Home Fires (9 page)

But instead, she swallowed her anger and placed the mug carefully on the draining board by the sink. Then she walked out of the room, more briskly than she intended, and through the hallway and then to the front door and on to the street where she walked and walked and walked until she could no longer feel the soles of her feet. She was scared by her own fury, by the uncontrolled nature of it. When she came back, several hours later, she had no key. She had to ring the doorbell and when Andrew let her in, he took her in his arms and held her close. She should have felt relief. Instead what she felt was resentment.

‘Do we have to go through with this?’ she asked Andrew when they were sitting next to each other on the sofa, sifting through possible funeral readings. The vicar had given them a slim paperback volume of elegies, a gesture that had initially seemed macabre but that later proved to be extremely useful. They had already decided on one of the poems to read. Something about not grieving the life that was lost but celebrating how it had been lived.

‘I’m sorry?’ Andrew looked at her, vaguely. ‘You mean choose the readings?’

‘No, I mean the whole thing. The funeral . . .’ she drifted off. ‘All those people.’

Caroline did not like the thought of saying goodbye. Everyone spoke about how important it was to achieve ‘closure’ but she knew that she would never be able to let go; that any notion of closing the door on her son was unthinkable, almost heretical. She knew that they had to bury him and that proper procedures needed to be observed but at the same time she felt uncomfortable – sending out the endless emails to his friends and making those nasty little phone calls to distantly connected relatives – that she had to share Max with so many others who did not love him anywhere near as much as she did.

Andrew reached across and cupped her chin with his fingers. His hand felt cold.

He was still able to carry out the unthinking gestures of the everyday in a way that Caroline wasn’t: the smile for the postman; the steady hand for his morning shave; the brush of a chair surface before he sat down. She wanted to shake him. And yet he could not see it.

‘Of course we need to have a funeral, Caroline.’

He spoke tetchily, the sentence heavy with tiredness. Neither of them had been sleeping. They twisted under the duvet, their minds contracting in the darkness, willing the night to be over. Then, when it was – when the blank, white sunlight had once again slipped through the curtains like a taunt – they emerged with their eyes puffy and black, remembering all over again; the temporary grace that came with a snatched half-hour of unconsciousness, immediately stained by the inevitable spillage of knowledge.

And Andrew would simply roll over and kiss her chastely on the cheek, as if it had been just another normal night’s sleep.

Perhaps, she thought, it was his way of coping. But that didn’t make it any easier to live with.

Andrew held her hand for a few seconds longer and then withdrew it. He picked up the book of poems and started to leaf through it, pretending that his attention was absorbed. After a few seconds, he cleared his throat.

‘I know this is hard for you . . .’ he started and even that expression – ‘hard for you’ – made her cross. To Caroline, it seemed merely the sort of thing one said in a conversation about the difficulties of finding a reliable builder or locating a convenient parking space. It was not something you said about your son’s death. It was not something you said when your world had collapsed. ‘But it’s hard for me too and we’ve got to get through this together, as best we can.’

She shook her head and moved away from him towards the edge of the sofa. ‘You don’t understand, Andrew.’

‘I do understand, Caroline. I understand very well indeed.’ He stopped. ‘I lost a son too.’ His voice quavered and he fell silent. After a while, he exhaled, slow and long. He stood and went upstairs. She could hear the sound of a bath running.

But whatever he said, Caroline kept coming back to the same conclusion: she did not believe that Andrew could possibly have felt Max’s death as deeply as she did. The two of them had been so close. Mother and son. Right up until the end.

She remembered the day Max got his A-Level results (straight As in History, English and Chemistry), when he went out in Worcester to celebrate with his friends. A group of them came back to the house in the evening – they were meant to have gone clubbing but couldn’t get in because some of them were wearing trainers. Andrew and Caroline had just finished dinner and were watching the news when they heard the unmistakable sounds of cheerful drunkenness – the exaggerated shushing, the clomping, irregular footsteps, the clatter of cutlery and plates as they tried to make sandwiches from what was left in the fridge.

‘Sounds like they’re back,’ Andrew said, hitting the mute button on the remote control.

‘I thought they were going to be out until the early hours,’ she said, picking up the packet of After Eights they had been working their way through. ‘I suppose I’d better go and see what damage they’re doing.’ She smiled: part of her simply wanted an excuse.

Andrew reached up and took her free hand in his.

‘I shouldn’t bother,’ he said, patting the sofa cushion. ‘Why don’t you relax? They can look after themselves.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’ She leaned down and kissed the top of Andrew’s head, inhaling the musky fragrance of his shampoo undercut with something else, a scent that was indefinably his. ‘I’ll be back in a minute. Why don’t you go on up?’

Andrew didn’t respond.

As soon as Caroline walked into the kitchen there was a chorus of whooping and catcalls.

‘Mrs Weston! Dudes, dudes, keep quiet. It’s Max’s Mum!’ She laughed, finding it funny in spite of herself. There were five of them slumped around the kitchen table in various states of inebriation. Max was standing at the sink, filling up a pint glass with water, expression bright, his hair tousled.

‘Where did you get that glass, Max?’ she asked.

He turned to look at her and laughed. ‘The pub, I think.’ His friends disintegrated into hysterics as if this were the most comically insightful epigram anyone had ever uttered.

‘OK, well listen, I just wanted to plead with you to keep the noise down –’

‘Yeah, guys, guys, guys, shhhhhhh!’

‘– because we do have neighbours –’

A couple of them started giving an out of tune rendition of the theme tune to the Australian soap at this point, ‘– so if you could
try
and be a little bit considerate, that would be great.’

Caroline looked over at Max, still standing by the sink, sipping his water. ‘Now, would any of you like something to eat?’

‘Mum, honestly, you don’t need to bother.’

‘It’s no bother,’ she said, wanting to stay in the room as long as possible. ‘You shouldn’t be drinking on empty stomachs.’

So she knocked up a round of fry-ups, the sound of sizzling eggs mingling with good-humoured banter, and when they had eaten their plates of food, leaving behind butter-yellow slicks of grease, they became quieter, more considered. The air hung thickly with the smell of fried bacon.

She felt a minor sense of triumph at having handled the situation so well. She had never enjoyed this kind of relationship with her parents. Her mother had been a lousy cook, forever sending Caroline down the road for fish and chips, with a saveloy on Fridays for her Dad. She could still smell the grease, clinging to her hair, still taste the tart tang of vinegar at the back of her throat. Once, when Caroline was seven, her parents had not come home from work as usual. She’d gone to bed scared, without washing. They’d rolled in at midnight, reeking of booze, and forgetting that she’d had to fend for herself.

‘We thought Kathy was babysitting –’ her mother had protested. ‘Ah well, no harm done, was there? You’re a big girl now.’

It was Andrew who’d taught her that wasn’t normal.

‘Mum, can we smoke?’ Max’s voice brought her up short. The vision of her mother disappeared. She shivered. He came up and put his arm around her and his face had that special pleading expression that he did so well.

‘No, Max, you know your father doesn’t like it.’

‘We’ll open the French windows.’ Five pairs of eyes looked up at her from the kitchen table in expectation, like willing Labrador puppies.

She hesitated. ‘Weeeell –’ She knew Andrew hated the fact that Max smoked. He hit the roof when he discovered a packet of Marlboro Reds in Max’s sock drawer and since then had expressly forbidden their son ever to light up in the house or anywhere near it. But Caroline also knew that Max still snuck in the occasional cigarette at the foot of the garden.

Sometimes she joined him there and shared the illicit pleasure of a few drags. It made her feel good, like she was young again and doing all the things that she should have done when she was
18
. She could quite understand why Max would enjoy the instant, head-numbing hit of tobacco. And really, what harm would it do just this once?

‘If you open all the doors and the windows . . .’

Max, scenting victory, gave her a rough kiss on the cheek. ‘Thanks, Mum. You’re a legend.’

His friends grinned at her. ‘Yeah, thanks, Mrs Weston. That’s really cool of you.’

‘And part of the deal is that you have to give me one too.’

So they sat there, smoking in the kitchen until the sky was studded with streaks of daylight and then Caroline passed out sleeping bags and duvet covers and went upstairs to bed. She slipped in beside Andrew, trying to curve herself round him like a bracket at the end of a sentence, but he shifted on to his front and buried his head in the pillow. She could feel, without anything having to be said, that he was annoyed with her.

Andrew was distant for days after that. She would ask him what was wrong and he would do his usual thing of shrugging and saying, ‘Nothing, why?’ and so she left it. In the early days of being with Andrew, Caroline had felt so reliant on him, so eager to please and to be taught how to behave. But when they had Max, the need for this had ebbed. She had found confidence in being a mother, a confidence she had never previously imagined she possessed. In those long, hazy summer weeks after his A-Level results, while Max was preparing for army life and his mates were getting ready for university or gap years, their home became an impromptu hang-out for anyone who happened to be passing. Caroline got used to returning from the weekly shop to be greeted by a motley assortment of overgrown schoolboys, their limbs sprawled in every direction, munching crisps and leaving crumbs on the carpet, swigging bottles of beer and talking loudly above a hailstorm of thumping pop music. For all that they tried to be recalcitrant teenagers, Max’s schoolfriends were always unfailingly polite. When her presence registered, the stereo system would be muted and everyone seemed to shift in their seats, backs straightening automatically until someone spoke.

‘Hi, Mrs Weston, hope you don’t mind, we were just . . . you know . . .’

And Caroline would smile because she was never as cross as she should have been. In fact, she was delighted to find them there. She loved hearing the house reverberate with noise. She loved making them snacks, collecting empty bottles, playfully swatting away feet from the furniture as if it mattered. She loved how happy it made Max. She loved feeling so needed.

‘My Mum would never be as laid-back as this,’ said Max’s best friend Adam in the midst of one particularly raucous afternoon. He was helping her load the dishwasher and Caroline looked at him bent over the sink, rinsing each plate with such care it hardly needed to be cleaned.

‘Your Mum is a much more sensible lady than I am, Adam,’ she said but she didn’t mean it.

He laughed and turned round. He was as tall as Max – well over six feet with a shocking mop of bright red hair and freckles that ran all the way down to his clavicle. When he smiled, it creased up the whole of his face.

‘Well, we all really appreciate it, Mrs Weston.’

‘Adam! I’ve been telling you to call me Caroline for bloody years.’

He blushed and she knew that she had embarrassed him so she told him to leave the rest of the washing-up to her and he strode out of the kitchen with the uneasy gait of a man who has not yet grown into his body.

In spite of herself, there was part of Caroline that rejoiced in the realisation that she had the power to make a boy blush.

And then Max went to Bulford and they didn’t see much of him for weeks on end. It was difficult for Caroline to get used to his sudden absence after a whole summer of tripping over his shoes. The house became enveloped in the silence of it, a lack of sound so noticeable, it seemed as loud as thunder.

She was mildly depressed for a while after Max left. She went with increasing frequency to the bottom of the garden to steal a cigarette. She had taken to buying the odd pack of Marlboros, just to kid herself that he was still around. He phoned a couple of times, but his calls were sporadic and only ever lasted for a few minutes on a crackly line. He began to speak with the sort of professional jocosity that the military seemed to encourage in its recruits, never really saying anything much apart from the fact that he was enjoying himself.

‘OK folks, I’d better go,’ he would say at the end of a conversation.

‘All right, Max,’ Andrew replied from the kitchen phone.