‘How can you be so sure?’ I said.
‘Florence, I’ve been with you all day. How could it have been?’
‘I keep telling you he’s breaking in. I keep telling you he’s moving things about. No one believes me. All they want to do is sweep me under the carpet in Greenbank.’
Jack stood. He seemed more certain of himself. More definite. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Two can play at that game.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What I mean, Florence, is that we’re not going down without a fight. We need to stop him. Before it’s too late.’
I could feel all the tears behind my eyes, waiting to happen. ‘You can call me Flo, you know,’ I said. ‘If you like.’
MISS AMBROSE
Anthea Ambrose looked back at the box of Terry’s All Gold, which had been watching her all morning from her office shelf. A gift from grateful relatives. Grateful people always gave chocolates, never fruit. They expressed their gratitude in calories and refined sugar, and her waistband strained with appreciation each time she tried to button up her trousers. On this occasion, the gratitude was for two weeks in Lanzarote minus Auntie Ada, who was squeezed into a ground-floor flat for respite, and the size of the box of chocolates suggested how very much they were looking forward to their holiday.
People sent cards, too, and the back wall was a chorus of thank-yous. Each time she closed the office door, they applauded her in the breeze, although some of them were so old she couldn’t even picture the resident, let alone their families. But she never threw them away. They made her feel useful. Sometimes, you needed something tangible, something you could hold in your hand, to prove to yourself that your existence wasn’t a complete waste of time. She counted them once, and discovered that for each year she’d been at Cherry Tree, she’d been thanked 16.2 times. Although she wasn’t sure if this made her feel better, or slightly worse, about herself.
She had just started to count them again, when Jack tapped on the window with his walking stick.
‘Miss Ambrose, I need you to come with me immediately.’
Miss Ambrose swallowed the remains of a Vanilla Flourish. Her favourite. ‘You do?’
‘It’s a matter of the gravest urgency. I do believe we have an intruder.’
‘An intruder?’ She rubbed at the chocolate in the corners of her mouth. ‘It’s ten o’clock in the morning. It’s a bit of a strange time to be intrusive.’
‘I couldn’t think of anyone else to tell,’ he said. ‘No one here is as reliable as you, Miss Ambrose. As reassuring.’
Jack did look rather excitable.
‘Well, if you insist.’ She considered taking the last Vanilla Flourish for the road, but decided to save it for later. In the unlikely event there was a real intruder and her blood sugars were in need of a boost. ‘I’ll just get my keys.’
‘Oh, there’s no time for that.’
She dug around in her pockets. ‘It’ll only take a second.’
‘The last time I saw him, he was heading towards the Japanese Garden.’
Miss Ambrose heard the door of her office yawn open before they’d even reached the end of the corridor.
‘Well, he isn’t in here now.’ Miss Ambrose peered over the lacquered bridge, although the only thing it bridged was a collection of flat stones, due to Miss Bissell’s paranoia that one of the residents would decide to throw themselves into six inches of water. ‘Where exactly did you see him?’
Jack waved towards the bypass. ‘Somewhere over there, I think. Or it might have been over there.’ He waved in the other direction. ‘Of course, it could have been one of the gardeners.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Average height. Average build.’ Jack kicked at the gravel with his stick. ‘I think he might have been wearing overalls of some kind.’
‘So he probably was a gardener, wasn’t he?’
Jack kicked the gravel a little more. ‘Probably,’ he said.
It was tempting to imagine Jack had arrived on this earth fully fashioned, grey-haired and stooped, and wearing a flat cap; to imagine all of the residents had jumped from birth to senility in one fatal leap. But just occasionally, very occasionally, she would notice a hint of who they used to be. A look, a laugh, a whisper of mischief, trying to escape from the pages of time, like a prisoner making a bid for freedom.
Miss Ambrose narrowed her eyes. ‘There’s something fishy going on, Jack.’
‘There is?’ He wouldn’t meet her gaze.
‘There is. It involves you and Florence Claybourne amongst others, and mark my words, sooner or later, I’ll work out what it is.’
‘You will?’
‘I will.’
Jack looked down at the stones under the bridge. ‘There are no fish here for you to smell, Miss Ambrose, I can assure you of that.’
And he smiled.
Miss Ambrose wandered back across the car park to her office. Justin was unloading the accordion from the back of a camper van, and Jack’s son sat in a Volvo eating what appeared to be a roasted-vegetable panini. He saluted her with a sliced courgette as she walked past the window.
She eyed her office with deep suspicion, but found it was just as she’d left it. Perhaps she was being overly dramatic. Perhaps she should allow the elderly their small eccentricities. She’d done it. On a course.
Increasingly peculiar behaviour, the course brochure had said.
Miss Ambrose continued to count the cards on the wall.
Can become fixated and paranoid.
Somewhere in the distance, a door closed, and she turned so quickly, the whole of the room tilted to one side. It was all well and good, but if anyone upset her azaleas, she wouldn’t be responsible for her actions. Just the thought of it made her dizzy, and she reached into the box for the last Vanilla Flourish.
But it had disappeared.
FLORENCE
A copy of the key sat on an armchair, and we all made a fuss of it, Jack, Elsie and me, as though it was a very important house guest.
‘Did your Chris not ask any questions?’ I said.
‘I bribed him with a panini.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s what they call a sandwich when they want to charge you twice as much for it.’ Jack picked up the key and held it to the light. ‘You did very well to steal the original.’
‘I’ve never stolen anything in my life,’ I said. ‘We just borrowed it.’
It had gone well. Everyone in the day room was far too busy involving themselves with Alan Titchmarsh to worry what we were up to. The only fly in the ointment was when I decided to help myself to a Terry’s All Gold. Elsie was quite adamant I should put it back, but unfortunately, it turned out to be a soft centre. Hopefully, no one was any the wiser.
‘Now all we have to do,’ said Jack, ‘is choose our time to strike.’
‘I’ve no idea if Ronnie ever goes out.’ I looked out of the window. ‘I don’t even know what he gets up to, when he’s not prowling around my flat.’
‘Every Tuesday. British Legion. Eleven until three,’ said Jack.
‘Really?’ Elsie said. ‘How did you find that out?’
Jack tapped the side of his nose. ‘Know thine enemy,’ he said, and he smiled.
I tapped the side of my nose and smiled back.
‘It’s a bit bare, isn’t it?’ I said.
We wandered around Ronnie’s flat, whispering. I don’t know why we found it such a novelty, because all our rooms are the same. Just like a hotel, really, except we live there. He hadn’t made any effort to cheer the place up. Not so much as an ornament.
I picked up a cushion. They were the same colour in every flat. Bissell Beige, Elsie called it. I re-covered mine with some leftover material I’d found at the back of a wardrobe, but Ronnie’s just stayed as it was. It didn’t even look as though anyone had ever leaned on it.
‘Perhaps it’s the best way. Less clutter,’ said Jack, who lived in the most cluttered flat I’d ever set ey
es on. His dead wife’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe, like a row of silent people, waiting for instructions. Even her hairbrush rested on a shelf in the bathroom, and her coat hung on a peg next to the front door, in case she should ever come back and find she had a use for it.
‘There’s no harm in an ornament,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t even got a clock on the mantelpiece.’
Jack looked behind the settee and shook his head. ‘Perhaps Ronnie Butler travels light,’ he said.
I took the sheet music out of my bag. ‘Or Gabriel Price,’ I said.
Jack was in the middle of inspecting a cupboard, but he stopped, and his head reappeared from behind the door. ‘Whatever did you bring that for?’
‘I’m going to leave it here. I want to rattle him,’ I said. ‘I want to rattle him as much as he’s rattled me.’
‘Florence, I really wouldn’t.’ Elsie sank into an armchair. ‘He’s dangerous. We don’t know what he might do next.’
‘I’d give that a miss, if I were you,’ Jack said. ‘We don’t want to rile him.’
Of course Jack and Elsie agreed with each other. They always agreed with each other. But riling Ronnie Butler was just what I wanted. He’d spent the last sixty years riling me, creeping into my mind uninvited, casting a shadow of himself over everything I had – or hadn’t – done with my life. Since the night Beryl died, there hadn’t been a day when he hadn’t wandered into my thoughts. Those were the days when the past felt so nearby, it was as though I could have taken a step and walked through it all over again. So when Jack returned to the cupboard, and Elsie decided to lift up a rug, I slipped the sheet music underneath one of the beige cushions and I left it there. It was my sheet music, and it was up to me what I did with it.
‘I really don’t think there’s anything in here.’ Jack stood in the middle of the sitting room and looked around. ‘How about we try the bedroom?’
The bland quiet of the sitting room had leaked into the rest of the flat, and the bedroom looked more like the kind of place you’d sleep somewhere off the M6. Snooping around someone else’s sideboard had felt strange, but looking around the room they slept in felt even stranger, and we all stood in the doorway, waiting.
‘Come on. Let’s get it over with,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll check the wardrobes and you look under the bed.’
Elsie took one side and I took the other, and when I knelt down and lifted the eiderdown, I saw her peering back at me from the other side.
‘Can you see anything?’ I lifted the material a little further.
‘Only your face,’ she said.
‘Nothing in here,’ Jack said from inside the wardrobe. ‘He hasn’t got many clothes.’
‘Have you checked all the pockets?’ I said. ‘People always find things in pockets on the television.’
‘Of course.’ Jack appeared from behind the wardrobe door and disappeared again.
The bedside drawer only contained a Vicks Sinex Nasal Spray and an old paperback.
‘Eighty-odd years and nothing to show for himself,’ said Jack. ‘It’s a bit of a rum do, isn’t it?’
We checked the kitchen, although there was nothing in there apart from Miss Bissell’s standard collection of saucepans and crockery. Even the fridge was bare.
‘Not even a pint of milk,’ I said. ‘Or half an upside-down orange.’
I pulled open one of the little plastic drawers and Elsie looked inside. It was unoccupied. ‘Even with a meal on a wheel,’ she said, ‘you’d think he’d have something in here.’
‘A jar of pickled onions,’ I said. ‘Or an opened tin of spaghetti hoops.’
‘It’s disappointing,’ said Jack. ‘After all that effort.’
Elsie sighed. ‘Are you hungry, Florence?’
‘A little bit,’ I said.
‘Had to be done, though.’ Jack straightened his cap. ‘It needed the once-over.’
‘So what now?’ I said. ‘We’ve rummaged in every corner of his life, and there’s nothing.’
‘We need to regroup.’ Jack nodded at himself as we passed a mirror. ‘We must be missing something.’
We’d reached the hallway (which wasn’t a hallway at all, but a square foot of beige carpet between the kitchen and the front door), when Elsie grabbed my arm.
‘His shoes. We didn’t check his shoes.’
I couldn’t understand what she meant at first.
‘Don’t you remember? Ronnie always used to hide things in his shoes. Matches, money, anything he didn’t want someone else to get their hands on.’
‘Of course.’ Jack was reaching for the front door, but my words made him stop and turn. ‘We need to look in his shoes.’
I went back into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe door. A pair of brown lace-ups looked back at me from a quiet darkness. They seemed harmless enough. The toes were a little tarnished and there was a brush of mud on the heels. I reached inside each one and felt around. Nothing; just the smooth, dark feel of leather. Perhaps we’d got it wrong. Perhaps Ronnie had grown out of silly habits, and he no longer hid things in there. As I lifted my hand out of the second one, though, the tips of my fingers felt something strange. The sole seemed to be raised, in the corner. It was just a bump, barely noticeable, but when I lifted it, there was a piece of lined paper, folded many more times than it needed to be, with a smudge of blue ink on the edges.
‘Bingo.’ I said it so loudly, Jack and Elsie stuck their heads around the door.
‘Come on then, let’s get it opened.’ Jack put his face very close to the paper, and he squinted.
‘Give me a chance,’ I said. It was difficult to unfold; the creases were tight and unhelpful, as though it had waited to be opened for a very long time. Eventually, I smoothed it out and placed it on the bedspread.
‘It looks like a telephone number,’ I said.
‘Or a code?’ Elsie said.
‘I think it’s a telephone number as well. It has the right number of digits,’ Jack pointed at the piece of paper.
‘Let’s ring it!’ I clapped my hands and Elsie blinked along with each clap.
‘Let’s just bide our time,’ Jack said. ‘Copy it down and put the paper back where we found it.’
And so we did, and Jack closed the front door behind us with a whisper of a click. We followed him along the path. ‘Ronnie will never know we’ve even been in there,’ he said, over his shoulder.
‘No,’ Elsie said. ‘He won’t.’
Which was fine, if it hadn’t been for the sheet music. And all the way back to the flat, and all that night after Jack and Elsie had left, I lay awake and wondered if I’d done the right thing.
Mabel Fogg lives at the very top of a house on the very top of a hill. The rest of the house belongs to her daughter and her granddaughter, and three generations of women balance their lives on top of each other, like tiers on a wedding cake.
‘I’d quite like to live like that,’ said Jack. We twisted along the driveway and rattled our kidneys in all the potholes.
Chris didn’t utter a single word.
I was composing a very complicated letter to the Highways Agency, and I decided to compose it out loud, to give other people a chance to chip in. Elsie was sitting next to me and I told her off for yawning.
‘Will you please stop,’ I said. ‘You’re making me do it as well.’
‘I didn’t sleep very well.’ She yawned again. ‘The music kept me awake.’
‘Music?’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear any music.’
‘What do you reckon, Chris?’ Jack abandoned his walking stick and gripped the dashboard instead. ‘How about I move into your loft? I’d only need a bedroom, because I’d be able to sit in your lounge with you every night.’
Chris had been quite cheerful, but all the cheerfulness seemed to disappear back into his face.
Jack looked over the seat and winked at us.
We pulled up at the front of the house, and no more than a second afterwards, a small army of chickens shouted past on th
eir way to somewhere else. Unusual birds, chickens. They’re quite beautiful if you take the time to study them, but they’re like pigeons in that respect. No one ever does. I pointed at them, and started talking about the week I turned into a vegetarian. Miss Bissell nipped it in the bud, which was probably just as well, because mealtimes were becoming something of an ordeal for everyone concerned.
There was a washing line of bedsheets across the lawn, and they snapped and folded in the breeze. It was the kind of house I used to dream I might live in at some point. If things had turned out differently.
‘I don’t remember Mabel very well, do you?’ I said, as we pulled ourselves out of the car.
‘I only remember she never stopped talking,’ Elsie said.
Mabel, however, remembered us. When I rang the day before, she’d spoken as though we’d all seen each other only the previous week. ‘I could tell she was smiling, even over the telephone,’ I said. Mabel waited for us on the porch. She was large and reassuring, in the way that a plumpness can sometimes be strangely comforting. Her hair is grey now, of course, but it’s a steel grey, and it rested carefully on her shoulders. Wrapped around her legs like two small skin grafts, were tiny children.
She shouted, ‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ and when we got closer, the children turned around. They were miniature Mabels. Tiny reflections of a long-ago child. Faces that seemed so familiar, the past was made to look as if it had never really bothered to leave.
Mabel’s daughter made Chris a sandwich (corned beef, not too much pickle, just a pinch of salt), and we sat with Mabel in a room crowded with sunlight and fresh laundry.
She began by apologising for the mess, but the sentence immediately slid into a discussion about her great-grandchildren. They appeared, one by one, as if summoned by an invisible register. With each child I became more fascinated, until I was openly staring at the sixth one with my mouth wide open.
‘Do you not have any children, Florence?’ Mabel said.
‘I didn’t even get as far as a husband.’ I watched the final child disappear from the room. ‘They’re like little pieces of yourself, aren’t they? Even when you’re gone, they’ll still be walking around, carrying on being you. Imagine that!’
Three Things About Elsie Page 16