The Soldier's Wife (19 page)

S
tephanie Marshall, junior physiotherapist at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court, not far from Epsom Racecourse, was crossing the staff car park on her way to her own car when she saw him. He was obviously services, being in khaki trousers and an epauletted ribbed sweater, but he was sitting under a tree on the ground and he didn't seem to have a coat, and it was, after all, late November, and although it was quite a nice day, it wasn't the right kind of day or weather for sitting outside and on the ground.

Stephanie had joined Headley Court when the new rehabilitation wing had opened. Eight million, it had cost, but it had this fantastic twenty-five-metre hydrotherapy pool, with a floor you could raise and lower, and generally amazing facilities. And the guys were amazing, too. And the girls. It was a girl she had been working with that afternoon, Captain Patsy Philp, twenty-five years old and a double amputee with only one leg and one hand. There'd been two physios with her, one on each side, getting her walking for a news team who'd come down from London with television cameras. The reporters had watched her for a while and then they'd asked her how she felt. She feels like shit, Stephanie
wanted to say, it's harder than you can possibly imagine, you stupid boys, thinking you're doing your bit by just wearing Help the Heroes T-shirts, but Patsy had managed a smile and had said, with no evident show of emotion, ‘It's tricky. It'll take more than a couple of weeks before I'm running upstairs again.'

Stephanie had wanted to hit the TV crew. It made you like that, working here. It made you so proud and defensive of the people you were treating, and if you weren't careful so contemptuous of all the civvy people just waltzing about taking their arms and legs for granted. There'd been no service people in her family, none at all, until her brother got this bee in his bonnet about joining the RAF, and now here he was at Headley Court, working in the prosthetics workshop, and because of him, she was here too, and it had changed her life, it really had. It had completely changed her way of thinking.

Which was why she wasn't just going to ignore that bloke sitting on the ground under a tree. She'd seen enough, now, to know that not all the wounds were visible. They'd got people in now who couldn't remember anything or decide anything, bleeds to the brain, you name it. She'd swung her car keys in her hand so that their jingle would alert him to her approach and went towards him, and when she was only a yard or so from him, he jerked up and on to his feet as if he'd been almost asleep or something and was reacting to a trained instinct.

‘It's OK,' Stephanie said. She was glad her coat was open, showing him her white medical tunic underneath. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were all right.'

He was a good-looking bloke, tall, fortyish probably. He wasn't wearing a rank slide or anything, but he'd be an officer of some kind, Stephanie reckoned – major, probably. He seemed a bit dazed.

She said again, ‘It's OK. It's just that we're used to people needing a bit of help, here. I was making sure you didn't. That's all.'

He smiled at her at last. He seemed to be focussing a bit better. He said, ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. I was just – digesting what I'd seen in there. That's all.'

‘In their own words,' Stephanie said, ‘they're awesome.'

He said, ‘That's what they say about all of you.'

She made a deprecating gesture. She said, ‘Well, if you're OK—'

‘I am. Thank you. I am.'

‘D'you have friends in there?'

‘Two of my men. Or, at least, men I know.'

‘They're lucky to be in there.'

‘Don't I know it.'

She took a step back. She made a little rattling farewell gesture with her car keys. ‘I'll let you get on, then.'

‘Thank you.'

She smiled up at him. ‘Take care,' she said.

George had done something he hadn't done in years. He'd bought a bottle of whisky – it had some pantomime Scottish name but Lord knows, at that price, what it was made from, or where. He'd taken it home, and was sitting in his only and hardly comfortable armchair with his shoes off and the television tuned to a channel he would have died rather than admit to watching, drinking steadily.

He wasn't, at least, drinking straight out of the bottle. He had fetched a glass from the cupboard in his bleakly orderly kitchenette, a thick, cheap tumbler that had come free with something or other – the equally cheap microwave probably – and had poured the first slug out of the bottle and added a measure of water. Then it became too much of a bother to get up and walk six paces to the tap for
more water, so he just sloshed the whisky into the tumbler undiluted, and stared at the pitiful, evidently cheaply made daytime quiz show in front of him, and tried to fight off the memories that always engulfed him when he let himself go like this, of that occasion in 1982, at Goose Green in the Falklands, when he'd spent a whole night alone with the body of a gunner, waiting – no doubt about it, either then or ever since – to die himself, not least because it seemed to him that it was the last word in disloyalty and cowardice still to be alive when his mate wasn't. The memories were never conscious things. He never deliberately summoned them up. But when emotional upset or alcohol – or, most fatally, a combination of the two – weakened his defence against recollection, he was back on that cold and stony hillside with his heart breaking, and the sight of little white Argentinian flags of surrender popping up in the dawn light as if – as a last straw – to mock the utterly pointless waste and sacrifice of the boy who lay now across the gun trails at his feet, as lifeless as the ground on which he had fallen. They were demons, those memories, lying in wait for him, goading him to let down his guard by getting in a state and then, heedlessly, stupidly, fatally, throwing a tenner away on a bottle of gut rot. He despised himself, utterly and thoroughly, for giving in to them.

He'd have stayed with Eric, if Eric had let him. After Alexa had gone, he thought his father might work himself into one of his rages, purple-faced and almost foaming with incoherent fury, but he had realized quite soon and with horror that Eric was almost in tears. His face was working and he was fumbling in his pocket for one of the huge old khaki handkerchiefs he still favoured. George had tried to put an arm round him, but Eric had flung him off and had then shuffled to the front door of the flat, knocking over the plate of cupcakes as he went, pulled it open, and made jerky,
urgent gestures with his arm to indicate that George should leave him.

George said idiotically, ‘What about the umbrella?' and Eric had roared something incomprehensible, and had seized his son's arm in a still-strong grip and had almost flung him out on to the communal landing.

Crashing into the banisters of the stairwell, George had said, ‘But Dad, will you be OK? Will you—' but the door had slammed behind him, and when he rang the bell repeatedly for re-admittance, Eric hadn't even shouted at him to leave off, he'd simply said through the letter box, his voice unsteady with distress, ‘Just bloody leave me, lad, would you?'

So George had left him and gone to see Uncle Ray, in the Gap Road Cemetery, who had had nothing to offer by way of explanation or consolation, and from there he'd gone to the pub for a whisky, and then to the supermarket for a bottle of their Spirits Offer of the Week, and here he was, shoes off, curtains pulled, sozzled and out of his stupid, nightmare-haunted mind by early afternoon on a perfectly ordinary Thursday. He aimed the remote control at the television and switched it off. The ensuing silence was terrible. He thought he might be about to weep too. He detested weeping. He picked up his glass and the smell of the whisky rose up and hit him with a nauseating force and he felt the lump in his throat rise up as well, through his whole skull, and then spill, hot and molten, out through his eyes and down his cheeks.

It was a moment or two before George realized that the telephone was ringing. He got up unsteadily. It would be the old man, calling to say he had a new idea, he wasn't giving up, he wanted George round there at once because he had cooked up a new scheme George was going to have to implement.

‘Dad,' he said wearily into the phone.

‘George?' someone else said.

He hesitated. His tongue seemed to have swollen so that it almost filled his mouth. ‘Who … who …?'

‘Are you OK?' the voice said. ‘Is that George?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good,' the voice said. ‘Good. Sorry if I woke you, or anything. I'm a friend of your daughter-in-law. I'm a friend of Alexa's. My name's Jack Dearlove.'

On the way home, Dan stopped to buy coffee and a sandwich he then didn't feel like eating. He filled the car with petrol while he was at it, and checked the tyres and screenwash, then he drove the car to the side of the garage forecourt, where he sat with the paper cup of coffee in his hand and the untouched sandwich (ham and mustard) on the passenger seat beside him.

‘Come on, sir,' Tommy Stanway had said, leaning forward, grinning. ‘It's not the end of the world, honest. At least now, when I'm out drinking my legs stay sober!'

Tommy Stanway was twenty-six. He was a double amputee, both legs having been blown off by a booby-trap bomb in Helmand. When Dan had reached him, three hours before, he had turned one of his artificial legs upside down, with its boot in the air, and was using the sole of the boot to balance a mug of tea on. He was grinning.

‘I've got a good mentality, sir. Gunner mentality. There's some Paras and Marines in here, and I'll show them, I will. Me and Micky Munt, we'll show them.' He made a half gesture, as if he had been about to give Dan a consoling pat and thought better of it. ‘I've got football field ambitions,' he said. ‘Remember? I was playing the night before – well, before life took a different path. I'll get back out there, you watch me. I may be four inches shorter than I used to be, but I'll be a hell of a goalie.'

Micky Munt, missing a foot and a right arm and an eye,
had told Dan that he thought he'd recently met the right girl. She was a soldier, too.

‘Women don't seem to care about the way folk look, like blokes do. And she's never known me with two of everything, has she? I'm good, sir. I'm fine. The only thing that gets me is that I feel I've let the boys down, coming home early like this. And the dreams, of course.'

‘The dreams?'

The young men had exchanged glances. Dan noticed that Micky Munt's remaining hand had an uncontrollable tremor.

‘Crazy dreams,' Tommy said.

‘Legs and arms growing everywhere—'

‘Mad stuff. Just popping out of your body like something out of outer space.'

‘Relief to wake up, to be honest.'

They both laughed.

‘Will there be more operations?' Dan said.

‘Lots, sir.'

‘We've got to keep the weight off—'

‘That's a bloody battle.'

‘Can't let the stumps get sweaty or you get sores, and the prosthetics are frigging painful—'

‘Get so hot, sir. You do, if you haven't got half of you. I get hot just thinking about it.'

Then they changed the subject and would not return to it. How was old so-and-so? And X troop, and Y troop? Which troop had the most medals? Why wasn't Dan on Facebook? Why didn't he go on the Army Rumour Service website – they lived on it! They missed everyone and would come and personally duff up anyone in the regiment who wasn't missing them back. They'd be sure to. Couldn't tell what the future'd be yet, but they sure as hell had one. Tommy said he was thinking of teaching and Micky said what a bleeding pansy suggestion and hit Tommy lightly on his good arm,
and Tommy said you watch it, you wait till I swing round your place in a specially adapted Porsche and see how pansy you feel like calling me then. You wanker.

‘Don't worry,' they both said to Dan. ‘We're used to it. Shit happens, sir.'

‘What do you need?' Dan said. ‘What can I get you? Smart phones?'

They tapped their pockets. ‘Got them, sir. We need, we ask. Don't worry.'

Dan had stood up, towering over both of them. Tommy Stanway had once stood more than six feet in his socks. They grinned up at him. ‘Thanks for coming, sir.'

‘Please—'

‘You should see us play volleyball, sir. We sit on our arses and chuck ourselves everywhere. It's a riot.'

Micky Munt had put his one hand out to Dan and said solicitously, ‘You take care, sir,'

Dan finished his coffee. It had been unsatisfactory, thin and bitter and carelessly made. He crushed the paper cup in his hand, picked up the sandwich and got out of the car to drop both in a crooked overflowing litter bin bolted to the peeling wall of the forecourt. Then he got back in the car, switched on the ignition and drove out of the garage as fast as if he were being pursued.

There was nowhere, right now, to offload the excess energy of his emotions. He remembered an old soldier saying once, in an explosion of frustration after a complicated episode in his private life, ‘I just want to go overseas, under orders and – and
kill
someone.' Dan wasn't sure about random killing, but oh, would he, at this precise moment, have welcomed the orders! If he were to get back to Larkford and find an email instructing him to report for immediate deployment on any mission, however insane, he would obey it with a fervour he had no measure for. As it was, he was confronted with getting
back to a house that would have done nothing for itself since he left it – bed roughly made, coffee pot in the sink, sitting room untouched since the television-and-takeaway session of the night before – and a dog longing for company and exercise. There might – or might
not
– be a message from Alexa. There'd been nothing that day from her to his mobile. He wasn't actually sure whether he wanted to hear from her or whether this peculiar limbo land in which they currently seemed to be existing was preferable to the next stage, where decisions would have to be made and action taken. He beat the steering wheel with the flat of his left hand. She should have been with him today, she should have! If she'd seen those boys, seen their irrepressible cheerfulness and determination in the face of their injuries and disabilities, she'd get all her and Dan's stuff into perspective, she'd see the difference between the mountains and the molehills, he knew she would, he knew it. He'd tell her about going out of the place in a daze and finding himself sitting under a tree, hardly knowing how he'd got there, and she'd understand. Of course she would. He'd tell her what faith the boys had in the Army, how they knew the regiment would always look after them, and she'd look at him as she used to do when they first met, when she spoke of what he did, what his colleagues did, almost with reverence. Of course she'd get it!