Mack turned round. ‘What would she say if she knew you were here?’
Dan said unhappily, ‘She’d probably tell me not to be such a bloody idiot.’
‘Then why wouldn’t you listen to her?’
‘Because,’ Dan said, ‘she’s had enough. So has Izzy. And I’ve had enough of letting them down like this. I can’t go on with it. It breaks my heart, but I can’t.’
Mack came back to the sofa. He sat down and leaned forward again, his elbows on his knees. He said, ‘Are you ambitious?’
‘As a soldier?’ Dan gave a little bark of laughter. ‘I was. Boy, I was.’
Mack said, ‘You had a good tour of duty.’
‘Yup.’
‘Your third tour of duty.’
Dan nodded.
Mack linked his hands and stared at the hearthrug. He said, ‘You’re coming into zone for promotion. As you know. We’d be looking at your past battle planning as well as your achievements. You know as well as I do that you did a fantastic job with your sub unit. You hit all the bases. You are not a guy, Dan, who walks between the raindrops. You’ve had your opportunities to shine and you’ve taken them. You even – dare I say – have your patrons. Afghanistan is the ultimate test – and you have not failed it.’
Dan muttered something.
‘What?’
‘I just said, I’m afraid it’s too late.’
‘Is it?’ Mack said with sudden energy. ‘Is it?’ He looked up from the rug, and gazed hard at Dan. ‘Are you telling me, really telling me, that you want to throw in the towel just as you come into the zone?’
Dan stared at him. ‘I don’t have a choice.’
Mack jabbed a forefinger at him. ‘I may be speaking out of turn. I may well be. But I can’t stand to see you giving up, I can’t stand it.’ He leaned closer until his face was six inches from Dan’s and said in a hoarse, urgent whisper, ‘You’re on target, mate. On target. To be pinked. Don’t bloody give up at the moment. You hit the bull’s eye!’
He shifted his position slightly now and put his hands over his face. Should he have said that? Should he? It was early December. The pink list wouldn’t be out for two months plus. On that fateful Thursday in February, Julian would ring him and say something like, ‘I’m aware that Dan and Gus both wanted and hoped, but only Dan got it,’ and then Mack would have to confront Gus and a whole tribe of other triple-alpha, confident people who believed they could do anything and tell them that only Dan—But maybe it wouldn’t, in the end, be Dan. Maybe, however great he’d been and might be, he wouldn’t finally get promotion. And then what would Mack have done that morning, setting that hare running, raising those hopes? He balled his hands into fists and beat them lightly against his forehead. Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut? Why hadn’t he heard Dan out and then rung Julian before he said another word?
There was a tap at the door.
‘Only me!’ Mary called, from the far side.
Mack got up from his desk and took a deep breath. He rearranged his features and his voice. ‘On my way, sweetheart,’ he said.
Isabel said that she would come home to play with the twins and help put them to bed, but that for the moment she would like to sleep at Franny’s house.
‘Just till Rupert gets back,’ she said, ‘and needs his bedroom.’
She hoped she had said his name really ordinarily. Alexa had flinched slightly, but had not said anything except that that would be lovely.
Franny said to Isabel. ‘Are you sure?’
Isabel nodded. ‘If that’s OK.’
‘It’s OK by me.’
‘Thank you,’ Alexa said to Franny. She put an arm around Isabel’s shoulders and held her hard. Then they ushered the twins out of Franny’s house and walked home round the Quadrant and the twins rushed across the grass to the beech clump in the middle so that they could kick the leaves up and shout. Isabel wondered whether to join them, and decided not to. It was a risk, staying with Mum, that she’d ask all kinds of questions, but luckily the risk was worth taking and she didn’t. Alexa just walked, and told her silly things the twins had said and done and how spoiled they had been in London, and then they were home, and there was Beetle, in a rapture of welcome, and Dan, in sort of uniform, looking very pale but laying the table and trying to smile. She smiled back at him but didn’t cross the room, and he seemed to get it and stayed where he was, a bunch of forks in his hand.
Alexa said to him, ‘You look very tidy.’
He shrugged. ‘Barrack office stuff. Very dull. Good to see you, Izzy.’
‘You, too,’ she said politely.
‘No Gus?’ Alexa said.
Dan placed two forks precisely on the table. ‘No Gus.’
‘Franny said that Kate—’
‘I know.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘If you want to know,’ Dan said, turning to get water glasses out of the cupboard behind him, ‘I don’t want to see either of them.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Oh.’
‘Where are the twins?’
Alexa pointed out of the window. ‘Coming. There they are.’
‘Isabel,’ Dan said, setting tumblers on the table, ‘could you field them and get their hands clean, for lunch?’
‘OK.’
Alexa said, ‘This all seems very brisk.’
‘What does?’
She gestured. ‘All this table laying and uniform and hand washing.’
Dan looked at her. ‘I’ve got to go into Salisbury.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dad’s coming.’
‘George?’
‘Sorry,’ Dan said. ‘Sorry, but I said yes. He just rang. Half an hour ago. He said he just had an impulse, and was acting on it.’
‘He never has impulses.’
‘He’s no trouble.’
‘No,’ Alexa said, ‘no trouble. Oh, well.’
‘Sorry.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t mind.’
Isabel looked out of the window. The twins were running across the grass to the house, their hands full of wet leaves.
‘He can have my bed,’ Isabel said. ‘I won’t be in it, will I? I’ll be in Rupert’s.’
George was carrying a laptop case. It was as surprising as if he’d arrived carrying a Masai spear or a blow-up doll.
‘What’s that?’ Dan said, indicating it.
‘A laptop,’ George said reasonably.
‘I thought it was all you could do to pick up a telephone.’
‘Ah,’ George said. ‘You have to speak to folk on telephones.’ He looked round. ‘No kids?’
‘No,’ Dan said.
George peered at him. ‘You all right, son?’
Dan looked down at the car keys in his hand. ‘Thanks for coming, Dad.’
‘Not at all,’ George said. He switched the laptop to his left hand and put his right on Dan’s arm. ‘When you rang—’
‘Sorry about that.’
‘What’s to be sorry for?’
‘Interrupting—’
George gave a yelp of laughter. ‘What’s to interrupt in my life, I wonder? Pension day, beers with your granddad, lottery tickets Friday. Full schedule, I have. Not a minute to call my own. But you—’ He tightened his grip on Dan’s arm slightly. ‘You worried me, lad, ringing like that. I thought there’d been a crisis. For two pins I’d have hired a car and driven straight here, except I’ve let my licence lapse, haven’t I? Not the only thing that’s lapsed, moron that I am.’
‘I told Alexa you’d rung. Not that I’d rung you.’
George said soothingly, ‘Same difference.’
‘I’d like to talk to you before we go back,’ Dan said, still looking at his car keys and not his father. ‘If that’s OK by you. Cup of tea, maybe?’
Dan drove George to the centre of Salisbury and left the car in a side street just off the market square. Then he stowed George’s rucksack and lapto
p under a blanket of Beetle’s, and took him to a coffee shop where the other customers were all women, women with children or shopping or both, making the atmosphere uncontrovertibly, reassuringly domestic. Dan settled George in a booth with banquette seats and a plasticized menu on the table, and went away to the self-service counter to fetch tea for both of them.
While Dan was away, George watched a young woman at one of the centre tables feeding chips and some battered balls of something to her two small children with her fingers, and he wondered if she was a squaddie’s wife, and if these children had been born nine months almost to the day after her man got back from a tour. He remembered talking to an Army midwife in Germany once, who said that when the boys came back, she’d block out a whole month in her diary for nine months later. ‘Regular as clockwork. Baby after baby. You’d think they’d never heard of precautions.’
Dan put two tall glass mugs of tea on the table.
George said, ‘You said on the phone that nobody’s ill.’
Dan eased himself into the booth, opposite his father. ‘All right as rain.’
‘That’s what I told your granddad.’
‘Did he ask?’
‘What?’
‘Why you were coming?’
George thought of his laptop, and the information it contained. ‘He knows,’ George said carefully, ‘that I’ll tell him what he needs to know. And he’ll ask. Never been shy of asking.’
Dan picked up his tea. ‘Unlike you, then, Dad.’
George shrugged. ‘Maybe some of us are better listeners.’ He glanced at Dan. ‘I’m all ready to listen to you – if you want to tell me.’
Dan leaned forward, his hands wrapped round his tea, his shoulders hunched. He said, ‘I’ll give you the short version, Dad. The very short version. We’ll leave out most of the last year. We’ll leave out the training in Kenya for Helmand, and we’ll leave out getting back from Helmand, and just focus on the here and now. It amounts to this. Isabel keeps running away from school because she hates it. Alexa got offered a job she can’t take because we might not be here much longer. I get let down big time by my best mate, which blows my mind, so I go and see Mack and tell him I can’t put my wife and family through any more of this, and he says, steady on, don’t chuck it all in right now because you’re bang on target for promotion.’
Dan stopped and looked up at his father across the table. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I just had to tell someone. It is, as the boys would say, doing my head in.’
It was almost nine o’clock when Alexa heard the car wheels crunching on the drive. Dan had texted to say that they were having tea, and then again a bit later to say that they were in a pub, and then a third time to say that they were bringing fish and chips home with them. In the meantime, she and Isabel had bathed the twins and read to them, put appropriately unfeminine sheets on Isabel’s bed for George, and had several stilted small conversations in which any real communication was rendered impossible by Alexa’s strenuous efforts not to ask questions.
When the twins’ voices had finally subsided into slumber, Isabel had put on her blue fleece, hugged her mother and set off round the Quadrant to Franny’s house with a torch, promising to text when she reached it. Just as she was leaving, Alexa had said impulsively and unguardedly, ‘Don’t you think it’s all a bit silly, you sleeping seven doors away?’ and Isabel had stared straight back at her and said, ‘No,’ in a voice that did not encourage further discussion.
She had texted five minutes later. ‘Safe at F’s. I love you.’
Alexa gripped her phone. How tempting it was to text back with whole paragraphs of questions and reassurances. But she would exercise restraint. It was, if she thought about it, not only her great life skill, but at the moment also her only option.
‘Xx,’ she typed back and pressed Send.
Now Dan and George were getting out of the car, lit by the half-hearted gleam of the lamp over the front door, and Beetle was tense with welcome in the hall. Through the window she could see that George was carrying his rucksack and what looked like a laptop case, and Dan had an armful of tidily wrapped paper parcels from the chip shop. She had laid the table – ketchup, vinegar – and made a salad. There were plates warming in the oven.
The front door opened and Beetle took charge of the greeting. Then Dan came into the kitchen, came straight across to her and kissed her. He smelled of beer. He said at once, ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said automatically. She wanted to say, ‘Does it occur to you how often we have that precise exchange?’ but there was George behind him, in his old anorak, smiling at her, coming forward, kissing her cheek, beery too, but lightly, as if whatever he’d drunk had been automatically diluted by the mildness of his nature.
He said, ‘Shouldn’t be dumping myself on you like this again.’
‘I like it, George, I really do.’
He stayed standing in front of her, still smiling. ‘Better than last time we met, eh?’
Alexa shot Dan a quick look. ‘Please don’t—’
‘He didn’t know,’ George said easily, ‘did he? He didn’t know anything.’
‘What?’
George dropped his rucksack on the floor and laid the laptop flat on the table. ‘We shouldn’t have been so long in the pub,’ he said. He seemed to Alexa to be in an unusual mood, much less diffident than his normal self. ‘We shouldn’t have had those second halves. Not really. It’s just that there was so much to say, as it turned out.’ He patted the laptop. ‘I’d got things to show Dan, you see. I’ve probably jumped a whole row of guns, getting pictures of a house I’ve seen, and all, but I’d been planning to show you both together, that’s what I had in mind. And then … and then …’
He looked at Dan, who was standing a yard away, still holding the fish parcels, and then he turned back to Alexa and smiled at her again. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘it turned out you’d never said a word to him. About any of it. Had you?’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was an impulse, really it was. One minute she was standing in the playroom, distractedly holding a pink plastic miniature saucepan and a Barbie doll with half her hair torn off, wondering where to put either, and, without really taking it in, watching the Brigadier’s wife crossing the Quadrant with her spaniels, and the next minute she was out of the front door and sprinting across the grass, still holding the saucepan and the doll and shouting Claire’s name.
Claire stopped walking, turned round, saw this distraught figure without a coat racing towards her and broke into a run herself.
‘Alexa! Alexa, what’s the matter? What’s happened?’
Alexa stopped in front of her, panting slightly.
‘The children,’ Claire said. She indicated the Barbie and the saucepan. ‘Is it the children?’
Alexa swallowed. She blinked. ‘No. They’re fine.’ She gave Claire a weak smile. ‘They’ve all gone swimming. With Dan. And – and his father.’
Claire peered at her. ‘Then what is it?’
‘I saw you—’
‘Yes?’
‘I was just – standing by the window, and I saw you. And the next thing, I was out here—’
Claire took a step forward. She put a hand on Alexa’s arm. ‘I was on my way home.’
Alexa said vaguely, ‘Were you?’
Claire glanced at the spaniels. They had both flopped down in the grass when she stopped walking and were lying there, as limp as rugs. ‘I was just taking these chaps back. And then I was going to make some coffee. Why don’t we go and lock your house, and then you come back with me to have coffee too?’
Alexa eyed her. ‘Well …’
‘Leave a note for Dan,’ Claire said. ‘Tell him where you’ll be. Julian’ll be glad to see you, too.’
‘Julian?’
‘He’s at home,’ Claire said. ‘Under my feet isn’t in it. You’ll be doing me a favour.’
Alexa looked down at Claire’s hand on her arm. It was sheathed in a brow
n sheepskin glove, sensible and of quality. She felt ridiculously, enormously comforted by that neat sheepskin glove resting on her forearm. She raised her eyes and looked at Claire. ‘Thank you,’ Alexa said.
When Julian Bailey had been promoted to Brigadier, he and Claire had decided not to move house. He would be entitled, he knew, to something bigger, grander, one of those substantial houses overlooking the polo ground, but he and Claire felt that such a house would be distancing from the brigade, less communal, and in any case, they were very well suited where they were. Their present house had a small downstairs room where Claire could take the children she saw for speech therapy. She worked two half-days a week in the local hospital, and then saw her other clients – ‘Not patients, Julian, not these days. Has it ever struck anyone that political correctness has become a form of censorship in itself?’ – at home in this tiny room which she had furnished to resemble the primary-coloured children’s section of a bookshop.
Her kitchen, by contrast, was neutral. Tidy, efficient, old-fashioned and neutral. Everything in it, Alexa thought as she looked round, had its place; there was even a custom-built wooden dog bed under the table, and a chair for Julian, close to the telephone and the table, but well away from any drawer or cupboard Claire might need to open.
He was in the chair when Alexa came in, reading a copy of the Economist, half-moon glasses on, spruce in a jersey and cords. He leaped up. ‘Alexa! My dear!’
‘I collected her,’ Claire said, pointing the spaniels to their lair under the table. ‘I was on my way home and there she was, and as we haven’t had a sight of her since that lovely supper party, I brought her back with me.’
Julian pulled out a chair. ‘Have a pew. Delighted.’
‘Thank you,’ Alexa said. She sat down. The table was shiny with varnish and completely bare, except for a blue pottery bowl of clementines.
Julian went round the table and pulled out the chair opposite. He said, sitting down, ‘I’m glad to see you.’
‘Coffee all round,’ Claire said, stating not asking. ‘And possibly shortbread, if I can find it.’
‘How is Isabel?’ Julian said.
Alexa looked at him. ‘You remembered.’
‘I don’t like to make the same mistake twice, if I can help it. How is she?’
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