The Soldier’s Wife
JOANNA TROLLOPE
Dedication
This book is for all those who gave me their invaluable
time and help in my research: Alice, Sarah B, Jason K,
Eliza and Rupert, Sophie, William and Charlie, Sarah
and Andrew, Sam, Ally, Tiggy, Joan, Denise, Nick S,
Patrick H, Joanna W, John S, Fiona S, Richard M,
Alex H, Tom N, Gemma, Julie, Chrissie, Toni and
Corporal Wallace. Thank you all, and so much.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
About the Author
Praise for Joanna Trollope
Also by Joanna Trollope
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
Even before her eyes were open, Isabel could tell that the house was awake. The water was thumping away in the pipes behind the wall in her bedroom, as it had done ever since Maintenance – now contracted out to some civilian firm in Liverpool that Isabel had heard her mother say was useless – had come to stop the shower leaking, and she could also hear the twins twittering away somewhere, in the sort of bird-speak they had developed for private communication.
It was annoying, really. It was annoying to be the last awake, and not the first. Isabel had discovered that if she could steal a march on the day – even by fifteen minutes – she could manage it better, get a grip on herself. At school – best, really, not to think about school if she could help it – she had devised this method of taking charge of herself deliberately and methodically, as a way of dealing with homesickness. Wake before everyone else, go through the wretched mental photo gallery of home and Mum and the twins and the dog, and the smells museum of the kitchen and Mum’s sweater drawer and the awkward cupboard where the bed linen lived, whose door would never shut, then gulp, sniff, wipe eyes, sit up and breathe. Breathe and breathe. Eyes shut, then eyes open. Swallow. Find hairbrush and begin to brush, reminding herself how amazingly lucky she was to have long, thick, straight hair and not the curly or frizzy kind that got you despised for something that you couldn’t possibly be blamed for in the first place. Put hairbrush back. One more deep breath. Up.
Isabel put her fingers lightly across her eyelids, and opened her eyes slowly behind them. She was not, of course, at school. She was at home, in her own bedroom, at number seven, the Quadrant, Larkford Camp, Wiltshire, which had been home now for nearly two years. Before that home had been a bit in Germany, and a bit in Yorkshire and a bit in London, and before that, when it was just Mum and Isabel on their own, a bit in another part of London in a high-up flat with the top of a tree right outside the windows, which Isabel believed she remembered with a passionate nostalgia. There’d also been schools to go with all these places, school after school.
‘Five schools by year six,’ Mum had said to Isabel, trying to make the case for boarding school. ‘It’s too much. It’s too much for you. It isn’t fair. You make friends and then you move and lose them. Don’t you think you’d rather have continuity, even if it means sleeping away from home?’
Isabel didn’t know. Even now, technically settled into boarding school, she didn’t know. She wanted to feel steadier, she wanted to please, she understood that if Dan got promotion they might move again – but then, if he didn’t, if they didn’t, why was it necessary for her to be away from home when home wasn’t, after all, changing? And then there were the twins. The twins went to a local nursery school, and when they were five would go to the local primary.
‘But the twins—’ Isabel began.
Mum looked at her. Isabel could see she understood and hadn’t got a real answer. She just said, ‘We – can’t plan, you see. Not if we want to stay together. As a family. But if you go to boarding school, at least you know – I know – that one thing, at least, will go on as before. That’s all.’
In Isabel’s experience, it was only the small things that went on as before, like the smell of the linen cupboard and the twins’ refusal to eat anything orange and the way one fingernail on her left hand grew at a very slight angle. The big stuff, like what was going to happen next, to all of them, was always a giant question mark hanging in the air, affecting everything, every mood. And even when the question mark was answered, it was always replaced by another one. Like today. Today was a big day, a day they had been looking forward to for six months, a day that was circled on the kitchen calendar, and for which the twins had made a huge messy paper banner randomly stuck with patches of shiny coloured paper and scraps of pink feather from a dressing-up boa.
Today, Dan was coming home from Afghanistan, with his whole battery. That, Isabel knew, meant about a hundred soldiers. Plus Dan. Plus all the other soldiers, from the other batteries, from the regiment. Planes and planes of them, all coming home together, in transports like flying sardine cans, Dan said, only huge. So Dan’s coming home took away the question mark of would he be killed or wounded while he was away, which was a huge relief because Dan had always been kind to Isabel, and she appreciated that. But now there was another question mark in place of the would-Dan-be-killed one, and that, although not as awful, was still a deep anxiety.
Isabel took her hands away from her face and stared hard at the ceiling above her. People at school talked about what might happen to their soldier fathers a lot. Nobody was supposed to look at or listen to the news at school, but people did, all the same, and then whispered about it. There’d been a helicopter crash in Afghanistan last term, and the radio announcer had said, ‘All killed. The relatives have been informed,’ and Libby Guthrie, whose father was in the Army Flying Corps and who had gone quite white, said, ‘Oh, phew. Relatives have been told. So we’re OK then.’ They’d all screamed then, and got hysterical with relief, jumping about with their arms round each other, and Isabel had felt an intense, brief, heady sensation of belonging.
But she didn’t feel that now. She felt very separate and very apprehensive. Dan was coming home and Mum would be thrilled and the twins would be thrilled, and she would be pleased. But what, the new question mark asked, would he be like?
In the kitchen, Alexa had the fridge door open. The interior was immaculate, the contents arranged with precision and by category. The kitchen floor – Army-issue vinyl printed to resemble outdated Italian floor tiles – shone. So did the windows. The walls, which she had painted pale blue herself, although she knew she would have to return them to magnolia when they left the quarter, were smear-free except for the twins’ exuberant Welcome Home Daddy poster. There were flowers on the table, the tea towels were ironed and her hair, still damp from the shower, had possibly never been cleaner. Her friend Mo had been round the evening before on her way to an Army Benevolent Fund early Christmas fair – ‘Twenty quid for tepid curry with the Old and Bold – you’re so lucky you can’t get a babysitter and come with me’ – and had shouted with laughter at the flawless state of the house.
‘God, we’re pathetic. What do we think we’re doing? Last time Baz got back from exercise he was completely, utterly filthy, and as rank as a polecat, and there I was, spotless in every crevice,
not a hair on my body. I ask you!’
Alexa said, surveying her manicured hands – no varnish, but no torn cuticles, either – ‘I suppose it’s relief. And excitement. And—’ She stopped.
‘And what?’
‘Army habit. Keeping up appearances. Smart at all times.’
Mo gave herself a quick glance in Alexa’s hall mirror. She pulled down the hem of her embroidered sweater. ‘I should be wearing a dress. To satisfy the Old and Bold. They’ll be in Jaeger and regimental brooches, comme toujours.’
‘You look great,’ Alexa said.
‘Better on a horse, though. It disguises my low centre of gravity.’ She leaned forward and gave Alexa a quick kiss. ‘I’ll be thinking of you tomorrow. It’ll be weird but wonderful. Have a row to clear the air as soon as you can – it’ll get him out of his cave. We usually schedule it for day four.’
Alexa picked a booklet out of a tidy pile on the hall table, and held it out. ‘That’s what Welfare recommend, only more circumspectly.’
‘What on earth’s that?’
‘Homecoming,’ Alexa said. ‘Welfare briefing on how to manage men going away and then men coming back again.’
Mo didn’t try to take it. ‘What a hoot.’
‘None of it’s a hoot.’
There was a small pause, and then Mo opened the front door. She blew Alexa a second kiss. ‘But we have to get on with it, don’t we? The house looks a peach and so do you. Lucky Major Riley.’
The door had slammed behind her, and Alexa heard the second slam of her car door, and then the car reversing and roaring away as if she were late to catch a train. Dan said Mo was at her happiest in an emergency, and Alexa had opened her mouth to say that maybe the visible and urgent expenditure of energy was more like a coping mechanism, and had then, for no reason she was very proud of, shut it again. Dan admired people who coped in emergencies. Emergencies were, after all, what he was trained for. And that was just one of the many things she had had to learn.
Something else she had learned now lay before her in the fridge. The food for a man sated with nourishment in foil pouches. Simple proteins – steak, chicken – beers, fruit and vegetables, powerfully mature Cheddar. He would probably eat nothing for a day or two – although the beers would vanish and no doubt much of the bottle of supermarket whisky she had bought – and then he would eat ravenously, whatever straightforward, un-messed-about food she put in front of him, liberally doused in Tabasco sauce. The British Army, she sometimes thought, could absorb as much Tabasco sauce as Avery Island, Louisiana could produce. The twins played shops with the rinsed-out miniature Tabasco bottles provided in every 24-hour Army ration pack – dozens of them, perfect replicas of the originals down to the McIlhenny label. Alexa pictured soldierly insides glowing and fire-hardened from years of pepper sauce which reduced everything, in her view, to a blazing similarity. Which was, perhaps, what soldiers wanted – a hot, peppery mush you could shovel in straight from the microwave or a pan of hot water. Certainly, if you shopped in the little supermarket which served the blocks behind the wire where over three thousand single soldiers lived, the freshest item you’d find there would be a foot-long sausage roll – no preparation, no unfamiliarity, no need for cutlery.
The fridge let out a bleat of alarm at being left open so long. Alexa gave a little start and banged it shut. What was she doing, standing gazing at marshalled rows of yoghurt pots with wet hair and none of the children either dressed or breakfasted? She was doing, she supposed, what her mother had done before every diplomatic party, checking and re-checking, feeling faintly sick and distinctly choked with anxious expectation, and possessed by a simultaneous conviction that she could not cope with what lay ahead and nor could she cope with it not happening.
She crossed to the window and held on to the edge of the sink below it. Rough autumn grass – she had mown it, she hoped for the last time that year, three weeks ago – stretched from the front of the house to the ragged hedge which separated them, and the house they were attached to, from the narrow asphalted road that ran round the Quadrant. There was a big circle of grass in the middle of the Quadrant, and a clump of beech trees through which the unmistakeable figure of the Brigadier’s wife – small, upright and purposeful – was making her way with two liver-and-white spaniels at her heels. She was the only officer’s wife in the regiment, Alexa thought, not to have Labradors – black Labradors – but she had grown up with spaniels, she said, she understood them. She also had cats.
‘Pansy animals, possibly,’ she once said to Alexa. ‘But bright. I like a clever creature.’
Alexa turned her head. Behind her, keeping a watchful eye but not moving until instructed, was Dan’s black Labrador, Beetle. He was not a clever creature, but he was biddable, kind and reliable. He was also the first dog Alexa had ever lived with, having had a wandering diplomatic upbringing that never seemed to allow for more pets than a tank, once, of tiny turtles, which had proved, after the initial wonder at their size and perfection, to be no more interesting to own than a box of slightly animated stones. Beetle was the first living thing Dan had introduced to Alexa – before any friend, before his father – and he had also proved to be the route that Isabel could take to accepting that Dan was here to stay in their lives, in a role she only really associated with a photograph.
‘Good dog,’ Alexa said.
Beetle’s tail moved very slightly in polite acknowledgement. He was perhaps the only one in the house whose reaction to Dan’s return would be entirely uncomplicated. Even the twins, Alexa could not be entirely sure of. Dan had been away once for only a month’s training, in Canada, when they were not yet two, and when he returned and swooped down to hug them they had been terrified of this unfamiliar giant and fled shrieking behind Alexa. Dan had been devastated. Alexa had found him in their then German garden, on a broken bench, his head in his hands, not able or inclined to be reasonable. It was a week before Tassy, the bolder of the twins, had instructed him to bath her. And another week before Flora had silently offered him her shoes to put on. And all that time, Dan hardly spoke. He wasn’t sulking, he was just somewhere else – ‘in the zone’, he called it – and there was nothing for Alexa to do but wait.
This time, of course, she had waited for six months. She had looked after the children, walked Beetle, cooked and cleaned, serviced the car and the lawn mower and the disobliging central-heating boiler; she had mopped up the girlfriends of the junior officers, who had frequently not even met their boyfriends’ parents, cut the grass, watched countless DVDs in the evenings, joined in endless small female social diversions in the days – ‘He’s in the Army,’ her father had said with forced joviality when she told him she had decided to marry Dan, ‘so you’ll end up an Army wife, measuring out your days in coffee spoons!’; she had tried not to write daily emails to Dan, and certainly not ones that even hinted at the bizarre mixture of feeling both trapped and insecure that haunted her, and was never separated from her telephone.
Once a week, there’d been a satellite phone call to Dan, in Afghanistan. If there was any crisis or sudden action, all the communications would shut down, and if you missed your turn, you missed it and were rewarded with a particular intensity of anxiety that persisted until the men were permitted to communicate again. Worries about Isabel’s misery at school, about Flora’s lazy eye (she wore miniature spectacles with a patch over one lens which gave her a sweetly scholarly air), about the lump on Beetle’s side, had to be choked down even if the phone connection worked, because Dan was mentally in another place, on quite another planet. This tour, he hadn’t even taken photographs of them all, nor the drawings the twins had done for him.
‘I can’t bear to,’ he said. He was standing among the precise piles of his kit, in their bedroom. ‘I couldn’t look at them last time, and I felt a shit because I couldn’t. So, better not to take them.’ He gave a half-laugh. ‘I feel shit about enough, as it is.’
As well as those calls – as vital as they were u
nsatisfactory – Alexa rang her girlfriends on the camp daily. She rang Mo, and Franny and Sara and Prue. She also rang Dan’s father once a week, out of affection, and her own parents, out of duty. And she rang Jack. She rang Jack almost as often as Jack rang her, which was every day or two.
Jack Dearlove had been in Alexa’s life since she was seven. His father had been a minor diplomat, like hers, and their peripatetic careers had brought their children together, quite by chance, in several postings, the last of which was Bonn, just before both Jack and Alexa went off to university. And at his university – Newcastle – Jack had made a friend, a close, slightly older friend, whom he had introduced to Alexa in a jazz café on the Fulham Road which specialized in live music. The friend was called Richard Maybrick, and it was his photograph, taken on a walking holiday in France with his hair ruffled and his teeth gleaming in a wide, untroubled smile, that his daughter Isabel kept on her chest of drawers at number seven, the Quadrant, Larkford Camp.
Richard Maybrick had died of a brain tumour in the neurological hospital in Queen Square, in London, when Isabel was only a baby. The tumour was diagnosed when he was twenty-six and his wife Alexa was pregnant with their first child, and it killed him eighteen months later. Throughout those months, the stocky, comfortable figure of Jack Dearlove was never far away. He was there after the consultations, he was there after every intense and terrifying bout of treatment, he was there when Alexa came out of Richard’s last hospital room and said, bleakly, ‘It’s over.’
Alexa’s parents supposed that their daughter would then, after a decent interval, become Mrs Dearlove. Alexa’s mother, who had always minded very much about appearances, had even commented upon what an attractive surname it was. Preferable, actually, she said carelessly, to Maybrick. But Alexa, although she saw so much that was loveable in Jack’s warmth and dependability and sturdy set of principles, saw nothing either romantic or exciting in him. In any case, Jack himself, devoted as he was to his mate Richard’s widow and baby, was in love with an Ethiopian model of startling, etiolated beauty, whom he captured, and married, and then lost again, but never ceased to yearn for. He became, as Alexa’s friend Franny put it, the perfect brother-friend. He had seen Alexa through Richard’s illness and death. She had seen him through Eka’s surrender, and then flight – insofar as he would let her. He was designed, Alexa knew, to pick up the scattered and shattered pieces of humans other than himself.
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