‘At Sun Valley Coaches, we pride ourselves on our leg-room,’ he said, as he walked past with his clipboard. ‘Not one single case of DVT in sixteen years.’ He eyed everyone’s calves as he moved down the aisle, perhaps looking for a red flag. ‘It’s all written in the brochure.’
After he’d gone past, I said, ‘Why does everything have to have a bro-shoor these days?’ and then I whispered to Elsie, ‘I’m not sure my bladder can hold on until the Yorkshire Moors.’
‘It has an on-board lavatory.’ She pointed towards the back of the bus. ‘Although you’ll have to be on the ball, it seems as though it’s going to be quite popular.’
Mrs Honeyman was making her way towards it, and we hadn’t even pulled out of the car park.
Ronnie Butler was the last to get on. He walked towards the coach, calm and unhurried, carrying a brown holdall. He was wearing a different trilby. This one had a small feather tucked into the band, and Elsie said it made it look as though he was going hunting. I chose not to comment. He paused when he reached the top of the steps.
‘Strange time of year to be going to the seaside.’ He spoke to Miss Ambrose and Miss Bissell, who sat together in the front row, looking quite pale, but his gaze fell on us immediately. It stayed there, even as he took off his trilby and found himself a seat.
‘It is a little brisk, but we felt Cherry Tree should have a weekend away.’ Miss Ambrose turned and joined in with looking at us. ‘Like everywhere else does.’
‘Any particular reason …’ Ronnie sat down and settled his overcoat on his lap. ‘… you chose Whitby?’
‘It’s the history, isn’t it?’ said Jack. ‘Nothing more intriguing than the past.’ His voice trembled at the edges. He held on to the seat in front, and I watched as his knuckles became pale with determination.
Ronnie turned in his seat and faced the front.
‘That’s the job, then,’ said Eric, and he started the engine.
Motorways are very dull. They might get you somewhere more quickly, but there’s very little in the form of entertainment. There’s only so much tarmac you can stomach in one day. Elsie dozed off before we’d barely even left the slip road, and Jack was far too busy with his Sudoku book and a propelling pencil to make conversation. He’d read somewhere that Sudokus prevent you from developing dementia, and he was up to six a day. He tried to involve me in one, but I told him they make me more confused, not less, and if I wanted to waste my time on puzzles, I’d rather plump for a word search. Eric was whistling to himself in the driver’s seat, and the back of Ronnie’s head hadn’t changed position in forty-five minutes. I knew, because I’d been looking at it since we left Cherry Tree. I’m not even sure why. Perhaps I thought if I looked for long enough, I could work out what was going on inside. Although Ronnie was still, everyone else moved around and changed seats. There was a constant parade of people going to the lavatory, supervised by Miss Ambrose. She began to overheat, and about an hour into the journey, she had to start fanning herself down with a sick bag.
Jack closed his puzzle book. ‘Our man’s very quiet,’ he said. ‘I bet he’s wondering what’s going on.’
‘Knowing Ronnie, he’ll have a plan brewing.’ I leaned back to let Mrs Honeyman into her seat.
Elsie woke at the sound of Jack’s voice. ‘He’s always got something up his sleeve,’ she said.
‘Does he have any connection with Yorkshire, I wonder?’ Jack said.
‘Not that I know of.’ I looked across at Elsie. She had her face against the glass, watching the traffic.
‘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.’