Home Fires (11 page)

There were dozens of them: brunettes and blondes, blue eyes and brown, the blow-dried Pony Clubbers like Amelia – the blousy girl that lived down the road – and the drop-out, creative types with too much make-up and translucent skin, like the girl by the door whom she didn’t recognise with dyed red hair, her wrists weighed down with thick metallic bracelets. The girls seemed to have nothing in common, no defining feature that would enable Caroline to understand why Max had picked them. But the sheer number of them took her aback. She thought that she would have known if her son was out kissing a different woman every night, but apparently not. And not only that, but he seemed so, well,
indiscriminate
in his taste. How could she not have known? This Max – the man that Adam was describing – was not her Max at all.

‘I thought as much,’ Adam was saying. ‘In case any of us were in any doubt, here is the physical evidence that Max Weston was a legend.’ There were loud cheers and clapping. ‘I have many favourite memories of my mate Max,’ Adam continued. ‘He was always game for a laugh, always braver than I was. I knew him from the first day of primary school and I don’t think there was a single day that passed when Max didn’t do something that surprised me.

‘I remember once when we were teenagers and Max was staying over at my house, we climbed out on to the roof through the attic window. It was evening and the sun was just about to go down. We were having a cheeky beer –’ he broke off and winked. ‘And Max said to me – like, completely out of the blue – “I bet I can jump across to your next-door neighbour’s roof.” I was like, “Yeah, whatever, mate.” But then he stood up and, before I could stop him, he only bloody went and did it. It was a good six-foot gap and he cleared it easily. Just like that. And then, afterwards, when I asked him why he’d done it, Max just said “Why not?” ’

Adam’s voice started to go. He stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. ‘He might not have lived beyond the age of
21
,’ Adam said, looking up, ‘but he achieved more than most of us will have done when we’re twice his age. So, here’s to my mate Max.’ He raised his glass and downed it in one. ‘To Max’ said the voices in the room, breaking into raucous applause as Adam stepped away from the fireplace.

Caroline remembered too late that she didn’t have a glass in her hand so she had to stand there, with a forced smile on her face while all the time she could feel her chest constrict. The room started to spin around her and she thought how odd that was, how she had always previously imagined it was the type of thing that happened only in films or books and never in real life.

‘Caroline?’ She heard Andrew speaking but could not find the words to reply. She felt herself being guided out into the hallway. ‘I think you need to sit down,’ he said and then he found a chair and asked someone to get her a glass of water and something to eat and he told her to put her head down between her knees until she felt better.

‘It’s all been too much for you,’ he said, stroking Caroline’s hair with a gentle, rhythmic motion that was strangely soothing. ‘They’ll start to leave soon and then I think you should have a long, hot bath and get into bed.’

She looked up at him and circled his wrist with her fingers, drawing his hand to her mouth and kissing the back of it, which smelled, as it always did, of Imperial Leather soap.

‘Thank you, Andrew.’

‘There’s no need to thank me.’

‘There is. I know I’ve been . . . difficult to be around.’

Andrew coughed lightly. ‘Well, we’ve both had a difficult time.’

Neither of them spoke for several minutes. They just sat next to each other, Caroline on the chair, Andrew crouched in front of her on the carpet, listening to the noises coming from the drawing room.

‘You know,’ Andrew said after a while, ‘what Adam said in there, it’s just young men letting off steam.’ He broke off and then added, ‘You mustn’t take it to heart.’

‘I haven’t,’ she said, trying to make herself believe that it was true. ‘I know what Max was like. He spoke to me . . . Well, he spoke to me about everything.’

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding his head slowly. ‘You were very close.’ But something about his tone didn’t ring true. There was a hint of condescension there.

‘What he got up to in his spare time was his business,’ Caroline said, her voice suddenly hard. ‘I don’t know why you’re going on about it.’

Andrew, still sitting on the floor with his legs outstretched, let his head fall back so that it thunked against the wall.

‘Andrew?’

He didn’t answer.

‘I’m going to start clearing away a few glasses,’ she said, standing up and smoothing down her skirt. ‘Perhaps that way they’ll get the hint.’

Silence.

‘Do you want to come and help?’

He turned towards her. Then, wordlessly, he stood up, unfolding himself a limb at a time.

‘Feeling better?’ he asked flatly.

‘Yes, much,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

They walked back into the drawing room.

It was a beautiful day for the funeral. Max was buried underneath a balmy sun and a blue, cloudless canopy of light, as though the world was deliberately showing them all what he would miss.

Caroline, still drained from the night before, found the service itself curiously empty of emotion. The ceremony of it was off-putting, as though everyone believed her grief would be assuaged by the neat precision of hymn and prayer. As the vicar spoke, inevitably, of life snatched away too soon and how we should be thankful not for the time we had lost with Max but for the time we had been given with him, she felt a furious resentment, as if her sadness were being belittled, as if it were no longer unique to her.

She cried only once, when Max’s coffin was lifted out of the church on the shoulders of his pallbearers, draped in a Union flag. It was the flag that upset Caroline; the idea of something so big, so important – the emblem of an entire country – weighing down on the body of her little boy.

They did what was expected of them. They walked to the graveside and threw handfuls of earth on to their child’s coffin, listening as it struck the wood with a scrabbling sound. They shook hands and nodded their heads and thanked people with small, sad smiles. They acknowledged the representatives sent by the army, straight-backed and proper and formal in their speech. They served tumblers of whisky at the wake and damp mushroom vol-au-vents that came, in bulk, from the supermarket. They did it all. And then, at the end of the day, when everyone had left and when Max had been buried under six feet of soil, they were left with the sudden emptiness of each other. Andrew and Caroline, with nothing in between. That was, until Elsa came to stay.

Andrew

It is a long drive to his mother’s house but Andrew has always rather liked the journey. He enjoys the cocooned sense of being in a car on his own, going somewhere, moving steadily towards his destination with nowhere else to be and nothing else to do apart from shift gears and turn the steering wheel. He likes not having to speak to someone in the passenger seat, not having to feel responsible for their safety as well as his own and being able to take risks, go faster, brake more quickly than he would if there were other people in the car. He likes the comforting wide expanse of motorway, the tarmac smooth against the tyres and the soothing regularity of service stations, each one looking the same as the last with their coffee bars and amusement arcade machines and Cellophane-wrapped bunches of flowers limply propped up in buckets only to be ignored by the motorists passing through.

He stops off at one of these at the halfway point, about two hours into the journey from Malvern to Grantchester. It is only
10
am and yet Andrew feels his stomach grumbling with hunger. He had been in a hurry to leave this morning and had not had time for a proper breakfast, choosing instead to butter a piece of bread and take it with him to the car, the crumbs falling messily on to his fleece top as he ate.

Caroline used to make his breakfast every morning before he left for work: a bowl of shop-bought muesli to which she added her own mixture of brazil nuts and raisins, two slices of wholemeal toast accompanied by butter on a dish and a jar of home-made marmalade with a long spoon so that the handle didn’t get sticky. She would get up when his alarm went off, kiss him good morning and then put on her dressing gown and go straight downstairs to get things ready while he took a shower. Andrew had loved the routine of it, the quiet but thoughtful ways in which their affection was expressed. He would dry himself off in the bathroom and the smell of toast would waft up from the kitchen. When he came downstairs, freshly shaven and in his shirt and tie, Caroline would put the kettle on and, after it boiled, she would warm the teapot before making the tea. Every weekday morning would be just the same, consoling in its familiarity. Andrew liked knowing what to expect.

She seemed to take pride in being his wife, in looking after him. He remembers the morning after their wedding day, when she had turned to him in the hotel room bed and said, blue eyes unblinking and wide: ‘You saved me.’

He had been so startled by that, so unsure of what it meant. ‘No I haven’t,’ he said, trying to brush the intensity of her words aside. ‘I love you. I want to be with you.’

But she shook her head. ‘No, you don’t understand. I . . . I . . .’

She had been shy back then, nervous about expressing herself. ‘I don’t feel worthy of you,’ she said finally, hiding her mouth with the tips of her fingers as though trying to put the words back in.

He had held her tightly to him and kissed her then, trying to dissipate her anxieties, to make her feel safe. He sensed that he held something terribly fragile in his arms, a damaged girl who wanted more than anything to be loved. Through the years, she had spoken to him only vaguely of her parents, but it was enough for him to get cross every time she mentioned them, to insist that she never had to see them again if she didn’t want to. It sounded as if she had grown up in a household bereft of love, as though her parents saw her as an inconvenience, an obstacle to their own enjoyment. She told him that they had ignored her, treating her as little more than a domestic encumbrance as they carried on with their lives. Both of them had worked long hours – leaving the house early in the morning and returning late at night, by which stage Caroline was expected to have walked home from school and to have fed herself. It was too much for a young, sensitive girl. Little wonder, he thought, that she had yearned to escape, that what she had craved all these years was a kind of acceptance.

He wanted, more than anything, to protect her. And he loved her, desperately, but he was aware that he had to be gentle, consistent, soft so as not to scare her off. She had grown to trust him and then, as the years passed, he noticed her beginning to change, to acquire the gloss of social ease. At first, it was almost imperceptible, those tiny accents of conversation that had once given her away – she started to use ‘sofa’ rather than ‘settee’, to ask where the ‘lavatory’ was, rather than the ‘ladies’, to say ‘How do you do?’ not ‘Pleased to meet you.’ The change accelerated in the early years of their marriage. She started ordering her clothes from the same shop as his mother – knee-length shift dresses and neatly buttoned cardigans, when he had always rather liked the mismatched, wayward way she used to dress. She cut her long hair so that it curled under, just beneath the ears, and dyed it so that it was flecked through with lighter, caramel streaks. She learned to cook. She sent Elsa carefully worded birthday cards, written in the round, simple writing that remained ineradicably hers. Her accent lost its rougher edges. Then, she had Max and, in many ways, her transformation was complete.

Perhaps he should have been happier for her, Andrew thinks, flicking up the indicator and hearing the familiar tick-tick-tick before turning carefully into the slip-road. He wonders why he wasn’t more supportive of Caroline’s obvious attempts to better herself but he thinks, deep down, it is because he never wanted her to change. He had loved her as she was: unvarnished; real. He had loved her because she wasn’t his mother.

She had loved him too, of course. Of that he was certain. But now, he isn’t sure how she feels about him. All her energies, all of her emotions seem to have been swamped by grief. It is as if, yet again, she doesn’t have room in her life for anyone but Max.

He parks the car, carefully checking each of his mirrors as he reverses into a space. He is a precise, sensible driver and an excellent parker. Although Caroline had passed her test just before Max was born, she tended to leave most of the driving to him, which was a source of secret pride. Andrew liked the idea of protecting his woman, of delivering her safely to her chosen destination. But recently, he had started to wish that she took more of an initiative. He desperately wanted Caroline to get out of the house more, to visit some friends or go to that yoga class she had taken up when Max was sent abroad. Anything, really, to take her mind off things. Instead, she spent all day in her pyjamas, moping around in bed or on the sofa, watching daytime television and eating out of cans. And any time Andrew suggested doing something, she gave him that look, the one that left him feeling both ignorant and pathetic, as if he were incapable of knowing what she was going through. It would surprise Caroline to know how clearly Andrew sees what she thinks of him. But he can read her very easily. The merest movement of her eyebrow or the tiniest curl of her lip – these are the things one notices after almost thirty years of married life.