Home Fires (28 page)

They go to her flat. Kate tells him she has forgotten a crucial piece of paperwork that she needs to take back to the office but they both know this is a lie. She lives above a travel agent and the entrance is to one side of a multi-coloured display advertising the latest winter sun deals to Egypt and Florida. Kate unlocks the door and walks ahead of him into the shared hallway. The sight of her bending to pick up the letters that have collected on the carpet is enough to make him feel the nudge of an erection through his trousers.

Quickly, so that he does not have time to think, he grabs her from behind and pulls her to him. She turns round and kisses him, violently so that their teeth clash and then her tongue, loose and wet, is in his mouth and he is shocked, again, that she is so forward with him. The kiss stops as quickly as it started. She reaches down with one hand and before he knows what is happening, she has taken his cock in her hand, is grabbing at it through his trousers.

He draws back, stung by the audacity of it. Kate looks at him, surprised. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand leaving a shiny smear of pink across her skin.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, foolishly. ‘I’m not used to this.’

‘Let’s go upstairs. I’m sure I can make you comfortable if I try hard enough.’

He follows her, mutely. His erection has gone. The brief excitement of the moment has dissipated into embarrassment and horror that he has got himself into this situation. He knows that he does not want this any more, that he never really has. He wanted to show it could be done, that he had it in him, but now it seems pointless. And yet, stupidly, he is too polite to back out. He knows he will go through with it.

Kate’s flat is modern and serviceable and almost entirely devoid of personality. There is a corner sofa in the small living room that doubles up as a kitchen. A white-framed photograph on one wall shows Kate and three other girls in summer dresses, all of them shiny and smiling.

She leaves her handbag on the kitchen counter and then takes his hand, leading him to the bedroom. ‘Come on,’ she says and he sees that with her other hand, she is already unbuttoning her blouse. She releases the blind so that it falls against the single window with a clattering sound and the light becomes fudged. She sits down on the edge of the bed in her underwear and starts undoing his trousers. He stops her, gently, then undresses himself. She watches him as he does so and this makes him uncomfortable. He feels the energy drain out of him.

Naked, he goes to her. She grasps him round the waist and pulls him down on top of her, kissing him again with that curious fierceness. He tries to kiss her back in the same way but it seems so wrong, so lacking in tenderness. She shifts up the mattress and tilts her head back, pushing her chest out so that her breasts graze his lips and he can do little else but circle his tongue dutifully round each nipple, as seems to be required of him. She starts to moan and then to whisper in his ear what she wants him to do to her but the words sound harsh and rasping and wrong.

Where did she learn to be like this? he wonders. He is taken aback by how mechanical her movements seem, as though she is watching a film of herself, as though she has a mental checklist of erogenous zones that must be ticked off before either of them can be truly satisfied. She flips herself on to her front and so she is on all fours in front of him. He finds it easier without seeing her face and, when he finally pushes himself inside, she screams out his name and he is instantly worried that the neighbours might hear. He feels no release.

Afterwards, he disengages himself almost immediately and sits up on the side of the bed, clicking the strap of his watch back into place. ‘Don’t go,’ murmurs Kate, her head half-buried in a crumpled pillow.

Even this sounds like something she thinks she should say.

‘I’m afraid I have to. Things to do back in the office.’

She turns to look at him, hurt.

‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ he says, dully. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. It shouldn’t have happened.’ He realises, as he speaks these hollow words, that for the first time in weeks he feels nothing. He has slipped into a void, a vacuum, an empty hole of space. He is not thinking of Caroline or Max or Elsa. For this moment in time, he is rid of them all. It is a sensation of pure relief.

He bends down to kiss Kate chastely on the mouth. She senses something has changed and narrows her gaze. ‘Sure,’ she says, feigning nonchalance. ‘Whatever.’ He can see her weighing up whether to say something cruel but for some reason, she decides against it. ‘I’ll see you back in the office.’ She turns over on the bed so that her naked back faces him. He looks at her skin: smooth, unblemished, young. And then, because he cannot help himself, he thinks of Max.

He nods, just the once. Then he walks out of the flat, letting the door slide shut behind him.

He does not go back to the office straight away but instead heads towards the Priory and sits on a bench overlooking a patch of grass and gravestones. He expects to feel sickened or anxious or guilty but in fact, he is calm and his heart seems to be beating more slowly than usual. His head is clear.

He leans back against the wooden slats of the bench and loosely crosses his legs. Two pigeons cautiously strut towards him, giving exploratory pecks at the leftover crumbs of someone else’s lunchtime sandwich on the ground by his feet. He watches them. He takes in the names on the gravestones around him: Isabelle, beloved wife of; Alice, passed away in the year of our Lord; Enid, with the angels; Alfred, much-missed father; George, younger brother; William, killed in action; Horace . . .

Horace. The name brings him up short. It is his grandfather’s name, a man whom Andrew knows so little about and yet, in recent weeks, he has been thinking of him more than ever. From what his parents had told him, Horace had been irrevocably changed by the First World War. When, as a young child, he had asked why he never saw his grandparents, the answer had been evasive. As he grew older, and the questions remained, Oliver became more blunt in his replies. Before he went to university, Andrew had tried to raise the issue again with his father over a pint in a pub – he knew, without being told, never to speak of it to Elsa.

‘He was abusive,’ Oliver said, removing his pipe from the corner of his mouth. ‘Treated your mother like dirt. And if you want my advice, Andrew, you’ll not pursue this any further.’

‘But what if . . .’

‘There’s no bloody what if,’ Oliver cut in, his voice quiet. ‘Horace was a violent bastard. I didn’t want any child of mine having anything to do with him. Neither of us did.’

Andrew, taken aback by Oliver’s strength of feeling, stayed silent. Oliver looked at him. ‘I absolutely won’t have your mother upset by this, do you understand? She’s been through enough.’

‘Yes, fine, fine. I just wondered –’

Oliver patted him on the arm. ‘I know – natural curiosity. But I’m asking you to let it rest.’

And he had. Andrew had never spoken of Horace again – at least, not until Caroline had started believing in conspiracies that didn’t exist. Then, choosing his moment carefully one evening after she’d finished watching the
10
o’clock news, he told her what he knew of Horace’s story, about how the war had scarred him – if not physically, then mentally – and how a lot of Elsa’s subsequent behaviour – her distance, her self-reliance, her vulnerability disguised as
froideur
– could be explained by this.

‘I don’t see what this has to do with us,’ Caroline said.

‘I suppose what I’m getting at is that sometimes –’ and he could feel himself slipping into a place he would not be able to return from, even as he spoke ‘– sometimes, it might be better to die a hero rather than coming back a broken man.’

The words, when they came out, sounded stilted and pathetic. Caroline looked at him, uncomprehending. ‘I can’t believe what you’ve just said. You – you think it’s better that Max –’

‘I’m not talking about Max,’ he protested, although in a way, of course, he had been.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ she cried. ‘I’d do anything –
anything
– to have Max back, you know that.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I wouldn’t care what state he was in. I wouldn’t –’ She was crying now and he, as usual, felt dreadful for having prompted her tears. He offered her a handkerchief, put his arms around her, but he knew, without anything further being said, that one more silent inch had slotted into the widening space between them.

On the bench, he uncrosses his legs, aware of a stiffness in his limbs. The pigeons scatter. He imagines Kate, sprawled across the messy tangle of sheets in her soulless flat, and he is shocked, for the first time, by what he has done. She is young enough to be his daughter, he thinks, and then, the half-occluded thought that has been crouching in the corner of his brain for the last few hours clicks glaringly into focus.

Young enough to be his daughter.

Had that been part of the attraction?

Had he wanted, just for a moment, to be more like Max?

For a moment he considers this. And then he forces himself to laugh. Ludicrous notion, he thinks. Cod-psychology at its worst.

A woman in a baggy tweed overcoat walks across his sightline, carrying a small bunch of pink flowers. He watches her as she wends her way towards a medium-sized gravestone, on the far side of the church. She bends over, placing the flowers carefully on the ground, and then she stands for a few seconds with her head bowed. He can see her lips moving. Before turning to leave, she touches the top of the headstone with her gloved hand. As she walks past Andrew on her way back out of the churchyard, she smiles at him. He notices that the corners of her eyes droop down as she does so.

Will he tell Caroline about what he has done? He is in two minds about this. There is part of him – the noble part – that feels he should, that he must, that he would expect the same of her, that their marriage will flounder if such dishonesty is allowed to flourish. But then there is another part of him that realises the knowledge of it would destroy her. It is not as if he intends to repeat the mistake, he reasons with himself. The episode with Kate had been a ghastly aberration, little more than that. He still loves his wife. He does not want to hurt her – not now that her sense of self is so fragile.

Sitting in the graveyard, with the pigeons at his feet, and without even feeling he is making an excuse, Andrew decides he will not tell her. It wouldn’t be fair, he thinks. Having come to this conclusion, he stands up, shakes out his raincoat, and walks back to the office, certain – as he always has been – that he has her best interests at heart.

Elsa, 1936

She meets him at a party in Fitzroy Square. Her first glimpse is of him standing on the stairs, dressed incongruously in a white tie and tails while everyone around him is a swirling mass of sailor’s trousers, velvet jackets, backless dresses and garnet-red jewels. He looks so formal, with one hand in his pocket, his body curving forwards so that he can hear what the girl next to him is saying. In his free hand, he is holding a tumbler of clear liquid without ice cubes. His bearing is sharp, angular, as though his body has been reduced only to its essential parts. But his face is softer than the rest of him. He has cheeks like small pillows. When he smiles, the pillows are pressed upwards, as if the feathers are being plumped to the corners by some unknown hand.

She looks at him for several seconds, unobserved in the shadows of the entrance hall, and it is only when someone tugs on her sleeve that she realises she is still wearing her coat.

‘Elsa, why have you got this on, you must be boiling!’ It is Rosa, her friend from the dark little office in Bloomsbury where they are both secretaries. ‘Come on,’ Rosa shouts. ‘You’re missing all the fun.’ And then Rosa disappears with a short, balding man into a room full of dancing couples and a loud swell of gramophone music.

Elsa shrugs herself out of the coat – it has blue and black chenille flowers on it and is her favourite item of clothing. She wears it every day, as a suit of armour. Now, without it around her shoulders, she can feel the coolness of the evening breeze on the back of her neck, mingling with the dense cloud of other people’s heat emanating from the drawing room. She experiences a tingle of nervousness, the anxious expectation that sweeps over you at the beginning of a party when you don’t know how it is going to turn out. She makes herself smile, mouths the word ‘brush’ under her breath and then she walks up the stairs, following the strains of the saxophone and the big band and the occasional scratchiness of the gramophone needle, stuttering over the loosening ridges of sound.

She brushes against him as she passes and feels the lip of his glass against her upper arm.

‘Sorry,’ Elsa says, brightly, as though she hasn’t given him a second thought. Close up, she can see that he has dark brown eyes and his hair smells of pipe smoke. His bow tie is slightly skewed. She glances quickly at his companion: a plump, pretty girl with a string of coloured beads tied tightly round her neck. Elsa starts to carry on up the stairs but he stops her, taking his hand out of his pocket and lightly grazing her wrist with the tips of his fingers.

‘So who are you?’ he says, amiably, his eyebrows fractionally raised.

‘Oh, I’m . . . I’m Elsa.’