Three Things About Elsie(5)

‘Indeed,’ Elsie said.

‘She has a clipboard, Elsie. She must be doing his levels.’

‘So it would seem,’ she said.

We measured out our afternoon with pots of tea, but the rinse of a September light seemed to push at the hours, spreading the day to its very edges. I always thought September was an odd month. All you were really doing was waiting for the cold weather to arrive, the back end, and we seemed to waste most of our time just staring at the sky, waiting to be reassured it was happening. The stretch of summer had long since disappeared, but we hadn’t quite reached the frost yet, the skate of icy pavements and the prickly breath of a winter’s morning. Instead, we were paused in a pavement-grey life with porridge skies. Each afternoon was the same. Around four o’clock, one of us would say the nights were drawing in, and we would nod and agree with each other. Between us, we would work out how many days it was until Christmas, and we would say how quickly the time passes, and saying how quickly the time passes would help to pass the time a little more.

The winters at Cherry Tree always took longer, and this would be my fifth. It was called sheltered accommodation, but I’d never quite been able to work out what it was we were being sheltered from. The world was still out there. It crept in through the newspapers and the television. It slid between the cracks of other people’s conversation and sang out from their mobile telephones. We were the ones hidden away, collected up and ushered out of sight, and I often wondered if it was actually the world that was being sheltered from us.

‘The nights are drawing in, aren’t they?’ said Elsie.

We watched the lights begin to switch on in the flats opposite. Rows of windows. A jigsaw of people, whose evenings leaked out into a September dusk. It was the time of day when you could see into different lives, a slice of someone else, before their world became curtained and secretive.

‘Someone’s in,’ I said.

Most of the uniforms had gone home, and Miss Bissell and her Mini Metro had long since sped through the lights at the bottom of the road and vanished up the bypass, but a bulb had been switched on in the lounge of number twelve. It faltered, like the reel of a cine film, and I watched, frame by frame, as a man walked across the room. Middle-aged, I thought, but the faulty light made it difficult to be sure.

I felt a catch of breath in my throat.

‘How many days is it until Christmas?’ said Elsie. ‘Do you want to count them with me?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t, especially.’

‘It’s ninety-eight,’ she said. ‘Ninety-eight!’

‘Is it?’

I watched the man. He wore a hat and an overcoat, and he had his back to us, but every so often he showed the edge of his face, and my mind tried to make sense out of my eyes.

‘How very strange,’ I whispered.

‘I know.’ Elsie smoothed tea cake crumbs from the tablecloth. ‘Last Christmas only seems like yesterday.’

The man paced the room. There was something about the way he lifted his collar, the shrug of his shoulders, and it made the world turn in my stomach. ‘It does. But it can’t be.’

‘It is. Ninety-eight. I’ve counted them whilst you’ve been wasting your time staring out of that window.’

I frowned at Elsie. ‘Ninety-eight what?’

‘Days until Christmas.’

‘I didn’t mean—’ I looked back, but the lightbulb had given up, and the man with the collar and the shrug of the shoulders had vanished. ‘I thought I recognised someone.’

Elsie peered into the darkness. ‘Perhaps it was one of the gardeners?’

‘No, at number twelve.’ I looked at her. I changed my mind and turned back. ‘I must be wrong.’

‘It’s dark, Florence. It’s easy to make a mistake.’

‘Yes, that’s what happened,’ I said. ‘I made a mistake.’

Elsie went back to sweeping crumbs, and I pulled the sleeves down on my cardigan.

‘Shall we have another bar on the fire?’ I said. ‘It’s gone a bit cold, hasn’t it?’

‘Florence, it’s like an oven in here.’

I stared into the shadows and the window of number twelve stared back at me. ‘I feel as though someone just walked over my grave.’

‘Your grave?’

I definitely must have made a mistake.

Because anything else was impossible.

‘It’s just a figure of speech,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

We were halfway through Tuesday before I saw him again.

Elsie was having her toenails seen to, and it always takes a while, because she’s difficult to clip. One of the uniforms was dusting the flat, and I was keeping my eye on her, because I’ve found people do a much more thorough job if they’re supervised. They seem to appreciate it when I point out something they’ve missed.

‘How would we manage without you, Miss Claybourne?’ they say.

This particular one was especially slapdash. Flat feet. Small wrists. Earrings in her nose, her lips, her eyebrows – everywhere except her ears.

There was a mist. The kind of mist that hammers the sky to the horizon to stop any of the daylight getting in, but I saw him straight away, as soon as I turned to the window. He sat on one of the benches in the middle of the courtyard, staring up at number twelve. He was wearing the same hat and the same grey overcoat, but that wasn’t why I recognised him. It was because of the way he pulled at his collar. The way he wore his trilby. The very look of him. You can spot someone you know, even in a strange place or a crowd of people. There’s something about a person that fits into your eyes.