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.’
I loosened my scarf. ‘So Miss Ambrose was wrong. Some of us must leave more than a footprint, or everything would always stay the same.’
‘Of course she was wrong.’
We’d only been there a matter of minutes, but already the sea air had pulled away some of the worrying. The colours seemed brighter and other people’s laughter was more obvious, and my face fell into a smile so much more easily.
Elsie was watching me. ‘You like Whitby,’ she said.
‘You know I do. It reminds me of holidays gone by. Things I’d forgotten.’
‘Do you remember the last time?’ she said. ‘On the final day, looking for something to buy with our spending money?’
I laughed. ‘We always did that. We had to say goodbye to the sea, and take something home with us, just to prove to ourselves we were once here. Even if it was just a pebble from the beach.’
I was still laughing when I felt the past creep inside my head. It stole away the bright colours and the smell of the ocean, and the sound of other people’s voices. It’s strange how it always does that – appears without notice. It’s as though the past and the present shift against each other all the time, and when you’re distracted, you can slip through a gap between one and the other, without even realising you’re doing it.
‘I can hear a child crying,’ I said.
I could tell Elsie was trying to listen, over the simmer of conversation as it drifted past, and the shrieking of seagulls in the bay. ‘I can’t hear it,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not now – then. On that last day. There was a child crying.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Yes there was.’
‘We walked by, didn’t we? Thinking someone else would help.’ Worry stumbled around in my head. ‘We didn’t do anything.’
‘Yes we did.’
‘He drowned. Fell from the harbour wall. It was in all the newspapers, don’t you remember? I said to you, that’s the little boy, that’s the little boy we didn’t help.’
When I glanced around, people were staring at us.
‘Florence, you must calm down. Listen to me.’
‘Why didn’t we do something?’ I began folding the scarf on my lap. ‘Why didn’t we stop?’
‘We did stop. The three of us waited on the steps until his mother came along. We even used up our spending money on ice cream for him.’
I stopped folding. ‘We did?’
‘We did,’ she said. ‘His name was Frankie. Don’t you remember?’
I shook my head.
‘He had really blue eyes. Like this.’ She pointed to a colour in my scarf. ‘It made us late setting off home. Your mother was furious, but when we told her what had happened, she just kissed the tops of our heads.’
I felt my whole face smile. ‘Did she?’
Elsie nodded.
‘I still miss her, you know,’ I whispered. ‘I know I’m not supposed to. Not after all this time.’
‘In the end, we were ages getting home anyway, because an hour earlier there’d been a big accident near York.’
She waited to see if my eyes would find the memory, but sometimes I’m just too tired to search any more.
‘Try to remember, Flo. It’s important. Really important.’
‘Why is it so important?’
She took my hand. ‘It just is,’ she said.
When we stood to leave, I looked back at the bench. There was a plaque, fixed to the wood.
In memory of Arthur and Clarice – they loved this place, it said. They’re all over the West Cliff, benches with small brass plates. Lines of people made unforgotten, staring out to sea for the rest of time.
‘I think I should quite like a bench,’ I said.
‘Why on earth would you want one of those?’
‘To prove to myself I was once here,’ I said.
‘Oh, Florence. All you really need to do is remember.’ She took my arm and we walked back to the hotel, past the crazy golf and the ice-cream vans, past the conversations and the pushchairs, and the days of other people.
As we walked, I turned to her and said, ‘Thank you.’
‘Whatever for?’
I smiled. ‘You reminded me that my mother kissed the tops of our heads. It was a memory I’d lost, and you found it and you gave it back to me again.’
That was the second thing about Elsie.
She always knew exactly the right thing to say to make me feel better.
The hotel bedroom was adequate, although the bathroom floor could have done with a going-over and there was a fine layer of dust on the pelmet. I wasn’t sure about the carpet, because it involved so many different colours that any stain would have quite happily slid right into it unnoticed. Elsie and I shared a room, because it seemed sensible, and I was worried about getting confused in the middle of the night and not being able to find the lavatory.
I stood in the doorway, the toes of my shoes resting on a little silver line. ‘Ronnie can’t get in here, can he?’ I said. ‘It’s safe, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it’s safe.’ Elsie went over to the window. ‘We’re on the first floor, and look, you can lock the door from the inside. No one can get in.’
‘Where’s the lavatory?’ I said.
‘It’s just through here. It’s en-suite.’
I hesitated.
‘It’s just for us,’ she said, and we spent the next ten minutes saying how wonderful it all was.
There were twin beds, covered in shiny pink eiderdowns. Comfortable, but not like being at home. The mattress was left wanting. Boxed springs. Saggy in the middle. Vague sensation of static each time you moved. Elsie went for the one nearest the door, because she knew I liked watching the seagulls. Above the writing desk there was a notice telling people not to pinch anything.
I read it out loud. ‘Well, I never did,’ I said.
I wasn’t sure what anyone could find to steal. There was a picture of a zebra above the bed and a pot dog on the windowsill, but in all honesty, I would have paid somebody to take them away. I began unpacking my things. Elsie told me it wasn’t worth it, because we were only going to be here for two nights, but I like to turn wherever I am into a home from home.
‘It would take more than a tube of Poligrip in a plastic beaker to make me feel that way,’ she said, but she let me get on with it.