Home Fires (27 page)

‘Try not to worry so much,’ Oliver said and then he left the room.

When, some time later, Andrew had become a father himself, he had tried very hard to show his love. He can vividly remember the first time he saw Max in the hospital: a tiny baby with a scrunched up face and a pot-belly and he remembers, too, how moved he had been by the sight. And yet, he found it almost impossible to put the profundity of his feeling on public display.

‘Do you want to hold him?’ Caroline had asked, moving the baby’s head away from her breast. Andrew had shaken his head, had not been able to risk taking this fragile, perfect package in his clumsy arms in case he did something wrong, in case he ruined it somehow. Caroline had looked at him and he hadn’t been able to find the words to explain what he felt, either then or at any time since.

After he has shaved, he goes downstairs to prepare Elsa’s breakfast. He unpeels a banana and mashes it with a fork on to a small plate with some full-fat milk and a squeeze of lemon. His mother had never had a big appetite, even when she was well, but now it has dwindled dramatically. When she first arrived, Andrew used to go through to her room in the mornings with a full tray containing a bowl of muesli, a pot of freshly made coffee, two slices of toast and marmalade and half of a chopped Cox’s apple. These days, she often struggles to finish the banana.

He shoves a slice of bread in the toaster for himself and then takes Elsa’s breakfast through.

She is already awake, lying flat on her back with the duvet drawn right up to her neck so that the only thing he can see in the dusky half-light is her delicate face, the cheeks sunken beneath the bone. Her eyes turn towards him as he enters.

‘Morning, Mummy,’ he says, as cheerfully as he can. He glances at the clock on her bedside and sees that it is already
7
.
15
. He needs to leave in a quarter of an hour.

But of course, everything takes much longer than it should – hoisting Elsa up into a sitting position, making sure she is warm enough, passing her a beaker of warmed water to sip on, feeding her the banana so that she does not spill it on to the bedsheets and then brushing her hair so that she looks presentable for the carer. He opens the curtains. The sky is the grey-white of a seagull’s wing, blurry at the edges with threatening clouds of rain.

‘All right, Mummy, I’ll see you later,’ he says, walking back to the bed and bending down to give her a peck on the cheek. Her skin is cool against the brush of his lips. She stares up at him. Andrew feels a stab of guilt. He turns on the battery-operated radio, tuning it to the soothing tones of a cello concerto on Classic FM. It is the kind of populist radio station she would normally have hated but recently, he has found that she reacts better to more familiar music. As he fiddles with the antenna to get rid of the static, he thinks he sees Elsa smile. When he looks at her again, her eyelids are almost shut, droplets of moisture gathering in the ducts.

He gathers up the breakfast stuff. Just as he is about to leave, he notices that the pink bed jacket he has put around his mother’s shoulders has slipped off. He puts the tray on the floor and reaches across Elsa to gather it up, coaxing her into leaning forwards so that he can slide the fleecy material behind her. She flops towards him, her muscles slack.

He notices there is a small but livid bruise just below her right cheekbone. It is the size of a five-pence piece and the colour of a ripening plum. The bruise looks unnatural against the scraggy pallor of her skin. Andrew leans in to peer at it more closely and then gently eases Elsa back against her pillows. He wonders how she got the bruise and makes a mental note to tell the carers they must be more careful when they handle her. But the thought of it does not trouble him unduly. Probably just one of those things that happened as one got older, he thinks, and it does not appear to be causing Elsa any pain – in fact, she didn’t seem to be aware of it at all.

He clears away the plate and the fork. Then he retrieves his car keys from the bowl by the fridge and walks outside, pushing the door carefully behind him so that it does not slam and wake Caroline.

He sees the envelope containing Max’s dog-tags on the kitchen table and hesitates. Ridiculously, he does not want to leave the package on its own. He picks it up and slips it into his jacket pocket.

By the time he gets into the office, half an hour later than he should have done, Andrew has forgotten about the bruise entirely. The first thing he does is open the top right drawer of his desk and place the dog-tags there, nestled among the paperclips and rubber bands. He rests his hand on the envelope, as if to shelter the contents.

The back of his head seems to tighten and he wonders if that marks the onset of a migraine. He has been suffering from them with increasing frequency and knows the signs: a sense of hyper-reality, the colours bleached from his vision, the world too sharply defined to be trusted and then, as the voices of those around him disappear down a tunnel of noise, there is a staggering pain that will last for hours. He fumbles around for a packet of
500
mg paracetamol, pressing out two from the foil and washing them down with his mug of cooling tea.

He slides the drawer shut, obscuring the dog-tags from view. On his computer screen, the unanswered emails are piling up and he knows he has a small mountain of paperwork to get through by the end of the day but still he cannot seem to motivate himself. He finds his mind wandering, thinking of Caroline and the dinner she had cooked him last night. He should be happy that she was making the effort, that she seemed to be returning to some semblance of stability but instead he felt uneasy. He could not quite put his finger on it. There had been something about her manner – contained but with an undercurrent of panic, as though she was going through the motions, imitating what she thought of as normal behaviour in order to divert his attention from what was actually going on beneath the surface.

The spinach and feta frittata, once a dish that Caroline could have prepared blindfold, had been undercooked: the egg albumen still slippery and raw, the cheese unmelted in big, salty lumps. She had tried to do everything too quickly: laying the table with such haste that she had given him a spoon instead of a knife and spilled the water as she poured it. She had laughed, too shrilly, when he pointed this out. And then she had looked at him with such hopeful expectancy when he ate his first mouthful, her eyes sharp, her mouth drawn in a tight little smile, that he had been forced to lie and tell her it was wonderful.

‘I’m glad,’ she had said, tentatively reaching out to take his hand. He gave it to her but he felt nothing as he did so; none of the familiar intimacy he had once so valued. ‘I want to try . . .’ Caroline looked away. ‘I want to try and be better.’

She sounded so desperate to please. ‘You mustn’t force yourself,’ he said. And then, neither of them could think of anything else to fill the gap and they had lapsed into a long, shapeless silence until they went to bed. Andrew knew she was disappointed in him. He had tried to touch her under the sheets, to scoop her into the concave curve of his body, but she had shifted away to the edge of the mattress.

He slips out of his reverie and notices that his computer screensaver has clicked into a shifting kaleidoscope of geometric shapes. The phone rings.

‘Hello,’ he says, picking up the receiver.

‘Andrew, it’s me.’

‘Caroline. How curious. I was just thinking about you.’

‘Nothing bad, I hope.’ That shrill laugh again. It set his teeth on edge to hear it.

‘No, no.’ He drums his fingers on the desk. He glances at the clock on the wall and wonders why she is calling him. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, more than all right. Derek Lester’s office called.’ She pauses, waiting for his reaction. ‘We’ve got an appointment to see him.’ Her voice is thrilled. He can imagine her standing in the hallway, shoulders tensed, one hand playing with the phone cable, fiddling with one ear lobe as she always does when she is nervous.

‘That’s good,’ he says, evenly.

‘Good?’ She laughs again. ‘I’d say it’s more than good, Andrew. It’s what we’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?’

How should he best respond? In truth, he does not think Derek Lester will be able to provide his wife with the answers she so craves. He is worried that she has spent so much time on this and concerned, too, that her mind seems to have been twisted out of shape by its obsession with conspiracy.

‘I just don’t want you getting your hopes up,’ he says.

Andrew can sense her frustration radiating towards him. ‘Right,’ she replies, clipping the word short. ‘Well, I just thought I should let you know. In case you can be bothered to come.’

He exhales to the count of three. ‘Of course I want to come. I just . . .’

‘I thought you’d be pleased.’ There is a catch in her voice. ‘Don’t bother coming back at lunch. I can deal with Elsa.’ Caroline hangs up.

He puts the receiver back carefully, resting his hand there for several seconds and then he takes a sheet of paper from his in-tray and tries to concentrate on what the typed letters and numbers are telling him. After a few minutes, there is a knock on his door.

‘Yes,’ he says, glancing up over the rim of his glasses.

Kate puts her head round the door. Her blonde hair is tied back in a loose ponytail. She is wearing fashionably square black-rimmed spectacles that he has never seen before. Andrew finds himself thinking that she looks better with her hair down, that it suits the softness of her face more.

‘Hi, Andrew,’ she says, smiling, her lips shiny with some kind of gloss. ‘I was just wondering if you fancied some lunch?’ Her hand is still on the door handle, as though she is prepared for him to say no, as he usually would. But today he finds that he wants to do something out of character. He wants to be someone else for a bit.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Why not?’

They go to an Italian place that has just opened round the corner, situated on a pedestrianised stretch of shops that is dingily lit and unprepossessing. The restaurant itself is all faux leather and cleverly angled mirrors. The other tables are empty apart from one elderly couple, both still in their overcoats. The woman is eating a bowl of soup but her hand is shaking and some of it has spilled off the spoon, leaving a splodge of green on the lapel of her mackintosh.

Seeing this, Andrew feels a clutching at his insides. He thinks of Elsa, back at home, trapped in bed, waiting. Always waiting.

‘Follow me, please,’ says the waiter, leading them to a squashed-away table right next to the lavatories.

‘Will you be OK here?’ asks Andrew once the waiter has left them with the laminated menu card.

‘Yes,’ says Kate, bemused. ‘Why on earth not?’

He feels caught out without knowing why. ‘I just thought . . .’ he is stumbling. ‘If there’s a draught . . .’ he gestures vaguely towards the door.

‘I’m sure I’ll cope,’ she says and then she leans across the table so that her blouse dips forward and he can see an exposed triangle of flesh and there, just beneath, a glimpse of black lace. She reaches her hand across the napkins and the wine glasses and the single wilting carnation in a vase and she touches the top of his wrist lightly. ‘Thanks for asking.’

The food, when it comes, is good. Kate eats precisely half of her spaghetti vongole and drinks two large glasses of a rosé wine that Andrew learns, for the first time, is called Pinot Blush. He has little appetite but eats most of his veal escalope without too much effort. He pushes the leftovers around his plate restlessly, so as not to make eye contact. The conversation is fluent, not stilted at all, but for some reason he cannot look at her. He feels that to look at her would be fatal. It would unravel him.

‘Are you sure you don’t want a drink?’ Kate is asking him, a teasing note to her voice. ‘Is your afternoon really so jam-packed with Important Business?’

‘No, no . . .’ he starts. Then the waiter interrupts him to take their plates away, which seems to take much longer than it should, and by the time the table has been cleared, he finds he has changed his mind. Bugger it, he thinks to himself. Why not?

So he orders a small glass of Burgundy and a tiramisu. Kate shakes her head when he passes the dessert menu to her.

‘No, I’m kind of watching what I eat,’ she says. ‘I’ve put on so much weight since sitting around that office. I look like such a blob these days.’

‘Nonsense,’ he says. ‘You look pretty good to me.’ He wishes as soon as the words are out of his mouth that he could reel them back in.

Kate flicks her eyes up quickly. ‘Do I?’ she says, leaning forwards in that distracting way again.

He fiddles with the edge of the tablecloth. ‘That thing you were saying about the Kilner account . . .’

Kate laughs, lightly. ‘Yes, let’s talk about work.’ A pause. ‘Much safer.’ She sits back in her chair, lifts her handbag on to her lap, takes out a small compact and applies a fresh coat of lip gloss to her mouth. He is shocked that she does this in front of him. It seems so intimate, somehow, and also a touch slatternly. He realises he has never seen Caroline in lip gloss.

The image of his wife burns a hole through his thoughts. His eyes moisten, briefly. Disgusted, he bows his head so that Kate will not see.

‘Shall we get the bill?’ she asks.