Authors: Elizabeth Day
Home Fires
For my grandparents, who wanted me to write stories.
And, as ever, for Kamal.
Contents
The water is closing in.
Her limbs are heavy. Waterlogged like wool left to soak.
Slipping, sliding, she feels herself go.
She smiles.
Nothing to stop her from falling.
Not now. Not any more.
They have come to see the marching men.
She is holding her mother’s hand, her fingers clasped around the familiar firmness of palm, knuckle, skin. She clings to it, tightly.
Her mother has told her that she must not, for any reason, let go in case they lose each other in the crowd. On either side of her, people jostle for space. She can hear the swish of ladies’ dresses, the dry coughs and small exhalations. All around, there are legs and waists and shoes. She fixes her gaze on the back of a pale blue skirt directly in front of her, the heavy material gathered up in an old-fashioned bustle that sticks out as if it is a face, as though the skirt is talking to her.
If she cranes her head round, still holding on to her mother’s hand, she can just about make out the street, appearing here and there in between the gaps left by shifting adult limbs. She wishes she could see better. She is always wishing for more than she has. When her father came back from the war, it was one of the first things he noticed about her: that she was too impatient, that she should be quiet and meek and talk only when spoken to.
‘Bite your tongue, child,’ he would say, even though he had been away for years and was a stranger to her.
She stares through the crowd, trying to focus on the procession. Her mother has told her this is a solemn occasion.
Solemn.
She likes the sound of the word, dense and slippery on the tongue.
There is a quick movement to one side of the blue skirt, a shifting swirl of something that Elsa takes several seconds to make out. Squinting hard, she sees it is the brown-beige lacquer of a horse’s hoof. From her vantage point, she can make out the silvery glimmer of its shoe, a crescent shape nailed neatly into the curve of its foot. The horse walks forward. The road is coated with sand and when the horse’s hoof makes contact with the ground, it thuds gently, the impact blotted by the granular surface.
The pale blue skirt with the bustle moves to one side so that Elsa now has an uninterrupted view of a broad sweep of street. A black gun carriage, pulled by six dark horses, draws in front of her. One of the horses is more jittery than the others, bucking its head against the bridle, nostrils flaring and shrivelling as it walks past. The crowd is quiet and then there is a rustling and when Elsa looks up she realises that it is the noise of everyone simultaneously removing their hats.
Behind the horse-drawn carriage, several hundred men are marching. Their feet thump with simultaneous regularity on the ground and behind that noise, there is another, less definable sound of the clatter and jangle of metal. Thump, clatter. Thump, clatter. As they pass, she sees the colour of their uniforms changing like a spreading bruise: blue into green into gunmetal grey, the shade of a thundercloud.
The silence of the crowd presses down on her. She turns back, tilting up her head to reassure herself her mother is still there. When she sees her, Elsa notices that her mother’s eyes are glinting, that the tip of her nose has reddened. She is still holding Elsa’s hand but her fingers have loosened. She seems distant, swallowed up by the men and women to her left and right, as if she is no longer Elsa’s mother but simply a person among many others.
‘Mama?’ Elsa whispers.
Her mother bends down, leaning on the handle of her umbrella, bringing her lips level to Elsa’s ears. ‘Yes?’ Her voice is distant, unspooling.
‘Why are all the men wearing different colours?’
Her mother looks at her strangely. ‘The soldiers wear different uniforms,’ she says. ‘Some are in the army, as Papa was, but some are in the navy or the air force.’
Elsa nods. She recites the names in her head like a poem: army, navy, air force, army, navy, air force.
The men file on by.
It was their next-door neighbour Mrs Farrow who had suggested the trip to London.
‘They are bringing home an unknown soldier to bury,’ she said one afternoon, sitting by the bay window of the drawing room, backlit by the fading sunlight so that Elsa could make out the fuzzy outline of downy hairs across Mrs Farrow’s cheek. Elsa’s mother seemed distracted but before she could say anything, Clara the maid brought the tea tray in, tripping over the edge of the woven silk rug and almost sending the crockery spinning to the ground. She managed to right herself just in time but her cap slipped down her forehead, giving her the appearance of a skittish, one-eyed shire horse. She looked flustered, embarrassed. Elsa felt sorry for her.
Her mother sighed and raised her eyebrows. Mrs Farrow glanced away, politely.
‘Thank you, Clara,’ her mother said. ‘That will be all.’
Clara bobbed her head and mumbled something under her breath. She had often overheard her mother saying the war made it difficult to get good domestic staff. Perhaps, now it was over, Clara would go. She hoped not. She liked Clara.
Her mother did not immediately respond to what Mrs Farrow had said, but instead busied herself with the tea. Elsa watched as she poured the milk, a growing pool of white leaking to the edges of the cup.
Eventually, her mother spoke. ‘Does it not strike you as being –’ she seemed to be searching for the right word, ‘a little morbid?’
Mrs Farrow laughed. ‘Alice, the whole war was morbid. I think the burial is intended as a symbol.’
‘A symbol?’ She passed the cup of tea across. There was a plate of cucumber sandwiches on the tray, the bread springy and thinly sliced, the translucent green discs slipping out like wet tongues. Elsa looked at them longingly. She was always hungry and hated herself for it. Her father said it was unladylike to display one’s appetite so nakedly.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Farrow continued, placing her cup and saucer on the lacquered side table. ‘All those poor people who were denied a funeral, who did not have a chance to grieve for their fathers or brothers or sons.’ She dipped her head. There was a small pause. ‘Or their husbands,’ she said, quietly.
The thought seemed to float between the two women, a leaden shadow that redistributed the weighted atmosphere of the room.
‘But of course, Alice, it is entirely up to you,’ Mrs Farrow said. ‘I merely thought that, as I intended to go and take Bobby with me, you and Elsa might wish to come along too.’ She stopped, before adding rapidly, ‘and Horace of course.’
The mention of her father’s name caused Elsa to breathe in sharply and to hold the air there, deep down in the pit of her stomach, where it would not make a sound. It made her feel small to do this, unnoticeable, a crumpled-up ball of paper that could be flicked to one side.
She sat on the chair by the fireplace not moving, straining to understand what was being said without appearing to eavesdrop, without drawing attention to herself. Through the corner of her eye, she could see her mother smiling her blank, colourless smile. Elsa had never met anyone else who could smile in quite the same way, so that whoever was on the receiving end of it could read whatever they wanted into the shape of her lips. It made her shiver to see it. The smile seemed to belong to another person; a borrowed piece of clothing.
She suspected that Mrs Farrow knew her father would not come, but the truth of it would not be spoken out loud. She glanced across at her mother. The smile was still there, fixed in place like glass in a window.
Her father didn’t want anything to do with the war, not any more. He couldn’t even touch the newspaper if there was a mention of the war on the front page. He would go out of his way to avoid the engraved plaque of names that had recently been erected at the bottom of their street. ‘Our Glorious Dead’ was the inscription across the top. Elsa thought that was an odd phrase. She couldn’t imagine a glorious way of dying. Even Our Lord Jesus who died on the cross – how could you call it glorious when he had nails hammered through his palms and feet?
But that was the phrase they had carved smooth and clear into the stone, the lettering cut so deep that Elsa could fit the tip of her little finger in the shallow grooves of the curving G. The stone felt cold to the touch.
On the morning they went to Westminster Abbey with Mrs Farrow, Elsa’s father was locked in his study working on his papers. They left him behind, even though he was the only one of them who had experienced the war first-hand.
Now here she is, holding her mother’s hand and standing amidst rows and rows of silent strangers. Above her, the russet-brown leaves of the sycamore trees quiver and twist in the sunlight. Mrs Farrow says it is ‘unseasonably warm’ for the time of year and Elsa thinks the men in uniforms must be hot, the collars of their tunics scratching against their neck as they walk. Hundreds upon hundreds of them seem to march past her and she imagines that each one of them has a family akin to hers that stretches all the way back from children to parents to aunts and uncles and grandparents and nieces and nephews and cousins and wives.
At school, the teacher had once drawn the family tree of Queen Victoria in chalk on the board. It had branches like a real tree, but made straight and long, and where you might have expected there to be a leaf, there was instead a name, a date of birth, of marriage and of death. She had been intrigued by that family tree, by the simple beauty of it, by the way everything could be connected. She had found the idea of it comforting.
She recalls it now, mapping out a family tree for each of these soldiers in her mind’s eye, the lines unravelling and criss-crossing through the generations, each interlinked branch expanding until she imagines the chalked-out marks covering the ground and the sky and the faces of the people who stood around her.
She begins to feel faint and her vision blurs around the edges. She blinks twice in quick succession to clear her sightline, dropping her head so that the muscles in her neck relax. When she looks up again, the procession is retreating into the distance, on its way to the Abbey. Someone has put a dented steel helmet on top of the coffin and Elsa finds herself wondering if it had been the unknown soldier’s helmet or not. How would they have worked it out? And if it wasn’t his helmet, whose was it? She does not like the thought of a soldier lying on his own, his head uncovered and defenceless. Would he be missing his helmet now, wherever he was? Wouldn’t his family want it back?
Her arm is aching. She wishes she could shake herself loose and let go of her mother’s hand. She twists back to look at her and sees that her mother is crying. She is embarrassed for her and shocked that she is showing such visible emotion in public.
But then Elsa realises that someone else is crying too. There is a tall woman in a pale pink cloche hat and threadbare gloves standing next to her. The woman has not made eye contact with anyone since she arrived a few minutes before the horse-drawn carriage came past. She had been flustered because she was late and her face had been covered in a light sheen of sweat. She had jostled her way to the front, bumping into Elsa as she did so but offering no apology. Instead, the woman had stood impassively to one side, her shoulders sloping. Her demeanour had not altered as she saw the coffin but now Elsa sees that tears are slipping down the woman’s cheeks, making her face appear misshapen. The woman is sobbing openly, oblivious to anyone else around her. The sobs are dry little hiccups and they catch in the woman’s throat as though she does not want to let go of them completely, as though she is frightened about what might happen if she forgets to control herself.
