‘You can’t do up your buttons.’
‘Marks & Spencer do a perfectly good range of clothes without a button in sight,’ I said.
The clock ticked in the corner of the room, and grew the distance between us. The woman glanced at the clock and glanced away again.
She blinked a few times and then she said, ‘That’s not the point, Miss Claybourne. We need to make sure you’re being looked after. We only want what’s best for you.’
‘Do we?’ I said.
It didn’t take them long to undo my life. I had spent eighty years building it, but within weeks, they made it small enough to fit into a manila envelope and take along to meetings. They kidnapped it. They hurried it away from me when I least expected, when I thought I could coat myself in old age and be left to it. A door doesn’t sound the same when you close it for the last time, and a room doesn’t look the same when you know you’ll never see it again.
‘I’ve left something behind,’ I said to them. ‘I need to go back and get it.’
And so I walked around an empty house for one last goodbye, because I was afraid there might be a day when I’d forget what it looked like, and there would be no one left to remember it except for me.
When I got into the car, they said, ‘We’ve only got a short drive to Cherry Tree – we’ll be there before you know it.’
It was the longest journey of my life. When we stopped at a set of traffic lights, I opened the door and tried to leave.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said. ‘I’m going home.’
They chased me across the high street, and I realised for the first time in my life that I no longer had a mind of my own to change.
I have always lived alone, but this was a stairless, hand-railed alone. The rooms smelled of paint and someone else. It took me ages to work out where to put all my things, and even now I keep changing my mind.
Elsie wasn’t here then, of course. She moved in a few weeks later. I spotted her walking through the grounds, in a coat that had seen better days, talking to herself and looking up at the sky. I shouted across the courtyard, and she turned to me and waved.
‘I didn’t know you were here too,’ I said. ‘When did you arrive?’
‘This morning,’ she said. ‘You can show me the ropes. It’s going to be fine, Florence. It’ll be just like the good old days. You don’t have to worry any more.’
And she was right. I didn’t.
FLORENCE
We’d cornered Simon in the corridor. As soon as we asked him to help, he said, ‘Yes.’ It threw Jack a bit, because I think he was expecting an argument, and he ended up with all these words and nowhere to put them. Simon took us into the staff room. The staff room! I’d never been in the staff room before, although it was a bit of a disappointment, if I’m honest. Lots of tired furniture and piles of magazines that had clearly never been read.
‘We don’t know how to cancel the subscription,’ Simon said.
He pulled out two chairs. Jack sat on the settee, and Elsie and I settled ourselves down next to a big screen on a desk. It jumped to life the minute Simon pressed a button. He took the piece of paper from me and said, ‘Let’s have a look on the internet.’
‘I’ve never been on the internet before,’ I told him.
‘You could soon learn, Flo. I could teach you. We could set up a little class.’
‘Sign me up,’ shouted Jack from behind one of the magazines.
Simon pressed some buttons and then he turned the screen so we could see properly.
‘It’s a music shop,’ he said.
‘A music shop?’ I said.
We peered into the computer.
‘In Whitby,’ he said.
‘Are you certain?’ Elsie moved forward until her face was right in front of the picture.
Simon enlarged the image on the screen. The outside of the music shop was painted shiny black, and its name was written in gold lettering. It was the kind of font you never seemed to see any more, swirled and decorated with the past. The more Simon enlarged the photograph, the more blurred it became, but you could still see instruments in the window. Saxophones and trombones with their Glenn Miller curves, and violins watching from the back, straight and serious, like a row of old ladies. There were lines of silvered flutes and guitars with hourglass figures, and a washing line of sheet music, pegged across the top.
‘George Gibson & Son.’ I read out the name. ‘I’ve never heard of them before.’
Simon took his hands from the keyboard. ‘I thought you said the number was in the back of your address book?’
‘It was. I just can’t remember why.’
I could tell Simon was suspicious, but I decided if I didn’t look at him, it might go away.
Simon wrote the address down for us, on a sticky piece of yellow paper. As he was doing it, Cheryl from the salon walked in. She looked her usual self. Bleached pale and filled up with thinking.
‘Hello, Miss Claybourne.’ If she was surprised to see us in the staff room, she didn’t let on.
‘Hello, Cheryl. How are you?’
Cheryl just mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
‘I’m glad we’ve seen each other,’ I said. ‘Because I have something for you. Well, not for you exactly, for your …’ I struggled to find the word. ‘… your assistant.’
I pulled a piece of paper out from my handbag.
‘It’s about tracing your family tree. I found it. In a magazine. I thought it might help her find the great-grandma from Prestatyn.’
Cheryl took it from me and mumbled something else. ‘And how is little Alice?’ I nodded at her wrist.
She came out with the strangest jumble of words, and Simon looked up from his writing.
‘I met some children recently,’ I said. I think she expected me to add something else, but that was really all there was to it, so I asked her how old Alice was instead.
‘She …’ Cheryl hesitated. I thought it was strange how a mother had to think of her own daughter’s age, but people have never stopped surprising me. ‘She was born three years ago,’ she said, finally.
‘And is she a good little girl?’ I said.
‘The best, Miss Claybourne. The very best. Beautiful blonde curls. The biggest blue eyes you’ve ever seen. Always smiling.’
She didn’t have a photograph with her, but she promised she’d bring one in for me.
‘I’d like that,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see Alice.’
Cheryl went to the sink and started clattering pots around, so I couldn’t hear all her words, but she did say, ‘Thank you so much for bothering to ask.’
When Simon handed Jack the piece of paper, he gave my shoulder a little squeeze and said, ‘You are lovely, Florence, you know,’ which I thought was rather nice, when the only thing I’d really done was make conversation.
9.02 p.m.
Elsie and I used to complain about how small these rooms are, but right now everything feels very far away. I thought I might be able to reach some of that nonsense under the sideboard. A coin, or whatever’s dropped there. Throw it at the window. Get someone’s attention, although I don’t really know whose. They’ll tell me off when they find me, because I should be wearing my medallion. That’s what Elsie and I call them, because they’re so big. ‘I need help’ it says on the front. It kept banging on things and getting in the way, and once, I knocked it on the back of the Radio Times and Simon barged into the flat with grated cheese all over his chin. I took it off after that. I hung it on the back of the bathroom door.