Home Fires. Elizabeth Day

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      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.’

      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, СКАЧАТЬ