On Tuesday afternoons, I always go to the hairdresser, and Cheryl washes my hair and messes around with a comb for a while, until she finds me an entire head of it again. Not Cheryl with a cherry, but Cheryl with a shhhh. Although I’m always forgetting and I don’t see why it makes that much difference.
It’s not a real hairdressers, it’s a room at the back of the residents’ lounge, but they do their best, and put posters up of people no one could ever look like, and arrange the cans of hairspray on a little coffee table next to the door. She’s an odd girl, Cheryl. Short blonde hair. Always frowning. A tattoo on the inside of her wrist. It’s her little girl’s name, apparently, but no one ever mentions it. The last time I went, I didn’t realise Ronnie was in there as well until I closed the door, and by that time, I couldn’t find a way to get out again.
He was sitting in the other chair, and he smiled at me. But it wasn’t enough of a smile that you could give one back, even if you’d wanted to.
‘Miss Claybourne.’ Cheryl lifted herself off one of the counters and pulled out a seat. ‘What will it be today?’
She always said the same thing. What will it be today? I thought one week I might surprise her. I might say Rita Hayworth red or a fringe like Veronica Lake, but I knew it would only make Cheryl-with-a-shhhh frown even more than she does already, and so I said what I always said as well. Just the usual, Cheryl. And she got out her comb and put a little cape around my shoulders.
Another girl was cutting Ronnie’s hair. No one knew what her name was, and as there were only two of them, everybody always called her Not-Cheryl. ‘Who did your set and blow dry?’ and people would reply, ‘Not-Cheryl,’ and we all knew where we were because that’s who she was. She knew we did it, and she didn’t seem to mind. Not-Cheryl was taking pieces of Ronnie’s hair between her fingers and snipping at the ends. I watched through the mirrors.
‘You settling in all right, Mr Price?’ said Not-Cheryl.
‘Perfectly grand,’ he said. ‘I feel as though I’ve been here all my life.’
His voice. It hadn’t changed at all. I tried to close my ears to the sound, but it still crept in, and each word turned my stomach over. For someone so full of violence, his voice was almost soft and whispery, like a woman’s. If you listened very carefully, there was even a lisp.
‘Where did you say you were from originally?’ The girl took another pair of scissors from her pocket.
He didn’t answer for a moment, then he said, ‘Here and there,’ and I could hear the smiling. His words were still full of themselves, even after all these years.
‘That’s nice,’ she said.
Cheryl combed my hair out, and I looked in the mirror and wondered how long I’d looked this old. ‘There’s lots of activities go on in the day room, Mr Price,’ she said, ‘if you want to meet some more people,’ and I thought, I’m sitting in your seat and you should be talking to me, you shouldn’t be talking to him.
I heard Ronnie shift in his chair, and all the pretend leather creaked with his weight. ‘I’ve been rather too busy for that,’ he said, ‘of late.’
‘What have you been up to, then?’ said Not-Cheryl, who was young enough to fall into traps.
I heard the chair again. ‘I’ve been tracing my family tree, as it happens.’
I was sure his reflection was staring at me, but Cheryl and her overall kept getting in the way.
‘I’ve always wanted to do that.’ Cheryl pulled the ends of my hair over my ears. ‘It must be really fascinating.’
‘Oh, it is,’ said Ronnie. ‘Fascinating.’
‘How far back did you go?’ Cheryl gave up on my ears and searched for a parting instead.
Ronnie took a while to answer. He always did. It was as though he needed to enjoy the taste of his own opinion for a while, before he was willing to let it go. ‘As far back as I needed to,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’ Not-Cheryl spoke to the mirror. ‘I know my great-grandma used to live in Prestatyn, but everyone lost touch.’
I was certain Ronnie moved again, because when I looked up, his reflection seemed closer. ‘It’s amazing what you can find out with a little research. You can trace anyone you like if you’re determined enough.’ He smiled. ‘Even great-grandmas who used to live in Prestatyn.’
‘Do you think so?’ said the girl.
‘Anyone is traceable.’ He stood and brushed down his jacket. ‘I think you’ll find there are no hiding places left in this world any more.’
As he spoke, he looked at me. I was worried they could hear me breathing. I was worried Cheryl would ask if I was all right, and why I’d gone so pale, and if I’d like a glass of water. But no one said anything. Ronnie slipped through the door and back into the lounge, the girl swept away all traces of him from the floor, and Cheryl pulled a towel from a shelf and wrapped it around my shoulders and said, ‘Shall we get you sorted out, then?’
I didn’t say anything. I sat there and tried to concentrate on the radio, but it wasn’t playing a song I wanted to hear. I listened to Not-Cheryl talking about her great-grandma in Prestatyn, and Cheryl pretending to be interested. I listened to the click of the scissors and the whir of the hairdryer, and the sound of water running in a sink. I tried to make these noises cover up my thinking, but all they did was make it louder.
When I went to pay, I tried to take my mind off things, and I looked at the tattoo on Cheryl’s wrist whilst she was searching for change in the till.
‘It’s a lovely name,’ I said. ‘Alice. I had an aunt called Alice a long time ago.’
When I spoke, she dropped the coins on the floor. It took her an age to collect them all, but when she had, she stood back up again and looked me right in the eye for the first time.
‘Thank you so much, Miss Claybourne,’ she said.
‘You’re very welcome, Cheryl,’ I said back. Although I wasn’t even sure what it was she was welcome to.
After I’d left the hairdressers, I went to the little shop near the main gates. I thought I might have a look around. Treat myself. I knew Ronnie wouldn’t be in there, because Miss Bissell allowed him to go to the supermarket all by himself. I’d seen him. Walking across the courtyard, weighed down by carrier bags. Although what he finds to buy in there, I couldn’t tell you. I thought perhaps Jack or Elsie might be around, though, and we’d all be able to walk back to my flat together.
It was empty, as it happened. Just the man behind the counter, who doesn’t look up when he’s serving you, let alone when you walk in. I used to try and pass the time of day, but then I noticed he wears those little headphones in his ears, and half the time he isn’t even listening.
‘I’m just having a browse,’ I shouted, when I walked in. ‘Don’t mind me.’
And he didn’t.
I did my best, but it’s difficult to browse in a shop that small. There’s only so long you can stare at a loaf of bread. Qwick Stop, it’s called. I’ve had it out with Miss Bissell on many an occasion, but she says it’s out of her remit. I don’t really know what a remit is exactly, but you can guarantee if Miss Bissell has one, it stretches as far as she damn well wants it to. The shop is all primary colours and bright lights, although it still looks tired, like it needs a good bottoming. It sells basics. Aisles full of milk and bread, and lavatory paper. They have a freezer packed with ready meals and ice cream, and a little display of cakes and biscuits. I studied the display for as long as I could, before the man started peering round the till. In the end, I plumped for the Battenberg. It’s nice to have a bit of cake in, just in case you have an unexpected visitor, and you can’t go wrong with a Battenberg. Although I did think I might still have one unopened in a tin somewhere.
When I went to pay, the man had taken his earphones out, but he still shouted, ‘One pound seventy-four pence.’ I shouted, ‘Thank you,’ back again. I was putting the change in my purse when I said, ‘Would you like me to go round and give everything the once-over?’ He stared at me.
‘Would you like me to give the shelves a clean?’ I said.
‘We have a cleaner, thank you.’
‘You don’t have to pay me,’ I said. ‘I’m free now, as luck would have it. I could soon get started.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ he said.
I was about to point out a few things to him, and explain how necessary it actually was, when the girl with the plait came in. She wasn’t wearing her uniform, but she was wrapped into a scarf and wearing a coat that was at least two sizes too big for her.
‘Are you looking for me?’ I said.
She frowned and shook her head, and put three bars of chocolate on the counter.
‘Hungry?’ said the man. He didn’t shout this time.
‘I just fancied something sweet,’ she said.
I smiled at her. ‘I’ve just bought a lovely Battenberg. Why don’t you come over. I could put the kettle on. Cut you a slice?’
She looked at me over the scarf. ‘No thank you, Miss Claybourne,’ she said.
‘You’d better hurry,’ I said, ‘before it all goes.’ I gave a little laugh, but she didn’t answer.
I waited a bit, but they started talking about something they both watch on the television, and I couldn’t really join in, so I left them to it. I took the long way around the courtyards. I sat on one of the benches for a while, and looked up at the windows of my flat. I’d left the lights on, but you still couldn’t really see much from the outside, even when you stood and craned your neck. I was going to go up there, but then I thought I should call in at the residents’ lounge. Check the noticeboard. I hadn’t looked at it since I’d had my hair done, and they might have pinned up something important.
When I walked in, Jack was laughing at some television programme he had on at full volume, and Elsie was sitting in the corner and watching the birds through the French windows. I went over to the noticeboard, although nothing had changed, but neither of them spotted me. They wouldn’t have seen me at all if I hadn’t gone to the coffee table to find a magazine I wanted to take home.
‘Florence!’ Jack shouted over all the canned laughter. ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’
I didn’t bother looking up. ‘I’ve had my hair done.’
‘Of course you have,’ he said. ‘Of course you have. Very fetching.’
‘I just wanted a magazine. I’ve got lots to do, I need to be on my way.’
‘Why don’t you take your coat off? Stay here a bit?’ he said.
‘No, you’re busy.’ I nodded at the television.
I’d got as far as the door when he shouted to me. ‘Florence,’ he said. ‘You’ve forgotten your magazine.’
When I went back, he reached for the remote control and turned off the television programme. ‘Do me a favour and keep me company for a bit?’
‘I thought you were watching that,’ I said.
‘Only until someone better came along.’ He pointed to the other armchair.
Elsie shouted from the corner, ‘For heaven’s sake sit down, you’re making the room look untidy.’ And she shook her head and laughed.
‘Just for a bit then,’ I said. ‘But I can’t stay for many minutes.’
I told them both as I was taking my coat off.
‘He found out where I was,’ I said, as I pulled at one of the sleeves. ‘He researched me.’
‘He was probably just talking about tracing his family tree.’ Elsie looked at me over the top of a cup. ‘It’s easy to get the wrong end of the stick in a hairdressers. All those strong smells and running water.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘he came looking. He wanted to find me.’
‘And why would he want to do that?’ Jack said.
I thought I saw Elsie shake her head very slightly.
‘Because of what happened,’ I said. ‘Because of what happened to Beryl.’
Elsie was definitely shaking her head now, but I decided I wasn’t forced to take any notice.
Elsie says I can’t help myself. She says I’ve always been the same. She says my mouth runs away with me, and before anyone realises, I’ve said everything there is to say.
‘Some things are better left in the past,’ she says, ‘but all you want to do is dig them up again and show everybody.’
‘Beryl was Elsie’s sister,’ I said to Jack. ‘Something happened to her. Something terrible.’
‘Jack doesn’t want to hear about that,’ Elsie said. ‘Why don’t you tell him about the factory instead? We had some good times there, didn’t we? Despite everything?’
‘I never wanted to work in the factory,’ I said. ‘Neither of us did.’
It was true. We didn’t. But sometimes life takes you along a path you only intended to glance down on your way to somewhere else, and when you look back, you realise the past wasn’t the straight line you thought it might be. If you’re lucky, you eventually move forward, but most of us cross from side to side, tripping up over our second thoughts as we walk through life. I never used to be like that. I always knew exactly what I wanted to be, even when I was a child.
‘Did Beryl work at the factory?’ Jack said.
I shook my head. ‘Apparently we mustn’t talk about Beryl.’
Jack frowned. ‘What about the factory, then? If you didn’t want to work there, what did you want to do?’
‘I wanted to be a scientist,’ I told him. ‘I wanted to make a difference with my life.’
I did. The first time I announced it to the world, we were sitting at my kitchen table. The house smelled of warmth and pastry, and my dog, Seth, lay at our feet, his tail beating a tune into the carpet. Elsie said she sometimes borrowed my family, just to taste what it was like for a while. She said it was the only time she ever saw cutlery arranged around a placemat.
‘I’m going to invent something.’ I moved my schoolbooks from the path of a dessert spoon. ‘Something that will change the world.’
‘And what about you, Elsie?’ my mother said.
Elsie reached down and stroked Seth’s head. ‘Beryl says we’ll both end up working at the factory, and I’m not sure you can really change the world from there.’
‘Beryl doesn’t know anything,’ I said. ‘Beryl talks too much.’
It was true. Beryl did talk too much, and talking too much would eventually be her downfall, but of course none of us knew that then.
‘You can change the world from this kitchen table if you want to.’ My mother reached down into the dresser and lifted out an armful of dinner plates. ‘All you have to do is make wise decisions.’
Jack is listening to the story. ‘She was right,’ he said. ‘Your mother was right.’
My mother was always right. My mother looked like the kind of woman who had made wise decisions her entire life. Her hair was always pinned, her clothes always ironed. Whenever I walked through the front door, she would appear from a corner of the house, wiping her hands or carrying something interesting. It was as though she was a template for motherhood, cut from one of the dressmaking patterns Elsie’s sister always left on their dining-room table. I think a mother was all she’d ever wanted to be. Florence’s mother. It was how she always introduced herself to people, and it made me feel as though by being born, I’d accidentally swallowed up everything else she used to be.
I turned to Jack. ‘I wanted us to go to university,’ I said. ‘I had it all planned, but Elsie wouldn’t come with me.’
There was a softness at the edges of Jack’s voice. ‘She wouldn’t?’
‘It’s not that I didn’t want to,’ Elsie said. ‘You know how things were. You knew exactly why I couldn’t go.’
We had sat on the lawn later that evening, watching Seth chase moths. He could never quite manage to catch one, and so he barked at them in a temper fit instead. A lopsided bark. A sound filled with a strange sense of urgency that dogs always feel when no one else is able to. Not ready to give up on the summer, Elsie and I had wrapped ourselves up into cardigans and curled into abandoned deckchairs. The evenings had grown cold and inevitable, and I could feel the seasons turn in the air.
I sat up straight in my deckchair. ‘How do you know you’re not the university type?’ I said. ‘We’re only fourteen. We don’t even know who we are yet.’
In the far corners of the garden, an autumn evening had stolen away the light. We might only have been fourteen, but I knew Elsie had more than managed to discover herself already. In her mother. The violent rages. The way she refused to eat for days at a time. The way she had to be coaxed from her bed like a child. Elsie had discovered herself when she found her mother cleaning the house in the early hours of the morning, and when her mother gave away her father’s clothes, only to stand on doorsteps and beg them back a few hours later. In the way Elsie’s sisters, one by one, seemed to be escaping. Gwen was training to be a teacher. Beryl had started looking at wedding dresses without even the slightest hint of a man in her life, and Dot had moved to the Midlands and married an obnoxious little fool called Harold, who put all his energy into telling other people what they should be thinking. Elsie’s mother said she did it to spite them all.
‘There’s always a choice, isn’t there?’ I said. ‘Every situation has an alternative waiting for you by the side of it.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Don’t you think,’ I said, ‘we can change everything, just with the small decisions we make?’
She still didn’t reply. I knew for Elsie, looking into the future must have felt like re-reading a book she’d never very much enjoyed in the first place.
‘You never know what life has in store, do you?’ I said. Seth settled down between the deckchairs and looked up at us both.
Elsie stared at the trees, where autumn rested on the branches, waiting for its turn. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you do.’
My mother died the following January.
‘Lungs,’ Elsie’s mother said. ‘They run in your family.’
I wanted to say that lungs ran in everyone’s families, along with kidneys and livers, and hearts, but after Elsie’s father was killed, her mother became strangely fixated with death. The more violent the end of someone’s life, the better. She once walked three miles in the pouring rain to stare at a tree where a motorcyclist had been decapitated. ‘It’s important,’ she said. ‘To look.’ At first, I couldn’t understand why she would want to do something so intensely morbid, but then I realised it was a comfort to her. She liked to remind herself that God hadn’t just singled her out for tragedy alone. It happened to other people, too. It somehow helped her to think we were all hurtling towards our destiny without having any choice in the matter. When I tried to explain it, Beryl said, ‘She needs her head read, if you ask me,’ without even looking up from her magazine. Elsie’s mother probably did need her head read, but no one ever managed it. There were so many stories in there, I doubt even she could find all the words.
We started at the factory that summer.
‘It’s just temporary,’ I said, as I slid on to the chair next to Elsie’s. ‘Until my father gets back on his feet.’
It was a chair I would sit on for the next forty years.
‘So neither of you went to university?’ said Jack.
I shook my head. ‘We worked at the factory instead, for that horrible little man. The one who marched up and down, and shouted at everybody.’
‘Mr Beckett,’ Elsie said. ‘The supervisor.’
‘Mr Beckett. You don’t give me enough time to think. You rush me too much. I would have got there myself if I’d had a minute.’
Elsie arched her eyebrow, but I chose to ignore it.
Jack reached over for his tea. ‘What did you make at the factory?’
I laughed. ‘Corsets.’ He laughed along with me. ‘They were all bones and panels,’ I said. ‘When you tried to sew one, it was like holding on to a hostage.’
‘You were very good,’ Elsie said. ‘Mr Beckett’s star pupil.’
I looked across the lounge, and into the past. It was more useful than the present. There were times when the present felt so unimportant, so unnecessary. Just somewhere I had to dip into from time to time, out of politeness. When I came back, Jack was waiting for me. ‘There was a girl,’ I said. ‘Sat next to me and Elsie. She couldn’t get the hang of it at all. Shook every time she tried to thread a needle.’
‘You mean Clara?’ Elsie said.
I nodded. ‘Said Beckett was just like her father. She was terrified of him.’
‘What happened to Clara?’ said Jack.
I whispered, ‘She hanged herself.’
‘She did not!’ Elsie put down her cup, and it argued with its saucer. ‘Wherever has that come from?’
I ignored her and turned to Jack. ‘Elsie’s mother said Clara was still swinging when they found her.’
‘No one hanged themselves.’ Elsie hadn’t got anything else to put down, so she raised her voice instead. ‘You’re getting all mixed up again. Why on earth would she do that?’
‘She was afraid,’ I said. ‘Mr Beckett used to bully her.’
‘Surely they did something about him, after that?’ said Jack.
Elsie leaned forward and tried to find my eyes. ‘But you helped her, Florence. Don’t you remember? You taught her how to thread and how to stretch the corset. She got really good at it.’
I stared at her. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘You spent hours teaching her. She started coming to the dance with us on a Saturday night. Married the boy who worked in the fishmonger’s. Moved to Wales, I think.’
I began to say something and swallowed it back.
‘Try to remember, Florence. The long second. What did you do with it?’
‘Take your time,’ Jack said. ‘Don’t worry about it. We all get in a muddle.’
I turned over thoughts like a game of cards, trying to decide on the ones that matched. The coat still rested on my knees, and I felt the material twist between my fingers. After a while, I said, ‘I can’t find a memory I trust.’
‘I’ll bet you can.’ Jack reached for my hands. ‘Tell me something clear. Tell me something you’re absolutely sure of.’
I stopped twisting the material, and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Ronnie Butler worked in the factory,’ I said.
‘When did you last see it?’
It was the girl in the tangerine overall. Of all the pointless questions you could ask a person who has lost something, this has to be the one to win a prize.
‘If I knew that,’ I said, ‘I’d know where to find it, wouldn’t I?’
She was an unusual-looking girl. Small eyes. Small ears. Wears a crucifix. Although if she’s ever seen the inside of a church, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs.
‘What does it look like?’ she said.
‘It’s a book.’ I closed my eyes. ‘It’s book shaped. It has words in it.’
‘But what colour is it?’
‘I don’t know. Blue. Green, perhaps. I don’t remember. I don’t take any notice of the outside, it’s the inside I’m interested in.’
‘My mum says things are always where you least expect them to be,’ said the girl. ‘Why don’t we try looking there?’
‘The refrigerator, then? Or maybe the lavatory cistern?’
The girl smiled. ‘Yes, exactly!’
I closed my eyes again.
The book should have been exactly where I left it. On the little table next to my armchair. Each night I leave it there when I go to bed, and each morning I pick it up from where I left it, and read until Elsie comes over.
‘You must have put it somewhere else last night.’ The girl poked around behind the cushions. ‘Perhaps you were a bit absent-minded.’
‘My mind isn’t absent,’ I said. ‘It’s very much present and correct, thank you. It’s just old.’
The girl stood with her hands on her hips in the middle of the room. ‘Well, it’ll turn up,’ she said. ‘When you least expect it.’
Which, I believe, means ‘I’m tired of looking.’
‘It’s not the first thing, either.’ I sat in the armchair whilst she unpacked her little basket of dusters. ‘Last week, a pint of milk vanished from the fridge – and I know it was there, because I’d only started it that morning – and the week before, I found the Radio Times underneath my pillow.’
The girl didn’t say anything.
‘It was one of you, wasn’t it? It must have been. I’d rather you told me you’d done it, then I can stop worrying.’
Still nothing.
‘If this carries on,’ I said, ‘I’m going to have to have a word with Miss Ambrose.’
The girl carried on rubbing Pledge into the sideboard.
‘Or even Miss Bissell.’
The girl’s duster became very still. ‘Why don’t we make you a nice pot of tea, Miss Claybourne, and we’ll have another look.’
I knew the mention of Miss Bissell would rouse the troops. I have my routines. I read my Radio Times by the window, and my book in the armchair. I buy one pint of milk on a Monday, and it lasts me five days. I live my life around habits. When your days are small, routine is the only scaffolding that holds you together.
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.’
‘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.