The Soldier's Wife (22 page)

Isabel said that she would come home to play with the twins and help put them to bed, but that for the moment she would like to sleep at Franny's house.

‘Just till Rupert gets back,' she said, ‘and needs his bedroom.'

She hoped she had said his name really ordinarily. Alexa had flinched slightly, but had not said anything except that that would be lovely.

Franny said to Isabel. ‘Are you sure?'

Isabel nodded. ‘If that's OK.'

‘It's OK by me.'

‘Thank you,' Alexa said to Franny. She put an arm around Isabel's shoulders and held her hard. Then they ushered the twins out of Franny's house and walked home round the Quadrant and the twins rushed across the grass to the beech clump in the middle so that they could kick the leaves up and shout. Isabel wondered whether to join them, and decided not to. It was a risk, staying with Mum, that she'd ask all kinds of questions, but luckily the risk was worth taking and
she didn't. Alexa just walked, and told her silly things the twins had said and done and how spoiled they had been in London, and then they were home, and there was Beetle, in a rapture of welcome, and Dan, in sort of uniform, looking very pale but laying the table and trying to smile. She smiled back at him but didn't cross the room, and he seemed to get it and stayed where he was, a bunch of forks in his hand.

Alexa said to him, ‘You look very tidy.'

He shrugged. ‘Barrack office stuff. Very dull. Good to see you, Izzy.'

‘You, too,' she said politely.

‘No Gus?' Alexa said.

Dan placed two forks precisely on the table. ‘No Gus.'

‘Franny said that Kate—'

‘I know.'

‘Have you seen her?'

‘If you want to know,' Dan said, turning to get water glasses out of the cupboard behind him, ‘I don't want to see either of them.'

‘Really?'

‘Really.'

‘Oh.'

‘Where are the twins?'

Alexa pointed out of the window. ‘Coming. There they are.'

‘Isabel,' Dan said, setting tumblers on the table, ‘could you field them and get their hands clean, for lunch?'

‘OK.'

Alexa said, ‘This all seems very brisk.'

‘What does?'

She gestured. ‘All this table laying and uniform and hand washing.'

Dan looked at her. ‘I've got to go into Salisbury.'

‘Have you?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Dad's coming.'

‘George?'

‘Sorry,' Dan said. ‘Sorry, but I said yes. He just rang. Half an hour ago. He said he just had an impulse, and was acting on it.'

‘He never has impulses.'

‘He's no trouble.'

‘No,' Alexa said, ‘no trouble. Oh, well.'

‘Sorry.'

She shrugged. ‘I don't mind.'

Isabel looked out of the window. The twins were running across the grass to the house, their hands full of wet leaves.

‘He can have my bed,' Isabel said. ‘I won't be in it, will I? I'll be in Rupert's.'

George was carrying a laptop case. It was as surprising as if he'd arrived carrying a Masai spear or a blow-up doll.

‘What's that?' Dan said, indicating it.

‘A laptop,' George said reasonably.

‘I thought it was all you could do to pick up a telephone.'

‘Ah,' George said. ‘You have to speak to folk on telephones.' He looked round. ‘No kids?'

‘No,' Dan said.

George peered at him. ‘You all right, son?'

Dan looked down at the car keys in his hand. ‘Thanks for coming, Dad.'

‘Not at all,' George said. He switched the laptop to his left hand and put his right on Dan's arm. ‘When you rang—'

‘Sorry about that.'

‘What's to be sorry for?'

‘Interrupting—'

George gave a yelp of laughter. ‘What's to interrupt in my life, I wonder? Pension day, beers with your granddad, lottery tickets Friday. Full schedule, I have. Not a minute to
call my own. But you—' He tightened his grip on Dan's arm slightly. ‘You worried me, lad, ringing like that. I thought there'd been a crisis. For two pins I'd have hired a car and driven straight here, except I've let my licence lapse, haven't I? Not the only thing that's lapsed, moron that I am.'

‘I told Alexa you'd rung. Not that I'd rung you.'

George said soothingly, ‘Same difference.'

‘I'd like to talk to you before we go back,' Dan said, still looking at his car keys and not his father. ‘If that's OK by you. Cup of tea, maybe?'

Dan drove George to the centre of Salisbury and left the car in a side street just off the market square. Then he stowed George's rucksack and laptop under a blanket of Beetle's, and took him to a coffee shop where the other customers were all women, women with children or shopping or both, making the atmosphere uncontrovertibly, reassuringly domestic. Dan settled George in a booth with banquette seats and a plasticized menu on the table, and went away to the self-service counter to fetch tea for both of them.

While Dan was away, George watched a young woman at one of the centre tables feeding chips and some battered balls of something to her two small children with her fingers, and he wondered if she was a squaddie's wife, and if these children had been born nine months almost to the day after her man got back from a tour. He remembered talking to an Army midwife in Germany once, who said that when the boys came back, she'd block out a whole month in her diary for nine months later. ‘Regular as clockwork. Baby after baby. You'd think they'd never heard of precautions.'

Dan put two tall glass mugs of tea on the table.

George said, ‘You said on the phone that nobody's ill.'

Dan eased himself into the booth, opposite his father. ‘All right as rain.'

‘That's what I told your granddad.'

‘Did he ask?'

‘What?'

‘Why you were coming?'

George thought of his laptop, and the information it contained. ‘He knows,' George said carefully, ‘that I'll tell him what he needs to know. And he'll ask. Never been shy of asking.'

Dan picked up his tea. ‘Unlike you, then, Dad.'

George shrugged. ‘Maybe some of us are better listeners.' He glanced at Dan. ‘I'm all ready to listen to you – if you want to tell me.'

Dan leaned forward, his hands wrapped round his tea, his shoulders hunched. He said, ‘I'll give you the short version, Dad. The very short version. We'll leave out most of the last year. We'll leave out the training in Kenya for Helmand, and we'll leave out getting back from Helmand, and just focus on the here and now. It amounts to this. Isabel keeps running away from school because she hates it. Alexa got offered a job she can't take because we might not be here much longer. I get let down big time by my best mate, which blows my mind, so I go and see Mack and tell him I can't put my wife and family through any more of this, and he says, steady on, don't chuck it all in right now because you're bang on target for promotion.'

Dan stopped and looked up at his father across the table. ‘Sorry, Dad,' he said. ‘Sorry, I just had to tell someone. It is, as the boys would say, doing my head in.'

It was almost nine o'clock when Alexa heard the car wheels crunching on the drive. Dan had texted to say that they were having tea, and then again a bit later to say that they were in a pub, and then a third time to say that they were bringing fish and chips home with them. In the meantime, she and Isabel
had bathed the twins and read to them, put appropriately unfeminine sheets on Isabel's bed for George, and had several stilted small conversations in which any real communication was rendered impossible by Alexa's strenuous efforts not to ask questions.

When the twins' voices had finally subsided into slumber, Isabel had put on her blue fleece, hugged her mother and set off round the Quadrant to Franny's house with a torch, promising to text when she reached it. Just as she was leaving, Alexa had said impulsively and unguardedly, ‘Don't you think it's all a bit silly, you sleeping seven doors away?' and Isabel had stared straight back at her and said, ‘No,' in a voice that did not encourage further discussion.

She had texted five minutes later. ‘Safe at F's. I love you.'

Alexa gripped her phone. How tempting it was to text back with whole paragraphs of questions and reassurances. But she would exercise restraint. It was, if she thought about it, not only her great life skill, but at the moment also her only option.

‘Xx,' she typed back and pressed Send.

Now Dan and George were getting out of the car, lit by the half-hearted gleam of the lamp over the front door, and Beetle was tense with welcome in the hall. Through the window she could see that George was carrying his rucksack and what looked like a laptop case, and Dan had an armful of tidily wrapped paper parcels from the chip shop. She had laid the table – ketchup, vinegar – and made a salad. There were plates warming in the oven.

The front door opened and Beetle took charge of the greeting. Then Dan came into the kitchen, came straight across to her and kissed her. He smelled of beer. He said at once, ‘Sorry.'

‘It's OK,' she said automatically. She wanted to say, ‘Does it occur to you how often we have that precise exchange?'
but there was George behind him, in his old anorak, smiling at her, coming forward, kissing her cheek, beery too, but lightly, as if whatever he'd drunk had been automatically diluted by the mildness of his nature.

He said, ‘Shouldn't be dumping myself on you like this again.'

‘I like it, George, I really do.'

He stayed standing in front of her, still smiling. ‘Better than last time we met, eh?'

Alexa shot Dan a quick look. ‘Please don't—'

‘He didn't know,' George said easily, ‘did he? He didn't know anything.'

‘What?'

George dropped his rucksack on the floor and laid the laptop flat on the table. ‘We shouldn't have been so long in the pub,' he said. He seemed to Alexa to be in an unusual mood, much less diffident than his normal self. ‘We shouldn't have had those second halves. Not really. It's just that there was so much to say, as it turned out.' He patted the laptop. ‘I'd got things to show Dan, you see. I've probably jumped a whole row of guns, getting pictures of a house I've seen, and all, but I'd been planning to show you both together, that's what I had in mind. And then … and then …'

He looked at Dan, who was standing a yard away, still holding the fish parcels, and then he turned back to Alexa and smiled at her again. ‘And then,' he said, ‘it turned out you'd never said a word to him. About any of it. Had you?'

I
t was an impulse, really it was. One minute she was standing in the playroom, distractedly holding a pink plastic miniature saucepan and a Barbie doll with half her hair torn off, wondering where to put either, and, without really taking it in, watching the Brigadier's wife crossing the Quadrant with her spaniels, and the next minute she was out of the front door and sprinting across the grass, still holding the saucepan and the doll and shouting Claire's name.

Claire stopped walking, turned round, saw this distraught figure without a coat racing towards her and broke into a run herself.

‘Alexa! Alexa, what's the matter? What's happened?'

Alexa stopped in front of her, panting slightly.

‘The children,' Claire said. She indicated the Barbie and the saucepan. ‘Is it the children?'

Alexa swallowed. She blinked. ‘No. They're fine.' She gave Claire a weak smile. ‘They've all gone swimming. With Dan. And – and his father.'

Claire peered at her. ‘Then what is it?'

‘I saw you—'

‘Yes?'

‘I was just – standing by the window, and I saw you. And the next thing, I was out here—'

Claire took a step forward. She put a hand on Alexa's arm. ‘I was on my way home.'

Alexa said vaguely, ‘Were you?'

Claire glanced at the spaniels. They had both flopped down in the grass when she stopped walking and were lying there, as limp as rugs. ‘I was just taking these chaps back. And then I was going to make some coffee. Why don't we go and lock your house, and then you come back with me to have coffee too?'

Alexa eyed her. ‘Well …'

‘Leave a note for Dan,' Claire said. ‘Tell him where you'll be. Julian'll be glad to see you, too.'

‘Julian?'

‘He's at home,' Claire said. ‘Under my feet isn't in it. You'll be doing me a favour.'

Alexa looked down at Claire's hand on her arm. It was sheathed in a brown sheepskin glove, sensible and of quality. She felt ridiculously, enormously comforted by that neat sheepskin glove resting on her forearm. She raised her eyes and looked at Claire. ‘Thank you,' Alexa said.

When Julian Bailey had been promoted to Brigadier, he and Claire had decided not to move house. He would be entitled, he knew, to something bigger, grander, one of those substantial houses overlooking the polo ground, but he and Claire felt that such a house would be distancing from the brigade, less communal, and in any case, they were very well suited where they were. Their present house had a small downstairs room where Claire could take the children she saw for speech therapy. She worked two half-days a week in the local hospital, and then saw her other clients – ‘Not
patients
, Julian, not these days. Has it ever struck anyone that political
correctness has become a form of censorship in itself?' – at home in this tiny room which she had furnished to resemble the primary-coloured children's section of a bookshop.

Her kitchen, by contrast, was neutral. Tidy, efficient, old-fashioned and neutral. Everything in it, Alexa thought as she looked round, had its place; there was even a custom-built wooden dog bed under the table, and a chair for Julian, close to the telephone and the table, but well away from any drawer or cupboard Claire might need to open.

He was in the chair when Alexa came in, reading a copy of the
Economist
, half-moon glasses on, spruce in a jersey and cords. He leaped up. ‘Alexa! My dear!'

‘I collected her,' Claire said, pointing the spaniels to their lair under the table. ‘I was on my way home and there she was, and as we haven't had a sight of her since that lovely supper party, I brought her back with me.'

Julian pulled out a chair. ‘Have a pew. Delighted.'

‘Thank you,' Alexa said. She sat down. The table was shiny with varnish and completely bare, except for a blue pottery bowl of clementines.

Julian went round the table and pulled out the chair opposite. He said, sitting down, ‘I'm glad to see you.'

‘Coffee all round,' Claire said, stating not asking. ‘And possibly shortbread, if I can find it.'

‘How is Isabel?' Julian said.

Alexa looked at him. ‘You remembered.'

‘I don't like to make the same mistake twice, if I can help it. How is she?'

‘Not good. I – we – are going to have to move her. She's home again.'

‘Home!' Claire said.

‘Yes.'

‘You sound doubtful.'

‘Well,' Alexa said, ‘it's complicated.'

Julian said, ‘Would you like to tell us about it?'

Alexa looked at him. ‘No.'

‘No?'

She said, as if explaining something to someone hard of hearing, ‘Emotion and unhappiness are so suppressed round here. I'm out of the habit of talking about anything much. I really am. It all has to be kept so quiet, no boat must be rocked, there's no admitting that anyone's at the end of their rope, no confessing to an inability to manage whatever's thrown at you.'

Julian leaned forward a little. He said gently, ‘My dear—'

‘Please don't tell me—'

‘I wasn't going to tell you anything. I promise.' He glanced up at Claire. ‘Is that coffee coming along? Alexa, I think the time has come, really, for you to tell
me
. Don't you?'

Claire came forward and put three striped mugs on the table. ‘Tell him,' she said.

Alexa glanced up at her. ‘Tell him?'

‘Tell him how it is. Tell him what you feel.'

‘But—'

‘Tell him,' Claire said, ‘about going to see Walter. In Welfare.'

Alexa laughed.

‘That's better,' Julian said, relieved.

‘It was useless,' Alexa said frankly.

‘
Useless
?'

‘He's so nice. So kind. But he had nothing to say, nothing to offer me. Of course he hadn't! And he hates the job. They all hate the job, when they have to do it.'

Julian said, a little stiffly, ‘I'm sorry to hear that.'

‘You know it,' Claire said to him crisply. ‘You all know it. No soldier wants to do Welfare. It's seen as pansy. That's why they don't do it for very long. That's why there's no continuity.'

Julian looked down briefly at the table. ‘Ah,' he said.

There was a small awkward silence, and then Claire put a coffee pot and a small jug of milk on the table, and Alexa said, with an abrupt rush of energy, ‘Actually—'

They both looked at her.

‘Actually, what?'

‘Actually,' Alexa said, her voice gathering conviction, ‘I do have something to tell you. I do.'

She lifted her chin and looked past Julian's well-brushed head to a poster on the wall of Van Gogh's sunflowers, framed in black. ‘I went to London – and I – I was offered a house.'

‘A house!'

‘In London?'

‘Yes.'

‘Will you take it?' Julian said.

Alexa transferred her gaze to his face. ‘I might,' she said. She smiled. ‘I might do a lot of things.'

Claire eased herself very quietly into a chair at the end of the table.

‘And Dan?' Julian said.

Claire nodded. She put her hands round her coffee mug. She didn't speak, but there was something about her demeanour that Alexa felt was far from antagonistic.

Alexa smiled slightly at Julian. ‘You'd better ask him yourself,' she said. ‘It's no good asking
me
.'

When Alexa had gone, Julian Bailey followed his wife into her teaching room. She settled herself in front of her computer and he perched behind her, in a small red inflatable armchair intended for the children she was helping. They sat in silence for a while, Claire tapping on her keyboard, and then Julian said to her back, ‘Do you think she's going to leave him?'

‘I have no idea. Why didn't you ask her?'

‘God,' Julian said, with sudden force. ‘I don't know. Two of my best rising stars and their private lives are round their ankles! Gus and Kate. Now Dan and Alexa. I don't want to sound like the judge who didn't know who the Beatles were, but what the hell is going on?'

Claire stopped typing. She turned round and regarded Julian gravely. ‘What do you think? I mean, consider how the picture – the whole picture – has changed since your father and my father were army cadets. You
know
what's going on, Jules.'

He sighed. He shifted himself tentatively in the inflatable chair. He said miserably, ‘I do. I do. For my old dad, in the Cold War, military duty was simple and honourable, but these discretionary fights aren't the same. We choose them, they're morally complicated, and we're responsible for them. I know I have a unique duty of care as a result. I know it. I want it. I'm on duty for the brigade at all times, and yet here's this girl telling me that my families welfare officer is useless—'

‘For
her
,' Claire said.

‘She—'

‘She only said for
her
.'

‘What are you trying to tell me?'

Claire swivelled her desk chair round until she was facing him. It crossed her mind, briefly, that it might cheer some of Julian's junior officers to see him so disadvantaged, crouching there in a red balloon chair meant for an eight-year-old. She put the thought firmly to one side and said, ‘I'm trying to tell you what Mrs Major Riley was trying to tell you. You can't treat the men as if they didn't have families. You can't pour all this thought and all these resources into the soldiers if you don't deal with their human landscapes too. You've got to open it all up. You've got—'

‘I'm running a
brigade
, Claire, not a therapy session.'

‘Soldiers are people. Their partners and children are people. Dan's habit of diplomatically not telling his wife alarming things is infectious and she's holding back from him now, too. There's no encouragement to talk, everyone feels they're letting themselves down if they do.'

Julian leaned out of the chair, causing it to squeak in protest. ‘You've never said this sort of thing before.'

Claire examined the nails of one hand. ‘Maybe I've never seen things the way I've seen them recently, before.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like these marriages. Like these wives who want careers, too, not just part-time jobs. Like – like what it's like, frankly, living in a situation whose vocabulary simply does not include the word compromise.'

Julian put out a hand and grasped one of his wife's. She gave his hand a quick squeeze and dropped it. He said, ‘Claire, where should I begin?'

She swung her chair back to her computer, and then she said to the screen, ‘I should start by going to see Alexa Riley again and asking for her help. It won't do any harm to
ask
instead of telling, for a change.'

It was years since Jack Dearlove had been inside Elaine and Morgan's flat. The last time, not long after Richard died, had admittedly been a bit of a strain, because Jack knew how much the Longworths were hoping he'd marry Alexa, and he knew even more certainly that she would never agree to it. He supposed he might, given a free rein, have married her if he'd been given the chance, and he supposed – quite often, actually, since then – that if they'd married, they'd have made quite a companionable go of it. But he thought, on balance, it was probably best that she, at least, had known her own mind. It was odd, now, to enter that luxurious,
old-fashioned lift, in that luxurious, old-fashioned building, and recall that earlier Jack who'd last been there, full of an eager – it now seemed to him naïve – certainty that he could make a difference. To all of them.

Elaine Longworth looked exactly the same to him, careful and conventional, greeting him with just enough warmth to be more than polite, but without the enthusiasm that might take her into the badlands of being effusive. Morgan, wearing the kind of tweed jacket that made men of Jack's shape look like comic characters out of P. G. Wodehouse, shook Jack warmly by the hand and led him to a cream sofa beside a glowing electric fire full of artificial coals, in front of a glass coffee table bearing an orchid in a porcelain pot and a precise stack of expensive books. Nothing had changed in the nine years. Nothing.

He looked round. ‘Nice to see some things can be relied on!'

Elaine sat down opposite him. ‘We had Alexa and the twins here, mind you.'

‘I know.'

‘It was amazing how the flat coped with them.'

‘And amazing,' Morgan said jovially, ‘how
we
did.'

Elaine looked at him frostily. ‘We loved it.'

‘Of course we did!'

‘It made the flat come alive, having them. They were so sweet. And funny. They looked adorable in bed.'

Morgan made a tipping gesture with one hand towards Jack. ‘Drink?'

Jack shook his head. ‘I've sworn off it for the moment.'

‘Good God,' Morgan said. ‘What's brought this on?'

Jack considered. He had promised himself that he would not mention Maia. He knew that if he mentioned her once, he was very likely to go
on
mentioning her, and in the course of all those mentions he would give away the fact that he was
trying, desperately, to lose weight, in order – in order to be worthy of her.

He looked at Morgan, gave a rueful smile and patted his belly briefly.

‘Nonsense,' Morgan said heartily.

‘Leave him alone,' Elaine said.

Morgan tried again. ‘A very weak—'

‘No, thank you,' Jack said. ‘Nothing.' He touched the pocket of his leather jacket that contained his calorie counter, as if for reassurance.

Morgan said teasingly, ‘Glass of tonic?'

‘Leave it,' Elaine said sharply. She turned to Jack and said, in quite a different tone of voice, ‘Thank you for coming, Jack.'