The Soldier's Wife (12 page)

And then something almost miraculous had happened. Isabel's instinctive panic had resolved itself into an unheard-of focus and energy. She had found herself in the circle with an equally anxious girl who represented no threat, and she had caught the ball, smoothly and without fluffing, every time it came her way, and had put it neatly and cleanly into the net on four separate occasions. She had scored four times. Four. Her side had won, four nil. At the end of the game she had bungled nothing and achieved everything. On the way back from the netball courts to the school buildings, several people had banged her on the shoulder and said nice, congratulatory things, and Libby Guthrie, running past, had even turned to smile and give her a thumbs up. It was the first smile Libby had thrown her way since, since – well, since
then
.

Isabel stood in the shower, eyes closed, drenched in
thankfulness. When she was alone, after, she would text Mum and say with appropriate nonchalance that she had done quite well at netball that day and people seemed to like her a bit, in consequence. She turned so that the water – never hot or fierce enough – could run down her back. Apart from texting Mum, it was going to be quite important not to show anyone that she felt her triumph that afternoon had brought her any kind of salvation. She mustn't mention it, or even look at all pleased. She must compose herself with all the quiet apology she had been trying to convey recently, and if anyone said anything, or was friendly, she mustn't leap on them like Beetle if offered a titbit, all wagging enthusiasm. She must, she resolved, just let any rehabilitation the afternoon had brought happen of its own accord.

She turned off the shower. In the next cubicle two people had obviously been showering together, which was strictly forbidden. She recognized their voices – Libby Guthrie and a new girl who everyone was very keen on, on account of her acceptable kinds of prettiness and cleverness and her remarkable prowess as a gymnast. The two were talking in a familiar, breathless way about the boys they were or were not going to allow as friends on Facebook when the new girl said, in her light, attractive voice just faintly spiced with an Australian accent, ‘She was OK, today, wasn't she?'

‘Who was?' Libby said. Her voice was slightly muffled, as if she was towelling her hair.

‘Isabel.'

‘Isabel!'

‘Yeah. Well, she was OK, right? Cool score, yeah?'

Libby grunted a reply that Isabel could not catch.

‘Come on,' the new girl said. ‘Come
on
. She's OK, isn't she? You can't carry a grudge for ever, can you? She's a bit pathetic, but she's OK, right?'

‘What?'

‘I,' the new girl said in her laconic, offhand way, ‘don't mind her. Do you?'

There was a pause. In it, Isabel stood, naked and dripping and frozen to the spot.

‘I think,' Libby Guthrie said at last, ‘that if I were you, and I thought anything as mental as what you've just said, I'd keep pretty quiet about it.'

There was the sound of someone being given a shove, and a brief small cry.

‘OK?' Libby said. ‘Get it?'

The twins were drawing after lunch, at the kitchen table. Flora was drawing her usual tiny, contorted pictures in the corners of sheets of paper, and Tassy her preferred huge abstract scrawls that often swept over the paper's edge and across on to the table. Alexa, on her way upstairs to distribute ironed laundry among the bedrooms, had left them comfortably bickering about the text from Isabel that she had read out to them. It had been a very factual text about her netball triumph, and at the end she had written, ‘Don't ring. I'm fine. A bit busy.'

‘She was the winner,' Tassy said to her sister, kneeling up on her chair in order to be able to use her whole arm for a great swirl of red wax crayon.

Flora, her nose almost on her minute, crabbed scribbling, said nothing but just breathed noisily, as she was wont to do, through her mouth.

‘At football,' Tassy added.

‘No,' Flora said.

‘Yes!'

‘No.'

‘Yes, yes,
yes
! She was the winner at
football
.'

Alexa paused on the stairs to listen. After a second or two, Flora's audible breathing stopped long enough for her to say,
‘Neckball.'

‘Football!'

‘Neck—'

There was the sound of a car pulling up outside. Alexa called down, ‘Twins! Daddy! Daddy's back!'

There was a stampede from the kitchen, led by Beetle. From almost the top of the stairs, Alexa watched for a moment as dog and children scrambled together to get the door open. Then she put the basket of ironing down on the stair above her and began to run down.

‘Ow!'

‘Stop him, Mummy! Stop, Beetle—'

‘Let me, let me—'

The door burst open and Beetle charged through, followed by Tassy. Flora lay on the doormat, her spectacles half off, her mouth open and wailing.

Alexa crouched beside her. ‘You're OK, darling. Let me put your specs on.'

Flora fought to resist help. ‘No.'

‘Yes. Just so's you can see where you're going.'

‘Daddy!' Flora screamed. ‘Daddy!' She battled her way out of Alexa's arms and began to run after her sister.

Alexa stood, smiling, full of the cheerful resolve she had been cultivating since her phone call with Jack. In the driveway, Dan was getting out of the driver's seat, laughing at the exuberant tangle of dog and children that greeted him. And out of the passenger side, at the same moment, slowly climbed – Gus.

A stab of sheer fury streaked through Alexa, almost briefly blinding her. How could he? After all they'd been through, all he'd said to her, all he'd promised about things being different once leave started? How he would be able to forget everything to do with the Army and focus on all the human and domestic matters that she had been dealing
with alone? How could he be so clumsy, so insensitive, so utterly
obtuse
as to start this precious period of rebuilding by bringing Gus, of all people, home with him? Gus, who represented to Alexa, right now, all the reasons for Dan's remoteness and absences and deafness to family concerns. It was as if, she thought wildly, bitterly, Dan had no intention of his leave being in any way different from his working life. She stood in the front doorway, her arms folded, unable even to raise the smile of courtesy required, by unspoken but insistent Army custom, for one's husband's colleagues.

She waited for Dan to pick the twins up, as he usually did. But he didn't. He stooped to kiss them and to fondle Beetle's ears briefly, but then he went round the car to the passenger side, put an arm round Gus's shoulders and closed the car door with his other hand. Then he began to make his way back, almost pulling Gus with him, looking down with the greatest concern. Alexa unfolded her arms. Was Gus ill? Was he hurt? He looked as if he was almost stumbling, within the circle of Dan's arm. Had he done the typical male show-off thing at final PT and strained himself?

The twins, jabbering and jumping, attached themselves to Dan's free side as he came round the car. Alexa waited. Now that she could see him, Gus looked awful. Greyish, haunted. He wasn't as tall as Dan and he was stockier in build, but he looked as if he'd suddenly shrunk, as if the air had gone out of him. Dan raised his head and, for the first time since he got back, looked straight at Alexa. And then he lifted his free hand and put a warning forefinger against his lips.

Alexa hurried across the grass. She put a hand on Gus's arm. ‘Gus. Are you OK?'

He nodded. ‘I'm fine.'

‘Are you ill? Has something happened?'

Gus glanced at her. His brown eyes were as lugubrious as
Beetle's were when commanded to stay in his basket. ‘Not ill,' Gus said, with a fleeting attempt at a grin.

‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!' the twins sang, seizing Dan's trousers in order to tow him into the house.

‘What's happened?'

Dan said, ‘He'll tell you. I'll take these two upstairs for a moment. Gus'll tell you.'

Alexa put her hand out. ‘Gus?'

He looked at her. She saw, to her horror, that his eyes weren't just sad but full of tears. He clutched at her hand and said, in a hoarse whisper, ‘She's left me.'

‘Of course, there's someone else,' Gus said.

He was hunched at the kitchen table, his hands round a mug of tea. His hands, those big, capable, military hands set off by a big, capable, military watch cased in black rubber, made a weird contrast to his face and to his normally disciplined hair, which now stuck up in awkward little tufts as if it had been chopped at randomly while he slept, for a prank. He stared at the table top. ‘There's been someone else for a year. Or more. For quite a time before we deployed, anyway.' He flicked a glance at Alexa. ‘I half want to know nothing and I half want to know everything. I thought she'd have talked to you. I thought that if she talked to anyone, it'd be you.'

Alexa said sadly, ‘I've hardly seen her. All the time you were away, she was working. Or seeing the children—'

‘Both those things. And more. Much more. He runs a company that's one of her major donors. Some money thing. Hedge-fund manager or something. I don't know what. I don't understand money. Never have. She said to me, “Do you realize you've never paid a bill in your life?”'

‘Dan doesn't either.'

Gus took his hands away from his mug and propped his
elbows on the table. He said, not looking at Alexa, ‘What did she say to you?'

‘Nothing much, Gus.'

He shot a look at her. ‘I can't believe that. You girls—'

‘I've said, I've hardly seen her. All the time you were away, she was the one I didn't see. She came for the first time in ages, the other day.'

His head jerked up. ‘Did she?'

‘Gus, she was in a funny mood, very spiky and edgy, but she didn't say anything that made me think that this was in her mind. She just said it was all so very hard.' She paused. ‘Which it is.'

Gus gave a little groan and put his forearms down on the table, and then his head on them.

‘I'm as surprised as you are,' Alexa said. She gave the ceiling a quick glance, as if she could somehow will Dan downstairs to assist her.

Gus mumbled something. She bent towards him. ‘What?'

Gus said, slightly more distinctly, ‘It's not a surprise.'

‘Gus!'

He raised his head and said wearily, ‘She's been telling me forever. Not about someone else, but about how she can't hack patch life, how she can't sacrifice her career to mine, how she can't believe any of it's worth it.' He blinked. ‘I could put it out of my mind, out there. Or, at least, I could put it out of my mind most of the time. And when I did think about it, I'd tell myself that I'd make it up to her when we were back, I'd tell her one more promotion and then I'm out, and we'd live wherever she wanted and she could have the prime career and I'd do everything to support her, everything.' He gave a grimace. ‘I've never looked at anyone else. Not since I met her. I thought that she felt the same, in spite of our differences. But she said last night that it wasn't lack of love, it was lack of respect. She said Dan and I are
the last of the dinosaurs and the new uni-educated officer boys are respectful of their partners' lives and don't live and breathe the regiment the way we do. She said how can she respect someone so unworldly, so unquestioning' – he turned his mournful brown gaze on Alexa again – ‘and I expect she's right.'

‘Did she tell you this face to face?'

‘No,' Gus said, ‘on the telephone. I rang her to say I was coming up to London this afternoon and she said, don't, and I said, why? and she said, there's nothing to come up for any more, we're through.' His face crumpled and he buried it in his arms again. ‘Not sure I can stand it.'

Alexa said, ‘Would you like a whisky?'

Gus shook his bowed head. ‘That was another thing. She said she couldn't stand the way booze was part of Army life. I thought she got it. I thought she knew good hard partying was only second to good hard sport as a coping strategy. I mean, she seemed fine when I was president of the Mess Committee. No complaints then, or at least none I heard. She seemed to like the parties, she really did. I thought she was OK with that. With me. With – well, everything. But then,' he lifted his head again and gazed gloomily at Alexa, ‘I read all the runes wrong, didn't I? Bouncing around on my own little cloud and never seeing the storm gathering. Lex—'

‘Yes?'

‘What am I going to do without her?'

Alexa put a hand out and laid it on Gus's nearest one. He turned his hand over at once and gripped hers so hard she thought he'd crush it. There were steps on the stairs, running down.

‘Dan's coming,' Alex said, aware her tone indicated that he could somehow solve everything. She glanced across the room.

From the doorway, Dan said, ‘I've made a very impressive Lego castle. Come and see.'

Gus let go of Alexa's hand and got slowly to his feet. Dan held out his own hand to him, as if he was a child. He said to Alexa, ‘Won't be long, sweetheart.' He smiled at her. ‘I've said Gus can have a billet here for a bit. Can't have him rattling round in an empty quarter, can we? Put him in Izzy's room for now. OK?'

A
lexa parked the car outside the Larches Social Centre. It was situated beside its namesake, a stand of lanky larch trees, just beyond several lines of the grim, dank terraces of outdated married quarters for other ranks, interspersed with strips of broken hardstanding and shabby grass, that in their dismalness could only contribute to family breakdown, Alexa thought. There were no curtains at some of the windows, and sagging sheets were pinned carelessly across others. MacDonald Gardens, they were called. Gardens! They were as garden-like as the bleak car park in which she was standing. What a way to live. What a way to try and keep a family together, let alone bring it up. OK, so the terraces were condemned as unfit for purpose and would be demolished in time and replaced, but in the meantime, there they were, sodden with rain and gloom, a few hundred yards' buggy push from the usual Army shopping parade of cut-price supermarket, off-licence, barber, kebab joint and tanning salon. Tanning salon! Did any profession in the universe spend quite so much time looking at itself in the mirror as this one?

She got slowly out of the car and locked the door. Dan was home with the twins, while she, at the urging and arranging
of Dan's two senior officers, had an appointment with the regiment's welfare officer, Walter Cummings. It was, she felt, shameful to be doing this, but if she had refused – as Kate Melville would surely have refused – then it would look defiant to the point of destructiveness. She had said to Dan, attempting to be reasonable, attempting to show she was not supinely giving in to yet another Army insistence, ‘We should be going to this together, you know,' and Dan, spooning yoghurt into Flora, who was intent upon being a thorough baby and was sitting, sweetly helpless, on his knee, said without looking up, ‘Who'd look after the twins? I'll come next time. If there is a next time.' He scraped the spoon expertly along Flora's lower lip. ‘In any case, Gus'll be back from playing squash soon. Let's hope hammering the hell out of a squash ball and Freddie Stanford will make the poor bugger feel a bit better.'

Alexa looked round her now. There were few people about – just an overweight girl pushing a double buggy with her phone clamped to her ear, a woman leaning against a nearby bus stop, smoking, and a youngish man in battledress, gazing at the display in the window of the video store. In front of her was the social centre – Pilates classes advertised, coffee mornings – and beside it the dental practice, and beyond that, the welfare service building. Reddish-brown bricks, rain-streaked concrete, with avenues of lime or chestnut planted everywhere, with absolute precision, in an attempt to ameliorate and soften the necessarily functional appearance of a community which had been created for a purely, crucially, inflexibly pragmatic reason. How many of the inhabitants of MacDonald Gardens – and even of the slightly classier NCO quarters, and flimsy middle-ranking-officer houses with their tacked-on garages and patios – were relishing the prospect of this long leave? How many of them would, like Alexa, actually make an appointment to see someone on Walter Cummings's
staff? Almost none of them. Why would they? How could they justify it to themselves, in any case, with all the soldiers needing help, all those men peeling away from a war zone with their heads full of noise and horror. TRIM, it was called, the ongoing service they were offered. Trauma Risk Management. ‘A consultative process,' it was referred to in welfare speak. How many men would ever admit they needed it? And would she, if left to herself? Would she, Alexa Riley, be standing here on a late November morning, with the sky like a grey duvet laid across the low and depressing rooftops round her, unless Dan's commanding officer had, with the greatest skill and courtesy, not given her any option? What, in fact, was one admitting to, by having an appointment to see Walt the Welfare?

He was an affable man, she knew that. The Chaplain General, a surprisingly young and sinewy man who always looked as if he was longing to be allowed to break the Army's rule of padres not being permitted to carry a weapon, approved of him, and said so in public loudly and frequently. But, for all his huge significance as families welfare officer, Walter Cummings would only be in that role for a couple of years. After all, no soldier wanted to be a welfare officer. It was, in the eyes of the military, definitely a pink job, and even the trust displayed in being chosen for it didn't compensate. When Walter Cummings was appointed, he had said jovially to anyone who would listen, ‘Suddenly I'm supposed not to shout but listen! I ask you!'

He was waiting for Alexa in his ferociously orderly office, his desk surface empty apart from a pad of paper placed parallel to the nearest edge, and a rollerball pen aligned exactly beside it. He held out a hand. ‘Good to see you.'

Alexa regarded him. He was of the same build as her grandfather-in-law, with the same open countenance. ‘Sorry—'

‘What do you mean, sorry?'

‘I mean,' Alexa said, ‘that I'm sorry to be here. I'm sorry it's thought that I should see you.'

‘Ah-hah,' Walter Cummings said.

A girl in battledress and Army boots appeared in the doorway, her hair pulled back so tightly that it almost hurt to look at her.

‘Tea?' Walter said to Alexa. ‘Coffee?'

‘Neither, thank you.'

‘Oh, come on,' Walter said. ‘It'll make it easier. Miriam's got sod all to do this morning, have you?'

‘I wish,' Miriam said, with emphasis.

‘Tea, then. Thank you.'

‘Milk, ma'am?' Miriam said. ‘Sugar?'

‘Neither, thank you.'

‘He,' Miriam said, tossing her head in Walter's direction, ‘takes
everything
.'

When she had gone, Walter motioned Alexa to the wooden-armed chair in front of him. ‘Make yourself comfortable. I have to say—'

‘What?'

‘I have to say, Mrs Riley,' Walter said, ‘that I'm pretty surprised myself, to see you here.'

Dan and Gus were watching the late news on television. Gus had spent a long time, that evening, talking to his sons on the telephone, who had been, he said, completely brilliant for kids of ten and twelve, even the younger one, who said, even though he couldn't help having a bit of a weep about the situation, that he hoped it all meant that Mum would be a bit happier now and that he, Dad, could get on with soldiering without having to worry about her so much any more.

The conversation had made Gus a bit tearful again. He had sat at the supper table and said that the younger boy
was longing to join up, had always wanted to, was a born soldier just like Franny and Andy's two, that he wasn't the kind of pad brat who had a teenage rebellion and kicked off just to spite his parents, but had always been a good kid, one of the best, and here he was now, putting his old Dad's feelings before his own. He drank his soup and said, between swallows, that he didn't know what he'd done to deserve kids like that, and Kate was a bloody good mother, he had to give her that, and maybe he hadn't appreciated how good she'd been, and hadn't told her often enough that he thought the job she'd done on the boys was bloody marvellous.

They'd cleared up after supper together, the three of them – Gus had learned, with astonishing speed and efficiency, the layout of everything in the kitchen – and then Alexa said she was going to sort out the twins' clothes for the morning, and Dan said he'd just catch the news with Gus and he'd be up straight after, promise.

‘No beers,' Alexa said to him, in an undertone.

‘Why d'you say that?'

‘Because you and Gus have been up after midnight every night since he moved in. And I want to talk to you.'

Dan looked at her warily.

‘I want,' Alexa almost whispered, ‘to talk to you about this
morning
.'

He put a hand out and squeezed her arm briefly. ‘Of course.'

So she was now sitting on their bed, fully clothed, listening to the murmur of the television and Dan's and Gus's occasional voices from the sitting room below. She looked at the clock. She would give Dan another ten minutes. Then – then, however typical it was, however Wronged Wife she appeared, she would go downstairs and say, quite loudly if necessary, that she needed to speak to Dan, and she wanted to do it
now
.

She lowered herself back on the bed until she was lying
flat, staring at the ceiling, her feet still on the floor. Walter had been kind to her, very kind. He had sympathized with her predicament, he had understood her frustration, he had said he knew from personal experience what it was like to feel one had no choices. And, of course, it was going to be worse now leave had started because everyone would want a piece of Dan, the families and so forth, so it was no wonder Alexa was feeling she never got a look in. Ask my wife!

Alexa said awkwardly, ‘It isn't really that. I mean, it's only partly that. It's more … more …' She glanced at him and looked away again. ‘I mean, what am
I
supposed to do?'

Walter Cummings looked politely puzzled. ‘Come again?'

‘I shouldn't be asking you this. It's not up to you to sort out the wives like me, the ones with resources. But …'

‘But what?'

Alexa looked down at her lap. ‘We're married to men who know what they're doing all the time because they're told so. And we have to fit round that. Part-time wives. Part-time earners. Even part-time mothers—'

Walter Cummings picked up his rollerball pen and looked at it intently.

‘Sorry,' Alexa said. ‘It's just that as far as self-fulfilment goes, it's close to impossible. And our children. It's so unfairly hard on all our children. This boarding-school thing—'

He cleared his throat. He looked like someone who was being asked to solve an intractable problem that they had never signed up for in the first place.

Alexa took sudden pity on him. ‘Sorry,' she said again. ‘Sorry, sorry. I'm not helping. I'm all over the place, none of that was connected—'

Walter sighed.

Alexa read his sigh. She said, ‘And you've heard it all before?'

He nodded. ‘Doesn't mean I don't feel for you.'

‘But?'

Walter sighed again. He picked up his pen and put it down again. Then he said, ‘There are changes coming.'

‘Changes?'

‘You know about the Army Families Federation?'

‘Of course.'

‘Well,' Walter said, ‘they are fighting what they see as a government attack on conditions of service. They say the forces are a special case because of the willingness of forces personnel to lay down their lives, and therefore their conditions of service should be special, too.'

He glanced up at her. She was sitting very still.

‘The last government presided, shall we say, over the dismantling of regiments and all the subsequent humanitarian fallout that that entailed. Charities can't possibly pick it all up, and they aren't. There are fashionable, discretionary fights right now, and charities like Help the Heroes do a great job for them. But what about the wars of the past? Trouble is, the military covenant has never been written down, and now there aren't enough funds.'

Alexa leaned forward slightly. ‘I don't quite see—'

‘I'm coming to it,' Walter said. ‘I'm coming to something that might affect you and, in its way, help by limiting your choices. There's been a recent doubling of operational allowance, as you know, and a huge improvement in services for mental health. But we're all having to look right across the demands. At present, you get the continuity-of-education allowance, don't you? Something above five grand a term.' He raised a hand as if to pre-empt being interrupted. ‘You may hate boarding school for your daughter, but a lot of money goes towards keeping her there. In all, the Army spends £1.8 billion keeping its kids educated. So something like the Harriers, which cost £1.2 billion, have to be deleted. D'you see what I'm driving at?'

Alexa nodded. A grey wave was rising in her with terrible familiarity, a sense of having made an inappropriate fuss at an inappropriate time.

‘I'm very sorry,' Walter Cummings said, ‘if anyone feels betrayed. I really regret we can't satisfy everyone. The continuity-of-education allowance is under review right now. You may have your answer to one problem in your life made for you. And I'm sorry, as I say, that I can't do anything for you. I haven't got any solution, especially at the moment. There isn't one.' He grimaced. ‘To be frank with you, Mrs Riley, if you weren't an officer's wife, I'd probably be saying to you, in as nice a way as I could think of putting it, that your husband will do as he's told and you'll have to accommodate yourself to that. Finish. I could offer you a 15 per cent discount on Relate sessions, I suppose, but I don't somehow think you'd take me up on that, would you?'

She had let a little silence fall when he finished speaking and then she had stood up, just as there was a knock at the door and Miriam came in with two white cups on a tray. Then she said, with as little vehemence as she could manage, ‘I never thought there was anything you could do. Not your fault. Not mine. Just – just the system.'

They had drunk their tea and coffee still standing, talking gently and unthreateningly about how the Army was going to reconcile its needs for better equipment and housing with the cuts being imposed on and by the Ministry of Defence. Walter had taken her cup from her and put it back on the tray, and had held the door open for her, indicating that he was going to accompany her out of the building. His whole physical bearing was solicitous, as if she were very frail or very old, his hand hovering at her elbow at every step or unevenness in the surface on the way back to the car park.

She'd held out her hand to him. ‘Thank you.'

He'd grimaced. ‘Rocks and hard places come to mind.'