Caroline

For Caroline, it had all started with a knock on the door.

Ta-tat.

A quaver, then a crotchet, thumped out against the wood.

She thinks now how odd it was that they knocked when there was a perfectly good doorbell, a square box nailed to the wall with a circle-white buzzer so that every time she passed it she thought of an unfinished domino tile. Andrew had installed it several years previously, disproportionately proud of his prowess with the Black & Decker drill she had given him for Christmas. At first, he put it too high up on the doorframe so that no person of average height would be able to reach it. Then he moved it down several inches, but the wood remained dotted with holes where the doorbell had once been.

So the point was: they must have seen the doorbell and chosen to ignore it. Perhaps, she thinks, it was protocol, an anachronistic gesture of respect from a time before the installation of domestic electronics.

Whatever the reason, it was a knock that signalled Caroline’s life was about to change. The knock seemed to echo more loudly than a buzzer, its staccato force reverberating clean and clear against the hallway tiles. It bounced off the buttermilk-painted walls, pinging its way like a pinball up to the top of the stairs where she was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in her jeans, folding freshly washed pillowcases to stack on a shelf in the airing cupboard.

She called to Andrew to answer. It was a Saturday and they had been out for the afternoon, shopping for things they believed they needed but probably could have done perfectly well without: cushions for the conservatory chairs, a new fig and bergamot scented candle for the living room, a long-handled spoon for jars of marmalade to replace one that had mysteriously disappeared. On the way back to the house, they had stopped for tea at the vegetarian café and shared a slice of carrot cake, the vanilla cream icing melting sweetly in their mouths.

There was no answer from Andrew and Caroline remembers being irritated by that. She remembers flinging down the pillowcase she had been folding and making her way hurriedly downstairs, cursing her husband’s absent-mindedness under her breath.

It seems so trivial now to have got upset over such a tiny inconvenience – magical, almost, to think that her life could have been so content back then that she had to invent reasons to be upset simply to give her day a bit of texture.

There was another knock before she got to the bottom of the stairs: three beats in quick succession.

Was it then that she began to sense that things were not as they should be? Was it then that she felt the first thump of blood to her head? She isn’t sure. There is a temptation, in retrospect, to claim some psychic maternal intuition that all was not right. But she doesn’t think she suspected anything. It had been a very normal Saturday up until that point. She does remember walking briskly across the hallway so that she wouldn’t keep whoever it was waiting.

She was still, at that time, mindful of the necessary social politesse.

She walked down the hallway and looked through the glass-panelled front door to see a warped beige-blue darkness, an indistinct, lumpy shape that gradually shifted apart into two inky shadows. One of the shapes appeared to have yellow stripes on one shoulder but when it moved, the yellow dispersed, swirling into flakes of confetti with each dent of the glass. She squinted, unsure of what she was seeing and yet aware that it was somehow an echo of a thing she recognised.

Something about the way they were standing, erect, unbowed, certain, made the pieces fall into place. In her mind, the jumbled sparkle of a hundred kaleidoscope fragments slid into sudden formation.

Two men.

Uniforms.

A knock on the door.

This is what happens when soldiers die.

She felt a hole in the base of her stomach, as though something had unclenched within her and yet she kept moving towards the door. She turned the handle and opened it several inches but then she stopped, not trusting herself any further. Her eyes were shut, as if she were a child who could make something disappear by not seeing it.

‘Is this 25 Lytton Terrace?’ said the first man. ‘Are you Mrs Weston?’ He was dressed in charcoal grey and wore a gold signet ring on his little finger polished to an iridescent brightness. She didn’t notice his colleague until much later.

Time slowed. The seconds dripped like treacle from a spoon.

‘Would we be able to come inside?’ the first man asked. And she knew, then. She knew.

She bent over before he could say any more, clutching at her waist, head dropping down so that she did not have to look at them. For a few seconds, she could make no noise. It felt as though the next breath would not come but remain, halted, just beyond her reach. She moaned. She said ‘No,’ and her voice when she heard it sounded far away: a whisper on the opposite side of an echoing cave.

She slammed the door shut. She leaned against it with her whole weight, pushing the glass with her hands, fingers splayed against the light. She pushed so hard that her flesh turned white and numb. And all the time she was saying no, no, no, feeling the lurch of desperate nausea in the pit of her stomach, the sweat breaking out underneath her arms and trickling down her spine. She was shaking her head, refuting the thought that this could possibly be real. It was not true. It couldn’t be.

The two men knocked on the door again, saying her name, trying to be kind, but she couldn’t let them in. She would not let them into the house. She would not listen to what they had to say. She thought to herself that if she could stop them from speaking, if she could keep the door shut, if she could prevent them crossing the threshold, then everything would stay the same. She would prise open a gap in time, a velvety corner she could squeeze into where she would be safe, cocooned.

She heard footsteps running up behind her and for a moment she thought that the men had somehow got inside the house and were coming to get her, but then she remembered Andrew. Her husband.

She remembered with a rush that he existed, that he was with her, that she was not alone, that there was a rational shape to things, and then she felt his hands around her wrists, his warm, reassuring palms firmly gripping her throbbing veins. He was murmuring, saying something to her that made no sense, but his voice was familiar and soothing and the tendons in her hands relaxed as he prised them off the glass and held them tightly in his. She looked at his mouth and it was moving and he was making a sound but it took several seconds until Caroline could understand anything.

‘We have to let them in,’ he was saying. ‘We have to let them in.’ And his face was colourless and scared and she was shaking her head, but he simply kept repeating the same phrase over and over and she was lulled by the weird rhythm of his voice and then she felt exhaustion come over her and she slumped against him while he opened the door and let the two men in dark suits across the threshold.

And that is how she learned that her darling son was dead.

 

Later, the two men tried to tell her how Max had died but all Caroline could hear was a vague blur of voices. She had the overwhelming sensation of being too cold and then she went limp in Andrew’s arms, as if she no longer possessed enough energy to expend on even the most basic of tasks. He half-carried her to an armchair in the sitting room, upholstered in a flowered pale-green fabric and she turned her head and pressed her face into the back of it so that she would not have to look at anyone.

She breathed in the armchair’s comforting scent of hair and familiar sweat and felt the roughness of the material against her skin. She stared at a sun-faded lily stitched into the fabric, noticing the curl of the petals and the worn-away threads of the stalk. She did not cry but according to Andrew, she was whimpering – that was his word, ‘whimpering’ – like a broken-down dog limping to the side of a road.

Andrew managed to ask the relevant questions, to elicit the desired information, his voice flat and devoid of emotion, his hands placed carefully over the curve of each knee-bone. The two men said that Max had been on foot patrol in Upper Nile State, scanning the African countryside for pockets of resistance and ensuring the safety of the local villagers, when he stepped on a landmine. For some reason, they didn’t call it a landmine. They referred to it as an Improvised Explosive Device, or IED. An acronym. It seemed wrong, somehow, to reduce his death to three slight letters.

The landmine had exploded directly underneath Max’s feet. He was thrown backwards several metres, landing on his back and snapping his vertebrae. A two-inch piece of shrapnel sliced his chest in half. It lodged itself so close to his heart that the army doctor who got to him some time later could not risk extracting the metallic fragment in case it increased the bleeding. The doctor did what he could to staunch the flow of blood, pressing down with his own hands when they had run out of balled-up T-shirts and improvised bandages.

There would, she imagines, have been a few seconds when it could have gone either way: that fragmented moment that lies between the everyday and the nightmare. And then, in a faraway country, lying in a pool of his own blood, he stopped breathing. And that was it for Lance Corporal Max Weston, aged 21. That was it.

When the men had finished speaking, Andrew offered them a cup of tea. They said no, and she was relieved by that; relieved that they did not have to pretend or act normally.

Caroline had questions. So many questions.

What was Max’s last thought?

Do you have last thoughts when you are dying?

Would his life have flashed through his mind as one is told it does, or would there not have been enough time?

What would his face have looked like?

Was his skull still intact, the smooth dip into the nape of his neck that she loved so much?

Was he always meant to die at 21? Was the shadow of his death hanging over them all during those times they had together? Had they simply been too arrogant or too innocent not to pay attention to it?

Did he think of his mother at all?

Did he know how much she would miss him?

Did he know that he was her life, her everything?

And: without him, how could she go on?

 

In the days that followed, Caroline would spend hours sitting in the kitchen, a mug of cooling coffee cradled in her hand, thinking back to the time when Max was a child, searching for any clues she might have missed about the path his life took.

But the irony of it was that Max had never played with soldiers when he was little. Andrew had once given him a much-cherished set of tin figurines, inherited from his own father, in the hope that Max would carry on the Weston family tradition of reconstructing interminable historic battles on the bedroom carpet. When Max opened the musty cardboard box and inspected the soldiers’ minute Napoleonic uniforms greying with age, their bayonets blunted by the repeated pressure of other children’s excitable fingers, he was distinctly unimpressed. He was nine years old – the perfect age, one would have thought, for playing with action men.

‘You see, this chap here,’ Andrew said, lifting up a portly-looking gentleman on horseback, ‘is in charge of the cavalry.’ And he passed the toy to Max, who looked pensively at his father before taking it wordlessly in his hand.

‘Why is he on a horse?’

‘That’s how soldiers used to fight. In the old days. It meant they could move faster and cover more ground.’

Andrew looked up at Caroline and caught her eye and she could see he was delighted by Max’s tentative curiosity. He up-ended the box and the soldiers tumbled out in a metallic heap. Max looked on warily, the cavalryman still clasped in his hand. He was an extremely thoughtful child, in the original sense of the word: he would examine everything with great care before deciding what to do about it. Unlike most boys of his age, he was not given to spontaneous outbursts of random energy or unexplained exuberance. Rather, he would step back and evaluate what was going on and then, if it was something that interested him, he would join in with total commitment.

He was selective about the people and hobbies he chose to pursue but Max’s loyalty, once won, was never lost. From a very young age, he pursued his enthusiasms with utter dedication. After a school project on the history of flight, he spent hours making model aircrafts and would put each new design through a rigorous set of time trials in the hallway, recording the results neatly in a spiral-bound notebook. When he discovered a talent for tennis, he practised religiously, hitting a ball against the back wall of the garage until the daylight faded. He met his best friend Adam on the first day of primary school and although they did not immediately take to each other, they became close through a shared love of Top Trumps and were then inseparable, all the way to the end.

But in spite of Andrew’s early optimism, he never could get Max to play with those tin soldiers. For weeks, they remained in a haphazard heap on the floor – the cavalryman standing disconsolately on his own by the skirting board looking on with despair at the unregimented jumble of his men – until Caroline cleared the toy army away, putting them all back in the box which stayed, untouched, underneath the bed in Max’s room for years. In the days after his death, she took to going up to his room and sliding the box out. She liked to find the cavalryman and to hold him in her hand and to think that her son had also held him like this. It made her feel that she could touch Max again in some way, as if a particle of his skin might still have been lingering on the silvery-cool surface and they could make contact, even through the tangled awfulness of all that had happened. She sat for hours like that, feeling the time ebb gently away.

Perhaps Max was a gentle child partly because he did not have to compete for their attentions with other siblings. It had taken them years to conceive and then, just at the point where it had seemed to be hopeless, Max had made his presence known. The first time Caroline heard him cry after he was born, she instantly recognised it as the sound of her child. You could have put Max in an auditorium full of wailing babies and she would have known. Andrew made fun of her for that, but he couldn’t have understood. He wasn’t there at the birth – men in those days weren’t – and she felt afterwards that he had missed out. Deep down, there was still a part of her that felt Andrew was never as close to their son as she was. And now, as she sat in the kitchen chair, the lingering acridity of coffee in her mouth, she genuinely didn’t believe his grief could be as profound as her own.

 

The military was the last career either of them had imagined for Max. He grew into a popular, self-assured teenager, the kind of boy that seems to radiate light. He was good at everything: academically gifted, a brilliant sportsman and yet he retained an artistic temperament, a kindness around the edges that set him apart from his contemporaries. His friends all said so at the funeral.

He was made head boy even though he attended the local boarding school as a day-pupil and it was practically unheard of for a non-boarder to be asked. They were talking about Oxbridge, wondering whether to put him up for a scholarship, and then, without warning, Max announced over dinner one evening that he wasn’t going to university.

‘What do you mean you’re not going to university?’ said Andrew, his knife and fork hanging in mid-air.

Max laughed. He had this infuriating habit of defusing tension with laughter – it always worked because it made it quite impossible to be angry with him.

‘I mean just that, Dad. I’m not going. I don’t think it’s right for me.’

Caroline looked at her son and saw that, despite the twitch of a smile, he was totally serious. She saw, all at once, that he would not be dissuaded. She had always imagined Max would be a barrister or an academic, someone who wore his success lightly and yet who was all the more impressive for it; someone who was impassioned by what he did and yet not defined by it. She could see herself talking about him to her friends in that murmuring, boastful way that proud mothers have, dropping nonchalant mentions of his latest achievement into conversation. She had wanted everything for her son, for him to achieve all the things she was never able to.

But his announcement shattered that illusion in a matter of seconds. Caroline forced herself to adopt a lightness of tone.

‘Well, darling, what on earth do you intend to do? Sweep the streets?’

Max grinned and patted her hand. ‘Fear not, mother dear. I don’t intend to end up destitute or homeless.’

‘And before you get any ideas, let me tell you I certainly won’t be doing your stinky washing any more,’ she said, punching him lightly on the arm. Max squinted with pretend pain. ‘Ow!’ He grinned. ‘Mum, you don’t know your own strength.’

She laughed. Then she saw Andrew out of the corner of her eye, his face set in rigid lines of worry and disapproval. She wanted to reach out to him, to rest her hand on his arm and tell him it was going to be all right. But she felt torn. She did not want Max to feel she was taking sides. So she waited.

‘What are your plans, Max?’ Andrew asked after a while.

‘I thought I’d join the army.’

There was a stunned silence, broken only by the sound of Max chewing on a piece of steak.

Andrew put down his knife and fork.

‘The army?’

Max nodded. He pushed his unfinished dinner to one side, the plate still heaped high with potatoes and limp green beans. The butter from the fried mushrooms was congealing at the edges, like wax.

‘Where on earth did you get that idea from?’ asked Andrew. Caroline looked at her son and noticed his eyes getting darker. She didn’t want there to be a scene.

‘We never realised you were interested in the military,’ Caroline said, trying to be conciliatory. It seemed to work. Max’s shoulders relaxed. He was still wearing his tatty brown denim jacket for some reason. Perhaps he had been on his way out somewhere – he had an incredibly active social life – but the brown bagginess of the material combined with his uncontrollable mop of hair gave him the air of an enthusiastic teddy bear. She had to stop herself from reaching out and pushing the floppy strands of blond hair away from his forehead.

‘It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while,’ he said. ‘I know it’s not what you wanted or expected for me and I’m sorry for that, but you’ve always taught me that it’s important to do what you love –’

‘Within reason,’ Andrew interjected.

‘OK, well, I know I’m good at schoolwork and exams –’

‘You’re more than “good”, Max. You’re academically gifted. Your teachers are talking about Oxbridge.’

‘Dad, please let me finish. I might be good at school but I don’t love it.’

‘What do you love?’ Caroline asked.

‘I love being part of a team. I love sports and being captain of rugby and people respond to me, Mum, they do. I’m a good leader. I like that about myself. But most of all I like the thought of doing something that counts. That really, truly counts for something.’

‘Oh come on, Max,’ said Andrew. ‘Wanting to make a difference is not the same thing as offering yourself up to get killed.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Max looked at them both steadily, still slouched on the table, his chin propped on his hand as if this were the most casual discussion in the world.

Neither Caroline nor Andrew knew what to say to that.

‘How can you truly change anything unless you’re willing to die for it?’ Max asked and it sounded like something he had heard, a phrase to be played with like a picked-up pebble.

‘Well, that’s very philosophical of you, Max, but I don’t think you know what you’re talking about . . .’

‘Have you thought of going to university first and then making a decision?’ Caroline suggested. ‘At least then you can leave your options open.’

But she could tell, even as she was mouthing the words, that there was nothing either of them could do to change his mind. There was something about the way Max was talking, something about the utter certitude with which he met his father’s eye, that made Caroline realise he thought he had found his vocation. She had never heard him so determined.

They found out later that a serving officer had been to speak at the school, invited by the politically correct careers department who were no doubt keen to introduce the pupils to a representative cross-section of society. In the same month, the school also hosted talks by a high court judge and the home affairs editor of a national newspaper. For whatever reason, Max was not enthused by what these two had to say. It was the army officer who inspired him and, as with the model airplanes and tennis practice and as with Adam, his best friend, Max had given himself over entirely to the idea of becoming a soldier and would remain loyal to it until he died.

 

To Caroline’s surprise, Elsa gave her unequivocal backing to Max’s decision. Part of her wondered whether her mother-in-law was doing it deliberately, to show her up for her failings, to show her that she had never deserved the privilege of being Max’s mother or Andrew’s wife.

Elsa’s phone call came on a weekday morning, when she must have known Andrew would be at work. Caroline immediately assumed her brightest telephone manner, obscurely flattered by the fact Elsa had chosen to speak to her and her alone. Normally, she would only have gone through the motions with Caroline – how are you, how’s Max, how’s the garden, what are you having for supper, that kind of thing – until, after a reasonable interlude, she could ask to speak to Andrew, as if Caroline were simply some sort of conversational gatekeeper that had to be got through. But on this day, it was different.

‘Caroline, it’s Elsa,’ she said, even though the kitchen telephone had already flashed up with her number.

‘Hello, Elsa. How are –’

‘You simply must allow Max to join the army,’ she said, cutting in. ‘He’s told me all about it.’

‘Max has told you about it?’ Caroline asked, incredulous. When had he done that?

‘Yes, he called me last night and he says you and Andrew are opposed to it.’

Caroline felt her shoulders tense. ‘We’re not opposed,’ and a note of defensiveness crept in to her voice.

Elsa backtracked. ‘No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that. What he said was that you were trying to be supportive but he could tell your heart wasn’t in it.’

‘Well, Elsa, I don’t think that’s so surprising.’

Her mouth was dry. She disliked the idea of Elsa currying favour with Max, of exploiting a momentary lapse in her judgement. She disliked the thought of the two of them being close, forming an alliance that excluded her.

‘No, of course not,’ Elsa said. ‘I’m sure it must be very difficult to think of your son in that kind of danger but Caroline, you must realise . . .’ And the next words were so surprising, Caroline was not at first sure she had heard them correctly. ‘You must realise that young men need to fight. They need to get it out of their system.’

Caroline was so taken aback that she did not think to question then why Elsa said it. It seemed such a curious statement of fact from an elderly lady whose only son was an accountant. What could she possibly know about a young man’s need to fight?

Elsa carried on talking. ‘I’m worried that if Max doesn’t do this, he’ll end up feeling he’s never proved himself. He’ll take it out on someone or something else. He’ll make stupid decisions. He won’t want to be thought of as a coward.’

‘But . . .’

‘There, I’ve said enough,’ Elsa said, resuming her customary briskness. ‘I’m sure you think this is none of my business, Caroline, but for reasons I can’t go into, I feel very strongly about this.’ And then she put the phone down.

Caroline did not tell Andrew about the conversation but she soon came to realise that unless she showed Max her wholehearted support, she would risk pushing him away. He would seek out other friends, people who were more sympathetic to his ambitions – people like Elsa. The thought of this scared her. She did not want to lose him. So she gave Max her blessing. In time, Andrew had followed.

There was no stopping Max after that. He signed up to 1 Rifles, part of the 12 Mechanised Brigade based in Bulford and when his parents went to Wiltshire for his passing-out parade after thirty-eight weeks’ basic training, he stood proud and bold in front of them, his hair shaved short, his shoulders broad and bulked-out underneath the uniform and Caroline wore a bright red hat and Andrew wore a dark grey suit and they clapped along with all the other parents and smiled and flashed their digital cameras and shook their heads in shared disbelief at how grown-up their children seemed. Max, surrounded by friends, his tired eyes gleaming, was in his element.

She has a photograph from that day of the two of them, taken by Andrew. In it, Max is laughing, his handsome head tilted backwards. He has his arm around her and Caroline remembers that the stiffness of his uniform made his movements unnaturally heavy. She has her hand on his chest, lightly resting just below his heart and her lipsticked mouth is stretched into a smile that manages to be both joyful and anxious. But Max . . . well, Max looks wonderful.

Sometimes, now, Caroline will see other bereaved families on the evening news who have been trotted out for the television cameras by the Ministry of Defence and they look like half-people, their ghostly outlines blurred from the ghastliness of their grief. They look slumped and shattered, shuffling forwards as if their spines are sagging, grey-faced and shaken and not quite comprehending the all-encompassing reality of what they have just been told. Often, these families will have a statement that they wish to read out. Most of the time, this statement will contain a line about how, in the midst of this terrible tragedy that has engulfed them, they take comfort from the knowledge that Paddy or Niall or Ian or Geoff or Ben died ‘doing what they loved’.

Perhaps, Caroline thinks, it should give her succour now to think that Max died doing something he loved so much. But it doesn’t. It makes her angry that he chose to put himself in danger. It makes her angry that no matter how much she loved him, it wasn’t enough, that he needed something else. It makes her angry that he’s dead. And, above anything else, it makes her angry that she was too gutless to stop him.

Because, after all, what is the point of a mother if she cannot protect her only child?

 

His body – what there was of it – was flown back on a military plane. They were driven up to RAF Lyneham in a plush black Mercedes provided by the army and although they held hands in the back of the car, Caroline felt completely separate from her husband. She rested her head against the window, watching the motorway service stations skidding by, the spindly trees caked in exhaust fumes, the dull, overcast sky that seemed to stretch for ever in a uniform pale brushstroke, and she could feel nothing. She was numb, empty, hollow.

‘You OK?’ asked Andrew, turning to look at her with dark-circled eyes.

She didn’t answer. She tried to nod her head but it felt like a lie.

Once they got there, they lined up with the other bereaved parents in a surreal sort of welcoming committee. One of the mothers, a thin streak of a woman with badly cut hair, smiled at Caroline and then started crying so that for a moment it looked as though her face had been split into two halves in a game of consequences.

Three coffins covered in Union flags were carried out of the plane’s hull in slow succession, each one held aloft on the shoulders of six uniformed men who walked with respectful sombreness across the tarmac. It was very windy and Caroline’s hair kept slapping across her face.

The woman who had smiled at her was now crying uncontrollably, segments of a balled-up paper tissue in both hands. Her husband had his arm around the woman but kept looking straight ahead, his gaze masked, two thick wrinkle-lines etched from the corners of his mouth down either side of his chin.

Andrew’s arms were crossed. His head was angled to one side so that she could only just make out the pinkish trace of a shaving cut on one side of his cheek. A tear, translucent and slippery as a slug’s trail, was falling down his face. Caroline was surprised to see it there and she realised that, until now, she had never once seen Andrew crying.

The sight of him – vulnerable but trying not to be for her sake – moved her. She held out her gloved hand and he took it, gratefully. But then, with her hand in his, she started to feel trapped, as if she were betraying something, as if to be thinking of anyone else but Max in this moment was a form of disloyalty. For so long, she had relied on Andrew to be her rock. But now, she did not want him near her.

For her part, Caroline had no tears. She found that her grief was so vast it blanked everything else out. It was as though she were in the middle of a storm, perfectly calm at its epicentre but looking outwards at the whirling mayhem, the engulfing waves and thunder-split skies, the spiralling madness of normality ripped apart at the seams.

As she watched the soldiers carrying the coffins across the tarmac, she found herself remembering – of all things – the time she took Max to have his warts treated with liquid nitrogen at the hospital. He was 10 and his middle finger had bubbled up, the skin becoming hardened and nodular. None of the over-the-counter wart treatments worked, so they had driven one morning to the hospital, Max sitting in the front passenger seat, holding his finger up to the light to examine it better.

‘Why can’t I keep my wart?’ he said in his plaintive, inquiring way.

‘Because it’s contagious.’

There was an effortful silence as Max considered this.

‘What does contagious mean?’

‘It means . . .’ she pondered how best to describe it. ‘It means other people can catch them.’

‘Like a ball?’

‘No, like the flu.’

That seemed to satisfy him and he was very brave with the doctor, pressing his hand down on to the table as he was told, trembling only the tiniest bit when the liquid nitrogen was applied with the tip of a cotton bud. But Caroline could tell it hurt because he blinked quickly three times which was exactly what he had done two summers previously after fracturing his elbow falling off his new bicycle.

As they walked to the hospital car park, she asked him whether it had hurt.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know how it felt.’

She looked at him, surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It felt really hot but it also felt really cold and I couldn’t work out which it was. It hurt too much to know.’

Eleven years later, watching him come back to her in a box and a body-bag, that was how it was for Caroline: too painful to know what she was feeling.

 

The casualty visiting officer, a whey-faced woman called Sandy, told them that the army would pay for Max’s funeral. She told them this as if it were a great favour.

‘So you and Mr Weston won’t have to worry about any of that,’ she said, with a sympathetic expression that looked as if it had been ordered from a catalogue of necessary human emotions. Caroline was in the middle of making her a mug of tea. Instead of answering, she asked: ‘Do you take sugar?’

‘Yes, two please.’

Two sugars, thought Caroline, how common. She had stopped taking sugar years ago after Elsa had commented, devastatingly, on her ‘terribly sweet tooth’.

Still, Caroline thought to herself as she stirred the loose leaves into the pot, there was no accounting for taste.

She brought Sandy’s tea to the table. They were sitting in the kitchen, in the extension they’d had built after Max left for his training in Bulford. It had sliding windows that opened on to the garden and the light that day was streaming through, showing up the dusty streaks and cobwebs that Caroline hadn’t got around to cleaning from the glass. You couldn’t see the Malvern Hills from the kitchen but you could feel their presence, crouching like cats across the horizon.

Andrew, sitting across from Caroline with a file of papers in front of him, nodded at the officer absent-mindedly and made a note of something on the uppermost sheet of typed A4. Sandy was looking at her expectantly, clearly worried that Caroline wasn’t taking anything in. ‘The army will pay for the funeral, for everything,’ she emphasised, enunciating each word with extra care.

Something about the way she spoke, in that patronising, slow voice used by teachers when a child is failing to grasp an elementary fact, made Caroline snap.

‘Am I meant to be grateful for that?’ she said. Andrew looked at her cautiously.

‘The army will pay for his funeral? Well, that’s terribly good of you,’ Caroline continued, her voice squeezed tight. ‘How kind. Still, I suppose it’s the least you can do given that you were the ones who killed him.’

Sandy coughed uneasily. Andrew reached across the table and put his hand over Caroline’s. She snatched it away.

‘They are doing the best they can, Caroline,’ he said in a level voice.

She stared at him. She could not understand why he insisted on being so reasonable.

‘They killed our son.’

He shook his head. ‘No, darling, no they didn’t.’

‘They sent him there.’ Caroline could hear her words getting higher and more frantic. He had never listened to her, ever. He had never believed her opinions were worth having. She felt that she had to shout, to be louder than he was, just to make him hear what she was saying. ‘They ordered him out on patrol so that he could step on a fucking landmine!’

The swear word sliced through the room. Sandy put her mug of tea down carefully on a coaster.

‘Mrs Weston, I didn’t mean to . . .’

‘Don’t . . .’ she said. And then, more quietly, almost apologetic: ‘I’m sorry, but you have no idea.’

She stood up with such a jolt that the chair toppled over and clattered against the floor.

‘Caroline,’ Andrew said. ‘Calm down.’

It was those words that tipped her over the edge. Arms crossed, she dug her fingernails into the fleshy part of her bicep, to stop herself from letting go, to remind herself that she must act appropriately. But inside, she imagined lifting up her mug and hurling it at the wall. It would shatter on impact and spray the room with porcelain shards. She imagined a brown trickle of tea streaming down the paintwork and gathering in a pool at the skirting board.

But instead, she swallowed her anger and placed the mug carefully on the draining board by the sink. Then she walked out of the room, more briskly than she intended, and through the hallway and then to the front door and on to the street where she walked and walked and walked until she could no longer feel the soles of her feet. She was scared by her own fury, by the uncontrolled nature of it. When she came back, several hours later, she had no key. She had to ring the doorbell and when Andrew let her in, he took her in his arms and held her close. She should have felt relief. Instead what she felt was resentment.

 

‘Do we have to go through with this?’ she asked Andrew when they were sitting next to each other on the sofa, sifting through possible funeral readings. The vicar had given them a slim paperback volume of elegies, a gesture that had initially seemed macabre but that later proved to be extremely useful. They had already decided on one of the poems to read. Something about not grieving the life that was lost but celebrating how it had been lived.

‘I’m sorry?’ Andrew looked at her, vaguely. ‘You mean choose the readings?’

‘No, I mean the whole thing. The funeral . . .’ she drifted off. ‘All those people.’

Caroline did not like the thought of saying goodbye. Everyone spoke about how important it was to achieve ‘closure’ but she knew that she would never be able to let go; that any notion of closing the door on her son was unthinkable, almost heretical. She knew that they had to bury him and that proper procedures needed to be observed but at the same time she felt uncomfortable – sending out the endless emails to his friends and making those nasty little phone calls to distantly connected relatives – that she had to share Max with so many others who did not love him anywhere near as much as she did.

Andrew reached across and cupped her chin with his fingers. His hand felt cold.

He was still able to carry out the unthinking gestures of the everyday in a way that Caroline wasn’t: the smile for the postman; the steady hand for his morning shave; the brush of a chair surface before he sat down. She wanted to shake him. And yet he could not see it.

‘Of course we need to have a funeral, Caroline.’

He spoke tetchily, the sentence heavy with tiredness. Neither of them had been sleeping. They twisted under the duvet, their minds contracting in the darkness, willing the night to be over. Then, when it was – when the blank, white sunlight had once again slipped through the curtains like a taunt – they emerged with their eyes puffy and black, remembering all over again; the temporary grace that came with a snatched half-hour of unconsciousness, immediately stained by the inevitable spillage of knowledge.

And Andrew would simply roll over and kiss her chastely on the cheek, as if it had been just another normal night’s sleep.

Perhaps, she thought, it was his way of coping. But that didn’t make it any easier to live with.

Andrew held her hand for a few seconds longer and then withdrew it. He picked up the book of poems and started to leaf through it, pretending that his attention was absorbed. After a few seconds, he cleared his throat.

‘I know this is hard for you . . .’ he started and even that expression – ‘hard for you’ – made her cross. To Caroline, it seemed merely the sort of thing one said in a conversation about the difficulties of finding a reliable builder or locating a convenient parking space. It was not something you said about your son’s death. It was not something you said when your world had collapsed. ‘But it’s hard for me too and we’ve got to get through this together, as best we can.’

She shook her head and moved away from him towards the edge of the sofa. ‘You don’t understand, Andrew.’

‘I do understand, Caroline. I understand very well indeed.’ He stopped. ‘I lost a son too.’ His voice quavered and he fell silent. After a while, he exhaled, slow and long. He stood and went upstairs. She could hear the sound of a bath running.

But whatever he said, Caroline kept coming back to the same conclusion: she did not believe that Andrew could possibly have felt Max’s death as deeply as she did. The two of them had been so close. Mother and son. Right up until the end.

She remembered the day Max got his A-Level results (straight As in History, English and Chemistry), when he went out in Worcester to celebrate with his friends. A group of them came back to the house in the evening – they were meant to have gone clubbing but couldn’t get in because some of them were wearing trainers. Andrew and Caroline had just finished dinner and were watching the news when they heard the unmistakable sounds of cheerful drunkenness – the exaggerated shushing, the clomping, irregular footsteps, the clatter of cutlery and plates as they tried to make sandwiches from what was left in the fridge.

‘Sounds like they’re back,’ Andrew said, hitting the mute button on the remote control.

‘I thought they were going to be out until the early hours,’ she said, picking up the packet of After Eights they had been working their way through. ‘I suppose I’d better go and see what damage they’re doing.’ She smiled: part of her simply wanted an excuse.

Andrew reached up and took her free hand in his.

‘I shouldn’t bother,’ he said, patting the sofa cushion. ‘Why don’t you relax? They can look after themselves.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’ She leaned down and kissed the top of Andrew’s head, inhaling the musky fragrance of his shampoo undercut with something else, a scent that was indefinably his. ‘I’ll be back in a minute. Why don’t you go on up?’

Andrew didn’t respond.

As soon as Caroline walked into the kitchen there was a chorus of whooping and catcalls.

‘Mrs Weston! Dudes, dudes, keep quiet. It’s Max’s Mum!’ She laughed, finding it funny in spite of herself. There were five of them slumped around the kitchen table in various states of inebriation. Max was standing at the sink, filling up a pint glass with water, expression bright, his hair tousled.

‘Where did you get that glass, Max?’ she asked.

He turned to look at her and laughed. ‘The pub, I think.’ His friends disintegrated into hysterics as if this were the most comically insightful epigram anyone had ever uttered.

‘OK, well listen, I just wanted to plead with you to keep the noise down –’

‘Yeah, guys, guys, guys, shhhhhhh!’

‘– because we do have neighbours –’

A couple of them started giving an out of tune rendition of the theme tune to the Australian soap at this point, ‘– so if you could try and be a little bit considerate, that would be great.’

Caroline looked over at Max, still standing by the sink, sipping his water. ‘Now, would any of you like something to eat?’

‘Mum, honestly, you don’t need to bother.’

‘It’s no bother,’ she said, wanting to stay in the room as long as possible. ‘You shouldn’t be drinking on empty stomachs.’

So she knocked up a round of fry-ups, the sound of sizzling eggs mingling with good-humoured banter, and when they had eaten their plates of food, leaving behind butter-yellow slicks of grease, they became quieter, more considered. The air hung thickly with the smell of fried bacon.

She felt a minor sense of triumph at having handled the situation so well. She had never enjoyed this kind of relationship with her parents. Her mother had been a lousy cook, forever sending Caroline down the road for fish and chips, with a saveloy on Fridays for her Dad. She could still smell the grease, clinging to her hair, still taste the tart tang of vinegar at the back of her throat. Once, when Caroline was seven, her parents had not come home from work as usual. She’d gone to bed scared, without washing. They’d rolled in at midnight, reeking of booze, and forgetting that she’d had to fend for herself.

‘We thought Kathy was babysitting –’ her mother had protested. ‘Ah well, no harm done, was there? You’re a big girl now.’

It was Andrew who’d taught her that wasn’t normal.

‘Mum, can we smoke?’ Max’s voice brought her up short. The vision of her mother disappeared. She shivered. He came up and put his arm around her and his face had that special pleading expression that he did so well.

‘No, Max, you know your father doesn’t like it.’

‘We’ll open the French windows.’ Five pairs of eyes looked up at her from the kitchen table in expectation, like willing Labrador puppies.

She hesitated. ‘Weeeell –’ She knew Andrew hated the fact that Max smoked. He hit the roof when he discovered a packet of Marlboro Reds in Max’s sock drawer and since then had expressly forbidden their son ever to light up in the house or anywhere near it. But Caroline also knew that Max still snuck in the occasional cigarette at the foot of the garden.

Sometimes she joined him there and shared the illicit pleasure of a few drags. It made her feel good, like she was young again and doing all the things that she should have done when she was 18. She could quite understand why Max would enjoy the instant, head-numbing hit of tobacco. And really, what harm would it do just this once?

‘If you open all the doors and the windows . . .’

Max, scenting victory, gave her a rough kiss on the cheek. ‘Thanks, Mum. You’re a legend.’

His friends grinned at her. ‘Yeah, thanks, Mrs Weston. That’s really cool of you.’

‘And part of the deal is that you have to give me one too.’

So they sat there, smoking in the kitchen until the sky was studded with streaks of daylight and then Caroline passed out sleeping bags and duvet covers and went upstairs to bed. She slipped in beside Andrew, trying to curve herself round him like a bracket at the end of a sentence, but he shifted on to his front and buried his head in the pillow. She could feel, without anything having to be said, that he was annoyed with her.

Andrew was distant for days after that. She would ask him what was wrong and he would do his usual thing of shrugging and saying, ‘Nothing, why?’ and so she left it. In the early days of being with Andrew, Caroline had felt so reliant on him, so eager to please and to be taught how to behave. But when they had Max, the need for this had ebbed. She had found confidence in being a mother, a confidence she had never previously imagined she possessed. In those long, hazy summer weeks after his A-Level results, while Max was preparing for army life and his mates were getting ready for university or gap years, their home became an impromptu hang-out for anyone who happened to be passing. Caroline got used to returning from the weekly shop to be greeted by a motley assortment of overgrown schoolboys, their limbs sprawled in every direction, munching crisps and leaving crumbs on the carpet, swigging bottles of beer and talking loudly above a hailstorm of thumping pop music. For all that they tried to be recalcitrant teenagers, Max’s schoolfriends were always unfailingly polite. When her presence registered, the stereo system would be muted and everyone seemed to shift in their seats, backs straightening automatically until someone spoke.

‘Hi, Mrs Weston, hope you don’t mind, we were just . . . you know . . .’

And Caroline would smile because she was never as cross as she should have been. In fact, she was delighted to find them there. She loved hearing the house reverberate with noise. She loved making them snacks, collecting empty bottles, playfully swatting away feet from the furniture as if it mattered. She loved how happy it made Max. She loved feeling so needed.

‘My Mum would never be as laid-back as this,’ said Max’s best friend Adam in the midst of one particularly raucous afternoon. He was helping her load the dishwasher and Caroline looked at him bent over the sink, rinsing each plate with such care it hardly needed to be cleaned.

‘Your Mum is a much more sensible lady than I am, Adam,’ she said but she didn’t mean it.

He laughed and turned round. He was as tall as Max – well over six feet with a shocking mop of bright red hair and freckles that ran all the way down to his clavicle. When he smiled, it creased up the whole of his face.

‘Well, we all really appreciate it, Mrs Weston.’

‘Adam! I’ve been telling you to call me Caroline for bloody years.’

He blushed and she knew that she had embarrassed him so she told him to leave the rest of the washing-up to her and he strode out of the kitchen with the uneasy gait of a man who has not yet grown into his body.

In spite of herself, there was part of Caroline that rejoiced in the realisation that she had the power to make a boy blush.

And then Max went to Bulford and they didn’t see much of him for weeks on end. It was difficult for Caroline to get used to his sudden absence after a whole summer of tripping over his shoes. The house became enveloped in the silence of it, a lack of sound so noticeable, it seemed as loud as thunder.

She was mildly depressed for a while after Max left. She went with increasing frequency to the bottom of the garden to steal a cigarette. She had taken to buying the odd pack of Marlboros, just to kid herself that he was still around. He phoned a couple of times, but his calls were sporadic and only ever lasted for a few minutes on a crackly line. He began to speak with the sort of professional jocosity that the military seemed to encourage in its recruits, never really saying anything much apart from the fact that he was enjoying himself.

‘OK folks, I’d better go,’ he would say at the end of a conversation.

‘All right, Max,’ Andrew replied from the kitchen phone.

‘Love you,’ she would say, sitting upstairs on the side of their bed, trying her best not to show her own emotion.

‘Yep, bye, Mum. Bye, Dad.’

Then there would be the click of a receiver placed back on the hook and both Andrew and Caroline would stay on the phone for a few seconds longer, listening to each other’s breathing.

‘You still there, darling?’

‘Yes, Andrew.’

‘He loves you too, you know.’

‘Yes. I know.’

Andrew was patient with her, sensing how hard she was taking it. He was quietly reassuring, never demanding her cheerfulness, always solicitous and affectionate. He did little things, like renting a video of a film Caroline had wanted to watch for months and surprising her with it. He took her out for dinner a couple of times and said she looked lovely. He held her hand across the table and talked about their future plans, about their shared past.

They went on holiday, just the two of them, to a self-catering place let out by a golfing acquaintance of Andrew’s in the South of France. They had a blissful week in clear sunshine just along the coast from Cannes. They spent the days reading books on the beach on rented sunloungers, ordering salade niçoise for lunch from the uniformed attendants. In the evenings, they would go out for supper. Caroline tried lobster for the first time. Her face grew burnt, then the redness turned to brown and a spray of freckles appeared across her nose. They talked more than they had done for years and Caroline felt the glimmer of that first excitement, of youthful love, re-ignite in the pit of her stomach.

For a while, everything had seemed to be getting back on track. But then, when they returned, Elsa got ill and much of Andrew’s time was taken up with sorting out her affairs, arranging for Mrs Carswell to come in and care for his mother on a daily basis.

And then, Max died, and nothing was ever the same again.

 

The night before the funeral, they invited as many of Max’s friends as they could to the house for a few drinks. They thought it would be a way of making everything a bit less formalised and they wanted the funeral to be as much for his friends as it was for the military brass.

They had asked them over from 5pm but no one turned up until 6pm, at which time there was a gentle trickle of his army friends – big, hulking men with young faces and careworn eyes, their skin creased with experiences they were too young to have endured. Some of them, like Pete, a signals officer who’d been on tour with Max when he died, Caroline had met before. Others, she didn’t recognise but they all came up to her and introduced themselves, shaking her hand strongly, saying how sorry they were but she could tell they were deliberately not thinking about it too much, as though it would be unlucky to dwell too much on death.

With awful timing, the news that morning had been dominated with the story of a South Sudanese man who was being trained by the British Military Police and had turned against them, firing his weapon in the compound just as five of his teachers were settling down for a cup of tea. Four of them died; the fifth was in a critical condition in hospital. And there these boys were, stuck in the middle of a mess that was not of their own making.

The army men made straight for the drinks table. Caroline noticed a couple of them downing swift tumblers of neat whisky before helping themselves to the cans of lager Andrew had bought from the cash and carry that morning. They drank and drank and drank and yet they never got drunk. The alcohol seemed simply to warm them up, to get them to a point where they could cope with normal social interaction.

Then, after about half an hour, Max’s schoolfriends arrived in a succession of large groups, taking comfort in numbers. They were much noisier, more boisterous than the others. It seemed, after a while, as if they had almost forgotten why they were there and the atmosphere of the house lifted with the sound of party chatter.

Caroline made a point of greeting all those that she knew by name and those that she didn’t with a shake of the hand. They had a book open on the cabinet in the hallway for people to sign.

‘Have you written in the book?’ she would ask, smiling tightly as though she were making small talk, her voice brittle. ‘You must. You really must.’ And she would give them a pen and press the book to them and stand there while they wrote. Some of them looked uncomfortable in her presence, unsure of what to say.

There was a man called Tim, an army colleague who had turned up in a badly fitting suit, clearly bought some years ago for a special occasion and not worn much since. His hair was shaved clean against his scalp, the stubble growth glinting in the soft light of the standard lamp. He had a wonky nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. His ears were misshapen and swollen. Caroline, recognising the injuries as the result of over-enthusiastic rugby tackles, asked him if he played and he grinned, showing a row of gold teeth along one side of his mouth. ‘Afraid so, Mrs Weston,’ he said. ‘And Max was always a fast little bugger. Couldn’t catch him.’ And then he caught himself laughing and his smile vanished as quickly as chalk wiped off a blackboard. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’ She nodded. She never knew how to respond to this, although she appreciated hearing it. It was important to Caroline to know that other people were sorry. The worst was for someone to make no reference to it, simply to carry on as though nothing had happened, as though she might forget if the person she was speaking to did not mention it. Like those strangers she met who, when they found out, would tell her that ‘time is a great healer’. She didn’t agree with that. Time meant simply that the actual event was further away so the shock of immediacy had subsided. The grief was still there, just as profound as it ever was.

Caroline didn’t expect Tim’s message to say much but when he passed the book back over and she read it, she saw that all he had written was: ‘The best die young.’ That was it. It was not an original thought, nor was it particularly poetically expressed and yet something about its very simplicity seemed to convey more emotion than any amount of flowery sentiment. The combination of Tim’s straightforward masculinity with this quiet, considered epitaph touched her more than she could have expressed. So she moved on, without being able to thank him in case her voice broke.

There were a lot of girls there too – shrieking, giggling, slips of femininity who were uncertain of how to act. To Caroline, they seemed so slight, so insubstantial in comparison to the army men. Max had been out with a few girls at school – light-hearted flings that would start at a party on Saturday night and seem barely to last till the end of the week – but no one remotely serious. Only once did he bring one of them home to meet his parents, a waif-like girl called Angelique with thin arms and long, raggedy blonde hair. Caroline had cooked lasagne for supper and Angelique had barely eaten her portion, instead lifting dainty forkfuls of salad into her mouth and chewing interminably. When Caroline had cleared the plates away, she had looked at her with a limpid gaze and said ‘Thank you, Mrs Weston, that was lovely,’ even though she had left more than she had eaten.

‘Ange has got a tiny appetite,’ Max had said. He had turned and grinned at her, placing his hand on top of hers, covering her slender fingers as if they needed warming up. Angelique had met his gaze and smiled and, in that moment, she seemed to change entirely and the coolness of her stretched, white skin had been infused with warmth.

That evening, before the funeral, Angelique was sipping on a glass of white wine, her shoulders hunched, her face pallid and smudged with too much eyeliner. She was wearing skinny jeans tucked into flat-soled boots and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt with ‘Kiss’ emblazoned across the front in white sequins. Her hair hung down to her chest, unbrushed and held back from her face by a thin, silver-plaited hairband. No one seemed to be talking to her so Caroline went over, using the condolence book as an excuse.

‘Hello, Angelique.’

She looked startled. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Mrs Weston. You remember me?’

Caroline noticed she had that habit of going up at the end of a sentence even when it wasn’t a question.

‘Yes, of course I do. You came for supper that time.’

She smiled, and again the whole shape of her face appeared to change.

‘I wondered if you wanted to sign this book . . .’ Caroline said, passing it over to her. Angelique didn’t take it. The two of them stood there, uneasily, for several seconds before Caroline closed the book and tucked it back under her arm.

‘It’s just . . .’ Angelique said. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say.’ She started to tremble, pulling the sleeve of her sweatshirt over her hand. ‘I’m not good at that kind of stuff. Max was always loads cleverer than I was, but he was so sweet, you know?’

Caroline tried to smile. ‘He would never look down on me. He, like, really cared. I miss him all the time. I thought he was stupid to join the army and we kind of stopped talking after he left. And I know I was never properly, like, his girlfriend and that he could do loads better than me.’ She gave a short, sharp snort of laughter. ‘I mean, I was sooo not in his league. But he was so, so . . .’ She let the sentence trail between them. ‘So sweet.’

Caroline did not want to hear any more. She walked away and left Angelique standing in the middle of the room with no one around her, cheeks wet and legs twisted around each other as if she were about to lose balance. She didn’t feel like offering the girl comfort. At that moment, she felt that she simply didn’t have enough of it to spare. Instead, she went to the kitchen, poured herself a neat tumbler of vodka and downed it in a single gulp. Andrew came in just as she was screwing the cap back on the bottle. He raised his eyebrows.

‘Dutch courage?’

‘Something like that,’ she replied.

He came across to Caroline and she could see that he was about to put his arms around her but something stopped him from doing so. He pulled back, cleared his throat and went to the sink to wash up some glasses. There were trays of untouched food still on the table – no one had seemed in the mood for eating – and she started to wrap some of it in cling-film. A joint of ham they had bought at Waitrose, its skin studded with cloves. A platter of smoked salmon blinis. A bowl of grated carrot salad that Caroline had stayed up late to make the night before. Looking at it all now, she was struck by how awful it was to have put on a spread. It seemed so wrong, as if they were celebrating something.

A strange, snuffling sound was coming from the sink and when Caroline turned towards it, she saw that Andrew’s shoulders were shuddering uncontrollably. The tap was still running but his hands hung immobile at the lip of the sink. His head was bowed. She knew that she should go to him, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t face it.

They had asked Adam to say a few words and when Caroline returned to the drawing room, she could see he had positioned himself with his back to the fireplace, one hand in his pocket, one hand holding a glass of wine as if he were about to make a toast. When she looked at him, she could still see the traces of the boy who used to play with Max in the garden, small legs spinning, knees grazed, cheeks red. He looked ill at ease in his suit, the sleeves marginally too long for his arms, and Caroline wondered whether he had borrowed it for the occasion from his father. The thought of that made her well up so that her contact lenses misted over. She had to blink back the tears so that she could see clearly again.

‘Excuse me,’ Adam said, his voice hoarse. ‘If I could have your attention for a few minutes.’

The chatter and the clink of glass subsided and Adam blushed deeply with the knowledge that everyone was looking at him, the redness filtering out from the tips of his ears and spreading across his face. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to stroke his hair back so that the tufts of it that always stuck out just above his sideburns would be smoothed down.

She felt a breeze against her side and realised that Andrew had come in from the kitchen to stand next to her. She gave him a quick smile of support. He smiled back and put his arm around her, giving her right shoulder a squeeze. And then Adam started to speak.

‘I’d like to start off with a question for all the ladies in the room,’ he said, his mouth curling up at the corners. There were some vague tittering sounds as people looked at each other, bemused. ‘Please raise your hands if you ever snogged Max Weston.’ The titters transmuted into louder guffaws and a male voice from the back of the room started cheering as if he were at a sporting match. Caroline froze. She could feel Andrew tense up beside her.

‘Come on, ladies, don’t be shy,’ said Adam, taking an enormous swig from his wine. That’s it, she thought, he must be drunk, no one will take any notice of him.

But then, slowly, the hands started going up, each contoured arm rising to the ceiling like a string trailing a helium balloon. Caroline could see Angelique tentatively raising her hand, the fingernails glossed with black nail varnish. All around her, girls seemed to be putting their hands up. At first, they looked at each other with vague embarrassment but then they began to smile and it seemed that their shared discomfort was turning swiftly into a badge of pride. As more and more girls identified themselves, Caroline began to feel faint. But she was aware, simultaneously, that people were scanning her face to gauge her reaction. She told herself that she must be a good sport and so she tried to smile, fixing her lips in place so that no one could see how horrified she actually was.

There were dozens of them: brunettes and blondes, blue eyes and brown, the blow-dried Pony Clubbers like Amelia – the blousy girl that lived down the road – and the drop-out, creative types with too much make-up and translucent skin, like the girl by the door whom she didn’t recognise with dyed red hair, her wrists weighed down with thick metallic bracelets. The girls seemed to have nothing in common, no defining feature that would enable Caroline to understand why Max had picked them. But the sheer number of them took her aback. She thought that she would have known if her son was out kissing a different woman every night, but apparently not. And not only that, but he seemed so, well, indiscriminate in his taste. How could she not have known? This Max – the man that Adam was describing – was not her Max at all.

‘I thought as much,’ Adam was saying. ‘In case any of us were in any doubt, here is the physical evidence that Max Weston was a legend.’ There were loud cheers and clapping. ‘I have many favourite memories of my mate Max,’ Adam continued. ‘He was always game for a laugh, always braver than I was. I knew him from the first day of primary school and I don’t think there was a single day that passed when Max didn’t do something that surprised me.

‘I remember once when we were teenagers and Max was staying over at my house, we climbed out on to the roof through the attic window. It was evening and the sun was just about to go down. We were having a cheeky beer –’ he broke off and winked. ‘And Max said to me – like, completely out of the blue – “I bet I can jump across to your next-door neighbour’s roof.” I was like, “Yeah, whatever, mate.” But then he stood up and, before I could stop him, he only bloody went and did it. It was a good six-foot gap and he cleared it easily. Just like that. And then, afterwards, when I asked him why he’d done it, Max just said “Why not?” ’

Adam’s voice started to go. He stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. ‘He might not have lived beyond the age of 21,’ Adam said, looking up, ‘but he achieved more than most of us will have done when we’re twice his age. So, here’s to my mate Max.’ He raised his glass and downed it in one. ‘To Max’ said the voices in the room, breaking into raucous applause as Adam stepped away from the fireplace.

Caroline remembered too late that she didn’t have a glass in her hand so she had to stand there, with a forced smile on her face while all the time she could feel her chest constrict. The room started to spin around her and she thought how odd that was, how she had always previously imagined it was the type of thing that happened only in films or books and never in real life.

‘Caroline?’ She heard Andrew speaking but could not find the words to reply. She felt herself being guided out into the hallway. ‘I think you need to sit down,’ he said and then he found a chair and asked someone to get her a glass of water and something to eat and he told her to put her head down between her knees until she felt better.

‘It’s all been too much for you,’ he said, stroking Caroline’s hair with a gentle, rhythmic motion that was strangely soothing. ‘They’ll start to leave soon and then I think you should have a 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.