Home Fires (18 page)

For the first time then, she began to feel old. Not physically, but mentally, as though her mind were becoming blunt, her thoughts empty of meaning. She missed Max, she knew, and at the same time, she would not allow herself to. She felt, already, that she was losing him. She felt, perhaps, they all were.

Caroline

She begins to make more of an effort. She gets out of bed, dresses herself, tries to regain some semblance of normality. Each task seems endless, as if she is trying to gather up spilt sugar from the linoleum only to find the next day that there are still sticky granules of it crunching underfoot. Still, she keeps on trying.

Part of it is guilt: she knows she has been neglecting Andrew and that he is upset by this, although he would never say so. But part of it is that, with Elsa in the house, Caroline cannot help but feel it is self-indulgent to carry on as she has been.

Her mother-in-law has been with them now for almost a month and Caroline can see the pleading desperation in her face every time she walks into her room. Although she can barely speak, Elsa’s discontented anger is there in her every gesture: the clenched fist on the counterpane, the narrowed eyes when the curtains are opened, the way she twists and turns when they try to change the bedclothes. And when Caroline witnesses this, it feels cruel, somehow, to choose to be in bed all day when Elsa so furiously wishes to be elsewhere. Until now, her mother-in-law had never displayed any hint of fragility in front of Caroline. She had been impenetrable. To watch this sudden disintegration is not upsetting exactly – Caroline had never been fond enough of Elsa for that – but it is disjointing, as if the natural order of things has once again been thrown out of kilter. First Max; now Elsa. She feels that she must do her bit to maintain some kind of continuity.

She tries, without success, to remember how she used to be, to reassemble the scaffold of her previous self bit by bit. One morning, she is able to brush her hair. The next, to put on a load of laundry. Within a week, she has cut her fingernails and filed them neatly. Of course, there are still things she struggles to do. She does not like to leave the house. She has not yet risked driving the car. Sometimes, she cannot get dressed and she disappears into a thick mist, unable to hear what is going on around her, unable to communicate or answer questions that are asked of her. And no matter how well she seems to be doing, there is a point, every day, every single day, where she will collapse on to the carpet and curl up and cry. The smallest thing can set her off. Yesterday, it was the appearance of Max’s name on her mobile phone screen. It had pinged up without warning when she was looking through her text messages and there it was, the last text he had ever sent her: ‘Hi Mum. At Brize Norton about to get on plane. Missing you and sending you lots of love. Save me some apple crumble for when I get back. Xxxx.’

She had no words for how she felt about seeing that.

Tonight, Andrew is preparing dinner. He has asked that they eat, not with trays on their laps in front of the television as has become their custom, but around the kitchen table and he has laid it beautifully with candles and a jam jar filled with pale pink blossoms from the garden. Caroline is trying to be pleasant, to nod her head and listen to what he is saying but the fine grain of conversation keep slipping through her fingers before she can catch hold of it. Her head is blocked up from too much crying.

‘I can’t understand her,’ Andrew is saying, tipping the edge of the frying pan over a platter of poached salmon, covering it with a greasy trickle of lemon-butter. The silence goes on for a fraction too long and Caroline realises she is meant to respond.

‘Who?’ she asks, vaguely.

He turns to look at her. ‘My mother. Elsa. We’ve just been talking about her.’

‘Sorry. What about her?’

He is about to sigh but then he stops himself, unaware that it is too late. She has already heard the whisper of irritation.

‘I was just saying I can’t understand the things she’s trying to say to me.’ He waits, expectantly.

‘Maybe you’re trying too hard?’

He brings the food to the table, placing a too-full plate in front of her. Looking at the food makes her tired.

‘What was that?’ Andrew asks.

‘Maybe you’re trying too hard to understand each syllable when actually you should just let it all wash over you and get an impression of what she’s trying to say.’

He lets this sink in. ‘Yes, maybe. That’s a good thought,’ but his voice suggests precisely the opposite. She has noticed, in the last few weeks, that Andrew has begun to dismiss what she says, almost as if he expects her to fail him.

‘Sorry. Forgot the salt.’ He stands up from the kitchen table, holding the back of the chair with one hand so that it will not tip over. She wonders if he honestly thinks it would matter if the chair fell, if the worst thing it would mean is that one of them would have to bend down and pick it up?

She concentrates on slicing a boiled potato into quarters, lifting a piece to her mouth, forcing herself to swallow. It is not good for Andrew to see her upset. Recently, he has been making comments about Caroline ‘not being able to cope’, questioning whether the pills are ‘doing her any good’, asking whether she wouldn’t prefer ‘to talk to someone’. Caroline finds the thought of this, of not having the trap-door of chemical numbness through which to escape, too awful to contemplate. She reminds herself: I must pretend to be on top of it all; he expects me to be getting better. I must get better. I must put on a show of it.

She takes a deep breath and Andrew sits back down next to her, stroking her arm lightly with the tips of his fingers.

‘You’re right,’ he says, soothing, conciliatory. ‘I’m too worried about getting each word and so often she gets things the wrong way round.’ He opens the packet of Maldon sea salt and pinches a clump of white crystals between his thumb and forefinger.

‘The other day she called me her daughter,’ he says, sprinkling the salt liberally over his plate.

‘Yes. She did that with Max.’

He looks momentarily taken aback. ‘You talked to her about Max?’

‘She brought it up,’ Caroline says.

‘Oh.’ He is obviously taken aback.

‘She pointed at Max’s photo on the wall.’ Caroline pushes the salmon around her plate. The smell of the fish makes her sick. ‘You know,’ she gestures vaguely. ‘The one in that room. Of his passing out parade.’

‘Ah,’ says Andrew, his forehead crinkling. ‘How interesting. Well, I’m glad she remembers that much at least.’

‘Why wouldn’t she? Remember Max’s death, I mean.’ Caroline senses that her words are coming out in the wrong order, that she isn’t being clear enough. ‘She adored him.’ A pause, and then she cannot help herself from adding: ‘She seemed to think she was closer to him than I was half the time, don’t you remember?’

He looks at her, quizzically. ‘Oh darling, you were always too sensitive about that.’ After a while, he adds: ‘It’s just that normally she hates talking about anything to do with war . . . the military . . . Or she did at any rate.’

Andrew polishes off the last of his salmon, pushing it against his fork with a sliver of potato and a piece of broccoli, then wiping round the plate to soak up any leftover sauce. He is so precise, she thinks, even when he eats.

‘Had enough?’ he asks.

Caroline nods. ‘I’m sorry. Not terribly hungry.’

He clears away the plates, loading the dishwasher without rinsing them first, which used to drive her mad. He turns on the cold tap, letting it run before filling up a glass of water. He drinks two litres a day, is religious about it.

‘Why doesn’t she like talking about the war?’ Caroline asks, deliberately not watching as he drinks. She can’t bear it. The routine of it. The way he just carries on as if nothing has happened. She wonders, not for the first time, if her love for Andrew has dried at the edges: a shallow stream on a hot, hot day.

‘Oh you know, all that stuff with her father,’ says Andrew, coming back to sit next to her. ‘I mean, yes, he survived the war, but was never quite the same. I think he was a difficult man to live with when he came back.’ Andrew tips back the glass in his hand and downs the water swiftly in a series of gulps. He exhales, satisfied, and wipes his top lip. ‘Mummy’s never really spoken to me about it though. Not in depth, at least.’ He leans across, touching the back of her hand with his palm. ‘As you know, she’s not particularly good at opening up about that sort of thing.’

He smiles, trying to re-establish some of their old intimacy but when she looks at him she feels tears welling inside and she cannot help it. He registers that she is about to cry and withdraws his hand quickly. The tears start to trickle down her cheeks even though she doesn’t feel especially sad. She wipes her nose on the cuff of her sweatshirt sleeve.

‘I’m sorry –’ she starts and then she realises there is no point. ‘It was a lovely dinner.’ A lie. Another one. She imagines the lies in a small pile, accumulating like dry twigs for a bonfire. She gets up, pushing back with two hands on the table to steady herself. She finds she is shaky on her feet nowadays and when she moves too quickly, her head is flooded with a tight, constricting blackness dotted with pixels of blurred light. The other day, she had knelt down to scrub out the bath and felt she was about to faint. She had to lie down, cold-clammy with sweat until the nausea subsided.

‘Where are you off to?’ asks Andrew.

‘Just going to see what’s on the box,’ she replies, walking down the hallway.

‘Do you think that’s wise?’

She considers answering and then decides against it. She pushes open the sitting-room door and sinks gratefully into the sofa, feeling the familiar cushioned contours shift to accommodate her shape. She reaches for the remote control, which is lying at exactly the same angle where she had left it on the coffee table. The screen jumps into life and she feels intense relief as the voices start. It is the male newsreader she likes, the one with the Welsh accent and the side-parting. The first item is about the rise in tuition fees. Caroline jiggles her leg, impatient. If they carry on talking about this, she will turn over to the satellite news channel. But then, as if the newsreader has heard her thoughts, the next story is about the parents of a dead RAF man taking the Ministry of Defence to court.

Andrew thinks it is bad for her, this constant need for information about the war. He says that she was never interested before, when Max was serving, so why should she be now? He says she will never be able to move forwards if she insists on raking over the past. He says he is telling her this not because he wants to cause her pain but because he loves her, because he wants to look after her. She can understand his sentiment but she does not feel it in any real way. And if she tried to explain why she watched, she knows she would be unable to put it into words.

The parents of the dead RAF man are on screen now, sitting in a café, talking to the reporter. The mother’s face is puffy, but her features are delicate. Her hair has been dyed blonde but it is growing out so that there are dark roots across the crown of her scalp.

‘What do you want to achieve from this case, ultimately?’ the reporter is asking.

‘I want someone to be held accountable,’ the mother replies. ‘I want to find out why. I wasn’t there when my boy most needed me in life. But I’m going to make sure I’m here for him now, in death.’

That’s exactly it, Caroline thinks. That’s exactly how she feels. And looking at this woman, there is a filament of recognition. She is seized by an idea. She remembers the words that had been floating in the recesses of her mind for days: body armour.

Later, she goes upstairs to the study. She sits at the desk, waiting for the computer screen to jump into life, listening to the internal machinery of it whirr as she presses the ‘on’ button. She types ‘body armour’ and ‘foot patrol’ into the search engine and hits the return key.

At the bottom of the second page of search results is a small news story published in the
Observer
a few weeks ago. Caroline is surprised that she had not seen it at the time, but she and Andrew subscribe to the
Telegraph
and it has taken her a long while to be able to look at any newspaper after Max’s death. Until recently, she had not wanted to read any reports of her son’s death, had not wanted to submit to the journalistic stringing together of a series of clinical sentences. She had not wanted his death to become part of the historical record, appropriated by others.

She clicks on the link to the
Observer
article. It is headlined: ‘Questions Raised Over Soldiers’ Deaths’ and, when she skims through it to get the general gist, she learns that a support group of ‘grieving families’ had written an open letter to the paper which decried the lack of equipment given to their sons and daughters on the front line. She clicks on to the link so that she can read the letter in its entirety.

‘Dear Sir –

We, the undersigned, call upon our government to do more to equip our armed forces in the light of a number of worrying incidents concerning the failure to supply the latest body armour to our troops on the front line.

All of us have experienced the loss of a loved one, killed in action while serving our country in various conflicts abroad. We believe it is time for our troops to be afforded the respect that they deserve. If they put their lives on the line in our name, we believe that the very least we can do is provide them with the best protective equipment.