Home Fires (33 page)

In her moments of stillness, Elsa finds her thoughts are so clear, so brightly defined that it is as though they have been lit up from behind. The memories come to her in pictures. She can make out every twist, every small gap and curve, every fragile hairline crack. She can hold them in her mind’s eye for hours, tracing each tiny delineation.

In her memories, she is always a small girl. She has been told she is a mother, but she cannot see her own child’s face, even though Ashleigh has explained to her that she has a son; has, in the past, shown Elsa photographs of this creature who seems to bear so little resemblance to her. When she looks at these pictures, she feels nothing. She blinks hard and her brow becomes corrugated with concentration. She can sense how much Ashleigh wants her to remember but she can’t. Her eyes lose focus, the lids become heavy, the indistinct face of her son in the photographs – now a man; now an adolescent; now a baby boy – mesh and blur together in a thick, soupy liquid. She feels no sadness. How can she feel sad over someone she does not know?

Instead, as she sits in front of the tinny-voiced television or underneath the leafy canopy of the oak tree in the garden, she finds herself thinking of her father, of Horace. She remembers, with surprising acuteness, that she used to hate him. It feels as though half her life has been swallowed up by hating him and now, as she looks down at her resting hands, she realises she is too tired to carry on. The animosity seeps out of her like liquid tar, and it is as if a pool of it gathers at the base of her wheelchair, sticking on the wheels, on the metal frame, globules of it hardening in the sunlight with the semi-sweet smell of melting liquorice. She waits until she has nothing more to fear from it, until the fear of him can no longer tug her underground, and then she feels lighter, more able to breathe.

She sees Horace as he was when he first walked into that house in Richmond, when he shook her hand and looked at her through the far-away sharpness of his tired eyes. She sees, now, how she must have seemed to him: a small child he did not know, a girl who was claiming to be his daughter, an alien being from another life altogether. A life of families and love and gentleness. A life of normality and goodness and honour. A life where no one knew what it was like to stand next to a man and watch him get shot. A life where no one could understand that even if you got clean of the dirt – that endless, unforgiving dirt that clung to death and disaster – that even if you burned your uniform in the back garden, that even if you never spoke of it again, no matter how hard you tried, the mud would stick to you still.

She thinks of Horace and of the war and occasionally a flash of something like remembrance comes to her, an image, an idea, a half-woken memory of a thing she can never have experienced. And sometimes she does not know which of her thoughts belongs to her and which to her father.

She sees:

Darkness. A man. The whole of his right side is stuck in some kind of clay, a coagulating slowness that seems to be sliding upwards to his waist.

A bird flapping its broken wing against the ground. The bird has gauze-white feathers and black eyes and its head is swivelling from side to side in terror. She knows that she should kill it. She should wring its neck or stamp on the bird’s back with her foot to crack its spine into splintered bone. But she cannot bring herself to do it.

A pool stretching several metres away from her, the size of a small lake or a large pond. She is anxious about the water. She knows that it will keep rising as she sinks further and further into the mire. The mud is not like normal mud. It has desperate qualities all of its own: it will latch on to you and drag you under, it will pull you and crush you and it will spread itself endlessly across the landscape until there is no greenness left.

She becomes aware of a smell, a sweetish aroma like the pear-drop fragrance of chlorine gas. But it is not gas, it is something else, a saccharine smell with a fermented undertone, like an overripe plum that is beginning to go bad. She recognises it but cannot quite place it. At precisely the same moment as she remembers, she sees a floating corpse on the other side of the water.

It is half-submerged and she can just make out the tips of the other man’s boots, the outline of his grossly bloated face. The man’s skin has assumed a variety of gruesome shades: green, black, a bluish purple.

She looks over at the body. She can see the scrappy remains of a uniform. The man’s flesh has been grossly distended, bloated and pushed to the surface of the tar-tainted water as if it were a child’s bath toy. There is a shadow lying across his mouth, furry at the edges. And then, as her gaze adjusts, she realises it is not a shadow but the man’s tongue, lolling to one side: a useless slab of muscle.

A sheet of paper, translucent as the skein of an onion. Written there, in black ink, is the line ‘I am quite well.’ And she knows, as she reads it, that this is a lie. She knows this, because as soon as you tried to explain, you realised the necessary language did not exist.

A woman called Alice who is sitting on a white garden chair, bathed in late evening sunshine, her boots pressing into the daisies and bending their petals to one side. The brim of her hat is obscuring half of her face so that from a distance, you can see only the tantalising curve of her cheekbone, the twist of her shoulder, the elegance of her wrist as she holds a cup and saucer.

She belongs to a different world.

A man lying dead on the ground in a wood. The trees around the corpse are leafless, charred black and broken into unrecognisable shapes. There is no grass. The ground is pitted with holes and bones and chunks of metal, so that the landscape seems to be defined more by absence than presence: a negative of what it should have been.

The man is freshly killed, the blood still trickling out of his mouth, his eyes calcified in surprise. His moustache is caked in crimson spittle. There is a small scattering of violet-blue forget-me-nots, just below the man’s right earlobe. The petals are stained red.

A young girl in a hallway, staring at a man in uniform, unsure of what to do. When the man looks down, he notices that the child is holding a bunch of forget-me-nots. She is clenching them so tightly in her fist that the stems are being crushed against her fingers and a dribble of fluid is trickling down her slender wrist. The child releases her grip on the flowers, sending them falling to the ground, and the man sees that blood is pouring out of a wound in the centre of her palm, a hole that goes right the way through her bones to the other side of her small hand, so that he can look through it like a spyhole in a door.

The man starts to cry.

And then, she wonders where she is.

Caroline

It is when she is vacuuming that she notices it: a glint of silver underneath the bookshelf. At first, she wonders if it is a trick of the light but whatever it is keeps twinkling at her from the shadows.

Caroline turns the hoover off, the silence of it flooding her ears. She gets down on her hands and knees, stretches her arm out beneath the bookcase and taps her hand along the skirting board. The tips of her fingers graze against something cold and smooth. She eases the object out into the light and, even before she looks at it, she knows. It is the cavalryman. She holds it in her open palm, blinking. The red and blue of the uniform has faded. She scratches at a loose chip of paint on the figure’s shoulder, watching a dot of pink lodge under her nail. The memory of a nine-year-old Max playing with the tin soldiers comes back to her, the force of it so acute that she closes her eyes, just for a second, just to believe it is still true and that nothing has changed. She can smell Max’s hair, freshly washed by her in the bath with Timotei. She can see him squinting up at her, cheeks dimpled by his smile. There he is. Her son. The wholeness of him . . .

No, she thinks, no. Let it go.

She opens her eyes.

Let it go.

Caroline props the cavalryman on the bookshelf and leaves him there, standing sentry while she finishes cleaning the room. She averts her eyes from the doorframe where she knows, without looking, she will find the series of pencilled lines and dates, each one a horizontal marker for Max’s yearly growth spurts. The last is from April
2002
, when Max was
12
. After that, he’d seemed too big to carry on doing it.

With the hoover switched back on, she doesn’t hear Andrew come in and so it is only when he taps her on the shoulder that she realises he has been trying to get her attention.

‘Sorry,’ she says, brushing hair from her forehead with her arm. ‘Didn’t hear you.’

‘No, don’t worry.’ Andrew stands a few centimetres from her, hands on his hips. ‘All done?’

‘Almost. I just want to pass a duster over it and then –’

He nods.

‘The bags are ready to go,’ he says.

She notices he is not looking at her directly.

‘OK. Which charity shop were you thinking of taking them to?’

‘I hadn’t really thought . . . whichever one’s closest, I suppose.’

She stares at the back of his neck, then pats his upper arm. She lets her hand rest there. It feels strange to be so awkward with each other but she knows the effort is worth it. Cleo, the bereavement counsellor they have been seeing, says that they have to focus on what they have, on the support they can give each other.

Andrew glances at her, then takes Caroline in his arms. They stand there, embracing, for several seconds.

‘It’s hard, I know,’ he says.

She doesn’t answer.

‘We’ll never forget him, Caro.’

She tenses. For a moment, she feels the old resentments returning: the fizz of anger, the bleak loneliness. Breathe, she thinks. Take a breath. Count to ten. Remember that he is grieving too. ‘I know,’ she says, finally. ‘I know we won’t.’

Time has passed, as it always does. The days have accumulated, the distance is greater. Other people would say she is getting better. She is not so sure. It is true that the numbness has gone, that she feels more connected with the world around her. But the sadness remains, overlain by confusion.

She cannot summon up large chunks of the recent past. Her mind has played a trick on her. The day with Derek Lester has disappeared: she has no memory of fainting, no recollection of collapsing by the Cenotaph. When Andrew tells her how strangely she acted, how obsessive she had become, she finds it curious, as though he is talking about someone else.

Glimpses of clarity will occasionally emerge from the mist. Yesterday, while she was brushing her teeth, she remembered with total precision the sensation of Andrew holding her in his arms on the train all the way back to Malvern. This morning, when she was getting the hoover out of the cupboard below the stairs, she remembered coming to the same cupboard to get the bucket and sponge on the day Elsa wet herself. She remembered how panicked she had felt and the same nausea gripped her again, the same knot of dread in her stomach. And then, of course, the thing that she tried never to remember came back to her, shrieking and vivid, and she had to stop herself, she had to get out with the hoover and close the cupboard door and turn to go upstairs.

Elsa’s room stands empty now. The bed has been removed, the furniture rearranged. Caroline goes in there sometimes, to stand amidst the industrial-sized tubs of E
45
and the half-used packets of incontinence nappies. There are castor marks on the carpet and a musty smell in the air that lingers, no matter how many times she leaves the windows open. She finds, oddly, that she misses her mother-in-law. Not so much the reality of her presence as the knowledge that there was someone else in the house. Now, the vacant room is another absence, another stillness where once there had been life.

But of course, Elsa is better off where she is. She is being cared for in an old people’s home – one of the very best, Caroline keeps reminding herself. The brochure had been glossy and discreet, containing pictures of spacious grounds and chintzy armchairs that made it look more like a country house hotel than an institution for the elderly. Rosedale, it was called: one of those made-up names designed to imply a bygone pastoral idyll. The care, according to Andrew, was ‘second to none’ and Caroline was pleased about this. It made her feel better. As if, in the end, they had not failed her entirely.

That Elsa should go into a residential home was one of the first things Caroline and Andrew had decided when they came back from London. The day after the meeting with Lester, they had sat at opposite ends of the kitchen table and Andrew had told her things needed to change.

The cold outside was starting to bite. Andrew made a pot of coffee and slid a mug across the table. She took it, wrapping her hands around it gratefully.

‘You have to let this go, Caro,’ he said. ‘These conspiracy theories – they’re not helping you. They’re not helping Max.’ He stopped, then added more to himself than to her: ‘Let it go. Please let it go.’

For a while, she couldn’t answer. It got darker. Neither of them switched the lights on. Andrew waited.

Eventually, she spoke. ‘I can’t let him down.’

Andrew knew, without asking, who she was talking about.