Home Fires

It seems almost funny to think of how concerned she used to be with how it looked, of how she had spent hours leafing through interminable sofa catalogues and pale, tasteful paint samples until she found the perfect combination of style and homeliness. She had liked the act of redecoration, of papering over something that she did not want to see. The smell of fresh paint, of clean, glossy newness, was soothing to her.

She had spent years refurbishing the house, stripping back the damp, acrid-smelling carpets, sanding the floorboards and covering them artfully with thick, woven rugs. She had painted every single wall and skirting board herself, from the duck-egg blue of the downstairs bathroom to the delicate ivory hues of their bedroom, offset by the wrought-iron bed frame and the dark, almost blackened wood of the wardrobe. She had discovered that you can learn taste quite easily. The home she had created for her family bore little relation to the Artex tiles and pebble dash of her youth.

There was one room she left untouched so that, now, still, after everything that has happened, the walls are magnolia, the floor is carpeted in a brownish-grey that does not show up the dirt. There are two stripped-pine bookcases on either side of the fireplace, the shelves devoid of books so that they stand empty as a toothless mouth. The wardrobe door bears the pitted marks of blu-tack and the shallow black dots of drawing pins withdrawn. The sheetless single bed, covered by a thin, tartan blanket, looks hollow. In this room, it is only the spaces that have been left behind.

Sometimes, when she passes the door, she thinks she sees him there in a lump beneath the blankets, sleeping in, wasting half the day, snoring gently. But it is always a trick of the light, or of the mind. And then she is forced to remember, all over again.

‘Caroline!’ Andrew’s voice resurfaces, this time more impatient. She knows she should answer but she thinks hazily that if it is important, he will come upstairs to find her. She stays sheltered underneath the duvet, numbed against any sense of time by those oblong white pills the doctor has given her to blot out the sharpest edges of her grief. Xanax, they are called, and the name makes her think of a creature from science fiction, an alien being burrowing away inside her, reshaping her internal moonscape.

‘These should make you feel a bit better,’ the doctor had said, in an attempt to be reassuring. But they do not make her feel better so much as remove the need to feel in the first place, so that her distress becomes strangely separated from her sense of self. The pain is still there but it begins to exist almost as a curiosity, a thing to be looked at and acknowledged rather than the awfulness that envelops her, that makes existing on any sort of practical level seem impossible.

Most of the time these days, she finds that the best way of dispersing the encroaching shadow, the slow puddle that spreads across her consciousness like spilt ink, is to take another pill. She is aware that she is ignoring the doctor’s advice. The printed label on the front of the brown plastic bottle tells her she is allowed a maximum of four over a period of twenty-four hours. Yesterday, Caroline took six, convincing herself that she needed them, craving the consolation. Also, if she is truly honest, part of her likes the thought that she is deliberately causing herself harm. There is something so comforting in the thought of self-destruction, in the thought of painting herself out altogether.

‘Caroline! Where are you?’

But there is Andrew to think about, of course. There is always him. Always, always Andrew . . . She hears him bounding up the stairs, taking them two at a time and the mere thought of this makes her feel exhausted. She is mystified that he can still possess so much energy. There is something unseemly about it, she thinks, something untrustworthy about his absurd good health. His hair has turned grey in the last twelve weeks but oddly this change appears to suit him, emphasising the prominent incline of his cheekbones and the dark hazel of his wide-set eyes. He has grown into his looks, the weathering of his flesh lending him an air of self-contained purpose.

By contrast, Caroline’s looks have been slipping away from her, as though her physical appearance is no longer under her control. Her skin, once fair and smooth, has turned sallow. She has dark circles under her eyes and a delicate web of faint wrinkles at each corner, radiating outwards. Her lips have narrowed and dried so that she finds herself licking them without thinking, running the tip of her tongue across the surface, feeling the sticky bits of skin dislodge as she does so. She has lost weight and although she has always disliked being plump in the past, has always tried to shift the extra heaviness around her belly and thighs, this new thinness does not suit her: her arms poke out of T-shirts and her hair has got thinner at the ends, sparse as straw.

She is not yet so far gone that she does not care about these changes. She has never been enamoured by her own appearance but these days it makes her sad to look at herself in the mirror. She sees an image of a face reflected but it does not seem to be her. There is no recognition at the image in the glass. There is nothing there, just emptiness, a lack of expression.

She feels defeated.

She senses Andrew sitting down on the edge of the bed, his weight causing her to roll slightly towards him. She thinks: why can’t he just leave me alone?

‘How long have you been in bed for?’ he asks and she hears in his voice the tone of disapproval. In fact, she does not know the answer. Her sense of time has become rather elastic but she knows she must offer him something concrete, so she lies.

‘About forty minutes or so,’ she says, choosing a number that is long enough to convince him she is telling the truth and yet short enough still to be within the realms of respectability.

He nods his head once, satisfied, and then he reaches out and strokes her hair softly. She has not had a shower for days and for a brief moment she worries that Andrew will notice the grease, coating the palm of his hand.

‘Darling, you must try and keep going,’ he says.

He is a good man, her husband. She knows this. He is good in spite of her badness, in spite of her being unable to pull herself together. He loves her still, even though he knows her love has gone somewhere else, has been lost and cannot find its way back.

‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ Andrew continues and she notices there is a small note of hesitation in his voice. She can still read him so precisely, so intimately. This knowledge, which used to provide her with such a sense of security, now seems only to frustrate her. She hates the thought that they have become so dependent on each other, moulding their shapes and their silences around the solidifying shadows cast by the other person.

‘It’s about my mother.’ Andrew’s voice drifts back. ‘She’s taken a turn for the worse. Mrs Carswell called up this morning and said she’d found her in her nightdress, lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. We don’t know how long she’d been there but she wasn’t making much sense, apparently.’ Andrew breaks off, waiting for a response. She opens her eyes lazily and meets his gaze. He looks sad and confused: a small boy. ‘It was already hard enough understanding her on the phone so goodness knows what state she’s in now.’ He shakes his head. Caroline sits up, propping the pillow against the curved bars of the bed frame so that the coldness of the iron does not press through her cotton nightdress. The effort of this single movement leaves her momentarily dizzy and unable to speak. She touches Andrew’s wrist lightly. He grabs hold of her hand too eagerly and lifts it up to his lips, brushing a kiss against her knuckles. She lets him hold her hand for a few moments longer and then slips it back down to the mattress.

‘Poor Elsa,’ she says and she can hear that the words are slurred. She tries to remember how many pills she’s taken today but she can’t. Not a good sign.

Andrew looks at her quizzically. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Oh . . . fine.’ Caroline turns away. She glances at the rosy wash of the linen curtains held up against the fading evening light. There is a tap-tap-tapping sound against the window like pebbles scattering across glass. ‘Is it raining?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ Andrew replies. ‘It might even be hail by the sounds of it.’ He clears his throat. ‘Anyway, Mrs Carswell said that she’s not sure how much longer the current arrangement will be . . .’ he pauses, searching for the right word, ‘viable.’

‘Oh?’

‘She was very nice about it but she doesn’t think she can offer Mummy the necessary level of care. She seemed to think that Mummy might need someone with her on a more permanent basis and she suggested . . .’

Too late, Caroline can see where this was going. A scratchy panic rises up her gullet and lodges itself there.

‘Well, she suggested that maybe Mummy could come and live here,’ Andrew finishes, speaking the words quickly so that the damage is done as quickly as possible. ‘After all, we’ve got the room.’

She doesn’t say anything but the thought of looking after anyone else, of having to plan what to make for dinner, of having to exist on a day-to-day basis, of continuing normal life, of picking it up where they had left off as if she were picking up a fallen stitch in a piece of knitting . . . the thought of it overcomes her and seems to press the breath out of her lungs.

‘I know that the timing isn’t ideal,’ says Andrew. ‘But she is my mother, after all, and I feel I owe this to her.’

His voice is firmer now, less apologetic. He has a streak of steeled strength buried underneath all those layers of politeness and good-humoured kindness and a strong sense of right and wrong. It is part of the reason she used to love him so much.

‘Andrew, I don’t know if I can . . .’

‘Darling, I know you feel very weak at the moment –’ She looks at him, disbelieving. Does he honestly believe that is all it is? Weakness? ‘But maybe, just maybe, having someone else in the house might alleviate the pressure a bit.’

‘You think I’m wallowing, that I’m being self-indulgent.’

‘No, no,’ he insists. ‘I think you are having a terrible time, of course you are, but you can’t go on like this. At some point, you, we, both of us, we’ll have to get on with our lives . . .’

‘And forget Max ever existed?’

Andrew looks taken aback. ‘Neither of us will ever, ever do that,’ he says quietly. ‘But it’s been four months now –’

‘Three-and-a-half.’

‘OK, three-and-a-half months and I’m worried about you. I’m worried about these things –’ he takes the bottle of pills that is on the bedside table and rattles it in his hand. ‘You need to start living again. And part of that is being able to look outwards, to think about other people.’

She doesn’t say anything. She knows that this is Andrew’s way of coping: always doing things, thinking about the next thing, losing himself in involvement.

‘I’m not suggesting we move Mummy in immediately, but I do want her to come and stay with us. I know it’s an awful lot to ask but she’s old and fragile and she needs our help.’ He looks at her cautiously.

Caroline closes her eyes. After a while, she feels Andrew stand up and hears him walk out of the room, his footsteps going down the stairs. There is the sound of plates clashing as he loads the dishwasher. She is angry at that, at the resumption of normal service in the kitchen below, and she reaches, without thinking, for the pills, pressing down on the white lid of the bottle so that the catch releases as she twists. Caroline puts one in her mouth and swallows it with a sip of water from the glass on the bedside table. Within seconds, she eases into the familiar fog. Her thoughts relax. Her mind unclenches and fills slowly with the whiteness of space. The image of Andrew, washing plates, dissipates and his face is rubbed out, slowly, bit by bit, until there is nothing of him left and she falls into a state of numbness that is not quite sleep but near enough.

If she casts her mind back, she can remember the first time she met Elsa. The image comes to her completely intact: she is in the passenger seat of Andrew’s car, feeling the sticky rub of leather against her bare legs, and they have turned into a short gravel driveway and parked underneath the bending branches of a yellow-green willow. She has to be careful opening the door so that it does not scratch against the tree trunk and then she must squeeze herself out, shimmying through the narrow space, making sure her skirt doesn’t ride up her thighs as she manoeuvres herself upright and out of the car.

The house is medium-sized with latticed windows and a rambling rose climbing up the façade towards the tiled roof. The walls are painted the pink of iced cakes and there is a double garage with wooden doors to one side. Caroline has never seen a double garage.

‘Do they have two cars, your parents?’ she asks.

‘What?’ he says and then he notices her looking at the garage. ‘Oh, I see, no, only the one. They use the garage for storage mostly. Actually, there’s still some of my stuff in there.’

‘What kind of stuff?’

‘University stuff, old boxes of clothes, you know,’ he says. She nods her head as if the idea of university is unremarkable but inside she is impressed. She likes the fact that he is clever and more educated than she is. Caroline had never done well at school. Her father had always said she’d never amount to anything and, after a while, she began to think he was right and stopped making the effort. If her Dad could see her now, she thinks to herself, about to go for lunch with her boyfriend in a house with a double garage. That would make him stop and think.

She is nervous as she walks to the front door, her arm linked through Andrew’s. Sensing her unease, he smiles at her and pats her hand.

‘It’ll be fine,’ he says and a lock of hair falls forward over his left eyebrow. Caroline likes the way his hair does this. It was one of the first things she had noticed about him.

‘You’ll be wonderful,’ Andrew is saying.

She does not believe his reassurance, but she knows the appearance of confidence is important. She feels so lucky to be Andrew’s girlfriend, so surprised and flattered that he would choose to be with her that she is constantly on guard in case she does something wrong, in case she says something that will make him see who she really is.

The front door opens and a woman emerges, arms crossed over the front of her oatmeal-coloured cardigan, a small, precise smile on her face.

‘Andrew,’ the woman says and she leans forward, bending from her waist so that she does not step out beyond the doorframe, and then she brushes Andrew’s cheek against hers and kisses him but the kiss does not make contact so that all that is left is the suggestion of it.

Andrew’s mother is slender and elegant and taller than Caroline expected. She is wearing a tweed skirt that stops just above the calf, belted tightly around her small waist. Her hair is grey but she does not look old, even though Caroline knows that she is in her sixties.

She glances down at Elsa’s shoes. She has found that you can learn a lot about someone from their shoes. Elsa’s are made from expensive leather, buffed to a gleaming black patency, and Caroline is surprised to notice they are high-heeled, with a flat gold circular button on each toe. The shoes are beautiful but impractical, especially in the middle of the Cambridgeshire countryside. Caroline finds herself wondering whether Elsa has different, outdoors shoes that she keeps by the front porch or whether she has put these heels on because she feels the need to dress for the occasion. She makes a mental note of this, storing it for later.

‘And this must be –’ Elsa says.

‘Yes, Mummy, this is Caroline.’ He places the flat of his hand on Caroline’s back and she takes a step forward, leaning in at exactly the same angle as Andrew did for a perfunctory brush of the cheek, but Elsa puts out her arm and, slightly too late, Caroline realises she is meant to shake hands.

‘Oh,’ she stumbles. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Weston.’

‘Do call me Elsa,’ says Andrew’s mother. ‘Mrs Weston makes me feel far too old.’ And then she takes her hand back a touch too quickly, moving it up to the silver chain necklace lying delicately across her collarbone as if checking it is still in place. For a few seconds, Elsa leaves her hand resting there, her long fingers static but tense, like a lizard on a rock.

‘The pink walls are very pretty,’ says Caroline and the words are out before she can stop them and when she hears them she feels stupid and wishes she hadn’t said anything.

Elsa gives a mock shudder. ‘Oh don’t! We’ve been wanting to get them painted ever since we moved in.’ She stands to one side, beckoning them indoors. ‘Come in, come in,’ and she leads them through a dark, windowless hallway into a room with mismatched armchairs and a cream sofa running the length of one wall. A large tabby cat is dozing in a basket by the fireplace and the sound of its purring mingles with the tick-tock of a grandfather clock. Andrew squeezes Caroline’s hand, then lets go and, instead of sitting down with her, walks across to the bookcase, where he stares intently at the orange paperback spines.

She stays standing, shifting her feet.

‘Where’s Father?’ he asks and Caroline thinks the word seems formal, stilted. She calls her own parents Mum and Dad. Or she did, before she left home. She pushes the idea of them away. She does not want to think of them, not now.

‘Oh, he got held up with some paperwork,’ Elsa says. ‘Lecture notes or something, you know what he’s like. Please, Caroline –’ She gestures to one of the armchairs and Caroline sits down, perched on the very edge of the seat because she is aware, all at once, that her skirt is too short. She presses her knees together, feeling the flesh between them get clammy and hot, and then she searches for something to say. She is so desperate to impress Elsa, so keen that she should not make a fool of herself or say something wrong. She wants, more than anything, to fit in.

Her nose starts to run but she has no handkerchief so tries to sniff discreetly.

Elsa is bending down to the gramophone player, putting on a record and placing the needle carefully on the vinyl. A piece of classical music starts up, hesitant and stuttering. Caroline can make out a piano and some strings. It is soothing, she thinks to herself, relaxing. Perhaps she can ask about the music. She clears her throat.

‘This is lovely,’ she starts, but even those words sound wrong – her accent too nasal, her vowels too flat. ‘What is it?’

Elsa walks across to the sofa, her heels click-clacking against the parquet floor. She balances herself on one of the arms, crossing her legs so that Caroline can hear the smoothness of her sheer stockings as they slide against each other.

‘Chopin,’ Elsa says. And then she smiles, brightly. ‘It is nice, isn’t it? The sonatas have always been a favourite of mine. What kind of music do you prefer, Caroline?’

Caroline feels her cheeks go hot. She does not know how to answer. She looks at Andrew for help but he still has his back to them, still examining something of interest in the bookcase.

‘I – I – don’t listen to much music,’ Caroline says. ‘But I like this very much.’ There is a pause, so she continues. ‘It’s so –’ she searches for the right word. ‘So delicate.’

Elsa nods her head, slowly, obviously, as though she is making an effort to be encouraging. ‘I agree,’ she says in a way that suggests exactly the opposite. ‘Nothing quite so elegant as the tinkling of the ivories, is there?’ She glances at Andrew. ‘What do you think, darling?’

He turns around, hands in his pockets. ‘What would I know, Mummy?’ He smiles, affectionate, joshing. ‘I only listen to young people’s music these days.’

Elsa laughs. She throws her head back as she does so, revealing the soft pallor of her throat.

‘Oh darling, I hope that’s not true,’ Elsa says. ‘You’re not getting all rebellious on me now, are you? Do you know, Caroline, he was always such a serious little child. He used to look at me exactly the way he is now, even as a baby. The Steady Gaze, we used to call it.’ She cocks her head to one side. ‘Does he do that to you?’

Caroline shakes her head, unsure of how to reply. She stares down at the hem of her skirt, wishing she had chosen to wear something different. Before coming, Andrew had told her his mother was fashionable, that she liked clothes, and Caroline had taken this literally. She had worn the most up-to-date items in her wardrobe: a bright yellow miniskirt and a chiffon blouse with swirly patterns, tied at the neck with a bow. But now she saw that had been a mistake. Andrew did not mean fashionable – he meant classic, refined; he meant his mother had taste and wealth and breeding. He meant his mother was posh, but, like all posh people, he would never have seen the need to say it.

She feels acutely uncomfortable sitting here, in her out-of-place clothes and her overly styled hair. Elsa seems to have no make-up on other than a small circle of blush on each cheek. Caroline’s lashes are caked in mascara. Her lids feel heavy as she blinks. She is worried that her eyeliner has smudged, that there are dark, unbecoming patches of black on her skin that everyone is too polite to mention. She has lost the thread of the conversation and it is only when she hears her name again that she resurfaces.

‘So,’ Elsa is saying, ‘Andrew tells me he found you on a doorstep?’ She smiles as she asks the question but Caroline can sense the implied disapproval, the deliberate intimation that the idea of this is somehow ridiculous, to be made fun of.

‘Yes,’ Caroline says. ‘I was locked out.’

In fact, she had been crying. A few weeks earlier, she had run away from home with £20 in her pocket. She had caught the train to London, found a room to rent in a dingy flat in Notting Hill and, after a few days, got a job as a cinema usherette in the Coronet. She spent the evening of her nineteenth birthday handing out mini-pots of Italian ice-cream and a middle-aged man had cornered her by the Ladies’ and tried to stick his tongue down her throat before she kneed him in the groin, letting the ice-cream tray fall to the ground. She lost her job after that. She had soon realised that city life was not as liberating as she had expected it to be. She was glad to be away from her parents but she found she missed the familiarity of her childhood home, the dreary pebble-dash bungalow beneath the flight path in Sunbury-on-Thames. She had been so unhappy there, had hated it so much and yet now, when she was finally free of it, paradoxically, she found she missed it. Still she kept trudging on, attempting to forge a new life for herself, eating unheated soup out of cans, buying clothes in second-hand shops, trying not to speak to anyone, not wanting to be discovered. She felt as though she could have slipped through the seams of life altogether and no one would notice she had gone. She became small, unobtrusive, silent. She left no trace. And then, one day, she had lost her keys, sat on her doorstep and started to cry. And that was how she had met Andrew.

‘She was in tears,’ Andrew is saying now. He is crouching down by the basket, tickling the cat’s chin with the tips of his fingers and grinning at Caroline as he talks. ‘I could never resist a beautiful damsel in distress so I did what any decent man would do and took her for a coffee to warm her up.’ He stops and Caroline is flushed by the compliment. She has never thought of herself as beautiful before. Her shame dissipates, replaced by pride that Andrew wants to talk about her, wants to prove how much he cares in spite of his mother’s unconcealed belief that he could do better. ‘I’m incredibly grateful that she said yes.’ He winks at her and she is flooded with happiness. ‘So, here we are.’

Elsa smiles, her lips stretched like a rubber band on the brink of snapping. ‘Well, that’s a charming story,’ she says, getting up in one swift, fluid movement. ‘Do please excuse me. I must go and check on the chicken.’