Home Fires (10 page)

‘Love you,’ she would say, sitting upstairs on the side of their bed, trying her best not to show her own emotion.

‘Yep, bye, Mum. Bye, Dad.’

Then there would be the click of a receiver placed back on the hook and both Andrew and Caroline would stay on the phone for a few seconds longer, listening to each other’s breathing.

‘You still there, darling?’

‘Yes, Andrew.’

‘He loves you too, you know.’

‘Yes. I know.’

Andrew was patient with her, sensing how hard she was taking it. He was quietly reassuring, never demanding her cheerfulness, always solicitous and affectionate. He did little things, like renting a video of a film Caroline had wanted to watch for months and surprising her with it. He took her out for dinner a couple of times and said she looked lovely. He held her hand across the table and talked about their future plans, about their shared past.

They went on holiday, just the two of them, to a self-catering place let out by a golfing acquaintance of Andrew’s in the South of France. They had a blissful week in clear sunshine just along the coast from Cannes. They spent the days reading books on the beach on rented sunloungers, ordering salade niçoise for lunch from the uniformed attendants. In the evenings, they would go out for supper. Caroline tried lobster for the first time. Her face grew burnt, then the redness turned to brown and a spray of freckles appeared across her nose. They talked more than they had done for years and Caroline felt the glimmer of that first excitement, of youthful love, re-ignite in the pit of her stomach.

For a while, everything had seemed to be getting back on track. But then, when they returned, Elsa got ill and much of Andrew’s time was taken up with sorting out her affairs, arranging for Mrs Carswell to come in and care for his mother on a daily basis.

And then, Max died, and nothing was ever the same again.

The night before the funeral, they invited as many of Max’s friends as they could to the house for a few drinks. They thought it would be a way of making everything a bit less formalised and they wanted the funeral to be as much for his friends as it was for the military brass.

They had asked them over from
5
pm but no one turned up until
6
pm, at which time there was a gentle trickle of his army friends – big, hulking men with young faces and careworn eyes, their skin creased with experiences they were too young to have endured. Some of them, like Pete, a signals officer who’d been on tour with Max when he died, Caroline had met before. Others, she didn’t recognise but they all came up to her and introduced themselves, shaking her hand strongly, saying how sorry they were but she could tell they were deliberately not thinking about it too much, as though it would be unlucky to dwell too much on death.

With awful timing, the news that morning had been dominated with the story of a South Sudanese man who was being trained by the British Military Police and had turned against them, firing his weapon in the compound just as five of his teachers were settling down for a cup of tea. Four of them died; the fifth was in a critical condition in hospital. And there these boys were, stuck in the middle of a mess that was not of their own making.

The army men made straight for the drinks table. Caroline noticed a couple of them downing swift tumblers of neat whisky before helping themselves to the cans of lager Andrew had bought from the cash and carry that morning. They drank and drank and drank and yet they never got drunk. The alcohol seemed simply to warm them up, to get them to a point where they could cope with normal social interaction.

Then, after about half an hour, Max’s schoolfriends arrived in a succession of large groups, taking comfort in numbers. They were much noisier, more boisterous than the others. It seemed, after a while, as if they had almost forgotten why they were there and the atmosphere of the house lifted with the sound of party chatter.

Caroline made a point of greeting all those that she knew by name and those that she didn’t with a shake of the hand. They had a book open on the cabinet in the hallway for people to sign.

‘Have you written in the book?’ she would ask, smiling tightly as though she were making small talk, her voice brittle. ‘You must. You really must.’ And she would give them a pen and press the book to them and stand there while they wrote. Some of them looked uncomfortable in her presence, unsure of what to say.

There was a man called Tim, an army colleague who had turned up in a badly fitting suit, clearly bought some years ago for a special occasion and not worn much since. His hair was shaved clean against his scalp, the stubble growth glinting in the soft light of the standard lamp. He had a wonky nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. His ears were misshapen and swollen. Caroline, recognising the injuries as the result of over-enthusiastic rugby tackles, asked him if he played and he grinned, showing a row of gold teeth along one side of his mouth. ‘Afraid so, Mrs Weston,’ he said. ‘And Max was always a fast little bugger. Couldn’t catch him.’ And then he caught himself laughing and his smile vanished as quickly as chalk wiped off a blackboard. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’ She nodded. She never knew how to respond to this, although she appreciated hearing it. It was important to Caroline to know that other people were sorry. The worst was for someone to make no reference to it, simply to carry on as though nothing had happened, as though she might forget if the person she was speaking to did not mention it. Like those strangers she met who, when they found out, would tell her that ‘time is a great healer’. She didn’t agree with that. Time meant simply that the actual event was further away so the shock of immediacy had subsided. The grief was still there, just as profound as it ever was.

Caroline didn’t expect Tim’s message to say much but when he passed the book back over and she read it, she saw that all he had written was: ‘The best die young.’ That was it. It was not an original thought, nor was it particularly poetically expressed and yet something about its very simplicity seemed to convey more emotion than any amount of flowery sentiment. The combination of Tim’s straightforward masculinity with this quiet, considered epitaph touched her more than she could have expressed. So she moved on, without being able to thank him in case her voice broke.

There were a lot of girls there too – shrieking, giggling, slips of femininity who were uncertain of how to act. To Caroline, they seemed so slight, so insubstantial in comparison to the army men. Max had been out with a few girls at school – light-hearted flings that would start at a party on Saturday night and seem barely to last till the end of the week – but no one remotely serious. Only once did he bring one of them home to meet his parents, a waif-like girl called Angelique with thin arms and long, raggedy blonde hair. Caroline had cooked lasagne for supper and Angelique had barely eaten her portion, instead lifting dainty forkfuls of salad into her mouth and chewing interminably. When Caroline had cleared the plates away, she had looked at her with a limpid gaze and said ‘Thank you, Mrs Weston, that was lovely,’ even though she had left more than she had eaten.

‘Ange has got a tiny appetite,’ Max had said. He had turned and grinned at her, placing his hand on top of hers, covering her slender fingers as if they needed warming up. Angelique had met his gaze and smiled and, in that moment, she seemed to change entirely and the coolness of her stretched, white skin had been infused with warmth.

That evening, before the funeral, Angelique was sipping on a glass of white wine, her shoulders hunched, her face pallid and smudged with too much eyeliner. She was wearing skinny jeans tucked into flat-soled boots and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt with ‘Kiss’ emblazoned across the front in white sequins. Her hair hung down to her chest, unbrushed and held back from her face by a thin, silver-plaited hairband. No one seemed to be talking to her so Caroline went over, using the condolence book as an excuse.

‘Hello, Angelique.’

She looked startled. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Mrs Weston. You remember me?’

Caroline noticed she had that habit of going up at the end of a sentence even when it wasn’t a question.

‘Yes, of course I do. You came for supper that time.’

She smiled, and again the whole shape of her face appeared to change.

‘I wondered if you wanted to sign this book . . .’ Caroline said, passing it over to her. Angelique didn’t take it. The two of them stood there, uneasily, for several seconds before Caroline closed the book and tucked it back under her arm.

‘It’s just . . .’ Angelique said. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say.’ She started to tremble, pulling the sleeve of her sweatshirt over her hand. ‘I’m not good at that kind of stuff. Max was always loads cleverer than I was, but he was so sweet, you know?’

Caroline tried to smile. ‘He would never look down on me. He, like, really cared. I miss him all the time. I thought he was stupid to join the army and we kind of stopped talking after he left. And I know I was never properly, like, his girlfriend and that he could do loads better than me.’ She gave a short, sharp snort of laughter. ‘I mean, I was sooo not in his league. But he was so, so . . .’ She let the sentence trail between them. ‘So
sweet
.’

Caroline did not want to hear any more. She walked away and left Angelique standing in the middle of the room with no one around her, cheeks wet and legs twisted around each other as if she were about to lose balance. She didn’t feel like offering the girl comfort. At that moment, she felt that she simply didn’t have enough of it to spare. Instead, she went to the kitchen, poured herself a neat tumbler of vodka and downed it in a single gulp. Andrew came in just as she was screwing the cap back on the bottle. He raised his eyebrows.

‘Dutch courage?’

‘Something like that,’ she replied.

He came across to Caroline and she could see that he was about to put his arms around her but something stopped him from doing so. He pulled back, cleared his throat and went to the sink to wash up some glasses. There were trays of untouched food still on the table – no one had seemed in the mood for eating – and she started to wrap some of it in cling-film. A joint of ham they had bought at Waitrose, its skin studded with cloves. A platter of smoked salmon blinis. A bowl of grated carrot salad that Caroline had stayed up late to make the night before. Looking at it all now, she was struck by how awful it was to have put on a spread. It seemed so wrong, as if they were celebrating something.

A strange, snuffling sound was coming from the sink and when Caroline turned towards it, she saw that Andrew’s shoulders were shuddering uncontrollably. The tap was still running but his hands hung immobile at the lip of the sink. His head was bowed. She knew that she should go to him, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t face it.

They had asked Adam to say a few words and when Caroline returned to the drawing room, she could see he had positioned himself with his back to the fireplace, one hand in his pocket, one hand holding a glass of wine as if he were about to make a toast. When she looked at him, she could still see the traces of the boy who used to play with Max in the garden, small legs spinning, knees grazed, cheeks red. He looked ill at ease in his suit, the sleeves marginally too long for his arms, and Caroline wondered whether he had borrowed it for the occasion from his father. The thought of that made her well up so that her contact lenses misted over. She had to blink back the tears so that she could see clearly again.

‘Excuse me,’ Adam said, his voice hoarse. ‘If I could have your attention for a few minutes.’

The chatter and the clink of glass subsided and Adam blushed deeply with the knowledge that everyone was looking at him, the redness filtering out from the tips of his ears and spreading across his face. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to stroke his hair back so that the tufts of it that always stuck out just above his sideburns would be smoothed down.

She felt a breeze against her side and realised that Andrew had come in from the kitchen to stand next to her. She gave him a quick smile of support. He smiled back and put his arm around her, giving her right shoulder a squeeze. And then Adam started to speak.

‘I’d like to start off with a question for all the ladies in the room,’ he said, his mouth curling up at the corners. There were some vague tittering sounds as people looked at each other, bemused. ‘Please raise your hands if you ever snogged Max Weston.’ The titters transmuted into louder guffaws and a male voice from the back of the room started cheering as if he were at a sporting match. Caroline froze. She could feel Andrew tense up beside her.

‘Come on, ladies, don’t be shy,’ said Adam, taking an enormous swig from his wine. That’s it, she thought, he must be drunk, no one will take any notice of him.

But then, slowly, the hands started going up, each contoured arm rising to the ceiling like a string trailing a helium balloon. Caroline could see Angelique tentatively raising her hand, the fingernails glossed with black nail varnish. All around her, girls seemed to be putting their hands up. At first, they looked at each other with vague embarrassment but then they began to smile and it seemed that their shared discomfort was turning swiftly into a badge of pride. As more and more girls identified themselves, Caroline began to feel faint. But she was aware, simultaneously, that people were scanning her face to gauge her reaction. She told herself that she must be a good sport and so she tried to smile, fixing her lips in place so that no one could see how horrified she actually was.