Three Things About Elsie(54)

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.