A man in a smart suit came over and interrupted and Elsie asked for the bill. She giggled when I’d put on my poshest voice to thank the man in the suit for my ‘delightful tea’.
‘Delightful,’ she teased as he walked away.
‘I panicked!’
Elsie paid and we left the room. Elsie went off to find where to book a taxi and I felt a bit sad to be leaving. There were big double doors opposite and a sign outside said, ‘LINE DRAWING: AN INTRODUCTORY CLASS’. A man in his twenties with shoulder-length hair appeared and suddenly he was ushering me inside and telling me which table to join.
Elsie appeared behind me and the man greeted her too, ‘Oh, wonderful! I really hoped there’d be more take up, so good of you to support us. It’s just a donation at the end, for repairs to the house, they’re fixing the roof again…’
‘Oh, we…’
I knew Elsie was trying to get us out of it and my mouth was wobbling, wanting to break out laughing. I also really wanted the day to keep going.
‘Come on, Ells, let’s learn how to draw,’ I said, giggling when she glared at me.
‘I haven’t drawn in years,’ she said, her eyes round.
‘It will return,’ the man told her, tucking his hair behind his ears, and I nodded, patting Elsie’s arm as I went and stood behind a table, all the materials laid out on the surface, pencils of every shape and size, a rubber, some paper.
‘Come on,’ I said, her expression making me laugh. I liked to draw and this would definitely be more fun than heading back to sit waiting for Mum to return from her shift. We still had no television and Elsie never watched it. I couldn’t imagine owning a TV and choosing not to turn it on. She could be so weird.
She moved to the table next door, looking really frightened now, holding her pencil the wrong way round. I gave her a thumbs up. The man was very keen and he moved around the room making encouraging noises at the things we were trying to draw.
‘Why don’t you draw me?’ I suggested to Elsie, who was still holding the pencil upside down and looking dumbly at the blank page in front of her. ‘You draw me and I’ll draw you,’ I said. ‘It’ll be fun.’
Picking up one of the pencils, I started to sketch, trying to get her straight grey hair right, the parting in the middle, the shape of the nose, the tiniest scar on the left side I’d never noticed. Her eyes, light blue looking at me desperately, still not sure where to begin.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Just make me better-looking,’ I suggested, giving her a stupid wide grin, which made her relax a little.
The man leapt across and started to help her, guiding her hand across the page, which started to make her blush. ‘Thank you,’ she said to him as he complimented her on the shape of my jawline. ‘You’ve captured his essence already,’ the man said, and Elsie went all twittery, flapping her hand in front of her face. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ she blushed.
‘Someone’s got a crush,’ I whispered as the man turned away to help the woman behind us.
‘Nonsense!’ Elsie said, eyes down on her page, her cheeks going pinker. ‘Now be quiet or I’ll give you an extra-large nose.’
The hour zipped past, Elsie seemed totally relaxed now. I learnt about shading, the man showing me how to use the different pencils, how to get the twinkle in Elsie’s eye.
‘I don’t twinkle,’ she twinkled, with the high voice again, the one that made me want to crease up.
Her own picture was pretty good. She’d spent a long time on my short hair, making the haircut look less worse than it was, and she’d done a good job of making it look a bit like me.
When I spun mine round to her I felt a small thrill at the look on her face. ‘Billy,’ she said, her voice filled with wonder, ‘that is really, really good, you have such a talent.’
Our teacher had clearly overheard and came over to inspect our work. I sat straighter in my chair as he bent over to study the pictures.
‘You have a careful hand,’ he said to Elsie, ‘and you listened when I explained the contouring in that section.’ He beamed. Elsie looked pleased, biting her lip as he stared at my picture.
‘Young man,’ he said, ‘this is excellent, she is quite right. You have captured the expression on her face perfectly and played with light in an extraordinary way. You should be impossibly proud of your efforts. Well done!’
It was my turn to blush. The man turned, called away to another part of the room.
‘Someone’s got a crush,’ Elsie whispered to me, leaning across her table to mine.
I couldn’t help the shout of laughter that made everyone turn our way.
Chapter Seventeen
ELSIE
This morning Elsie felt nervous. She and Billy had explored almost all the places on the map over the last few weeks and today they were headed somewhere that always reminded her of her mother, somewhere she hadn’t visited in almost thirty years.
Elsie walked down to see her mother early that morning, as she always did on a Friday, sometimes visiting on a birthday or anniversary, and sometimes when she felt unbearably alone and needed to talk. Walking past the shops, their ‘CLOSED’ signs hanging in the window, there were no pedestrians, only the occasional car inching by. The day would be warm, the sky a milky blue, the air still.
The graveyard was empty as Elsie moved under the lychgate framed with creepers, her fist tight on the pale pink flowers she had picked that morning, her bare feet on the dew of the lawn as she made her selection. Her mother’s favourites.
She replaced the old with the new, a small bottle of water used to top up the vase, a few large stones in the base so it remained standing even in the most adverse weather conditions.
‘Hello, Mother,’ she began softly.
She stood in front of the gravestone, the familiar dates a blur as a hundred memories flooded her. Remembering the day, aged thirty-four, when she had stood at this very spot watching her mother’s coffin lowered into the ground, surrounded by a handful of locals, heads bowed, Mr Porter giving her a sad nod as he caught her eye. She had watched as the first fistful of earth was thrown and more to follow. It hadn’t been a long illness, the cancer had already spread to her lymph nodes by the time they caught it. An elderly couple she didn’t recognise had been hovering by the lychgate and a card had been sent a few days later: her grandparents.
She knew now why she didn’t have holidays with her grandparents, why her mother had been estranged.
She never wrote back.
Elsie had been back here a hundred times, some days disbelieving – was she really gone? Re-reading the name of the stone over and over as if it might sink in: Rosa Maple. It had always been just the two of them and it seemed impossible her mother had left her alone in this way. She had been Elsie’s everything and Elsie had been her world.
Her mum’s belongings were still in her bedroom, her tri-mirror reflecting the combs and bottles on her dressing table. In the wardrobe were her dresses, full skirts, her blouses, her cardigans, kept in clothes bags, away from the moths that would eat away at them. Her queen-size bed was still made, the pink and grey quilt she so loved folded neatly over the foot of it.
Elsie still slept in the bedroom on the landing opposite, the smaller room, remembering the times her mother would sit propped up next to her in the small single bed and read fairy tales in the lamplight, Elsie snuggled into the crook of her arm, laughing as her softly-spoken, shy mother attempted all the voices. She knew she would never move. Those things were what was left and she wouldn’t ever let them go.
She left the graveyard, the high street a little busier: an elderly man and his dog; the lone customer in the small supermarket; the general store manager dragging the pots, spades, buckets of balls under their blue, striped awning; the butcher, Mr Porter, placing the chilled trays out on display, a hand raised as he saw her. Elsie nodded, giving him a small smile of acknowledgement.
The chemist was pretty empty, a man with a tartan, wheeled shopper rattling vitamin bottles. June stood behi
nd the counter, arms folded, watching him through narrowed eyes.
‘Elsie,’ she said, uncrossing them as Elsie approached, her eyes still on the man shaking the bottles. ‘They’re multivitamins,’ she called out and he hurriedly put them back. ‘People, Elsie, people!’
‘Um, yes, quite.’
‘As if I don’t have better things to do, Elsie, than rearrange the shelves…’
‘Right,’ Elsie said, thinking that sounded like a fundamental part of June’s job.
‘It takes me an age to get the labels all facing out. But do people appreciate it? No, Elsie, no, they don’t…’
She was about to launch into another complaint, the pharmacist busily moving up and down the shelves behind her.
‘I was hoping to see you,’ Elsie started.
June’s magenta lips puckered. ‘Me?’ She leant conspiratorially across the counter, a glance back at the pharmacist still busy checking the shelves. ‘Is it a female issue, Elsie? There’s a side room if you want privacy? And,’ she stepped back to indicate the shelves behind her, ‘we keep the creams for delicate areas on the bottom shel—’
‘No,’ Elsie interrupted, her face flaring with heat, the man with the tartan shopper approaching, clutching a bottle of vitamins. ‘No, nothing like that. It was, well, I saw a sign…’ she began and explained what she needed.
She eventually left, the man with the vitamins handing over his bottle to June with a frightened expression. Elsie felt a bubble of excitement at what she had begun, and a tiny surprise that June had been so amenable.
At home, she moved around, ticking her chalkboard, racing through her usual jobs, skipping others. They could wait. Then, once he was due to arrive, she dressed in cropped trousers and a loose-fitting top with a scalloped neckline. She had seen it in the window of the boutique of the high street and, on a whim, had purchased it. A little different from her normal clothes. Combing her hair, she stood back, staring at herself in the small mirror in her bedroom. ‘What do you think? Presentable?’ A knock on the door and she descended the stairs to answer it.
Billy appeared, in shorts and the familiar orange T-shirt. He wore about three on a loop; she really must take the boy shopping or work out how to get him some more new clothes without embarrassing him. She’d given him two tops the other day but he needed more. Perhaps she could ask Scarlet in the library to help her with some ‘online shopping’ – she had read an article that said lots of people were doing that.
‘I’ve packed a picnic,’ she said as he followed her into the kitchen, a small basket covered in a tea towel on the side.
‘Do you need to do anything before we go?’ Billy asked, used to her routines and timings, knowing she had a plan for her day. He asked it with a half-smile on his face.
‘No, Billy Greenwood, I am at your disposal.’
He frowned. ‘What does that mean?’
Elsie laughed. ‘It means we can leave. You carry the basket, I’ll take the rug.’
Billy hooked the basket over his arm and headed to the front door.
For a moment Elsie was taken over with panic. Perhaps she could make up some excuse? Perhaps they could picnic elsewhere? Perhaps…
Billy turned, interrupting her inner monologue.
‘Coming?’
Elsie took a breath and nodded, ‘I am.’
The hedgerows needing cutting, the grass on the verges spilling over the tarmac as they meandered down the lane, speckled with shadows from the trees above. Elsie stopped at the gap in the hedge, a small turnstile taking them through two fields. Billy offered her a hand as he hopped down on the other side.
‘I’m not that old,’ she said, laughing and joining him.
Billy shrugged. ‘Just being a gent, Mrs M,’ he said, whistling and strolling off. Her heart bloomed for this boy, the moments where he relaxed and joked with her revealing a confident young person.
‘And how are you getting on, Billy? At school, I mean? Have you made any new friends?’
Billy raised an eyebrow. ‘New?’
Elsie flushed; he really could get to the heart of things.
‘Nah, it’s alright,’ he said, batting a hand at her. ‘There’s a girl, Becky, she sort of smiles at me but I think she’s quite shy and all the girls move everywhere together, and I was paired up with Ben in maths last week and we got on because we both like video games and he said I should play his PlayStation with him, but then some of the other boys had a word and he hasn’t asked again…’
‘That’s a shame. Perhaps you could arrange to see him after school one day, away from the others.’
Billy shrugged, kicking the long grass. ‘Mum won’t let me get a mobile and they all talk to each other on them, which sucks.’
They burst through the trees, pine needles blanketing the ground, the air cooler in amongst the soaring trunks. Billy stared around at the blanket of purple. As far as the eye could see, the bluebells stretched into the distance, enormous clumps in between the trees so that the ground was awash with them. The scent was overpowering, her mother’s favourite perfume, and for a second Elsie’s head spun with it.
‘My mother,’ she tried to steady her voice, ‘my mother loved to visit the woods, do the bluebell walk. We would visit every year and she would lie in amongst them, delighting in their colour and smell.’
She was back there with her for a moment. Her mother, never usually one for theatrics, her laughter louder and brighter as she unfurled the blanket they’d sit on, ‘Isn’t it beautiful, my darling girl.’ She was brighter in this place.
‘There’s millions,’ Billy said, eyes stretched in wonder, walking alongside Elsie as she navigated long-forgotten paths, every so often glimpsing the fields through the trees, the working farm below, the lane hidden at the bottom of the valley as they climbed higher.
A grey squirrel scampered up a tree as they approached, the chatter of insects accompanied the sound of their footsteps as they moved. The day grew warmer and Elsie looked around for a shady spot, laying the tartan rug on the ground, instructing Billy to remove the things from the basket.
He took out two glass tumblers – ‘No wonder this thing weighed a ton’ – and set them on the rug next to the cans of ginger beer Elsie had bought the day before.
‘Pear squash?’
‘Not this time!’ Elsie laughed. ‘It’s ginger beer, like we are in an Enid Blyton book,’ she announced, pulling off the tab.
Billy looked at her blankly and Elsie laughed again. ‘Another book you haven’t read?’
He accepted the fizzy drink, adding, ‘Is this Windy Willows all over again? You’re still not over it?’
‘The Wind in the Willows,’ Elsie stressed, laughing. ‘It’s a classic, Billy.’
‘If you say so. I’m more into films.’
Elsie rolled her eyes in mock exasperation, and then remembered that first trip to the cinema. It had only been a few weeks ago but it seemed a lifetime; this boy had become such an important part of her week. The thought jolted her: what if something happened to him? She reached for her own glass, trying not to feel the panic, the worry of losing yet another person in her life.
Billy hadn’t noticed her serious expression, the shake of her hand as she poured the ginger beer.
‘So,’ Billy said, after polishing off his ham sandwiches, so full he hadn’t been able to finish his custard cream, ‘what next?’
‘What do you mean?’ Elsie asked, resting back on the palms of her hands, her head tilted towards the sky, the sun dappled on her face, the leaves a canopy above them.
‘Well, we’ve explored most of the map, apart from that house in that village, Goring.’ He pronounced it ‘Go Ring’.
‘Goring,’ Elsie corrected.
‘Yeah, Goring. We should go there…’
Elsie sat up straighter, the start of a pulse in her neck.
‘It’s like one of the only places outside the village on the map. Is it a museum or somewhere you went with your mum?’
; ‘I…’ Elsie licked her lips, tried to buy herself some time as she thought. ‘It’s nothing, it’s… No, we never…’ How could she explain she had never visited with her mother? How could she explain that she hadn’t known the importance of the place until that day all those years ago?
She thought back to that afternoon, her confusion as she stood outside the house, triple-checking its location on the map, her brow pulled together as the enormity of what she was seeing, what she was discovering, sunk in. She had left as quickly as she’d arrived, wandering back along the river in a daze, tears pricking her eyes, all the way down the Thames path, not taking in the sights – the river meandering, the swans, the boats idling – not noticing the rain as it had started to fall, bouncing on the surface of the water, wetting her hair, dripping down her collar. Not realising she had returned home until she was stood back in her kitchen, staring round at the familiar room, the house she had shared with her mother, knowing everything had irreversibly changed.
She remembered seeing the tin on the dresser, the bold red snapping her out of her catatonic state. She had dug the hole that night, the rain still falling, a light mist clinging to her skin, growing heavier as she raked at the soil with her bare hands.
She had lowered the tin into the damp soil, needing to see it gone but unable to throw it away. Under the ground it had gone, deep, but she fetched one thing from it first, the sheet of paper that had caused her to head out that morning, placing it in the waistband of her trousers. She had pushed the soil over the tin until the red had disappeared completely, smoothing and patting as she cried so many tears: confused, frightened, angry.
No one had seen her in the darkness, knelt in the mud, weeping as she buried that tin forever, not realising then that it would be found twenty-eight years later when Billy would uncover it, lift it out and threaten to expose her biggest secret.
‘…Mum’s working Saturday again, we could head there then?’ Billy was still talking as Elsie was lost, back there in the dark, in the cold, alone. ‘Mrs M? Elsie?’ he nudged her.
The Garden of Lost Memories Page 12