Home Fires (34 page)

‘You’re not.’ He paused. ‘You were a good mother.’

‘I’ve never been good enough. For you or my parents or Elsa. Or Max.’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Caroline, that’s enough. Enough!’ He grabbed her hands in his. ‘Don’t you understand that I love you exactly as you are? That I always have? Don’t you get it?’ He gave a short, sharp stab of laughter, then released his grip. ‘All of this –’ he swept an arm in front of him – ‘it’s just self-pity. You need to wake up. I need you to wake up. I need
you
. I need you to come back to me.’

And she had, in a way. As the seasons had blurred and the weeks had passed, she had come back to him, more herself but not entirely the person she had once been. The grief, she knows, will never go. But she has discovered that you can learn to live with it, that you can still continue to exist, even when everything is shaded in the colour of loss.

Perhaps, she thinks now as she dusts the furniture in Max’s bedroom, there will always be something in her that is lacking but, on the surface, a sort of harmony has been restored between them. This gives her, if not complete contentment, then at least a sense of security, a knowledge that she is loved. The old, cherished intimacy with Andrew might return some day. For now, she finds that she does not miss it.

She wipes the yellow duster across the chest of drawers. When she looks at the rag, it is covered in a fine grey webbing of dirt. Max’s room hasn’t been cleaned since he died, almost a year ago. She opens the top drawer to clean inside and notices a lumpy shape under the patterned lining. She lifts up the loosened corner of waxy paper and finds a small envelope, filled with pills. She is shocked by this, by the cunning it displays. It is one of her secret stashes of Xanax. She had forgotten it was here.

She is almost off the pills now, the self-administered dosage dwindling gradually while she readjusts to everyday life and waits for her frenetic emotions to burn themselves out, for the accusatory images of Derek Lester and Elsa and Max to diminish. Counselling has helped. It is the kind of thing she never would have had time for before but Andrew had insisted they needed it. They go every week, for an hour, to a bland breeze-blocked building in the centre of town. Their therapist is a woman called Cleo, with dyed red hair and a strident Glaswegian accent. She is fairly no-nonsense.

‘Guys,’ she said in their first session. ‘You need to be honest with each other. Let’s start with that, shall we? Let’s just give it a go.’

And, for the first time she could remember, Caroline had tried to tell the truth about herself. Instead of being disappointed, Andrew had encouraged her. He seemed, if anything, to love her more for her failings. She felt as though the varnish she had spent so many years acquiring was being stripped back, layer by layer. She felt naked in her own vulnerability but, at the same time, there was intense, overwhelming relief that the struggle was over, that she no longer had to pretend.

Caroline takes the envelope and crumples it, stuffing it into her jeans pocket. She’ll throw it away later, she thinks. She unplugs the hoover and gathers up the electrical cord. The carpet is lined with its indentations, like a freshly mown lawn. She goes to the door and rests her hand on the handle briefly, glancing back to check that everything is as it should be. Satisfied, Caroline carries the hoover back downstairs.

She leaves the tin soldier on the bookcase, looking outwards.

Caroline, Andrew

They are sitting at a metal table in the forecourt of a small café, surrounded by the smell of melting cheese and coffee grounds. It is not yet warm enough to dispense with their coats but it feels good to be in the fresh air, breathing in the first fragrances of spring: the catkins and the crocuses, the turned-over soil, rich with promise.

She smiles across at Andrew, sipping her cappuccino but keeping her gaze on his, silently tracing the solidity and familiarity of his features. He leans forward, stroking the inside of her wrist, pushing up the leather of her watch strap as he does so.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Good, actually.’ The more she says it, the more she begins to believe it.

He nods; looks at his watch. ‘Best get going.’ She finishes off the coffee and scoops out the chocolate-flecked foam with her spoon.

He looks over his shoulder to get the attention of the waitress and then, just as she knows he will, he does a mime of signing a bill. He has always done this, ever since the first day they met. Knowing he will do this, she feels the smallest flicker of well-worn love.

They park on a sweep of gravel outside the home. It is a large red-brick building, a Victorian house with several single-storey extensions winding backwards and looping around a well-tended garden. She can hear the swish-click of sprinklers as she approaches. She presses the bell by the front door and is buzzed through. Inside, it smells of floors polished and meals cooked. She is led down a carpeted corridor by a young girl with a plump face and sensibly cut black hair. The girl introduces herself as Ashleigh and speaks with an Irish accent. She is wearing a casual pink uniform: polyester trousers that rustle as she walks and a loose V-neck. There is a plaster on her upper arm, decorated with illustrations of children’s cartoon characters.

‘You’ll find she’s a bit frail, so you will,’ she says as she holds open a swing door with a small, padded hand. ‘But she’s still the same old Elsa.’

Ashleigh takes her to a bedroom situated at the end of a short corridor. There is no noise to indicate a physical presence but you can tell the room is occupied. The air seems weighted differently, stilted and heavy.

The blurred half-light of early evening is pooling across the carpet, a brown-black penumbra growing inch by inch. The door shuts, sliding into place with a click.

At first, the bed in the corner seems only to contain a loose tangle of sheets. As she gets closer, Caroline begins to make out the shape of her, she sees the thinness of her bones and the sallowness of her skin. She had forgotten how small Elsa was, how slight and insubstantial.

Elsa is lying flat, surrounded by a low metal bar on either side of the mattress. Her body is covered in a sheet and a neatly tucked-in blanket but her arms lie long and straight over the top. Her hands are curled upwards into fists, the veins in her wrists exposed. There is something sacrificial about her pose. She turns, slowly, to look at Caroline as she walks towards her but Elsa’s face shows nothing. Her mouth gapes open, a blank hole. Her breathing makes no sound.

Ashleigh is busying herself with the bed, pushing the bars down and pressing what looks like a remote control so that the pillow end slides upwards into a reclining position. She helps Elsa sit up, all the time maintaining a constant stream of cheerful chatter.

Caroline draws up a chair and begins to speak, self-consciously aware of the other person in the room. ‘Hello, Elsa. It’s me. I mean, it’s Caroline. I – I – wanted to see how you were . . .’

Elsa makes no movement.

Caroline starts to feel nervous. What is she doing here? Why did she ask Andrew to bring her?

‘It’s normal,’ Ashleigh says, brushing down the blankets. ‘It takes a while sometimes for things to come to her.’ She pats Caroline on the shoulder and her hand smells of chemicals, of anti-bacterial hand-wash. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

‘Thank you.’

Ashleigh pads briskly to the door and turns back with her hand on the handle. ‘I’ll be just outside if you need me. Can I get you a cup of tea or a drink of water?’

Caroline shakes her head. Ashleigh smiles, then leaves.

She is unsure of what to do with herself. Her handbag is on her lap so she starts to fiddle with the strap of it because then, at least, her hands have something to do.

Elsa’s eyes have closed. Her lashes are so fair that they have almost disappeared. She seems to be fading away at the edges, as though her physical appearance has lost all those small accents of definition that made her an individual, a person in her own right. Her hair is sparse and patches of her scalp, grey and shiny, are pressing through.

There is a beaker, a child’s drinking cup, on her bedside table. Someone – Ashleigh, probably – has put a silver-framed photograph of Oliver there, angled towards the window so that the evening sunlight catches on its glass surface. It is a formal portrait: black and white with Oliver in a suit, holding a pipe in one hand. As Caroline sits there, waiting for some sign of what to do, a distant memory flashes before her, of Oliver in the drawing room in the house at Grantchester, patting down the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe, sucking on the stem with a popping sound as he lit it, and then shaking the match to rid it of the flame.

She had liked Oliver, even if she had never understood his deep love for Elsa. He had seemed so gentle, so forthcoming in comparison to his wife’s coolness. If Oliver had lived, would Elsa have been different, more tender, perhaps? Would everything have happened quite the way it had?

‘Elsa –’ She tries, again, to rouse her mother-in-law, to glimpse some note of acknowledgement but there is none. Elsa shifts her head on the pillow. She is awake, thinks Caroline, she can hear what I’m saying.

In the car on the way to the nursing home, Andrew had told her not to expect too much. ‘She’s barely there most of the time,’ he said, shifting gears as he slid into the fast lane of the motorway. ‘You can’t get much sense out of her.’

Caroline blinked.

‘I just feel I need to see her again, I can’t explain why.’

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. ‘Closure,’ he said, putting on a faux American accent. ‘Isn’t that what the talk-shows recommend?’

Caroline laughed. ‘Well, not exactly but . . .’ She paused. ‘I suppose there’s an element of setting some demons to rest. I was always so scared of Elsa. Ridiculous, really.’

He didn’t speak for a few minutes and Caroline thought he would let the comment pass without reply but then, just as he was indicating to turn off at the next junction, he said: ‘No, I can understand that. She was pretty formidable.’

She took Andrew’s hand in hers, lifting it to her lips and kissing the knuckles softly. ‘Thank you.’

‘What for?’

‘For giving me another chance.’

Caroline’s handbag slips to the floor with a thud. The noise causes Elsa to jolt awake, startled. She moans lightly.

‘It’s all right,’ Caroline says. Automatically, she reaches out to calm her but then stops herself. Her hand stays there, suspended between the chair and the bed and Caroline realises she is frightened of touching Elsa, of what she might do.

The idea of what had happened seems to belong to a different time, to a different person, caught in a fog, as though she is standing on a beach, squinting far across the horizon, attempting to make out the shape of something on the other side of the ocean.

She exhales slowly, readying herself for what she needs to say. This, after all, was why she had insisted Andrew bring her here.

Elsa’s eyes are fully open now, darting to and fro, taking in her surroundings. There is a yellow speck of dirt in her left tear duct. She twists her head to look at Caroline, the veins in her neck sticking out with the effort. But, still, in her features, there is no sense of recognition. Elsa’s gaze is blank, unfocused but polite, as though preparing to welcome a stranger across the threshold.

‘Elsa. It’s Caroline,’ she starts again. ‘Your daughter-in-law. I’m Andrew’s wife. Your son, Andrew. And I’m the mother of Max, your grandson.’

She hadn’t been sure whether to mention Max but now it seems right. ‘I know you loved Max a great deal, didn’t you?’ Elsa’s face is static, her chest rising and falling in shallow dips.

‘And he loved you, he really did. He loved your cakes,’ she adds, trying to smile.

Her voice begins to break. She refuses to give into it. She forces herself to give a jerky laugh.

‘And I was so jealous, wasn’t I, Elsa? I was so jealous of your closeness because I – I – well, I suppose I wanted Max all to myself.’

Outside, there is the faint sound of a lawnmower starting up. The window is framed by ivy and the leaves tremble in the evening breeze, so that the shimmering light bounces rhythmically against the glass.

‘I never felt good enough for you,’ she says, more quietly. ‘The truth is, Elsa, I never was.’

She remembers all those times she had felt slighted or maligned by Elsa’s supercilious manner and casual put-downs. All those times she had done the wrong thing and had it pointed out to her with a raise of an eyebrow, a curve of the lip, a silence laden with meaning. But how much of it had been Elsa and how much of it had been Caroline? She isn’t sure any more. She feels as though she has wasted a lifetime trying to live up to expectations that didn’t exist outside her own head. Because what had been the point of it?

The lawnmower outside has stopped. A smell of fresh-cut grass lingers.

‘Elsa, I came to say I’m sorry.’ Caroline waits but still there is nothing but the rattle-whisper of Elsa’s breaths catching lightly in her throat. ‘I’m so desperately sorry.’

Cautiously, she puts her hand over Elsa’s. The old woman’s skin is papery to the touch. Caroline can feel the pitter-patter of her pulse at her wrist.

‘Can you understand? I don’t know what happened – I – I –.’ How to find the words? To explain? ‘Whatever I felt about you, however jealous I was, I should never, ever have done what I did. I should never have hit you.’ She takes a paper tissue out of her handbag and starts kneading it with her fingers. Scraps of it scatter on to the floor like dust. ‘I don’t know what it was –’