Home Fires (24 page)

Elsa

When Elsa wakes, her first feeling is one of panic. Small circles of brightness float in front of her eyes, as if cells are being pressed underneath a microscope slide. She cannot see properly and she cries out with the confusion of it. After a while, the dots begin to clear and Elsa breathes more calmly, feeling the reassuring rise and fall of her chest.

She is sitting in an armchair and she is cold, very cold. Her head feels too heavy for her neck and she cannot, for the moment, lift it up to take a look at her surroundings, to attempt to work out what has happened to her.

Her thoughts judder into place, unsure of themselves, jostling for position. They slide around, looping from the present to the past and back again, like skaters on ice painting figures of eight with sharpened blades. Her mind flicks through various disjointed images: herself as a child, reading a book; a flash of her wedding day, dressed in organza silk; her young son, handing over a pine cone he has found, the gum of it sticky on her fingers; lying in bed with her husband, awake, feeling hurt over some unintended slight; Mrs Carswell, smiling broadly, cutting the crusts of sandwiches; falling down the stairs, the pain slicing into her hip, the hospital, with its disinfectant smell and the slick of baked beans on each plate . . . And then? Then what had happened?

Vast, grey clouds pass through her imaginings, colliding and shattering and exploding into a thousand tiny pieces of float-away ash before coalescing again. Slowly, painfully, her mind shifts into focus. That’s right, she thinks, then she came here, to Andrew’s house. This is where she is being looked after.

As the fogginess of sleep starts to scatter, she finds that she is thinking of that woman, the one with the pale blue eyes that seem to look without seeing. She is wondering why the woman wants to hurt her and, at the same time, she is consumed by the familiar unexplained certainty that she has done something wrong. She must have done something wrong to be punished. It must be her fault.

What is that woman’s name? She shakes her head, like a cat trying to shake a flea from it’s ear. That woman. Elsa does not like her. She never has, she thinks to herself, strangely satisfied by this scrap of remembered feeling. She has never trusted her, never believed that the woman is capable of telling the truth about herself.

Who
was
she?

And why does Elsa feel so cold?

She looks down then, moving her eyes from her chest down towards her waist and she sees she is not wearing a skirt. Shame subsumes her. Elsa is shocked and tries to cover herself with her hands. Her thighs feel moist and clammy to the touch. Why is she wet? Did she forget to dry herself when she got out of the bath? she wonders. Has she got caught in a rainstorm on her daily walk around the Grantchester fields? Is she waiting for her clothes to dry on the radiator until she puts them on again, feeling the stiff crinkle of the fabric against her skin?

And as she is asking herself these endless, pointless questions, the image of the woman with the blue eyes becomes confused. She sees her father instead. She feels she has angered both the woman and her father in some way, that she is at fault without knowing why. What can she do to make it better?

Elsa extends her fingers, flexing them as far as she can. She tries, once more, to lift her head but her muscles feel numb and tingly and she cannot find the energy to do it. She will not show she is scared. All her life, she has prided herself on being able to keep her feelings in check, on being able to hide what was really going on inside underneath the smooth, elegant surface she presented to the world. She had become hard. Her feelings were her own. She did not even reveal them to Oliver, not really, in spite of the fact that she had loved him so much. There was always a darkness, deep down. It made her feel safe to keep it there.

The door to the room swings ajar. The woman, the one whose name she cannot remember, comes over to Elsa and she is carrying a bucket of water in one hand. The woman’s face is sharp and pale apart from two distinct patches of pink in each cheek. Her mouth is set in a firm line, the corners twisting ever so slightly downwards.

‘Right, Elsa, let’s get you cleaned up,’ she says, and she kneels down on the carpet and dips a sponge into the bucket, squeezing out the excess water with rapid, edgy movements. She seems impatient, Elsa thinks. Impatient and slightly frenzied, as though something has gone badly wrong that she is not admitting to herself.

The woman reaches forward and starts to wash down Elsa’s legs but she moves too briskly and presses down so hard that the sponge prickles against Elsa’s skin, leaving behind a tracery of red marks. The woman returns the sponge to the bucket, wringing it out, and then tries to shift Elsa on to one side so that she can reach behind. Elsa does not help. She makes every muscle and every bone in her body as heavy as she can and she sees the woman struggling with the weight and for a moment, Elsa feels triumphant.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Elsa, can’t you bloody well move?’ the woman says through gritted teeth. Let her struggle, Elsa thinks. Let her see what it feels like.

‘Fine, have it your way,’ the woman says, giving up the fight. Dropping her voice, she adds in a half-whisper: ‘You always have.’

And then Elsa remembers. It is Caroline. It is her daughter-in-law. She gives a crooked smile, glad to have made a nuisance of herself. She watches through narrowed eyes as Caroline walks over to the wardrobe and, after jangling the coat hangers, takes out a fresh skirt. Without speaking, Caroline bends down to put the skirt on the floor, lifting Elsa’s feet up, one by one, to place them through the waistband. She slides the skirt up Elsa’s legs, grappling a bit when she gets to the thighs, still stuck clammily to the chair seat, but she manages it after a few seconds.

And then, as she turns to go, Caroline notices Elsa’s smile. Elsa can see her register it. She can see Caroline’s lower lip tremble; she can see her expression go blurry and distant; she can see her hands begin to shake with the heaviness of the bucket.

After she leaves, Elsa chuckles to herself.

Coward, she thinks. She mouths the word over and over, then whispers it out loud, and the two slinky syllables of it sound familiar and well worn. She’s a coward. Just like Horace. Just like her mother. Just like all of them.

Elsa shifts in her seat, attempting to get more comfortable. On the wall, a clock tick-tocks noisily. She gazes at it, remembering the clock on the kitchen wall in Grantchester which sounded a different bird call on the hour. She had bought it from the RSPB catalogue a few years ago. It cheered her up when it got to one o’clock and it was the woodpecker, her favourite.

When Max came to stay, he always joked about how awful the clock was, how he couldn’t relax because he was always on the edge of his seat waiting for a pigeon to coo or a parrot to squawk. The way he said it made her laugh. Elsa is warmed by the memory. She sees Max quite clearly in her mind’s eye: standing at the sink with a dishcloth in his hand, drying plates as she passed them to him, his hands too big for the task, his hair flopping forwards so that he had to keep blowing it out of his face and the bird clock on the wall about to sound its hourly call.

Max had not been a coward, she thinks. He had fought for what he believed in. She was proud of that, proud of the fact that her grandson had righted the wrongs of her father’s moral failure. Max was a good man, she thinks. He would have been a good father.

Her thoughts slide and dissolve, the memories once again become grey and indistinct. She senses the wave crest over her, tugging her down, pounding against her limbs until they are woollen and useless and she must surrender herself. She feels herself go under, the water lapping over her head, pushing away all her former certainties, the tide crashing against her thoughts and grinding them up like sand, carried off by the sea until the salty wetness on her cheeks is all that is left and she does not know why she is crying.

She cannot remember where she is or what she is doing here or how long she has been sitting in this chair.

And that woman, the one with the blue eyes, what was her name?

Caroline

Weeks have passed. Caroline is watching the television news when the postman rings the doorbell with a package that will not fit through the letterbox. Although it is past
11
.
00
, she has not yet managed to get dressed, so she answers while still in her dressing gown, her hair in disarray.

‘Late night?’ asks the postman with a leer. He is barely more than a teenager, with a shaven head and a gold stud in one ear. She notices that his right eyebrow has been sliced through three times with a razor. The skin beneath is gleaming and untouched.

She doesn’t answer and he, sensing coolness, scowls as he hands her the electronic pad.

‘Just need your signature,’ he says, looking her up and down with casual interest. She draws the dressing gown more tightly around her and signs on the screen with the plastic stylus. He passes her a wide padded envelope, holding on to it a second too long as Caroline tries to take it from him. He laughs before letting go. His swagger makes her feel scared and she shuts the door quickly so that she is safe again, contained within the familiar four walls.

In the kitchen, she turns the package over in her hands, squinting in an attempt to make out the postmark. It had been franked and the address typed across the front. She slides her finger underneath the envelope flap, feeling the stickiness give way as it opens. Inside is a bulky square of bubble wrap, wound round with strips of Sellotape. There is an accompanying letter but she is so intrigued by the contents of the package that she ignores it. The package is light and she finds herself thinking that it would not have required any extra postage to send.

She sits down at the table and places the bundle in front of her. The Sellotape is overlapped in several places as though the person wrapping it had been in a hurry. She takes a pair of scissors from the knife holder and cuts into the plastic, the air bubbles flattening, the layers of tape parting smoothly to reveal what was inside.

At first, Caroline does not understand what she is looking at. She can see that it is something metallic. For several seconds, she simply stares, feeling herself disappear into one of those somnolent dazes. Then Caroline reaches out and touches the dull grey circle of metal, picking it up and holding it to the light. A chain unravels, making a slippery sound against the slickness of the plastic and she realises, all at once, what she is holding. Max’s identity tags. There are two slim discs attached to the chain, each one dented and dimpled so that the thin engraved lines that spell out his name and blood type are obscured.

The upper half of one of the discs seems to have been corroded by rust. She looks at it more closely, bringing it up to eye level, and then, with the edge of one fingernail, she scratches at it to see if it will flake off. The stain doesn’t shift. A speck of it lodges in the tip of her nail and she understands, all at once, that the irregular patch of orangey brown sticking along the edge of Max’s dog-tag is not, in fact, rust. It is blood.

Her insides contract. She drops the tags to the floor, sending them skittering across the linoleum. She rushes to the sink and vomits, the bile stinging against the back of her throat. She has not eaten so there is not much to show for her retching. When she looks down, there is only a thin plume of yellowish liquid that sits, gelatinous, around the plughole. She turns on the tap, washes it down and then fills a glass with water. She takes small sips, leaning her weight against the sink until the nausea subsides.

She looks at the dog-tags by her feet. She cannot bring herself to touch them again. Caroline slides down on to the floor and sits with her back against the kitchen cupboard. She can feel the coolness of the linoleum against her shins. She does not cry. Instead, she retrieves the dog-tags, wraps them back up, slides them into the envelope and leaves it on the table for Andrew. Then she goes back to the sitting room, turns up the volume on the television and watches as a hearse rolls across the screen.

She turns up the volume as loud as it will go and the sound swells up, pumping and pressing against the walls, and she imagines the force of the noise making the bricks and beams buckle out of shape. Another two servicemen dead, this time marines. The news reporter says that one of them, a boy called Ted with a heart-shaped face, was known as ‘Boss’ by his men. Boss, Caroline thinks, even though he looked so young.

A woman in the crowd is being interviewed now, talking about what a tragedy it was that two mothers had ‘lost’ their sons. Caroline had always disliked that phrase, the idea that she had lost Max, that she had put her child somewhere, then forgotten where he was. As if she had mislaid him, left him behind so that she could no longer find him. As if she had been negligent. A bad mother.

She chews her lip.

She imagines her own mother then, sitting across the room from her, swinging backwards and forwards in the rocking chair that had stood in their kitchen for years, the wood dark and mottled with age.

‘Never were much good at anything, were you?’ her mother says. She would be in her eighties now, Caroline thinks, but still her shoulders are erect, her mouth fierce. There is a packet of cigarettes on her knees, a lighter gripped in her left hand.

‘Please don’t smoke in my house,’ Caroline hears herself saying, even though she knows her mother is not there; that this is a hallucination.