Home Fires (4 page)

He turns around, hands in his pockets. ‘What would I know, Mummy?’ He smiles, affectionate, joshing. ‘I only listen to young people’s music these days.’

Elsa laughs. She throws her head back as she does so, revealing the soft pallor of her throat.

‘Oh darling, I hope that’s not true,’ Elsa says. ‘You’re not getting all rebellious on me now, are you? Do you know, Caroline, he was always such a serious little child. He used to look at me exactly the way he is now, even as a baby. The Steady Gaze, we used to call it.’ She cocks her head to one side. ‘Does he do that to you?’

Caroline shakes her head, unsure of how to reply. She stares down at the hem of her skirt, wishing she had chosen to wear something different. Before coming, Andrew had told her his mother was fashionable, that she liked clothes, and Caroline had taken this literally. She had worn the most up-to-date items in her wardrobe: a bright yellow miniskirt and a chiffon blouse with swirly patterns, tied at the neck with a bow. But now she saw that had been a mistake. Andrew did not mean fashionable – he meant classic, refined; he meant his mother had taste and wealth and breeding. He meant his mother was posh, but, like all posh people, he would never have seen the need to say it.

She feels acutely uncomfortable sitting here, in her out-of-place clothes and her overly styled hair. Elsa seems to have no make-up on other than a small circle of blush on each cheek. Caroline’s lashes are caked in mascara. Her lids feel heavy as she blinks. She is worried that her eyeliner has smudged, that there are dark, unbecoming patches of black on her skin that everyone is too polite to mention. She has lost the thread of the conversation and it is only when she hears her name again that she resurfaces.

‘So,’ Elsa is saying, ‘Andrew tells me he found you on a doorstep?’ She smiles as she asks the question but Caroline can sense the implied disapproval, the deliberate intimation that the idea of this is somehow ridiculous, to be made fun of.

‘Yes,’ Caroline says. ‘I was locked out.’

In fact, she had been crying. A few weeks earlier, she had run away from home with £
20
in her pocket. She had caught the train to London, found a room to rent in a dingy flat in Notting Hill and, after a few days, got a job as a cinema usherette in the Coronet. She spent the evening of her nineteenth birthday handing out mini-pots of Italian ice-cream and a middle-aged man had cornered her by the Ladies’ and tried to stick his tongue down her throat before she kneed him in the groin, letting the ice-cream tray fall to the ground. She lost her job after that. She had soon realised that city life was not as liberating as she had expected it to be. She was glad to be away from her parents but she found she missed the familiarity of her childhood home, the dreary pebble-dash bungalow beneath the flight path in Sunbury-on-Thames. She had been so unhappy there, had hated it so much and yet now, when she was finally free of it, paradoxically, she found she missed it. Still she kept trudging on, attempting to forge a new life for herself, eating unheated soup out of cans, buying clothes in second-hand shops, trying not to speak to anyone, not wanting to be discovered. She felt as though she could have slipped through the seams of life altogether and no one would notice she had gone. She became small, unobtrusive, silent. She left no trace. And then, one day, she had lost her keys, sat on her doorstep and started to cry. And that was how she had met Andrew.

‘She was in tears,’ Andrew is saying now. He is crouching down by the basket, tickling the cat’s chin with the tips of his fingers and grinning at Caroline as he talks. ‘I could never resist a beautiful damsel in distress so I did what any decent man would do and took her for a coffee to warm her up.’ He stops and Caroline is flushed by the compliment. She has never thought of herself as beautiful before. Her shame dissipates, replaced by pride that Andrew wants to talk about her, wants to prove how much he cares in spite of his mother’s unconcealed belief that he could do better. ‘I’m incredibly grateful that she said yes.’ He winks at her and she is flooded with happiness. ‘So, here we are.’

Elsa smiles, her lips stretched like a rubber band on the brink of snapping. ‘Well, that’s a charming story,’ she says, getting up in one swift, fluid movement. ‘Do please excuse me. I must go and check on the chicken.’

After his mother has gone, Andrew gets up and comes across to Caroline, bending down to murmur in her ear. ‘She likes you,’ he says and Caroline is so surprised by this obvious lie that she laughs.

‘She thinks I’m common.’

He shakes his head, bringing his face close to hers so that the tips of their noses almost touch.

‘No, she doesn’t.’

‘She thinks I look cheap.’

‘You look gorgeous. That’s what I think.’

Caroline giggles, feeling the knot in her stomach relax.

‘She just takes a while to warm up,’ Andrew says. ‘That’s the way she is. Don’t worry so much.’

He traces the curve of her cheek with his fingers. She thinks, not for the first time, that he must have had practice at this. He is ten years older than her, so it stands to reason he would have had other girlfriends; girls who were prettier, classier, cleverer than her; girls from good families who knew what a Chopin sonata was. But instead of feeling downcast by this, it makes her even more determined to please him, to keep his attention. She wants to be better than the lot of them. She wants to prove his mother wrong. She wants to love him more than he has ever been loved before. And she can do it. She knows she can. She just has to keep trying.

Elsa, 2010

Elsa has been told by Mrs Carswell that she is going somewhere. She knows that she has been told this many, many times but still she cannot quite remember where it is she is meant to be going. If she could just reach out that little bit further, she thinks, if she could only stretch the thread of memory that tiny bit more, she would be able to grab hold of the elusive fact.

She looks around her for clues and finds she is sitting in her customary armchair and there is a battered leather suitcase in the corner of the room, staring at her accusingly.

Where am I going? she asks herself.

Will the journey be long?

What will happen when I get there?

Much of Elsa’s life nowadays seems to be taken up with the thankless task of trying to remember things. It is as if she is trying to see something clearly through a frosted window – the outline is visible but the detail, the crucial sense of it, remains cloudily lost.

She blames Mrs Carswell for this. Elsa is waging a secret war against her daily. She still calls her ‘the daily’, at least in her own mind, even though, for the last few months, she has been doing considerably more than simply cleaning the house. Mrs Carswell is a fat, red-cheeked publican’s wife wreathed in purposeful cheerfulness that Elsa finds especially irritating. It is Mrs Carswell’s briskness, tinged with condescension, that is so galling. It is always ‘How are we today?’ and ‘Shall we tuck this blanket in a bit? We don’t want to catch cold do we?’, always delivered with an inane grin, always accompanied by the rapid, forceful movements that make Mrs Carswell’s flesh rise and wobble like a baking cake. Elsa will sit there, the blanket now tucked in so uncomfortably tight it seems to cut off the circulation in her legs, and the resentment will rise silently within her until she becomes more and more furious and determined to say something.

But she is never able to find the right words. Ever since she’d had that fall a while back, she has not been feeling herself. And then there had been a stroke – at least, that’s what she has been told; all she can remember is waking up one morning with a burning sensation in her head, unable to move – which leaves her frustratingly incapable of expressing herself. She knows exactly what it is she wants to say and yet she can never quite remember the way to say it. When she does try, her tongue lolls loosely in her mouth and her voice comes out as an embarrassing groan. It is mortifying. She used to be so eloquent, so fluent in her speech, so intolerant of other people’s grammatical errors and sloppy vocabulary and now here she is, an old saliva-drooling nuisance pushed around and patronised by her former cleaner.

When she tries to describe it to herself, the metaphor she comes up with is a crack in the pavement. There is a crack, a fatal gap, between Elsa’s thoughts and the capacity to act on them and in this crack grows a thick weed of festering anger, almost entirely directed at Mrs Carswell, who knows nothing about Elsa’s blackly murderous thoughts.

Sometimes Elsa entertains herself by imagining a giant speech bubble magically appearing above her head containing all the vicious insults passing through her mind at any given time. She envisages Mrs Carswell turning round from the washing or the cooking or the lighting of the gas fire or whatever menial task she was engaged in and being confronted by the brutal reality of what was going on in Elsa’s head. Elsa can while away several happy hours imagining her reaction: Mrs Carswell’s mouth would slip open slackly, the expression one of horror compounded by the sudden, inescapable knowledge of how much she was hated. She would scream, perhaps, or whimper in distress. Then Mrs Carswell would run out of the house, shrieking, never to return.

Well, thinks Elsa grimly, one can but dream.

For the last couple of weeks, Elsa had been taking her revenge in small but deadly ways. A few nights ago, she had unscrewed the hot water bottle cap and let the tepid dampness seep all over her sheets. It had taken her the best part of an hour to get her arthritic fingers to do what she wanted them to, but she had managed it eventually and when Mrs Carswell came in the morning to get her out of bed, there was a delicious moment where Elsa noticed the glimpse of panic on her face when she thought her increasingly infirm charge had wet herself. Ha! Elsa thought. That’ll teach her.

‘Dear me, what have we here?’ Mrs Carswell said, roughly pushing Elsa over on to her side so that she could inspect the cotton nightdress clinging wetly to her withered thighs. ‘What have you done to yourself, eh?’ She tutted gently under her breath before spotting the hot water bottle, lying flaccid and shrunken at the foot of the bed. ‘Oh my stars,’ said Mrs Carswell, picking up the offending object and examining it closely. ‘How on earth did that happen? I thought I screwed it on ever so tightly.’ She looked at Elsa levelly, her piggy little eyes flashing with something like distaste. ‘Well. It’s a mystery.’ But Mrs Carswell was no fool. She knew what this meant. Still, she wasn’t about to let on. ‘Let’s get you up, shall we?’ she said with exaggerated brightness and she started dressing Elsa in dry clothes, managing to strip and remake the bed with such efficiency that within half an hour, the episode seemed barely to have happened. ‘There,’ said Mrs Carswell, clapping her hands together once the task was completed. ‘All done. Let’s get you some breakfast, shall we?’

Today, Elsa is taking a different approach. She has been left in the usual armchair by the single-bar gas fire in what Elsa calls the sitting room and what Mrs Carswell insists on calling the lounge. From here, Elsa can hear the tell-tale ping of the microwave that signifies Mrs Carswell is making lunch. A wheeled table, of the sort they have in hospital wards, has been moved over to the side of the chair, the white metal tray lifted several centimetres over her knees. On the tray is a single spoon with which Elsa is expected to eat her food. The indignity of that spoon enrages her. She is perfectly capable of using a knife and fork, even if it takes her longer and the results are rather messier than she would like. But to be reduced to a spoon – such a babyish piece of cutlery! – makes her feel so powerless, so demeaned that she can barely look at it without feeling her eyes fill with unintentional tears. After staring at it for a while, she tells herself firmly to lift her right arm (it is almost impossible to get her left side to do what she wants) and slowly, she feels her shoulder socket click into action. She lifts her arm, heavy as a flooded sandbag, and feels a shooting pain across her chest as she does so. Elsa winces and pauses for a second to gather her strength. Finally, she manages to get her hand on to the table, to close her knotted fingers around the spoon handle and to hide it, as quickly as she can, under the chair cushion.

She can feel her heart beating lightly against her chest in a breathless tap-tap-tap. A flash of memory comes to her of when she was a small girl, lifting up a dying sparrow from the patch of garden behind the house. The bird lay in her cupped hands, its beady eyes swivelling frantically and Elsa had wanted more than anything to help it, to soothe its panic with a friendly touch, but she found she was unable to. The bird twisted uncomfortably but had no strength to escape. She noticed its chest twitching and realised after a moment that this was the sparrow’s heart, twitching frail and fast against its feathers, pressing so forcefully against the bird’s delicate flesh that it looked as though something were trying to escape and burrow its way out. The thought disgusted her. She dropped the bird on to the ground and ran back into the house.

And then, another memory: this time, she is wearing a cotton nightdress that is too thin to keep her warm even in summer. She is walking noiselessly down the hallway, being careful to avoid the creaking floorboards and it is night-time, the heavy sort of darkness that envelops the first hours after midnight. She is pushing open the door to her mother’s room, reaching up with one arm to turn the handle, the brass cool and dry against the palm of her hand. She stops in the doorway, until she can make out the recognisable outlines of the chest of drawers, the heavy oak wardrobe and the bedstead. She starts to walk on tiptoe towards the bed, inhaling her mother’s familiar sleep smell – clean linen mixed with the faintest traces of her hair and the sweetness of her sweat. She can hear the rise and fall of her slow breathing, calmer than it is in the daytime. And then she can hear another, unfamiliar sound, a throaty, deeper noise that she cannot place. But before she has time to work out what it is, the bed jolts and a large, dense shape rises up from the mattress. She hears the shape take three strides across the floor and she feels herself being lifted up, her chest squeezed with the force of two hands pressing against her skin. ‘This is no place for little girls,’ says a male voice and then she finds herself in the hallway, her mother’s bedroom door slammed shut behind her. She stares down at her bare feet, her toes turning white-blue with the cold, and she tries for a while to make sense of what has happened but she can’t and so she walks quietly back to her room, feeling scared and alone. She thinks: I wish my father had never come back.