Home Fires. Elizabeth Day
seemed to belong to another person; a borrowed piece of clothing.
She suspected that Mrs Farrow knew her father would not come, but the truth of it would not be spoken out loud. She glanced across at her mother. The smile was still there, fixed in place like glass in a window.
Her father didn’t want anything to do with the war, not any more. He couldn’t even touch the newspaper if there was a mention of the war on the front page. He would go out of his way to avoid the engraved plaque of names that had recently been erected at the bottom of their street. ‘Our Glorious Dead’ was the inscription across the top. Elsa thought that was an odd phrase. She couldn’t imagine a glorious way of dying. Even Our Lord Jesus who died on the cross – how could you call it glorious when he had nails hammered through his palms and feet?
But that was the phrase they had carved smooth and clear into the stone, the lettering cut so deep that Elsa could fit the tip of her little finger in the shallow grooves of the curving G. The stone felt cold to the touch.
On the morning they went to Westminster Abbey with Mrs Farrow, Elsa’s father was locked in his study working on his papers. They left him behind, even though he was the only one of them who had experienced the war first-hand.
Now here she is, holding her mother’s hand and standing amidst rows and rows of silent strangers. Above her, the russet-brown leaves of the sycamore trees quiver and twist in the sunlight. Mrs Farrow says it is ‘unseasonably warm’ for the time of year and Elsa thinks the men in uniforms must be hot, the collars of their tunics scratching against their neck as they walk. Hundreds upon hundreds of them seem to march past her and she imagines that each one of them has a family akin to hers that stretches all the way back from children to parents to aunts and uncles and grandparents and nieces and nephews and cousins and wives.
At school, the teacher had once drawn the family tree of Queen Victoria in chalk on the board. It had branches like a real tree, but made straight and long, and where you might have expected there to be a leaf, there was instead a name, a date of birth, of marriage and of death. She had been intrigued by that family tree, by the simple beauty of it, by the way everything could be connected. She had found the idea of it comforting.
She recalls it now, mapping out a family tree for each of these soldiers in her mind’s eye, the lines unravelling and criss-crossing through the generations, each interlinked branch expanding until she imagines the chalked-out marks covering the ground and the sky and the faces of the people who stood around her.
She begins to feel faint and her vision blurs around the edges. She blinks twice in quick succession to clear her sightline, dropping her head so that the muscles in her neck relax. When she looks up again, the procession is retreating into the distance, on its way to the Abbey. Someone has put a dented steel helmet on top of the coffin and Elsa finds herself wondering if it had been the unknown soldier’s helmet or not. How would they have worked it out? And if it wasn’t his helmet, whose was it? She does not like the thought of a soldier lying on his own, his head uncovered and defenceless. Would he be missing his helmet now, wherever he was? Wouldn’t his family want it back?
Her arm is aching. She wishes she could shake herself loose and let go of her mother’s hand. She twists back to look at her and sees that her mother is crying. She is embarrassed for her and shocked that she is showing such visible emotion in public.
But then Elsa realises that someone else is crying too. There is a tall woman in a pale pink cloche hat and threadbare gloves standing next to her. The woman has not made eye contact with anyone since she arrived a few minutes before the horse-drawn carriage came past. She had been flustered because she was late and her face had been covered in a light sheen of sweat. She had jostled her way to the front, bumping into Elsa as she did so but offering no apology. Instead, the woman had stood impassively to one side, her shoulders sloping. Her demeanour had not altered as she saw the coffin but now Elsa sees that tears are slipping down the woman’s cheeks, making her face appear misshapen. The woman is sobbing openly, oblivious to anyone else around her. The sobs are dry little hiccups and they catch in the woman’s throat as though she does not want to let go of them completely, as though she is frightened about what might happen if she forgets to control herself.
For a second, Elsa is ashamed for the woman and for her mother, but then her ears seem to pop, as if they had been filled with wax until that moment, and she hears the same scratchy sobbing sound replicated a dozen times over from all different directions. The whole crowd seems to be crying as one, their breaths heaving and creaking like a swinging rope.
She is unsettled by the strangeness of what is happening and, in search of reassurance, turns to find Mrs Farrow but her neighbour’s eyes are shaded by the tree leaves and Elsa cannot make out the expression on her face. Mrs Farrow’s son Bobby, who has been unusually quiet throughout the procession, is looking intently at his feet, scuffing the toe of his boot into the sand until his mother tells him to stop fidgeting. After several minutes, the woman in the pale pink cloche hat wipes her eyes with her gloved fingertips and turns to go. Slowly, the crowd thins out and disperses. Her mother lets Elsa’s hand drop and Mrs Farrow suggests they should start making their way home.
On the train back to Richmond, the four of them sit in a carriage, empty apart from an elderly gentleman in one corner, his left eye obscured by a glinting monocle. For a while no one speaks.
‘Alice, my dear, are you quite well?’ Mrs Farrow asks. The train judders forwards, hissing and spitting as it does so. Her mother nods, listless. Mrs Farrow leans across to pat the back of her hand. ‘That’s the spirit.’ She turns to look at Elsa and cocks her head to one side.
‘What a day,’ she says.
She has dark brown eyes that are almost black and Elsa finds that she cannot look away. She gazes back at Mrs Farrow without speaking. Bobby is swinging his legs against the train seat, his feet beating out an irregular rhythm.
‘Quiet now,’ Mrs Farrow says, resting a cautionary hand on his arm. He stops immediately and Mrs Farrow smiles, gently. She is a kind woman, Elsa thinks. Kind but firm.
She wishes she could say something to her, something that would explain how she feels. She wishes she could tell Mrs Farrow that she is scared to go home, that she does not like her father, that his return has changed everything for the worse, that her mother no longer loves her as much as she used to, that she does not know what to do about any of it, any of it at all. She wishes she could find the words, that she was old enough to know how.
Instead, Elsa breaks away from Mrs Farrow’s gaze and rests her head against the leather-lined upholstery. She does not want to have to think. After a while, she falls asleep. The war fades away in her mind: a bubble pricked before it reaches the ground. For the remainder of the train journey, her thoughts sink under a shroud of blankness, the flakes of its quietness falling like silent snow.
Back at the house, her father is nowhere to be seen.
‘I expect he’s still in the study,’ says Elsa’s mother, removing her gloves finger by finger. She leaves them on the hall table in a careless heap. Elsa stands by the doorway, not wishing to make a noise. Her mother looks at her and something about the way she is hanging back, wordlessly, seems to aggravate her.
‘What are you doing, dear?’ she says. ‘Close the door properly behind you and then . . .’ The sentence hangs between them, incomplete. A single strand of hair sticks to her mother’s forehead. Elsa wonders if she has noticed it there, the gentle itch of it against her skin. ‘Why don’t you go up and see if your Papa would like some tea?’ says her mother, walking into the drawing room.
She watches her go and whereas, in the past, Elsa might have felt a lurch of disappointment at her mother’s absence, she realises that her feelings have changed. She does not allow herself to need her, not like she used to. She thinks: I am no longer a baby.
Elsa, still in her coat, makes her way towards the staircase. She walks slowly, so as to eke out each second before she has to confront her father, before the shape of the day will be changed by his mood. She holds out her hands. The right