The Soldier's Wife (23 page)

He ducked his head in acknowledgement.

‘It's – it's just that we've been so worried. Ever since Dan got back. Of course, we don't want to interfere, but we'd like to help, if we can, if they'd like it too. We'd like—' She stopped and glanced at Morgan, and then she said, ‘And we've had old Eric Riley on the phone.'

Jack sat up straighter. ‘
Have
you?'

‘He was so upset,' Elaine said. ‘I couldn't understand him at first, I couldn't think what he was trying to say, he was half shouting, as he does, and it all came out backwards, but it was something to do with Alexa going to see them, taking my umbrella and forgetting it because they offered her money for a house or something, and all she did was burst into tears and rush off and there was my umbrella, still in Eric's bathroom. Do – do you know anything about any of that?'

Jack sighed. He looked at the orchid. How much happier it would be if it were still in Thailand. ‘Yes,' he said.

Elaine leaned forward. ‘So, it's true.'

‘More or less.'

‘But the house,' Morgan said. ‘This house …'

Jack said cautiously, ‘The Rileys were just trying to inject a bit of stability—'

‘Have they
bought
something?'

‘Oh no. No. They've just got some money put by, and George has done a bit of research.'

He smiled at Elaine. He didn't want to tell her about meeting George, about their visit to the terraced house with its bay windows and seventy-foot garden, which George walked round with all the exclamatory optimism of an estate agent, pointing out the light and the ceiling heights and the proximity to Wimbledon Common. Jack had looked at the sad little kitchen and the antediluvian bathroom and sucked his teeth, and George had exclaimed over and over, ‘Nothing that can't be fixed! Nothing can't be fixed!'

He said now, ‘Like you, they couldn't bear to do nothing.'

Elaine looked down at her hands. ‘It's so hard …'

‘Yes,' Jack said.

Morgan took his reading glasses out of his top pocket and jabbed them towards Jack. ‘And what, I wonder, have
you
said to her?'

Jack shifted a little. He said as vaguely as he could, ‘I just told her to get on with it.'

‘With what?' Morgan said.

‘With deciding.'

Elaine glanced at Morgan. Then she said, ‘That's what we're afraid of.'

‘What is?'

‘That she will decide.'

‘Decide?'

Elaine looked at Morgan. He said, almost through clenched teeth, ‘She'll decide to leave him.'

‘Leave him!' Jack said. ‘Leave Dan?'

‘Yes.'

‘Never,' Jack said. He felt his face grow hot. ‘That's the whole bloody problem, excuse my French. She'll never leave him. She adores him. It's taken me a while to realize it, but that's what it is.' He looked at them both, turning his face from one to the other. ‘That is why – that is why she's so stuck.'

When Julian Bailey had rung, Alexa had supposed that he was ringing to speak to Dan, so it had taken some minutes for him to get through to her that it was her he wished to see, her he wanted to speak to. When she at last understood him, she immediately felt apprehensive.

‘Can you tell me what it's about?'

‘I would much rather be in your presence before I say anything further.'

Alexa had taken the call in her bedroom. She had gone upstairs to make the bed after the twins had had a prolonged post-breakfast jumping session on it. It looked as if the bedding had been stirred up by a giant spoon. She put a hand to her forehead. ‘I can't quite think.'

‘I'd be so grateful if you could see me before Christmas. I'm sure you have plans for Christmas.'

‘I haven't even thought about it,' Alexa said, subsiding on to the edge of the bed. ‘I don't even know where we'll be.'

Julian let a small silence elapse and then he said, ‘I'd so appreciate just an hour …'

Alexa reached out and pulled a small green sock out of the tangle of bedclothes. ‘Perhaps tomorrow – tomorrow afternoon?'

‘I'll be there,' Julian said.

And now here he was. In the sitting room, leaning against Dan's Union Jack cushion, refusing tea or coffee or even water, and waiting for Alexa to stop fidgeting about around him and focus on the reason for his coming. She had
moved from the arm of the sofa to the seat, and then to a chair wedged against the television. The children were out, at Franny's, to be part of a welcome-home celebration for Rupert and his brother. Dan had taken George behind the wire to see the new regimental gym. He hadn't asked her why Julian was coming. He wouldn't. She could see it in his face. He wouldn't.

‘Settle,' Julian said now. ‘Please.'

‘I feel,' Alexa said, ‘that you've come to tick me off.'

Julian spread his hands. ‘That's the
last
thing I've come to do. Please sit somewhere comfortable. That doesn't look at all comfortable.'

‘It isn't.'

‘Then move. Please.'

Alexa stood up. ‘Could we go into the kitchen?'

Julian rose too. ‘I'd be glad to.'

Alexa walked in front of him into the kitchen. Even as she moved, she felt better. Being in the kitchen gave her a kind of small authority and took the formality out of the meeting. She turned. ‘
Now
, will you have coffee?'

He shook his head. He said, ‘I want your attention.'

‘Why? What are you going to say to me?'

He said soberly, ‘Nothing.'

‘Nothing?'

‘No. I'm here to ask you. I'm here to ask you what you want.'

‘You don't mean it.'

‘I do,' he said. ‘I do. What do you want?'

She turned away from him and looked out of the window. He was still standing behind her. She said, not entirely steadily, ‘You know about the negatives.'

‘I think I do.'

‘Do you want me to recite them again?'

‘Only,' he said, surprisingly gently, ‘if you do.'

She turned back to look at him. ‘No,' she said, ‘I don't. I'm exhausted by them. I'm worn out with battling against things I can't change.'

He said nothing. He was plainly just waiting. It occurred to her suddenly that he might be a very senior officer, he might – it was his job, after all – demand unquestioning obedience from his men, but he was a man, too; in a way he was
just
a man, standing there in his navy-blue cord trousers and rust-coloured sweater with his hands in the pockets of his waxed jacket, which she had omitted to ask him to take off and which he seemed to have forgotten he was still wearing. Clever, weathered, healthy face. Thinning hair. A man. A husband and father. Just a middle-aged man, in her kitchen.

‘I had a few days in London,' Alexa said.

‘Ah.'

‘It didn't change anything, not there and then. But since I got back …'

‘Yes?'

She said, not looking at him, ‘I've had an idea.'

He waited.

‘For – well, to help myself, but to help other people too. Army people. Army wives. And families.'

He leaned forward and rested his hands on the back of the nearest kitchen chair. He was looking at her now with a disconcerting focus. ‘Yes?' he said again.

‘It isn't enough, any more, just to follow the drum …'

‘I know that.'

‘And we can't go on being marginalized by what our men do.'

‘I know that, too.'

Alexa made herself look straight at him. ‘I'd like to train to be what Walter Cummings and his ilk don't want to be.'

Julian snapped upright. ‘Good heavens. You mean—'

‘I'd like to be the first female non-serving welfare officer in the British Army. The first of many, I hope.'

He spread his hands. ‘My dear girl—'

‘I need your help. Civilian women helping Army women.'

He regarded her. He said, ‘But Dan—'

‘It's my kind of compromise,' she said quickly. ‘And if you think
I
'm a radical kind of Army wife, women like Freddie Stanford's girlfriend will make us lot look like dinosaurs.' She paused and then she said, ‘Those bright girls your bright boys want to marry just won't put up with things as they are.'

He said slowly, ‘And nor will you?'

‘No. Not if I want to stay married. And I do.'

‘Good,' he said emphatically.

‘But I can't live any longer with no settled home and Isabel so miserable and—'

‘I know,' he said. ‘I know, I know.'

‘I'm accepting the offer of the deposit on a house. I'm sending Isabel to day school.'

He put his hands in his pockets. ‘Decided?'

‘Yes.'

‘With Dan?'

‘Not – quite,' Alexa said carefully.

‘Please tell him.'

‘It's not up to me. He has to hear me. He has to come out of his soldier's cave or wherever he is, and
hear
me.'

‘I've heard you,' Julian said.

‘Have you? Have you really?'

He gave her his steady frank soldierly look. ‘Really.'

‘Right,' she said. She felt entirely in command of the moment. She tilted her chin very slightly, to issue her small challenge. ‘Will you help me, then?'

I
sabel was home. She had brought the twins back from Franny's house, plus her backpack, and had announced that she was staying, and that she would sleep on the airbed in the twins' bedroom until George went back to London. Alexa looked at her, then looked at the twins, expecting shrieks of excitement at the prospect of having Isabel in their bedroom, especially from Tassy. But neither Isabel nor the twins appeared about to explode about anything. They stood in a funny little row in the doorway to the playroom, silently manifesting a distinct and disconcerting solidarity.

‘Lovely,' Alexa said politely, as if addressing mere acquaintances. ‘I'm so glad you're home.'

‘Me too,' Isabel said, and then motioned to her little sisters to follow her. In silence, Alexa watched them stump upstairs, Flora trailing the tattered rag of pram blanket that she still needed as a refuge in stressful moments. It had once been pink and white check. It was now a blurred grey.

Alexa went into the sitting room and looked at the dented Union Jack cushion where Julian had briefly sat. Then she went back into the kitchen and switched the kettle on. But the thought of tea was somehow not just unappetizing but entirely irrelevant, so she switched it off again and the kettle
gave a great sigh, as if exasperated by the change of plan, and subsided.

‘I will make some investigations,' Julian had said. ‘Some enquiries. Ring some people.'

‘Yes,' Alexa said, forcing herself not to add ‘Thank you.'

He had paused in the front doorway. ‘I may look to you like someone entirely resistant to change, but appearances can be deceptive. All I would warn you is that in the Army things don't happen overnight.'

She smiled at him but didn't utter a word.

‘Are you,' he said, half-smiling back, ‘tempted to say “Please don't state the obvious”?'

When he was in his car, he wound the window down and added, looking up at her, ‘I will be in touch. As soon as I have anything to report to you. You may be sure of that.'

It was a step. A small one, but the first one. And Isabel was home and Dan knew about George and Eric's offer. It was all, she told herself resolutely, progress. She was advancing by tiny steps. Might advancement even bring an improvement, however small? In what, exactly? Not, really, in relations with Dan. He knew about the offer of a house, but he had apparently decided not to react. Not to his father, nor Alexa. But she must cling to what small shreds of hope there were and tell herself resolutely that if he wasn't being at all communicative about it, at least he hadn't refused it out of hand, either, or lost his temper and shouted. He'd simply looked as if he was trying to grasp something alien and unwieldy, and that if he were interrupted in this intractable process, all his personal progress – if, indeed, that's what it was – would go to waste.

Alexa gave a little exclamation of impatience. What use was it, fidgeting about down here when three of the four most significant people in her life were together, upstairs? She took the stairs two at a time and almost ran down the
landing, halting in the doorway to the twins' bedroom. Her three daughters were sitting in a rough circle on the floor, and on the carpet in the centre of the circle sat the miniature teaset that Isabel had had when she was the twins' age, and which they were forbidden, as a general rule, to touch. There was a tiny cup and saucer in front of each child, and Isabel was pouring water into each of them in turn from an equally tiny teapot, gravely regarded by the twins.

‘Hello,' Alexa said from the doorway.

Nobody moved or looked up.

‘I just wondered,' Alexa said, aware that her voice had none of the firmness she had used while speaking to Julian Bailey, ‘if I could join in?'

Dan had found a cart track going up a steepish ridge on the edge of one of the firing ranges. It was a flinty track leading up a bleak hillside, but the austerity of it suited his mood, and, in any case, Beetle thought it was terrific, and despite his age was trundling resolutely up the slope ahead of Dan, his tail signifying his enthusiasm. George had asked to be left back at camp, back in the blocks, where he had found someone whose father he had served with in the South Atlantic. In any case, there was no more, really, that Dan wanted to say to his father right now. He would, in truth, have liked George to go back to London, but George seemed in no hurry to go, and was full of benign certainty that this house scheme of his and Eric's would come off if he just kept nudging it along, like a dog with a ball. And Alexa, Dan had noticed with mounting tension, was doing nothing to discourage him.

Dan stopped for a moment and took several deep, deliberate lungfuls of air. It was cold up here, but exhilarating, and the views across the immensity of Salisbury Plain – those vast uplands where the Celts had grown the wheat that the
invading Romans referred to as ‘Celtic Gold' – were soothing to what the padre would almost certainly term his ‘troubled mind'. It
was
troubled. He wasn't sure it had ever been so purely troubled, and the bizarre interview that morning with Gus had done little to quiet it.

Gus had asked to see him. He had rung and said, without any familiar preliminaries, that he'd be grateful if Dan could spare him half an hour.

‘Sure.'

‘Where?'

‘Want to come here?'

There'd been a fractional beat and Gus had said, ‘Not the best idea. Not here, either, actually.'

So they'd ended up in the coffee shop of a service station on the A303, among people eating egg and chips on their way to a West Country Christmas, drinking cappuccinos sold to them by a girl in an insistently cheerful uniform, who would plainly rather have been anywhere else on the planet than where she was.

And Gus had started off by saying a lot of the things he'd said when he and Kate came round, saying them very fast, not meeting Dan's eye, repeating how gutted he was, how he'd never meant it to happen, it was just an insane impulse, how he was in such a state and Alexa was being kind to him and of course he thought she was a great girl, but not in that way, and Dan must believe him, he really must, he just felt like shit about it all, he really did.

Dan had stirred his coffee in its thick white cup and waited. He'd wanted to say, ‘All that aside, mate, what about me? How d'you think it feels to be me without you to rely on?' But now that the moment had come and Gus was sitting opposite him, he couldn't somehow be bothered. It was pointless. It was too late. It was pathetic. And anyway, Gus was rushing on now, saying that all this stuff, everything
that had happened since they got back, had stopped him in his tracks a bit, made him reassess, look at the wider picture. And the bottom line was that he couldn't do without Kate, he just couldn't. God knows, he adored the Army. Adored it. It was his life, it really was. But if he didn't have Kate, nothing else would have any value, not even the Army, he knew that now, not
even
the Army. He couldn't do it. He couldn't let her go. So he'd talked to her. Really talked to her like he wasn't sure he ever had, and he'd said he didn't care if she'd been seeing someone else, he didn't care what she'd done, he'd put up with anything, as long as she'd give him another chance to prove to her that she came first in his life and always would.
First
. And to his relief, she'd said OK, but – there's always a but, isn't there? – she said, but what, Gus, are you going to
do
about that? I'm not interested in more talk and easy promises, I'm only interested in what you
do
to change things.

Gus took a gulp of coffee, leaving a faint smear of foam on his upper lip.

‘So,' he said, ‘I've done it. I've actually gone and done it. I'm going to leave. It's bloody awful, but not as awful as losing Kate. God knows what I'll do, but we're going to London, all of us, we're going somewhere to start a new life and I've never been so panicked about anything in my entire life. But I know it's right. I
know
it. That's what I told Mack when I went to see him. I saw him yesterday. He'd got one leg in the car going off to Scotland, but he was pretty decent when I told him it was urgent and said he could postpone going for an hour or so. And when we got into his office and I told him, I almost had to field him falling over. He was pretty shell-shocked, I can tell you. In fact we were quite a pair, reeling round the room. I can't believe I've done it, I can't believe I actually went and saw Mack and told him. But I did. I did it, and I'm in bloody pieces and I'm not. I'm
not
. Because Kate is thrilled. She's thrilled with me. I can't remember her reacting to anything I've ever done the way she did to this.'

He stopped and, for the first time, looked up at Dan.

Dan said flatly, ‘You've got coffee froth on your face.'

Gus took no notice. His eyes were shining, whether with tears or a kind of evangelical fervour, Dan couldn't tell.

‘You can't imagine that, can you?' Gus said, staring at Dan. ‘You just can't imagine what it's like going into Mack's office and telling him you're giving it all up for the wife and family, can you?
You
'd never think of doing that, would you, Dan? Not in a million years. Not
you
.'

After that – well, what could he have done? Grinned and said sorry mate, but old Mack was shell-shocked because you were the second of us in three days? Or, good idea, mate, because we aren't all going to get pinked, and it looks like me rather than you? Or, no grins, no revelations, just an honest, heartfelt reaction to the prospect of no longer having Gus to – to
talk
to? Especially with his own situation so unresolved, so unarticulated, so – so bloody lonely.

He whistled for Beetle. He had meant it when he told Mack that he didn't think he could put Alexa and the girls through any more of what his soldiering compelled them to cope with and endure. He had not only meant it then, he meant it now, up here on this windy ridge with the great plain unfolding in front of him, darkened with gorse and bracken in the foreground and criss-crossed with the precise pale lines of the tank tracks. But his meaning it was now tussling with the prospect that Mack had held out to him, a more-than-prospect that Mack should probably never even have hinted at, but did because – and this was what was making it all so fiendishly hard – he really believed that Dan was in with more of a chance of being promoted to lieutenant colonel than almost anyone else at his level and with his
experience. Mack would not have said what he'd said if he didn't believe it. And then he'd compounded his conviction by ringing Dan from a motorway service station somewhere in Westmorland, on his way to Scotland, and begging him not to do anything final, not yet, not till everyone was back at Larkford in the New Year. Please, Dan, please do nothing. Sit on your hands. Please.

Beetle came to Dan's side, carrying a stick with the air of one who has been asked to lead a royal procession bearing a sceptre.

‘What to do?' Dan said to him despairingly.

Beetle looked sternly ahead. Stick-carrying allowed no room for the diversion of conversation.

‘I probably couldn't have told Gus anyway,' Dan said. ‘Not if he hadn't been tipped the wink, too. So at least I'm no worse off in that way. At least Dad knows, but it isn't fair to tell Alexa—'

In his jacket pocket, his phone began to ring. It would be Alexa, calling not to ask if he was OK – she had stopped doing that – but to ask if he would be back before dark because the twins—

But it was not Alexa. It was Eric. He lifted the phone cautiously to his ear. ‘Granddad?'

‘I expect,' Eric shouted, ‘you'd forgotten you'd bloody
got
a granddad, hadn't you?'

‘No, I—'

‘Where are you?'

‘On a hill. Walking Beetle. It's a bit windy.'

‘Get down off it,' Eric commanded. ‘Get yourself somewhere where you can bloody think, and ring me. Ring me right back. Do you hear me?'

‘Yes,' Dan said, closing his eyes, holding the phone hard against the side of his head. ‘Yes. Are you OK?'

There was a short pause, and then Eric said, not shouting
this time but with emphasis, ‘Yes, lad. Yes, I am. I'm A1. It's you that bloody isn't.'

‘Are you crying?' Tassy asked.

She and Flora were sitting on one side of the kitchen table, with squares of Marmite toast on their plates, looking at Kate Melville.

Kate had a mug of tea in front of her. She was wearing jeans and a sweater of Gus's and had tied a red bandanna over her head to keep her hair off her face. ‘A bit,' she said.

‘Did you fall over?' Flora enquired.

‘
Flora
fell over,' Tassy said.

Flora started to wrench up the sleeve of her cardigan to show Kate her wound. ‘It was
blooding
.'

Kate tried not to smile. ‘I haven't got blood.'

‘
Look
,' Flora said reverently. She held out a small, flawless arm with a barely discernible pink smudge across it.

‘Gosh,' Kate said, peering to see.

‘She yelled,' Tassy said. ‘She yelled till all snot came out of her nose.'

‘Enough,' Alexa said sharply.

Alexa wasn't sitting at the table, but standing by the kitchen counter, near the kettle. Dan wasn't back – no surprise there, then – and George had returned from the camp, having been given a lift home by someone or other, and had taken himself off with Isabel to Franny's house. Alexa liked George, even loved him, but she could not work out why he was staying so long, nor why Dan tolerated it and why she felt powerless to ask him why herself. She just knew that when she saw Kate Melville making for her front door, her only thought had been that she did not have the energy for such a visit. Dealing with George, and Dan, and her own current thoughts, was more than enough.