The Soldier's Wife (3 page)

‘But?'

‘I don't think I've ever had three such good-looking men all together in my drawing room before.'

Morgan waited. He picked up Eric's teacup and George's whisky tumbler.

‘Of course—' Elaine began and stopped.

‘I know.'

‘Richard was … well, better educated. More … more sophisticated.'

‘Certainly,' Morgan said.

He took the cup and the glass out to the sleek little galley kitchen. When he came back, Elaine had picked up one of the cushions and was holding it against her, as if for comfort. She said, ‘I couldn't help liking them.'

‘Especially the old man. Didn't he remind you of Bombardier Prout?'

‘In Hong Kong? Yes, exactly. Do – do you think she'll be safe with him?'

‘With Dan? As houses.'

‘But this Army thing. We saw so much of it, didn't we? Yearning for a settled home, not knowing whether to be with the husband or the children—'

Morgan adjusted the glass coffee table one inch. ‘Just like us, then.'

‘We weren't—'

‘We were. I remember you were in a frightful state when Lex had to board.'

Elaine put the cushion back at a precise angle to its pair. ‘You didn't like it either.'

‘I hated it,' Morgan said. ‘Poor little girl. First an only child and then sent off to boarding school in a wretched climate.'

‘She was an only child,' Elaine said on a dangerously rising note, ‘because I was forty when we married and forty-two when she arrived. She was something of a
miracle
.'

Morgan threaded his way between the sofa and the coffee table so that he could put an arm round his wife's shoulders. ‘My observation was not meant as an accusation. You know that. She was a miracle indeed. And,' he said, increasing the
pressure of his arm, ‘you were loyally following me all over the place.'

There was a small silence, in which both of them did a little diverse remembering. Morgan recalled – as he often did, pleasedly, privately – the one time he had achieved deputy head of mission, in Jakarta, and the very brief period, in Paris – Paris! – when he had stood in as a minister at the Embassy, during someone else's illness. Elaine, in the circle of her husband's arm, remembered the unspoken reason, all those long travelling diplomatic years, for persistently accepting posts overseas. If Morgan was overseas, he was graded as an A2 – he loved that – which would not have been the case had he remained at a desk job in the Foreign Office in London. She also remembered, after a brief battle with self-control that always accompanied the recollection, that except for two briefly glorious temporary appointments in Jakarta and Paris, Morgan had, more often than not, been a counsellor. Three years here, three years there – Athens, Hong Kong, Reykjavik, Buenos Aires, all over the place. She swallowed. Morgan was seventy-eight, now, and she was seventy-six, and there was absolutely no point in wishing that their lives had been either different or more candid.

She moved, very slightly, to elude Morgan's arm, and said, ‘Dan's done very well. In the Army.'

‘And weren't they proud of him!'

‘He's sweet to her,' Elaine said. ‘And to Isabel. Perhaps he'll be a good influence. Perhaps he'll persuade Lex that letting a child grow up without many rules only makes for unhappiness all round.'

‘You mean the gumboots.'

Elaine cast a quick look at her cream sofa. ‘So –
odd
. And Lex in jeans.'

‘She's always in jeans.'

Elaine looked across the room. On a reproduction eighteenth-century French console table against the far wall was a photograph of Richard Maybrick, the same photograph that his daughter Isabel would have, eight years later, in her bedroom at Larkford Camp.

‘She's been through so much,' Elaine said. ‘I just don't want there to be any more. No more worries and separations and choices. I wish Dan wasn't a soldier. I wish he was a lawyer or a doctor, someone who came home at night, someone with a career and not – not a
calling
.'

She turned her head away. Morgan put his arm back round her shoulders and offered her a clean white handkerchief.

‘I know,' he said.

‘I think you should ring Mrs L,' Eric Riley said to his son.

They had moved on from tea to beer. George was drinking his from the can; Eric, from a glass. They were each on their second beer. They never drank more than two, and if George went to the pub on his way home for a top-up, he never mentioned it to his father.

‘Why me?'

‘They'll be wondering, that's why,' Eric said. ‘It's bloody manners.'

‘But Alexa'll ring them—'

‘Not with Dan back, she won't. She won't ring anyone. Get on that phone and tell Mrs L the plane's landed and we can all breathe easy.'

‘I'll do it from home.'

Eric pointed across the room to where his telephone sat on the small cloth-covered table where George's mother had first put it, eighteen years before.

‘You'll bloody well do it now.'

George put his beer can down and stood up. ‘I've got nothing to tell her—'

‘You have. Dan's back in England. That's all she needs to know. Get on with it.'

George moved reluctantly towards the telephone. He hated telephones, always had. He preferred to walk miles to deliver a message, rather than say it down a phone line.

‘Can't remember the number.'

‘It's on the wall. On my list. Third one down.'

‘Dad—'

‘You're useless,' Eric said, heaving himself out of his chair. ‘Bloody useless. Just as well you didn't apply to Signals or Logistics, they'd have laughed in your bloody face.' He came slowly across the room, shuffling slightly in his leather slippers, the backs trodden down as they had been in all the identical pairs of slippers George could remember him wearing, all his life. He held his hand out. ‘Give it here, you moron.'

George handed him the telephone. He was grinning. ‘Thanks, Dad.'

‘Sing out the number.'

George watched his father's big fingers jabbing at the numbers on the handset. If your hands looked at home ramming a shell up the breech of a gun, they never looked quite right when required to do anything domestic. It still amazed George to see his father making a sandwich. It was as surprising as finding an elephant able to do it.

‘That you, Mrs L?' Eric shouted into the receiver. ‘Good. Good … Yes, not too bad, thank you, nothing death won't take care of … Yes. Yes. That's why I'm ringing. His plane's landed, and he should be on his way home, or home by now … No. He didn't want that. He wanted them at home, waiting for him … No idea, Mrs L. Who's to say what's in a man's mind after six months in the bloody desert? … No. No, I shouldn't. Leave them to ring you. I've just said as much to the boy's idiot father. Your first family comes first,
and the rest of us just have to wait. But he's home. He's safe … You, too, Mrs L. Regards to His Excellency.' He took the phone away from his ear, squinted at it, punched a button and handed it to George. ‘Useless woman,' he said. ‘She'll never get it. She talks as if he was home from some bloody business trip, no more to worry about than writing a report and getting his shirts washed.'

‘You like her,' George said reprovingly.

‘Of course I bloody like her. She's Alexa's mother, isn't she? But a lifetime's poncing round Embassy cocktail parties is never going to help you understand soldiering, is it?'

In her drawing room above the Marylebone Road, Elaine Longworth sat holding her telephone. Morgan was out at some reception at the Argentine Embassy – he loved those parties still, but she only went with him these days if there was a very particular reason to – and she was alone in the quiet flat, with the comforting rumble of traffic from below and the silk-shaded lamps lit, throwing her carefully arranged pieces of South-East Asian sculpture into dramatic relief. There was a precisely mixed gin and tonic beside her, on a rosewood table acquired in The Hague, but she hadn't touched it. Nor had she opened the evening paper, or put on her reading glasses. She was simply sitting, on one of her cream sofas, in a pool of lamplight, thinking.

It had been during a car journey, in the dense heat and traffic of Jakarta, that she had mooted to Alexa that she might – would – have to go back to England, for schooling. To boarding school. She would come out to Indonesia for the holidays, of course, travelling on the aeroplane with a label round her neck advertising her as an unaccompanied minor, but in the term time she would be at a school where lots of diplomatic children went, so there would be lots of girls,
lots
, who were in the same position as Alexa.

Elaine put the telephone down beside her on the sofa and closed her eyes. When she thought about Jakarta, she remembered their house (lovely) and their staff (even lovelier), but the things that brought it back most vividly were the details, like the sound of sandals slapping against bare heels and the intense fruit taste of mangosteens. And like that moment in the car, when she faltered in painting a rosy picture of English boarding-school life to Alexa, and at the same instant the car stopped at some traffic lights and was at once surrounded by distressing hordes of barefoot children, begging and beseeching, and the driver wound down his window far enough to throw out a handful of rupiah coins, as light and inconsequential as sequins. And Alexa had turned to her and said, ‘If I have to go to England, why don't you come with me?'

She remembered that she had looked out of the window away from Alexa. The car was moving forward again, and what with her tears, the faces of the children outside the window were elongated into brown blurs. She wanted to blurt out, ‘I can't, I can't,' but instead she said in a slightly choked voice, her face still averted from Alexa, ‘I have to stay with Daddy, darling. You know that.'

Alexa hadn't replied. She sat staring at the back of Pak Hari's sleek black head. Elaine had reached out for her hand, and although she hadn't refused to let her mother take it, she didn't respond, and her hand lay in Elaine's, warm but inert. Then, after a polite interval, she took it back again.

Elaine had wanted desperately to say sorry, but she had felt, obscurely, that apologizing for this decision would somehow be betraying Morgan, and she had promised herself on her wedding day in Chelsea Registry office to show no kind of disloyalty that wasn't private to herself alone. Morgan had been forty-two then, and it was plain that he would never,
for all his talk and mild self-delusion, be anything more than a useful minor diplomat. She could see that, but she would never countenance anyone else making it plain that they had seen it too. Especially not Alexa. Daddy's job was paramount. Daddy was paramount. Without Daddy, we wouldn't get to travel and live in interesting places and eat mangoes in the bath and learn to say thank you in Bahasa. Daddy's life made our lives possible, and that had to be remembered and accommodated at all times. Otherwise she, Elaine Jackson, might still be the spinster personal assistant to a senior partner in a firm of solicitors in St Mary Axe, specializing in disputes between air-freight companies and their carriers.

Alexa had not mentioned going to boarding school again. When they got home, she had climbed out of the car – Pak Hari holding the door for her, respectfully – and run down to the compound gate to talk to the guard and his friend in the dusty street outside, who sold chicken soup from a barrow with smeary glass walls and a violently bright kerosene lamp. And when she came back to the house, she joined her parents for dinner – nasi goreng, with prawns and chilli – with the air of someone who had won some kind of inner tussle and would definitely not welcome further discussion on the matter.

Elaine opened her eyes. That was over a quarter of a century ago. Alexa was now thirty-four with children of her own. But feeling for her, on her behalf, didn't seem to get less acute just because they were both older. She still couldn't bear to think of Alexa leaving for school and England, any more than she could bear to think of her now, at once heady with relief at Dan's safe return and simultaneously faced with getting to know him again, and then bracing herself for the next departure.

She picked up the evening paper. Don't ring them, Eric had
said. Don't. She opened the paper and stared at it, unseeing, without her spectacles on. She wouldn't. It was the least she could do. And the least was so much better than, as in the past, the wrong thing.

D
an was so thin. When Alexa, unable to conceal her shock, pointed it out as he emerged from the shower, he gave a little bark of laughter and shook water out of his hair. He said deprecatingly, ‘We all look pretty shabby.'

‘You didn't,' Alexa said, misunderstanding him. ‘You got home shaved, laundered—'

Dan ran a thumb down his visible ribs. ‘I meant this. The fitness—'

‘Oh,' Alexa said, and then, as if correcting a mistake, ‘Of course.'

‘The body armour weighs a ton. And then all the kit. The heat—'

‘Sorry, Dan. I know.'

He smiled at her. He said, quoting, “Selfless commitment”.'

‘Don't remind me.'

‘What comes next?'

‘“Respect for others”,' Alexa said, quoting the military mantra and trying to keep the smallest hint of disrespect out of her voice. ‘“Integrity, loyalty, discipline and courage”.'

‘Word perfect, Mrs Riley. You'd make a fine soldier.' He leaned forward and kissed her mouth.

When he took his mouth away, she said, ‘Lunch?'

He shook his head. ‘Seeing someone.'

She intended not to say ‘Who?' and failed.

He moved past her, wrapping a towel around his waist, and made for their bedroom. ‘Gus.'

‘But you saw Gus—' Alexa said, and stopped.

Dan didn't reply. He dropped the towel on the bedroom floor and began to dress, rapidly and neatly, but not in battledress, she noticed. He was putting on barrack dress – khaki drill trousers, shiny shoes, the blue ribbed sweater that looked like a garment belonging to a dated Action Man.

She said, ‘Why formal? Why barrack dress?'

He didn't turn round. He was buttoning his epauletted shirt in front of the mirror which – Army issue again – had never been long enough for people of their height to see themselves in, except in sections.

‘Two CO's orders. He doesn't want us going berserk just because we're home.'

‘Oh,' Alexa said faintly.

She looked at Dan's back, then she looked at their bed. She had been married to Dan for seven years and she still could not always look at their bed, or him, with much equanimity. Four days ago, when he got home, he had carried her up there –
carried
her, all five foot ten of her – and he'd hardly said a word. He wasn't saying many words now, either.

‘But – but can't someone else do whatever you have to do? Won't the sergeants supervise all the unpacking and sorting of stuff?'

‘Of course.'

‘But—'

Dan turned round. He had his red-and-blue side hat in his hands. He said, ‘I need to see Gus.'

‘OK.'

‘And the young officers. Set them up a bit not to wreck
their leave. Sort out their money. Remind them about drink driving. You know.'

‘And Gus?'

‘You know about that, too.'

Alexa looked at the ceiling. A water stain like a great, blurred grey cobweb covered one corner, where a pipe from the water tank in the attic above had leaked six months ago. Gus was Gus Melville, another battery commander, another major, a friend of fifteen years' standing.

‘My bezzie mate,' Gus often said of Dan, standing beside him, almost leaning on him. ‘The man with whom I can, and do, speak in tongues.'

Dan put his side hat on with precision, without glancing in the mirror. He came round the bed and put his hands on Alexa's shoulders. He said, looking straight at her, ‘My ears are still ringing.'

‘I know. I didn't mean—'

He bent, very slightly, to kiss her again. ‘All those boys of mine,' he said. ‘That big slug of Scots folk dying to get home. But they're useless. Their risk threshold is completely out of whack. I've got to talk to them before they go, or they'll get arrested. Or die on the roads. And I've got to talk to Gus.'

She stood aside. ‘You go.'

He paused for a second. Then he said, ‘I'm not with it yet. Bear with me,' and ran down the stairs at the speed of an adolescent setting himself a record.

The front door slammed shudderingly. Alexa went slowly along the landing and into the twins' bedroom, and picked up a slipper and a doll and a length of mauve Christmas tinsel from the floor. The twins were at nursery school until lunchtime. Isabel was back at boarding school after half-term. She had gone back with another child, driven by another mother, and she had not looked out of the car window as they pulled away, but had seemed to engage in
animated conversation with the other girl as if to indicate that home, where all the rest of her family was now reunited and together, was of no real consequence to her. Alexa had turned to Dan. He'd held her.

‘She'll be OK,' he'd said.

‘I don't think so. She hates it. Hates it.'

‘Everybody hates saying goodbye. Look at us.'

She'd glanced up at him. ‘Dan?'

But he was already looking somewhere else. He was thinking about something else. The arms that were round her were still holding her, but remotely, as if her body was anyone's. She gently detached herself. Dan had said that deployment on active service made you long for extremes, either the supreme domesticity of home when you were away from it or the violence of action and danger when you were back. You couldn't just halt the pendulum, he said, you couldn't stop it crashing from side to side, often out of control. Even if it sometimes hit her – or the children – as it swung.

It was over an hour until she needed to collect the twins. They would run out of school towards her, on a high, and then squabble in the car, because they were hungry. She had planned to say, ‘Daddy'll be there at lunchtime,' but she couldn't, because he wouldn't be. He'd be with Gus and the other officers, in the officers' mess, with the silver Chinese dragon on the table and the sentimental narrative paintings of regimental defeats and moments of noble and fruitless heroism on the walls, drinking soup and speaking in tongues, that Army patois of acronyms and specific slang which was as bonding and exclusive as the twins' private cheeping. He would not be thinking about the twins. Or her. He would be – as they all described it – in the zone.

She looked round the room. She had painted it corn yellow and put up cork boards for the twins' energetic and
random artistic efforts. Their beds, German and ingeniously converted from their original cot form, had been a present from her parents. Two little beds, two fleece dressing-gowns, two sets of slippers with animal faces on the toes, two hairbrushes, one plastic pot of hair slides and clips, umpteen soft toys. It was, as she stood there holding the slipper, the doll and the mauve tinsel, eerily quiet. She hadn't left a radio on downstairs and Beetle, disappointed at not being taken with Dan, would be burying his suffering in sleep, in his basket. The silence, now that she was really listening to it, was enormous.

Of course, the telephone hadn't rung for four days. Neither the landline nor her own mobile. All her friends, respectful of her and Dan's reunion, were carefully leaving them alone. So were his family, and her parents. They would all be imagining the household alive and vibrating with relieved energy – even, as Mo had pointed out, the energy of rows. They would be visualizing meals together, and walks together, and hilarious subterfuges to get to bed together with a pair of lynx-eyed three-year-olds in constant attendance. They would not be picturing this solitude, this silence. The only person Alexa could think of in a similar position, except that both her children were away at school, was Gus's wife, Kate Melville – although Kate worked in London three days a week and had never – loudly – let the inflexibility of the Army stand in her way. Today was one of her London days. She would not have altered that, even for Gus's homecoming.

Alexa bent and put the doll on a bed and the slipper beside its pair. Then she balled up the tinsel and put it in her pocket. Kate Melville was energetic and impressive and focussed, but she did not seem to need Sara and Prue and Franny and Mo as Alexa did; she did not appear to suffer from doubts about validity, or visibility. She ran a cancer-research charity in
London, and in her crisply expressed opinion, her work had all the importance and consequence of her husband's.

‘Gus may wear the uniform,' Mo said of the Melvilles, ‘but Kate wears the trousers!'

Alexa went slowly downstairs and into the kitchen. Beetle remained in his tight curl, in his basket, but a faint tremor of his tail acknowledged Alexa's entrance. Dan would probably come back after lunch and collect him, to take him up to the battery offices, and she would see Beetle being completely fulfilled by this small attention. There was a lot to be said for emulating the attitude of a Labrador – take what's on offer with a glad heart, and if nothing's on offer, go to sleep. Franny's boys were like that, robust and cheerful, easy to handle and prone to sleeping when bored.

‘Too sad,' Franny'd say, looking at them. ‘Pure cannon fodder. Cookie-cutter Andys, both of them. My genes didn't get a look in.'

Alexa took her telephone out of her jeans pocket. Maybe she'd ring Franny. But then, if she rang Franny there'd have to be some good reason, however small, for doing so, otherwise Franny would immediately guess what was the matter.

‘Give him time,' she'd say. ‘They are on Planet Afghan when they get back. Give him time.'

And she'd be right. Only the afternoon before, out in the garden with the twins so that Flora could show her father that she had learned to propel herself on the swing by herself, a woodpecker – unexpected, out of season – had suddenly started drilling into a tree fifty yards away, and Dan had let go of Tassy, whose hand he was holding, sprinted across the grass and dived under the garden table. The twins, shrieking with delight, had thought it was a game. Alexa had known that it wasn't. When Dan crawled out and stood up, shaking and shamefaced with the little girls jigging and squeaking round him, Alexa had wanted nothing so much as to hold
him and comfort him. But that would have been the last thing he wanted. He simply stood there for half a minute, mastering himself, and then he said to Flora, ‘OK, now, show me,' and walked past Alexa back to the swing as if she hardly existed.

She looked down at her phone, pressed the buttons to reach her Favourites list, and dialled, on impulse.

‘I should be in a meeting,' Jack Dearlove said, without preamble.

‘Are you?'

‘No. Instead I'm not eating a prawn-mayonnaise sandwich that is sitting on my desk.'

‘Oh, Jack—'

‘It never ends, this battle with the body. I put my bathroom scales in a suitcase behind a whole lot of stuff in my bedroom cupboard and then I got them out again. Pitiful. How's the hero?'

Alexa looked out of the kitchen window. ‘Thin. And spaced. Not with me in spirit.'

‘But in body?'

‘None of your business.'

‘So that's OK then. Give him time.'

‘I am.'

‘Give him,' Jack said, ‘
loads
of time.'

Alexa felt a sudden urgent desire to argue. She swallowed hard. ‘I need to talk to him.'

‘Nothing that can't wait?'

‘Well,' Alexa said, ‘there's all the old stuff. Isabel's homesickness, Flora's eye, the state of the car, more lumps on Beetle. I suppose that can all wait till he can switch his sights round to us again. But—'

‘But what?'

‘There's something else,' Alexa said.

‘You're not pregnant!'

‘Work it out, Jack. If I was, I'd be huge by now.'

‘I meant—'

‘By someone else?'

‘Well,' Jack said, ‘it happens—'

‘Not to me.'

‘OK. Sorry.'

‘Frustration is one thing. Fidelity is quite another.'

‘I said sorry,' Jack said. ‘What other thing, then?'

Alexa looked across the kitchen. On the dresser which she had bought for ten pounds at a car-boot sale in Wincanton, propped against her cherished row of polka-dotted pottery mugs, was a long white envelope. She cleared her throat. Then she said, precisely, ‘I have been offered a job.'

‘Good for you.'

‘No, Jack,' Alexa said. ‘A proper job. Full-time assistant head of languages at a private school near by, with a real salary and real responsibilities.'

‘Oh.'

‘It's nearly as good as the job I had when I met Dan. It means health insurance and perhaps a place for Isabel—'

‘You can't do it,' Jack said.

‘
What?
'

‘You can't. You have the twins, and Dan'll get posted somewhere or start a course in Shrivenham or something. You know you can't.'

There was a short silence. Then Alexa said, ‘Are you
listening
to yourself? Or are you just thinking about that sandwich?'

‘I am thinking about you.'

‘And telling me that I can't even consider—'

‘You can't.'

Alexa closed her eyes. ‘I'm having a pretty awful day. And you are making it much worse. I think I'm going to ring off.'

‘Do that,' Jack said. His voice had none of its usual warmth. ‘Just do that. And see if it makes you feel any better.'

‘I really thought that you, of all people—'

‘You
chose
Dan,' Jack said, interrupting. ‘You
chose
this life, you traded freedom for security, you
know
you did. When the twins are bigger or Dan gets a regiment or something,
then
you can think of working. But not now.'

‘What's come
over
you?'

‘Reality,' Jack said. ‘Hunger. Anxiety about you. Facing living with the consequences of my own decisions. All of it. None of it. Fed-upness. Thursday. I don't know. I only know that you can't indulge yourself right now, so don't burden poor bloody Dan with it, fresh from being bombed out of his skull.'