A Question of Identity by Susan Hill

welcome.
    Ray lay on his back and snored and a faint wash of snoreseven reached Elinor Sanders two doors away and ruffled her sleep so that she turned over and back and murmured quietly, but did not wake. She had gone to bed in the knowledge that if she wanted to sleep in she could, though her conscience would not have let her stay in bed beyond eight thirty.
    Ray would wake at five and get up at ten minutes past, as he had done for sixty years. He made black tea with four spoons of sugar and sat at the window drinking it, looking out. He would do the same in Duchess of Cornwall Close, staying at his window for an hour or more.
    Ray liked to think he missed nothing.

How long does it take to stop dreaming about the old life? I walk those streets not these streets. I see the people who live there not here. They call me by my own name. This name isn’t my own name and never will be, even though I went through all their tripwire tests until they were satisfied. How do you stop being the person you were since the day you were born? You’re born all over again with this new name, new past, new place, new house, new life, but your memories aren’t new, are they?
    Anyway, I like those memories. I liked that life. I like to think about what happened. Everything. I like to walk those streets in my dreams not these streets. I like to lie in bed before I drop off and go back there. Go back. Be me. Remember everything.
    Keeps me warm at night.

Fourteen
    QUIET. A STRANGE, muffled quietness. A cool moonlight coming through the window and silvering the opposite wall.
    Elinor Sanders had slept a little, woken, slept a little less. Switched on the light and switched it off again. Then sat up suddenly, afraid of the silence and the odd light. It was bitterly cold. She was used to cold, used to living in the North-East after all, but the walls of the new bungalow felt raw-cold, without having had any heating to penetrate the bricks and settle there. The bed was deep and soft and she was warm inside it, but the air outside chilled her face and one arm which had been outside the covers.
    She got up and went to the window. The paving stones on the paths were pale as bone. The air was brilliantly clear, the moon full. Cold.
    She went into the kitchen. Colder. Looked out of the window again, waiting for the kettle to boil. There was a light in one of the other houses. Someone else not able to sleep. Would it be all right here? The North-East was very friendly – too friendly, sometimes, but you were never ignored, never left to rot, never without someone you could call on, or call out to. Would that be true here? ‘The South?’ they’d said, wondering at her state of mind. They weren’t friendly in the South. They kept themselves to themselves and nobody just popped in.
    The light went out. The moon had gone behind heavy clouds. She drank her tea. She should get a cat. If cats were allowed.Dogs were not, she knew that, there were notices up already, little wooden signs in the grass. A cat could be the best company and no trouble at all.
    She sat for some time in the soft silence but then, as she went back to bed, something caught her eye. It was snowing again, great fat flakes like goose feathers spinning slowly down. Elinor stood looking at them and some memory of childhood came back to her, of their father holding them both up at the window to see the snow falling, she with his right arm round her, Muriel with his left, trying to make him put Elinor down, trying to get all his attention.
    That’s how it always was.
    She watched the snow falling until her eyes crossed with following the flakes and trying to see where exactly each one lay on the ground. By the time she had climbed into bed the grass was already covered in a soft eiderdown.
    She went to sleep, snow flakes twirling and turning behind her eyes, warmer.
    Happier.
    It was after eight when she woke, unusually late. She lay in bed, enjoying the warmth and the sense of rest after a