And my mother looked at her and said, “Oh — no, love. I’m not Mrs Ellis.”
And Rosalie said, “You are. Everybody got it wrong. It’s Eilis, isn’t it. E-I-L-I-S.”
And my mother put her hand on the counter.
And here is the thing that I did not expect and that has stayed with me more than any of the rest of it.
My mother did not remember her.
Not a flicker. Not the name, not the face, not 1983, not the shoes, not the cloakroom.
Nothing.
And she was not being modest and her memory is fine — she is eighty-three and sharper than I am about most things.
She did not remember because it did not happen once.
It happened, by her own estimate, “a fair few times a year” for twenty-six years, and it never once registered as an event, because to her it was the same category of thing as wiping a table.
Rosalie Quint has organised eleven years of her life around a Wednesday afternoon in 1983.
And the woman who did it could not have told you a single thing about it under oath.
That is what that kind of person is actually like and I have thought about it every day since, and it is not comfortable.
The rest of that afternoon.
Terrence Falk read three of the letters out. Just three, standing at the end of a checkout, in a supermarket, on a Saturday.
The last one was Iolanda’s. There was no fund.
My mother cried, which she does not do.
The queue did not move for about eleven minutes and I want to record that not one person complained.
Four people behind us went and got chairs from the café at the front. Somebody I have never met put a hand on my back and left it there for a while.
The woman with the trolley left after about ninety seconds.
She did not say anything. She did not apologise and nobody asked her to and nobody spoke to her.
She left a full trolley at the end of the aisle and walked out through the front doors, and the only person in that shop who watched her go was my mother.
I asked Mum about it in the car, because it had bothered me and because I wanted her to be angry.
And she said: “She was in a state about something before she ever got to us, love.”
And I said something about how that was no excuse.
And my mother, who had just been told she should stay at home, said: “No. But it’s what it was.”
I have not been able to argue with that and I have tried four times.
What has happened since.
The letters. All forty-one have now been given to my mother. Terrence Falk boxed them up properly and Rosalie wrote an index, and my mother has them on the sideboard and gets them out about once a fortnight.
The people. Eleven of the forty-one have now met her.
Not all at once — Rosalie was firm about that and she was right. In ones and twos, at a café on Corran Street, since August.
The oldest is a man called Wilbur who is sixty-four and who left Colverne Primary in 1973 and who talked for forty minutes about a coat and then had to go outside.
Iolanda came in October. She brought her brother, who is fifty-one, and who was the one who went to Carrow Bay in 1991.
He did not say very much. He shook my mother’s hand for about eleven seconds.
Rosalie comes to my mother’s for lunch on the first Sunday of the month and has since September. She brings the same terrible lemon thing every time and my mother has told her twice that it is lovely.
The shop did something in November that my mother tried very hard to stop.
Brackley’s has a small community fund. Every branch does. It is not a great deal of money — about four thousand a year in that store.
They renamed it.
The Eilis Fund. With the spelling. On a laminated sign by the customer desk, and the first thing on the sign is a note explaining the pronunciation, which was Rosalie’s idea and which is the funniest and best thing about the whole business.
It does one specific thing, which Rosalie specified and which the regional office agreed to: it pays for school uniform, shoes and trip costs at three primary schools in Colverne, on a referral from the school office, with no name attached and nothing said to the child.
They did the first eleven in September.
My mother refused to go to the sign thing. She said she would not be stood next to a laminated sign at her age and she meant it.
