The Soldier's Wife (14 page)

Chapter 28

I
PICK ALL THE
fruit on my land. The apples I store on cardboard trays in the shed, and I bottle up the plums from the plum tree in my garden, but the Comice pears from my yard we eat at once—they won't keep. Millie refuses to eat the skins, and I peel and slice the fruit for her; the grainy flesh is oozing with syrupy, viscous juice.

The wind is blowing from the north, and birds come in on the wind, making their way to the warmer lands where they will pass the winter. Our island lies on one of the main migration routes in Europe, a route that leads south down the western fringe of the land. At night you can hear the fluting calls of waders in the darkness, and sometimes the crying of geese, like lost souls, harsh and desolate.

A day comes when a sudden storm blows in from the sea. I'm cycling home from Elm Tree Farm when clouds mass and boil above me. There's a sound like many people running in the lane, and a rustle along the hedgebanks, and then the rain streaks down. I'm instantly drenched—I've left my raincoat behind. I curse the unpredictable weather of these islands, feeling that crossness familiar to every housewife, when you've left your washing on the line and now you're far from home, and all your hard work will be wasted.

My bicycle slows and grinds on the ground. I can tell my front tire has gone flat. I get off, swearing under my breath. Millie and Evelyn are on their own, and I don't like to leave them for long. I push my bicycle down the road and start out on the lengthy walk home. A German truck passes me, driving straight through a puddle, so water plumes up and splashes me, all over my face and my front. This feels malicious, deliberate. My dress and cardigan are sodden, and water seeps into my shoes. I feel so tired, suddenly—exhausted, dragged down by it all: by Evelyn, querulous, losing her mind; by Blanche, still angry with me because we didn't go on the boat; by the Occupation, the shortages, and all the rain-soaked washing on my line—these things muddled up in my head, all utterly beyond me.

Another vehicle approaches.
Damn
. I turn my face away as it passes, not wanting to get splashed all over again.

I hear the car stop, then reverse. I glance up. A familiar black Bentley gliding back toward me. Captain Lehmann is driving. He stops the car beside me, and leans across to the passenger side and winds the window down. My heart slams around like a tennis ball in my chest.

“Mrs. de la Mare. May I give you a lift?”

I can't imagine how messy I look. My hair is plastered to my head and across my face, in rats' tails. Water runs along my part and drips down onto my nose. I push the wet hair out of my face. I try to shake my head, but I can't quite manage it.

“You have a puncture, I think,” he says. “So why not let me help you?”

“I can't do that.” But my voice doesn't sound very sure.

“Why can't you do that?” he says.

I don't want to think why he's being so insistent, when of course he knows my answer perfectly well.

“I really don't think I should,” I say.

He watches me as I hesitate. I feel he will wait forever.

“Anyway, my bicycle . . .”

“You could leave it here,” he tells me. “I can send one of the boys to pick it up.”

“But you must be busy, you must have things to do. . . .” Though as always I'm baffled imagining what those things might be.

I see a slight smile in his eyes when I say that, as though he knows I am conceding something.

“Nothing that can't wait,” he says.

“And you weren't going that way . . .”

“I can easily drive to your house,” he says.

“I really shouldn't. . . .”

He reaches across the passenger seat and pushes open the door.

I climb into the Bentley that used to belong to Les Brehauts. I ought to be angry, that Mr. Goubert's car was requisitioned, I ought to say no to this lift; but I feel so tired and cold and wet, and it's such a long way home.

Captain Lehmann is looking at me—at my dripping hair, the goose-pimpled flesh on my arms, my wet clothes sticking clammily to me.

“Mrs. de la Mare. You are shivering. You should borrow my coat.”

“I can't do that,” I say.

“I think you should. You don't want to get pneumonia. Especially when you have people who depend on you,” he says.

That, at least, is true enough.

When I don't say anything, don't protest, he reaches around to the seat behind him. He takes his coat and wraps it around my shoulders, pushing it down between my body and the back of the seat. His nearness shocks me. He slides his hand under my hair at the nape of my neck, easing out my hair where it's been caught under the coat collar. He does this scrupulously—not missing a single strand, but scarcely touching my neck, just grazing me with his fingertip. His skin is warm against me. I can hear his breathing; I'm sure that he can hear mine. Neither of us says anything.

He starts up the car again. The coat is long, it rucks up at the small of my back. But it's warm and close on my shoulders.

“This is kind of you,” I tell him, as formally, politely, as I can. My voice has too much breath in it.

He shakes his head slightly, as though denying that this is kindness at all.

“How is Millie?” he says.

“She's fine now. Thank you for asking.”

“Max came to see her?”

“Yes.”

“I thought that Max would be able to help her,” he says.

“Yes. Thank you.”

The thought ripples in me that he wants me to know this: he wants to tell me that he was the one who sent Max. He knows that nothing would draw me to him like his concern for my child. This thought makes me feel happy, in a way that I don't want to look at.

I turn from him, stare out the window. It's a long time since I saw Guernsey from the inside of a car. The storm is passing over, the world filling up with color: the drenched grass a startling feverish green beneath the white of the sky, wet rowan berries shiny as a woman's lipsticked mouth. The windows steam up with our breathing, so the countryside blurs, its colors running together, as though this land is insubstantial, about to dissolve. He winds his window down a little, so the cool air will clear the window glass.

He is silent for a while. The scrape of the windscreen wipers fills in the silence between us. The damp brings out the smells of things—the wet wool of my cardigan, the musk of my wet hair. I turn slightly toward him, watch his heavy, solid body, the way his hands move on the steering wheel. I remember the feel of his fingertip on the back of my neck—warm, terrifying. He's driving very slowly.

“So, the chocolate,” he says. As though he is continuing a conversation we've had. “Did you eat it yourself or did you give it all to your children?”

“I ate some of it,” I tell him.

“And did you like it?” he asks.

I remember the melting sweetness of it—the portion I kept for myself.

“Yes. It was delicious.”

“Even though you were so reluctant to take it?” he says.

I don't look at him, but I hear the smile in his voice.

“I didn't say no because I thought I wouldn't enjoy it,” I say.

The words hang there between us.

The wind is tearing the clouds apart. Light pours over the land, so everything's lit up, sparkly. He wipes the mist from the inside of his window with his sleeve. The colors of the countryside dazzle—the copper and bronze of the turning leaves, a field of tawny dandelions, leggy as girls. We pass a fabulous vine that tumbles over a wall, its leaves all the colors of flame, but soft.

“This landscape is like a watercolor,” he says. “I would like to paint this landscape.”

I'm immediately intrigued. “You're an artist?”

“I wouldn't presume to call myself that,” he says. “But I like to paint when I can. Just for my own pleasure.” He hesitates for a moment, as though searching for the right words to express what he feels. “I find it good to leave my daily life behind for a while.”

I recognize that impulse—when you crave a safe place, a haven. Like me with my piano and my poetry books. But it isn't quite what you'd expect a soldier to say.

“Art is not my profession,” he says. And then, when I don't ask, “I was an architect, before the war.”

I'm surprised, as I was when Captain Richter told me he was a doctor. I never think about these men having other careers. I try—and fail—to conjure up an intelligent question to ask.

The sky is clearing rapidly now. Ahead of us, against the blue splendor, there's a great bank of dark cloud that looks completely solid—like a far country, like the rounded storybook hills in the tales I read to Millie. He doesn't say anything more, but it doesn't seem to matter. I feel so happy, here in the car, in his coat—feel a rash, impulsive happiness that rushes through me, floods me. I can't control it or deny it or push it away.

At the bend in the lane, by the cattle trough, there's a dark shape under the hedge—a woman in a head scarf, walking her dog. I recognize Clemmie Renouf, who I know a little from church. She's looking straight at the car; her keen gaze seems to seek me out. I feel a judder of fear. I tell myself she can't possibly see through the blur of wet on the glass. But I wish this hadn't happened.

We're nearly at Le Colombier now.

“I could drop you at your door. But if you prefer I could leave you around the corner,” he says.

“Yes. That would be better really.”

He stops the car some way from my gate.

“If you give me the key to your padlock, I can send Hans Schmidt to pick up your bicycle,” he says.

I take the key from my pocket and drop it into his hand, careful not to touch him.

“Thank you for the lift,” I say.

“My pleasure, Mrs. de la Mare.”

I take off the coat, and fold it, and put it down on the seat. I'm so lonely, so cold, without it. I open the door of the car; I have my back toward him.

“My name is Vivienne,” I tell him.

“Vivienne.” He repeats my name gravely, carefully, as if he might damage it if he spoke it too roughly. “Thank you.” As though I have given him something.

THAT NIGHT I
dream about him. In the dream he's holding me close—just holding me, no kiss, no sexual touch, just his body pressed entirely against me, wrapped so close around mine, as you might hold someone you loved after a long separation. In the dream, this is the most natural thing—how things are meant to be. But when I wake the dream appalls me.

Chapter 29

I
'VE BEEN SORTING
out some of Frank's things,” says Angie.

There's a pile of books on her kitchen table:
Mr. Middleton Talks About Gardening, Three Men in a Boat,
a book of Guernsey tales.

“These were all Frank's,” she tells me. “They're no use to me now, Vivienne. I'm not like you or him. I've never been one for book learning, like I told you. So I thought I'd give them away, to people who'd put them to use.”

She hands me the book of Guernsey folktales.

“I know how your Millie loves her stories,” she says. “And I thought she might like this book.”

I open it, and the pages release a scent of dust and mold. I flick through. The typeface is old-fashioned, decorative, the initial letter of each tale wrapped round with trailing leaves. A pressed flower serves as a bookmark; though it's paper pale and dried out, I know from the shape that it's restharrow, a creeping plant with pink petals that grows everywhere on the island, on any verge or clifftop or patch of unmown ground. I've always liked its name—the idea that its loveliness makes the harvesters stop in their tracks.

“Thank you. Millie will love these stories. Both of us will,” I tell her.

She has made a kind of coffee by infusing roasted parnips. It's rather bitter, but drinkable—as long as you put the memory of real coffee out of your mind. We sit and drink quietly at her kitchen table.

She still has a white, frayed look. When I ask her how she's keeping, she smiles a small rueful smile.

“Not so bad, Vivienne. Mustn't complain,” she tells me.

“If there's anything I can do . . . ,” I say.

Angie as always is practical.

“Well, you could help me shuck some peas, Vivienne, while you're here,” she says.

She takes pea pods from her vegetable rack and dumps them on the table. For a while there's just the snap of the pods, and the neat, percussive sound of peas falling into bowls, and through her open door the scratch and bustle of chickens and the whisper of the countryside. A dark lacquer of sadness seems to spread across the room.

After a while, she clears her throat, but she doesn't look in my direction.

“You know, Vivienne, I hated Frank sometimes,” she says. Very matter-of-fact, almost as though she's replying to a question I've asked. “The thing is, in the drink, he couldn't keep his hands to himself. Did you know that, Vivienne?”

I'm a little shocked that she's talking about this in such an open way.

“I'd wondered sometimes,” I tell her, carefully.

“Well, you're very sensitive, Vivienne, you do notice things,” she says. “You notice what people are feeling. . . . So when he was in the drink, I had to watch my P's and Q's. I had to sit there just like a good little girl, or he would give me a beating. . . . But now he's gone I miss him to distraction. Love's a strange beast,” she tells me, shelling the peas.

“Yes, it is,” I say.

“He could be two people. Two different people. That's odd, isn't it, Vivienne? And one of those people was like a stranger to me. Sometimes I think, Did I really know him at all?”

I think of that terrible moment when I looked into Eugene's dressing room—the moment when I saw him with Monica Charles. I think of the sickness, the insect creep of that knowledge on my skin: seeing my marriage wasn't at all as I'd believed it to be. The parsnip coffee has left a bitter, burned taste in my mouth.

“I know what you mean—how you could feel that,” I say. “How you could wonder how well you knew someone.”

Outside, the leaves of the elder tree rustle. They're drying out with autumn; they have a harsh, sibilant sound.

“He was a good man really, in spite of it all,” she tells me. Speaking slowly, exactly, choosing her words. “A very hard worker, which is what you need in a man. And I miss having a man around the place. Well, that's the natural order of things, isn't it? To have a man about the house. I used to hate him sometimes and now I miss him something cruel. . . . What I've learned, Vivienne—you should always be grateful for every gift life gives you.” She splits open a pod with a crisp little snap. “Cherish what you have,” she says, as the peas rattle into the bowl.

I WALK BACK
to Le Colombier, feeling a tug of sadness because of the way she has changed. She's so quiet now, so reflective. But when Frank was alive she'd always be talking, talking. She'd be full of news and gossip: she knew so many old tales, and she loved to describe the superstitions old people still believe in. The scrape of the undertow on the shingle, when heard inland, presages rain. Births happen more readily with the flowing tide, and deaths with the ebb, for life comes in with the flood and goes out with the fall of the water.

She especially loved to tell about the Guernsey witches, who long ago met at Le Catiorac, a headland out to the west. The witches would dance there naked, as witches do, she'd say; and they'd curse the monks who lived across the water on Lihou Island—Guernsey's holy island, just off the western shore. It was rather a startling picture: the ferocious naked women, cursing and railing into the wind, for there's always a wild whistling wind on the headland, at Le Catiorac. We used to go there sometimes in summer: at low tide, you can reach the island across a causeway of stones. There are no monks there now, no one lives there. It's a desolate place—black rocks, gray water, black seaweed on pale sand. The girls would dart off, poking around in the rock pools, and on the way back I'd always be telling them to hurry—the tide comes in so rapidly, you could easily be cut off. There was always an urgency to those walks: always that fear, at the back of your mind, that the water might overtake you.