Home Fires. Elizabeth Day
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