Home Fires (14 page)

‘Caroline is looking forward to seeing you.’ She hears Andrew speaking but cannot make sense of what he is saying. She lets his voice wash over her and then, once the wave has been sucked back by the tide, she picks up the left-behind words like shells on a beach, playing with their textures one by one until she understands them.

Caroline. She turns the name over in her mind. A face does not immediately come to her. She thinks longer, harder, and then the image begins to emerge from a swirling circular fuzziness, like melted chocolate being poured into a bowl of cream. Of course, she thinks, Caroline. And then she remembers her as she first saw her. She was a mousy-looking girl wearing a skirt that accentuated her plumpness, so that when her blouse rode up, Elsa could see a creamy roll of flesh spilling over the waistband. She had always believed that being overweight, even mildly so like Caroline, was indicative of a lack of discipline. Her first impressions of her were not favourable.

No, she hadn’t taken to Caroline, even though she could tell the girl was desperately eager to please. There was something about her Elsa couldn’t quite place, other than knowing she came from a different kind of background. She certainly hadn’t thought she was marriage material. Not for Andrew, in any case.

But then, Elsa thinks bitterly, she’d got her claws into him after all.

Andrew is looking at his mother sideways, still concentrating on the road, his hands on the steering wheel in an exact ten to two position. ‘You remember Caroline,’ he is saying now, indicating to overtake a lorry in the lane in front of them. ‘My wife.’

Does he honestly believe she’s that far gone? Of course she remembers. Elsa nods her head, opens her mouth to say ‘Yes’ but it comes out as a sibilant sludge of Ss. She is angry now, frustrated both by Andrew’s condescension and her own incompetence. She can recall, years ago, that she had lent Caroline a book. It comes back to her now, with absolute precision. Caroline and Andrew had driven up for the weekend, bringing with them a moody, teenage Max who spent most of his time unsuccessfully trying to catch fish in the Cam with Oliver’s old rod.

Over tea and slices of Dundee cake on the Saturday afternoon, Elsa had discovered through the course of their conversation that Caroline had never read Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
.

‘Oh but you must,’ Elsa said. ‘You simply must, mustn’t she, darling?’ She looked at Andrew for confirmation. He nodded his head but his mouth was full of cake, the crumbs falling on to his napkin.

‘It’s one of my absolute favourite books,’ Elsa continued. ‘I’d take it with me on my Desert Island.’ She laughed, lightly. ‘I’ll lend it to you. I’m sure I’ve got a copy knocking around here somewhere.’

Caroline, who was stirring two heaped teaspoonfuls of sugar into her tea, looked up.

‘Oh . . . that’s very kind of you, Elsa, but . . .’ The sentence trailed off. ‘Well, the thing is, I’m not a big reader.’

Elsa glanced at her, astonished. ‘Nonsense,’ she said briskly. ‘Everyone reads.’

Caroline blushed, shifting uneasily in her seat. Elsa noticed that she was wearing new shoes. They were high-heeled, with a small gold disc on each toe and looked expensive. They were not like her normal scuffed shoes at all. In fact, thought Elsa, they reminded her of a similar pair she had owned years ago.

‘Yes, you’re right of course, Elsa,’ Caroline said, nodding her head too quickly. ‘I’m sure I’ll love it. I’m bound to, if
you
think it’s good.’

Elsa raised her eyebrows. She wished her daughter-in-law didn’t try quite so hard.

‘Why don’t you go and track it down, Mummy?’ Andrew said. ‘I wouldn’t mind rereading it myself.’

She had found it eventually in the bookcase in the spare bedroom – a dog-eared paperback with a Hogarth reproduction on the cover. But before handing it over to Caroline, she had done something unusual: she had written her name on the top right-hand corner of the inside page in blue ink. Elsa realised, as she moved her fountain pen quickly across the paper, that she did not trust Caroline to return it. And the curious thing was, she never had. Elsa had never seen the book again.

Remembering this now, she feels a surge of irritation, even though so many years have passed, even though the book itself never really mattered. And she is scared, too, that Caroline, a woman she has mistrusted for so long, will feature largely in this new, unasked-for life.

She is familiar with this feeling of being beholden, of being trapped. Because, of course, it has happened to her before.

Elsa, 1919

She is
6
when her father comes home from the war. On the day of his arrival, Elsa cannot sleep. She wakes early, when the morning is still unworn, before the milk bottles have been left on the doorstep. She tiptoes out of bed in her nightdress and sits at the window-seat in her bedroom, overlooking the faded blue of a hydrangea growing in a clay pot in the back garden.

Until a few months ago, her window had been covered with a dense black material that was meant to protect them from something called a Zeppelin. Once, in the early evening, the blind had lifted all the way up until it was at right angles to the wall, where it stayed, levitating, for several seconds. There had been no wind and Elsa had been frightened when she saw it, that the Zeppelin would come, but it never had. No one had ever explained to her what a Zeppelin was, they just assumed she knew. To her ears, it had sounded fun and jolly, the sort of name one might give a magician from overseas who pulls rabbits out of hats and has a twirly moustache and a dashing red coat.

Now the black material has gone and Elsa has her old curtains back again. She is fascinated by the curtains. They were sewn by her mother out of thick, beige material that was scratchy and dense to the touch. The fabric was delicately etched with country scenes, the pale pink lines of shepherdesses and oak trees spreading outwards like bloodshot veins leaking into the white of a tired eye. Elsa had asked her mother once where the material had come from and had been told that it was French and called Toile de Jouy. Her mother had written it down for her on a piece of paper in her elegant copperplate, the T and the J leaning to the right; trees swayed by the wind.

Elsa had folded the paper and hidden it underneath the loose floorboard in the corner of her room where she kept all her most precious possessions. There was a marble shot through with a liquid purple flame that she had won in a game with Bobby Farrow from next door; a miniature Bible, the paper thin and translucent, edged with gold and crackly to the touch; and a dog-eared postcard, the image of a village church dulled with the years. On the back of the postcard, her mother had written in brown ink: ‘Dear Mama and Papa, We have arrived safely in Broadhembury and are pleasantly ensconced in clean rooms in The Drewe Arms (which faces the church you see pictured overleaf). The weather is warm and a little overcast. Tomorrow, we hope to summon up our energies sufficiently to go exploring. Your loving daughter, Alice.’ When she first discovered this postcard, nestling among the pages of a musty-smelling scrapbook, Elsa had been confused as to who the ‘we’ referred to. She had never known Alice to exist as anything other than her mother. If Elsa had not been with her on this trip to Broadhembury, then who had?

‘Why, your father of course,’ her mother had said, a gentle smile on her face. She stroked Elsa’s light brown hair and patted it down flat with the palm of her hand. ‘We took a trip to Devon shortly after we got married.’

Elsa crinkled her nose. ‘Why was I not there?’ she asked, confused.

Her mother laughed. ‘Because you weren’t born yet, my darling.’

The thought of this seemed so extraordinary, so against the natural order of things, that Elsa had not known what to do with it. The idea of her mother travelling somewhere without her, in the company of her father, a man whom she thought of as a rather austere, remote figure, was too much to take in. She knew him only through a photograph on the mantelpiece above the fireplace in the drawing room. It is in a silver frame and it shows a man standing upright and stern, his face unsmiling through the dusty sepia. Although he has a moustache, it is not twirly like a magician’s but instead neatly trimmed and workmanlike, the edge of it cut flush against his top lip. His eyes are large, a bit bulging and he is gazing beyond the frame at something unexplained, as if he has just left the house and forgotten something he needed. His name is Horace.

For all her life up to this point, her father has existed only as a distant, unfocused idea in her mind. Her mother says Elsa has met him once but she was too young to remember and he has been away ever since, fighting the Germans in France. Sitting on the window-seat now, she finds it difficult to connect the photograph with the solidity of an actual person. She knows that her father is real, that he is coming home today, but still, in her mind, he remains intangibly trapped in two dimensions. He is like an illustration in a book. He is like the Zeppelin: a concept that she accepts without ever really knowing what it is.

They wait for him all day, sitting in the drawing room, stilted and silent, both too nervous to move. Elsa casts sideways glances at her mother and notices that her hair looks different, more plumped-up than normal. She is wearing a blouse that Elsa has not seen before, made of creamy silk, with a high lace collar, elegant puffed sleeves and tightly buttoned cuffs that emphasise the slenderness of her wrists.

At teatime, Bobby Farrow appears at the door to tell them that he has seen Mr Brompton at the railway station. ‘He’s back,’ Bobby says, breathing hard because he ran all the way up the hill and now has to bend over with his hands on his knees to recover. ‘Mr Brompton. He’s coming up the street now.’

And so they rush to the door and peer out and there he is, just as Bobby said, walking towards them with a limp and a sagging kit bag slung over one shoulder, a grey-green cap on his head that looks like a flattened mushroom and shades the upper half of his face against the sunlight so that Elsa cannot make out his expression.

‘Are you glad he’s back?’ Bobby asks.

‘Yes,’ she replies without thinking. But, in reality, she is not glad at all. She is nervous at the thought of this stranger coming to live with them. She thinks of the postcard, hidden away underneath the floorboards upstairs, and feels a quivering in her throat.

And then, all of a sudden, he is through the door and standing in front of her. He is a tall man with a surprisingly slender frame. His arms hang down to his mid-thigh, long and shapely and almost feminine. He has pale brown hair and his moustache turns ginger at the edges. His expression is fierce. There is something about his appearance that makes him look old even though Elsa knows he is
27
, not that much older than her mother. But his face has the unhealthy look of uncooked pastry, the flesh pouched, swollen and shiny with light perspiration.

He does not particularly resemble his photo, the stillness of which had made him seem calm and controlled. In real life, his movements are quick and sharp and constantly wary, like a small, tense animal. He does not smile when he walks into the house.

Her mother steps forward to greet him, putting her hands on his shoulders hesitantly and politely kissing his cheek. This new, unknown man does not respond, other than to pat Alice stiffly on the back. ‘No need to fuss,’ he says, breaking off from the uneasy embrace to remove his cap, which he places carefully on the glass-panelled cabinet at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Who’s this then?’ he says, turning towards Elsa, his voice gruff and blank. His face is impassive as he looks at her and it feels to Elsa as though he is examining something he is about to buy, measuring it up in his head to see whether it would fit in the hallway. She does not reply, but stands shyly clinging on to the thick wooden banister pole so as to occupy her hands. She twists her right foot around her ankle, unsure of what is going to happen next.

‘Elsa, it’s your Papa,’ her mother says in the brittle, shiny voice that she normally uses for strangers. Elsa sees that her mother’s mouth is trembling at the corners, as if she has been smiling too hard. She lets go of the banister with great reluctance and steps forward into the shadow cast by her father.

‘Hello, Papa,’ she says, quietly.

She wants to like him but instinctively she shrinks away. He seems to carry within him a sort of darkness, an impenetrable shadow that surrounds him in a circle of stillness. But it is not an aura of calm; rather it gives the sense of a violence being contained; a blackness that is pushing and scrabbling to get out of him.

Without a word, he holds out his hand. For a moment, Elsa is not sure what he expects her to do. Is he leading her somewhere? Is it a game of some sort? She stretches out her own hand timidly and he takes it firmly in his grasp, shaking it up and down with great vigour. Elsa can feel bristly hairs on the back of his thumb. His clothes smell damp. She notices that the edges of his boots are caked in a grey-coloured clay but that it does not flake off on to the carpet like ordinary mud. There is a livid red scar at the point where his neck meets his jawbone, knotted and twisted like a coil of rope.

‘Good,’ he says, letting go of her hand with another dry little cough. He stands up straight and places both arms behind his back, his face tilting upwards as though he is sniffing the air to check it smelled the same as when he had left it. Elsa slinks back to her place by the banister, already aware that she must not make too much noise. She does not want to upset him. She has some instinct, some child’s intimation, that it would unleash something bad.