Home Fires (5 page)

Elsa starts at the thought, as though she has woken, quickly, from a desperate dream. The cushion she has been leaning against slips to one side and she cannot get comfortable again. She sees the brown suitcase, lurking in the corner like a shadow, and grimaces. It is strange how these glistening shards of the remembered past come to her, strong and clear as though they were more real than what is happening to her in the present. They are never the memories she expects to have – first days at school, weddings, family Christmases – those regular friends that become little more than well-thumbed photographs the more they are leafed through. They are, instead, memories that she had forgotten she possessed, memories that had been buried deep beneath the seabed for years before rising: a gleaming piece of driftwood, the bark stripped back to reveal an untouched whiteness glimmering in the bleakness of daylight.

She calms down after a while and can feel the reassuring lump of the spoon’s outline underneath her thigh. She hears Mrs Carswell opening the fridge door, humming off-key as she does so. The radio is tuned to a station that plays unchallenging popular music for older people and Elsa can make out the occasional tinny chord of easy jazz, her irritation rising with each syncopated beat. When Elsa had been herself, the radio had two settings – Radio
3
for classical music in the morning and evenings and Radio
4
for the news and
The Archers
in between. The wireless dial never wavered from this strict routine: if Mrs Carswell had ever listened to her commercial rubbish when she came to clean, she was always scrupulously careful to retune it at the end of her two-hour session. Now, Elsa noticed, she doesn’t bother. Dear God, it is boring waiting for a lunch that she knows will taste exactly the same as her lunch yesterday and the day before that. She tries to entertain herself by taking flights of fancy in her mind but after a while, even her own thoughts bore her. She remembers a book she once read when her eyesight was still workable about a man who had suffered a brain haemorrhage and who had woken up with his mind perfectly intact but unable to move. The only way he could communicate was by blinking a single eyelid. It had struck Elsa at the time as a peculiarly nightmarish existence but now, horribly, she feels she is stuck in a similar limbo. Of course, she is still able to speak after a fashion but it takes so much effort to form the words and she is aware that her periods of complete clarity are becoming more and more irregular. She can shuffle around on her own but her movements have to be self-consciously slow and considered and planned some time in advance of being executed. It is the helplessness she couldn’t stand: the enforced dependence on other people.

It embarrasses her to be so reliant on Mrs Carswell, a woman she had always looked down upon and poked fun at in the past. She had not meant to be cruel or supercilious, but it was rather that her relationship with Mrs Carswell was marked by the benign exercise of an employer’s power over her employee. Mrs Carswell had understood this perfectly well. She was staff. Elsa was a lady. They belonged to different classes, different backgrounds, different life experiences. They were fond of each other but only in a distant, careful sort of way. At Christmastime, Elsa would give Mrs Carswell an envelope with two crisp £
20
notes and a box of chocolate-covered Brazil nuts that she knew were a particular favourite. Mrs Carswell would be genuinely grateful, her face flushed with pleasure. Every year, Elsa received a card in return, always festively emblazoned with a garish snowman or a winter skating scene, always written with economy in Mrs Carswell’s roundly looped handwriting. ‘To Mrs Weston,’ it would say and then there would be the printed line – Happy Christmas or Season’s Greetings (which Elsa sniffed at for being politically correct) – and then Mrs Carswell always added the words ‘with best wishes from Barbara and Doug’ even though Elsa had never spoken more than two sentences to Doug and never once referred to Mrs Carswell by her Christian name.

But Elsa’s increasing decrepitude has changed all that. Now Mrs Carswell is in control and although she remains polite and respectful, there is part of Elsa that suspects she rather enjoys the shift in circumstance. Mrs Carswell is no longer intimidated by her employer, by her big house or her clever words, and she no longer exercises that quiet, particular deference that Elsa had always believed was her due. The balance of power has tipped in Mrs Carswell’s favour but Elsa is not surrendering without a fight.

She can hear Mrs Carswell dimming the radio’s volume in the kitchen – this is another thing that drives Elsa mad: why does she not turn the blasted thing off when she is leaving the room? It’s a terrible waste of electricity, she thinks to herself, but people never seem to care nowadays about things running out.

Mrs Carswell’s footsteps squeak on the linoleum as she walks down the corridor towards the sitting room. Elsa holds her breath in anticipation. She shifts in her seat.

‘Here we are then,’ Mrs Carswell says, carrying a tray through the doorway. She places it on the table with an unnecessary flourish. There is a plastic cup of water, a small glass bowl of tinned fruit salad and a plate of glutinous-looking pasta shells covered in a virulent red sauce that had obviously come straight from a packet. ‘Let’s just get this serviette in place,’ she says, apparently oblivious that the word ‘serviette’ causes Elsa to wince in pain. She unfolds a cheap blue paper napkin and tucks it into Elsa’s collar, rough knuckles grazing the stringy veins in her neck. ‘There we are.’ Mrs Carswell straightens up, casting her eye approvingly over the scene in front of her. There is, Elsa thought, something so
self-satisfied
about her. Then Mrs Carswell notices there is no spoon. Elsa can see it happen: the trace of a smile fading gradually from her face, the brow becoming furrowed, her expression clouding over with uncertainty.

‘What the . . .’ Mrs Carswell shakes her head, causing her helmet-shaped hair to quiver like a set jelly. ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered. I could have sworn I brought that spoon out here.’ She stands for a second with her fleshy pink arms crossed in front of her ample chest, assessing the situation, a vague crinkle appearing between her eyes.

Elsa is delighted. She couldn’t have hoped for a better reaction. It’s the confusion she relishes the most: Mrs Carswell, who was always so sure of herself, always so practical and efficient, is now reduced to second-guessing and hesitation. Let her feel what it’s like to be confronted with one’s own forgetfulness! Let her be filled with doubt, with the encroaching sense of paranoia that her faculties are not what they once were!

Elsa feels her insides contract with joy at the point she has scored and, before she can stop herself, her lips curve themselves into a crooked little smile. She notices too late that Mrs Carswell is looking at her curiously, her head tilted appraisingly to one side. ‘I don’t suppose
you’d
know where that spoon went, would you?’ she says, her voice light and good-humoured. She throws her head back and laughs, a full-throttled sound. ‘Well I never,’ she says, bubbling with jollity. ‘You little minx. You’ll be the death of me, you will.’ Mrs Carswell wags her finger vigorously, as though remonstrating with an endearing toddler. She makes a great show of searching for the missing spoon as if it were a game Elsa had devised purely for her enjoyment. ‘Is it here then?’ she asks gaily, bending down and looking underneath the piano pedals and then when she sees that is not the hiding place, she potters brightly around the room, examining increasingly ludicrous objects in order to make the joke last even longer. ‘Ooh, I know,’ she says, picking up one of Elsa’s precious enamel pill boxes, ‘it’s in here, isn’t it?’ Mrs Carswell opens the delicate lid with her thick fingers and Elsa holds her breath. The worst of it is that Mrs Carswell thinks she is being a terribly good sport. She thinks that Elsa
wants
her to make light of it, to include her in the pretence when, in actual fact, it makes the whole episode gruesome and painful because Elsa is powerless to put her sharply in her place and tell her to stop being so silly. She tries to form a suitably icy put-down but her mouth feels too thick and slow. When she does finally ask Mrs Carswell to stop, the sound comes out as ‘shop’ which triggers a whole new comic monologue. ‘Oh I see, you want me to go to the shop and buy a new one, do you?’ Mrs Carswell giggles, her cheeks pink with exertion. ‘Well, I’m afraid I’m not made of money. I can’t very well go and do that when you’ve hidden it, can I? Ooh, you little tinker! I shall just have to get another spoon from the kitchen until you tell me where it is.’ And off she bustles, repeating, ‘Well I never, well I never’ under her breath.

Elsa watches her go. She is crushed by exhaustion. How could it have gone so awry? She can feel the tears starting again. Since the stroke, she seems to be unable to regulate her feelings in the way she had been able to in the past. Everything appears heightened: the most trivial thing can make her weep while the mere sound of her son’s voice at the end of a telephone line is often enough to give her a surge of love. She has become emotionally incontinent. Now here she is with tears streaming down her cheeks, their wetness serving only to underline the dryness of her skin. She wipes her face with the back of her hand. She would have liked a handkerchief but there is never enough time to get it out from the sleeve of her blouse. Lately Mrs Carswell has got a bit slapdash about dressing her and today Elsa is wearing an over-the-top cardigan with an extravagant feathered collar over a plain, checked shirt. Looking at these mismatched garments somehow makes everything seem worse and the tears start dropping on to her blue serge skirt, leaving damp dot-to-dot circles in the fabric. And still she cannot remember where it is she is meant to be going.

She must pull herself together. She does not want Mrs Carswell to see her like this. It would be too undignified. But she can hear Mrs Carswell’s footsteps and then it is too late because she is in the room, crouching down next to Elsa, her fat, kindly arms around her, saying ‘There, there. No harm done’ and being so nice and so sincere in her comfort that Elsa feels even worse. Why had she been so mean to Mrs Carswell? What had prompted her spitefulness? She cannot remember. She is suddenly awash with gratitude and wants simply to snuggle into Mrs Carswell’s chest and be protected from the harshness of the world around her. More than anything, she wants to be looked after; she wants not to have to fight this constant battle to defend herself, to pretend her mind is intact. She wants finally to surrender, to snap the worn rope that connects her to the rational present and to allow her thoughts to dissolve like melting granules of sugar in a mug of hot, hot tea.

‘It’s because you’re leaving, isn’t it?’ Mrs Carswell is saying, patting Elsa’s hair softly with the palm of her hand. ‘Oh you poor darling, there’s nothing to be upset about now, is there? Andrew will take good care of you, of course he will. Yes, of course he will.’

And then Elsa remembers: she is going to live with her son and his wife in Malvern. Her son is called Andrew and his wife is called . . . what is her name? She can picture his wife so vividly – peaky face, too much make-up, a skirt that is too short, hair all puffed up like she had something to prove – and yet she cannot put a name to her.

And there was a child too, wasn’t there? A son, blond and broad and beautiful. A son called Max. Yes, she thinks, Max, that was it, and she can remember him also, sitting by the fire, his breath smelling of coffee walnut cake, the crumbs of a just-eaten slice falling on to the rug, a shame-faced smile when he realised he was making a mess.

It is all coming back to her, she thinks in a spasm of clear-sightedness, but Max . . . something had happened, something bad. What was it? Why couldn’t she put her finger on it?

And as she is thinking these thoughts, the questions chasing round her mind, a half-recalled memory comes back to her, the edges of it gleaming like the planes of a cut diamond catching the light.

It is a memory of a christening.

Andrew, 1989

He has not been particularly involved with the preparations for Max’s christening. In truth, he is not even sure that he wants his child blessed by a God he doesn’t believe in, but Caroline has been quietly determined that it is ‘the right thing’ to do and so he has gone ahead with it. These kinds of things are important to her.

In the end, the service goes without a hitch. Max is extremely well behaved until the moment Caroline hands him over to the vicar, at which point his face screws up tightly and there is a dangerous semi-quaver of absolute silence while he breathes in, ominously gathering his strength before emitting the most gargantuan howl. The baby looks at them all, clenching his fists together and punching the air, simultaneously bewildered and disgusted that he should have been placed in such an undignified situation.

Andrew finds it rather gratifying to witness this unexpected streak of stubbornness developing in his son’s character. But Caroline, her face pale, immediately lurches forward from the pew, hand outstretched as though she fully intends to take her child back. Andrew grips her arm to stop her. ‘It’s fine,’ he murmurs in her ear. There is a silvery thread of sweat in the dimple of her chin. She has been panicky since Max’s birth, more than usually anxious. ‘He’s fine. Leave him be.’

Caroline does not acknowledge him, but shifts away to one side, releasing her arm from Andrew’s grasp. She sits perfectly still and Andrew is left feeling that he has done something wrong, that he is being reproached by her, silently. But then, when they stand to sing the next hymn, she turns and smiles at him and mouths ‘Thank you’ and the natural equilibrium between them is restored. He puts his arm round her waist, lightly, to let her know he loves her.