Andrew wakes at 6.38 in the morning, exactly seven minutes before his alarm is due to go off. He is always roused at exactly this moment, his mind jolted into consciousness by some automatic reflex. He once experimented by falling asleep without setting the alarm clock and found that he overslept. Andrew was tickled by the idea that his subconscious mind reacts to the idea of regulation rather than the practical exercise of it. He is, generally speaking, a creature of habit.
He pushes the flat black button on top of the clock-radio to mute the beeps before they sound and then slides out of bed as carefully as he can so as not to wake Caroline, although he knows her sleep has been twitchy and disturbed of late. There is an uncomfortable pressure on his bladder and he walks over to the lavatory to relieve himself, noticing as he does so that the bathroom needs to be regrouted. Patches of black mould are dotted along the white tiles. The bath is ringed with a pale brown water line and the whole room smells damp and mildewy.
They had only put this bathroom in a few years ago but already it needs an overhaul. Andrew groans at the thought of it. There was a time when he would have done it himself, rolled up his sleeves and got out his toolbox and fixed whatever needed to be done. He used to like DIY even though the results, admittedly, were somewhat mixed. But there was something about the simple practicality of a manual task that appealed to him: he did not have to think while he was painting a wall or drilling a hole or scraping flat a patch of Polyfilla, he simply had to follow the rules. And then there was always the sense of satisfaction, however slight, that you got when a task had been completed, when a problem had been rectified, when things were straight and ordered once more. Was it absurd to say that it made him feel more like a man? Possibly.
But increasingly he found he was too busy for DIY. He began to realise that his tinkering with screwdrivers had only ever been an indulgence, a hobby he could pursue because he possessed the luxury of time and because he also knew that professionals could be called in whenever something went seriously wrong. With Elsa living under the same roof, he found that he had less and less free time at his disposal. He was working long hours at the office – a tricky new corporate client needed mollifying on a regular basis – and Caroline was still not herself, so Andrew found he had to pick up the slack more and more. It had been agreed before his mother moved in that Andrew would take on the bulk of the care but he had not realised then quite how much he would need to do. Elsa was in rapid and apparently irreversible decline – where once he could have relied on Caroline to keep an eye on her during the day, now he was forced to rush to and from the office to help the carer lift and change his mother’s incontinence nappy.
The main carer was a cheery-faced Kenyan woman called Sanapei – ‘but you can call me Snappy,’ she had said on her first day with a giant smile. Andrew had managed to arrange with a local care agency for her to come four times a day to change and wash his mother. It was a laborious task that required two people and although normally he could have relied on Caroline to help Sanapei, he thought it was safer to arrange someone else to be there. But the other carer, a quietly spoken Ukrainian woman he’d found in the Classifieds section of the Malvern Gazette, could only come twice a day – once in the morning and once in the afternoon – so Andrew had to rush back from work to cover the other two slots with Snappy, at lunchtime and in the early evening.
Even in the short time that Elsa had been with them, the change had been dramatic. She could barely talk at all now and her mental acuity was slipping away from her. Andrew was no longer sure what went in and what didn’t. The other day, he had walked into the room to see an expression of intense anxiety on her face and he had to remind her who he was, reaching out to give her a reassuring touch on the shoulder.
It was, Andrew found, difficult to readjust. His mother had always been the one in control. Growing up, Elsa had been easier to admire than to love. He remembers with perfect clarity the party she threw for his fifth birthday. He had invited three friends, all of whom lived nearby, and Elsa had bought a cake from the Fitzbillies bun shop. She lit five candles and brought it into the kitchen where the four boys were seated round the table in paper crowns. They sang Happy Birthday, with his father providing the only baritone voice, and then Andrew blew out the candles in one go, which gave him an immense feeling of pride. He looked up to his father for confirmation that he had done well and Oliver broke off from patting tobacco into the bowl of his pipe to smile at him and raise his eyebrows to show he was impressed. Andrew’s cheeks burned with happiness.
Elsa took a long shiny knife out of the cutlery drawer to cut the cake. It was the biggest chocolate cake Andrew had ever seen and his stomach had rumbled in anticipation of eating it. There was a thick layer of icing that dripped down over the sides and Andrew, overcome by greed and excitement, reached out to pick off a small piece of it with the tip of his index finger. Elsa did not notice Andrew’s finger as she started to cut. He felt a sharp stab of pain in his hand. He cried out with a yowl. There was blood on the yellow tablecloth, mixed in with a muddy stain of chocolate. The other boys were shrieking with shock. Elsa, at first unaware of what all the fuss was about, quickly realised what had happened. And what Andrew remembered most vividly about that day was not the pain of the cut but rather what his mother had said next.
‘Oh Andrew, stop being such a baby,’ she said, putting down the knife and turning away. ‘It’s only a scratch.’ She did not comfort him or put her arms around him. It was left to Oliver to scoop him up and take him to the bathroom, where he ran Andrew’s finger under the tap and put a plaster on it. ‘All right, old chap?’ Oliver said, and his breath smelled of tobacco. Andrew nodded his head and the movement caused a single tear to spill out on to his cheek. Oliver, embarrassed, took his hand roughly. ‘Come on then.’
The cake, when he ate it, did not taste as good as he had imagined it would.
Years later, Andrew had asked his father about this, about whether he thought it unusual that Elsa appeared so detached from her own child. By that time, Andrew was married himself and Oliver, always gentle, had mellowed to the point that he could quite easily be moved to tears by a heart-wrenching story on the evening television news. He hadn’t been surprised by Andrew’s question. In fact, it was almost as though he had been expecting it.
They were sitting in the living room of the house in Grantchester, where Andrew and Caroline had come to stay for the weekend. They were reading the papers while Sunday lunch was being prepared in the kitchen down the hallway and occasionally there would be the reassuring sound of jostled cutlery or an oven door being opened and shut. The buttery smell of roasting potatoes thickened the air around them. Caroline had gone upstairs to change, even though Andrew kept telling her she didn’t need to.
‘I think I should open a few bottles of that red,’ said Oliver, folding up his section of newspaper and putting it on to the nest of tables to his side.
And Andrew asked him, the question coming out of the blue. He hadn’t even been aware he was thinking of it but then it popped out of his mouth.
‘Do you think Mummy ever really loved me?’ he asked. ‘As a child, I mean.’
Oliver looked at him over his reading glasses, his chin tucked into his neck. He considered the question for a few seconds and then, taking off his glasses, he said: ‘Of course she did, Andrew.’ His voice was straightforward, not unkind, but not especially comforting either. Oliver sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘Elsa has always found it difficult to show her love. I suspect she thinks it would be a weakness to do so.’
There was a pause.
‘Listen, she loves you a great deal, Andrew, as you well know, but there are things about her . . . her upbringing that make it hard for her to admit it. She’d hate me talking about her like this,’ Oliver shook his head, ‘but it’s probably a lot to do with her own parents. She had been very close to her mother but then, when her father came back from the war.’ He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was tight. ‘He was an absolute brute.’ Andrew glanced at him. His father’s face had grown mottled and red. ‘It was bloody lucky, all things considered, that I didn’t serve.’ When Oliver had volunteered to fight in the Second World War, so Andrew recalled, the doctors had discovered a heart murmur at his medical check-up. He spent the rest of the war doing something rather secretive and unexplained in intelligence. ‘I think it would have undone her,’ Oliver continued, fixing his gaze at a midpoint on the wall. He seemed to be struggling with something, uncomfortable at what he was about to say. ‘There are things we never told you, Andrew, things you shouldn’t ever have to hear about your own grandfather. Elsa couldn’t even speak about him. Couldn’t mention him by name.’ Oliver stood up and smoothed down his chinos, scattering the crumbs from a messily eaten handful of Twiglets on to the Afghan rug. ‘Now I really must get on with that wine or I’ll be for it.’ He walked past Andrew’s chair towards the drinks cabinet, pausing briefly to pat his son on the shoulder.
‘Try not to worry so much,’ Oliver said and then he left the room.
When, some time later, Andrew had become a father himself, he had tried very hard to show his love. He can vividly remember the first time he saw Max in the hospital: a tiny baby with a scrunched up face and a pot-belly and he remembers, too, how moved he had been by the sight. And yet, he found it almost impossible to put the profundity of his feeling on public display.
‘Do you want to hold him?’ Caroline had asked, moving the baby’s head away from her breast. Andrew had shaken his head, had not been able to risk taking this fragile, perfect package in his clumsy arms in case he did something wrong, in case he ruined it somehow. Caroline had looked at him and he hadn’t been able to find the words to explain what he felt, either then or at any time since.
After he has shaved, he goes downstairs to prepare Elsa’s breakfast. He unpeels a banana and mashes it with a fork on to a small plate with some full-fat milk and a squeeze of lemon. His mother had never had a big appetite, even when she was well, but now it has dwindled dramatically. When she first arrived, Andrew used to go through to her room in the mornings with a full tray containing a bowl of muesli, a pot of freshly made coffee, two slices of toast and marmalade and half of a chopped Cox’s apple. These days, she often struggles to finish the banana.
He shoves a slice of bread in the toaster for himself and then takes Elsa’s breakfast through.
She is already awake, lying flat on her back with the duvet drawn right up to her neck so that the only thing he can see in the dusky half-light is her delicate face, the cheeks sunken beneath the bone. Her eyes turn towards him as he enters.
‘Morning, Mummy,’ he says, as cheerfully as he can. He glances at the clock on her bedside and sees that it is already 7.15. He needs to leave in a quarter of an hour.
But of course, everything takes much longer than it should – hoisting Elsa up into a sitting position, making sure she is warm enough, passing her a beaker of warmed water to sip on, feeding her the banana so that she does not spill it on to the bedsheets and then brushing her hair so that she looks presentable for the carer. He opens the curtains. The sky is the grey-white of a seagull’s wing, blurry at the edges with threatening clouds of rain.
‘All right, Mummy, I’ll see you later,’ he says, walking back to the bed and bending down to give her a peck on the cheek. Her skin is cool against the brush of his lips. She stares up at him. Andrew feels a stab of guilt. He turns on the battery-operated radio, tuning it to the soothing tones of a cello concerto on Classic FM. It is the kind of populist radio station she would normally have hated but recently, he has found that she reacts better to more familiar music. As he fiddles with the antenna to get rid of the static, he thinks he sees Elsa smile. When he looks at her again, her eyelids are almost shut, droplets of moisture gathering in the ducts.
He gathers up the breakfast stuff. Just as he is about to leave, he notices that the pink bed jacket he has put around his mother’s shoulders has slipped off. He puts the tray on the floor and reaches across Elsa to gather it up, coaxing her into leaning forwards so that he can slide the fleecy material behind her. She flops towards him, her muscles slack.
He notices there is a small but livid bruise just below her right cheekbone. It is the size of a five-pence piece and the colour of a ripening plum. The bruise looks unnatural against the scraggy pallor of her skin. Andrew leans in to peer at it more closely and then gently eases Elsa back against her pillows. He wonders how she got the bruise and makes a mental note to tell the carers they must be more careful when they handle her. But the thought of it does not trouble him unduly. Probably just one of those things that happened as one got older, he thinks, and it does not appear to be causing Elsa any pain – in fact, she didn’t seem to be aware of it at all.
He clears away the plate and the fork. Then he retrieves his car keys from the bowl by the fridge and walks outside, pushing the door carefully behind him so that it does not slam and wake Caroline.
He sees the envelope containing Max’s dog-tags on the kitchen table and hesitates. Ridiculously, he does not want to leave the package on its own. He picks it up and slips it into his jacket pocket.
By the time he gets into the office, half an hour later than he should have done, Andrew has forgotten about the bruise entirely. The first thing he does is open the top right drawer of his desk and place the dog-tags there, nestled among the paperclips and rubber bands. He rests his hand on the envelope, as if to shelter the contents.
The back of his head seems to tighten and he wonders if that marks the onset of a migraine. He has been suffering from them with increasing frequency and knows the signs: a sense of hyper-reality, the colours bleached from his vision, the world too sharply defined to be trusted and then, as the voices of those around him disappear down a tunnel of noise, there is a staggering pain that will last for hours. He fumbles around for a packet of 500mg paracetamol, pressing out two from the foil and washing them down with his mug of cooling tea.
He slides the drawer shut, obscuring the dog-tags from view. On his computer screen, the unanswered emails are piling up and he knows he has a small mountain of paperwork to get through by the end of the day but still he cannot seem to motivate himself. He finds his mind wandering, thinking of Caroline and the dinner she had cooked him last night. He should be happy that she was making the effort, that she seemed to be returning to some semblance of stability but instead he felt uneasy. He could not quite put his finger on it. There had been something about her manner – contained but with an undercurrent of panic, as though she was going through the motions, imitating what she thought of as normal behaviour in order to divert his attention from what was actually going on beneath the surface.
The spinach and feta frittata, once a dish that Caroline could have prepared blindfold, had been undercooked: the egg albumen still slippery and raw, the cheese unmelted in big, salty lumps. She had tried to do everything too quickly: laying the table with such haste that she had given him a spoon instead of a knife and spilled the water as she poured it. She had laughed, too shrilly, when he pointed this out. And then she had looked at him with such hopeful expectancy when he ate his first mouthful, her eyes sharp, her mouth drawn in a tight little smile, that he had been forced to lie and tell her it was wonderful.
‘I’m glad,’ she had said, tentatively reaching out to take his hand. He gave it to her but he felt nothing as he did so; none of the familiar intimacy he had once so valued. ‘I want to try . . .’ Caroline looked away. ‘I want to try and be better.’
She sounded so desperate to please. ‘You mustn’t force yourself,’ he said. And then, neither of them could think of anything else to fill the gap and they had lapsed into a long, shapeless silence until they went to bed. Andrew knew she was disappointed in him. He had tried to touch her under the sheets, to scoop her into the concave curve of his body, but she had shifted away to the edge of the mattress.
He slips out of his reverie and notices that his computer screensaver has clicked into a shifting kaleidoscope of geometric shapes. The phone rings.
‘Hello,’ he says, picking up the receiver.
‘Andrew, it’s me.’
‘Caroline. How curious. I was just thinking about you.’
‘Nothing bad, I hope.’ That shrill laugh again. It set his teeth on edge to hear it.
‘No, no.’ He drums his fingers on the desk. He glances at the clock on the wall and wonders why she is calling him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, more than all right. Derek Lester’s office called.’ She pauses, waiting for his reaction. ‘We’ve got an appointment to see him.’ Her voice is thrilled. He can imagine her standing in the hallway, shoulders tensed, one hand playing with the phone cable, fiddling with one ear lobe as she always does when she is nervous.
‘That’s good,’ he says, evenly.
‘Good?’ She laughs again. ‘I’d say it’s more than good, Andrew. It’s what we’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?’
How should he best respond? In truth, he does not think Derek Lester will be able to provide his wife with the answers she so craves. He is worried that she has spent so much time on this and concerned, too, that her mind seems to have been twisted out of shape by its obsession with conspiracy.
‘I just don’t want you getting your hopes up,’ he says.
Andrew can sense her frustration radiating towards him. ‘Right,’ she replies, clipping the word short. ‘Well, I just thought I should let you know. In case you can be bothered to come.’
He exhales to the count of three. ‘Of course I want to come. I just . . .’
‘I thought you’d be pleased.’ There is a catch in her voice. ‘Don’t bother coming back at lunch. I can deal with Elsa.’ Caroline hangs up.
He puts the receiver back carefully, resting his hand there for several seconds and then he takes a sheet of paper from his in-tray and tries to concentrate on what the typed letters and numbers are telling him. After a few minutes, there is a knock on his door.
‘Yes,’ he says, glancing up over the rim of his glasses.
Kate puts her head round the door. Her blonde hair is tied back in a loose ponytail. She is wearing fashionably square black-rimmed spectacles that he has never seen before. Andrew finds himself thinking that she looks better with her hair down, that it suits the softness of her face more.
‘Hi, Andrew,’ she says, smiling, her lips shiny with some kind of gloss. ‘I was just wondering if you fancied some lunch?’ Her hand is still on the door handle, as though she is prepared for him to say no, as he usually would. But today he finds that he wants to do something out of character. He wants to be someone else for a bit.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Why not?’
They go to an Italian place that has just opened round the corner, situated on a pedestrianised stretch of shops that is dingily lit and unprepossessing. The restaurant itself is all faux leather and cleverly angled mirrors. The other tables are empty apart from one elderly couple, both still in their overcoats. The woman is eating a bowl of soup but her hand is shaking and some of it has spilled off the spoon, leaving a splodge of green on the lapel of her mackintosh.
Seeing this, Andrew feels a clutching at his insides. He thinks of Elsa, back at home, trapped in bed, waiting. Always waiting.
‘Follow me, please,’ says the waiter, leading them to a squashed-away table right next to the lavatories.
‘Will you be OK here?’ asks Andrew once the waiter has left them with the laminated menu card.
‘Yes,’ says Kate, bemused. ‘Why on earth not?’
He feels caught out without knowing why. ‘I just thought . . .’ he is stumbling. ‘If there’s a draught . . .’ he gestures vaguely towards the door.
‘I’m sure I’ll cope,’ she says and then she leans across the table so that her blouse dips forward and he can see an exposed triangle of flesh and there, just beneath, a glimpse of black lace. She reaches her hand across the napkins and the wine glasses and the single wilting carnation in a vase and she touches the top of his wrist lightly. ‘Thanks for asking.’
The food, when it comes, is good. Kate eats precisely half of her spaghetti vongole and drinks two large glasses of a rosé wine that Andrew learns, for the first time, is called Pinot Blush. He has little appetite but eats most of his veal escalope without too much effort. He pushes the leftovers around his plate restlessly, so as not to make eye contact. The conversation is fluent, not stilted at all, but for some reason he cannot look at her. He feels that to look at her would be fatal. It would unravel him.
‘Are you sure you don’t want a drink?’ Kate is asking him, a teasing note to her voice. ‘Is your afternoon really so jam-packed with Important Business?’
‘No, no . . .’ he starts. Then the waiter interrupts him to take their plates away, which seems to take much longer than it should, and by the time the table has been cleared, he finds he has changed his mind. Bugger it, he thinks to himself. Why not?
So he orders a small glass of Burgundy and a tiramisu. Kate shakes her head when he passes the dessert menu to her.
‘No, I’m kind of watching what I eat,’ she says. ‘I’ve put on so much weight since sitting around that office. I look like such a blob these days.’
‘Nonsense,’ he says. ‘You look pretty good to me.’ He wishes as soon as the words are out of his mouth that he could reel them back in.
Kate flicks her eyes up quickly. ‘Do I?’ she says, leaning forwards in that distracting way again.
He fiddles with the edge of the tablecloth. ‘That thing you were saying about the Kilner account . . .’
Kate laughs, lightly. ‘Yes, let’s talk about work.’ A pause. ‘Much safer.’ She sits back in her chair, lifts her handbag on to her lap, takes out a small compact and applies a fresh coat of lip gloss to her mouth. He is shocked that she does this in front of him. It seems so intimate, somehow, and also a touch slatternly. He realises he has never seen Caroline in lip gloss.
The image of his wife burns a hole through his thoughts. His eyes moisten, briefly. Disgusted, he bows his head so that Kate will not see.
‘Shall we get the bill?’ she asks.
They go to her flat. Kate tells him she has forgotten a crucial piece of paperwork that she needs to take back to the office but they both know this is a lie. She lives above a travel agent and the entrance is to one side of a multi-coloured display advertising the latest winter sun deals to Egypt and Florida. Kate unlocks the door and walks ahead of him into the shared hallway. The sight of her bending to pick up the letters that have collected on the carpet is enough to make him feel the nudge of an erection through his trousers.
Quickly, so that he does not have time to think, he grabs her from behind and pulls her to him. She turns round and kisses him, violently so that their teeth clash and then her tongue, loose and wet, is in his mouth and he is shocked, again, that she is so forward with him. The kiss stops as quickly as it started. She reaches down with one hand and before he knows what is happening, she has taken his cock in her hand, is grabbing at it through his trousers.
He draws back, stung by the audacity of it. Kate looks at him, surprised. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand leaving a shiny smear of pink across her skin.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, foolishly. ‘I’m not used to this.’
‘Let’s go upstairs. I’m sure I can make you comfortable if I try hard enough.’
He follows her, mutely. His erection has gone. The brief excitement of the moment has dissipated into embarrassment and horror that he has got himself into this situation. He knows that he does not want this any more, that he never really has. He wanted to show it could be done, that he had it in him, but now it seems pointless. And yet, stupidly, he is too polite to back out. He knows he will go through with it.
Kate’s flat is modern and serviceable and almost entirely devoid of personality. There is a corner sofa in the small living room that doubles up as a kitchen. A white-framed photograph on one wall shows Kate and three other girls in summer dresses, all of them shiny and smiling.
She leaves her handbag on the kitchen counter and then takes his hand, leading him to the bedroom. ‘Come on,’ she says and he sees that with her other hand, she is already unbuttoning her blouse. She releases the blind so that it falls against the single window with a clattering sound and the light becomes fudged. She sits down on the edge of the bed in her underwear and starts undoing his trousers. He stops her, gently, then undresses himself. She watches him as he does so and this makes him uncomfortable. He feels the energy drain out of him.
Naked, he goes to her. She grasps him round the waist and pulls him down on top of her, kissing him again with that curious fierceness. He tries to kiss her back in the same way but it seems so wrong, so lacking in tenderness. She shifts up the mattress and tilts her head back, pushing her chest out so that her breasts graze his lips and he can do little else but circle his tongue dutifully round each nipple, as seems to be required of him. She starts to moan and then to whisper in his ear what she wants him to do to her but the words sound harsh and rasping and wrong.
Where did she learn to be like this? he wonders. He is taken aback by how mechanical her movements seem, as though she is watching a film of herself, as though she has a mental checklist of erogenous zones that must be ticked off before either of them can be truly satisfied. She flips herself on to her front and so she is on all fours in front of him. He finds it easier without seeing her face and, when he finally pushes himself inside, she screams out his name and he is instantly worried that the neighbours might hear. He feels no release.
Afterwards, he disengages himself almost immediately and sits up on the side of the bed, clicking the strap of his watch back into place. ‘Don’t go,’ murmurs Kate, her head half-buried in a crumpled pillow.
Even this sounds like something she thinks she should say.
‘I’m afraid I have to. Things to do back in the office.’
She turns to look at him, hurt.
‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ he says, dully. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. It shouldn’t have happened.’ He realises, as he speaks these hollow words, that for the first time in weeks he feels nothing. He has slipped into a void, a vacuum, an empty hole of space. He is not thinking of Caroline or Max or Elsa. For this moment in time, he is rid of them all. It is a sensation of pure relief.
He bends down to kiss Kate chastely on the mouth. She senses something has changed and narrows her gaze. ‘Sure,’ she says, feigning nonchalance. ‘Whatever.’ He can see her weighing up whether to say something cruel but for some reason, she decides against it. ‘I’ll see you back in the office.’ She turns over on the bed so that her naked back faces him. He looks at her skin: smooth, unblemished, young. And then, because he cannot help himself, he thinks of Max.
He nods, just the once. Then he walks out of the flat, letting the door slide shut behind him.
He does not go back to the office straight away but instead heads towards the Priory and sits on a bench overlooking a patch of grass and gravestones. He expects to feel sickened or anxious or guilty but in fact, he is calm and his heart seems to be beating more slowly than usual. His head is clear.
He leans back against the wooden slats of the bench and loosely crosses his legs. Two pigeons cautiously strut towards him, giving exploratory pecks at the leftover crumbs of someone else’s lunchtime sandwich on the ground by his feet. He watches them. He takes in the names on the gravestones around him: Isabelle, beloved wife of; Alice, passed away in the year of our Lord; Enid, with the angels; Alfred, much-missed father; George, younger brother; William, killed in action; Horace . . .
Horace. The name brings him up short. It is his grandfather’s name, a man whom Andrew knows so little about and yet, in recent weeks, he has been thinking of him more than ever. From what his parents had told him, Horace had been irrevocably changed by the First World War. When, as a young child, he had asked why he never saw his grandparents, the answer had been evasive. As he grew older, and the questions remained, Oliver became more blunt in his replies. Before he went to university, Andrew had tried to raise the issue again with his father over a pint in a pub – he knew, without being told, never to speak of it to Elsa.
‘He was abusive,’ Oliver said, removing his pipe from the corner of his mouth. ‘Treated your mother like dirt. And if you want my advice, Andrew, you’ll not pursue this any further.’
‘But what if . . .’
‘There’s no bloody what if,’ Oliver cut in, his voice quiet. ‘Horace was a violent bastard. I didn’t want any child of mine having anything to do with him. Neither of us did.’
Andrew, taken aback by Oliver’s strength of feeling, stayed silent. Oliver looked at him. ‘I absolutely won’t have your mother upset by this, do you understand? She’s been through enough.’
‘Yes, fine, fine. I just wondered –’
Oliver patted him on the arm. ‘I know – natural curiosity. But I’m asking you to let it rest.’
And he had. Andrew had never spoken of Horace again – at least, not until Caroline had started believing in conspiracies that didn’t exist. Then, choosing his moment carefully one evening after she’d finished watching the 10 o’clock news, he told her what he knew of Horace’s story, about how the war had scarred him – if not physically, then mentally – and how a lot of Elsa’s subsequent behaviour – her distance, her self-reliance, her vulnerability disguised as froideur – could be explained by this.
‘I don’t see what this has to do with us,’ Caroline said.
‘I suppose what I’m getting at is that sometimes –’ and he could feel himself slipping into a place he would not be able to return from, even as he spoke ‘– sometimes, it might be better to die a hero rather than coming back a broken man.’
The words, when they came out, sounded stilted and pathetic. Caroline looked at him, uncomprehending. ‘I can’t believe what you’ve just said. You – you think it’s better that Max –’
‘I’m not talking about Max,’ he protested, although in a way, of course, he had been.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ she cried. ‘I’d do anything – anything – to have Max back, you know that.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘I wouldn’t care what state he was in. I wouldn’t –’ She was crying now and he, as usual, felt dreadful for having prompted her tears. He offered her a handkerchief, put his arms around her, but he knew, without anything further being said, that one more silent inch had slotted into the widening space between them.
On the bench, he uncrosses his legs, aware of a stiffness in his limbs. The pigeons scatter. He imagines Kate, sprawled across the messy tangle of sheets in her soulless flat, and he is shocked, for the first time, by what he has done. She is young enough to be his daughter, he thinks, and then, the half-occluded thought that has been crouching in the corner of his brain for the last few hours clicks glaringly into focus.
Young enough to be his daughter.
Had that been part of the attraction?
Had he wanted, just for a moment, to be more like Max?
For a moment he considers this. And then he forces himself to laugh. Ludicrous notion, he thinks. Cod-psychology at its worst.
A woman in a baggy tweed overcoat walks across his sightline, carrying a small bunch of pink flowers. He watches her as she wends her way towards a medium-sized gravestone, on the far side of the church. She bends over, placing the flowers carefully on the ground, and then she stands for a few seconds with her head bowed. He can see her lips moving. Before turning to leave, she touches the top of the headstone with her gloved hand. As she walks past Andrew on her way back out of the churchyard, she smiles at him. He notices that the corners of her eyes droop down as she does so.
Will he tell Caroline about what he has done? He is in two minds about this. There is part of him – the noble part – that feels he should, that he must, that he would expect the same of her, that their marriage will flounder if such dishonesty is allowed to flourish. But then there is another part of him that realises the knowledge of it would destroy her. It is not as if he intends to repeat the mistake, he reasons with himself. The episode with Kate had been a ghastly aberration, little more than that. He still loves his wife. He does not want to hurt her – not now that her sense of self is so fragile.
Sitting in the graveyard, with the pigeons at his feet, and without even feeling he is making an excuse, Andrew decides he will not tell her. It wouldn’t be fair, he thinks. Having come to this conclusion, he stands up, shakes out his raincoat, and walks back to the office, certain – as he always has been – that he has her best interests at heart.