Home Fires (21 page)

It had been a pleasant evening, he thinks, as he presses forward, feeling the heat rise from his muscles as he walks, ignoring the growing thirst at the back of his throat. They had both been working late on a new account and, when Andrew got up to leave for the evening shortly before
8
pm, Kate had suggested ‘a quick pint’. He had been surprised by the offer, assuming that she would have better things to do on a Friday night than spend time with her fusty old boss and he told her so.

She laughed, switching off her desk lamp. ‘You’re not
that
fusty,’ Kate said, reaching for her coat from the hat-stand. She looked at him and for a moment he caught her eye. She blinked slowly, almost drowsily. He smiled and she turned away, but he noticed a pale flush rising up her neck.

They had spent an enjoyable hour in the pub. It had felt good to be in a pub again, inhaling the malty smell of sweat and beer-mats. He had sunk his first pint fairly easily and he was surprised to see that Kate matched him, drink for drink. Caroline never liked to drink too much. She had told him once it was because the thought of losing control terrified her. But Kate seemed not to care. She was relaxed in his company, chatty and smiling and never running out of conversation and it was nice, after months of never being able to say the right thing, to feel he could be charming, that a woman wanted to listen to him. No – more than that – that a woman wanted to flirt with him.

He stops himself short. He mustn’t think like this. He has never been unfaithful to Caroline, never so much as looked at another woman. But she had always been so attentive to his needs, so sexually available, that he had never wanted to stray. Now, his wife seems to have folded into herself, seems no longer to need his intimacy.

Once, after they had been seeing each other for a few months, they went to St Ives for a long weekend. They booked a room in a bed and breakfast in the centre of town, with a small balcony overlooking the seafront. Every evening, they sat on the balcony with a glass of wine and watched as a small crowd of onlookers gathered along the edge of the pier to see the lifeboat being taken out of its shed for a practice run.

In the mornings, they woke to the cawing of seagulls and, after breakfast, took long walks along the cliffs towards Zennor, overtaking other stragglers and tourists in their haste to get to an isolated outcrop of rock, where they sat, their shoes dangling over the edge, looking out at the vastness of sea and sky. They talked about nothing in particular, or they fell silent, knowing that they did not need to speak.

On the way back from one of these walks, Caroline had shrieked and stumbled when she saw an adder, curled on a rock like a loosening knot. He had laughed at her, Andrew remembers now, and had been astonished to see hot tears of frustration in her eyes.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

‘I didn’t mean –’ he reached out to touch her and she let him draw her close. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of.’

He stroked her hair, pressing his lips to her temple. He realised, then, that she thought he was laughing at her, that he was somehow mocking her perceived stupidity.

‘Caroline.’ She did not look at him, so he tilted her face towards his. ‘I love you.’

It was the first time he had spoken the words. He hadn’t been sure, until then, that he was going to say them or, even, that he felt so profoundly. But something about Caroline’s vulnerability in that moment, her obvious childishness, had clutched at his heart. She was less sophisticated than any woman he had ever known – in the sense that her emotional reflexes were instant and easily decoded – and he found that he valued this about her, that he cherished her unspoiltness. She did not seem to want to play games with him. There was no manufactured coolness to her. Her affection for him was worn without concealment, as though it were a thing to be proud of rather than disdained.

She looked at him, astonished, and then squealed with delight. ‘Andrew,’ she laughed. ‘I can’t believe you said that!’

He chuckled. ‘Well,’ he started. And then, again: ‘Well, I hope you . . . like me too.’

‘Of course I do.’ She spun away from him, grabbing his hand so that he fell towards her and then, into her arms. ‘I’ve loved you for ever.’

‘You haven’t known me for ever.’

‘But it feels like it.’

They kissed. The salt-scented breeze rushed up from the water so that Caroline’s hair whipped against his cheek. He could feel his nose beginning to run with the cold, but he ignored it, placing both gloved hands around her face, pressing her closer to him, until he was not sure where her lips began and his came to an end.

He had no idea how long they stood like that or how much longer they would have stayed there, had not a group of ramblers suddenly appeared over the crest of a hill, interrupting their romantic reverie with a blur of cagoules, bobble hats and walking sticks.

‘Terribly sorry,’ the lead rambler said. ‘Didn’t mean to interrupt.’ He was a man with a ruddy face and a plastic-wrapped map hanging around his neck who appeared so flustered at finding Andrew and Caroline mid-embrace that they couldn’t help but giggle.

‘No harm done,’ said Andrew, stifling his laughter. ‘Please, carry on.’

‘You too,’ the man said, gruffly.

They were unable to stop themselves after that. A mild hysteria trailed them all the way back to St Ives.

A year later, they were married.

The light is dusk-bruised and he realises that it is almost
4
o’clock. He feels guilty that he has left Caroline on her own for too long. He picks up his pace and soon reaches the edge of the valley, with its sweeping view of the town below. He has worked up a sweat from his walk and he takes off his Barbour, spreading it over a tussock of grass and sitting comfortably on the lining so that he can spend a few minutes looking out across the low horizon. The ground and sky are beginning to melt together: the syrupy brown of the soil merging with a strip of cloud that gives way to a clear wash of blue. Andrew breathes in, feeling the coolness of the late afternoon trickle into his lungs. Briefly, his mind empties and there is a glimpse of contentment.

And then he thinks of Kate, of Elsa, of Caroline, of the varied responsibilities he has to all these women and his mind is crowded with a perceptible sense of failure. He wishes Max were here. He wishes he could talk to him, listen to his problems and feel like a father again. He shakes his head and then, pressing on, makes his way back down the hillside.

Elsa, 1923

She knows never to talk about it. She has learned, finally, to be silent and acquiescent, to nod her head when it is required, to speak only when spoken to. Her father has drummed it into her and although, deep down, Elsa knows that she is pretending to be good, she does it so well that he seems to have no complaint. She does not mention her father’s behaviour, does not even think of it much any more. She comes to believe it is normal, because it is easier that way, easier to assume it is happening in other houses on the same street, in the same city, to the same kind of children.

She is determined that he will have no excuse to hit her so that, when he does, when he unbuckles his belt and twists it round his hand and flicks it halfway up behind his shoulder, then brings it back down on her, whipping her flesh with a stinging force that takes her breath away, when he does this, she knows. She knows he has no reason for it. He is simply doing it because he is a bully; a bully and a broken man.

‘You must not test his patience so,’ her mother said one morning, before she went to school. Elsa looked up at her from the dining table. She saw that her mother’s hair was turning grey, strands of it flecked with white. Before, she would have said something, would have stood up for herself and replied ‘But I don’t, Mama. I don’t do anything to upset him.’ Now, though, Elsa knew better. She knew that the appearance of things was more important to adults than the truth of what lay beneath. She knew that they wanted her to be meek, not difficult. She knew that her spirit must be split in two, her ardour for life dampened until she was no longer a challenge to them.

She had been doing things wrong all this time, Elsa thought to herself as she folded her napkin, and no one had told her. She felt foolish, as though her mother had deliberately led her into a trap, encouraging her to behave one way, only to have her father come back from the war and undo it all. She looked at the empty place at the head of the table where, later, her father would take his seat. She knew she was a disappointment to him and although she tried not to care, although she tried to hate him for what he was, Elsa found that she couldn’t. Not entirely.

‘He is under a great deal of strain,’ her mother continued. ‘There are things perhaps you do not understand . . .’

‘About what, Mama?’

Her mother walked over to the mantelpiece, busying herself with the winding up of a carriage clock, so that from where she was sitting, Elsa could see only her smooth, long back and her shoulder blades pressing against the silk of her blouse like jagged wings.

‘About how he left the army.’ She kept winding the clock. ‘They said he was a coward. They said his nerves couldn’t cope. It was agony for him, to hear them say that, the men he had fought with.’ She was trailing off, speaking to herself more than Elsa. ‘All through that last year of fighting, Horace was being cared for in a hospital and all the time, I thought . . . I thought . . .’ Her voice was breaking. ‘I never knew. He never told me. He seems . . . he seems ashamed.’

Ashamed.

Coward.

She was not sure what those words meant, but there was a part of Elsa that understood she was being told something of crucial importance and that there was shame attached to it, to the notion of her father not fighting. She took this in, silently looking at her mother’s silhouette against the fireplace, careful not to say anything that would upset the tender balance of what had just happened. Elsa clutched the secret tightly to her, unwilling to let it go, hiding it away as if it were another treasure to add to her hidden stash underneath the floorboards.

She thought then of her father’s strangeness, of the way he tried to disguise his occasional stammer by using words that did not begin with a ‘p’ or a ‘t’, of the way he jumped at the sound of a door slammed too quickly. The way he did not like to walk past the butcher’s shop because he could not abide the smell of uncooked flesh or the sight of blood-red meat set out on big cool slabs for customers to buy. The way that when it rained, he refused to walk outside in case he got mud on his shoes.

Was that because he was a coward? Was that how a coward acted?

She thought, too, of a day long ago when she had seen a woman in a blue-black dress following a man over Putney Bridge. The woman had touched the tip of his elbow and the man had turned around and then, with a curious kind of smile, the woman had handed him a white feather. It was her smile Elsa remembered. It had seemed so out of place.

Coward.

She plays with the two syllables, heavy like marbles in her mouth, and, as she says them out loud, she cannot help but think of a bovine face, limpid eyes and milky udders.

Coward.

Is that what her father is?

It is night. She tiptoes along the corridor from her bedroom. Her purpose is clear, but she is not sure what drives it. The door to her parents’ room is pushed to, but not closed. She presses a single fingertip against the wood and the door swings back, incrementally, so that she can peer into the darkness.

Her father is lying on the side of the bed closest to her, the covers wrapped up tightly around him, the pillows covering his head so that only his nose pokes out of the blankets. How can he breathe? she thinks. And then, before she can stop the idea, she imagines what would happen if he suffocated, if his next breath never came. How different her life would be. She whispers the word then, hearing the two languid syllables unfold themselves as she stands by the door, one hand on the cool brass knob.

‘Coward,’ she says. She holds her breath. She stands there for a moment longer to see if he has heard. There is no movement from underneath the bedclothes and she goes quietly back to bed. She feels stronger for having said it.

It is daytime. They walk past a man in Richmond Park and there is something odd about his face. Elsa knows she shouldn’t stare but she cannot help it. As they approach, she sees that although half of the man’s face is moving normally as he speaks and smiles and lights up his pipe, the other half is completely immobile. As they walk closer to him, she sees that he is wearing a mask, forged out of the lightest tin and painted expertly with the mirrored imprint of his face. From a distance, you would not have thought there was anything wrong with him. Up close, the mask seems sinister, something one might see in the circus. Elsa shivers when she sees it and turns away, quickly. But her father stops dead in his tracks.

‘Horace?’ her mother says, lightly touching his elbow with her gloved hand.

Without explanation, her father starts walking rapidly in the other direction. It is a hot day and by the time they reach the welcome shade of the nearest copse of trees, his cheeks are drained of colour. He is pale and sweating, his moustache damp with heat. Her mother trails some steps behind, leaning heavily on the handle of her parasol, her breaths shortened by the tightness of her old-fashioned corset. She looks to Elsa like a long-stemmed lily – the petals curling brown at the edges, the pollen-heavy stamens lolling downwards in the warmth of a summer’s day. Something about her visible frailty seems to anger him. ‘Keep up, woman, can’t you?’ he shouts. Her mother pauses, looking up at him, squinting in the sunlight. Elsa, straight-backed, stands silently next to Horace waiting for her to reach them. He glances at her, his face shaded by the brim of his hat.