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Elsie groaned and stepped outside, leaving the Mexican standoff in the ice cream café behind her. The early-April evening was clear and a slight breeze sent goosebumps along her arms as she gazed up the quiet street. While she didn’t want to admit it to the group inside, she could feel her optimism fading like the light in the early evening sky above. Maybe the venue was wrong, or the night of the week? She shivered as a gust of wind whipped along Gardner Street. If there was one thing that could be said about her, she reminded herself, it was that Elsie Maynard wasn’t a quitter. This was, she told herself, merely a blip. It may not be the establishment-rocking, quasi-revolutionary idea that Woody seemed to think it was, but starting this choir was something she wanted to do. Therefore, she had to find a way to make it happen …
‘Am I too late?’
Elsie turned her head to see a tall figure approaching. As the light from the café window illuminated his face she felt her heart lift.
‘Olly! I’m so pleased to see you.’
Olly’s smile was easy and completely welcome. ‘That’s the best reception I’ve had all day. So, how’s it going?’
Elsie’s shoulders dropped. ‘It’s not. The only people here are my sister, my boss and Woody.’
‘Ah.’
‘I know. But now you’re here, so that’s a step in the right direction.’
‘Mmm. Only slight problem is that I can’t stay, I’m afraid. I was on my way to a family thing and thought I’d look in.’
The bright glimmer of hope in Elsie’s heart spluttered out. ‘Oh, I see. Thank you, though – for thinking of me.’
His brow furrowed and he held up his hand. ‘Wait there.’
Elsie watched as he raced off, ducking into a doorway about fifty yards down the street. Taken aback, Elsie remained obediently outside the shop, pulling her thin cardigan around her shoulders to ward off the evening chill. For a full five minutes, she waited, peering in the direction Olly had disappeared for any sign of his return. Finally, just as the tips of her fingers were beginning to numb, a shaft of light flooded into the street from the doorway and Olly stepped out, accompanied by five others. Elsie could hear their excited conversation as the group approached.
‘Here you are: choir volunteers!’ he announced happily.
‘But how did you …? Where …?’
Olly dismissed her questions. ‘Doesn’t matter. You can buy me coffee when we meet on Saturday.’
Elsie frowned. ‘Which Saturday?’
‘Whichever Saturday you like. As long as it’s soon. Not saying you owe me or anything but …’ he indicated the small group of people around him. ‘Deal?’
It was impossible not to smile at his brazen cheek. ‘Fine, deal.’
‘Excellent. I’ll call you. Now, don’t you have a rehearsal to run?’ With a grin so wide it would make the Cheshire Cat envious, he left Elsie on the street surrounded by the volunteers. She watched him leave, the surprise of this new development tingling through her, before bringing herself back to the present and ushering the group inside.
Daisy and Woody’s faces were a picture when she appeared with the new choir members and they sprang into action, shaking hands, taking names and contact details and arranging the chairs into a circle in the middle of the room. The first members of the choir were a diverse group of people indeed: nineteen-year-old Danny Alden and his bird-like girlfriend Aoife McVey; self-assured twenty-nine-year-old Sasha Mitchell; fifty-something taxi driver Stan Goodson and quiet pensioner Irene Quinn. It transpired that they had all been drinking in the pub at the end of the street when Olly had burst in and silenced the patrons with an impassioned appeal for choir members. Whether he had offered anything in return was unclear, although Elsie suspected money might have been placed behind the bar to quench the thirst of potential volunteers. But it didn’t matter – whatever his modus operandi, Elsie was immensely thankful for Olly’s assistance and, she had to admit, more than a little thrilled by it.
Once the group had assembled and had been furnished with coffee by Cher, Elsie motioned for the meeting to begin.
‘Thank you all, so much, for being here this evening. I know that none of you were expecting to join a choir today.’
A ripple of laughter passed around the room.
‘But let me explain why I think this project will work. Firstly, there are no auditions, no prerequisites for joining and no charge for being a choir member. We’ll all decide the songs we want to sing and try to include something for everyone. The most important thing for me is to create something we can all be a part of and enjoy. All I need from you, if you’re interested, is enthusiasm. Everything else will come along the way.’
Woody coughed loudly, causing all eyes to turn towards him.
Elsie took the hint. ‘I won’t be doing this alone. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Woody Jensen …’
The assembled group murmured their hellos as Woody stood, his Matrix-style leather coat and skull T-shirt beneath giving him what he hoped was a suitably imposing appearance. Silver chains jangled at his wrists as he raised both hands in a red carpet greeting. ‘Greetings. You may remember me from the hit Eighties rock band,Hellfinger?’
Daisy stifled a giggle at the uniformly blank looks that met this question.
‘No bother, you can Google me later. I’m proud to say this choir was my idea and the universe itself sent me this wonderful woman to be a minstrel to my musical wizardry. Together, friends, we can shake the very foundations of this town, infuse the collective psyches of the people with mystical tunes and bring power back to the proletariat through the medium of music …’
‘… Or just have a lot of fun making music,’ Elsie added quickly, noting the relief on several of the group’s faces.
Woody nodded. ‘Well, yeah, that too.’
‘Does that sound good?’
Danny raised his hand. ‘Could we do some up-to-date stuff? I was part of The DreamTeam for six months and the most modern thing we did was “Mr Postman” by The Carpenters.’
Sasha sniggered. ‘Talk about lame. I vote we do Gaga.’
‘Gaga is great, man! We can mash her up with Led Zep or Hendrix …’ Woody’s grey eyes were alive as a million musical possibilities flashed before him.
‘We can do whatever you want,’ Elsie said, trying her best to rein Woody in. ‘It’s important that we find music we all like and have fun performing it.’
Stan raised his hand. ‘Well, you can count me in, girl. I love a bit of warbling, me.’ He nudged Irene, who was sitting beside him. ‘What d’ya reckon, Reenie? Up for showing these whippersnappers how it’s done?’
Irene smiled but said nothing, her downy cheeks turning the tiniest bit pink.
‘Don’t let her fool you,’ Stan said. ‘Irene used to be on the stage, back in the day. One of Brighton’s finest, she was. Sang with Vera Lynn on a concert tour for the troops in Canada at the end of the war when she was just seventeen.’ He patted her knee. ‘Bit of a hoofer in your day, weren’t you, girl?’
‘Stop it, Stanley,’ she replied, and Elsie noticed how bright her eyes shone as she smiled. ‘I haven’t sung for years.’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’ll be good to have another Brighton great in our ranks,’ Daisy remarked, pointedly nodding at Woody.
‘So what happens now?’ Aoife asked, the sudden arrival of her voice surprising everyone in the room.
Elsie shrugged. ‘It’s really up to you all. I suppose the first thing is to find an evening to meet that suits everybody and then we start work proper next week.’
After much discussion – and several random veerings off-course with Woody’s Hellfinger references – Wednesday evenings were deemed to be perfect for choir rehearsals, and the inaugural meeting of the choir came to an end.
Elsie thanked them as they began to leave, wondering how many would return the following week.
‘It sounds like a bit of a laugh,’ Sasha said at the door, long false eyelashes fluttering beneath her razor-sharp, bleached-blonde fringe. ‘Will we be able to do solos and stuff? Only people say I have a bit of a solo voice.’
Elsie shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not. This choir can be whatever we want it to be.’
‘Sweet. See you next Wednesday.’
Stan and Irene shook Elsie’s hand. ‘Lovely evening,’ Irene smiled. ‘Most unexpected, but lovely.’
‘I hope you’re ready for our vocal delights, girl,’ chuckled Stan.
‘I’m looking forward to experiencing them.’
Daisy joined Elsie by the door as the last of the choir members filed out into the chilly night. ‘Do you think that went well?’ she asked, clearly not all that convinced that it had.
‘I think so. I suppose we’ll find out next week.’
Walking home, Elsie took a deep breath and looked up at the starlit sky. The night might not have taken the course she was expecting, but it felt good nevertheless. Positivity seemed to sparkle around her as she walked: the lights from the homes she passed were brighter, the night sky was a beautiful midnight blue and her heart felt lighter than it had for years.
‘This choir could well be the making of you, Elsie Maynard,’ she said to herself.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hello again, hello …
It was still dark when Elsie awoke next morning, pools of light from the streetlights outside her windows pooling in through the half-closed curtains in the bedroom of her Victorian terraced house. The dream from which she had stirred was the same that had brought her to daylight many times before: not a nightmare as such, more a captured moment of time playing on a perennial loop in her subconscious. She had dreamed it so often that it was strangely comforting now, almost reassuring in its reliability. There were never any words, only sensations. Oddly enough, the locations regularly changed, but the essence of the dream remained constant: the touch of a hand on hers followed by a tiny squeeze – barely perceptible to the naked eye but as powerful as a one-hundred-thousand-volt shock. And then, nothing but the feeling of being suspended in a pitch-black void, as if hanging above the earth before the lights of morning appeared. At first, Elsie had been unnerved by the dream but now it was an accepted part of her new life: a last vestige of the past to remind her of how far she had come.
Slowly rising from sleep-tossed sheets, she padded down white wood-stained stairs to her kitchen and leant against the beechwood countertop as the kettle bubbled up into life. She rubbed her eyes and caught sight of the list of possible choir songs she had scribbled on the back of an electricity bill by the phone hours before. Instantly, she felt her heart lift as the thrill of potential struck her like it had last night walking home from the choir meeting.
There was a mixture of material – from well-loved musical numbers to a smattering of recent chart songs and a couple of choir classics she remembered singing at school. Woody had, of course, suggested a few that she had so far successfully avoided – including an intriguing medley of Blue Oyster Cult ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ and Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed a Girl’, performed to a stomping glam rock-style beat. Something told Elsie that Brighton, however bohemian it liked to appear, wasn’t quite ready for that musical delight to be unleashed …
She made tea in a mug Guin had made for her and smiled as she read the legend in vivid pink paint-strokes surrounded by blue and orange flowers:
Do it, or Elsie!
It was a bad joke, typical of her sister’s humour – but this morning it assumed a feeling of greater significance. Taking her tea back upstairs, Elsie sat on the side of her high, iron-framed bed and reached over to pick up the silk-covered box from her bedside table. Lying on top of the pile of papers inside it was the next message:
I love you because you love surprises xx
Not all surprises, Elsie thought. Some surprises I could live without. As she sipped her tea, watching the dawn begin to peek over the rooftops of her street, she couldn’t have known how timely her thoughts would prove to be …
As soon as she arrived at Sundae & Cher, Elsie knew that something was up. For a start, Cher was already in, which was most unlike her, and had uncharacteristically restocked the ice cream cabinet – a job normally reserved for Elsie on account of the fact that Cher disliked lifting the bulky tubs from the freezer. This task completed, Cher now appeared to be pacing the kitchen floor.
Elsie smiled as she entered the kitchen. ‘Morning. Is everything OK? Only I didn’t think seven-thirty a.m. existed in your vocabulary.’
‘It doesn’t, usually. But I thought I’d break with tradition today,’ she replied, fiddling with a box of sugar sachets and failing in her attempt at nonchalance. ‘I had that new batch of Kiwi and Gooseberry to mix downstairs and there’s a ton of Cookie Dough waiting for you to work your magic on. Not right now, obviously. Just – um – whenever you’re ready.’
‘Right.’ Frowning slightly, Elsie passed Cher to put her coat and bag in the cupboard by the back door. ‘I’m going to check the freezer stock levels downstairs.’
Cher’s guilty smile did nothing to remove Elsie’s growing suspicion. ‘Absolutely. Yes. Great idea.’ She paused as if to say something else, then clapped her hands. ‘In fact, I’ll come down with you.’
‘Fine.’ Leading the way, Elsie walked to the stairs at the back of the kitchen that led to Sundae & Cher’s ice cream lab in the small basement of the café. The smell of vanilla filled the air as she entered the chill of the basement and Elsie momentarily forgot Cher’s strange behaviour as she revelled in the magic of the room. She loved it here: not just because of the sweet aroma or large industrial mixer (the sight of which always brought out the kid in her, reminding her of standing on a stool next to Jim learning how to use the food processor on one of their many Saturday baking sessions), but because this place signified the heart of Sundae & Cher. This was where the magic happened – taking a basic ice cream mix and adding weird and wonderful ingredients to create brand new taste experiences.
She opened the door of the enormous freezer cabinet and began to count the stacked tubs inside. ‘Looks like we’re running low on Vanilla. We should probably get another batch made today.’
‘I’m on it. We can’t be running out of our top-selling flavour, can we?’
Elsie lifted out two heavy tubs of pale green gelato. ‘Is this the new flavour?’
‘Yes. Mixed it earlier. Good, huh?’
‘I think this is going to be really popular,’ Elsie replied, turning to Cher. ‘It might be an idea to put one of them out straight away. Shall I swap it for one of the regular flavours today and see how it sells?’
‘Yes. Good. Er – actually, before you do that, there’s something you should know …’
Elsie ignored the tightening in her stomach. ‘Yes?’
‘Now don’t be mad at me, but I might have just maybe, set you up on a date …’
‘Cher …’
Cher shrugged apologetically. ‘I know, I’m sorry. I just happened to be chatting with an old friend of mine and she mentioned that her brother would be fun for a date – if you were interested, of course.’
‘Well, that’s very kind of you, but right now I’m not really in a position to …’
‘Of course. I mean, no pressure, obviously. Although I did tell her that we were going to The Feathers for a drink after work this evening.’
Elsie felt her backbone bristling. ‘I might not be able to make it.’ She picked up one of the tubs and began to ascend the stairs.
Cher followed her with the other tub, hurried past her in the kitchen and stood across the entrance to the café, blocking Elsie’s way. ‘Actually, I think you should.’ Her forthright assertion was fatally undermined by her uncertain expression.
‘You do?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. Why?’
Cher sighed. ‘Because it would be good for you. And because my friend might have arranged for her brother’s boss to be there too, who happens to be rather gorgeous.’
Elsie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘So you’ve set us up on a double date?’
‘Don’t say it like that, Els, you make me sound conniving.’
‘Well, maybe that’s because you are …’
‘I really like him. I mean, I think he has serious potential. And I’ve been trying to score a date with him for over a year.’ She lowered her voice and clasped her hands together like a plaster saint. ‘He has his own house, Elsie! Not like the last one. And his own teeth! He’s normal and has no strange hobbies or questionable personal habits. Do you know how hard it is to find someone that sane in this town? Practically impossible! Not to mention the fact that he’s successful and interesting and I know he thinks I’m attractive. You know how rubbish my dating life has been. This one is normal! So I’m not even going to ask you: I’m going straight to pathetic begging. Please?’
Elsie knew she had no choice. If Cher could have the chance to enjoy a normal date for once, perhaps it was worth one uncomfortable evening in presence of a ‘someone’s brother’.
‘I don’t have anything to wear,’ Elsie replied slowly.
‘I’ll give you cash to buy an outfit at lunchtime,’ Cher answered. ‘Shoes too, if you like.’
‘I haven’t brought my make-up with me.’
‘You can borrow mine. Or buy new. Please?’
Elsie weighed up her options. ‘Fine. But I’m only staying for an hour.’
Cher beamed like a kid at Christmas. ‘One hour is all I need.’
