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Home Fires
Elizabeth Day
A stunning, delicate portrait of a family bookended by war, Home Fires explores the legacy of loss, the strictures of class and the long road to redemption.Max Weston, twenty-one, leaves for his first army posting in central Africa. What happens to him changes the lives of his family forever. At home, his parents struggle to cope. The overwhelming love Caroline has always felt for her only child is now matched by the intensity of Max's absence. The silence is broken by the arrival of Caroline's mother-in-law, Elsa, who at the age of ninety-eight can no longer look after herself. After years of living in fear of putting a foot wrong in front of this elegant, cuttingly courteous lady, finally, Caroline has the upper hand.
Copyright (#u87c53aff-a294-54c1-a407-d3d1962a57c6)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc in 2013
This eBook edition published by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © Elizabeth Day, 2013
Elizabeth Day asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008221737
Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008221744
Version: 2018-03-06
Praise for Home Fires (#u87c53aff-a294-54c1-a407-d3d1962a57c6)
‘Elizabeth Day writes with unflinching, responsible honesty’ Sadie Jones
‘It’s to Elizabeth Day’s credit that she turns her back on the conventional narrative to explore the realistic consequences of war and violence on the women who, to cite the song to which the novel’s title alludes, keep the home fires burning. Day chooses the tough option at every turn, with the result that the novel becomes a powerful and, at times, heartbreaking account of Caroline and Elsa’s inability to deal with their crises. The prose is crisp and forthright, particularly when Day is describing the variations of violence, although she has a piercing eye for a telling phrase or a poetic flourish’ Irish Examiner
‘Brilliant’ Viv Groskop, Red
‘Day is an empathetic observer. She is meticulous in teaching and dissecting each sentence her characters experience … Home Fires conveys a broader version of life with the claustrophobia of emotional repression’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
‘Day has created a compelling study of grief, not least the conflicting ways in which the bereaved may wish to remember the dead … A bold novel, shocking in what it confronts and also in its suggestion that love will, ultimately, survive trauma’ Daily Telegraph
For my grandparents, who wanted me to write stories.
Contents
Cover (#u814cc6cb-cdb2-5282-a0aa-81d794db66c8)
Title Page (#uc0884c4d-7f18-5b32-9411-1c173efde51f)
Copyright (#u80ebf8a8-1c57-5e19-8306-1f7b1bfdcbf5)
Praise (#u7e24012d-8cd8-59d0-9ff8-253010b02ee4)
Dedication (#u0ded79ca-fbd9-5722-abf2-bb64fd4d3f06)
Prologue (#ub7947ad3-4977-5a9a-a63d-6e2e52211e99)
Part I (#u4eef91ef-ec05-5e24-88f3-3e443192ff02)
Elsa, 1920 (#u1882fbba-b393-51b7-884d-6675ef2eed76)
Caroline, 2010 (#u6acf4216-7bbe-5a23-9ec7-578a3c89d8c3)
Elsa, 2010 (#ubcb1b4ea-bc4c-5cfb-bcf5-caf9e36d2ea4)
Andrew, 1989 (#uc1c6b399-487c-5416-810a-8fb3ec6006be)
Part II (#ue31aea73-2ccd-5696-849b-d2c4614031bc)
Caroline (#uaec1dcf8-6a1d-5027-989f-9e9c24fbb3b6)
Part III (#litres_trial_promo)
Andrew (#litres_trial_promo)
Elsa (#litres_trial_promo)
Elsa, 1919 (#litres_trial_promo)
Caroline (#litres_trial_promo)
Elsa (#litres_trial_promo)
Caroline (#litres_trial_promo)
Andrew (#litres_trial_promo)
Elsa, 1923 (#litres_trial_promo)
Caroline (#litres_trial_promo)
Elsa (#litres_trial_promo)
Caroline (#litres_trial_promo)
Max (#litres_trial_promo)
Andrew (#litres_trial_promo)
Elsa, 1936 (#litres_trial_promo)
Caroline (#litres_trial_promo)
Part IV (#litres_trial_promo)
Elsa (#litres_trial_promo)
Caroline (#litres_trial_promo)
Caroline, Andrew (#litres_trial_promo)
Elsa (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note on the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#u87c53aff-a294-54c1-a407-d3d1962a57c6)
The water is closing in.
Her limbs are heavy. Waterlogged like wool left to soak.
Slipping, sliding, she feels herself go.
She smiles.
Nothing to stop her from falling.
Not now. Not any more.
Part I (#u87c53aff-a294-54c1-a407-d3d1962a57c6)
Elsa, 1920 (#u87c53aff-a294-54c1-a407-d3d1962a57c6)
They have come to see the marching men.
She is holding her mother’s hand, her fingers clasped around the familiar firmness of palm, knuckle, skin. She clings to it, tightly.
Her mother has told her that she must not, for any reason, let go in case they lose each other in the crowd. On either side of her, people jostle for space. She can hear the swish of ladies’ dresses, the dry coughs and small exhalations. All around, there are legs and waists and shoes. She fixes her gaze on the back of a pale blue skirt directly in front of her, the heavy material gathered up in an old-fashioned bustle that sticks out as if it is a face, as though the skirt is talking to her.
If she cranes her head round, still holding on to her mother’s hand, she can just about make out the street, appearing here and there in between the gaps left by shifting adult limbs. She wishes she could see better. She is always wishing for more than she has. When her father came back from the war, it was one of the first things he noticed about her: that she was too impatient, that she should be quiet and meek and talk only when spoken to.
‘Bite your tongue, child,’ he would say, even though he had been away for years and was a stranger to her.
She stares through the crowd, trying to focus on the procession. Her mother has told her this is a solemn occasion.
Solemn.
She likes the sound of the word, dense and slippery on the tongue.
There is a quick movement to one side of the blue skirt, a shifting swirl of something that Elsa takes several seconds to make out. Squinting hard, she sees it is the brown-beige lacquer of a horse’s hoof. From her vantage point, she can make out the silvery glimmer of its shoe, a crescent shape nailed neatly into the curve of its foot. The horse walks forward. The road is coated with sand and when the horse’s hoof makes contact with the ground, it thuds gently, the impact blotted by the granular surface.
The pale blue skirt with the bustle moves to one side so that Elsa now has an uninterrupted view of a broad sweep of street. A black gun carriage, pulled by six dark horses, draws in front of her. One of the horses is more jittery than the others, bucking its head against the bridle, nostrils flaring and shrivelling as it walks past. The crowd is quiet and then there is a rustling and when Elsa looks up she realises that it is the noise of everyone simultaneously removing their hats.
Behind the horse-drawn carriage, several hundred men are marching. Their feet thump with simultaneous regularity on the ground and behind that noise, there is another, less definable sound of the clatter and jangle of metal. Thump, clatter. Thump, clatter. As they pass, she sees the colour of their uniforms changing like a spreading bruise: blue into green into gunmetal grey, the shade of a thundercloud.
The silence of the crowd presses down on her. She turns back, tilting up her head to reassure herself her mother is still there. When she sees her, Elsa notices that her mother’s eyes are glinting, that the tip of her nose has reddened. She is still holding Elsa’s hand but her fingers have loosened. She seems distant, swallowed up by the men and women to her left and right, as if she is no longer Elsa’s mother but simply a person among many others.
‘Mama?’ Elsa whispers.
Her mother bends down, leaning on the handle of her umbrella, bringing her lips level to Elsa’s ears. ‘Yes?’ Her voice is distant, unspooling.
‘Why are all the men wearing different colours?’
Her mother looks at her strangely. ‘The soldiers wear different uniforms,’ she says. ‘Some are in the army, as Papa was, but some are in the navy or the air force.’
Elsa nods. She recites the names in her head like a poem: army, navy, air force, army, navy, air force.
The men file on by.
It was their next-door neighbour Mrs Farrow who had suggested the trip to London.
‘They are bringing home an unknown soldier to bury,’ she said one afternoon, sitting by the bay window of the drawing room, backlit by the fading sunlight so that Elsa could make out the fuzzy outline of downy hairs across Mrs Farrow’s cheek. Elsa’s mother seemed distracted but before she could say anything, Clara the maid brought the tea tray in, tripping over the edge of the woven silk rug and almost sending the crockery spinning to the ground. She managed to right herself just in time but her cap slipped down her forehead, giving her the appearance of a skittish, one-eyed shire horse. She looked flustered, embarrassed. Elsa felt sorry for her.
Her mother sighed and raised her eyebrows. Mrs Farrow glanced away, politely.
‘Thank you, Clara,’ her mother said. ‘That will be all.’
Clara bobbed her head and mumbled something under her breath. She had often overheard her mother saying the war made it difficult to get good domestic staff. Perhaps, now it was over, Clara would go. She hoped not. She liked Clara.
Her mother did not immediately respond to what Mrs Farrow had said, but instead busied herself with the tea. Elsa watched as she poured the milk, a growing pool of white leaking to the edges of the cup.
Eventually, her mother spoke. ‘Does it not strike you as being –’ she seemed to be searching for the right word, ‘a little morbid?’
Mrs Farrow laughed. ‘Alice, the whole war was morbid. I think the burial is intended as a symbol.’
‘A symbol?’ She passed the cup of tea across. There was a plate of cucumber sandwiches on the tray, the bread springy and thinly sliced, the translucent green discs slipping out like wet tongues. Elsa looked at them longingly. She was always hungry and hated herself for it. Her father said it was unladylike to display one’s appetite so nakedly.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Farrow continued, placing her cup and saucer on the lacquered side table. ‘All those poor people who were denied a funeral, who did not have a chance to grieve for their fathers or brothers or sons.’ She dipped her head. There was a small pause. ‘Or their husbands,’ she said, quietly.
The thought seemed to float between the two women, a leaden shadow that redistributed the weighted atmosphere of the room.
‘But of course, Alice, it is entirely up to you,’ Mrs Farrow said. ‘I merely thought that, as I intended to go and take Bobby with me, you and Elsa might wish to come along too.’ She stopped, before adding rapidly, ‘and Horace of course.’
