‘Very powerful organ, the brain. Renews itself every twenty-eight days.’
‘I thought that was skin?’ Jack said.
‘But the brain controls the skin.’ Cyril nodded in agreement with himself. ‘It controls everything, so if you can fool the brain, Bob’s your uncle.’
‘Everything slows down as we age, though,’ I said. ‘Your brain more than anything.’
‘Not mine. Faster than it’s ever been. I get up to more now than I did sixty years ago. I’ve got my allotment and my computer class, and I’m learning the trumpet. Stacks of sheet music I’ve got in there.’ He pointed back at the boat with his thumb. ‘Hours I spend practising.’
I gave the other boats a small nod of sympathy.
‘To say nothing of my enactments. Battle of Edgehill on Saturday, if you fancy it?’
We all found excuses in the backs of our throats.
‘Everyone ages, Cyril. Look at us.’ Jack used his most reasonable voice. ‘We’re like different people.’
‘On the outside, maybe. But on the inside, I’m the same person I was sixty years ago.’ He jabbed at his chest, to show us where his insides were. ‘It’s just the packaging that’s changed.’
Jack shifted in his seat and glanced over at us. ‘What kind of person were you sixty years ago then, Cyril?’
Cyril smiled and folded his arms. ‘I was the life and soul, wasn’t I? Very popular, me. Couldn’t walk down a street without being stopped by someone.’
I tried to smile back, but I couldn’t quite wring it out.
‘Had my pick of the ladies. They couldn’t get enough. Spoiled for choice, I was. Like a selection box.’
‘So who did you decide on in the end?’ Jack said.
‘My Eileen, God rest her soul.’ He crossed himself. ‘Was Everest. You must remember her?’
I felt my mind begin to fidget.
I started to speak and looked at Elsie, but in the end I just said, ‘I’ll tell you later.’
‘Fifty-five years we were married. Never a cross word. Died in her sleep, she did. I just woke up one morning, and she’d left.’ Cyril licked his thumb and rubbed at a stain on the side of his mug. ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you, after all that time, you’d be given a chance to say goodbye.’
I’m not sure if it was because the sun disappeared behind a cloud, but Cyril looked older in those few moments. More fragile. You can see the fracture lines in people sometimes, if you search hard enough. You can see where they’ve broken and tried to mend themselves.
‘My wife died of cancer,’ said Jack. ‘I think going in your sleep is a blessing.’
‘For them, maybe. I’ll be seeing you, Cyril. That’s the last thing she ever said to me. I wish there was some kind of sign to tell you it’s the last conversation you’ll ever have with someone. “This’ll be your lot, mate, so make it a good one.”’
We sat in silence, listening to the drift of the boats, and the soft call of a pigeon as it waited for its mate at the water’s edge.
‘Do you hear of anyone else,’ Jack said eventually, ‘from the dance?’
‘Living it up in the cemetery, most of them. Or else stored away in sheltered accommodation.’ He glanced up at us. ‘No offence, like.’
‘None taken,’ I said. ‘So you’ve lost touch with everyone?’
‘I hear of a few. The twins moved down Surrey way. Or it might have been Kent. Somewhere far-fetched. Mabel Fogg lives with her granddaughter and an army of kids. Spends all her time watching cartoons and mopping up Weetabix.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Not my idea of fun.’
‘We should count our blessings, though. Some of us didn’t make it.’ I tiptoed the words towards him. ‘Look at Ronnie Butler.’
‘Some of us didn’t deserve to make it,’ he said. ‘Nasty business. Although I smelled a rat right from the start.’
I sat up a little straighter. ‘You did?’
‘He wound so many people up in his time, they would have formed a queue to push him in. And I would have been at the bloody front.’
‘He just fell, Cyril. The police decided in the end. He was a drunk.’ My throat was so dry, I felt the words try to fasten themselves to the sides. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’
‘I saw him on the night of the accident, you know. Talking to whatshername. The girl who died.’
I looked at Elsie.
‘Beryl,’ I said. ‘I think you mean Beryl.’
‘That’s it. Beryl. Nice girl. Talked too much, but then most of them do, don’t they?’
Jack coughed.
‘Outside the town hall, they were. Arguing hammer and tongs. I told the police, but no one’s ever interested in what I’ve got to say.’
‘What happened then?’ said Jack.
‘You tell me.’ Cyril folded his arms. ‘Next thing I heard, they’d found her at the side of the road. Hit and run. Question is, who hit and who ran? No one ever found out, but I know who my money’s on.’ His whole body was rigid, to match his opinion.
I looked at Elsie. Her expression hadn’t changed, but her eyes blinked away at all her thoughts.
‘The police must have been suspicious,’ said Jack. ‘What did they have to say?’
‘They kept us in that draughty police station for ruddy hours, asking questions. You must remember that, Florence?’ Cyril shook his head. ‘Frozen to death, I was. Didn’t even have a coat with me.’
It was there. The memory. I felt it, before I even knew it had arrived.
‘I remember!’ I said. ‘There was a frost. When I walked out of the dance, I made clouds of breath with my words, even with a scarf on. All that talking. Afterwards, I was worried she was cold, lying there in the grass all by herself. Waiting to be found.’
Cyril sniffed. ‘Proper state she was, by all accounts. The woman who found her said—’
‘Ronnie’s car!’ I could hear myself shouting. ‘I remember it driving out of the town-hall car park. I remember him leaving.’
‘Of course it was Ronnie.’ Cyril dragged air between his teeth. ‘We all knew that. It’s just that no one could prove it.’
‘Not even the police?’ said Jack.
Cyril found more air to drag. ‘There were no forensic whatnots then. You should know. All a policeman had was a notebook and a sense of duty.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ Elsie said. ‘A different life.’
I felt a memory shift in the corner of my head.
‘Was there someone else in Ronnie’s car that night?’ I said. ‘There was, wasn’t there?’
I’d found it. The memory. I opened a drawer and saw all the contents and wondered if I should close it again.
Cyril squinted in the September sunshine as it tripped across the canal. ‘Of course there was,’ he said. ‘We all knew that.’
‘Who was it, Cyril?’ I said.
The question waited in the air.
I realised I was holding my breath.
‘We don’t know, do we? No one ever came forward.’
‘But what do you think?’ said Jack.
Cyril picked at a back tooth.
‘What I think doesn’t really matter, does it? Not after all this time. I said my piece then and no one listened.’
‘We’re listening now,’ said Jack.
Cyril sat back in the deckchair. ‘I’d nipped outside,’ he said. ‘Bit of fresh air. As you do. I saw them arguing, and then she storms off, Beryl does.’
Jack put his tea on the fold-up table. ‘Where did she go?’
‘She headed across that stretch of waste ground at the back of the town hall. Housing estate now, of course. They couldn’t just leave it as it was; they had to start building on it. I used to say to Eileen—’
‘So what did Ronnie do?’ Jack said.
Cyril coughed away his anecdote. ‘He stood there for a minute, smoking his cigarette, staring at where she’d been standing, then he threw the stub on the grass and got in his car.’
‘He was alone, then?’ I sai
d.
‘At that point, yes. But he’d just got to the gates of the car park, and someone stopped him. Banged on the passenger door. He leaned over and they got inside, then the two of them drove off.’
‘Did you see who it was?’ Elsie and Jack both spoke at the same time.
I could feel the breath in my chest, waiting to leave.
‘Not from where I was standing, no. Although I can tell you one thing.’ Cyril leaned back in his chair again. ‘It was definitely a woman.’
We fired shells of questions at Cyril. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I keep telling you, I wasn’t close enough. If you want more than that, you’re better asking Mabel.’
‘Mabel?’ said Jack.
‘Mabel Fogg. She was walking to the dance. Said Ronnie nearly ran her over on his way out. She would have got a better look.’
The last admission was blown across his tea, in an attempt to cool it down.
We left, after Cyril had dug around a little more for our motives and found nothing of interest to him. We were just tucking in our scarves and buttoning our coats when Jack turned to him and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of someone called Gabriel Price?’
‘Gabriel Price, you say?’
Jack nodded.
Cyril picked a little more at his teeth.
‘Can’t say as I have.’ He examined the fruits of his labour. ‘Friend of yours, was he?’
‘Someone just mentioned him to us,’ Jack said, ‘and we can’t quite place the name.’
‘It does sound familiar, I have to say.’ Cyril stared across the canal, as though his memories sat there on the water, waiting for him. ‘I knew everyone of course, so it would be most unusual for me not to remember.’
He had another try with his teeth. I wanted to turn him upside down and shake him, until something useful fell out.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Can’t place him either.’
But Cyril continued to frown and pick at his teeth, even as we were pushing back the deckchairs.
‘Are you sure I can’t talk you into a skirmish at the leisure centre car park this weekend?’ he said. ‘My daughter could soon run you up a costume.’
‘Is that what she does for a living?’ I said.
‘Oh no. Very high up in catering, she is. I couldn’t tell you the mouths she’s fed.’
‘Really?’ I said.
He tapped the side of his nose. ‘We’ll just say Philip and leave it at that.’
We walked back down the towpath, towards the car. The ducks had vanished, and in their place a breeze brushed at the surface of the water. Winter snaked towards us. You could feel it buried in the grass and hiding in the branches of the trees, waiting to make an appearance. I pulled my coat a little tighter and dug my hands into the pockets.
We were almost at the wooden bench, and Jack had begun to complain about the music we could hear drifting from the car window. Elsie was very quiet. We’d been given back a piece of the past, and I don’t think she really knew where to put it. Cyril only just managed to catch us in time.
‘I’ve remembered!’ he shouted.
I turned and he was trotting along the towpath, waving a piece of paper at us.
‘Here,’ he said, through a mouthful of breath. ‘I knew it sounded familiar. I was only looking at it last night, and the name stuck in my head. Although it’s probably nothing to do with your chap.’
He handed me the paper. It was sheet music. A page full of crotchets and quavers fluttering in the breeze. These things had always evaded me, how dots and tails and ticks could turn themselves into a sound. ‘Look.’ He jabbed his finger at the top of the page. ‘Gabriel Price. Unusual name, isn’t it? I knew I’d seen it before.’
There was the name, in copperplate pencil, written above the first line, from an age when we had so few possessions that we claimed ownership of each one, for fear it might become separated from us.
‘Gabriel Price (1953),’ I said. ‘Where did you get it from?’
‘My daughter found it on holiday in Whitby. In a charity shop. Great stack of music she got me from there, when I started the trumpet. Couldn’t tell you where it came from before that. You can keep it if you want. Never let it be said I haven’t still got my uses.’ Cyril started to walk back to his boat. ‘Leisure centre car park. Nine sharp. If you change your minds,’ he shouted.
The three of us walked along the towpath.
‘Do you think this Gabriel Price has anything to do with the name Ronnie chose for himself?’ said Jack.
‘I’m not sure.’ I held on to the music as we got back into the car and fastened our seatbelts.
I ran the tip of my finger over the notes. ‘It can’t just be a coincidence, though. The song.’
‘What song is it, anyway?’ said Jack from the front seat.
‘What song do you think it is?’ I said back.
Midnight, the Stars and You.
We sang it, all the way back to Cherry Tree. Although none of us really knew why.
MISS AMBROSE
Anthea stared at the computer screen. She had stared for so long, the white of the Word document had begun to shimmer, and the black letters danced and flickered on the page.
The problem with writing a CV was that everything you had ever done, or ever tried to do, looked small and unimportant. Years of effort and misery were condensed into one line, and appeared as if they had taken up just an afternoon of your life. A trivial few hours. It also involved seeing your date of birth nailed to a headline, which led you to peer at that date and wonder whatever happened to yourself. Miss Ambrose leaned back and tried to remember what she might have been doing in 1997. There were vast oceans of space in her life. Spaces she hadn’t realised existed, until she tried to explain herself in a single side of A4.
Miss Bissell would try to talk her out of it, of course. She had even tried to talk herself out of it. She had tried to rearrange her existence to make it more appealing. She had wandered around IKEA, and trespassed in make-believe rooms, filled with carefully tousled bedsheets and empty breakfast trays. A little series of worlds, inhabited by absent families, who lived laundered, stainless-steel lives. She had once taken a book from one of the shelves. It was hollow cardboard. Still, she had filled her car boot with potted plants and scatter cushions, to layer over the Cherry Tree beige, but they sat in her apartment and watched her like hostages.
When that didn’t work, Miss Ambrose had joined a gym. She had run away from herself on a treadmill and sweated out the very essence of herself on a cross trainer, and then she had walked through department-store beauty halls, past the rows of painted faces, trying to pick which one she might like to become. At one counter, she had been persuaded into an expensive lipstick, in the hope that it might transform her into someone else, but when she put it on, she discovered that she was still only Miss Ambrose, but wearing an expensive lipstick and thirty pounds out of pocket. She had even decided to call herself Ms Ambrose. The only problem was, most of the residents couldn’t understand what they were supposed to be saying, and the few who did made her sound like an angry wasp.
The only thing left was her job.
She turned her head, in the hope that her CV might look more attractive from a forty-five-degree angle.
‘You want to watch yourself. Sixty-three per cent of people experience neck strain from using a computer.’
‘Simon.’ Miss Ambrose straightened her neck and tried to click out of the screen, but it was too late. Simon was leaning over her shoulder and pointing.
‘What did you do in 1997?’ he said.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You don’t want to leave big gaps like that, it makes people nervous.’
‘Simon, was there something you wanted?’
He sat in the chair opposite and pulled out his notebook. ‘This,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure what I should be writing in it.’
‘Anything you find suspicious.’
‘I find most things suspicious, if
I stare at them for long enough,’ he said.
‘Then go with your instinct.’ Miss Ambrose gave a small sigh. ‘Your gut feelings.’
‘I’m not sure my guts have any feelings.’ Simon examined his belly. ‘I tend to think about something before I make my mind up. For quite a while,’ he said. ‘Weeks, sometimes.’
‘Do you never make quick decisions?’
He shook his head.
‘Never?’ said Miss Ambrose.
Simon looked down again. ‘I went on a day trip once. Caught the first train out of the station without checking where it was going.’
‘And?’ Miss Ambrose held her breath.
‘Ended up in the railway sidings. It was three hours before they found me.’
‘Simon …’
‘I came out in a rash.’
Miss Ambrose tried to find a sentence, but she couldn’t decide on all of the words.
‘Is that what you’re doing now?’ He nodded at the computer screen. ‘Going with your gut instinct?’
She looked back at the CV. ‘I suppose I am,’ she said. ‘Although I’m not even sure what my gut is telling me either.’
‘What kind of job do you want?’
‘Something interesting,’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘Something where I can make a difference.’
‘Retail can be quite interesting.’
‘I want to make a difference, though.’ Miss Ambrose twisted the back of her earring.
‘Try going into a shop with nothing on the shelves.’
She looked around the office. ‘I think I’m in a bit of a rut. I feel exhausted just being me.’
‘I was exhausted being in the railway sidings. Perhaps that’s the problem.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I wasn’t being me,’ he said. ‘I was trying to be someone else.’
‘I’m not even sure who I am, Simon. And I don’t know where to start looking.’ Miss Ambrose studied herself in Times New Roman. ‘I used to be so definite about what I wanted. So certain. Now I’m not even sure who Miss Ambrose is any more.’
Simon didn’t speak for a while. Instead, he brushed at the fluff on the sleeve of his shirt. When he did reply, he replied softly. ‘My granddad always said …’ His words tailed off into the distance.
Three Things About Elsie Page 14