Home Fires

Home Fires Read Online Free PDF

Book: Home Fires Read Online Free PDF
Author: Elizabeth Day
herself as beautiful before. Her shame dissipates, replaced by pride that Andrew wants to talk about her, wants to prove how much he cares in spite of his mother’s unconcealed belief that he could do better. ‘I’m incredibly grateful that she said yes.’ He winks at her and she is flooded with happiness. ‘So, here we are.’
    Elsa smiles, her lips stretched like a rubber band on the brink of snapping. ‘Well, that’s a charming story,’ she says, getting up in one swift, fluid movement. ‘Do please excuse me. I must go and check on the chicken.’
    After his mother has gone, Andrew gets up and comes across to Caroline, bending down to murmur in her ear. ‘She likes you,’ he says and Caroline is so surprised by this obvious lie that she laughs.
    ‘She thinks I’m common.’
    He shakes his head, bringing his face close to hers so that the tips of their noses almost touch.
    ‘No, she doesn’t.’
    ‘She thinks I look cheap.’
    ‘You look gorgeous. That’s what I think.’
    Caroline giggles, feeling the knot in her stomach relax.
    ‘She just takes a while to warm up,’ Andrew says. ‘That’s the way she is. Don’t worry so much.’
    He traces the curve of her cheek with his fingers. She thinks, not for the first time, that he must have had practice at this. He is ten years older than her, so it stands to reason he would have had other girlfriends; girls who were prettier, classier, cleverer than her; girls from good families who knew what a Chopin sonata was. But instead of feeling downcast by this, it makes her even more determined to please him, to keep his attention. She wants to be better than the lot of them. She wants to prove his mother wrong. She wants to love him more than he has ever been loved before. And she can do it. She knows she can. She just has to keep trying.

Elsa, 2010
    Elsa has been told by Mrs Carswell that she is going somewhere. She knows that she has been told this many, many times but still she cannot quite remember where it is she is meant to be going. If she could just reach out that little bit further, she thinks, if she could only stretch the thread of memory that tiny bit more, she would be able to grab hold of the elusive fact.
    She looks around her for clues and finds she is sitting in her customary armchair and there is a battered leather suitcase in the corner of the room, staring at her accusingly.
    Where am I going? she asks herself.
    Will the journey be long?
    What will happen when I get there?
    Much of Elsa’s life nowadays seems to be taken up with the thankless task of trying to remember things. It is as if she is trying to see something clearly through a frosted window – the outline is visible but the detail, the crucial sense of it, remains cloudily lost.
    She blames Mrs Carswell for this. Elsa is waging a secret war against her daily. She still calls her ‘the daily’, at least in her own mind, even though, for the last few months, she has been doing considerably more than simply cleaning the house. Mrs Carswell is a fat, red-cheeked publican’s wife wreathed in purposeful cheerfulness that Elsa finds especially irritating. It is Mrs Carswell’s briskness, tinged with condescension, that is so galling. It is always ‘How are we today?’ and ‘Shall we tuck this blanket in a bit? We don’t want to catch cold do we?’, always delivered with an inane grin, always accompanied by the rapid, forceful movements that make Mrs Carswell’s flesh rise and wobble like a baking cake. Elsa will sit there, the blanket now tucked in so uncomfortably tight it seems to cut off the circulation in her legs, and the resentment will rise silently within her until she becomes more and more furious and determined to say something.
    But she is never able to find the right words. Ever since she’d had that fall a while back, she has not been feeling herself. And then there had been a stroke – at least, that’s what she has been told; all she can remember is waking up
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