Home Fires. Elizabeth Day
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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.’
After his mother has gone, Andrew gets up and comes across to Caroline, bending down to murmur in her ear. ‘She likes you,’ he says and Caroline is so surprised by this obvious lie that she laughs.
‘She thinks I’m common.’
He shakes his head, bringing his face close to hers so that the tips of their noses almost touch.
‘No, she doesn’t.’
‘She thinks I look cheap.’
‘You look gorgeous. That’s what I think.’
Caroline giggles, feeling the knot in her stomach relax.
‘She just takes a while to warm up,’ Andrew says. ‘That’s the way she is. Don’t worry so much.’
He traces the curve of her cheek with his fingers. She thinks, not for the first time, that he must have had practice at this. He is ten years older than her, so it stands to reason he would have had other girlfriends; girls who were prettier, classier, cleverer than her; girls from good families who knew what a Chopin sonata was. But instead of feeling downcast by this, it makes her even more determined to please him, to keep his attention. She wants to be better than the lot of them. She wants to prove his mother wrong. She wants to love him more than he has ever been loved before. And she can do it. She knows she can. She just has to keep trying.
Elsa has been told by Mrs Carswell that she is going somewhere. She knows that she has been told this many, many times but still she cannot quite remember where it is she is meant to be going. If she could just reach out that little bit further, she thinks, if she could only stretch the thread of memory that tiny bit more, she would be able to grab hold of the elusive fact.
She looks around her for clues and finds she is sitting in her customary armchair and there is a battered leather suitcase in the corner of the room, staring at her accusingly.
Where am I going? she asks herself.
Will the journey be long?
What will happen when I get there?
Much of Elsa’s life nowadays seems to be taken up with the thankless task of trying to remember things. It is as if she is trying to see something clearly through a frosted window – the outline is visible but the detail, the crucial sense of it, remains cloudily lost.
She blames Mrs Carswell for this. Elsa is waging a secret war against her daily. She still calls her ‘the daily’, at least in her own mind, even though, for the last few months, she has been doing considerably more than simply cleaning the house. Mrs Carswell is a fat, red-cheeked publican’s wife wreathed in purposeful cheerfulness that Elsa finds especially irritating. It is Mrs Carswell’s briskness, tinged with condescension, that is so galling. It is always ‘How are we today?’ and ‘Shall we tuck this blanket in a bit? We don’t want to catch cold do we?’, always delivered with an inane grin, always accompanied by the rapid, forceful movements that make Mrs Carswell’s flesh rise and wobble like a baking cake. Elsa will sit there, the blanket now tucked in so uncomfortably tight it seems to cut off the circulation in her legs, and the resentment will rise silently within her until she becomes more and more furious and determined to say something.
But she is never able to find the right words. Ever since she’d had that fall a while back, she has not been feeling herself. And then there had been a stroke – at least, that’s what she has been told; all she can remember is waking up one morning with a burning sensation in her head, unable to move – which leaves her frustratingly incapable of expressing herself. She knows exactly what it is she wants to say and yet she can never quite remember the way to say it. When she does try, her tongue lolls loosely in her mouth and her voice comes out as an embarrassing groan. It is mortifying. She used to be so eloquent, so fluent in her speech, so intolerant of other people’s grammatical errors and sloppy vocabulary and now here she is, an old saliva-drooling nuisance pushed around and patronised by her former cleaner.
When she tries to describe it to herself, the metaphor she comes up with is a crack in the pavement. There is a crack, a fatal gap, between Elsa’s thoughts and the capacity to act on them and in this crack grows a thick weed of festering anger, almost entirely directed at Mrs Carswell, who knows nothing about Elsa’s blackly murderous thoughts.
Sometimes Elsa entertains herself by imagining a giant speech bubble magically appearing above her head containing all the vicious insults passing through her mind at any given time. She envisages Mrs Carswell turning round from the washing or the cooking or the lighting of the gas fire or whatever menial task she was engaged in and being confronted by the brutal reality of what was going on in Elsa’s head. Elsa can while away several happy hours imagining her reaction: Mrs Carswell’s mouth would slip open slackly, the expression one of horror compounded by the sudden, inescapable knowledge of how much she was hated. She would scream, perhaps, or whimper in distress. Then Mrs Carswell would run out of the house, shrieking, never to return.
Well, thinks Elsa grimly, one can but dream.
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