Elizabeth Is Missing (12 page)

“And write on the sign, too,” Helen says. “I’ll come with you and help.”

She puts out a hand and I hold it to stand up. Somehow I’ve managed to get the curtain caught in my trousers, and Helen has to untuck it. She walks very close on the way to the kitchen, her fingers covering mine once on the handrail. When we get there I realize I’ve left the pen in the sitting room. Helen runs to fetch it.

“Even eggs,” she says, coming back. “Write ‘even eggs’ on the sign.”

I do as she says and then put the pen down. “What does that mean?” I ask. “‘Even eggs’? What does that mean?”

T
hat old Eric Coates tune is in my head. “Calling All Workers.” It spins round and round, getting more manic by the second. Bouncier, louder, more militaristic. I imagine a crazed smile on my face, my arms moving as if they’re pulled by strings. I used to feel restless like this when I was a girl. Everyone telling you to get on and help, to work, for the war effort, but not giving you anything specific to do. I switch on the TV, but can’t focus on it, so I potter about the house, tidying up, doing a bit of cleaning, arranging, dusting. I plump the cushions on the sofa and put the books neatly away. I spray polish on to the coffee table and fetch a cloth to rub it with. Carla comes in just as I’m buffing the first smear of spray into a shine.

“There’s a busy bee,” she says, taking off her coat. “You doing some cleaning? I should write it in your folder.” She nods at me, flipping through the pages with her pen poised, but then she turns and makes a little noise. “Oh, but what’s going on?” she says. “Are you going to burn them? Why have you piled all the books into the fireplace?”

“What are you talking about?” I say, dropping the cloth. The books are neatly in position. They fit perfectly in the little alcove next to the TV. It looks very nice.

“And, er,” she says, “what are you using to clean the table?”

“A cloth,” I say, frowning at her. She seems to be full of silly questions today.

“No, I don’t think it is a cloth.”

She has the lump of material in her hands, ready to straighten it out. When she holds it up I can see what it is. A skirt. One of Sukey’s. A skirt of dark-brown jersey, covered now in matted polish and crumbs. I must have pulled it from the wardrobe in my old room. There are lots of Sukey’s things in there. Things I cut up and adjusted and wore, and things I kept just because I couldn’t bear to throw them away. And now I’ve gone and ruined something.

Carla grins. “Novel way to use a skirt,” she says. And then she catches my eye and tilts her head to one side. “I’ll put it in the washing machine. Not to worry. It’ll be good as new.”

When Carla’s gone I find I don’t have the patience to sit down. I have a nagging feeling that there’s somewhere I’m supposed to be. I put on my coat and walk out. I can’t think where I’m going, but that doesn’t matter, I’m sure I’m supposed to be somewhere and I must come to it eventually.

A bus goes past as I reach the top of the road. I hope I didn’t mean to get on it. If I did, it’s too late now anyway. I keep myself steady with a hand on someone’s garden wall while I turn to look back down the street. There is moss, wet under my fingers, and I find I’m scratching it off, enjoying the feel of the roots breaking from their hold. A few brightly coloured scraps of paper are dotted along the pavement. They must be mine, my notes, my paper memory. My pockets are stuffed full of lists and memos. For a moment I can’t be bothered to go back and pick these lost ones up, but I bend for the nearest, feeling a creaking in my joints, knowing something critical might be lost if I don’t retrieve it. This nearest is a blue square of paper:
Charity Shop 2 p.m. today
. I still help out there.

Two p.m. today. Does that really mean
today
? I have a feeling it doesn’t, but I wouldn’t like to let them down. Those awful images of skinny children with swollen bellies and flies around their mouths would haunt me if I did. And if it’s a Tuesday, Elizabeth will be there. I walk to the bus stop, reaching for the nearest scraps of paper as I go. I’m sure these terrible famines didn’t happen so much when I was young. I find half a bar of chocolate in the pocket of my coat while I’m waiting and eat it on the bus.

The charity shop is in the arcade. It used to be a posh jewellers’, and it’s where my sister got her engagement ring. My old hairdresser’s is here, too, though it’s been closed a long while. The windows are dusty, and the old-fashioned hairdryers, which have been left behind, stand, slowly disintegrating, like a row of overgrown harebells in a sandy field. The shop next door sells all sorts of bathroom gifts. Salts and oils and bubbles, and glass trays for soap and shells dyed different colours. We get quite a lot of their things given into our charity shop. I would have loved the shells when I was young. I had a collection once, and still have some of them stored away at home, in a chest made of glued-together matchboxes. I used to pick them up from the edge of the beach, my parents shouting at me not to get too close to the barbed wire. I liked to hold them to my ears and listen to the rush of the waves.

I had a lot of pink ones and some speckled grey. I never got further than that in identification, though. Uncle Trevor gave me a book on shells when he found I was collecting, but I wasn’t interested in knowing the names, and as I looked through the pages, the drawings of the horrid sluglike things that had lived in my beautiful collection began to make me feel sick. I didn’t like to think of those ugly slimy things in connection with the pearly, perfect shells. The word “mollusc” angered me and eventually I threw the book away.

I am hit by the musty smell as I go into our shop. We can never seem to get rid of it, despite steam-cleaning all the donated clothes. The air is stale and sourish; it’s the only thing I really dislike about working here. That and Peggy. She looks up from behind the counter as I walk in, her pale, starch-stiff hair catching the light. She is only sixty-eight and so is better than me by a good dozen years.

“Maud?” she says. “What are you—?”

“Am I late?” I say, pushing at a rack of clothes so I can get past.

“No, Maud. We don’t need you . . . I mean”—she leans her hands on the counter and puts on a high-pitched, wheedling voice. It’s the one my daughter uses when she is trying to persuade me that throwing half my possessions away or giving up cooking is “for the best”—“we decided you weren’t to worry about coming back here, didn’t we? Do you remember?”

I lower my head and pretend to look through the basket of things on the front desk. I feel a sudden welling up of hatred for Peggy as I poke at the soiled leather bookmarks and plastic napkin rings. I do remember. She and Mavis decided I wasn’t up to working here. Well, I was always at a disadvantage. The others had jobs in shops when they were young. Peggy was at Beales, Mavis managed Carlton Shoes, and Elizabeth’s father owned a bakery, which she had to serve in as a child. But my dad got me a job at the exchange straight out of school, so I was never anything other than a telephonist. I found the till at the charity shop difficult enough as it was, and then I began to get the different coins confused, giving people too much change. When I was flustered by a customer it was even worse. One day I stood staring at a pound coin, unable to recognize it. The man at the counter kept sighing. “You can’t be that bad at maths,” he said.

I don’t know what I gave him in the end, but Peggy was very angry.

She taps her varnish-encrusted nails on the counter now, waiting for me to answer. I carry on rummaging through the basket, and my finger catches on the back of a little picture frame. “That’s funny,” I say, pulling it out. “Elizabeth has a frame like this. It holds a picture of us just after we met. It’s unusual, isn’t it?” I smooth my thumb over the corner. The frame is made of creamy porcelain with flowers delicately sprouting along both sides. A tiny cherub’s head pokes out at the top, looking down at where the photo should be. “I wouldn’t have thought there would be two alike,” I say. “She bought it from here a few months after she’d started.”

“God, yes, she was always buying bits of china. I see you have a good memory for some things, Maud.”

“I really think it is her frame. But she would never have given it away.” I look up at Peggy. “Was the photo in it?”

“Possibly, but we would hardly have tried to sell it with a photo still inside. Anyway, I doubt very much that it’s Elizabeth’s frame.”

The door opens and Peggy smiles briefly at someone entering the shop. “You can always give us the two pounds for it, if you want it. Buying things is the best way for you to help us now.”

I know what this means. But I’m not ready to leave yet. “Shall I make you a cup of tea?” I say, laying the frame down carefully in the basket. “I can remember where the kettle is, and you’re stuck out here . . .” I begin to move towards the back room. Peggy’s frown fades.

“Well,” she says. “Well, that would be nice. I’d like an instant coffee.”

I fill the kettle and switch it on. One thing I do remember about Peggy is that she can’t bear to throw photos away. I’ve always thought that fact made her seem more human. Under the work table piled high with donated clothes there’s a drawer she keeps the old photos in. The wood squeaks as I pull it out, and I flick a look towards the door, glad the kettle makes such a noise, before sitting down to sift through the pictures.

Lots of them are of pets, a couple of family groups, and a few on stiff card from long ago—a man in uniform about to go off to fight in the Great War, and a woman with leg-of-mutton sleeves standing by a potted palm. I set them aside, searching through several layers of snapshots before I find a highly coloured photo of two ordinary-looking women in soft floral blouses. Elizabeth and me. We are standing just outside the arcade, the painted iron gates curling prettily behind us. Elizabeth’s grey-streaked hair is pinned tightly to her head, and mine floats away into the air. We smile at the camera, showing off the wrinkles that prove we are past middle age, and Elizabeth holds something up. It’s a frog-shaped jug she bought on her first day at the charity shop. “Just a replica,” she said, and hideous if you ask me, but Elizabeth’s hands are holding it as though it were very precious. That was the day we met, the day I found out that her garden was the one with the pebbled wall, the day I decided we’d be friends. I can still remember the way my face ached from laughing. She would never have thrown this picture away. My eyes fill with tears. I’m starting to think she must be dead. The mounds of discarded clothes on the table suddenly take on an ugly significance. All the hours Elizabeth and I spent going through the donations, and I never thought that one day one of us might be going through the things of the other.

I put the photo in my pocket and the kettle pings. I take Peggy’s mug to the counter.

“Oh,
Maud
,” she calls out as I leave the shop. “I asked for coffee and you’ve given me tea!”

I walk back through the park. There’s a plank for sitting on, a long sitting plank, by the bandstand that looks towards Elizabeth’s road, and I have a rest, watching a man top up a compost heap. It’s cold and it looks like rain, but I don’t feel like going home yet, I want to sit and think about this new find and let the fresh air free me of the shop’s musty smell. What is it about old clothes that makes them smell like that? Even clean clothes seem to give off that sour smell after a time.

It’s the smell from the suitcase I remember most. Dad was the one who brought it home, nearly three months after Sukey disappeared and about a week before my fifteenth birthday. I didn’t recognize the case at first: Dad was crying when he handed it to me and I could only look at him, feeling a falling in my chest like guilt or fear. The skin on his face was creased and he made a dry sound in his throat. I’d never seen him cry before and was too shocked to comfort him. He sat down on a chair by the stove and turned his face away. Ma didn’t comfort him, either, she just laid the suitcase on the kitchen table.

Sukey had got it for her honeymoon, a bulky thing, made of brown leather, with a brown leather handle and brass clasps. A point of pinkish light shone through the window, picking out the places on the clasps where the brass was scratched. I ran a finger over one, dulling the metal, and Ma brushed my hands away to open the case. That sour-clothes smell filled the room, lying over the usual kitchen smells—fried onions and dried herbs and soap flakes—like a thick layer of dust.

We stood and looked at Sukey’s things. The clothes were screwed together and twisted against the striped canvas lining. Blouses and pullovers and false fronts, a fur collar and a pair of fawn trousers with tiny pleats on the waistband. Underneath was a dress, once beige, which Sukey had only recently dyed a deep navy colour to make it new. And then there were the underclothes, knickers and camisoles, patched in silk and trimmed with lace. They weren’t dirty, but the shine on the material was gone, as if they’d been handled by lots of people.

“Oh, dear. I can’t think how you wash this,” Ma said, taking out the dyed dress. “With cold water, perhaps. How much soap d’you suppose, Maud?”

I kept my eyes on the suitcase, wondering how long it was since Sukey had touched the things inside. This was all we had left of her. I wanted to curl up in the case and shut the lid, not take everything out and wash her away. A blue glass bottle nestled against the sleeve of a blouse as if held in the crook of an arm. Sukey’s perfume, Evening in Paris. I pulled it free, automatically splashing my wrists and neck before I thought what I was doing. Ma stared at me through the haze of cheap, sweet scent, too light to linger long in the air, and then began to grab at the mass of cotton and jersey and wool as if she were kneading dough, battering the clothes against the sides of the case. Smaller things fell away, slipping on to the floor, and I was bundling up several pairs of silk drawers when Douglas came in. He paused, stared, turned sideways and dropped his eyes.

“Sukey’s?” he asked. “Where from?”

“Station Hotel. Police found it,” Dad said.

He was staring into the wood burner in the range, his face red from the heat. I was grateful he wasn’t crying any more. Ma had stopped her kneading when Douglas came in, and stood rigid, a silk scarf and the belt of a dress reaching like creepers up to her elbow. I slowly unwound them and pushed the knickers I’d gathered from the floor back into the case.