I couldn’t decide which bench to sit on. The one on the far end was near the flat, but it was the furthest away from any of the main buildings, and the one near the day room had bird nonsense all over it. I changed my mind quite a few times. I saw Gloria staring at me from the staff-room window, but it’s a free country, and I could change my mind as many times as I wanted to.
I wish I’d never offered her a piece of cake. I was only being civil. It was the girl with pink hair. Green tabard. Tiny feet. Chews her fingernails right down to the skin. You look tired, I said to her. She was changing the bed-sheets. Spending far too long on the corners. Why don’t I make you a cup of tea? Take the edge off things.
‘We’re not allowed to, Miss Claybourne,’ she said. ‘Miss Bissell doesn’t let us take anything from the residents. Not even cups of tea.’
‘Well, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,’ I said.
I put the kettle on and I decided she could have my best cup. The one with Princess Diana on it. I bought it after she died. To remember her by. I don’t even let Elsie have that cup, because she’s too clumsy.
‘I’ll put two sugars in,’ I shouted. ‘Give you a bit of a boost.’
I was stirring when she came in. Yawning. No effort to put her hand over her mouth. No one seems to bother these days.
‘Why don’t we have a bit of cake?’ I said. ‘Push the boat out?’
‘I couldn’t, Florence. Really.’
‘Oh go on, I’m not going to tell anyone. I’ve got a lovely Battenberg. Just in that cupboard above your head.’
She looked up and reached for the handle. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. I couldn’t work out what was going on at first, where it was all coming from. They fell all over the worktop and a few of them spilled on to the floor.
The girl stood in silence.
‘I didn’t buy all those,’ I said. ‘I only bought one. Who put all those in there? Was it you?’
She didn’t say anything. She just carried on staring.
There were twenty-three. She counted them. I wanted her to take them away, but she said she wasn’t allowed to, that she’d have to tell Miss Bissell and someone would come over.
No one did.
I waited.
In the end, I had to go outside, because I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was the smell. The marzipan. It’s funny, because I used to love the smell of marzipan. It reminded me of Christmas and mixing bowls, and my mother, dusted in flour and smiling. Now the smell filled the whole flat, and it made me feel sick. I even sat in the bathroom with the door shut to get away from it, but it crept in somehow. I could taste it. Jack had gone off with Chris somewhere and I couldn’t find Elsie, so I decided to sit on a bench until someone came to take them away.
‘Are you all right, Florence?’
It was the handyman. Big talker, little doer. Always appears slightly confused. Wears training shoes, although he doesn’t look the type who sees the inside of a gymnasium very often.
‘It’s Simon,’ he said.
Simon. That’s it. I would have got there if he’d given me a bit more time.
‘It’s a bit cold,’ he said, ‘to be sitting out here on your own.’
‘Does it make it any warmer if you sit out here with someone else?’ I said.
He didn’t answer, although I thought it was a perfectly reasonable question.
‘It does old people good to get fresh air,’ I said. ‘I read about it. In a magazine.’
‘I was just worried you were getting a bit too much of it,’ he said.
I studied his face. I’ve never been very good at guessing ages, but I thought he might be about forty. Elsie says I guess the same for everybody, but I’ve found it suits most people. His face wasn’t wrinkled, but his thinking had begun to make lines around his eyes. I sometimes wondered if you were supposed to think more as you got older, and so the lines were there just to make it easier for your face to fall into a thought.
‘You need a shave, Simon,’ I said.
I didn’t know it had come out. Sometimes I think the words stay in my head, but then I look at people’s faces and realise my mouth has opened and set them all free. Simon just laughed.
‘I think you’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I walk you back to your flat, and we can have a cup of tea? Warm ourselves up a bit?’
I sat up a little straighter. ‘Not with all that cake,’ I said.
‘Cake?’
‘I didn’t buy it. Everyone will think it was me, and it wasn’t. Even I’m not that mad on marzipan.’
He frowned at me, and so I explained it to him.
‘They were supposed to take it away, but no one came. That’s why I’m sitting here. To get away from it.’
Simon put his hand on mine, and I let him.
‘Why don’t I move it for you, Florence? We’ll go back together, eh?’
I found him an old carrier bag in the back of a drawer.
‘There are twenty-three of them,’ I said. ‘Only one of them is mine. I don’t know who the rest belong to.’
He gathered them up and put them in the bag, and tied a little knot in the top. ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ he said. ‘We’ll let Miss Bissell sort it out.’
‘You’ll tell her, won’t you? You’ll tell her they’re not mine, or she’ll use it against me.’
He nodded and smiled at me, and all the thinking on his face disappeared.
‘It looks like they broke your mug when they fell,’ he said.
The Princess Diana cup. It lay on the floor in a lake of tea.
‘It was my favourite,’ I said. ‘I’m worried I’ll forget about her now.’ My voice shook, although I wasn’t really sure where the shaking came from. It never used to be there.
‘I tell you what,’ Simon said. ‘I’ll soon fix that for you. It’s only the handle, you leave it with me, Florence.’
He wrapped the cup in a sheet of newspaper and put it in his coat pocket.
I looked up at him.
‘You can call me Flo,’ I said. ‘If you want to.’
I managed to wait until he’d left before I started crying.
I hadn’t cried in years. There have been times in my life when I’ve cried for so long, I completely ran out of tears, but not so much recently, because there hasn’t seemed to be much point in it. I thought I’d forgotten how, but as soon as Simon left, I realised it was like riding a bicycle.
It’s strange, because you can put up with all manner of nonsense in your life, all sorts of sadness, and you manage to keep everything on board and march through it, then someone is kind to you and it’s the kindness that makes you cry. It’s the tiny act of goodness that opens a door somewhere and lets all the misery escape.
‘We’ll have to monitor your purchases from now on,’ Miss Ambrose said. ‘We’ll have to be sure you’re making sensible choices.’
She said did I want to see a nutritionist? Or the dietician?
I asked her what the difference was, and she just coughed and looked for something in a drawer. I don’t know when jobs became so complicated, where all these names come from. I wonder if the names make people feel better about themselves, or perhaps it just makes other people more likely to listen to them. I told her I didn’t want to see anybody. I told her the only person I wanted to see was someone who believed me. She didn’t even bother to reply.
I’m not even sure Jack and Elsie believed me, although Jack bought me an air freshener. To get rid of the smell of marzipan, he said. Forest Walk, it’s called. Sits in a little plastic cube on the draining board. It smells a bit like Jeyes Fluid, but I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. The shop sells them. There’s Lavender Meadow and Winter Wonderland as well. They all smell like Jeyes Fluid to me. The only difference I can see is the picture on the front. I didn’t buy one. The man with the earphones watches me now. He writes down everything I buy in a book under the counter.
I said to him, ‘It’s like rationing, only it’s just me this time,’ and I tried to laugh a little bit.
He didn’t join in.
When Jack brought the air freshener around, he asked about Beryl again. He tried to hide it in another conversation, but I spotted it straight away because men aren’t very good at that kind of thing. He wanted to know what happened to her. How she died. He said we might be able to use it. He said we could play Ronnie at his own game.
It’s funny, because I can’t tell the difference between those daft air fresheners, but whenever anyone mentions Beryl, all I can smell is the wooden polish of the dance floor and the spilled beer. I can hear the music as well. All those notes, playing in my head. The slide of the trombone and the brush of the piano keys. The tangos and the waltzes and the foxtrots, all spinning around and covering up everything else. I tell him I can’t remember. I tell him I walk down all these different paths in my mind, but the only thing I can find are dead ends. Miss Ambrose says everything is up there, I just have to find a way of getting it out.
‘It’s your retrieval system, Florence,’ she says, whenever I forget something. ‘You have all these memories stored in drawers in your head, and we just need to find the key to open them up again.’ She taps the side of her skull when she says it. Like I don’t know where my head is.
If you sit in the day room for long enough, someone comes along with photographs of film stars and prime ministers, and pop singers.
‘Come on, Florence,’ they say. ‘Let’s open those little drawers.’
I don’t recognise my own face sometimes, so I don’t know how I’m supposed to recognise theirs. I just say Winston Churchill to everything, and they go away after a while and pick on someone else.
I tried to explain it to Jack. I tried to explain that sometimes memories don’t want to be remembered, that they crouch behind all the other memories in the corner of your mind, trying to be unfound.
‘Perhaps there was someone else there, apart from Clara,’ he said, ‘who might be able to remember?’
I looked over at Elsie. She was sitting in the corner of the room, listening to the conversation with her eyes.
‘Cyril was there,’ she said. ‘Cyril would know.’
‘Cyril Sowter?’
‘See,’ she said. ‘You’re not as daft as you think you are. You remembered his name. You opened a drawer, Florence.’
Cyril Sowter lives on a barge. We’d heard rumour, but we weren’t sure whether to believe it or not, because some elderly people have very little else to do apart from exchange nonsense backwards and forwards between themselves to help pass the time. However, on this occasion, it happened to be true.
‘Do you think he’ll remember the night Beryl died?’ Jack said, as we climbed into the car.
‘He’ll have an opinion on it,’ said Elsie. ‘If nothing else.’
‘He has a full set of marbles, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘Or at least, as many as he started off with.’
Chris pulled into a cramped space by a wooden bench and a litter bin, and we spilled out of the car on to the towpath. I hadn’t been here in years. Not since Elsie’s mother used to walk up and down the bank, talking to the fresh air, and we would watch from a distance until she’d exhausted herself. In my mind, the water had a strange smell, but now when I took a breath, there was nothing. Just grass and trees, and a faint scent of diesel. What I remembered was probably just a post-war fragrance, when the whole world smelled tired and worn out.
There was a cluster of boats moored further up. A collection of primary colours and gold lettering. They bobbed together against the canal wall like a group of conspirators.
‘Which one do you think is his?’ said Elsie.
‘Cyril’s will be the odd one out.’ I squinted against the light. ‘Whichever one looks like it doesn’t belong.’
We left Chris and walked towards the boats. A family of ducks followed alongside for a while, cutting through the water in a line of determination, as though they had a very important meeting to attend.
‘You can see the appeal, can’t you?’ Jack tapped his stick along the towpath. ‘Pulling back your curtains in a morning and seeing a view like this, instead of the canteen fire doors.’
‘And the whole world slows down,’ I said. ‘Like someone took out the key to the clock.’
‘No one has keys in clocks any more.’ Elsie put her arm through mine. ‘I think that’s the problem.’
Cyril Sowter sat on a deckchair by his barge. I was right: the boat was painted in a canary yellow, and was called The Narrow Escape. His name had been written in red underneath. For good measure.
‘Sir Cyril Sowter?’ I said.
‘I decided to knight myself. People treat you with a bit more respect when you’ve got a title in front of your name.’ He nodded at the boat. ‘I don’t see why it should be limited to the Queen; I never voted for her, and it’s about time you turned up. I’ve been waiting all morning.’
‘You knew we were coming?’ I said.
‘You came to me.’ He pointed to the empty deckchairs. ‘In a premonition. I have them quite often. I told everybody we’d be getting a change of prime minister, and I predicted there’d be a new Tesco on the ring road. I even foresaw Welsh independence.’
‘Wales isn’t independent,’ said Jack.
Cyril tapped the side of his nose and smiled.
‘Well you can’t have predicted us very well,’ I said. ‘There are only two spare seats.’
Cyril made a pot of tea and we sat in September sunshine, watching the ducks. Elsie had to make do with a footstool, but it was fine, because she’s from a big family. Whilst we listened, Cyril stretched out in his deckchair and gave out the same opinion he’d been generous enough to share with everyone sixty years ago. Another prime minister, different wars in countries with unfamiliar names, a new set of people to blame, but the viewpoint was unchanged. He had just recycled himself for the modern age.
‘And that’s what’s wrong with this country today,’ he said. ‘Too many do-gooders, clogging up the place with their namby-pamby nonsense.’
‘Do-gooders?’ Jack said.
‘You’ve only got to look at charity shops.’ Cyril paused a mug of tea on the shelf of his stomach. ‘Everywhere, they are. Stretched along the high street like bunting.’
‘They do a lot of good, Cyril—’ But the end of Jack’s sentence was never allowed to make an appearance.
‘Not for me, they don’t. I never see a penny of it.’
‘What about Age Concern?’ said Jack.
He snorted. ‘No one’s concerned about my age. Why should they be?’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘All in the mind,’ he mouthed.
‘Is it?’ Jack turned in his deckchair. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Stands to reason.’ Cyril placed his mug on the fold-up table with the kind of precision people use when they have what they feel is a very important point to make. ‘You expect things to happen, so they do.’
‘They do?’ said Jack.
‘Of course they do.’ Cyril moved his mug half an inch to the left. ‘You expect to get indigestion after a big meal. You expect to feel cold when it snows. So that’s what happens. Same with ageing.’
‘Is it?’ said Elsie.
‘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 said.
‘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.