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 eyes 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 their 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!’
Mabel went back to apologising, although to be honest, the room didn’t seem a mess at all. Even though light flooded through a stretch of glass, and picked out all the toys and the clothes, and the colouring books, it looked as though everything was exactly where it was meant to be.
We explored pockets of the past. Favourite stories were retold, to make sure they hadn’t been forgotten. Scenes were sandpapered down to make them easier to hold. When we talked about the war, we didn’t mention the loss and the fear and the misery; we talked about the friendships instead, and the strange solidarity that is always born of making do. There were people missing from our conversation, and others were coloured in and underlined. Those who made life easier were found again, and those who caused problems were disappeared. It’s the greatest advantage of reminiscing. The past can be exactly how you wanted it to be the first time around. This meant, of course, that no one mentioned Ronnie Butler, but just as I was trying to think of a way in, Mabel’s daughter appeared with a pot of tea, and said it was such a coincidence we’d rung, because her mother came back from the British Legion only last week and said she could have sworn she saw Ronnie Butler on a bus.
There was a piece of fruit cake exactly halfway between the plate and my mouth, and it waited there for a good minute before I remembered I was eating it.
‘Ronnie Butler?’ I said.
‘But of course, it wasn’t.’ Mabel took another slice of cake. ‘It would be impossible.’
‘Impossible,’ I said.
‘Although …’ Mabel put the cake down again. ‘I really did think it was him for a moment. It was the voice as well, you see, when he spoke to the driver. Exactly the same. Took me right back.’
‘It did?’ I said.
‘And when he walked down the bus, he had a little scar, right in the corner of his mouth.’
She pointed, and we all pointed along with her.
‘I said to him, “You look just like someone I used to know.”’
‘You spoke to him?’ said Jack.
Of course she spoke to him. Mabel speaks to everyone. She’d find someone to speak to in an empty room.
‘What did he say?’ I leaned forward on the sofa.
‘What did you talk about?’ said Elsie.
‘Nothing much. He said he’d only recently moved, and he didn’t really know anyone around here.’
We all exchanged a look across a laundry basket.
‘It gave me quite a turn, it did.’ Mabel didn’t seem like the kind of woman who turns easily, but I would imagine that would almost certainly do the trick. ‘Reminded me of the last time I saw him.’
We waited. I was on the absolute edge of speaking. Elsie glanced over again and we had a conversation between us with our eyes. Elsie always says, if you leave someone to use up a silence, they will eventually fill it with far more enthusiasm than they would have done if you had said something. I don’t like to admit it, but she’s right. Mabel found the story all by herself.
I allowed Elsie a small nod of triumph.
‘It was the night Beryl died. I was just turning the corner on the way up to the town hall, when his car came tearing down the road like a bat out of hell. Nearly knocked me off my feet.’ Mabel pressed her hand to her chest. ‘It could have been me,’ she said, and her fingers left little red prints of thinking on her flesh.
‘Was Ronnie on his own in that car?’ Jack said.
I tried to swallow, but my throat point blank refused to go along with it. I was concerned I’d begin to cough, or have a choking fit, and the more concerned I became, the more likely it seemed it was going to happen. My body has always had a habit of failing to cooperate whenever it’s called upon.
‘Of course he wasn’t. But I’ve no idea who was with him. Don’t think I haven’t tried to work it out over the years.’
‘Nothing?’ said Jack.
Mabel shook her head very slowly. ‘All I remember is a flash of red. A scarf, perhaps.’
She stared at us.
‘Or a hat?’ she said.
One of the children barrelled into the room waving a piece of paper, and everyone reappeared in the present. A strange conversation ensued between Mabel and the child, and I followed every word with my mouth. I held out my hand for the child to come forward, but instead, he helicoptered back into the main part of the house.
‘I hope I see him again.’ Mabel watched the child disappear.
‘Who?’ I said.
‘The man who looks like Ronnie. Perhaps he’s a relative of his?’
‘I’d steer well clear, if I were you,’ Jack said. ‘And of anyone calling themselves Gabriel Price.’
‘Who?’
‘Just remember the name,’ he said. ‘And be careful.’
‘I’m fine.’ She took a mouthful of cake. ‘I’ve got my own resident copper.’
‘There’s a policeman in the house?’ said Elsie.
‘Our Sandra married a detective. Retired now, of course, but he still thinks like one. Then there’s my Norman.’
‘Norman?’ I said.
‘You must remember Norman from school. We’ve been married nearly sixty years.’
Norman. Short. Skinny. Can’t stand up for himself. ‘But I thought he ran away?’ I said.
‘Ran away?’ Mabel frowned at me.
‘To London,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘My Norman’s only been to London once in his life, and that was under protest. Do you want to say hello? He’s only in the garden.’
I looked through a window to where a man stood on the lawn, hands on hips, surrounded by children and chickens. He was skinny and short, but he had that settled, reassuring look that only seems to come from old age and good health.
‘We won’t trouble him,’ I said.
I looked at Elsie. ‘We found the long second, didn’t we?’
‘We did.’
‘Perhaps it’s time we were on our way,’ I said.
She smiled at me. ‘It’s always later than you think.’
As we climbed into the car, and Chris did the little cough he always does before he starts the engine, I looked back at the wedding-cake house, filled with children.
‘I would like to have lived somewhere like that,’ I said.
Jack peered through the side window. ‘In the middle of nowhere?’
I watched a line of grandchildren follow Norman back into the house. ‘That’s part of it,’ I said. ‘You always think “one day”, don’t you, and then you realise you’ve reached the point when you’ve run out of them.’
Elsie turned to me. ‘How many more “one day I’d like to”s do you have hidden away?’
‘One day I’d like to learn to play the piano,’ I said. ‘One day I’d like to go whale-watching.’
‘Whale-watching?’
‘I’ve always fancied it.’
‘You get seasick on a canal boat,’ she said.
‘One day,’ I said, ‘I might be the kind of person who doesn’t get seasick.’
‘I’ve never fancied it,’ she said. ‘All that bobbing about.’
‘No one’s putting a gun to your head, Elsie. No one said you have to come with me. We don’t always need to do everything together.’
I saw Chris and Jack give each other side-looks. Elsie pushed herself as far as she could into the seat beside me, and her chin made a home in her coat.
Jack cleared his throat. ‘Can you think,’ he said, ‘who might have been in that car? Who might have been wearing red?’
Elsie shook her head. I could see her face fighting with the past, and the sight of it was so hard to bear, I had to look away again.
‘I don’t remember,’ I said. ‘I don’t even remember being told Beryl was dead. It’s as though I’ve always known it.’
I rested my forehead against the glass and watched the traffic. So many cars. We’re running out of roads, I thought. Soon, it will be a stalemate. An endless line of people looking out over their steering wheels, searching for a destination they’ll never reach and stuck on the tarmac forever.
‘Some experiences are like that.’ I heard Jack from the front seat. ‘They affect you so much, you can’t remember what life was like before they happened.’
‘But I need to remember,’ I said. ‘We need to find out who it was.’
‘You will,’ he said. ‘You will.’
I leaned further into the glass and closed my eyes. I’d almost drifted off when I heard Elsie’s voice.
‘They make wristbands now,’ she said, ‘for travel sickness. Very effective they are, by all accounts.’
I reached over and squeezed her hand.
When we pulled into the grounds of Cherry Tree, Chris said, ‘What’s all this then?’ and put the brakes on so violently, Elsie and I lurched forward in our seats.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
In the courtyard, there were fire engines – two of them. Fire engines are like cows, in that you don’t realise how large they are until they’re standing right in front of you. There were people walking around with their hands on their hips, and mixed in with the helmets and the high-visibility jackets, the residents drifted like leaves. Simon appeared to be attempting a head count, but Miss Ambrose had to keep retrieving the heads for him and appealing to their better nature.
‘All hands on deck!’ said Jack. He unfastened his seatbelt.
I tapped Elsie’s arm. ‘I thought he was in the army, not the navy.’
‘It’s interchangeable,’ she said, ‘in a crisis.’
It was only when Jack marched across the gravel that I realised his stick lay forgotten in the footwell of the car.
‘Ah, here you are.’ Miss Ambrose spotted us from a distance and made a beeline. She stamped across the courtyard with her arms folded, and pieces of gravel launched themselves into the grass in fear. ‘I was wondering when you’d be back.’
‘What’s happened? What have we missed?’ I said.
She looked over at the flats. ‘There’s been an incident. Quite a serious one, I’m afraid, but no one has been hurt, so we should count our blessings.’
‘What kind of incident?’ said Jack.
Miss Ambrose bit her lip. ‘A fire.’
We all joined in and looked over at the flats. Nothing seemed out of place. ‘A fire?’ Elsie said.
‘Well, more explicitly, a near miss.’
‘People should be more careful,’ I said. ‘Chip pans, gas fires. Everything you put on yourself these days is Chinese and flammable.’
‘Where did it start?’ said Jack. ‘This near miss?’
Miss Ambrose looked at us with a tilted head. ‘Well, actually,’ she said, ‘it was in Florence’s front room.’
My mouth became very dry.
I stopped looking at the flats and looked at Miss Ambrose instead. ‘My front room? What on earth is there to catch fire in my front room?’
‘You left the iron on,’ she said. ‘It burned a hole in the ironing board. You really should be more careful, it could have been disastrous.’
A fireman walked past. He stared.
I carried on talking, although I wasn’t sure anyone was listening any more. ‘I don’t even use an iron. I’ve not ironed anything in years.’ And then, ‘There’s been a mistake. Where is Miss Bissell?’
‘We need to do some paperwork,’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘We’ll have to fill out an incident form.’
‘But I didn’t cause the incident. The incident wasn’t me.’ I knew I was shouting, because Jack put his hand on my arm.
I pulled my arm back. ‘I’M NOT AN INCIDENT—’
‘And we should all be very grateful to Mr Price,’ said Miss Ambrose.
‘Mr Price?’ The three of us repeated back, in a chorus.
‘Yes.’ She nodded over to the corner of the courtyard, where Ronnie Butler was shaking hands with a high-visibility jacket. ‘He was the one who smelled the burning and alerted us.’
Jack reached for my arm again.
‘What was he doing sniffing around my flat?’ I said, but Miss Ambrose ignored me and beamed her smile across the gravel.
‘He’s our Resident of the Month.’
‘What’s a Resident of the Month?’ said Elsie.
‘We don’t have a Resident of the Month,’ I said.
‘We do now,’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘I’ve made a decision.’