Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff

truth. Nothing was clear now, because he could see all that he had spurned by not coming home and how much of him was here between these four walls. Everything was rooting him to the spot and taking away the power of speech. There was the fact that he knew the name of the village in northern Italy, and could even see that tiny, neat as a pin shop where he had stood outside, too big and clumsy to be allowed in, while she sat inside buying the glasses that she had put by every place on the table where he was nursing his drink. He knew why she set a table like this, when it was only for Barbara and Rae, two friends of hers from work, why she dressed up. It was what her mother did. He knew the exact components of her salad dressing – garlic, Dijon, salt, pepper, one part lemon to two parts olive oil – because it was her dad’s recipe. The weight of all these facts crushed down on his chest. But he said nothing and she just shook her head again and gave the lemon a hard squeeze.
    He knew he ought to be taking control of the situation and steering them both in the right direction. He knew what that direction was too – it should all end with him putting out his hand and saying he wanted to go to bed, and she would take it and help him off with his coat and take him upstairs. And then he would throw his clothes on the chair and lie down in the bed and she would come and they would lie side by side and after much effort of will he would reach over and put his arm around her and with more effort of will he would say he was sorry for not having been able to phone or give her any indication of where he had been. He could see the right path all right.
    â€˜Go upstairs and shave,’ she said. ‘They’ll be here in ten minutes.’
    He did as he was told, finding his shaving things put away beneath the sink, and their place taken on the shelf below the mirror by her cleansers and pads. He lathered himself up, averting his eyes from the eyes that met him in the mirror, and cut himself a few times.
    When he looked, she was leaning against the door-frame, watching how his old face came up clean as the razor peeled away the whiskers. He just kept on going, watching her out of the corner of his eye, when he went on to treat his cuts with the styptic pencil.
    He spoke her name to the mirror. ‘Elizabeth.’ Liz Drew as was. Eldest daughter of Bart and Carla Drew of Norwood, Massachusetts. ‘You’re kidding,’ she said, and her face lit up, when they met for the first time at a party in London and he told her that he was from Dedham, just up Route 1A. After all these years, she was still the girl most likely to succeed. Age had not dimmed her. She was still smiling out of her graduation picture. Not now, of course, but she could. He felt, in an absurd way, that it was to his credit that he hadn’t destroyed that in her.
    He could see Bart in that thick cardigan Carla knitted for him against the icy night air, sauntering down at Charlie’s side to the liquor store at the bottom of their road. They came back with enough stuff, as Bart put it happily, to launch a rocket to Mars, and they drank all of it. That was how Christmas should be, Carla said, when it was all over and he was on the floor beside her, picking that tree decoration stuff, the silver thread, out of the plush pile of her carpet.
    â€˜Charlie.’ He could hear Elizabeth whisper his name in the dark woods behind her parents’ house, when they were side by side on the path amid the feathery snow, the year they got married.
    â€˜Yes,’ she said. ‘Tell me,’ not there, not twenty-four, wrapped in a scarf against the cold, but here and forty-six, with her hair up and her earrings catching the light from the hall.
    â€˜I don’t know about this thing with Rae and Barbara,’ he said.
    She had the wry look on her face. ‘My war correspondent husband,’ she began, ‘the guy who gets shot at