The Soldier's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  The door opened. Alexa was standing there, holding her mobile phone. She looked odd, as if she’d seen something unexpected and upsetting. Dan got up off the sofa, and stood up. ‘Are you all right?’

  She hardly looked at him. She just held out the phone wordlessly. He took it from her. At the top of the screen it said ‘Isabel’, and below it was a text message, just a single word: ‘Help’.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  To her relief, Isabel wasn’t made to sit on a chair in the corridor outside the headmistress’s office. The old headmistress had had a row of chairs in the corridor, and when you were sent to see her you had to sit out there in public, so that anyone going past could see that you were in trouble. But Mrs Cairns, the new headmistress, had made a lot of changes. She was younger than Mrs Arbuthnot had been, and she drove a cool car, an old Morgan sports car, and she wore high heels and make-up and red-framed spectacles. There wasn’t a detail of her appearance or manner that wasn’t subjected to a forensic-style scrutiny in assembly every morning, and minutely analysed afterwards. But so far, she’d met with general approval, if only because she was a refreshing change from Mrs Arbuthnot, who had seldom smiled and wore gross mohair cardigans and even grosser Celtic jewellery. She was determined, it seemed, to signal that relations between staff and girls should move on to a more informal, more humane footing, and to that end, when you were summoned to see her you didn’t have to sit humiliatingly in the corridor, but were allowed an upholstered seat in the outer room to her office, where Mrs Cairns’ secretary sat at an L-shaped desk in front of her computer.

  Isabel wasn’t sure if she should speak to the secretary. She had said ‘Thank you’ when told where to sit – in a corner, under a watercolour of a cottage garden – but as the secretary said nothing further to her, she decided that it would look as if she didn’t know she’d done anything wrong if she were to initiate any further discussion. In any case, the secretary, a solid middle-aged woman with an iron-grey bob and a penchant for what the girls called art-teacher shoes, with instep straps, had been inherited from Mrs Arbuthnot, and was palpably not in favour of many of her successor’s changes.

  So Isabel sat on her chair, with consciously good posture, and tried to deflect her frightened thoughts by wondering what would happen if the watercolour of a cottage garden suddenly fell down on her, or a mouse emerged from behind one of the William Morris print curtains and ran over the secretary’s foot. She leaned out from the back of the chair, very slightly, so that when the picture fell it wouldn’t hit her on the head, and stared at the carpet so hard that she could almost picture a mouse darting across it from the cover of the curtain to the shelter of the desk. Then she remembered how excited Beetle got if ever there was a mouse in the kitchen, and her throat tightened at the thought. She would not cry, she must not cry. No more thoughts of Beetle, or how Flora looked if you offered her carrots, or—

  Mrs Cairns’ door opened. She stood in the doorway, holding it. She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t scowling, either.

  ‘Isabel,’ she said.

  Isabel scrambled awkwardly to her feet.

  The secretary said, ‘Mrs Arbuthnot always used the intercom.’ She didn’t add Mrs Cairns’ name.

  Mrs Cairns looked at her with a wide smile. ‘And sometimes I will too, Jean. It depends upon whom I am seeing.’ Then she looked back at Isabel. ‘Come in, please.’

  Isabel had only been in the headmistress’s office once before, when she and Alexa and Dan came to see the school together. Mrs Arbuthnot had spoken mainly to Dan, who had said quite plainly that he was only Isabel’s stepfather, but Mrs Arbuthnot had taken no notice and afterwards, in the car, Alexa had said, ‘My God, she’s just like the Queen, isn’t she, much prefers action men.’

  Dan had glanced round at Isabel, in the back seat of the car, and said, ‘What did you think, Izzy?’

  And Isabel, feeling powerfully that a decision had already been made and that asking her opinion was merely a courtesy, said bravely, ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly Hogwarts, was it?’ and Dan had laughed.

  The room looked a bit kinder than she remembered it. There were flowers, and photographs of Mrs Cairns’ nearly grown-up children, and the furniture seemed to be smaller and paler and less alarming than last time.

  ‘Why don’t you sit there?’ Mrs Cairns said.

  She indicated an armchair beside a low table by the window, with another armchair opposite it. Isabel looked at it doubtfully. She had been expecting to sit on a hard chair across a desk from Mrs Cairns.

  ‘There?’

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘Even if the talk is uncomfortable, there’s no need for our bodies to be as well.’

  Isabel lowered herself carefully into the armchair and sat upright, careful not to lean back. She stared at the table top. It was completely empty, except for a plastic bottle of water and two tumblers.

  ‘Water, Isabel?’

  Isabel shook her head. ‘No, thank you.’

  Mrs Cairns sat down opposite her. ‘Could you look at this, please, Isabel?’

  Isabel raised her head, very slowly. Mrs Cairns was holding out a pink plastic Nintendo DS.

  ‘Do you recognize this?’

  Isabel nodded.

  ‘Could you speak, please?’

  Isabel swallowed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who does it belong to?’

  Isabel swallowed again. ‘Libby Guthrie.’

  ‘Did Libby lend it to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Isabel, did you ask Libby if you could borrow it?’

  ‘No.’

  Mrs Cairns put the DS down on the table beside the water bottle. ‘But it was found, after Libby had reported it missing, in your locker.’

  There was a brief pause. Then Isabel said, with difficulty, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you explain how it got there?’

  In a whisper, Isabel said, ‘I took it.’

  ‘Can you tell me why?’

  Isabel shook her head.

  ‘Please try, Isabel.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you want to attract Libby’s attention?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want a DS of your own?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you jealous of Libby Guthrie?’

  There was another pause and then Isabel said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  Mrs Cairns leaned forward. She had taken off her spectacles and they swung round her neck on a fragile jewelled chain that caught the light. She said, with slightly more severity, ‘And you haven’t apologized to Libby, have you?’

  Isabel said nothing.

  ‘Have you? Please answer me, Isabel.’

  Isabel said miserably, ‘I didn’t want to upset her. I didn’t mean to. But it … it just happened.’ She looked up for a second and said in a rush, ‘I couldn’t stop it.’

  ‘Of course you could.’

  Isabel shook her head dumbly.

  Mrs Cairns leaned back a little. Isabel felt herself being surveyed and her face growing hot under the scrutiny. It was impossible to explain the sensation of knowing she had done wrong while knowing just as strongly that she almost meant to.

  ‘Isabel,’ Mrs Cairns said, ‘you say you don’t want a DS. You say you aren’t trying to get your own back in some way on Libby. You didn’t try to hide the DS when you knew your locker would be searched. Can you please tell me something, anything, about what was going on in your head when you stole it?’

  Isabel gave a huge sigh. She shot Mrs Cairns a quick glance and then she looked past her, at an engraving on the wall of what the house where the school now was had looked like in the nineteenth century, with a carriage and horses standing on the drive and ladies in crinolines being handed down the steps.

  ‘I … just did it,’ Isabel said, and waited.

  ‘No,’ Alexa said into the twins’ darkened bedroom. ‘No more water, no more songs, no more talking. You are going to sleep.’

  Tassy said somethin
g incomprehensible to Flora, and Flora sniggered faintly.

  ‘Daddy?’ Tassy then said clearly, to Alexa.

  ‘When he’s home, he’ll come up and kiss you. But if I hear one more sound out of either of you, he won’t.’

  There was a powerful silence, and then Flora said, ‘Beeldy-buss.’

  ‘Flora,’ Alexa said warningly.

  Tassy said, giggling, ‘She wasn’t talking to you.’

  Alexa pulled the door shut until there was only a crack for the light from the landing to shine through. She stood for a moment, eyes closed, collecting herself, and then she walked slowly down the narrow landing and even more slowly down the stairs. Dan had said that he hoped – hoped – to be home by seven. It was now seven forty-five. She had promised herself that she would greet him without a hint of reproach, however late he was, not least because she wanted to talk to him – the kind of talking that required both participants in the conversation to focus – about Isabel.

  Mrs Cairns had telephoned to ask if Alexa had any views on the DS episode. Alexa, who had tried unsuccessfully to speak to Isabel without the latter either crying or saying, over and over, that she didn’t know, she didn’t know, she didn’t know, had said that she would like to come and see Mrs Cairns, and Isabel herself, as soon as possible.

  ‘We would both like to come,’ Alexa said, not having asked Dan. ‘Isabel’s stepfather as well. He’s known her since she was tiny. None of this is remotely in character.’

  Mrs Cairns had made an appointment for three days’ time. She had sounded to Alexa as if she wasn’t in the kind of hurry Alexa would have liked her to be in.

  ‘What will happen to Isabel in those three days?’

  ‘Completely normal routine,’ Mrs Cairns said.

  ‘But if Libby Guthrie—’

  ‘We are perfectly observant,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘And I have no intention of allowing the situation to escalate.’

  Alexa had felt rebuked. Add that to a powerful desire to leap into the car and drive madly to Isabel’s school and somehow snatch her from it, and it was hard to concentrate on anything much. She had snapped at her mother, on the telephone.

  ‘But I’ve waited six days,’ Elaine said plaintively. ‘It’s almost a week since Dan got home, and while I do try not to pester you, I think you might consider how it feels to wait for news as long as that.’

  ‘You knew he was home,’ Alexa said irritably, her phone tucked into the angle of her neck and shoulder while she folded the twins’ interminable little duplicate clothes. ‘Eric rang you. George told us Eric rang you.’

  ‘It isn’t the same,’ Elaine said, pacing her words for emphasis, ‘as hearing, from you, that Dan is safe home and that you are all reunited. Nor is it the same as actually speaking to Dan. I haven’t heard his voice in six months.’

  Alexa picked up a tangle of khaki socks. Was it wonderful to have socks to pair up again, or were they just another reminder that the man might be back in person, but hardly seemed to be in spirit?

  She said, less crossly, ‘I’m not apologizing for him, Mum.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to.’

  ‘I think you do. But I won’t. I can’t. It’s very hard for them, coming back. Why don’t you ring him in his office?’

  ‘Oh!’ Elaine said, as if appalled at the notion. ‘I couldn’t interrupt him there!’

  Alexa laid two cocoons of sock beside the twins’ laundry. She said silently, to the air, ‘But it’s fine to have a go at me about him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Are you still there?’ Elaine asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Alexa said. ‘Sorting socks, with soup in the blender, a clean kitchen floor and an agenda as long as your arm for when he—’ she stopped.

  ‘When what?’

  Alexa added more socks to the pile. ‘Nothing. Nothing. I shouldn’t have—Mum, I’m just a bit overdone with the domestic round. I’ll get Dan to call you.’

  ‘It would be nice,’ Elaine said, ‘if he felt calling us was a pleasure, rather than a duty.’

  ‘I can’t promise you perfection,’ Alexa said, flaring up again. ‘Why can’t you take what’s on offer without always wanting more?’

  There had been an injured silence and then Elaine had said, in a voice that made Alexa feel she had stupidly revealed far too much, ‘I will ring again in a few days, when you have both had time to sort yourselves out,’ and then added, infuriatingly, ‘Daddy sends his love. Of course.’

  Alexa had ended the call without saying goodbye properly. Rude, childish conduct. Rude, childish conduct that gave her no satisfaction beyond the brief, delicious spurt of temper as she clicked her phone off. Her mother’s call was just one more thing, albeit a relatively small one, to add to the ever-growing list of things to talk to Dan about. She glanced across the kitchen, to the white envelope still balanced among the pottery mugs. Hah! In her current mood, hah! was the only response to the ironic notion that anyone might stop the pursuit of their own ends long enough to consider whether she, Alexa Riley, perfectly intelligent and professionally qualified, might not merit a chance to fulfil herself as much as everyone else around her assumed they had a perfect right to do.

  From an apparently profound slumber in his basket, Beetle suddenly sat up, ears pricked, and whimpered.

  ‘Go,’ Alexa said tiredly. ‘Go and be nice to him.’

  Beetle dashed past her to the hall at the moment when car headlights swung into the drive. Alexa stood with her hands resting on the piles of laundry. Do not snap, she told herself, do not sigh, do not be sarcastic or chilly or unhelpful. The man now opening the front door is, as all the other wives would say, your man, and you knew what you were taking on. Even if you didn’t, because nobody could know what being in the Army is really like until they’ve lived it.

  ‘Hi, there,’ Dan said, from the doorway. Beetle was right behind him, nose pressed to the back of his knee, eyes shining.

  Alexa didn’t move. She tried to smile. ‘Hello.’

  ‘I’m late.’

  ‘I know.’

  He came across the kitchen and turned her away from the laundry so that he could hold her. ‘Sorry, doll.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said into his shoulder. ‘I kind of knew—’

  ‘When they’ve all gone on leave,’ Dan said, ‘it’ll be better. It’s just this getting-back-and-going-off thing—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Twins asleep?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Dan let her go. He said, ‘I’ll just go up and check.’

  She watched him go out of the room in his combats and boots, his stable belt tight round what still seemed to her too small a waist for a man of his height. When he’d held her, she could feel the padded rectangle of the rank slide on the front of his shirt press into her. In her present mood, that seemed like yet another reminder that the Army was there between them in a way that was peculiarly unbearable, since, if asked, she would have said, almost truthfully, that she believed in what Dan was doing nearly as much as he did.

  She crossed the kitchen to the fridge and took out a bottle of white wine. Mo had brought it round, saying she’d won a case in a raffle at the Army Benevolent Fund Christmas Fair the other night and felt like sharing.

  Alexa had demurred. ‘No, honestly, Mo. It’ll keep, you know.’

  ‘Not in our house,’ Mo said. ‘Safer to give most of it away. Anyway, you’ve drunk nothing while Dan’s been away, have you?’

  Alexa looked at the bottle now. She hadn’t. She hadn’t drunk any alcohol and she hadn’t, she realized, touched another adult. For six months. In one way, it had just happened; in another, she had made it happen, as if tiny sacrifices might add up to enough to bargain with Fate for Dan’s safe return. And now he was back, really back, kissing his sleeping children in their darkened bedroom. While hers, her firstborn, waited to be rescued.

  She reached up on top of the fridge to where the corkscrew lived, in a shallow basket, along with bottle openers and spare corks. From
the doorway, Dan said, ‘Out for the count, both of them.’

  ‘So they should be.’

  He came to take the bottle and the corkscrew out of her hands. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What news?’

  Alexa said, too suddenly, ‘Mrs Cairns can see us on Thursday.’

  Dan pulled the cork slowly out of the bottle. He set the bottle down on the table. Then he said, awkwardly, ‘Sorry, sweetheart.’

  Alexa said nothing.

  Twisting the cork out of the corkscrew, Dan said, ‘We can’t do Thursday. It’s the family day. Parade and all that. We all have to be there.’

  Alexa folded her arms. ‘I don’t.’

  Dan put down the cork and corkscrew with elaborate care. ‘Lex, I need you there. My family on family day. The battery needs you there. The regiment does. All their families do. It’s something we do together.’

  Alexa let a beat fall and then she said, ‘Not, I’m afraid, while there’s a crisis with Isabel. She’s my priority, even if she isn’t yours.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘And this situation isn’t fair to Isabel! Or me.’

  ‘Please don’t say that.’

  ‘I feel it,’ Alexa said. ‘Suppose it was one of the twins?’

  ‘That’s not fair either—’

  ‘And this situation isn’t fair to Isabel! Or me.’

  Dan opened a cupboard and took out a couple of glasses. He said, ‘In just over a week’s time, I’ll be all yours. We can do whatever you want, go wherever you want—’

  ‘It’s never like that in practice,’ Alexa said, ‘is it? There’s always demands, always something needing doing, always other priorities.’

  Dan sat down opposite her. He closed his eyes briefly. Then he opened them and said, ‘Please.’

  Alexa reached out towards the wine bottle. Dan took her wrist in one hand and picked up the bottle with the other. He said, pouring, ‘I’d really like to come with you. You know I would. I think the world of Isabel and I’m very upset she’s unhappy. I’m not making light of this episode, but I don’t think it’s such a big deal because she’s such a great kid and as honest as they come. I think it’s just a blip. And when all the boys have gone off to see their mums and book their holidays in Ibiza, I’ll talk to whoever you want and be glad to do it. But I can’t do it now. I can’t do it on Thursday. Could you – could you postpone the meeting?’