Home Fires (6 page)

But the organist is thumping out the notes too loudly and a headache that has been plaguing him since morning thuds insistently back into life, pricking the tightness behind his eyes, so that by the time the small congregation emerges, blinking, into the midday light, Andrew feels untethered from the ground, as though he is viewing proceedings through a pool of shallow water, his ears muffled so that everyone’s speech sounds disjointed and slow.

He removes his sunglasses from his jacket pocket and slips them on. The crispness of the autumnal daylight is immediately softened by an overlay of sepia. He looks around and sees Caroline, standing underneath the spreading branches of a sycamore tree just in front of a cluster of faded and slanting gravestones. She is laughing, relieved to have her son back in her arms, able now to joke about the timing of his tears.

‘Typical,’ he hears her saying to the vicar. ‘He’s been good as gold all morning and then just at the moment . . .’

Good as gold, thinks Andrew. She never used to speak like that. It amuses him, this habit she has of picking up phrases like a magpie picks up glitter. She tries so hard to be someone else, something better and yet Andrew loves her exactly as she is. It doesn’t matter how much he tells her this. She has no faith in herself, he thinks as he walks towards her. No faith at all. ‘Happens all the time,’ the vicar is chuckling amiably. ‘I seem to have that effect on babies.’ His mother is standing next to the vicar in a smartly tailored two-piece suit in royal blue. She laughs, causing the feathers on her fascinator to tremble. ‘Our son was just the same,’ Elsa says. ‘You should have
heard
the fuss that Andrew made. Of course, he’s been compensating ever since by being so terribly sensible.’

Caroline giggles, arching her eyebrows to show she knows exactly what her mother-in-law means, that she gets the joke.

Andrew edges into the circle of conversation, giving a non-committal smile. He holds out his arms to take Max, overtaken by the need to hold him, to feel him close.

‘Are you all right?’ Caroline asks and he sees that instead of giving him the child, she has moved to one side so that Max’s face is obscured by the folds of her blouse, the silhouette of her hip.

‘Fine, fine,’ he says, putting his hands back into his pockets. ‘Just a bit of a headache.’

Elsa looks at him. Her face, still beautiful through the wrinkles, is impeccably made up: blended brushstrokes of crimson lipstick, brown-black mascara, grey eyeshadow at the corners of her lids, lighter brown on the inside. She smells lightly of tuberose. ‘Have you taken anything for it?’

He nods. Elsa pats him on the arm. ‘Some champagne will do you good,’ she says. ‘When we get back, you’ll sit down and I’ll bring you an ice-cold glass of fizz.’

He sees Caroline frowning and then he remembers: they haven’t bought any champagne. Caroline had thought sherry would be more ‘appropriate’.

‘But first, I insist on having a cuddle with my glorious grandson,’ Elsa is saying, moving towards Caroline with elegant arms outstretched, a discreet gold bracelet hanging from her left wrist. ‘Oh I could just eat him alive.’

The vicar gives a giant guffaw, arching his back so that his stomach protrudes over his waistband. ‘Grandparents have the best of both worlds, don’t they?’ he says. ‘They can always give the little blighters back at the end of the day!’

The vicar carries on talking, but Andrew is not listening. He is looking, instead, at the interaction between his mother and his wife. Elsa still has her arms outstretched, is still waiting for her grandson to be handed over. Perhaps it is the headache that makes it seem such an interminable wait, as though the ticking of time has slowed down until it is more pause than motion. But it seems to him as though Elsa waits for several long minutes, her arms gradually sagging and falling back down to her sides when she finally realises Caroline is not going to pass the baby over.

And in this new, slowed-down world his head is inhabiting, Andrew is able to see each minute sliver of reaction in perfect detail. He sees his wife give an almost inconspicuous shake of the head. He sees her smile become rubbery and false. And then he sees her tighten her grip around Max’s gown, lifting up the palm of one hand to his downy head, as though shielding him.

He sees Elsa, for the briefest of moments, look as if she has been slapped. And then, almost immediately, she masks her face with a blank politeness.

He is astonished by the clarity with which he notices all of this. When his thoughts click back into normal time, nothing appears to have happened. The vicar is still talking. Caroline is laughing easily again, saying apologetically, ‘I’m sorry, Elsa, I think he needs changing. I’ll just take him inside’ and then Elsa is tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, giving a meticulously understanding smile.

‘I’ll do it,’ Andrew says and he understands, as he is offering, that this is a test, that he is wondering how Caroline will react.

‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ she says. She walks off towards the vestry with Max squirming in her arms. ‘You know you can’t change nappies for toffee.’

For toffee. Another phrase that doesn’t fit.

He looks at her go, he hears the brisk clicking of her heels against the flagstones, the sway of her skirt as she moves.

He puts his sunglasses back in his jacket pocket and takes Elsa’s arm. ‘Come on, Mummy,’ he says. ‘Let’s make a start on wetting the baby’s head.’

She looks up at him, warmly.

‘Good idea.’

They say goodbye to the vicar and walk towards the car, where they sit in a charged kind of silence until Caroline comes back. He notices as she approaches the passenger window that her face is unreadable: a freshly polished piece of silver.

‘All done,’ she says, as she straps Max into the baby seat, giving him a small kiss on his brow before getting into the car.

The hem of Caroline’s dress catches in the door when she closes it. ‘Hang on,’ she says, opening the door and retrieving the dress, now stained with a smear of grease. ‘What a nuisance,’ Caroline says, tutting to herself. She clicks her seatbelt into place, then twists round to look at Andrew and gives his hand a squeeze.

‘No one will see it,’ he says automatically. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘You’re right. It’s not as if anyone will be looking at me, will they?’

‘No,’ he replies, turning the key in the ignition. ‘It’s all about Max from now on.’

As if on cue, Max gives a grizzly little whimper from the back seat. They all laugh, lightly.

Andrew releases the handbrake and the car judders forward. Behind them, the church recedes, its steeple gradually disappearing behind the rising bend in the road.

Caroline

For Caroline, it had all started with a knock on the door.

Ta-tat.

A quaver, then a crotchet, thumped out against the wood.

She thinks now how odd it was that they knocked when there was a perfectly good doorbell, a square box nailed to the wall with a circle-white buzzer so that every time she passed it she thought of an unfinished domino tile. Andrew had installed it several years previously, disproportionately proud of his prowess with the Black & Decker drill she had given him for Christmas. At first, he put it too high up on the doorframe so that no person of average height would be able to reach it. Then he moved it down several inches, but the wood remained dotted with holes where the doorbell had once been.

So the point was: they must have seen the doorbell and chosen to ignore it. Perhaps, she thinks, it was protocol, an anachronistic gesture of respect from a time before the installation of domestic electronics.

Whatever the reason, it was a knock that signalled Caroline’s life was about to change. The knock seemed to echo more loudly than a buzzer, its staccato force reverberating clean and clear against the hallway tiles. It bounced off the buttermilk-painted walls, pinging its way like a pinball up to the top of the stairs where she was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in her jeans, folding freshly washed pillowcases to stack on a shelf in the airing cupboard.

She called to Andrew to answer. It was a Saturday and they had been out for the afternoon, shopping for things they believed they needed but probably could have done perfectly well without: cushions for the conservatory chairs, a new fig and bergamot scented candle for the living room, a long-handled spoon for jars of marmalade to replace one that had mysteriously disappeared. On the way back to the house, they had stopped for tea at the vegetarian café and shared a slice of carrot cake, the vanilla cream icing melting sweetly in their mouths.

There was no answer from Andrew and Caroline remembers being irritated by that. She remembers flinging down the pillowcase she had been folding and making her way hurriedly downstairs, cursing her husband’s absent-mindedness under her breath.

It seems so trivial now to have got upset over such a tiny inconvenience – magical, almost, to think that her life could have been so content back then that she had to invent reasons to be upset simply to give her day a bit of texture.

There was another knock before she got to the bottom of the stairs: three beats in quick succession.

Was it then that she began to sense that things were not as they should be? Was it then that she felt the first thump of blood to her head? She isn’t sure. There is a temptation, in retrospect, to claim some psychic maternal intuition that all was not right. But she doesn’t think she suspected anything. It had been a very normal Saturday up until that point. She does remember walking briskly across the hallway so that she wouldn’t keep whoever it was waiting.

She was still, at that time, mindful of the necessary social politesse.

She walked down the hallway and looked through the glass-panelled front door to see a warped beige-blue darkness, an indistinct, lumpy shape that gradually shifted apart into two inky shadows. One of the shapes appeared to have yellow stripes on one shoulder but when it moved, the yellow dispersed, swirling into flakes of confetti with each dent of the glass. She squinted, unsure of what she was seeing and yet aware that it was somehow an echo of a thing she recognised.

Something about the way they were standing, erect, unbowed, certain, made the pieces fall into place. In her mind, the jumbled sparkle of a hundred kaleidoscope fragments slid into sudden formation.

Two men.

Uniforms.

A knock on the door.

This is what happens when soldiers die.

She felt a hole in the base of her stomach, as though something had unclenched within her and yet she kept moving towards the door. She turned the handle and opened it several inches but then she stopped, not trusting herself any further. Her eyes were shut, as if she were a child who could make something disappear by not seeing it.

‘Is this
25
Lytton Terrace?’ said the first man. ‘Are you Mrs Weston?’ He was dressed in charcoal grey and wore a gold signet ring on his little finger polished to an iridescent brightness. She didn’t notice his colleague until much later.

Time slowed. The seconds dripped like treacle from a spoon.

‘Would we be able to come inside?’ the first man asked. And she knew, then. She knew.

She bent over before he could say any more, clutching at her waist, head dropping down so that she did not have to look at them. For a few seconds, she could make no noise. It felt as though the next breath would not come but remain, halted, just beyond her reach. She moaned. She said ‘No,’ and her voice when she heard it sounded far away: a whisper on the opposite side of an echoing cave.

She slammed the door shut. She leaned against it with her whole weight, pushing the glass with her hands, fingers splayed against the light. She pushed so hard that her flesh turned white and numb. And all the time she was saying no, no, no, feeling the lurch of desperate nausea in the pit of her stomach, the sweat breaking out underneath her arms and trickling down her spine. She was shaking her head, refuting the thought that this could possibly be real. It was not true. It couldn’t be.

The two men knocked on the door again, saying her name, trying to be kind, but she couldn’t let them in. She would not let them into the house. She would not listen to what they had to say. She thought to herself that if she could stop them from speaking, if she could keep the door shut, if she could prevent them crossing the threshold, then everything would stay the same. She would prise open a gap in time, a velvety corner she could squeeze into where she would be safe, cocooned.

She heard footsteps running up behind her and for a moment she thought that the men had somehow got inside the house and were coming to get her, but then she remembered Andrew. Her husband.

She remembered with a rush that he existed, that he was with her, that she was not alone, that there was a rational shape to things, and then she felt his hands around her wrists, his warm, reassuring palms firmly gripping her throbbing veins. He was murmuring, saying something to her that made no sense, but his voice was familiar and soothing and the tendons in her hands relaxed as he prised them off the glass and held them tightly in his. She looked at his mouth and it was moving and he was making a sound but it took several seconds until Caroline could understand anything.

‘We have to let them in,’ he was saying. ‘We have to let them in.’ And his face was colourless and scared and she was shaking her head, but he simply kept repeating the same phrase over and over and she was lulled by the weird rhythm of his voice and then she felt exhaustion come over her and she slumped against him while he opened the door and let the two men in dark suits across the threshold.