Three Things About Elsie(78)

‘I wonder what I’d leave,’ he said. ‘To show people.’

‘Only you can work that one out.’ She reached into the bag. ‘Oh damn it, they’ve given me the wrong sodding flavour. I hate these. Do you want them?’

She pulled out a packet of crisps. They were cheese and onion.

Simon walked out of the tent and blinked into the sunlight. It felt as if he’d escaped from a parallel universe and it seemed unthinkable that the rest of the world had continued in his absence. His eyes slowly became used to the brightness, and when they finally began to focus he found himself face to face with Miss Ambrose.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said.

Miss Ambrose studied the jumble sale poster. ‘I was thinking of having a look through the bric-a-brac,’ she said.





MISS AMBROSE


Anthea Ambrose had spent the morning walking around Whitby’s streets. It gave her the chance to search for Mrs Honeyman, or at least feel as though she was doing something constructive.

She had never lost anyone before. There was a small scare a few months ago, when one of the residents inadvertently locked themselves in a cupboard with the hoover, but no one had ever been gone for more than forty-five minutes. Mrs Honeyman was pushing twenty-four hours. To begin with, she thought she’d spotted her quite a few times. It was a mistake, of course. A flash of grey hair, a stooped figure. Someone else. Miss Ambrose never realised just how many old people there were, until she was trying to locate one. The world seemed to be swarming with them. She’d walked all the way around the east side (although she’d drawn the line at climbing up to the abbey), across the bridge, and once more around the West Cliff. She was just about to cross over again, and at least have a peer up the abbey steps, when Miss Bissell rang her mobile telephone and insisted Miss Ambrose gave the Co-op a once-over, because Mrs Honeyman had previous for getting confused in a supermarket. It would have been a perfect little job for Handy Simon, but he seemed to have vanished as well, so she’d spent the next hour walking between canned vegetables and cold meats, until the store manager asked if there was anything they could help her with.

‘Not unless you sell old people,’ she’d said, and burst into tears.

It was all too much. She felt responsible. The previous evening, Miss Bissell hadn’t helped matters by saying she had ‘no words’, and then spending the next hour and a half managing to find a whole dictionary full of them.

They’d put her in the staff room with a weak tea and a shelf-stacker called Chelsea, who said her mum swore by the medium on the West Pier.

‘They bring them in, don’t they?’ said Chelsea. ‘When someone’s missing. They’re on telly all the time. They give them an item of clothing, and they can smell the missing person and work out where they are.’

‘I thought that was German shepherds?’ said Miss Ambrose.

But she had still found herself wandering down the boardwalk with Mrs Honeyman’s spare cardigan and a packet of Co-op tissues, which is where she finally found Handy Simon holding a bag of cheese and onion crisps.

She glanced at the poster for a coffee morning. ‘I was thinking of having a look through the bric-a-brac,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

Handy Simon looked back at the tent. ‘Thought I’d have a laugh, you know.’ He tried to laugh, as evidence, but it didn’t quite make it.

Miss Ambrose held on to Mrs Honeyman’s cardigan. ‘Is she any good, do you think?’

Simon looked back at the tent. ‘I can’t quite make up my mind. She said I shouldn’t worry.’

‘Are you worried?’

‘Perhaps more than I was before someone told me I shouldn’t be,’ said Simon. ‘Are you?’

Miss Ambrose could feel the packet of tissues in her coat pocket. ‘I am, Simon. I keep telling people I’m not, but we’re supposed to be heading back to Cherry Tree tomorrow. What if she’s still missing? We can’t just leave her here.’

‘I could stay behind. If you think it would help?’

Simon’s offer, along with his shabby rucksack and his cheese and onion crisps, somehow made things worse, and Miss Ambrose felt her eyes begin to fill.

‘That’s very kind of you, Simon.’ She took a tissue out of the packet. ‘But I don’t see how it would help.’

‘Are you all right, Miss Ambrose?’

‘It’s the sea air. All the salt,’ she said, blowing her nose. ‘It gets me every time.’

Simon offered his arm, and they walked together up the twist of white steps to the crescent and back to the hotel. Past the unfamiliar faces and the crowds of families, all present and unmissing, and slotted neatly into their lives.





FLORENCE


‘It’s that one. Right on the end.’ Jack pointed, with his finger this time, because the taxi couldn’t cope with his walking stick. ‘The one with a cat in the window.’

We’d crawled our way along Church Street. It was a tangle of vehicles and tourists. The traffic came to a standstill outside holiday cottages, where visitors loaded and unloaded their lives and wandered into the road as if they had been gifted with some strange kind of holiday immortality, weaving around cars and annoying the seagulls. People stretched out their afternoons on the wooden benches outside pubs, and spent ice-cream hours sitting on walls, watching the boats, because being away from home means you can let go of the clock. You can eat when you’re hungry. You can sit because your legs are holiday-tired. You can stare at the view, because there isn’t anybody to tell you there are other things to do.