The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  Blanche shrugs. She flicks on through her magazine, still lusting after the silk corsages and pastel, glimmery frocks.

  “The ghosts are white and creepy and they’re really, really sad,” says Millie.

  “Why should ghosts be sad?” Blanche asks her, rather wearily.

  “Of course they’re sad. Because they’re dead,” says Millie.

  “Of course. Silly me,” says Blanche.

  “Blanche, don’t be provoking,” I say.

  “They have very quiet feet,” says Millie. “They creep around very softly and you can’t hear them coming at all.”

  She stands up, tiptoes across the room, stretching out her arms in front of her, fluttering her fingers like a pantomime ghost. Blanche sighs an eloquent sigh and turns back to her magazine. Millie edges behind Blanche’s chair. She puts on a whispery, sinister voice.

  “They come nearer and nearer and then they go Whooooo.”

  She shrieks in Blanche’s ear. Blanche jumps and drops her magazine, though she must have seen this coming.

  “Millie. For goodness’ sake.” She’s cross with her sister for startling her. “I’ve had more than enough of your wretched ghosts. Just grow up, will you?” she says.

  Millie pays no attention. She goes back to her dollhouse, grave as an owl, all innocence.

  “Mum, you’ve got to speak to her. She’s such a little madam,” says Blanche.

  “I told you you’d be scared,” says Millie, rather smugly.

  WHEN I LOOK in the food safe the next afternoon, some of the chicken is gone.

  An impotent anger surges through me. I think of all the effort that went into making that food: rearing the chicken, feeding it, forcing myself to wring its neck, plucking it, and gutting it—all the things I have learned to do to make a good meal. And now a whole leg has been taken. Tears fill my eyes, and I try to blink them away.

  I tell myself it’s the cat. That must be the explanation—I left the door of the food safe open, and Alphonse found his way in. He’s rather wild now, living on birds and rodents, because I don’t have much to give him: he’d have jumped at the chance of some easy meat. But if Alphonse took it, why did he take just a leg? And why has the leg been neatly snapped? Why didn’t I find the bones scattered?

  MILLIE COMES RUSHING into the house, eyes shining. Burrs are stuck to her jumper, and there is grass in her hair.

  “We caught a stickleback,” she says. “In the stream in the Blancs Bois. He was really big, Mummy. This big.” She shows me how big with her hands. “Then we let him go again.”

  She looks up, sees my expression. She frowns.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?” she says.

  “Some chicken has gone from the safe,” I tell her. “Did you take it, Millie?”

  I almost wish I hadn’t asked. The happiness leaks out of her at my question. Her face is blank, a shut door.

  She shakes her head.

  “I didn’t eat the chicken,” she says, in a flat, stubborn voice.

  I kneel down in front of her, hold her face in my hands. Her skin is warm from running.

  “Look at me, Millie.”

  She looks. I feel her moth breath on my face.

  “Are you really telling the truth?” I say. “Is that really, really truthful?”

  She stares straight into my face. But her eyes are dull, giving nothing away.

  “Yes, it is,” she says.

  “You know how difficult life is, don’t you? When we don’t have much food?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  But I feel I’m not reaching her.

  “We have to share it out fairly. This is really important, Millie.”

  “I know that,” she says. “I know we have to share it fairly. I promise, Mummy. I didn’t eat it at all.”

  I’m left feeling uncertain. Perhaps she didn’t take the chicken. I can’t quite believe she’d lie to me so brazenly. But maybe I’m wrong—maybe I’m making too many concessions again. I have a defeated feeling. I wonder if I’ve brought up my daughters unwisely. I hear Evelyn’s voice in my mind, rather pious, not quite approving of me. Saying something she’s often said: “Children need plenty of discipline. You’re storing up trouble, Vivienne, the way you’re so soft with those girls. . . . Trust me, no good will come of it.”

  Chapter 54

  GUNTHER BRINGS ME bread from his ration.

  “But are you sure you can spare it?” I say.

  “I am happy to,” he tells me.

  I’m so grateful. I take it from him, trace my fingers across the cords of his wrists, pull him to me. “Thank you.” We’ll eat it with the chicken soup that I’ve made.

  The next day, when Millie is playing with Simon, I go to my larder, offering up a quick prayer that all will be as it should be. I pull open the door of the larder and lift the lid of the bread bin. No. Half the loaf is gone. It’s been cut, not torn, but cut ineptly, by someone who hasn’t yet learned to use a bread knife properly.

  When Millie comes home, I look around for the satchel she takes when she plays. She’s dropped it in the passageway. I unfasten it, feeling the butterfly beat of panic in my stomach, as if I know already before I look inside. A scent of apple hangs about it. I upend it, and all the treasures she has collected fall out: twigs, little blue stones, a pigeon’s feather. Bread crumbs.

  I have a sick feeling—unhappy questions crowding into my mind. Where have I gone wrong? Why isn’t my daughter truthful? Is it something I’ve done? Is it all the stories we’ve read? Whatever the reason, I’ve failed in the most important duty of a parent: I have let her live in a fantasy world, and she can’t tell right from wrong.

  I hear the xylophone ripple of her laughter from the living room. I go in. She’s playing with the pram that I used when the girls were babies, trying to persuade Alphonse to lie down in it under a sheet.

  “Millie. Some bread has been taken. Did you take the bread?”

  Her laughter is torn off.

  “No, Mummy?” she says. Her voice has an upward intonation. As though she’s trying out the answer to see how it will sound.

  The cat slithers out of the pram. She scoops him up; he struggles against her.

  “Millie. Put the cat down. You have to listen to me.”

  She lets the cat slip away from her; he has left a scratch like a thread of red silk on her wrist, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She’s a little frightened. I’m not often severe like this.

  “You mustn’t steal food,” I tell her. “That’s very, very naughty. It’s not fair to everyone else.”

  “No, it isn’t fair.” Her voice is colorless.

  “You know how short we are. Food has to be shared equally.” I’m stern, my voice fierce and high. “I always give you an apple when you’re playing out with Simon. That’s all we can spare,” I tell her.

  But her expression is opaque. Somehow I’m not getting through.

  “I didn’t do it,” she tells me. “I didn’t eat the bread.” Speaking defiantly now, as though she has worked out what she should say.

  “Millie. I found the crumbs in your satchel.”

  “No, you didn’t, Mummy,” she says.

  I fetch the satchel, show her the bread crumbs.

  “I didn’t do it,” she says.

  I’m appalled that she just goes on lying like this.

  “Millie. You know you have to tell the truth.” I feel I should be angry, should shout at her and smack her. But I see all the misery in her face, and I can’t quite do it. “Lying is wrong,” I tell her.

  “Why?” she says.

  I try out the answer in my mind. Because honesty is important. Because we have to trust one another. . . . Yet my life—my whole happiness—is based on a secret and a lie.

  “Some things are just wrong,” I tell her, my voice hollow as the belly of a cave, all the conviction gone from me. “You must promise me you will never do that again.”

  “But I didn’t do it,” she says again.
“I didn’t eat the bread.”

  Chapter 55

  VIVIENNE. SOMETHING IS worrying you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  I prop myself on one elbow, look down at his face on my pillow. Even in the gentling light of the candles in my bedroom, I can see how much he has aged in the time that I have known him—his hair paler and receding, the mesh of lines on his brow. And seeing this, I wonder how I must look in his eyes, how different from that moment when he first saw me in the lane, the scented wind blowing around us, for I know these months and years of war have worn me down as well.

  I clear my throat.

  “It’s Millie. She’s been stealing food. I tell her off, but whatever I say, it doesn’t seem to penetrate. I suppose she doesn’t understand how serious it is, when we all have so little.”

  “It is very hard for the young to be hungry,” he says.

  “And there’s more. She makes up stories. She keeps on saying she’s seen a ghost in a place where she plays. That the barn where she plays is haunted. It’s some complicated make-believe. But she seems to really believe it.”

  “Which barn is this?” he asks me.

  “It’s on Peter Mahy’s land. In the field beyond the Blancs Bois. She plays there with Simon, her friend. They have a fantasy game they play there.”

  “Many children do that, of course, playing such fantasy games,” he tells me, soothingly.

  “But the fantasy seems to be taking over, so it’s almost as real to her as the everyday world. I mean, obviously it’s an unnatural situation they’re in, growing up with a war on. But I’ve tried to keep their lives as normal as possible.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I know you have.”

  “Maybe it’s all my fault. Maybe I’ve read her too many stories.”

  He smiles—that smile that I love, that fills his eyes with light.

  “A child cannot be read too many stories,” he says. “That is impossible.”

  “And it worries me too that she’s telling lies. She took some of that bread you brought us and claimed she didn’t eat it. But I found the crumbs in her satchel.”

  “I think you shouldn’t worry,” he says. “Millie is still very small. And many children are like her, living at once in this world and in a world of their own.”

  “Do you think so? Other children—do you think they believe that their fantasy world is real?”

  He blows out smoke, the blue soft spirals blurring his face.

  “When I was a child,” he says, “I had an imaginary friend.”

  “Oh.” I’m charmed by this.

  “This was when I was very small, like Millie. This was before my mother married again,” he says, his face darkening.

  “Yes.” I think of what he told me about his cruel stepfather. I reach out to him and move my hand over his head, loving the naked, vulnerable feel of his close-cropped skin against me. “So, tell me all about your imaginary friend.”

  He flushes slightly. He is a little embarrassed.

  “My mother used to have to set a plate for him at the dinner table,” he says.

  I’m enchanted.

  “Did he have a name, your friend?” I say.

  A slight, self-deprecating smile.

  “His name was William,” he tells me.

  “William?”

  “Like your writer William Shakespeare. William was the only English name I knew. I thought it was very sophisticated,” he says.

  This makes me smile, but it touches me too. I love to think of him as a little boy. I want to reach back through the years and put my arms around him.

  I blow out my candles. I lie with my head on his chest; the smell of his skin is around me, and I can hear the drowsy beat of his heart. I sleep deeply.

  I wake when he leaves in the cold of the morning, as the first rook speaks and the first gray light of dawn seeps into the sky. And lying there once he has left me, I feel a vague unease—just a dark moth-flutter in the corners of my mind—and I don’t know why I feel this.

  Chapter 56

  THE AUTUMN TERM begins, and Millie starts back at school. I’m relieved. With all the brisk everydayness of class—with times tables, reading books, lists of spellings to learn—she won’t be able to spend so much time in the fantasy world she shares with Simon. I cut her hair and let down the hems of both her school frocks: she’s grown a lot during the holiday.

  On Sunday Blanche will be reading the Lesson in church.

  “Mum, I wish you’d come to church sometimes. I wish you could come and hear me,” she says. Her eyes are on me, blue as summer, requiring something of me.

  “I’ve love to, sweetheart,” I say. “But I worry about leaving Grandma.”

  “It’s not just that, though, is it?” she says. “I know you don’t really believe in the Bible anymore, with the war and everything. But I wish you would. God has a plan for the world, Mum. It must all be part of his plan.”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.” And then, turning to easier things: “But it’s true that I don’t like to leave your grandma alone. Except when I really have to.”

  “You have to on Sunday,” she says. “Grandma will be all right on her own for a couple of hours. Please, Mum.”

  So Millie and I put on our best clothes, and we go to Matins with Blanche.

  Though I’m not sure what I think about God, I still enjoy the service, finding a kind of consolation in the familiar words of the prayers. Oh God, make speed to save us. Oh Lord, make haste to help us. . . . And I love the glimmery candles on the altar, and the gilded sunlight falling through the window and laying its jewel colors all over the chancel steps. Most of the service is as it was before the Occupation, though prayers for our country aren’t permitted; but we can still pray for our King. We recite the Confession, the muttering of the congregation dragging behind the rector, the low words rumbling around the echoey nave: Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. . . . Repeating those words, I feel remote from the rest of the congregation, thinking how they might judge my actions, how sinful they’d think my love for Gunther to be.

  Blanche goes to the lectern to read the Lesson. She starts off rather shyly, with that slight stutter she sometimes has, then her voice grows stronger, more certain. Seeing her there, apart from me, I’m aware of how she is changing—becoming a woman, her body softening, her face more clearly defined. I know she still regrets that we didn’t go to London, believing her hope of happiness to lie a long way away—far off in the future, or over the Channel, anywhere but here. My eyes fill up as I watch her, sensing that yearning in her, for all the things she can’t have because she is growing up in wartime. I wonder if she’ll ever find what she is looking for.

  She comes back to join us in our pew, bright color staining her cheeks, at once pleased and embarrassed. We settle down for the sermon, which is all about Heaven and Hell. They’re not real places, the rector says—at least, not in the sense that St. Peter Port is a place: Heaven and Hell are states of being. In Heaven, we are forever in God’s presence, and worse than the myriad torments of Hell is the terrible absence of God.

  After the service, I chat with Susan Gallienne, who compliments me on Blanche’s reading. Susan is elegant as ever, in a dress of coral linen, though there’s something about her smile, sweet as icing, that sets my teeth slightly on edge. While Susan and I are talking, the girls walk on ahead of me.

  I say good-bye as soon as I decently can and catch up with Millie and Blanche. They’re deep in conversation, heads close together in the gold dappling light of the lane, a cool lacework of branches above them. They’re talking about the sermon: I’m surprised they were paying attention.

  “I know about Hell,” Millie is saying. “That’s where my ghost comes from.” Very matter-of-fact.

  “And how do you know that exactly?” says Blanche.

  “Be
cause he told us, stupid. That’s where he lives. He lives in Hell,” she says.

  Blanche turns to face her. I think she’s going to tell her sister off for calling her stupid. But she’s suddenly earnest—made serious by the service and her role in it, and rather troubled by what Millie said.

  “Millie. You shouldn’t go making up stories like that, about Hell.”

  “I’m not making up stories,” says Millie: robust, emphatic.

  “I mean it, Millie. It’s not a thing to joke about. People go to Hell if they’re wicked and don’t believe in Jesus.”

  Blanche is intent and solemn, concerned for her sister’s soul.

  “My ghost is a good ghost,” says Millie.

  “No, Millie. He must be bad if he lives in Hell,” says Blanche. “He must have been bad in his earthly life.”

  “He isn’t bad,” says Millie.

  Blanche purses her lips. She has that look of exasperation that always comes in her face when Millie talks like this.

  “Anyway, Hell’s not a place you can just dip in and out of,” she says. “People never come back from Hell. If you go to Hell, you’re stuck there. That’s what the Bible says. You ought to know that.”

  “They do. They do come back. Sometimes they do,” says Millie, uncertainty creeping into her voice. I see that her lip is trembling.

  I join them, reach to take her hand—but she pulls away from my touch. She breaks off a stick from the hedgebank. As we walk along, she swishes the stick, hitting the plants that we pass, turned away from me and her sister. Her eyes are shiny with tears, and she doesn’t want us to see.

  Chapter 57

  GUNTHER IS GOING on leave for a fortnight.

  The night before he is due to go, he follows me up to my room. I close the door, turn to him, but he doesn’t immediately hold me or touch me. He sits down heavily on my bed. He has a serious look. I wonder what is coming.

  “There is something I need to tell you,” he says. “Something that I have just heard. There are plans to deport people who are not native islanders—people who were not born here.”