‘Sometimes it is,’ I said.
The policemen left ten minutes later, with a selection of envelopes and their hats back on. Miss Ambrose watched us for a while through the chequered glass. There was a moment when I thought I saw her smile, but perhaps I was mistaken. When she finally left the office, Jack opened his eyes and shouted, ‘What was all that about, then?’ and Miss Ambrose said, ‘You tell me and we’ll both know,’ which confused me for a good fifteen minutes.
‘At least it’s taken our minds off the hospital,’ I said.
Jack turned from watching Miss Ambrose disappear along the corridor. ‘And how did that go?’
‘You can only do your best,’ I said. ‘Can’t you?’
Jack looked at me, and his eyes held my words for a moment. ‘You look after yourself, Florence, won’t you? We all need help from time to time. All you have to do is reach out and ask for it.’
‘I don’t think I deserve any,’ I said.
‘Of course you do. Everyone does. What on earth makes you say that?’
The words came out before I had a chance to go through them first.
‘I was so sure it was Ronnie who drowned, not Gabriel Price. I would have put my life on it.’
I watched him hesitate. ‘How can you be so certain, Flo?’ he said.
I looked him straight in the eye. ‘Because I was the one who pushed him in.’
10.13 p.m.
I remembered in Whitby, I think, but I’d put it in one of the drawers in my mind and tried not to think about it too much.
After Beryl died, neither of us went to the dance again. We couldn’t face it. The night Ronnie drowned, I poked my head around the door of the town hall, but the colours were too bright and the music was too loud, and the whole thing seemed almost obscene. I was just about to leave when I spotted Ronnie. Standing by the bar. Talking to some girl I’d never seen before. Whispering in her ear, a fraction too close, a moment too long. And he was laughing. He was laughing as though the whole board had been wiped clean and he could start all over again.
I don’t remember leaving. I don’t remember turning around or closing the door, or finding my way down the steps. The next time I even knew where I might be, I was marching into Elsie’s kitchen, looking for someone to join in with my anger.
The house was silent. Everyone was in bed. I paced around the empty room for a few minutes, and then I stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. You could usually hear Elsie’s mother walking around, no matter what time of the night it was, but even she was still. I remember the clock ticking in the hall and the silent floorboards, and I remember thinking the whole house must have found its sleep. Then I heard it. The crying. At first I thought it was a child somewhere, but it was too complicated for a child and it wasn’t crying that asked for anything. It didn’t even want to be heard. And then it hit me. It was Elsie.
I wanted to go to her. I even put my foot on the first step. Something stopped me, though; something held me back. It wasn’t because it was late, or because it felt awkward to find someone else crying. It was Elsie, and nothing had ever felt awkward with Elsie. It was because I knew that whatever I said, my words would never be able to make a difference. No matter how much I cared for her, and no matter how much I wanted to, I would never be able to help her through it. And so the thing that stopped me, really stopped me, from going to her that night, was the fact that it meant facing up to my own inadequacy.
I was shaking when I got back into the kitchen. I’m not sure if it was anger or frustration, or a cold November night, but I can remember poking at the fire and looking straight into the flames until it made my eyes smart. I must have decided right then, as I watched the coal burn, that I needed to do something. If I couldn’t find the right words, perhaps I could fill all the spaces up between them, and if no one else was going to face up to Ronnie Butler, then perhaps it was down to me.
I left Elsie’s house full of breath. I slammed the kitchen door behind me, and the sound seemed to fill the whole street. But I didn’t turn around. Instead, I headed straight back to the town hall. Of course, everyone had left by that time. Through the windows the evening lay abandoned. The empty stage and a wooden floor littered with streamers, and the pattern of glasses on silent tables. There were no people. They had all disappeared back into the warmth of a kitchen or the softness of a bed. Even the streets were empty. But I still searched. I knew Ronnie was out there somewhere, and I couldn’t face Elsie until I’d found him.
I don’t know how long I walked for. An hour. Perhaps more. I checked all the pubs, because I knew the musicians often found themselves in back rooms, drawing out their evening behind a locked door, and I wondered if Ronnie might have talked his way in there. I walked all the way to his flat, on the other side of the river, but the windows were still and dark. I’d done two circuits of the town, and I was just about to start a third, when I spotted him. At the top of the road, almost at the place I had started to look an hour before. He stumbled on the pavement, and leaned into a wall to steady himself.
I had no idea where he’d been. Perhaps he’d found a conversation in a bar that suited him, or a woman who didn’t look too closely, or maybe he’d just wandered the streets, as I’d done, trying to find a path home. I took a breath to shout, but my voice stayed in my throat. I’m not sure if I was afraid, or it might have been because I’d searched for him for so long, I just wanted to enjoy the satisfaction of finding him at last. He moved up the street, weaving a path between lampposts and fences, and I followed, at a distance, wishing my feet weren’t so loud, and that the breath wouldn’t cloud from my mouth. Ronnie didn’t turn. He was too busy concentrating, and so I edged a little closer, watching from the shadows of the street.
The river slices through the town, cutting a path between the old and the new. The alms-houses and workmen’s cottages on one side, where Elsie and I lived, which peered over the curve of a bridge to the factories and flats, and guest houses on the other. Ronnie lived on the new side. He lived where the streets were wider and the people were unfamiliar. Strangers, drifting through a town and never pausing long enough to be recognised. He could have taken the bridge. He could have spent a little longer getting home, but instead, he decided to follow the river. He made a choice, but I hesitated. The water was fast and wide. It raced through the town, pulled by the tides in the estuary, and my father had always made me promise never to walk there in the dark. ‘Too dangerous,’ he said. ‘Too many opportunities to slip.’ But this was different. This was something I had to do, because I couldn’t lose Ronnie now. Not when it had taken me so long to find him.