The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  “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 bac
k of your mind, that the water might overtake you.

  Chapter 30

  EVELYN CALLS OUT to me from the living room.

  “Vivienne? Is that you, Vivienne?”

  She’s in her armchair, with her knitting. I go to her.

  She gives me a stern look.

  “Clemmie Renouf dropped by when you were out,” she says. “She brought the parish magazine.”

  “Did she?”

  “Clemmie Renouf told me something I didn’t want to hear.”

  My heart pounds.

  “She saw you in a car, with the Hun. She said it was definitely you.”

  I briefly wonder if I should deny it.

  “It was one of the German officers from Les Vinaires,” I tell her. “He saw I had a puncture. He gave me a lift.”

  “Clemmie Renouf said you were smiling.”

  “Evelyn. That isn’t a crime,” I tell her. “The man gave me a lift. It was raining. I’d only just left Gwen’s place. I needed to get home to you and Millie.”

  “A great big smile,” she says.

  “He wanted to help. It’s just a question of human decency,” I say.

  “Yes, it is,” she says. “A question of decency.” Speaking slowly, weighting the words with significance. “And Clemmie said another thing. She said you were wearing his coat. His army coat. Tell me it isn’t true, Vivienne.”

  Oh God.

  “Clemmie can’t have seen properly,” I tell her. “Like I said, it was pouring with rain. The windows were all misted up.”

  But I feel terrible that I’m lying to her.

  Evelyn pulls her back very straight. Her eyebrows, thinly penciled in, are lowered in a frown.

  “You were letting the side down, Vivienne. Eugene wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “It’s such a little island,” I tell her. “We have to find a way of getting along.”

  She shakes her head.

  “He wouldn’t let it happen. Eugene always knows what’s right. . . .” Her words trail off. Her gaze flickers suddenly around the room. Doubt creeps into her voice. “Vivienne—where’s Eugene?”

  “He’s off fighting, remember?” I say gently.

  Her face has that opaque look, like a pane of glass misted over. A question gathers between her eyes, in a delicate sketching of lines.

  “Is he, Vivienne?”

  “Yes. Look . . .”

  There’s a framed photograph of Eugene on the mantelpiece. I took it with my Kodak camera, just before he left. He’s in uniform, and staring straight at the lens, and there’s a seriousness about him—a recognition that this is a solemn moment. Though I don’t know if he really felt that. Perhaps even in this moment he was acting, playing the part of the resolute soldier going off to war.

  “Here he is—just before he went off with the army,” I say.

  “Oh, Vivienne. He looks very smart,” she says.

  “Yes, doesn’t he?”

  “When did this happen?”

  “It happened last autumn,” I tell her. “Just before the outbreak of war.”

  “Oh. Oh. Did it? You know, Vivienne, sometimes I don’t remember things very well. . . . So Eugene’s gone to war, you say?”

  “Yes. We’re all very proud of him. . . .”

  “He’s gone, Vivienne?”

  Panic flares in her voice. Suddenly she starts crying. Her tears arise so suddenly—a minute ago she was angry, and now the tears come. It’s as though her emotions are all too close to the surface, her feelings raw, like broken skin, so the slightest touch can hurt her. The tears make glistening snail tracks in the powder on her face. This is so terrible for her—that she keeps forgetting he’s gone, and then has to learn the pain of it all over again.

  I wipe her face, as you would with a child. She slumps in her chair: she looks small and lost. I put my arm around her.

  “Everything’s all right. Don’t cry.”

  All the anger has left her—she’s spent, wrung out now. I feel so guilty that I upset her and made her cry. I feel so guilty about everything.

  Chapter 31

  I’M WORKING AT the bottom of my garden, in the part of our land that leads off around the back of Les Vinaires. There’s a low hedge between our gardens here, and a little gate in the hedge. I’m digging up part of the lawn to make a vegetable patch. It’s hard work. Millie was with me to start with—digging with a kitchen spoon, collecting worms in a jar—but now she’s gone off to play in the house. She’s left the jam jar on its side, and the captured worms have found their way out and are secretly gliding away. The sun is warm on my skin: in this sheltered corner, summer seems to linger. There are still a few flowers blooming: an autumn-flowering clematis in my hedge; dahlias, dusty pink, drooping their soft heavy heads; a few of my Belle de Crécy roses, peeling back their silks, and smelling so sweet they leave an ache in you. Bees fumble in and out of the throats of the flowers.

  I’ve stopped for a moment, breathing heavily, resting my weight on my spade, when a shadow falls across me. I jump.

  “Vivienne.”

  I turn.

  Captain Lehmann is there. He’s come in through the gate in the hedge. I notice how my name sounds different in his mouth—foreign, almost glamorous.

  “You startled me,” I tell him.

  “Yes. I saw that. I’m sorry,” he says.

  He’s always apologizing to me.

  Today he has a purposeful look—the air of someone who is about to go and do something important. He looks entirely wrong in my garden: his presence here makes the whole day feel a little dreamlike, unreal.

  “You have a beautiful garden,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  I’m wearing a baggy old jersey of Eugene’s that’s rather hot for the day. I can feel the sweat on me—under my arms, on my face. I tuck an unruly damp tendril of hair behind an ear. I feel messy and disheveled—he’s immaculate, cool, remote from me.

  “This flower is beautiful,” he says. He gestures toward the clematis that is growing up through my hedge. The flowers are a rich cream color, the stamens red as garnets. He reaches out, touches a petal; I watch his finger moving across the open vivid bloom. There’s a slight catch in my breath. I wonder if he hears it.

  “You like gardens?” I say. “You have a garden at home?”

  He shakes his head.

  “We have no garden, in Berlin. We have only a balcony. My wife has some potted plants there, and a bird in a cage.”

  An entire little picture is conjured up by his words. I think, This is what he was seeing in his mind’s eye when I glimpsed him reading a letter through the window in the evening—his wife, the balcony, the bird in the cage.

  “It sounds very nice,” I say. Polite. Helpless.

  He shrugs slightly. His eyes are on me, his gaze gray as wood smoke, requiring something of me.

  “I would prefer to have a garden,” he says.

  I feel my face burn. The smell of my roses licks at us like the tongue of an animal.

  You can’t see this part of the garden from Evelyn’s bedroom, or the living room. But I feel intensely uneasy, thinking how appalled she’d be if she glimpsed us standing here, when she’s already so suspicious of me. I turn my back toward my house, as though that makes me safer, like an infant who hides her face in her hands and believes she can’t be seen.

  “Have you always enjoyed this—to grow things?” he says.

  “Yes. Even when I was a child.” I clutch at the lifeline of something that feels safe to talk about. “Just the fancy stuff—not vegetables. I used to spend my pocket money on packets of flower seeds.”

  “When you were a child . . . ,” he says. He smiles, as though the thought pleases him.

  “I loved the drawings on the packets,” I tell him. “I remember buying love-in-a-mist because I liked the name and the picture.”

  The minute I’ve said it, I’m so embarrassed, because of the name of the flower. But he has a perplexed look, not understanding the words.
/>   “There’s a plant that we call love-in-a-mist,” I tell him.

  Talking about it, I remember it suddenly, with such clarity. Standing in front of the rack of seeds in the ironmonger’s off Clapham Common, choosing the packet with its enticing blur of blue-petaled flowers.

  “But they never came up like they promised,” I say. “I’d have such high hopes, then I’d just get a few ragged plants that didn’t ever flower. I’ve learned to grow flowers since then, of course.” The words tumble out of me: I can’t stop. I feel drunk, light-headed, and there’s an unpleasant cold trickle of sweat down my back. “But I’m going to have to change, of course—I’m going to have to dig half of them up and plant something we can eat. I should have started already, probably. But it’s difficult—I really love my flowers.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” he says.

  “The thing is—I’m not very practical,” I tell him. “It would be useful now, with the shortages and everything, if only I were more practical, if I were a different kind of person. I suppose I wasn’t really designed for such times.”

  He smiles slightly, but I see a kind of sadness in his eyes.

  “There are very few of us, Vivienne, who were designed for such times.”

  He’s silent for a moment. I hunt desperately in my mind for something else to say, but after my outburst there’s nothing left in my head. I feel as if I am underwater—it’s the damp on my skin, the watery surge of the wind in the trees in the hedge, the way I can’t breathe.

  I hear the slight click as he clears his throat.

  “There was something I wanted to ask of you, Vivienne. A favor.”

  There’s a different tone in his voice; he’s hesitant, unsure. Hearing this, my mouth dries up.

  “You may remember I told you I like to draw,” he says. “I wanted to ask if you would sit for me.”

  That was why he seemed so purposeful, coming in through my garden gate. I was his purpose.