The Soldier's Wife (16 page)

‘What did he say?'

‘Nothing much, really. Just that.'

Dan came over and stood behind her, looking down at his shirt, now a neat rectangle, collar buttoned. He said softly, ‘What did
you
say?'

She picked up the shirt and turned to add it to the pile on the table behind her. She said, ‘No big deal, Dan. Just – well, he was thanking me and I was saying that's fine, which I meant, it was, and then he—' She paused and looked at Dan. ‘He said that he'd be going anyway soon, because you were planning to take the twins and me off somewhere for a while. Are you?'

Dan shuffled a little. ‘I was thinking of it, yes.'

‘Thinking?'

‘Yes. I thought we needed to get out of here, all of us. We need to – have a change of scene. See and do something different. It's so hard for you, having me come back into a life and a routine you've devised in order to cope with me not being here. I can see that. I just thought we could both do with being out of this context for a bit, even a few days, until we get our bearings again. That's all.'

Alexa turned back to the ironing board and spread out a pinafore dress of Flora's. ‘Dan.'

‘Yes?'

‘Dan, I don't want to rain on your parade, but,
think
.'

‘I have thought.'

‘No.'

‘I have, I've told you, I've thought about what we can do to make the next few weeks an improvement, not just more of the same.'

Alexa banged the iron down. ‘No!'

Dan glanced towards the playroom. ‘Shh.'

‘No!' Alexa said again, more vehemently. ‘You haven't thought, have you? You haven't thought that you haven't seen your grandfather or my parents since you got back. You haven't seen your father properly, either. And you haven't thought, have you, that I can't go off on any jolly hols, leaving Isabel in this state. And how was Isabel? How
was
she? You walk in here, and the first thing you do is not tell me about her but ask where Gus is. The first thing!'

Dan moved a step away. ‘She's fine.'

‘I don't believe you. She can't be.'

‘Sweetheart, she's fine. She was great in the car. She was very calm when we got there. I said my piece to Mrs Whatsit and she took it in. Isabel had made her point, and she's fine.'

‘Making her point is only half the story!'

‘It's in hand,' Dan said. ‘Honestly it is. It'll be different now. They'll keep an eye on her.'

Alexa folded her arms. ‘God, Dan. Keeping an eye on her might help with the bullying but it won't help with the homesickness, will it?'

In his basket, Beetle stirred uneasily and sat up. Tassy appeared in the doorway. ‘I need,' she said commandingly, ‘lots of spoons.'

‘In a minute, darling.'

‘Lots,' Tassy said. ‘For their supper.'

Dan crossed the kitchen and picked his daughter up. ‘Hey there, bombshell.'

Tassy ignored him. ‘Spoons!'

‘I can't go anywhere,' Alexa said, ‘till I've got some peace of mind. And I can't
begin
to have that until I can believe Isabel has some solution ahead and you are even halfway back to Planet Normal.'

‘Spoons,' Tassy said, less strenuously.

Alexa turned round so that she was facing Dan and Tassy.

‘It's hard here,' she said. ‘Very hard. It was hard all the
time you were away, and it's been no better since you got back. While you were away, there were all kinds of problems, which I dealt with because there was only me and I had to. But now you're back, the problems haven't gone away. In fact, they're worse. They're worse because I can't take unilateral decisions any more. I can't because you're here and you are a problem in yourself. If it was down to me, I'd have Isabel out of that school and me in a job of some kind somewhere and living in a proper community and not this – this weird bubble. But it isn't down to me because you're back now, and what
you
do dictates what
we
do.'

She folded her arms. ‘What exactly did Isabel say to you? Did she say something you're not telling me? Am I going to discover that on top of all else you actually have the nerve to differentiate between our daughters?'

There was a short silence, then Dan said, as if she hadn't spoken, ‘What did you say to Gus?'

Alexa started across the kitchen. As she passed Dan and Tassy, she put her hand to her face, as if she was crying or she didn't want to see them.

‘He wanted to go, and I didn't stop him,' she said. ‘He said he found our happy family life hard to bear. Hah! The spoons are in the drawer. Where they always are.'

And then she crossed the hallway at a run, and they heard her race up the stairs and along the landing, followed by the slam of a door.

Tassy looked at her father. ‘Spoons?' she said hopefully.

Gus said he was OK. Fine, promise. Not exactly never better, but managing. And he'd got to. Manage, that is. He'd just been talking to one of his gunners – well, ex-gunner really, who'd decided to leave the Army because his wife couldn't hack it any longer, and he'd said it was strange, leaving with almost nothing. ‘Just a couple of day sacks and me Bergen,'
he'd said to Gus, and a bed in his mother-in-law's second bedroom. No room to swing a cat. ‘It made me thankful for what I've got,' Gus said, not quite steadily. ‘I'll be OK, promise I will.'

‘See you tomorrow?' Dan said.

‘Maybe, mate. Maybe. Got to sort my head a bit. You too.'

‘My head's getting there.'

There'd been a pause, and then Gus said guardedly, ‘I … I'm not sure we can actually say that. Can we?'

Then Dan had gone into the playroom and surveyed the cardboard-box train the twins had made, in which the toys were propped up and being given supper with teaspoons. He lowered himself to the floor and the twins immediately stopped their game and clambered on top of him, demanding that he play with them, read to them, listen to them, sing to them.

‘Where's Mummy?' Flora said. Her spectacles were askew again. Dan peered at the skin of her face, at the texture of her hair, and marvelled at their complete purity and perfection.

‘Sleeping.'

‘But it's not the night time!'

Dan lay down, holding a twin in each arm. ‘Sometimes people get tired in the daytime.'

‘I don't.'

‘But you're not a mummy.'

‘Nor are you,' Tassy said.

‘No,' Dan said. He gazed at them both, turning his head from side to side. ‘No, I'm not. What am I?'

Flora smiled at him. She adjusted her glasses. She said reverently, adoringly, ‘You are the
daddy
.'

Alexa woke from a brief, deep, bothered sleep. She had yanked the curtains across when she had come upstairs
and flung herself on the bed in order to rage impotently, face-down in the pillows, and now found herself, quite unintentionally, waking an hour later with a stiff neck and a dry mouth and a sense of dread at coming to, to face an unchanged everything.

She rolled over. Her mouth tasted disgusting and her eyes felt gluey. The house seemed very quiet, unnaturally so. Maybe Dan had taken the twins somewhere. Maybe he had taken them round to see Gus. No. Better not think that. If she thought that she'd be clutched by rage and revulsion again, rage at Gus's ineptitude and revulsion at his – his whimpering, appalled apologies. Don't think about Gus. Don't think about Isabel. Don't think about Dan's crass suggestion of a holiday. Lie here and count for a while, count to a hundred, and then get up and brush your hair, brush your teeth, and go downstairs and make supper for the twins without further recrimination or accusation.
Enough
.

Someone was coming up the stairs. It was a slow, careful tread, as if the person was uncertain, or maybe carrying something. Alexa lifted her head from the pillow and held her breath. The steps reached the top of the stairs and then came slowly along the landing. Then the bedroom door opened carefully and a slice of yellow light fell in from the ugly overhead bulb on the landing outside, revealing Dan, carrying a teacup and saucer.

He whispered, ‘You awake?'

She sat up a little. ‘Yes. Just.'

He came round the bed and put the teacup down on the pile of books on the small chest beside her. ‘I've brought you some tea.'

‘Thank you. Where are the twins?'

‘Downstairs.'

‘Doing what?'

‘Eating toast and jam,' Dan said.

‘Eating—'

‘Yes,' Dan said. ‘They're very jolly. Sticky, but jolly. Come down when you've come to.'

‘Yes, I'll—'

‘Soon as you can,' Dan said, his voice a little louder. ‘When you've drunk your tea. Your father's here.'

F
ranny's Rupert had texted to ask Isabel if she was on Facebook. There had been no kisses after the text, Isabel noticed, but she had to balance their absence against the fact that he had texted at all, and that he had virtually asked her to be a friend on Facebook. She had thought about her response for a long time – at least three hours – before ingeniously replying ‘Not yet. Not allowed,' which did not precisely give away the fact that she was not yet thirteen. She was pleased with the reply. It strengthened the impression she did not in the least mind him having, that she was pretty well a complete prisoner of unreasonable adult prohibitions. When she sent the text, she was careful to conclude without kisses, also.

Mobile phones were not permitted during school hours. The rule was that they were to be left in the cubbyhole by your bed in the morning, and only switched on in the evening to retrieve messages, after prep and supper and before lights out. Like most people, Isabel kept her phone on vibrate mode illicitly in her uniform skirt pocket, and the risk of getting caught lent the school day a pleasurable frisson of danger, not unlike the sensation Isabel had had while walking down the school drive. In the middle of double maths, Isabel's
phone trembled in her pocket. She counted to twenty and put her hand up. Mrs Twining, who found maths so exciting that she talked about it as if she'd just won
The X-Factor
, asked what she wanted, with impatience. Libby Guthrie and her gang turned to glance and grimace.

‘Please,' Isabel said, ‘may I be excused?'

In the lavatory cubicle, having already flushed the toilet to create a comforting wall of noise, Isabel read her screen.

‘Can u talk?' Rupert had texted.

‘Not allowed,' she wrote back.

‘!!!' he said. ‘Later?'

‘Yes,' she said, stopping herself before she wrote, ‘Please.'

‘OK,' he said. ‘Got an idea.'

She stared, smiling, at the screen. ‘4 me?'

‘Yes, thicko!' he wrote, but then he added ‘x'.

Someone came into the cloakroom and banged a cubicle door shut. Isabel reached behind her to pull the flush again. ‘Thank you.'

‘X,' he said.

She stood up, the phone glowing in her hand. She wanted to say ‘x' back. But she mustn't.

‘Maths,' she wrote. ‘Gotta go.'

She put her phone back in her pocket and unlatched the cubicle door. There was nobody by the washbasins and it was quiet, except for the sound of someone peeing from a cubicle at the far end. Isabel paused to lean over a washbasin and examine herself in the mirror. Nobody would ever, ever, in a million years, think she was pretty. Would they?

Lying in Isabel's bed, under a washed-out duvet cover from Isabel's childhood, appliquéd with an anthropomorphized mouse dressed as a ballerina, Morgan Longworth contemplated an extraordinary evening. When he'd arrived, unannounced as planned, he'd found his soldier son-in-law
lying on the floor under a mound of plush animals, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, while his twin granddaughters – what was the real situation with Flora and her spectacles? – conducted some sort of stately ritual with a plastic tea set over and around his body. Dan had sprung up, scattering hippos and pandas, and Morgan had found himself being welcomed with the bemused amazement he would have expected had he just landed from Mars. He had shaken Dan's hand, kissed the twins, patted Beetle's head, explained that this visit was merely an impulse rather than an emergency of any kind, and indicated that a cup of tea would be very welcome after the drive from London.

He had asked where Alexa was. Dan said, as if there was nothing to be inferred from it, that she was sleeping.

‘Like this!' said Tassy, casting herself down on the floor to demonstrate.

‘Like this!' Flora shouted, copying her.

Dan made tea and offered his father-in-law some toast. Morgan had declined the toast, and had sat at the kitchen table watching while Dan settled the twins in their chairs and embarked upon the complicated business – which Morgan remembered as being, in his experience, infinitely simpler and less messy – of special mugs for milk, and the
right
plastic plates, and toast and butter and the correct jam – no, not that one, not that one, the red one, the
red
– and having the toast cut into the exact and only shapes in which it could possibly be eaten. What, Morgan wondered, could be going on in Dan's head, cutting toast into stamp-sized squares? How, exactly, did one change mental gears so entirely fundamentally? He had taken a swallow of tea and cleared his throat. ‘Might – might we wake Alexa, do you think?'

When Dan had gone upstairs with a cup and saucer – Morgan noticed that his hand had hovered over, and
rejected, a mug – the twins had plainly felt it was their duty to entertain him.

‘Are you,' Tassy had said, her mouth full of toast, ‘the granddad?'

‘I am indeed,' Morgan said. ‘I am one of your two grandfathers. You know me perfectly well.'

Flora said conversationally, ignoring his last remark, ‘We have one called Eric and one called George.'

‘You do.'

‘So you,' Flora said, jam now even on her spectacles, ‘can be the spare one.'

‘Thank you. Thank you very much.'

‘Are you called Eric?'

‘No,' Morgan said. ‘My name is Morgan. You know that. I am Grandfather Morgan.'

For some reason, the twins had found this wildly funny. They had looked at each other and collapsed laughing, Tassy's mouth still packed with toast. Morgan had felt unaccountably foolish, somehow, sitting at the other end of the table in solitary and ridiculous state with his tea, so he had got up and brought a chair to sit between the twins and suggested that they stopped cackling and finished their toast.

Flora had turned her single visible blue eye on him. ‘Gruffalo Morgan!' she said, entranced by her own wit and daring, and it had seemed to Morgan that the only option open to him was to join in, so that when Alexa appeared, escorted by Dan with evident solicitude, they were all three laughing and, Morgan realized later, examining the sleeves of his cashmere cardigan, lightly and universally jammy.

Alexa didn't look well. She seemed surprised to see him, but not that surprised, giving the impression that she was in a place that was almost beyond the capacity for reaction. Morgan explained his impulsive wish to see them all, and when Alexa said where's Mum, replied untruthfully that she
had a migraine and had decided to go to bed as the best – indeed, the only – way to defeat it. Alexa seemed to accept what he said in much the same way as she accepted his being there, and then she absentmindedly helped herself to a square of Tassy's toast, and Tassy shrieked in protest, precipitating one of those scenes that Morgan would later describe to Elaine as being absolutely foreign to the parents of only children. For one thing, two protesting children make twice as much noise as one.

What followed had been, to begin with, rather enjoyable. Dan had made a covert phone call or two, and then he had suggested that Morgan might like to meet his CO and had driven him off to the garrison – behind the wire, no less – to a large Edwardian building called Ranpur House, where the CO and his pretty wife had been extremely welcoming and provided whisky and soda in a room – further memo to tell Elaine – that could only have belonged to a soldier, with pictures hung in completely straight lines and miniature cannons on the mantelpiece. His whisky had been handed to him in a cut-glass tumbler of satisfactory weight, an agreeable dog had decorated the hearthrug and the conversation took the comfortable turn of allowing him to pontificate – self-deprecatingly – on foreign affairs without feeling the constraint of Elaine's publicly loyal but privately sceptical eye upon him. When they finally left, Colonel Mackenzie had said to Dan, ‘Love to the lovely Alexa,' and Mary Mackenzie had added, almost too eagerly, ‘Oh mine, too!' and Dan had smiled in an easy, slightly proudly proprietorial way that indicated – seemed to indicate, anyway – that he knew himself to be a lucky man in untroubled possession of a complete jewel.

When they returned to the Quadrant, however, the jewel was not in evidence. The kitchen table was laid – rather sketchily, to Morgan's eye – for supper, and there was a pan
or two on the hob, but Alexa was absent. Dan appeared to be entirely undisconcerted by this, and settled his father-in-law in the sitting room with a newspaper before vanishing upstairs. It was twenty minutes or so before Alexa appeared in the doorway and said that it wasn't much, she was afraid, but that supper was ready.

Morgan got to his feet. ‘Darling. You weren't expecting me—'

‘It's just ham and salad, really. Sorry.'

‘I didn't come for food. Don't be sorry. I came to see
you
.'

Alexa had looked at him for a moment, as if weighing something up. Then she said, ‘I know. All the same.'

He took her elbow, as if to escort her to the kitchen. He said encouragingly, ‘And it's been so good to catch up with Dan for a bit.'

‘Yes.'

‘He's told me a lot of what went on. One wishes it didn't look so hopeless, but of course, history is against us.'

Alexa had said nothing further. In the kitchen, Dan was uncorking wine and there were candles on the table, and a bowl of potatoes from which steam was gently rising.

‘Potatoes!' Morgan said, in the tone of voice he might use to say ‘Caviar!'

‘Oh, Dad,' Alexa said despairingly.

‘A rare treat,' Morgan said, ‘I promise you. Your mother never buys them. No potatoes, no cream, no white bread, no biscuits.'

Dan pulled out a chair for him. He said, too heartily, ‘Welcome to Liberty Hall, then, Morgan!'

And then – well, then an atmosphere had descended on the table as chilling as if a miasma of dry ice had mysteriously been pumped into the room. His own voice, endeavouring to cajole or encourage his daughter and son-in-law into conviviality, sounded ever more forced, and the effort to make
more noise than the sound of knives and forks on plates grew unbearable. He had been full of theoretical initiatives on the journey down, buoyed up by the conviction that the situation on the ground would prove infinitely more tractable than it appeared from the anxious distance of London, but now that he was here, he felt both out of his depth and painfully without ideas or ammunition. The walls of silence he was battling were, plainly, not excluding him, but they were manifestly there between Alexa and Dan, and he simply had no idea how to penetrate them. He ate his ham, praised the potatoes again, drank his wine and harangued himself, silently, for having had the ludicrously misguided notion that he would be a more effective negotiator without Elaine. Spearing a piece of underripe tomato with his fork, he wished with all his being that she would suddenly materialize, at this terrible meal, to help him out. Goaded by the futility of this wish and by the sight of his daughter pushing food round her plate like a turbulent child, he said suddenly to her, ‘Why don't you come up to London?'

Her head jerked up. ‘What?'

‘Mum and I would love it. Please do. Just for a night or two. Come to London.'

Alexa gazed at him. Then, after a moment or two, she switched her gaze to Dan. She said – too peremptorily, Morgan thought – ‘Can you look after the twins for a couple of days?'

Dan shifted very slightly in his chair. He picked up his wine glass and said to his father-in-law rather than to his wife, ‘I was planning to go to Headley Court this week.'

‘Headley Court?' said Morgan.

‘Yes. To see some of our boys who got invalided out, the last six months—'

‘
Terrible
injuries,' Alexa said.

Morgan did not like her tone. He said to Dan, ‘This week?'

‘I'd like to.'

‘With Gus Melville,' Alexa said to her father.

Dan muttered, ‘I could always go alone.'

‘Oh,' Alexa said, ‘no need for that, I'm sure.'

Morgan hesitated. He thought of the spare bedroom in the flat at Marylebone Road with its padded coat hangers and monogrammed bed linen. He turned to his daughter. ‘I meant, darling, why don't you and the twins come? We don't see anything like enough of you, as it is. You can come back to London with me. I can drive you all.'

Alexa looked at Dan again. She said to him, still hardly pleasantly, ‘Could you manage to look after Beetle, do you think?'

He didn't look back. He emptied his wineglass and set it back on the table with a slight bang. He said tersely, ‘Of course.'

Alexa turned to look at her father. She gave him a wide smile, possibly the first smile of the evening, even if it lacked conviction. ‘We'd love to,' she said.

And now here he was, under the mouse ballerina duvet, conscious of a great external stillness – how used he was, he thought, to the perpetual hum of London – and an immense internal turmoil. There was no sound from the other side of the bedroom wall, only a distinct absence of noise that managed somehow to convey tension rather than slumber, and no sound either from that strange, enclosed, military world outside his window. In the room at the other end of the landing, his small granddaughters were sleeping with the abandonment of the very young. Below, in the kitchen, Beetle would be curled up tidily in his basket. In London, Elaine would no doubt also be sleeping, possibly in the centre of their bed rather than on her accustomed half, in one of the cream silk nightshirts he liked to buy her from a shirtmaker
in Jermyn Street, and somewhere twenty miles away, his oldest granddaughter, Isabel, was, he hoped, not awake and miserable in a school dormitory that did not, he fervently trusted, resemble in any way the one he'd had to endure over sixty years ago in a scarcely heated preparatory school in Berkshire. He had tried to introduce the topic of Isabel at supper, and Alexa had merely said, in a tone that encouraged nobody to pursue the matter, that he had better ask Dan, as Dan had taken charge of the situation now and would shortly come up with a solution. Dan had looked very much as if nobody should ask him anything further on any topic whatsoever, so Morgan had simply reiterated how pleased Elaine would be at the news that Alexa and the twins were coming to London, and had then got to his feet and begun to stack the plates on the table as an indication of how much he now wished the evening to be over.