Home Fires (29 page)

He smiles, the corners of his lips curling upwards and then staying like that, even when the smile begins to fade, so that the amusement lingers just below the surface of his features. They stare at each other. A heat passes through her.

‘Delighted to meet you, Elsa. I’m Oliver. And this –’ he turns towards the plump girl but she has gone. ‘Ah,’ he starts to laugh. ‘I must have been terribly boring company.’ He looks at her. ‘I’d make your escape while you can.’

But, of course, she does not want to be anywhere else and, without having to say anything more, she knows that he can sense this, that he knows immediately how she feels.

‘I’ll take my chances,’ she says, placing her hand on the banister and leaning fractionally backwards so that her cheekbones catch the light.

He nods, then takes a sip from the tumbler. ‘Oh, I say, you don’t have anything to drink.’ He starts to dash up the stairs, taking two at a time. ‘Wait there. I’ll be back.’

‘No – really – I – I –’ Oliver stops. ‘I don’t need a drink. I can talk to you.’ She smiles and she can taste the creaminess of her lipstick against the edge of her teeth.

He comes back to her. ‘Well, at least have a cigarette.’ He slips out a silver case from his inside pocket and clicks it open with his thumb. She takes one and he lights it for her, bending his head towards hers so that they are almost overlapping. She breathes him in.

‘So what brings you to this particular den of iniquity?’ he asks, standing closer than he needs to so that, if she wanted, she could reach out and touch him, letting her hand rest on his waist, on the imagined slant of his hip bone.

‘I work with Rosa. We’re secretaries. It’s not very interesting,’ she adds apologetically.

‘So why do you do it? A girl like you –’ He lets the thought hang, unfinished, between them. Every silence they share seems to crackle.

‘I’m afraid a girl like me isn’t qualified to do much else.’ She gives another tight smile, looks up to meet his eye and then drops her head, too nervous to hold his gaze. ‘What about you?’

‘Oh, I’m a friend of Rollo’s.’

‘Rosa’s brother?’

‘Yes. We were at Cambridge together.’

There is a pause. Elsa sucks on her cigarette, inhaling then breathing out the smoke and noticing the stencilled red shape of her lips on the paper. Emboldened, she asks: ‘Did your father go there?’

He guffaws. ‘No. I got in on a scholarship programme for people without connections.’

She laughs. ‘I see.’

‘As luck would have it, they’ve allowed me to stay on to do a PhD so . . .’

He knocks back the remainder of his gin. Neither of them says anything for a while. She is aware of Oliver looking at her, trying to work her out. She thinks he is probably the kind of man who is used to being asked questions, to having conversation made with him by girls wanting to impress and this suspicion makes her want to be different, to stand out from the others. So, quite deliberately, she says nothing. She blinks, slowly, and keeps smoking her cigarette.

‘So, Elsa –’ he says, drawing out each syllable of her name. ‘Did you grow up in the countryside like Rosa?’

She shakes her head. Her pearl-drop earrings dangle against her jawbone.

‘No, Richmond.’

‘I sometimes go riding there,’ he says. ‘In the park.’

‘I don’t go back much,’ she says. In fact, she had left the stagnant atmosphere, the unacknowledged tensions of her childhood home as soon as she was able. She had trained as a secretary in one of those colleges that had sprung up after the war for a new generation of surplus spinsters. ‘Baches’ they were called. Female bachelors. For five years, Elsa had lived among them, scrimping and saving for new stockings, never eating more than soup and a bun for lunch, spending the evenings pretending she was happy by the gloomy light of the single-bar gas fire. The rest of it – her childhood, her father and mother – she refused to remember. In a way, she had reinvented herself. And now, all she needed was the right man to make her escape complete.

She turns back to gaze at Oliver, eyelids half-closed, mouth seductive, waiting for him to speak. He shakes his head, smiling, and she realises he is nervous. He swallows drily. ‘So,’ he says, searching for something to say, ‘your parents are –’

Her heart skips a beat. She stops him before he goes any further.

‘Your glass is empty,’ she says brightly, taking it from him. ‘Let’s get a refill.’

He smiles at her and moves to put his hand on the small of her back. She turns, and walks past him up the stairs, knowing all the time that he will follow.

The next day, she gets into work a shade past
9
am and Mr Burns, the insurance broker for whom she types and answers the phone, gives her a disapproving glance from behind the glass screen that separates his office from the rest of the room. Elsa feigns ignorance and flashes him a purposefully friendly smile. Two red spots appear on his cheeks and he scowls, bending his head to disguise his embarrassment. Mr Burns is in his late forties and still lives with his mother. He is easy enough to handle.

Elsa takes off her gloves, folding them carefully into her coat pocket, before hanging the coat and her handbag on the hat-stand opposite her desk. She tries to suppress the depression she can already feel seeping into her and sits down with a sense of purpose, taking out her shorthand notebook and removing the cover from her typewriter in readiness for the first of many dull letters about insurance premiums and end-of-year tax assessments she will have to transcribe.

She tries not to question her life too much, tries not to lift it up to the light and ask herself what she is doing with her time. It is enough, she tells herself, that she is away from her parents, that her fate is in her own hands, that her days are no longer shaped by the unpredictability of other people’s moods. She prizes the monotony of her routine: the certain knowledge that each day will be the same as the one before. She values the simplicity of it all because, within this uncomplicated existence, she is safe. No one can get to her. Her parents have no idea of her whereabouts. Thus far, they have made no attempt to get in touch. But still, there is an unmistakable sense that she is wasting herself here, that her life should be more colourful than the drabness of a bed-sittingroom flat and a single hob. She thinks longingly back to last night, to the party, to Oliver. She cannot shake the thought of him, and yet she knows that it is hopeless. There is such a scarcity of young, available men these days that all the good ones tend to get snapped up before you have a chance to say hello. Last night, Oliver had been the centre of so much female attention that, despite the initial promise of their conversation on the staircase, Elsa left the party feeling thoroughly disheartened. She sighs, and then she makes a conscious effort to stop thinking. There is work to be done. Glancing up at the clock, she promises herself she will have eight letters done by lunchtime. She begins to type, her red fingernails click-clacking against the keys. The rhythm of the typewriter lulls her into a semi-somnolent daze. At
1
o’clock on the dot, she gathers up her coat, her handbag and her gloves, and she walks outside.

There, leaning against the bonnet of a grey car at the side of the road, is Oliver. He is holding a pipe in one hand, pressing at the tobacco in the bowl with his thumb. When he sees her, he smiles, and the corners of his eyes crinkle in exactly the way she remembers.

‘What are you doing here?’ Elsa asks.

He looks at her. ‘Waiting for you, of course.’

And the way he says it, it sounds like the most natural thing in the world.

Caroline

They catch the
8
.
22
train from Great Malvern for their meeting with Derek Lester. They are late getting to the station because Elsa’s new carer got lost driving to the house. She is a kindly, soft-spoken Nigerian girl called Remy. Andrew says she is studying for an MBA in the evenings and has a degree in linguistics from a university in Lagos. Caroline has no idea how Remy has ended up in a sleepy town in the Midlands, changing soiled bedsheets for the minimum wage, but the girl is reliable and gentle and they are lucky that she agreed to look after Elsa for the day at short notice.

Andrew had been hesitant about coming at first. For five days after she phoned him in the office to let him know that Derek Lester had agreed to meet them, he hadn’t mentioned it once. She became increasingly cross at his silence but had not wanted to challenge him until one night in bed, with the lights off and the curtains drawn and the two of them lying next to each other without touching, the anxiety she had been feeling spilled out of her.

‘I can’t believe you show such minimal interest in finding out what happened to our son,’ she said.

Andrew groaned. There was a time when he would have made an effort to disguise his impatience.

‘It’s not that at all, Caroline, as you well know.’ He was whispering, even though there was no one in the house to hear them apart from Elsa. ‘I simply don’t think it’s particularly healthy for you still to be raking over the same old ground.’

She turned away from him to lie on one side.

‘And I’m not sure this Lester chap will have the answers you want,’ he continued. ‘You mustn’t get your hopes up.’

‘My hopes?’ The words stuck in her throat like melting caramel. ‘I don’t have any hopes, Andrew. I lost
hope
a long time ago.’

He didn’t say anything and, after several minutes, she realised his breathing had changed and he was asleep. She wondered, lying there, waiting for morning to come, whether he was falling out of love with her and yet she did not have the energy to think of anything other than Max. For the last few weeks, the thought of her son had expanded to fill her mind like a pumped-up balloon, the rubber stretching incrementally with each jet of air until it could be pushed no further and the balloon simply sat there, trapped and bulging and pushing out everything else, squeezing against the edges of her skull so that even the smallest movement reminded Caroline of its presence.

But the next morning, Andrew had leaned across the breakfast table and squeezed her hand. ‘Of course I’ll come with you,’ he said. And she had smiled, relieved.

The train draws into the station, with the clattering sound of screeching metal. Andrew waits in the aisle for Caroline to slide into the window seat – it is an unspoken agreement between them that she, being smaller and female, will always sit in the more restricted space – and then gets in himself, unfolding a copy of the
Telegraph
that he bought at the newsstand before boarding. She is glad to see him do this because it means she does not have to talk.

Her mind is too full, her thoughts too jangling to make conversation.

Instead, she spends most of the three-hour journey gazing out of the window, watching the countryside slip past: fields and barns and cows and women with prams waiting at level crossings and trees with blurred branches skidding by.

She thinks of Elsa and feels sick remembering what she has done. She does not know how to be around her mother-in-law any more, has been scared – almost – that the truth will be visible, that anyone looking at the guilt in her face will know without having to ask.

But no one has noticed. Snappy has continued to treat Caroline with the same professional cheerfulness she has always done. Andrew hasn’t mentioned anything. Elsa’s eyes have shown no emotion other than confusion. And although Caroline told herself she was going to say something, soon the days were passing and enough time had elapsed to make her think it hadn’t happened at all. Not really.

If only actions could be cancelled out by penitence, she thinks now. Her penitence is genuine and deep and awful. She cannot look herself in the eye any more, for fear of what it might reveal. She prefers to block the idea of the slap from her mind. It is the only way she can carry on, the only way to convince herself she is who she once thought she was.

She tries to brush the thought of Elsa to one side and concentrates instead on the view beyond the train window. The trick is not to think. She watches the landscape slide and change. After a while, her mind turns silent and she dozes off.

‘Coffee?’ Andrew asks, a few minutes later. She looks up at him hazily and sees there is a refreshments trolley in the aisle, pushed by a young man with pale skin covered in small red pustules that look like eczema. His hair has been styled improbably into a
1950
s-style quiff that sits oddly with his uniform of nylon trousers and burgundy tie.

She shakes her head. Andrew orders himself a cup of tea and returns to the
Daily Telegraph
, the pages making a crinkling sound as he turns them. Caroline can smell the newsprint, sweetly acrid. She takes a deep breath and the nausea passes.

The train gets in just before
11
.
30
and they get a taxi to the Ministry of Defence so as not to be late for their midday appointment. The building is rather impressive when they get there and Caroline is surprised by this. She had expected an anonymous modern office block, but the Ministry is built out of a white-grey stone, the colour and smoothness of an opened oyster shell. They walk through revolving doors to the reception area, which is guarded by several police with bullet-proof vests and large machine-guns held in a possessive diagonal across their chests.