Home Fires by Elizabeth Day Page B

long, hot bath and get into bed.’
    She looked up at him and circled his wrist with her fingers, drawing his hand to her mouth and kissing the back of it, which smelled, as it always did, of Imperial Leather soap.
    ‘Thank you, Andrew.’
    ‘There’s no need to thank me.’
    ‘There is. I know I’ve been . . . difficult to be around.’
    Andrew coughed lightly. ‘Well, we’ve both had a difficult time.’
    Neither of them spoke for several minutes. They just sat next to each other, Caroline on the chair, Andrew crouched in front of her on the carpet, listening to the noises coming from the drawing room.
    ‘You know,’ Andrew said after a while, ‘what Adam said in there, it’s just young men letting off steam.’ He broke off and then added, ‘You mustn’t take it to heart.’
    ‘I haven’t,’ she said, trying to make herself believe that it was true. ‘I know what Max was like. He spoke to me . . . Well, he spoke to me about everything.’
    ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding his head slowly. ‘You were very close.’ But something about his tone didn’t ring true. There was a hint of condescension there.
    ‘What he got up to in his spare time was his business,’ Caroline said, her voice suddenly hard. ‘I don’t know why you’re going on about it.’
    Andrew, still sitting on the floor with his legs outstretched, let his head fall back so that it thunked against the wall.
    ‘Andrew?’
    He didn’t answer.
    ‘I’m going to start clearing away a few glasses,’ she said, standing up and smoothing down her skirt. ‘Perhaps that way they’ll get the hint.’
    Silence.
    ‘Do you want to come and help?’
    He turned towards her. Then, wordlessly, he stood up, unfolding himself a limb at a time.
    ‘Feeling better?’ he asked flatly.
    ‘Yes, much,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’
    They walked back into the drawing room.
     
    It was a beautiful day for the funeral. Max was buried underneath a balmy sun and a blue, cloudless canopy of light, as though the world was deliberately showing them all what he would miss.
    Caroline, still drained from the night before, found the service itself curiously empty of emotion. The ceremony of it was off-putting, as though everyone believed her grief would be assuaged by the neat precision of hymn and prayer. As the vicar spoke, inevitably, of life snatched away too soon and how we should be thankful not for the time we had lost with Max but for the time we had been given with him, she felt a furious resentment, as if her sadness were being belittled, as if it were no longer unique to her.
    She cried only once, when Max’s coffin was lifted out of the church on the shoulders of his pallbearers, draped in a Union flag. It was the flag that upset Caroline; the idea of something so big, so important – the emblem of an entire country – weighing down on the body of her little boy.
    They did what was expected of them. They walked to the graveside and threw handfuls of earth on to their child’s coffin, listening as it struck the wood with a scrabbling sound. They shook hands and nodded their heads and thanked people with small, sad smiles. They acknowledged the representatives sent by the army, straight-backed and proper and formal in their speech. They served tumblers of whisky at the wake and damp mushroom vol-au-vents that came, in bulk, from the supermarket. They did it all. And then, at the end of the day, when everyone had left and when Max had been buried under six feet of soil, they were left with the sudden emptiness of each other. Andrew and Caroline, with nothing in between. That was, until Elsa came to stay.

Andrew
    It is a long drive to his mother’s house but Andrew has always rather liked the journey. He enjoys the cocooned sense of being in a car on his own, going somewhere, moving steadily towards his destination with nowhere else to be and nothing else to do apart from shift gears and turn the steering wheel. He likes not having to speak to someone in the