10.01 p.m.
I don’t know when I first started sleeping in that chair.
I only remember staying up one night, because I couldn’t stomach the thought of going to bed, and it just happened. I didn’t mean it to. I borrowed two pillows from the bedroom and I used the little blanket on the back of the settee. It was quite comfortable, when you got used to it, and if you tucked yourself in, it wasn’t that cold. I didn’t dare leave the fire on, of course. Not after everything that happened. I kept it plugged in, though, for company, and I watched a red light dance through the imaginary coal and pretend to be a flame.
I would never have been found out, either, if Miss Ambrose hadn’t dropped in without any kind of forewarning. I always put the pillows back on the bed, and ruffle up the eiderdown, just for appearances’ sake, but she caught me out before I’d had a chance to do it.
‘Florence,’ she said. ‘Have you been sleeping in the chair?’
I chose something to look at.
‘Because if you have, I’m going to have to put you on night-time visits.’
I turned to her. ‘I don’t want someone coming in and putting me to bed, like a toddler.’
‘Then can you please go back to sleeping where everyone else sleeps?’
I wanted to tell her I felt better sleeping in the chair, that when I went to bed, all I did was lie there and listen for Ronnie walking around in the flat, that I could never find my sleep, because my mind was too busy trying to think of a reason for all the noises. But how can you talk to somebody when even their eyes aren’t listening to you?
‘So that’s settled then?’ she said.
I folded my arms as a reply, and after a few seconds, I heard the front door close to. I did think about carrying on with it, but Miss Bissell has a knack of knowing what you’re up to, even if Miss Ambrose rarely has the first clue.
I’d give anything to be in that chair right now.
I can just about see it from where I am, if I turn my head, but it’s getting more and more difficult because the longer I lie here, the less my body wants to do what I’m telling it to. It’s easier just to look at the nonsense under the sideboard, although I can’t make that out at all now. It’s so dark.
I keep thinking about Mabel and those little children. I’ve never really had much of an opinion about children. You don’t, really, if you have none of your own. It’s not that I ever set out not to have them, life just seems to pick up speed all by itself, and before I knew it, I was having a little retirement party at the factory. Drinks in white plastic cups. People you’ve never even said hello to before, waving their goodbyes. And you get home, and it’s only then you realise you forgot to make a family. It makes you think, though, when you see children close up like that, how they’re like tiny versions of yourself, carrying on where you left off.
Mabel said she’d pop in and visit. She hasn’t sent word, but people just drop in on you sometimes, don’t they? Look at Miss Ambrose. Mabel will be in such a state when she finds me.
‘Whatever have you been doing, Florence? How did you manage to get yourself down there?’
She won’t move me. You’re not supposed to, are you? I read about it. In a magazine. She’ll wait for the ambulance men instead. She’ll talk to me while we wait, though. About the town hall and the dance, and all those quicksteps we used to do. She’ll keep talking in the ambulance, and she’ll still be talking when we get to casualty. She’ll talk to all the other people in the bay as well, because that’s the kind of person Mabel is. She’ll be wearing a white top and a skirt full of flowers, and all the flowers will dance when she walks across the room. Her hands will smell of soap, and when I say something to make her happy, her whole face will find the laughter.
She’ll talk to the sister when we get to the ward. They’ll find something in common, because Mabel always finds something in common with everyone. I’ll look over, and the sister will check the watch that’s pinned to the front of her uniform, and she’ll nod, and Mabel will be allowed to sit with me. There will be lamps on at the nurses’ station, but all the other beds will be in darkness, and the rest of the ward will be bathed in a liquid quiet. Mabel will pull her chair closer, so she can whisper. She will brush the hair from my face, and pull the blankets straight, and tell me everything is going to be fine. And it will be. Because sometimes, that’s all you need. Someone to be there. Someone to watch over you, as you fall into sleep. Someone to tell you everything is going to be fine.
FLORENCE
The dining room seemed like a stranger in daylight. We all studied the plates of scrambled egg and the little sachets of brown sauce, as though we couldn’t work out what they might be doing there, sitting in front of us. The tables were covered in thick white linen and there were grains of sugar scattered around, where someone had failed to brush them up adequately. I was keen to point this out to the waitress, but after Elsie and I had a discussion, I settled for sweeping them up with my hands instead and dropping them on to the floor very theatrically. The tables were so close together, my elbow occasionally brushed against Miss Ambrose’s cardigan sleeve.
‘Starving ourselves isn’t going to help, is it?’ Miss Ambrose shovelled a fried mushroom into her mouth. ‘We have to keep our strength up.’
The wallpaper looked very tired. It was the kind of wallpaper that has a texture, as well as a pattern. The kind of wallpaper that makes you want to touch, just to see what it feels like.
‘You should really stop that,’ Elsie said. ‘People are looking.’
I took my hand away. ‘But what’s the point in putting velvet on the walls, if no one is going to feel it?’
The tea was lukewarm and the toast sat in its letter rack, cold and unwanted. It’s odd how worry affects your appetite. Some people completely lose all interest in food, whilst others do absolutely nothing but eat.
‘Starve a fever, feed a cold,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you’re supposed to feed a worry as well?’
‘Haven’t got the stomach for it, I’m afraid.’ Jack pushed his plate an inch forward. ‘Have you heard anything from the police?’
Miss Ambrose attacked a hash brown with her fork. ‘Not yet, but I’m sure they’re doing everything they can.’
‘I’m sure they are.’ He sat back. ‘And hopefully, they’ve listened to all of us very carefully.’
The hash brown disappeared. It left an echo of tomato sauce around Miss Ambrose’s lips, and I wiped my own mouth in sympathy. I’d never admit it to Elsie, but Beryl dying made me lose faith in the police force. How they never managed to get Ronnie. How something like that could happen, and no one was ever punished. Sometimes, you go through an experience in life that slices into the very bones of who you are, and two different versions of yourself will always sit either side of it, like bookends.
After she’d pushed the last hash brown around her plate, Miss Ambrose said we should all try our best to carry on as usual, but could we please try to avoid getting lost, and be back at the hotel for six o’clock at the latest. Jack cornered his eyes at us, and Elsie and I cornered ours back, even though neither of us was really sure why we were doing it, and he couldn’t really explain it all until we were out on the front step.
‘The man who owns the music shop,’ he said, buttoning up his coat. ‘I think we should ask him to elaborate on that research he said he did.’
I took a deep breath of seaside air, and the three of us walked along the little path towards the whalebones in the first catch of sunlight.
There is something special about a coastal morning. The day seems to have so much more potential when there’s a seaside attached to it. Perhaps it’s the brightness from the water, scrubbing everything clean like a front step, ready for you to start again.
We walked past sleeping ice-cream vans and wet concrete shelters, but the nearer we got to the whalebones, the more people began to appear. Everyone had made an early start, trying to squeeze as many minutes as they could out of their day. They al
l looked like tourists to me, because they had that air of holiday clothes and bellies full of hotel breakfasts. The traffic seemed local, though. Boy racers, speeding up and down the seafront, squealing their brakes and sending flocks of seagulls escaping into the sky.
As we turned a corner, there was a woman by the side of the road. She had two children, one strapped tightly into a buggy, and the other wandering the pavement, stepping on and off the kerb in some strange little-girl game. One where only she knew the rules. The woman was bending down, pushing hair behind her ears, trying to free one of the wheels of the pushchair, which had jammed against the concrete. The bells of St Mary’s rang a Saturday morning out across the harbour.
‘Help her, Jack. She’s struggling.’ I pointed Jack an instruction towards the pushchair, and he rested his walking stick against a bench and bent down. She stood up and looked round for the little girl, taking her hand and pulling her away from the road. Jack freed the wheel. He stood up and the woman was in the middle of thanking him when one of the racer cars tore around the corner, sending a wall of air across the seafront. It nearly knocked Jack off his feet and the woman reached out to steady him.
When he walked back to us, I said, ‘There’s your good deed for the day,’ and Jack said, ‘It was nothing.’ But there was satisfaction drawn into every line on his face.
‘Quite the character, our Gabriel Price.’
The man in the music shop stood behind the glass counter, his hands laced together on his chest, as though he had remained there for the entire night, just waiting for us to return.
We all leaned forward a good inch.
‘How do you mean?’ said Jack.
‘Well.’ The man’s fingers unlaced and laced back again, like a magic trick. ‘I’m not one to gossip when someone isn’t here to defend themselves. Heaven forbid that any of our own lives should be open to such scrutiny.’
We all said no, no and of course not, and made reassuring sounds at the backs of our throats.
‘He was a bit of a chancer, by all accounts,’ the man said.
‘He was?’ said Elsie.
‘Always dabbling in this and that. Spending his time at the racetrack.’
‘Are you sure?’ I thought of the soft smile and the gentle eyes.
‘Oh, quite sure.’ The man rested his fists on the counter. ‘He’s from Whitby, and it’s like any other small town. It never lets you forget. There are still people who remember him, I’m sure, although they will be in their later years, of course.’
He smiled an awkward smile, and we all smiled back and made more noises in our throats.
‘Do you know where we might find these people who remember him? Or remember what happened to him?’ Jack said.
‘That’s the mystery.’ The man shook his head. ‘He just vanished a few years after the war. It happens all the time when you’re trying to trace someone from the past. People don’t leave a trail like they do nowadays. The next generation will have no such problems chasing any of us.’ He straightened some leaflets on the counter, which were clearly in no need of a straighten. It appeared to be some kind of shopkeeper code to signal the end of the conversation.
‘You could try the library, of course. Plenty of historical information in there.’
We were at the door, and the little bell was celebrating our departure, when the man spoke again.
‘Of course, you might not find him under Price. It was just his stage name.’
‘So what was his real name?’ Jack turned back to the man, who still had the leaflets in his hand.
‘It’s strange, really. His real name sounds more like a stage name than the one he changed it to.’
‘So what was it?’ I could hear the frustration in Jack’s voice, although it clearly went over the top of the man’s head, because he was more interested in fussing with the leaflets than answering a perfectly simple question.
Eventually, he looked up. ‘Honeyman,’ he said. ‘Gabriel Honeyman.’
HANDY SIMON
Handy Simon waited on a crowded pavement for the bridge to close. He always seemed to catch the bridge at the wrong time, and he wondered if the boats held back until they saw him appear on the horizon and then put their foot down. Simon listened to the slow churn of the diesel engines, pushing through the water. Waiting for them to make their way through took an age, and a collection of people gathered around him. There were holiday teenagers, unfastened from parents, toddlers trying to join them and break away from their pushchairs, and Saturday-morning carrier bags, swinging from sunburned hands. The seagulls, free from the constraints of boats and bridges, watched everything from the harbour wall, and shrieked to themselves in amusement. Simon didn’t trust seagulls either. His mother once told him they’d take your eye out given half a chance, and he’d been on his guard ever since. He couldn’t see anyone he recognised from Cherry Tree. Miss Bissell had put a strong case forward for keeping everyone at the hotel, but in the end, it was decided confinement might cause more problems than it would solve.
‘Just be vigilant,’ Miss Bissell told them, which was exactly the kind of vague instruction that made Handy Simon nervous.
He looked over the water to where a mirror of people waited on the west side, and he spotted Miss Ambrose almost immediately. She was deeply involved in her mobile telephone, but every so often, she glanced up and looked confused by nothing in particular. Miss Ambrose always seemed to find him a little job to do, and he was just trying to work out a way of getting across the bridge without bumping into her when she closed her telephone and darted up an alleyway. This meant they would both be on the same side of the harbour, which made Simon pull the straps on his rucksack a little more tightly, and dig his finger into the collar of his shirt, but it couldn’t be helped. He had decided how he was going to spend his morning, and he wasn’t going to abandon his plans now.
The West Pier is the only part of Whitby that feels like it belongs to the tourists. The rest of the town, visitors just borrow for the summer months, trailing up and down the abbey steps and marching all over the beaches. Whitby really belongs to Yorkshire and to maritime. It belongs to the whalers of centuries past and to the fishermen of now, who slide into their boats in the still black of an early morning. It belongs to Captain Cook and the Endeavour, and to all those who sail towards a horizon, not knowing what they might face. Unlike other seaside towns, Whitby has not given itself up to the slot machines and the pink candyfloss. The yards and the snickets, and the alleyways, hold on to the footsteps of our ancestors, and somewhere at the point where the cliffs reach out to the North Sea, the past is valued rather than abandoned, and everyone who visits is given a reminder of their own place in history.
Simon drifted down the West Pier. You couldn’t really do anything other than drift, because although it was still early, crowds were beginning to build, and everyone seemed to be walking at a holiday pace. The smell of fried onions mixed with the seaweed green of the harbour, and Simon took a very deep breath. Perhaps if he breathed hard enough, he could hold on to the smell and revisit it whenever he wanted to, when his life returned once more to the aroma of Pot Noodles and guttering. He looked at the row of shops as he walked. Between the hot dogs and the ice cream, there were souvenir stalls. Places which specialised in postcards and sticks of rock, and putting your name on things. When Simon was little, everything he owned had his name on it. Pencils and bookmarks and T-shirts, moneyboxes without money and keyrings without keys. Even the door to his bedroom had his name on it, just in case his parents should get confused and accidentally try to sleep in there overnight. He wasn’t even sure why he did it, but every time he saw something with Simon written on it, he had to take it home with him. Perhaps it was the only way he could explain to the world who he was. Perhaps at that age, all he had was his name and an idea of who he might become. Simon kicked his shoes on the sandy pavement. Perhaps he was still waiting to find out.
Beyond the souvenir stalls and the arcades, where the co
ncrete turned to boardwalk and the wind tripped away from the sea and argued with the tourists, Simon found what he was looking for. The tent was only small, perhaps six feet square, and draped in red velvet and fringing. There was a blackboard propped up outside:
Gypsy Rosa
World Famous Clairvoyant and Spiritualist to the Stars
Speak with the dead and discover your destiny
Underneath there was a Post-it note Sellotaped to the velvet:
Simon looked at the line of black-and-white photographs pinned outside. In all of them, Gypsy Rosa was standing next to someone, and in each one, she was wearing the same headscarf and the same expression. The only thing that altered was her arms, which adopted a variety of poses suggesting she had perhaps conjured up these people by magic. Simon wasn’t sure who the people were supposed to be. Perhaps they were the stars mentioned on the blackboard, although he didn’t really recognise any of them.
‘Don’t waste your money, mate!’ someone shouted from across the pier. Simon wasn’t sure who it was, and he didn’t feel as though he wanted to turn around. Instead, he walked over to a little wall and sat next to a poster about a jumble sale, whilst he waited for Gypsy Rosa to return with her latte. If Miss Ambrose should spot him – or even worse, Miss Bissell – he could claim a sudden interest in bric-a-brac.
He studied the seagulls to pass the time. One of them was having a fight with a bin bag, and it hammered and battled with the plastic until it found what it wanted. As the gull disappeared across the harbour with its treasure, the rest of the bag coasted across the walkway, and the breeze began to lift and turn the contents. As he watched, a crisp packet broke free and came to a standstill by his feet.
He stared at it.
It was cheese and onion.
FLORENCE
For a town filled with history, you would expect Whitby’s library to be a building with criss-cross windows and crumbling steps. Instead, it’s made of concrete and glass, and there are little turnstiles to prevent you running away with all the books.
Three Things About Elsie Page 22