Home Fires (2 page)

For a second, Elsa is ashamed for the woman and for her mother, but then her ears seem to pop, as if they had been filled with wax until that moment, and she hears the same scratchy sobbing sound replicated a dozen times over from all different directions. The whole crowd seems to be crying as one, their breaths heaving and creaking like a swinging rope.

She is unsettled by the strangeness of what is happening and, in search of reassurance, turns to find Mrs Farrow but her neighbour’s eyes are shaded by the tree leaves and Elsa cannot make out the expression on her face. Mrs Farrow’s son Bobby, who has been unusually quiet throughout the procession, is looking intently at his feet, scuffing the toe of his boot into the sand until his mother tells him to stop fidgeting. After several minutes, the woman in the pale pink cloche hat wipes her eyes with her gloved fingertips and turns to go. Slowly, the crowd thins out and disperses. Her mother lets Elsa’s hand drop and Mrs Farrow suggests they should start making their way home.

On the train back to Richmond, the four of them sit in a carriage, empty apart from an elderly gentleman in one corner, his left eye obscured by a glinting monocle. For a while no one speaks.

‘Alice, my dear, are you quite well?’ Mrs Farrow asks. The train judders forwards, hissing and spitting as it does so. Her mother nods, listless. Mrs Farrow leans across to pat the back of her hand. ‘That’s the spirit.’ She turns to look at Elsa and cocks her head to one side.

‘What a day,’ she says.

She has dark brown eyes that are almost black and Elsa finds that she cannot look away. She gazes back at Mrs Farrow without speaking. Bobby is swinging his legs against the train seat, his feet beating out an irregular rhythm.

‘Quiet now,’ Mrs Farrow says, resting a cautionary hand on his arm. He stops immediately and Mrs Farrow smiles, gently. She is a kind woman, Elsa thinks. Kind but firm.

She wishes she could say something to her, something that would explain how she feels. She wishes she could tell Mrs Farrow that she is scared to go home, that she does not like her father, that his return has changed everything for the worse, that her mother no longer loves her as much as she used to, that she does not know what to do about any of it, any of it at all. She wishes she could find the words, that she was old enough to know how.

Instead, Elsa breaks away from Mrs Farrow’s gaze and rests her head against the leather-lined upholstery. She does not want to have to think. After a while, she falls asleep. The war fades away in her mind: a bubble pricked before it reaches the ground. For the remainder of the train journey, her thoughts sink under a shroud of blankness, the flakes of its quietness falling like silent snow.

Back at the house, her father is nowhere to be seen.

‘I expect he’s still in the study,’ says Elsa’s mother, removing her gloves finger by finger. She leaves them on the hall table in a careless heap. Elsa stands by the doorway, not wishing to make a noise. Her mother looks at her and something about the way she is hanging back, wordlessly, seems to aggravate her.

‘What are you doing, dear?’ she says. ‘Close the door properly behind you and then . . .’ The sentence hangs between them, incomplete. A single strand of hair sticks to her mother’s forehead. Elsa wonders if she has noticed it there, the gentle itch of it against her skin. ‘Why don’t you go up and see if your Papa would like some tea?’ says her mother, walking into the drawing room.

She watches her go and whereas, in the past, Elsa might have felt a lurch of disappointment at her mother’s absence, she realises that her feelings have changed. She does not allow herself to need her, not like she used to. She thinks: I am no longer a baby.

Elsa, still in her coat, makes her way towards the staircase. She walks slowly, so as to eke out each second before she has to confront her father, before the shape of the day will be changed by his mood. She holds out her hands. The right one is shaking and she is irritated by this, annoyed with herself for not being able to steady her nerves.

Upstairs, she creeps down the corridor to her father’s study. The door is ajar, a glimpse of sunlight streaming through in a narrow beam across the carpet. For a moment, she is dazzled by the whiteness of the light. Then, she can see her father, at his desk. He is sitting upright in the oak chair, his arms resting on the blotting pad. There is no evidence that he has been working on any papers. He is staring straight ahead, not moving, barely even breathing, and facing a blank wall that used to have a picture on it. There is a faint, discoloured triangle on the picture rail where once it had hung. It had been a faded reproduction of a country scene: a silty river, a hay cart, a pale blue sky, a man in a bright red coat. Elsa wonders where it has gone.

She knocks on the door. Horace starts at the noise. He shakes his head, as though to rid it of something and then takes out a pile of loose paper from a drawer, setting it in front of him.

‘Yes,’ he says. His voice is tired.

Elsa walks in. ‘Good afternoon, Papa. Mama has sent me up to ask whether you would like any tea.’ The words tumble out quickly. She dislikes how childish she sounds.

He shifts the chair round so that he is looking directly at her. She takes a step backwards, pressing herself as close to the wall as she can. His eyes seem unfocused, glittery.

‘Tell me,’ he says, leaning forwards, his expression intent. ‘How was it?’

Briefly, she is not sure what he is asking about. And then she thinks: of course, the procession. He is interested after all.

‘It was . . .’

‘Well, speak up, child, speak up.’

Elsa clears her throat. ‘It was . . .’ she cannot think what to say. What does he want her to say? What is the right way to answer? ‘It was busy.’

‘Busy?’ He repeats, eyebrows raised. Then he chuckles, a quiet sound that makes her nervous. ‘What else?’

‘It was impressive, sir.’

He nods his head. ‘Good, good.’ He stands up, without warning, the movement so quick that Elsa is startled. He comes towards her, arms behind his back. When he gets to within a foot of his daughter, he stops. He seems to be considering something, the thoughts scudding across his brow. And then he brings his right arm round to his chest and she notices that his hand is clenched tightly in a fist.

Elsa flinches.

He looks at her, surprised, then shakes his head again: quickly, in a succession of jerky movements.

‘Did you think …?’ he starts. Then again: ‘Did you . . .’ He does not complete the question but goes to the desk and sits down so that his back, once again, is turned towards her. ‘Go,’ he says, the words sharp, unkind.

She stands there for a second too long. ‘For God’s sake, go!’ he shouts and as she is running out of the study, she hears a crash and then a falling sound.

It is only later that she realises he must have thrown something at the wall.

Caroline, 2010

‘Caroline?’

She can hear Andrew calling her from downstairs but she can’t bring herself to answer. She lies on their bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, her thoughts half-disappearing into a grey sludginess that teeters perpetually on the brink of sleep. The curtains are drawn and fluttering gently as draughts filter through the gaps in the window frame.

They had been meaning to get the whole house double-glazed for months. Now, it seemed unlikely she would ever care enough to make it happen. Bricks and mortar did not seem to mean very much any more. The house had become a void; an unconvincing imitation of the home it had once been.

It seems almost funny to think of how concerned she used to be with how it looked, of how she had spent hours leafing through interminable sofa catalogues and pale, tasteful paint samples until she found the perfect combination of style and homeliness. She had liked the act of redecoration, of papering over something that she did not want to see. The smell of fresh paint, of clean, glossy newness, was soothing to her.

She had spent years refurbishing the house, stripping back the damp, acrid-smelling carpets, sanding the floorboards and covering them artfully with thick, woven rugs. She had painted every single wall and skirting board herself, from the duck-egg blue of the downstairs bathroom to the delicate ivory hues of their bedroom, offset by the wrought-iron bed frame and the dark, almost blackened wood of the wardrobe. She had discovered that you can learn taste quite easily. The home she had created for her family bore little relation to the Artex tiles and pebble dash of her youth.

There was one room she left untouched so that, now, still, after everything that has happened, the walls are magnolia, the floor is carpeted in a brownish-grey that does not show up the dirt. There are two stripped-pine bookcases on either side of the fireplace, the shelves devoid of books so that they stand empty as a toothless mouth. The wardrobe door bears the pitted marks of blu-tack and the shallow black dots of drawing pins withdrawn. The sheetless single bed, covered by a thin, tartan blanket, looks hollow. In this room, it is only the spaces that have been left behind.

Sometimes, when she passes the door, she thinks she sees him there in a lump beneath the blankets, sleeping in, wasting half the day, snoring gently. But it is always a trick of the light, or of the mind. And then she is forced to remember, all over again.

‘Caroline!’ Andrew’s voice resurfaces, this time more impatient. She knows she should answer but she thinks hazily that if it is important, he will come upstairs to find her. She stays sheltered underneath the duvet, numbed against any sense of time by those oblong white pills the doctor has given her to blot out the sharpest edges of her grief. Xanax, they are called, and the name makes her think of a creature from science fiction, an alien being burrowing away inside her, reshaping her internal moonscape.

‘These should make you feel a bit better,’ the doctor had said, in an attempt to be reassuring. But they do not make her feel better so much as remove the need to feel in the first place, so that her distress becomes strangely separated from her sense of self. The pain is still there but it begins to exist almost as a curiosity, a thing to be looked at and acknowledged rather than the awfulness that envelops her, that makes existing on any sort of practical level seem impossible.

Most of the time these days, she finds that the best way of dispersing the encroaching shadow, the slow puddle that spreads across her consciousness like spilt ink, is to take another pill. She is aware that she is ignoring the doctor’s advice. The printed label on the front of the brown plastic bottle tells her she is allowed a maximum of four over a period of twenty-four hours. Yesterday, Caroline took six, convincing herself that she needed them, craving the consolation. Also, if she is truly honest, part of her likes the thought that she is deliberately causing herself harm. There is something so comforting in the thought of self-destruction, in the thought of painting herself out altogether.

‘Caroline! Where are you?’

But there is Andrew to think about, of course. There is always him. Always, always Andrew . . . She hears him bounding up the stairs, taking them two at a time and the mere thought of this makes her feel exhausted. She is mystified that he can still possess so much energy. There is something unseemly about it, she thinks, something untrustworthy about his absurd good health. His hair has turned grey in the last twelve weeks but oddly this change appears to suit him, emphasising the prominent incline of his cheekbones and the dark hazel of his wide-set eyes. He has grown into his looks, the weathering of his flesh lending him an air of self-contained purpose.

By contrast, Caroline’s looks have been slipping away from her, as though her physical appearance is no longer under her control. Her skin, once fair and smooth, has turned sallow. She has dark circles under her eyes and a delicate web of faint wrinkles at each corner, radiating outwards. Her lips have narrowed and dried so that she finds herself licking them without thinking, running the tip of her tongue across the surface, feeling the sticky bits of skin dislodge as she does so. She has lost weight and although she has always disliked being plump in the past, has always tried to shift the extra heaviness around her belly and thighs, this new thinness does not suit her: her arms poke out of T-shirts and her hair has got thinner at the ends, sparse as straw.

She is not yet so far gone that she does not care about these changes. She has never been enamoured by her own appearance but these days it makes her sad to look at herself in the mirror. She sees an image of a face reflected but it does not seem to be her. There is no recognition at the image in the glass. There is nothing there, just emptiness, a lack of expression.

She feels defeated.

She senses Andrew sitting down on the edge of the bed, his weight causing her to roll slightly towards him. She thinks: why can’t he just leave me alone?

‘How long have you been in bed for?’ he asks and she hears in his voice the tone of disapproval. In fact, she does not know the answer. Her sense of time has become rather elastic but she knows she must offer him something concrete, so she lies.

‘About forty minutes or so,’ she says, choosing a number that is long enough to convince him she is telling the truth and yet short enough still to be within the realms of respectability.

He nods his head once, satisfied, and then he reaches out and strokes her hair softly. She has not had a shower for days and for a brief moment she worries that Andrew will notice the grease, coating the palm of his hand.