Home Fires

Elsa, 2010

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.

For the last couple of weeks, Elsa had been taking her revenge in small but deadly ways. A few nights ago, she had unscrewed the hot water bottle cap and let the tepid dampness seep all over her sheets. It had taken her the best part of an hour to get her arthritic fingers to do what she wanted them to, but she had managed it eventually and when Mrs Carswell came in the morning to get her out of bed, there was a delicious moment where Elsa noticed the glimpse of panic on her face when she thought her increasingly infirm charge had wet herself. Ha! Elsa thought. That’ll teach her.

‘Dear me, what have we here?’ Mrs Carswell said, roughly pushing Elsa over on to her side so that she could inspect the cotton nightdress clinging wetly to her withered thighs. ‘What have you done to yourself, eh?’ She tutted gently under her breath before spotting the hot water bottle, lying flaccid and shrunken at the foot of the bed. ‘Oh my stars,’ said Mrs Carswell, picking up the offending object and examining it closely. ‘How on earth did that happen? I thought I screwed it on ever so tightly.’ She looked at Elsa levelly, her piggy little eyes flashing with something like distaste. ‘Well. It’s a mystery.’ But Mrs Carswell was no fool. She knew what this meant. Still, she wasn’t about to let on. ‘Let’s get you up, shall we?’ she said with exaggerated brightness and she started dressing Elsa in dry clothes, managing to strip and remake the bed with such efficiency that within half an hour, the episode seemed barely to have happened. ‘There,’ said Mrs Carswell, clapping her hands together once the task was completed. ‘All done. Let’s get you some breakfast, shall we?’

Today, Elsa is taking a different approach. She has been left in the usual armchair by the single-bar gas fire in what Elsa calls the sitting room and what Mrs Carswell insists on calling the lounge. From here, Elsa can hear the tell-tale ping of the microwave that signifies Mrs Carswell is making lunch. A wheeled table, of the sort they have in hospital wards, has been moved over to the side of the chair, the white metal tray lifted several centimetres over her knees. On the tray is a single spoon with which Elsa is expected to eat her food. The indignity of that spoon enrages her. She is perfectly capable of using a knife and fork, even if it takes her longer and the results are rather messier than she would like. But to be reduced to a spoon – such a babyish piece of cutlery! – makes her feel so powerless, so demeaned that she can barely look at it without feeling her eyes fill with unintentional tears. After staring at it for a while, she tells herself firmly to lift her right arm (it is almost impossible to get her left side to do what she wants) and slowly, she feels her shoulder socket click into action. She lifts her arm, heavy as a flooded sandbag, and feels a shooting pain across her chest as she does so. Elsa winces and pauses for a second to gather her strength. Finally, she manages to get her hand on to the table, to close her knotted fingers around the spoon handle and to hide it, as quickly as she can, under the chair cushion.

She can feel her heart beating lightly against her chest in a breathless tap-tap-tap. A flash of memory comes to her of when she was a small girl, lifting up a dying sparrow from the patch of garden behind the house. The bird lay in her cupped hands, its beady eyes swivelling frantically and Elsa had wanted more than anything to help it, to soothe its panic with a friendly touch, but she found she was unable to. The bird twisted uncomfortably but had no strength to escape. She noticed its chest twitching and realised after a moment that this was the sparrow’s heart, twitching frail and fast against its feathers, pressing so forcefully against the bird’s delicate flesh that it looked as though something were trying to escape and burrow its way out. The thought disgusted her. She dropped the bird on to the ground and ran back into the house.

And then, another memory: this time, she is wearing a cotton nightdress that is too thin to keep her warm even in summer. She is walking noiselessly down the hallway, being careful to avoid the creaking floorboards and it is night-time, the heavy sort of darkness that envelops the first hours after midnight. She is pushing open the door to her mother’s room, reaching up with one arm to turn the handle, the brass cool and dry against the palm of her hand. She stops in the doorway, until she can make out the recognisable outlines of the chest of drawers, the heavy oak wardrobe and the bedstead. She starts to walk on tiptoe towards the bed, inhaling her mother’s familiar sleep smell – clean linen mixed with the faintest traces of her hair and the sweetness of her sweat. She can hear the rise and fall of her slow breathing, calmer than it is in the daytime. And then she can hear another, unfamiliar sound, a throaty, deeper noise that she cannot place. But before she has time to work out what it is, the bed jolts and a large, dense shape rises up from the mattress. She hears the shape take three strides across the floor and she feels herself being lifted up, her chest squeezed with the force of two hands pressing against her skin. ‘This is no place for little girls,’ says a male voice and then she finds herself in the hallway, her mother’s bedroom door slammed shut behind her. She stares down at her bare feet, her toes turning white-blue with the cold, and she tries for a while to make sense of what has happened but she can’t and so she walks quietly back to her room, feeling scared and alone. She thinks: I wish my father had never come back.

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.’