The Soldier's Wife (4 page)

She heard the line go dead. She looked at the screen on her phone. ‘Call ended,' it said with the kind of complacent obviousness that seemed to be the chief hallmark of modern technology. She put the phone back in her pocket. She was shaking slightly and found she was swallowing hard and repeatedly, as if to keep something uncontrolled – rage? tears? – at bay. She crossed the room to the dresser and picked up the envelope. It was addressed to her, Mrs Alexa Riley, and it had the school's name and elaborate crest printed in the top left-hand corner in dark blue. She knew the contents by heart, and there was absolutely nothing to be gained by rereading them. In the space of five minutes Jack had managed to take her enterprise in even applying for the job, and her achievement in being offered it, and reduce both to a handful of dust. You can't, he'd said, and by implication, it wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be fair to the man who has, quite simply, rescued you.

Alexa unhooked the car keys from their place among the mugs on the dresser, and motioned Beetle to follow her. He sat up, but hesitated, indicating that if he stayed where he
was, Dan might return to collect him, which was, if it was all the same to her, his preferred option.

‘Only if Gus is coming back this way,' Alexa said to him, reading him. ‘He went with Gus, you see. I have the car and I thought you might like to collect the twins with me.'

Beetle stayed where he was, his tail quivering apologetically. Dan's dog, attuned to Dan, for all his manners and kind-heartedness.

‘I wish I was like you,' Alexa said to him. ‘I wish what I had was always enough.'

Beetle lay down again in his basket and propped his chin on the edge. He was going faintly grey around his muzzle and sometimes his eyes had a blueish milky film to them. He was ten; quite an age for a Labrador.

Alexa knelt down by his basket, filled with sudden fear and remorse. ‘You know how important you are, don't you?'

Beetle looked embarrassed. He gave her outstretched hand a brief lick.

Alexa stood up again. ‘Won't be long.'

He didn't look up as she left the room.

Dan had left the driving seat of the car pushed right back, as was his wont, and the mirrors re-angled to suit the seat's new position. There was also a chocolate wrapper on the floor, as well as a Lottery scratch card and an empty can of Red Bull. The radio was tuned to Heart FM, or something she never listened to, and there was a pair of men's aviator sunglasses with a broken earpiece in the shallow well above the dashboard. The only thing that was heartwarming in her present frame of mind was a Simply Red CD in the disc player, the
Stars
album, produced in 1992 when neither she nor Dan had had any idea that the other one even existed. He'd given her the album on their third date, because he said that the words of one of the songs was what he felt about her already.

‘Listen,' he'd said. ‘Listen to this. The line about not believing in much but utterly believing in one other person. That's me. That's how I feel. I believe in you.'

Alexa adjusted the seat and the mirrors and started the engine. It was ten minutes to the children's school, through the garrison village – beauty and tanning salon, off-licence, video store, small supermarket, barber, Gurkha Variety Store – and out into the shallow hills that ran down towards the main road that led eventually, through Dorset and Devon, to Cornwall. On good days, the idea of a road running all the way down to Cornwall was exhilarating, like being in an airport and seeing Shanghai and São Paulo listed on the Departures board, but on bad days, such a road seemed merely to taunt her with the confirmation that escape was not for her, that her present choices were entirely circumscribed by her earlier choice, which she had made without really having any idea of the consequences.

It had been a history teacher at that long-ago boarding school who had pointed out to her class that patterns in life and events are only visible in retrospect. Life lived day by day, he explained, appeared a shockingly random business, and it was only looking back that gave a clear view of the steady rise and fall of cause and effect. He had been a white-haired man in an old-fashioned tweed suit and a green corduroy waistcoat, the retired headmaster of a local prep school, and he talked to the girls he was teaching as if he was merely musing, thinking aloud as he wandered up and down in front of the blackboard. Most of his pupils thought he was just a caricature old granddad, but a few of them, including Alexa, had a sense that they were in the presence of a mind that knew too much to be shocked or surprised by any revelation. Alexa had even been able to talk to him about the violent homesickness caused by being at school on the other side of the world from her parents, and he had
simply said, looking at her kindly but dispassionately, that she should try to enjoy these years before she had to shoulder the burden of making her own decisions.

‘It's a liberty,' Mr Stonelake had said, ‘not to have to live with the results of your own mistakes. You won't see it now, of course, but when you look back, you'll see it as one of the great freedoms of childhood.'

But she had, instead, ached for childhood to be over. At some level during those years at school, she had decided that the only way of getting through this period of her life was to accelerate herself somehow to the next stage, to hurry childhood and its dependency up by starting to take her own decisions, make her own choices. As an only child, there were, after all, only adults in her intimate world, and they seemed to make rules that suited themselves, rules that others then had to fall in with. And the falling in had, it was plain to Alexa, everything to do with money; the sooner she could pay for herself, the sooner she could decide for herself. Looking around at the worlds of work that she knew – diplomacy because of her father, teaching because of school – it seemed obvious to opt for learning to teach some of the languages she had acquired during the travels of her childhood. Even the Mandarin she had picked up in Hong Kong was an up-and-coming language, and then there was her Spanish from Buenos Aires, and the French she had excelled in at school. She allowed her parents to congratulate her on her admirable A-level results and then she announced that she was going to teacher-training college.

Her parents were horrified. Morgan had visualized the next phase of his daughter's life taking place in medieval libraries in Cambridge; Elaine had had a hazier vision of a punt on a dawn river, with Alexa wearing a ballgown and accompanied by a young man straight out of
Brideshead
Revisited
. Neither castle in the air featured anywhere remotely as prosaic as a teacher-training college.

‘But you can't. Without a degree—'

‘I'll get a degree,' Alexa said. ‘I'll do a degree alongside gaining qualified teacher status. It will take three years. I can do it in London.'

Elaine said wildly, ‘But who will fund it?'

Alexa looked at her coolly. She knew her mother had worked before her marriage, but her own rigorous view of work led her to consider Elaine's wifely supporting role during the last twenty years as not even beginning to count as work. She transferred her gaze deliberately to her father.

‘You will,' she said.

There had been a few seconds of suspenseful silence, and then Morgan had said courteously, meeting his daughter's eyes, ‘Of course.'

She knew they were disappointed. Whatever grandiose ambitions they had harboured for her were plainly difficult to relinquish, ambitions that manifested themselves in the – to her eyes – ridiculous formality of their domestic lives and the unbending stateliness of her father's bearing, even when encountered in a dressing-gown and slippers. There was nothing for it, Alexa decided, but to show them what muscular application she was capable of and what Real Life, as she termed it to herself, was all about. She deliberately chose a modest college in South London and was allotted a room in a hall of residence which had not seen one iota of modernization since it was built in the mid-seventies. She focussed on work, radical culture and mild political activism, on a sartorial diet of street markets and second-hand shops, and a physical one of anything in her local supermarket with a reduced label on it. She emerged, after three years, with a first-class degree and the offer of a job in the language department of a significant London girls'
school. Her parents, by then newly retired and installed in their careful flat on the Marylebone Road – within walking distance, Alexa noted, of Harley Street and its attendant range of private medical services – took her out to dinner in Mayfair to celebrate. Her mother was in grey silk and pearls. Alexa wore embroidered jeans and a second-hand fur jacket. Her father, his champagne glass slightly raised towards his daughter, made an elegant speech about parental pride and the satisfaction of being proved wrong by one's only and much beloved child. The child in question heard him in silence.

The following year, the day after being offered promotion, despite her youth, to assistant head of department, Alexa had joined her childhood friend Jack Dearlove at a jazz café on the Fulham Road and been introduced to Richard Maybrick. He was OK, Alexa thought – nice enough, nice enough looking, cleverish, but he couldn't hold a candle to her exhilaration at being promoted. He was just part of the audience that night, another smiling, congratulatory face in a pleasurable sea of them, and if he didn't take his eyes off her, well, hey, that was just how it was that evening. She could have got high on tap water that night, she could have swung from the moon. She had rung her parents to tell them the news and her father had said, for the first time in her life, ‘I am so proud of you.' Not ‘I want this for you' or ‘I wish you would do it this way,' but simply and at last, ‘I am so proud of you.'

The next day, Richard Maybrick was at the school gates. He took her out for supper, explained that he had read geography at Newcastle University, where he met Jack, and was now interested in becoming a marine biologist. He came to the school gates five times in the next ten days, and then he asked Alexa to come up to the Lake District with him at the end of term, for a week's fell walking.

She had gazed at him. ‘
Fell
walking?'

‘Yes.'

‘In what?'

‘Boots,' said Richard Maybrick, and reached under the café table. He put a stout paper carrier on the table. ‘These. Your size.'

‘Wow,' she said. She looked at the bag. ‘How do you know my size?'

‘I looked,' he said. ‘I bet I know your dress size too.'

‘And my bra size?'

‘I can guess.'

‘Are you – moving in on me?'

He smiled. He had a wide smile and strong, even teeth. ‘If you'll let me.'

She'd looked back at the carrier bag containing the boots. There was suddenly, after all the years of endeavour, of solitary enterprise, of ostentatious frugality, an unspeakable appeal about surrender. She could put her feet into those boots, chosen by Richard, and be taken up to the Lake District, where she had never been, by Richard, and then follow Richard up and over those mountains and hills, as if – as if she was, for a heady moment, just handing the responsibility of being herself to someone else. From where she sat, right then, the prospect seemed to promise a new and unexpected kind of liberty. She put her hand on the carrier bag and pulled it towards her. ‘OK,' she said.

Learning to love Richard Maybrick had been a profound but unalarming experience. His parents worked in medical research, his sister was a doctor and he himself was in no hurry about anything. He laid his emotional cards on the table, made it plain that they would not change, and then waited to watch – not see – if she picked them up. It was all so easy, in retrospect: his strange, distant, industrious family, his personal ease, his support for her ambition. He had been
brought up with working women, and expected, he said, nothing else. When he gained a place at London University's Marine Station on the Isle of Cumbrae in Scotland, it did not cross his mind to suggest that Alexa make any changes to her life and work. He would, he said, commute to the best of his ability, and he'd bend his mind to that just as soon as he'd got these headaches sorted. His sister had said they were probably eyestrain but that he wasn't to leave it. So he wasn't, he said. He also felt slightly sick a lot of the time. He was smiling as he spoke. There was, after all, plenty to smile about. He had been accepted at the Marine Station and Alexa was twelve weeks pregnant. Even commuting while he did his second degree wouldn't be a problem, he assured her. Problems and Richard Maybrick were unknown to one another. Promise? Promise.

Even now, Alexa couldn't look back on those two years with any equilibrium. Richard's visit to the doctor about his headaches had segued immediately into a taxi ride to University College Hospital and then, almost before he had time to communicate what was happening to Alexa, to an operating theatre for the removal of an astrocytic tumour, grade four. And after that, the skies fell in. Richard came home, went for X-rays and scans, was ordered back to hospital, came home, was scanned again and sent back to surgery, over and over in a grisly rollercoaster ride of anxiety and waiting and fear. Alongside him, Alexa worked and tried to remember that she was pregnant, constantly shuttling from school to hospital or home, to an empty bed, or one in which Richard lay waiting for a reason to resume his habit of steady optimism. Isabel was born in one London hospital, attended by her distressed maternal grandparents, while her father lay on the operating table in another, attended by his sister, who was burdened with her own unkind superfluity of medical knowledge. By the time Isabel had started to pull herself up
against armchairs and sofas, her father was dead and her odd, hardworking, undemonstrative paternal grandparents and aunt had retreated from her life, and her mother's, in a complete paralysis of unarticulated grief and shock. At twenty-five, Alexa found herself not so much free to choose as floundering in a marsh of utterly unwanted autonomy. She remembered looking down at Isabel in her cot, humped up on her knees in her preferred sleeping position, and thinking that if it wasn't for the need to provide for her, there really would be absolutely no point in troubling to draw another breath.