Three Things About Elsie(38)

‘The dance?’ I pushed my thoughts into a frown.

‘Florence, that’s why we’re seeing her. To ask about the dance,’ Elsie said.

The woman looked at her notes. ‘Dance? It doesn’t say anything about a dance in here.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’

‘We’re on the third floor.’ The woman looked at Jack. ‘Would you like to use the lift?’

The lift waited for customers in the corner of the hall. It had an iron gate and a very complicated pulley system, which appeared to be suspended from the ceiling.

‘I think I’ll go with the stairs,’ said Jack.

‘Don’t mind the stick,’ I said. ‘He only uses it to boss people about.’

Jack was still laughing when we reached the first landing.

As we climbed, the scent of lavender disappeared, and was replaced with the wipe-clean fragrance of a waiting room. Its aroma was rather like a doctor’s surgery or how you would imagine an operating theatre to smell. The furnishings altered, too. Vases of flowers were exchanged for cages of bedsheets, and the oil paintings became health and safety notices, drilled into the plaster and yellowed with age. Even the carpet turned to lino beneath our feet, as though gravity had pulled all the soft furnishings to the ground floor.

The woman turned right down another corridor. The doors became numbered, and the brochure descriptions disappeared along with the dried flowers. Within each room was a small piece of torment. Eyes were glazed with vacancy. Mouths gaped. Limbs rested on angry, twisted sheets, although perhaps worse were the ones who lay silent in perfectly made beds. The ones who had run out of arguing. I stared into each room, and a parcel of life stared back. Outside each door was a photograph, and the corridor looked as though a giant family album had been unfolded along its walls. People posed in gardens and on seafronts. They lifted children on to their hips and looked out at us from beneath Christmas trees. The woman saw us staring.

‘It shows the staff who they used to be,’ she said.

I tried to match the people in the rooms with the people under the Christmas trees. The ice-cream people on promenades, creasing their eyes in the sunshine, the people smiling at me from their black-and-white lives. But they had all disappeared.

‘Here we are.’ The woman waited outside a door numbered forty-seven. Further down the corridor, I heard singing.

‘“Onward, Christian Soldiers”,’ I said.

‘Onward indeed,’ said Elsie.

The woman coughed. ‘Shall we?’

Room forty-seven was filled with light. As we’d walked through Greenbank, the clouds had hurried across a September sky, exchanging the rain for a watery sunlight. The harsh lines, the sharp edges of a windowsill, the white stare of a pictureless wall, were all diluted with a butterscotch kindness. On the bedside table were a box of tissues and a beaker of water. The room had an echo.

The woman said, ‘She has everything she needs,’ before all of us were even inside.

I looked up at the ceiling, and it looked back at me with a magnolia indifference.

‘We couldn’t trace any family.’ The woman ran a finger down a page in her notes. ‘She used to live in Wales. Husband died years ago.’

‘Husband?’ I said.

‘She married Fred. From the dance,’ said Elsie.

‘The one who always smelled of fish?’

‘He worked in the fishmonger’s, Florence. I keep telling you, but you don’t take it in.’

The woman looked through her notes. ‘Fish? It doesn’t say anything about fish in here.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’

‘We went to his funeral, don’t you remember?’ said Elsie. ‘Clara stood by the grave in the pouring rain, because she couldn’t bear to leave him behind. You persuaded her to get in the car. No one else could.’

‘She was still swinging when they found her,’ I said.

‘No.’ Elsie took hold of my coat sleeve. ‘Don’t you remember? Measure twice, cut once. Trim the thread at an angle.’

She waited for a few minutes.

‘I helped her?’ I said.

We both looked at the clock on the wall, measuring out the seconds. ‘You did.’

A door opened and a girl in a brown uniform armed an old woman back to a seat. It took me a moment to realise the old woman was Clara. Her shoulders were too small. Her eyes were too quiet. Her hands were worn and shot through with veins. All I could see were the crumbs of a person, the leftovers of a life, but then she smiled, and I wondered how I could have failed to recognise her in the first place.

‘Here’s Clara,’ Elsie said. ‘Talk to her, Florence. She knew you best of all.’

The old woman frowned at us. ‘Who is it?’

I looked at Elsie, and I looked at the old woman and I took a step forward. My shoe leather squeaked on a mopped floor and I folded the belt on my raincoat.

‘It’s Florence,’ I said. ‘Florence. From the factory. Do you remember?’

I watched the woman’s eyes, milky with too much seeing. I watched the question tread through her mind, and the confusion steal away her answer.

I said, ‘Florence,’ again, then I took another step and said, ‘Flo.’