick a lock and get in anywhere he wanted to. He had a talent for it. Failing that, he’ll just get a copy made. Of the new key.’
r />   ‘And how is he going to manage that?’ Elsie said, without shifting her hands. ‘He can’t magic one up from thin air.’

  ‘Miss Ambrose keeps them all in her office. In a little tin cupboard on the wall,’ I said.

  Jack frowned. ‘She does?’

  ‘Next to the filing cabinets.’

  He sat forward. ‘What’s in the filing cabinets?’

  ‘Us,’ I said.

  We were sitting in the day room, eyeing up Miss Ambrose’s office.

  ‘I’ve never been a criminal before,’ I said.

  Elsie glanced over. ‘Try to sit normally, Florence.’

  ‘I am sitting normally.’

  I knew I wasn’t. I sat on the very edge of my seat, and when I looked down at my hands, my knuckles were bone white. I could hear the rain, hammering against the French windows, asking to be let in. It was the kind of rain that joins everything together and makes it difficult to see a way out.

  ‘Perhaps she’ll be in there all day,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we won’t get a chance.’

  I straightened one of the cushions and looked back towards the office. Miss Ambrose sat at her desk, and she studied the wall in front of her, as though the answer to all of life’s problems lay within its plaster.

  ‘She has to move at some point,’ Elsie said. ‘Everyone does.’

  The day room was empty, apart from Mrs Honeyman, who was dozing off against the trelliswork where Miss Ambrose was attempting to grow ivy up the walls. No one really knew why this was, except Miss Ambrose. Jack waited on the seat by the noticeboard, and we all looked at a television screen without watching. It was a gardening programme. Someone was standing on a patio in clean wellington boots, explaining how to plant seeds.

  Jack pointed at the screen with his walking stick. ‘At our age, it’s an act of optimism, planting seeds.’

  I went back to whitening my knuckles.

  ‘It’ll go off in a minute,’ Elsie said. ‘It’s antiques next. What’s It Worth? Everyone likes antiques.’

  ‘Perhaps if I was a roll-top table, I might get more visitors,’ I said, and everyone stared.

  Even Mrs Honeyman.

  MISS AMBROSE

  Anthea Ambrose peered out into the day room. General Jack was laying down the foundations of an opinion, and Florence Claybourne had spent the last twenty minutes staring at her. Now Jack was joining in, turning in his chair and frowning.

  Miss Ambrose took out her notebook. She was writing down things of her own, because she wasn’t convinced Handy Simon was to be relied upon. Plus, it wasn’t something you could necessarily put down in words. Words were not always adequate. This was more of a feeling. A sense that things were not quite as they should be, and it troubled her.

  ‘I wonder if I might trouble you?’

  A voice sent the pencil flying from her hand, and she scrambled around on the floor to retrieve it.

  ‘Mr Price. Not a problem. What can I do for you?’

  Gabriel Price didn’t reply until she had found the pencil, repositioned herself on the seat, and brushed a stray piece of hair from her top lip.

  ‘It’s a delicate matter, I’m afraid.’ He glanced into the day room through the chequered glass. ‘May I speak with you privately?’

  She hesitated for a moment and said, ‘Of course,’ and he reached back to close the office door.

  Miss Ambrose felt the day room disappear. It was strange how just a click sent everyone else an ocean away, rather than just the other side of a pane of glass. The television threw out images of antique furniture, Mrs Honeyman still dozed in the corner, and Jack waved his walking stick around at no one in particular. Even the rain had stopped, and the silence made it seem as if the world was a very elaborate play, written and performed for her entertainment, and yet one in which she was only ever going to be part of the audience.

  ‘Miss Ambrose?’

  ‘Sorry, I drifted off for a moment. What were you saying?’

  ‘The tall woman.’ He nodded at the day room. ‘You must excuse me, I’ve not quite got to grips with everyone’s names yet.’

  ‘Miss Claybourne?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, that would be the one.’ He checked the door again. ‘The thing is, I think she might be having a few problems.’

  ‘Problems?’

  ‘With the old upstairs.’ He tapped a finger against his temple. ‘Short on the marbles.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  He sighed and put his hands on the desk. ‘I think she might be getting a bit confused.’

  ‘Really?’ Miss Ambrose looked over at her notebook. ‘Whatever gives you that idea?’

  ‘You know I’m not one to complain.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But she’s been – how can I put this nicely – spying on people.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Me, actually,’ he said. ‘With binoculars.’

  Miss Ambrose sat back.

  ‘I wasn’t going to mention it. I don’t want to get Florence into trouble, and I’ve got no objection to being spied upon.’ He laughed, but Miss Ambrose had noticed that laughter never quite climbed as far as his eyes. ‘But I thought I’d better say something. Vulnerable, the elderly, aren’t they? When they get to that stage?’

  ‘They certainly are.’ Miss Ambrose frowned.

  ‘I’ll leave it with you,’ he said.

  She expected him to go, but he didn’t. Instead, he stood, just for a moment, the not-quite-smile resting on his mouth, the not-quite-stare held in his eyes. Eventually, the door unclicked and he disappeared, and Miss Ambrose found that she could breathe again.

  She needed to think, but any thoughts she had were eaten away by the tap of Jack’s walking stick and Mrs Honeyman’s snoring, and the sound of Florence Claybourne making one of her points, and so she took her notepad and her pencil, and a lipstick for good measure, and decided to go for a walk.

  FLORENCE

  ‘She’s off,’ I said.

  Elsie watched Miss Ambrose’s retreating back. ‘So she is.’

  Jack took up his position in the corridor.

  Miss Ambrose’s office reminded me of a jumble sale. Everything was on display. Drawers not quite closed, cupboards slightly ajar, all her belongings spread out on the desk like a shop counter.

  ‘Wherever do we start?’ I picked up a stapler, and its jaw hung open to reveal a set of silver teeth.

  ‘I wonder how she manages to work,’ Elsie said. ‘You’d think she’d be too distracted.’

  I examined a collection of pen tops and paperclips, which leaked from a plastic box at the corner of her desk. ‘Perhaps it represents her mind?’

  ‘Busy?’

  ‘A bloody mess,’ I said, and Elsie laughed.

  Through the glass, I could see the top of Jack’s cap wandering up and down the corridor. Elsie saw it too. ‘Let’s get a move on,’ she said.

  We searched. Strangely, it is more difficult to search in a place that’s disorganised, because you can never quite be sure how familiar someone is with their own particular mess. It might be very personal, exactly where on the floor litter has fallen and how many inches a drawer lies open. We had to work carefully, but despite our best efforts, all we found were half a dozen Sainsbury’s receipts and last year’s staff Christmas card.

  ‘Doesn’t Miss Bissell look lovely?’ I said. ‘She really suits an elf costume.’

  ‘Don’t get distracted, Florence. Try to concentrate.’

  ‘It’s just a shame she’s not smiling.’

  ‘Florence! We’re supposed to be looking for evidence, remember? Something we can use to stop them sending you away. We’re running out of time.’

  I put down the Christmas card. ‘Those are the filing cabinets I meant.’ I looked over at the far wall. ‘There’ll be something in there.’

  The filing cabinets were in the corner of the room. Giant silver monsters. The kind of filing cabinet no one owns any more, with drawers you are only allowed to open one at a t
ime, for fear of the entire thing crashing down and murdering an innocent bystander.

  And they were locked.

  ‘All the best drawers are,’ I said, because I knew she didn’t have time to question me. We studied the room instead. There were so many hiding places for a key, the thought of looking for one was paralysing.

  ‘Imagine you’re Miss Ambrose,’ Elsie said. ‘What would you do?’

  I looked around. ‘I’d probably tidy up a bit.’

  Elsie put her hands to her face. ‘With the key,’ she said.

  ‘The key?’ I had to wait for my eyes to remember and then I said, ‘It could be anywhere.’

  ‘It’ll be stuck underneath the desk with a bit of Blu Tack.’ Jack appeared in the doorway.

  I felt underneath the desktop.

  Elsie lifted her eyebrows. ‘How did you know that?’ she said.

  ‘War makes a man of you.’ He winked at us both.

  Elsie took the key over to the filing cabinet. ‘Let’s just see if it fits.’

  It did. The first drawer groaned on its runners, as though we had woken it from a heavy sleep, and there we all were in our manila folders, rows of silent people with silent pasts, waiting to be listened to.

  ‘Shall we read about ourselves?’ I reached into the C tab and pulled myself out.

  ‘No we will not.’ Elsie put me back inside again. ‘We’re not going to read about anyone other than him, not even ourselves. You know everything there is to know about yourself; you don’t need to go reading about it.’

  ‘I thought it might be nice to be reminded,’ I said.

  I closed the top drawer and pulled out the second one. I reached in. ‘P, Price, Gabriel.’

  We began to read.

  ‘Ninety-seven?’

  We didn’t get further than ‘date of birth’.

  ‘Isn’t Ronnie the same age Beryl would have been?’ I said.

  It was the unexpectedness of it, I suppose, but Elsie’s eyes reddened at the sound of her sister’s name. People need to be spoken about, I think. Their names need to be brought into conversations and mentioned in passing. Sometimes, a name is the only thing we can leave behind, and if people are afraid to use it, to hear it spoken out loud, we eventually fade away and become lost forever, just because no one ever talks about us any more.