Home Fires (19 page)

Yours faithfully –’

There followed a list of names, most of them female, with the italicised details of the relative they had lost in brackets. Caroline reaches for a piece of paper from the printer and, spreading it on the desk, starts to write down the names. The ballpoint of the biro makes a scrabbling sound against the wood as she moves across the page, her writing slanting and slipping in her haste to get all the information down.

She clicks back to the longer news story. The journalist had written that the families concerned were using the Freedom of Information Act to determine whether eight soldiers killed in Upper Nile State earlier this year had been given something called ‘Osprey body armour’. Apparently, there were concerns that the soldiers in question had been using old, out-of-date kit that did not offer comprehensive protection.

When she reads this, Caroline emits a small cry of surprise. She is startled by the noise, as though it had come from someone else. But then, she feels relief and that sensation turns into something more tangible, something approaching certainty. Did Max have the right body armour? Because if these men and women didn’t and if they were fighting in the same region as Max had been, facing the same kind of dangers, the chances were that he too would not have been provided with the right equipment.

The official cause of death given to Caroline by the army was that a piece of shrapnel had sliced into Max’s chest, severing the aortic artery. She had requested that they send her the full post-mortem, despite Sandy, the casualty visiting officer, cautioning her against it.

‘It will contain some uncomfortable details,’ she had said, with an expression of concern that looked tired, as though it had been worn several times before, on other occasions like this one.

‘More uncomfortable than the fact that Max is dead?’ Caroline had replied. There had been no response. She had found herself getting pricklier, more defensive, in the aftermath of Max’s death. In the dark stew of grief, she found that these small victories – points scored against an invisible enemy – made her somehow feel stronger, more like herself, more like the person she once was.

She remembers herself as she had been that very first time she met Elsa: young, insecure, scared and completely out of her depth. She feels no fondness for her younger self, only embarrassment mingled with an anxious desire never again to slip into the patterns of that person’s behaviour. As soon as she and Andrew had married and bought the sprawling, red-brick house in Malvern, Caroline had set about re-inventing herself. She cut off all ties with her parents. There had been no dramatic showdown, simply a gradual cessation of communication, a distancing, and, as Caroline had suspected, they made no effort to bridge the gap. They had died within a year of each other shortly after Max was born: her mother of cancer and her father of a heart attack. She had sold the flight-path bungalow, complete with the dingy three-piece suite and the flock wallpaper stained yellow with cigarette smoke. When she had shifted her parents’ double bed to hoover the carpet upstairs, two empty gin bottles had slipped to the floor. ‘You only live once,’ her mother had been fond of saying. ‘Might as well enjoy it while you can.’

Caroline had felt no grief at her parents’ death and, at the time, she was pleased by this, pleased by the thought that she had so successfully managed to eradicate any feeling for her flesh and blood. She dismantled her memories of them, of the sour disappointment they trailed, the small-mindedness of their ideas, the constant nagging at their only child. She pushed the thought of them out to sea.

And then Caroline concentrated on her own family, on raising Max and looking after Andrew and winning Elsa over by scratching away any trace of her less than acceptable past. She found it was surprisingly easy to assume the outward appearance of a respectable middle-class housewife, the kind of woman who wore espadrilles on holiday in the South of France and could rustle up a good lasagne at a moment’s notice. She listened to Radio
4
and picked up the tricks of received pronunciation. Her voice became deeper, her vowels more lengthened. There were little things she learned just by watching carefully: the fact that people who are comfortably off do not like their possessions to look brand new, for instance. Their BMW estates will always be slightly battered; their designer cashmere casually bobbled at the edges. The first time Caroline bought a pair of tasteful cream-coloured Converse trainers (so practical for the school run and rushing around the supermarket, don’t you find?), she was careful to scuff them gently before she wore them.

She had done it all for love, all of it. How odd that was.

And Max, in a way, had unwittingly been part of it. She had always been so afraid of letting him down, of her own son looking at her and realising she wasn’t what she should have been, that she had spent a whole life trying, as though the exercise of effort would be enough to make her lovable.

Because what a waste it all seemed. Now that he had gone, what did any of it matter?

Turning back to the computer, Caroline starts to type the relevant search terms into Google. She runs her finger down the piece of paper she has written on, making sure she doesn’t miss anything out or misspell any of the technical words. The keyboard becomes slick with the sweat from her fingertips. A lock of hair falls forward from her clipped-up ponytail and sticks to her cheek. She does not brush it away. She does not notice that it is past midnight and Andrew has already gone to bed without saying goodnight. She does not feel tired but instead is gripped with a kind of manic energy. She hasn’t felt this alive for months.

Within a couple of hours, Caroline has amassed a sheaf of documents, printed out in
12
-point Times New Roman. She discovers, leafing through them, that the Osprey kit offered good front and back protection whereas the older version – the enhanced body combat armour – did not fully cover the sides of the torso, meaning that fragments of shrapnel could slip through, sometimes fatally. But the Osprey was, inevitably, more expensive and there seemed to be a concerted effort by the Ministry of Defence to avoid paying for it – the more she searched, the more comments she found made by politicians claiming that the Osprey body armour was too bulky and heavy; that the older kit enabled soldiers to move more freely and carry more equipment.

‘They would say that, wouldn’t they?’ she hears herself muttering. The more she reads, the more convinced she becomes: slowly, all the pieces seem to fall into place. She feels her rib-cage constrict with the conviction that this is what had killed Max. He didn’t have the right body armour. How else would the shrapnel have sliced through his chest? As yet, she has no proof. But whatever it is – mother’s intuition, a woman’s instinct, call it what you like – she knows. She just
knows
.

There is an indistinct image on one of the sheets of paper, taken from an internet discussion forum on the war in South Sudan. It is a photograph of the Armed Forces Minister, a podgy-faced man named Derek Lester who has the appearance of a self-important rural bank manager. In the picture, his tie is skewed, with a small, tight knot. His cheeks are florid and plump, suggesting that Derek Lester does not refrain from indulging in the finer things in life. She looks at this picture and then, quickly, she finds herself scribbling across his face in pen until his features are hidden under a tangled mass of black ink.

Caroline switches off the computer. It fizzles and snaps and the screen goes black. She gathers up the sheets of paper and puts them neatly in the top drawer of the desk. Then she goes to bed, sliding in beside a sleeping Andrew and trying not to wake him. Automatically, she flexes her feet away from his legs so that he will not feel the coolness of her toes. She closes her eyes but she does not sleep. It will be morning soon, she thinks, and then it will begin, all over again.

Andrew

He goes for a long afternoon walk through the Malvern Hills, striding forward with swift purpose, shaking the dust from his thoughts. It is cold, a late autumn Saturday when the winter seems to be gathering in around the edges, slipping through the cracks. As he walks, following the public footpath up to St Anne’s Well, his wellington boots pick up strands of frost-dried mud and fragments of leaf.

He has no particular destination in mind, but he had been overcome, all of a sudden, by the need to get out of the house. So he had left Caroline sitting at her computer upstairs, staring at the screen, the desk covered in bits of paper.

Andrew has noticed that countless forms and official documents seem to appear from the ether when someone dies unexpectedly. Everywhere, there are ripped-open envelopes and sheets of foolscap and, for some reason, a sudden surge in the number of electrical cords. The house was full of thick, tangled wires leading nowhere.

This morning, he had woken and felt overwhelmed by lassitude, by the sense that he couldn’t muster up the energy to keep going. He had got Elsa her breakfast and spoon-fed her mashed-up banana as usual, but today she had been sulky and uncooperative, turning her head away when he tried to feed her, wrinkling her nose and mouth. He knew she did not do it maliciously, but a frustration had seeped into him. He had snapped at her and then, immediately, felt guilty about it.

‘I’m sorry, Mummy,’ he said but he couldn’t be sure that she understood or that she even heard him. Or perhaps she was taking it all in and that, in a way, would be worse. In the end, Elsa closed her eyes and he felt relief that he no longer had to look at their blueness, alive, still, beneath the murkiness of cataracts.

Once he had cleared up the breakfast tray, he thought a walk might clear his thoughts. He called upstairs to Caroline to let her know he was going.

‘I’m off out,’ he shouted from the hallway, his Barbour already halfway on.

She hadn’t acknowledged him.

‘I’ll see you in a bit,’ he said, more loudly.

Still nothing.

He has begun to feel resentment for his wife where previously there had been only sympathy and love. It is a change that worries him and he is anxious to discover the cause of it, so that he can tackle it, so that he can turn it into a logical problem to be fixed.

But now that he is out on the Hills on his own he finds that instead of the walk clearing his mind, it has left him feeling unsettled, preoccupied. He is worried about Caroline, about her strange obsession with this body armour stuff. She has, over the past week, acquired a wild energy, printing off reams and reams of what she calls ‘research’ and presenting them to him at all times of day and night. He wishes she would spend her time more usefully. Would it really be so much to ask for her to cook the occasional meal? Or to look after Elsa from time to time?

Yesterday, he had been soaking in the bath when she came in without knocking, bearing a fresh sheath of paper slipped into a clear plastic wallet.

‘There,’ she said, passing him the folder, and there was a peculiar triumph in her voice. ‘See what you think about that.’

Her hair was askew and her shirt buttons were in mismatched holes so that she looked unkempt, half-crazed. She used to be so lovely, he found himself thinking, and now she is old and too skinny. He took the folder with damp fingers and scanned the top document, noticing that she had marked several passages in highlighter pen.

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite see . . .’

‘Oh Andrew, come
on
,’ she said, impatiently snatching back the paper. ‘It says here that the European Court of Human Rights is expected to rule our servicemen have a right to life; that by ignoring the military covenant our government . . .’

He stood up in the bath, letting the water drip from him, trying to block out what she was saying. He finds it is best to allow Caroline to wear herself out with these theories, not to take any of it too seriously. At the start, he had tried to be supportive but, increasingly, he has come to fear that she is losing her grip on reality, that her mind has become inflated with the idea of a conspiracy that doesn’t exist.

‘Caroline, darling, stop,’ he said, wrapping a towel around his waist. ‘Stop this.’

She looked at him, wounded.

‘Don’t you care?’ she asked and he knew he had hurt her. ‘Don’t you see, Andrew, that this is what we need to prove that Derek Lester . . .’

Andrew groaned. He couldn’t help himself. If she mentioned that bloody man’s name one more time . . .

‘You know I care,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to let it go.’

Her gaze was vacant.

‘I don’t understand . . .’ she started, her voice quiet. ‘If Derek Lester . . .’

‘Sod Derek Lester,’ he said, surprised by his own outburst. ‘Sod the lot of them. You’re working yourself up for no reason . . .’

Caroline turned and dashed out of the bathroom. His first reaction was not of sympathy but of intense irritation. He noted this and it caused him a moment’s pain. There seemed to be such a breach between them. He could not imagine ever being close to her again.

He dried himself quickly, put on his dressing gown and went in search of her. He found her by the computer, hunched up in a chair, her shoulders heaving. She was making no sound. He went to her and tried to take her in his arms but she shrank away from him.

‘Go,’ she said. ‘Just leave me alone.’

And although he should have stayed, although he should have said sorry, he did as she asked.