Chapter 4
Cora had found Jelisaveta via a notice in Mr Patel’s window and because she’d had her big birthday coming up she’d wanted the place spick and span for the guests.
Cora mispronounced her name. Just call me Elisavet, the woman said.
After a month, she still didn’t know much about her, only that her house had never been cleaner. Gladdie needed someone to do for her too, and asked Cora what she thought of her.
It was a tricky question.
‘She’s a good worker. Spotless, my house is. She does it all once a week, from top to bottom.’
‘That’s no good to me. How can you clean a bungalow from top to bottom?’ Gladdie asked.
‘From side to side, then,’ Cora said mildly. Gladdie was a teacher before she retired and she liked arguing about trivialities. ‘But you can’t tell her what to do, because she doesn’t like it. She takes it as criticism, I think.’
‘It’s your sceptical eyebrow, Cora. It probably puts her off.’
‘I expect that’s it,’ Cora lied. Age, and her cock-eyed eyebrow, made her seem critical when she really wasn’t being. It wasn’t fair; Gladdie should have been born with the eyebrow because sarcasm came naturally to her.
No fooling Gladdie. ‘Go on. But?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘But she doesn’t smile,’ Cora said, summing up Elisavet in a sentence. Best to be honest about it. Her gaze rested on the strip of white on Gladdie’s neon-pink centre parting where her roots were growing out.
‘As long as she can do housework, I’m not bothered about the smiling,’ Gladdie said firmly.
No, Cora thought, but you will be.
She knew this from experience. She remembered a time when smiles had been painfully scarce at home. Misery was a wasteland, a sorrowful contagion because you couldn’t smile at someone who didn’t smile back; it was insensitive, or even insane.
‘Megan’s having her on Tuesdays and I’ll tell her you want her to come to yours on a Friday, shall I?’
‘Yes, do that, I like the place to be nice and clean, ready for the weekend,’ Gladdie said. ‘And you watch, I’ll have her cackling with laughter in no time, you know me.’
The following week, despite Gladdie’s optimism, Cora couldn’t see any change in Elisavet at all.
She was as serious as usual, silent, focused, hard-working.
She got to work polishing, sweeping, vacuuming, spraying, taps running, always energetic, always busy.
She had a small, bare face and her black hair was held back with the white Alice band that made her look like a nun.
It was hard to tell her age. Sometimes she looked quite young and other times she looked middle aged.
Cheer up, it might never happen, Cora wanted to say to her.
Usually she went out shopping when Elisavet came, to save getting in her way, but today it was raining so Cora put the kettle on and offered her a cup of tea. Got an abrupt shake of the head back. Cora persevered. ‘Coffee? Bottled water? Coca-Cola?’
‘I’m fine,’ Elisavet said, frowning.
‘Okay. Good.’
She’s like a locked box, Cora thought. Makes you wonder what’s inside.
She had experience of locked boxes because Frank had left a locked box behind when he died. Black metal, it was, an old cash tin about the size of a shoebox. It had something inside it, something heavy. When you shook it you could hear it knocking around in there.
She had never asked Frank what was in the box.
She had stopped seeing it years ago, although it had been at the bottom of the bookcase in the hall all through their long marriage.
It was only recently that she’d noticed it again, and that was because Elisavet had dusted it to a gleam.
Since then it had started to obsess her.
She wanted to know what was in it. At the same time, she was afraid of what she would find.
Whatever it was, it must have been important to Frank, because why else would he lock it away?
Discussing it, Megan told her to leave well alone, take the locked box to the dump and forget about it.
Gladdie, on the other hand, told her to hit the lock with a hammer, look inside and set her mind at rest.
There was something to be said for both suggestions.
With nothing to do on this rainy day except to keep out of Elisavet’s way and seem busy, Cora went to the oak bookcase to fetch the shiny tin – not a speck of dust on it, she noticed.
She set it on the kitchen table and rummaged in the bits and bobs drawer for something to pick the lock with.
Amongst paperclips, batteries, pens, Christmas cracker contents, Cora found a selection of keys, a couple of which were bafflingly ornate and possibly for winding up old clocks.
Why they’d kept the keys but not the clocks, she wasn’t sure.
She pulled up a chair and sat at the pine table, discarding the keys that obviously weren’t going to fit, and after a few minutes or so of trying the remainder she found the right one by a process of elimination. It slid into the lock neatly, and she turned it.
Clunk.
Easy as that.
She hesitated before opening it, filled with sudden apprehension.
What was she expecting the box to reveal?
In her heart, her biggest fear was that she would find something that would make her see Frank differently, make her realise that in death she’d never known him at all. Having already lost all of him, she was afraid of losing more of him. It was ridiculous, really.
She stared at the rain-streaked window and listened to the approaching drone of the vacuum cleaner. Before she could get to her feet the vacuum cleaner whined down into silence in the hall and Elisavet came into the kitchen with a yellow duster in her hand, looking surprised to see her.
‘I’ve just found the key to this box,’ Cora explained brightly, because for some reason she felt she needed to. ‘It belonged to my husband. It’s got something inside it,’ she said, rapping the lid with her knuckles. ‘Wait! Don’t go!’ she added as Elisavet excused herself.
Elisavet turned back and raised her dark eyebrows a fraction. Paused. Shrugged. ‘Okay.’
‘Right then,’ Cora said, taking a deep breath.
She lifted the lid and let it drop open with a clatter.
‘Oh!’ The thing that had been banging about in there was a dried-out lump of orange clay the size of a lime along with a small leather-bound notebook covered with clay dust. She blew the dust off and opened the notebook.
It was filled with Frank’s neat writing.
It stirred her deeply to look at all these words direct from his pen and from his heart, but it frustrated her too.
‘I can’t understand a word of it, it’s all in German,’ she said to Elisavet in frustration.
‘Ridiculous, isn’t it, that he didn’t teach me a few words?
But it made sense at the time to put his own language behind him because he wanted to fit in.
That’s all a person wants, isn’t it? To belong?
’ She wiped her hand over the cover. It was soft with age, and she passed the book to Elisavet.
Elisavet opened the first page, then flicked through it and put it on the table.
‘And this!’ Cora picked up the lump of clay.
It was the weirdest thing to find locked away in a tin box, the last thing she’d expected.
She weighed it in her hand – for some reason it felt like something she ought to do – and then she handed it to Elisavet.
Elisavet took it from her and gave Cora a quick, puzzled look. ‘Mud,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
Elisavet gave her back the lump of clay and Cora looked at it carefully and rolled it around in her palm in case there was something about it that they’d missed.
‘You know,’ she concluded, ‘I have absolutely no idea why my husband would keep these things locked away in a box all these years.’ She added irritably, ‘And I can’t even ask him! ’
No fault of his, of course, but he could at least have left a note to explain. She almost put them back in the box and then she changed her mind. ‘They obviously meant something to him, though, didn’t they?’ she said. ‘And now they mean something to me.’
Leaving the notebook on the table, she scraped back the chair and took the clay into the sitting room.
She put it on the mantelpiece next to the Royal Doulton figurine of a boy with a suitcase in one hand and a package under the other.
The Evacuee, the figure was called. The boy was wearing a green cardigan with a label tied on it, blue shorts and grey socks – one of which was slipping authentically round his ankle.
His cheeks were faintly flushed, and he looked heartbreakingly baffled due to the skill of the painter’s brush.
Elisavet stood next to her, frowning as Cora repositioned the lump of clay.
‘It’s all right, you don’t have to dust it,’ Cora reassured her. ‘My husband must have kept it since the war.’ The war! She heard the possessive way she said it, as if there had only ever been the one. ‘World War II,’ she added for clarity.
Elisavet looked at her. Her eyes were dark and probing. ‘Your husband was a soldier?’ she asked.
For the first time since they’d met, Cora felt Elisavet was actually seeing her. It was an unsettling feeling and she almost looked away. ‘Yes.’ She blushed as if she was lying, although it was the truth.
‘A soldier,’ Elisavet stated. She pulled her black hair over her shoulder and stroked it once, twice, as slowly and meditatively as one would stroke a dog. ‘So.’ She nodded, pulled her yellow duster out of her pocket and turned her attention to the mantelpiece.
So? So what? Cora wanted to ask her, staring at the slender shoulders under the blue overall. ‘Be careful with that,’ she said as Elisavet picked up the evacuee figurine.
Elisavet looked at her sharply, a Mother Superior look. ‘Of course.’
‘Sorry. I’ll leave you to it, then.’