The Soldier's Wife (2 page)

‘I can't bear to,' he said. He was standing among the precise piles of his kit, in their bedroom. ‘I couldn't look at them last time, and I felt a shit because I couldn't. So, better not to take them.' He gave a half-laugh. ‘I feel shit about enough, as it is.'

As well as those calls – as vital as they were unsatisfactory – Alexa rang her girlfriends on the camp daily. She rang Mo, and Franny and Sara and Prue. She also rang Dan's father once a week, out of affection, and her own parents, out of duty. And she rang Jack. She rang Jack almost as often as Jack rang her, which was every day or two.

Jack Dearlove had been in Alexa's life since she was seven. His father had been a minor diplomat, like hers, and their peripatetic careers had brought their children together, quite by chance, in several postings, the last of which was Bonn, just before both Jack and Alexa went off to university. And at his university – Newcastle – Jack had made a friend, a close, slightly older friend, whom he had introduced to Alexa in a jazz café on the Fulham Road which specialized in live music. The friend was called Richard Maybrick, and it was his photograph, taken on a walking holiday in France with his hair ruffled and his teeth gleaming in a wide, untroubled smile, that his daughter Isabel kept on her chest of drawers at number seven, the Quadrant, Larkford Camp.

Richard Maybrick had died of a brain tumour in the
neurological hospital in Queen Square, in London, when Isabel was only a baby. The tumour was diagnosed when he was twenty-six and his wife Alexa was pregnant with their first child, and it killed him eighteen months later. Throughout those months, the stocky, comfortable figure of Jack Dearlove was never far away. He was there after the consultations, he was there after every intense and terrifying bout of treatment, he was there when Alexa came out of Richard's last hospital room and said, bleakly, ‘It's over.'

Alexa's parents supposed that their daughter would then, after a decent interval, become Mrs Dearlove. Alexa's mother, who had always minded very much about appearances, had even commented upon what an attractive surname it was. Preferable, actually, she said carelessly, to Maybrick. But Alexa, although she saw so much that was loveable in Jack's warmth and dependability and sturdy set of principles, saw nothing either romantic or exciting in him. In any case, Jack himself, devoted as he was to his mate Richard's widow and baby, was in love with an Ethiopian model of startling, etiolated beauty, whom he captured, and married, and then lost again, but never ceased to yearn for. He became, as Alexa's friend Franny put it, the perfect brother-friend. He had seen Alexa through Richard's illness and death. She had seen him through Eka's surrender, and then flight – insofar as he would let her. He was designed, Alexa knew, to pick up the scattered and shattered pieces of humans other than himself.

He'd picked
her
up often enough, after all, quietly materializing just when she needed him, with the extraordinary faithful reliability of the best kind of sister in a Jane Austen novel. In fact, she often thought, he represented a continuity of presence and support in her life that, quite literally, no one else had been able to. Not girlfriends.
Not even Dan. Jack had always been there, even when he was physically in London, a sort of cheerful, dependable, affectionate human hand rail.

He had rung early that morning, before he set off on one of his runs. He was always running, or spinning, or lifting weights, at the gym in Chiswick, near his flat. It was, as he cheerfully admitted, all part of the endless battle he waged with his weight, having inherited his father's lack of height and his mother's lack of a usefully swift metabolism.

‘I just
look
at a doughnut,' he'd say, ‘and it immediately adds itself to my outline.'

That morning, he'd greeted Alexa with ‘Sick as a parrot, are you?'

Alexa, on her way to the shower, shampoo bottle in hand, had smiled into the telephone. ‘Sicker.'

‘Exciting, though.'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you in a corset and fishnets?'

‘I'm a mother of three,' Alexa said. ‘In a fleece dressing-gown that my grandfather-in-law chose for me himself, last Christmas, in Elys department store on Wimbledon High Street.'

‘Elys, eh?'

‘He likes it there,' Alexa said. ‘He doesn't like anything too up-to-date, like coffee shops. On the third floor in Elys, they give you strong tea in a metal pot, and a toasted teacake. Just the one, to be eaten slowly.'

‘I hope you'll eat. Breakfast, I mean.'

‘Thank you, Nanny, but I couldn't possibly. It'll be coffee with a longing look at the brandy bottle.'

Jack said, in mock amazement, ‘You have
brandy
?'

‘
And
weed killer.'

‘Wow,' Jack said. ‘You live life to the full, down in Wiltshire.'

‘We do,' Alexa said, ‘the fleece dressing-gown and me. And now I'm going to wash my hair.'

Jack's tone changed. ‘I'll be thinking of you.'

‘Please do.'

‘Ring me tomorrow.'

‘Of course.'

‘And a high five to the old hero.'

Alexa dropped her phone into her pocket, and then dropped the dressing-gown off her shoulders. She stepped into the shower – tiles on the wall were missing and the plastic tray at the bottom had a fine, wavering crack across it – and found herself humming. Talking to Jack was like finding a forgotten fiver in the fruit bowl. He never failed to make her feel better.

‘Mummy?'

Alexa turned from the sink. Isabel, in the outgrown nightie patterned with cherries that she insisted on still wearing, was standing in the doorway.

‘Hi, darling.'

‘I feel a bit weird.'

‘We all do.'

Isabel drifted towards the table and leaned on it. Beetle sat up in his basket, wagging, and waited for her to notice him.

‘D'you think Dan does?'

‘He probably feels weirder than anyone. Camp Bastion, then up to the air head, and then twenty-four hours in Cyprus, and then home.'

Isabel wound herself along the table edge until she was opposite Beetle's basket. His tail was a blur of wagging. She knelt beside him and put her arms round his neck. Alexa said, ‘Try not to let him lick you.'

‘I like it. What happens in Cyprus?'

‘It's called decompression. They get a shave and a shower and a comedy show and something like a barbecue—'

Isabel closed her eyes so that Beetle could make a thorough job of washing her face. ‘Do they get drunk?'

‘I don't know, darling. I think they're only allowed five cans each.'

‘And then be sick?'

‘Izzy, might I persuade you to have some breakfast?'

Isabel unlocked her arms and got to her feet. ‘Have the twins had breakfast?'

‘Just yoghurt so far.'

‘At school,' Isabel said, ‘Libby Guthrie's little sister, who's only five, said to me, “Is your daddy dead yet?” and I said yes. I said he'd been dead for ages and then Libby whispered to her sister why and Bella didn't get it and said, “Did someone shoot him or blow him up?”'

Alexa came across the kitchen and put her hands on Isabel's shoulders. Then she pushed her gently before her until they were standing in front of the fridge. ‘Now. Yoghurt, banana, cereal. Or cereal and an apple. Dan is coming home today and he is all in one piece and there's not a scratch on him. We are
not
going to talk about dying.'

Isabel said nothing. Alexa reached into the fridge and put a pot of strawberry-flavoured yoghurt in her hand. ‘Eat,' she said. ‘I'm going to get the twins.'

Dan had said, please don't come to Brize Norton. Just wait at home. It'll be heaving at Brize and I don't want to see you all again for the first time in public.

Alexa had thought of saying, I think I've done enough waiting, and then she thought, if I've waited six months, why can't I wait a few more hours, if he's asked me to? And he was right, anyway; it was so much better to see him come home, privately, than to be part of the massed, emotional,
tearful chaos of men and kit and babies and children and women and the wonderful, awful exhilaration of reunion. Wasn't it? She had, of course, planned to go to the airbase. She had washed the car, and hoovered crisp crumbs out of the child seats, and cleaned the dashboard with some patent spray cleaner that had left the interior smelling like a cheap beauty parlour. But two nights ago, ringing from Cyprus – safe in Cyprus! Safely out of Afghanistan! – Dan had said, please don't come to Brize. Be there for me at home, where I can picture you. I'll whistle for Beetle. Let Beetle out when you hear me whistle. Four-ish, I should think. Maybe earlier.

She wasn't sure how she would have got through the day, if it hadn't been for Franny. Franny just appeared, after breakfast, and looked at the girls and said, ‘Round to mine, babies,' to the twins, and ‘I need you,' to Isabel, and then she said to Alexa, ‘I'll bring them back about three thirty.'

‘How do I ever repay you?'

‘You have my horrible boys when Andy flies into a mountain.'

‘He won't—'

‘He might. He's another being in that chopper.'

Alexa looked at Isabel. She had put on small denim shorts over purple tights and the dumpy sheepskin boots that were an off-duty uniform for her school.

‘OK, Iz?'

Isabel nodded. She bent her head so that her inappropriately shining eyes were not evident. Franny's older boy, Rupert, gave Isabel the distinct feeling that he had somehow noticed her. And he was almost fifteen.

‘She'll be fine,' Franny said. ‘It'll give me a day of girl power, having your three.' She looked down at the twins, who were whispering away together in their particular language. ‘These two fascinate my boys. Even if they'd rather die than say so.'

When they had gone, Alexa toured the house for the twentieth time, straightening and adjusting, wrenching the dripping shower head to its furthest Off position, polishing the draining board with kitchen paper. In the hall, she paused, and took the homecoming leaflet from the Welfare office off the table, and opened it.

‘Why learn about homecoming and reunion?' it began brightly. ‘Everyone is affected, that's why – service members, spouses and children all feel the stress, as well as friends and relatives. After all, everyone changes. It's only natural that those who have been away, as well as the spouses and children, family and friends, will have changed with time. They won't, any of them, be exactly as you remembered.'

She put the leaflet down, and looked at herself in the mirror Mo had glanced in the night before. Was she different? Did she
look
different? A bit thinner, maybe, but the same height, obviously, and hair more or less the same length, and even if her jeans were newish, they were a familiar kind of jeans, and her hoop earrings had been given to her by Dan, soon after they met – he'd said that he thought big earrings went with long hair. She moved her head slightly. Her clean hair swished across her shoulders. Still long, if not quite as long as it had been when she went – so reluctantly! – to a party given by a work colleague at the school where they both taught, and there was this tall young man gazing at her from the other side of the room until she'd had enough to drink to go up to him and say, in a slightly pantomime voice that she was ashamed, in retrospect, of using, ‘Can I help you in any way, sir?'

‘Yes,' he'd said. ‘You can leave this party with me, right now, before anyone else nabs you.'

And she had. They'd gone to a pub, and then to a Chinese place to eat, and then for a walk in a park she didn't know because it wasn't in her part of London, and he'd kissed her,
suddenly, in the middle of a public path, right under a street lamp, and here she was, eight years and two babies and five house moves later, waiting for him to come back with all the sick excitement she had felt in that second, in the night-time park, before he kissed her, and when she had known with complete avidity that he would.

Beetle shot suddenly past her out of the kitchen, and stood, quivering and taut, by the front door, his tail a blur of wagging.

‘Nonsense,' Alexa said. ‘Nonsense. He won't be back for hours yet.'

Beetle took no notice. He focussed on the door as if he could see through it, every particle of him poised and straining.

‘I'll show you,' Alexa said. ‘I'll open the door and show you. And when it turns out to be someone else, you'll feel pretty silly.'

She leaned across Beetle and unlatched the door. Beetle, unable to bear waiting for even another fraction of a second, shoved the door wider with his shoulder and bolted out towards the road. Alexa looked up, across her badly mown lawn, over the ragged hedge, towards the beech clump. Coming across the central grass of the Quadrant, in desert combats and burdened with his grip and his Bergen rucksack, was – Dan.

G
eorge Riley had planned to go down, quietly, to Brize Norton when the planes came in from Cyprus. He'd had no intention of joining Alexa and the children or in any way compromising their exclusive and primary right to welcome Dan home, but he thought he'd just like to be there, in the crowd, to see the lad safe back with his own eyes, and then melt away, satisfied and relieved, to begin the laborious public-transport journey back to Wimbledon, where he could then go round to the old man's flat and report Dan's return and they could celebrate together with a beer.

But when Alexa rang to tell him that Dan wanted their reunion to take place at home and that she wasn't driving anywhere, it had seemed a bit sneaky, to George, to travel down to Brize, even if he didn't make himself known, so he went round to see his father instead, to tell him of the change of plan, and the old man said, don't ring him. Don't ring him for a couple of days.

George said, ‘What if he doesn't ring me?'

Eric Riley had never lost the manner of the regimental sergeant major he had once been. ‘Then he doesn't.'

‘But—'

‘You wait,' Eric said to his son. ‘You just bloody
wait
.
When I got back from Aden the families had to wait till the boys wrote them a bloody
letter
.' He put a not entirely steady hand out for his teacup. George thought his father drank more tea than anybody else in the universe. First thing in the morning, he'd make a brew. Last thing at night, he'd make a brew. In between, George suspected that the kettle never had time to cool down, and the teapot Eric used – squat and metal, encased in the crocheted wool cover George's mother had made decades ago, striped in regimental colours – was as black as a coalmine inside, from all the tannin. ‘When you got back from the Falklands,' Eric added, after a gulp of tea, ‘I don't recall you ringing. I don't recall you being in any bloody hurry to let your mum and me know you were home.'

George looked at his father's teacup. Once out of the Army, Eric swore he'd never drink a brew out of a mug again; he'd drink it in a civilized manner, out of a teacup. And he always had. Just as he took the antimacassar from the back of his armchair, embroidered in cross-stitch, to the launderette with his washing, and went to the barber every three weeks, and shined his shoes with spit and polish and a bone worn as dark as the teapot. Standards, he said.

‘I was in a twitch about Lisette, I should think,' George said. ‘What she'd been up to while I was away.' He leaned forward and put his arms on his knees. ‘Well, we know now, don't we?'

Eric gave a snort. ‘Well shot of that baggage, you are.'

‘She's Dan's mum, Dad.'

‘There's mothers and mothers,' Eric said. ‘Those who think they've done it all just by giving birth, and those who think that's where it starts. What kind of mother runs off to Australia with her fancy man and leaves a little lad behind?'

‘I'm glad she did, Dad.'

Eric gave his cup a little shove. ‘Fill me up, lad.'

George stood up. It was too hot in Eric's flat, as usual,
and the smell of dusty, fusty old fabrics and carpet gave the air a peculiar, slightly sickening density. If he opened the window, though, he knew that not only would Eric complain of a draught, but it would let in the equally thick, cheesy smell of the neighbouring dairy, whose milk floats were lined up docilely in the afternoons, as neatly as toy trucks in a children's cartoon. His mother Eileen, Eric's late wife, had regarded the flat as convenient, but only temporary. Her dream had been, one day, to cross the Queens Road and live in a part of Wimbledon she had always aspired to.

‘Trouble with your father,' she'd said to George, only days before she died, ‘is that if it isn't to do with the Army, he's got no more ambition than a potato.'

George picked up Eric's teacup. His mother hadn't been a Wimbledon girl, any more than Eric had been a Wimbledon boy. They'd ended up there because of Eric's brother – his one, much older brother, whose memory Eric revered, and who'd been killed at the very end of the First World War – October 1918 – and whose memorial headstone was in Wimbledon, in the Gap Road Cemetery.

Eric hadn't even known Ray. Ray had died four years before Eric was born, but there was something about the bad luck of being killed less than a month before the Armistice that impelled Eric to choose to live near by, and to keep his memory company with regular visits. And it was only his memory. Ray's body, like that of every soldier killed after 1915, was not repatriated after his death. There were too many of them, the authorities had decided, and most of them were too mutilated even to identify. So they were hastily buried where they had fallen, and this wretched fate, this horrible anonymity, had added to Eric's resolve, which he felt in the core of his being and would never have dreamed of analysing.

Anyway, Eric liked the Gap Road Cemetery. It wasn't
always quite as tidy as he would have liked – ‘There's over twenty-four acres of it to keep up, you know,' a Council gardener had protested one day when Eric complained about grass clippings not being picked up – but he couldn't fault the care the War Graves Commission took of the services headstones. The word he used to himself – a word he'd heard his granddaughter-in-law, Alexa, use – was meticulous. It was meticulous to spray the headstones regularly with fungicide so that they stood out, bright white, the lettering on each one sharply visible. ‘R. C. Riley,' Ray's headstone read, ‘17660. Private Army Pay Corps. 14th October 1918. Aged 20,' and then underneath, a big, simple, deeply incised cross. Eric didn't ever take flowers when he went to see Ray, except on Remembrance Day, when he took a few red paper poppies from the British Legion and stuck them in the earth at the bottom of the headstone in a neat, stiff little row.

Eric and Ray's mother had been eighteen when she'd had Ray and forty-two – and deeply ashamed to be pregnant, since it told the world that she and Eric's father still had relations – when she had Eric. She died when Eric was the age Ray had been when he was killed, but by then Eric was overseas, with the Army, in the Second World War and was offered no more concession for grieving or adjustment than half an hour with the padre and his mates holding back on the customary abuse for a couple of days. When he came back to England, he married the daughter of the couple who'd lived next door to his parents, whom he'd always got on well with.

‘Might as well,' she said, when he suggested they marry. ‘At least we know what we're getting into, what with the war changing everything, like it's done.'

That had been in 1945. The following year, George was born and Eric was promoted. He went on being promoted, up and up the non-commissioned ranks, until September
1965, when he went out to Aden as a regimental sergeant major, where he stayed till June 1967.

‘Best years of my life,' he'd say silently to Ray's headstone. ‘Bloody knew what I was there for. We lost a good battery commander in a helicopter crash, but apart from that, we showed them what's what. Bloody useful.'

George put the refilled teacup down in front of his father. ‘Bit stewed, Dad.'

‘You know I like it stewed. Stewed's how I've drunk it all my life. You spoken to Alexa?'

George sat down again opposite his father in the chair scratchily upholstered in cut moquette. ‘That's how I know Dan didn't want the family at Brize.'

Eric eyed him. ‘Was she cut up?'

‘I think she's so relieved he's out of Afghanistan she didn't care one way or the other.'

‘Bloody curse, these mobile and email whatsits,' Eric said. ‘You know too much. You have to tell too much.'

George thought back to the blueys of his soldiering days, those fragile airmail letters that invariably had too much depending upon them. And what you didn't read, you imagined, like him imagining all the things Lisette was doing – getting up to, more like – which she never mentioned but which somehow haunted her carefree, careless handwriting like shadows and whisperings. When he'd been down in the South Atlantic in 1982, he hadn't known whether to long for a bluey or to hope the next one never came. At least nowadays you knew the day-to-day stuff, it wasn't all such a big deal. And you got the football results almost as soon as the match ended. He said, ‘It's never easy, coming back. Not for them, or us.'

His father drank some tea with relish. ‘It was easier on those bloody ships. Took for ever. Plenty of time to readjust, get bored. Now it's decompression like a bloody diver, wham,
bang, out of ops and back in your own bloody bedroom with the wife wanting the moon and stars.'

George said reprovingly, ‘You don't think that of Alexa.'

Eric grunted. ‘I think the bloody world of Alexa.'

‘The tops,' George said softly.

When Dan had brought Alexa to Wimbledon, they'd both been bowled over. She wasn't a beauty, necessarily, but she had class. She was tall and smiling, with all that hair down her back, and she was a widow. Twenty-six, and a widow. They couldn't get over that. Bloody shame. Where was the justice in a lovely girl like that being a widow at twenty-six in this day and age when the doctors can do almost anything? But then, if her husband had still been alive, Dan mightn't have stood a chance. He might be the apple of his father's and grandfather's eye – Ministry of Defence-sponsored place at Welbeck College, Military College at Sandhurst, first commissioned officer in the family – but a girl like Alexa, married with a baby, might still never have given him a second glance. Just another typical bloody soldier, she might have thought. Why would I need one of them when I've got my nice civvy husband already?

But then the poor bugger had died, hadn't he? And horribly, from this tumour on the brain. And there was Alexa, trying to look after her little girl, trying to hold down her teaching job, trying not to ask her parents for help, and she goes to this party, not in a good mood, and there's our Dan, standing by the wall, drink in his hand, eyeing up the talent, and he spots her as soon as she comes in, and he thinks, that one's got my name on, and he waits and watches and waits and watches, and blow me if she doesn't bloody well come right up to him and ask him if there's something he wants. Wants?
Wants?
When what he wants is standing there right in front of him? Bloody marvellous.

There'd been much debate as to where Dan should bring
Alexa to meet his father and grandfather. George's austere little flat had been dismissed as having all the domestic charm of a hospital waiting room, and the café in Elys, which Eric so favoured, would indicate that they didn't have a home to take her to. So it was a teatime occasion, in the end, in Eric's flat, with Eric's teacups, and a plate of cakes from the French patisserie at the top of the High Street, all a bit uncomfortable, a bit awkward, until Alexa produced a bottle of whisky from her bag and set it down without comment next to Eric's teapot.

George thought he'd probably fallen in love with her at that moment. He knew his father had. And Dan was so deep in already he was almost drowning. George had looked at the four of them, sitting round the whisky and grinning, and felt suddenly, recklessly, that all the pains of the past, all the loneliness and anxiety and disappointment, had been swept away by the presence of this young woman and her – her sheer
style
. When he looked at Dan, the lad seemed to have a glow round him. A captain already, and soon – no doubt about it – to be beiged for a major. And now this girl, pouring whisky into Eric's late wife's sherry glasses and licking cake crumbs off her fingers. Her father was something in the Foreign Office, her mother – well, she was one of those ladies who knew how to arrange flowers and talk comfortably to strangers about nothing, from the sound of her. Meeting them might not be something any of the Rileys exactly looked forward to, but, hell, what did that matter? And if they could produce a girl like this, he could forgive them anything. He'd raised his whisky glass and looked at Alexa over it. ‘Here's to you, ma'am,' he'd said, and meant it.

As it turned out, the meeting between the Rileys and Alexa's parents was quite successful. Dan refused to get worked up about it, saying that his future parents-in-law were just
like the Army great and good who came to the regimental drinks parties the garrison held at Christmas – ‘You know the type, Dad.' Eric wanted to wear his suit, so George wore his, too, in case his father looked out of place; but when they got there, to this very classy flat in a vast building on the Marylebone Road – small but formal, with little sofas and a lot of lilies – Alexa's father was in a jacket and tie and her mother was in pearls, so the suits looked appropriate. Alexa, bless her heart, was in jeans and a velvet jacket, and her little Isabel was in gumboots which she refused to take off. Her grandmother said things like ‘Not on the sofa, darling' quite often, but neither Alexa nor Isabel seemed to take any notice, and when Morgan Longworth offered George a drink, Alexa said, ‘Don't do your global cocktail act on George, Pa. He drinks beer or whisky,' and Morgan, smoothly, not batting an eyelash, said, ‘Sensible man.'

Eric had asked for tea.

Dan said easily, ‘Granddad doesn't drink in other people's houses.'

‘On principle?' Elaine Longworth said archly.

Eric, ramrod straight in his suit, looked at her and smiled. ‘If I'm going to make a bloody fool of myself, ma'am, I'd rather do it in my own home.'

After they'd gone – Alexa declining to reveal where Dan was taking her and Isabel – Morgan Longworth gave his wife enough time to plump up all her handsome cushions and then he said, ‘Well?'

Elaine straightened. She put her hands on her hips. She said, not looking at Morgan, ‘Not sure what I was expecting …'