Three Things About Elsie(61)

‘We used to go on holiday to Whitby,’ I said to Jack, ‘when we were children, but I don’t remember very much about the place. Perhaps it’ll all come back to me when we get there.’

It was odd, how that happened. You imagine you forget, but the memories are just sitting there, and it only takes the smallest thing. A smell or the words to a song, or the glimpse of a face in a crowd. The remembrance floods through you as if it had never left. The memories are always waiting, you just need to work out how to find them again.

As it happened, I remembered nothing until we climbed out of Pickering and on to the moors, where the heather rolled out before us, a thick, purple blanket across the landscape. The moor is like no other place. It’s scrubbed and scoured, and happy in its lack of decoration. I always find it a comfort, that we can still see beauty in desolation. There were hikers in the distance, all primary-coloured and waterproofed, trying to reclaim a landscape that no one could ever really own.

I tapped Elsie on the sleeve. ‘Do you remember,’ I said, ‘we used to have a competition. The first person to see the sea?’

She wiped her chin and looked out of the window. ‘You always won because you were taller,’ she said. ‘But I’ve seen it first this time. Look.’

It was there. A sliver of ocean, resting on the horizon. It played hide and seek with us, as the coach turned and twisted on narrow roads until we reached the top and watched the abbey rise from nowhere into the skyline.

‘It looks exactly the same,’ I said.

‘Nothing’s changed since we were children.’ Elsie sat up a little straighter and watched the horizon.

Miss Ambrose was having a walkabout, and she leaned across and gazed out of the window. ‘And it’ll be the same long after we’ve left. We’re just passengers really, aren’t we?’ she said.

‘Do you really believe that?’ I said. ‘Don’t you think any of us makes any difference?’

She pointed to the hikers, now pinpricks of red and yellow in the distance. ‘We’d all like to think so, but most of us won’t even leave a footprint.’

I turned away from the window and closed my eyes. Just as I did, I heard Elsie’s voice.

‘She’s wrong, you know,’ she whispered.

Miss Ambrose had chosen a small hotel on the West Cliff, and the coach pulled up at the Royal Crescent and vomited us out on to the pavement. Elsie and I stayed here before when we were children. Not the same hotel, I don’t think, but along the same road. It was impossible to remember which hotel, because they were all identical. A row of guest houses and bed and breakfasts, brushed in creams and yellows, each one named after the sea, and all with little signs in the windows, inviting you to go inside. The whole of the street seemed to consist entirely of hotels. Packets of people, parcelled into rooms, all listening to the snoring of strangers through paper-thin walls. We had no sooner landed on the pavement than our spill of elderly people and walking sticks began to leak away from each other. Handy Simon produced his clipboard, and Miss Ambrose began waving her arms, as if we were all attached to her by invisible string and could be threaded back together again.

‘Try to stay put,’ she was saying. ‘Please don’t wander.’

It was too late. Before I knew what I was doing, I was halfway down the promenade, heading for Captain Cook. It was the excitement, I think, of being somewhere I never thought I’d see again.

‘Where are you going?’ Elsie shouted.

‘I’m going to the whalebones,’ I called back. ‘I want to see if they’re still there.’

‘Well of course they’re still there,’ she said.

When I looked back, Miss Ambrose had her face in her hands and Miss Bissell looked as though she had just been given a prize in a competition she had been expecting to win all along.

I made it all the way to the whalebones before Elsie caught up with me. I watched people move between them, eating ice cream and pushing buggies, a day’s worth of belongings swinging in carrier bags from the handles. People changed their path to pass beneath the arch, as if it was some magical doorway through which they needed to walk.

‘They’re still here,’ I said.

‘I told you they would be.’

‘It’s sad, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘For the whale, I mean.’

The sun escaped from behind a cloud, and Elsie shielded her eyes. ‘I suppose it’s a piece of history. A kind of remembrance.’

We walked to a bench. Across the water, ribbons of people climbed the abbey steps and below them, boats cut a wall of foam through the harbour, on their journey towards the North Sea. Whitby curves around the estuary, its east and west sides facing each other across the water, so as you stare over the bay, you see a reflection of people living an identical life, but on the opposite side of an ocean. As we sat, Cliff Street emptied out its contents. A cast of strangers, stretching across the pavements and littering the grass, sweeping up the remains of autumn before the coastline called time and wound down its shutters for winter. They wandered past, wrapped in conversation, their words catching on a breeze and drifting out towards the sea. No one noticed us. Two old ladies, buttoned into hats and raincoats, watching the rest of the world happen without them.

‘They’d never be allowed to do it now,’ Elsie said. ‘The whales, I mean. Times have changed.’