‘Bloody curse, these mobile and email whatsits,’ Eric said. ‘You know too much. You have to tell too much.’
George thought back to the blueys of his soldiering days, those fragile airmail letters that invariably had too much depending upon them. And what you didn’t read, you imagined, like him imagining all the things Lisette was doing – getting up to, more like – which she never mentioned but which somehow haunted her carefree, careless handwriting like shadows and whisperings. When he’d been down in the South Atlantic in 1982, he hadn’t known whether to long for a bluey or to hope the next one never came. At least nowadays you knew the day-to-day stuff, it wasn’t all such a big deal. And you got the football results almost as soon as the match ended. He said, ‘It’s never easy, coming back. Not for them, or us.’
His father drank some tea with relish. ‘It was easier on those bloody ships. Took for ever. Plenty of time to readjust, get bored. Now it’s decompression like a bloody diver, wham, bang, out of ops and back in your own bloody bedroom with the wife wanting the moon and stars.’
George said reprovingly, ‘You don’t think that of Alexa.’
Eric grunted. ‘I think the bloody world of Alexa.’
‘The tops,’ George said softly.
When Dan had brought Alexa to Wimbledon, they’d both been bowled over. She wasn’t a beauty, necessarily, but she had class. She was tall and smiling, with all that hair down her back, and she was a widow. Twenty-six, and a widow. They couldn’t get over that. Bloody shame. Where was the justice in a lovely girl like that being a widow at twenty-six in this day and age when the doctors can do almost anything? But then, if her husband had still been alive, Dan mightn’t have stood a chance. He might be the apple of his father’s and grandfather’s eye – Ministry of Defence-sponsored place at Welbeck College, Military College at Sandhurst, first commissioned officer in the family – but a girl like Alexa, married with a baby, might still never have given him a second glance. Just another typical bloody soldier, she might have thought. Why would I need one of them when I’ve got my nice civvy husband already?
But then the poor bugger had died, hadn’t he? And horribly, from this tumour on the brain. And there was Alexa, trying to look after her little girl, trying to hold down her teaching job, trying not to ask her parents for help, and she goes to this party, not in a good mood, and there’s our Dan, standing by the wall, drink in his hand, eyeing up the talent, and he spots her as soon as she comes in, and he thinks, that one’s got my name on, and he waits and watches and waits and watches, and blow me if she doesn’t bloody well come right up to him and ask him if there’s something he wants. Wants? Wants? When what he wants is standing there right in front of him? Bloody marvellous.
There’d been much debate as to where Dan should bring Alexa to meet his father and grandfather. George’s austere little flat had been dismissed as having all the domestic charm of a hospital waiting room, and the café in Elys, which Eric so favoured, would indicate that they didn’t have a home to take her to. So it was a teatime occasion, in the end, in Eric’s flat, with Eric’s teacups, and a plate of cakes from the French patisserie at the top of the High Street, all a bit uncomfortable, a bit awkward, until Alexa produced a bottle of whisky from her bag and set it down without comment next to Eric’s teapot.
George thought he’d probably fallen in love with her at that moment. He knew his father had. And Dan was so deep in already he was almost drowning. George had looked at the four of them, sitting round the whisky and grinning, and felt suddenly, recklessly, that all the pains of the past, all the loneliness and anxiety and disappointment, had been swept away by the presence of this young woman and her – her sheer style. When he looked at Dan, the lad seemed to have a glow round him. A captain already, and soon – no doubt about it – to be beiged for a major. And now this girl, pouring whisky into Eric’s late wife’s sherry glasses and licking cake crumbs off her fingers. Her father was something in the Foreign Office, her mother – well, she was one of those ladies who knew how to arrange flowers and talk comfortably to strangers about nothing, from the sound of her. Meeting them might not be something any of the Rileys exactly looked forward to, but, hell, what did that matter? And if they could produce a girl like this, he could forgive them anything. He’d raised his whisky glass and looked at Alexa over it. ‘Here’s to you, ma’am,’ he’d said, and meant it.
As it turned out, the meeting between the Rileys and Alexa’s parents was quite successful. Dan refused to get worked up about it, saying that his future parents-in-law were just like the Army great and good who came to the regimental drinks parties the garrison held at Christmas – ‘You know the type, Dad.’ Eric wanted to wear his suit, so George wore his, too, in case his father looked out of place; but when they got there, to this very classy flat in a vast building on the Marylebone Road – small but formal, with little sofas and a lot of lilies – Alexa’s father was in a jacket and tie and her mother was in pearls, so the suits looked appropriate. Alexa, bless her heart, was in jeans and a velvet jacket, and her little Isabel was in gumboots which she refused to take off. Her grandmother said things like ‘Not on the sofa, darling’ quite often, but neither Alexa nor Isabel seemed to take any notice, and when Morgan Longworth offered George a drink, Alexa said, ‘Don’t do your global cocktail act on George, Pa. He drinks beer or whisky,’ and Morgan, smoothly, not batting an eyelash, said, ‘Sensible man.’
Eric had asked for tea.
Dan said easily, ‘Granddad doesn’t drink in other people’s houses.’
‘On principle?’ Elaine Longworth said archly.
Eric, ramrod straight in his suit, looked at her and smiled. ‘If I’m going to make a bloody fool of myself, ma’am, I’d rather do it in my own home.’
After they’d gone – Alexa declining to reveal where Dan was taking her and Isabel – Morgan Longworth gave his wife enough time to plump up all her handsome cushions and then he said, ‘Well?’
Elaine straightened. She put her hands on her hips. She said, not looking at Morgan, ‘Not sure what I was expecting …’
‘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 ove
r 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.
The Soldier's Wife Page 3
