Home Fires. Elizabeth Day

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      ‘But . . .’

      ‘There, I’ve said enough,’ Elsa said, resuming her customary briskness. ‘I’m sure you think this is none of my business, Caroline, but for reasons I can’t go into, I feel very strongly about this.’ And then she put the phone down.

      Caroline did not tell Andrew about the conversation but she soon came to realise that unless she showed Max her wholehearted support, she would risk pushing him away. He would seek out other friends, people who were more sympathetic to his ambitions – people like Elsa. The thought of this scared her. She did not want to lose him. So she gave Max her blessing. In time, Andrew had followed.

      There was no stopping Max after that. He signed up to 1 Rifles, part of the 12 Mechanised Brigade based in Bulford and when his parents went to Wiltshire for his passing-out parade after thirty-eight weeks’ basic training, he stood proud and bold in front of them, his hair shaved short, his shoulders broad and bulked-out underneath the uniform and Caroline wore a bright red hat and Andrew wore a dark grey suit and they clapped along with all the other parents and smiled and flashed their digital cameras and shook their heads in shared disbelief at how grown-up their children seemed. Max, surrounded by friends, his tired eyes gleaming, was in his element.

      She has a photograph from that day of the two of them, taken by Andrew. In it, Max is laughing, his handsome head tilted backwards. He has his arm around her and Caroline remembers that the stiffness of his uniform made his movements unnaturally heavy. She has her hand on his chest, lightly resting just below his heart and her lipsticked mouth is stretched into a smile that manages to be both joyful and anxious. But Max . . . well, Max looks wonderful.

      Sometimes, now, Caroline will see other bereaved families on the evening news who have been trotted out for the television cameras by the Ministry of Defence and they look like half-people, their ghostly outlines blurred from the ghastliness of their grief. They look slumped and shattered, shuffling forwards as if their spines are sagging, grey-faced and shaken and not quite comprehending the all-encompassing reality of what they have just been told. Often, these families will have a statement that they wish to read out. Most of the time, this statement will contain a line about how, in the midst of this terrible tragedy that has engulfed them, they take comfort from the knowledge that Paddy or Niall or Ian or Geoff or Ben died ‘doing what they loved’.

      Perhaps, Caroline thinks, it should give her succour now to think that Max died doing something he loved so much. But it doesn’t. It makes her angry that he chose to put himself in danger. It makes her angry that no matter how much she loved him, it wasn’t enough, that he needed something else. It makes her angry that he’s dead. And, above anything else, it makes her angry that she was too gutless to stop him.

      Because, after all, what is the point of a mother if she cannot protect her only child?

      

      His body – what there was of it – was flown back on a military plane. They were driven up to RAF Lyneham in a plush black Mercedes provided by the army and although they held hands in the back of the car, Caroline felt completely separate from her husband. She rested her head against the window, watching the motorway service stations skidding by, the spindly trees caked in exhaust fumes, the dull, overcast sky that seemed to stretch for ever in a uniform pale brushstroke, and she could feel nothing. She was numb, empty, hollow.

      ‘You OK?’ asked Andrew, turning to look at her with dark-circled eyes.

      She didn’t answer. She tried to nod her head but it felt like a lie.

      Once they got there, they lined up with the other bereaved parents in a surreal sort of welcoming committee. One of the mothers, a thin streak of a woman with badly cut hair, smiled at Caroline and then started crying so that for a moment it looked as though her face had been split into two halves in a game of consequences.

      Three coffins covered in Union flags were carried out of the plane’s hull in slow succession, each one held aloft on the shoulders of six uniformed men who walked with respectful sombreness across the tarmac. It was very windy and Caroline’s hair kept slapping across her face.

      The woman who had smiled at her was now crying uncontrollably, segments of a balled-up paper tissue in both hands. Her husband had his arm around the woman but kept looking straight ahead, his gaze masked, two thick wrinkle-lines etched from the corners of his mouth down either side of his chin.

      Andrew’s arms were crossed. His head was angled to one side so that she could only just make out the pinkish trace of a shaving cut on one side of his cheek. A tear, translucent and slippery as a slug’s trail, was falling down his face. Caroline was surprised to see it there and she realised that, until now, she had never once seen Andrew crying.

      The sight of him – vulnerable but trying not to be for her sake – moved her. She held out her gloved hand and he took it, gratefully. But then, with her hand in his, she started to feel trapped, as if she were betraying something, as if to be thinking of anyone else but Max in this moment was a form of disloyalty. For so long, she had relied on Andrew to be her rock. But now, she did not want him near her.

      For her part, Caroline had no tears. She found that her grief was so vast it blanked everything else out. It was as though she were in the middle of a storm, perfectly calm at its epicentre but looking outwards at the whirling mayhem, the engulfing waves and thunder-split skies, the spiralling madness of normality ripped apart at the seams.

      As she watched the soldiers carrying the coffins across the tarmac, she found herself remembering – of all things – the time she took Max to have his warts treated with liquid nitrogen at the hospital. He was 10 and his middle finger had bubbled up, the skin becoming hardened and nodular. None of the over-the-counter wart treatments worked, so they had driven one morning to the hospital, Max sitting in the front passenger seat, holding his finger up to the light to examine it better.

      ‘Why can’t I keep my wart?’ he said in his plaintive, inquiring way.

      ‘Because it’s contagious.’

      There was an effortful silence as Max considered this.

      ‘What does contagious mean?’

      ‘It means . . .’ she pondered how best to describe it. ‘It means other people can catch them.’

      ‘Like a ball?’

      ‘No, like the flu.’

      That seemed to satisfy him and he was very brave with the doctor, pressing his hand down on to the table as he was told, trembling only the tiniest bit when the liquid nitrogen was applied with the tip of a cotton bud. But Caroline could tell it hurt because he blinked quickly three times which was exactly what he had done two summers previously after fracturing his elbow falling off his new bicycle.

      As they walked to the hospital car park, she asked him whether it had hurt.

      ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know how it felt.’

      She looked at him, surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘It felt really hot but it also felt really cold and I couldn’t work out which it was. It hurt too much to know.’

      Eleven years later, watching him come back to her in a box and a body-bag, that was how it was for Caroline: too painful to know what she was feeling.

      

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