The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  I take the curtain downstairs and hold it up to her face.

  “The color looks beautiful on you,” I say.

  “Could I use it? Really, really?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll hang it out to get rid of the smell of mothballs.”

  “But what should I make?” she asks me.

  We look in my sewing cupboard in the dresser. We poke around among the entangled, lavish colors, the skeins of thread and scraps of vivid wool, and find a Simplicity pattern that I bought and never used, for a sleek fitted jacket. The woman in the sketch on the packet has a sheen to her; she looks as wealthy young women used to look before the war. She has a hat of damson velvet pulled flirtily over one eye, and her shoes are spindly and delicate. You can picture her in the Palm Court of an opulent hotel, perched louchely on a bar stool, with a cigarette in a long holder and a Sidecar in her hand.

  Blanche peers over my shoulder.

  “That’s exactly what I want to look like,” she says.

  BLANCHE SEWS ASSIDUOUSLY every evening. In five days the jacket is ready, and she puts it on to go up to Celeste’s house. The color sets off the caramel blond of her hair, and the fit is perfect. She suddenly looks so much older—not just a girl anymore. Her loveliness dazzles me.

  “That looks gorgeous,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says, accepting this.

  As she’s leaving, we hear the ringing of a bicycle bell in our yard. I go to open the door: it’s Johnnie with a present from Gwen, a bag of cabbages and curly kale. He’s rushing, as usual. He almost bumps into Blanche as she slips out through the door.

  “Oh,” he says.

  I see the way he looks at her—eyes widening, as though she startles him, as though he’s never really seen her clearly before. She’s aware of his look. She’s shy, a little embarrassed, with this boy she used to play with. A bright blush spreads all over her face and her neck. Neither of them says anything; neither of them smiles.

  Later, when she comes home just before curfew, I remember the little incident.

  “It’s a shame you never see Johnnie now,” I say to her, not thinking. “Remember when you were children, how the two of you used to play? You’d be off in the woods for hours and hours. And I’ll never forget that afternoon you tried racing snails on the terrace. . . . You were just like Millie and Simon. . . .”

  She gives me a rather hard look, unsmiling. I know that I’ve struck the wrong note.

  “That was an awfully long time ago now, Mum,” she tells me coolly.

  She still has the jacket on. She goes to look at herself in the mirror in the living room. She holds up her hair with her hands, seeing how it might look swept high up on her head, revealing her graceful pale neck, a few stray blond curls hanging down. She’s like a yellow flower on a willowy stalk that tilts its face to the sun. She smiles at her reflection, striking a pose. She strokes the lapel of the jacket.

  “A week ago this was just an old curtain,” she says.

  I admire her—the way she’s made something so lovely from a thing so long forgotten.

  GUNTHER’S HAIR IS white now. When I notice this—as always when I’m aware how the years have marked him—I wonder what he is seeing when he looks at me. My hair is still dark, free of gray, but if I catch sight of myself in the mirror, when I’m unaware, not smiling, I see a new severity in my face—my lips are tight, my forehead creased in a frown—as though I’m surrounded by things I need to defend myself against. So I try not to look in the mirror. Our love has become a quieter, gentler thing now. Sometimes we just fall asleep in each other’s arms, like a long-married couple. I feel a deep gratitude for him—for his presence in my life, in my bed. It makes everything bearable.

  We still get news of the war, from the wireless that Celeste’s mother has hidden in one of Mr. Ozanne’s coffins. Blanche tells us about the siege of Stalingrad. The Germans are in the city: the German army is cut off, surrounded, but they will not give in.

  I ask Gunther about it.

  “What’s happening in Stalingrad?”

  I see how his face tightens, the hardening of the muscles around his mouth.

  “It’s Hell on earth there,” he says. I hear the splinter of fear that is always there in his voice, when he speaks about Russia. “The dogs and rats flee the city, only the people remain. Even the river burns, they say. There is nothing but fire and death there. . . .” He stumbles, as though there are no words in either his language or mine that could express the horror of it. “They are calling it the mass grave of the Wehrmacht,” he says.

  We welcome the coming of spring—the tremulous catkins, the flowering in the hedgebanks, the hope that comes with the softening air, the lengthening light. On daffodil-yellow mornings, when the breeze has a scent of blossom and last night’s rain still wet on the grass, you can believe for a while that things don’t have to be this way, don’t have to be such a struggle. That there could be an end to this: that we could be living a different life.

  Spring gives way to summer. The swallows come: I love to watch their darting flight over the fields, the warp and weft of their movement, as though they are weaving some gossamer fabric in the blue wide air. The roses in my garden bloom, the Blancs Bois is full of singing birds, and secret under its gorgeous canopy of green. The world turns on in all its loveliness, oblivious to us—whatever is done to us, whatever we suffer, whatever choices we make.

  Chapter 69

  IT HAPPENS IN high summer.

  One evening, when the girls are in bed, an hour before Gunther will come, I’m sitting alone in my living room with a load of darning to do. I hear a soft dull thud on the door at the back of the house. I jump up. My first thought is that some large animal has bumped against the door—maybe a horse or a cow has broken into my garden. I go to the door, my pulse skittering, open it cautiously.

  I can only move it a little way: something is pushing it shut. I peer through the crack. For a brief, muddled moment, unable to make sense of what I see, I think that a heap of filthy gray rags has been flung down on my doorstep. I stare. Oh God. The bundle of rags is a man. He’s on his front, his face hidden. As I look, he raises his head.

  “Oh God. Kirill.”

  His eyes flicker open.

  Please God, I think. Please God, let nobody have seen . . .

  “Vivienne. I came back.” His voice is a rasping whisper.

  The change in him appalls me. He was wretched, ragged, starved, before, but now there’s such fragility to him, almost a translucence. His face is hollow, the skeleton looms through the skin—you can see how he will look in death. There are shadows like bruising around his mouth, his eyes. He coughs, and the cough is a predatory creature, scrabbling at him, almost destroying him.

  He moves, just enough to let me open the door. I slip out.

  “Can you get up?” I ask him.

  I put out my hand. He grasps it, struggles to his feet. I bring him into my house.

  I give him what food I have, cold potatoes and soup. He eats slowly; he has to struggle to swallow, the action takes all his will. I remember how eagerly, hungrily, he used to eat my food. I’m glad that Millie is sleeping, that she doesn’t have to see him like this.

  “You stopped coming to the barn,” I say.

  “There were different guards,” he tells me.

  But perhaps that’s not the real reason. Perhaps it was because I’d said that a German visits my house.

  I light our cigarettes, hand him his. He sits at my table, resting his head in his hand. I look at him, at the shadows, blue as ash, in his face. I remember my mother on her sickbed, the imminence of death in her. I know he has only a few days left. Yet he came here to find me. Something in him still clings to life, something will not let go—not yet. He came here.

  In that instant, thinking this, I know just what I must do. I see this with perfect clarity, the absolute necessity of it, the weight of the moment falling on me, sudden, drenching as rain. But I flinch from it. Everything’s ha
ppening so quickly: I’m not prepared, not ready. This isn’t the way I do things—so instantly, impulsively. I would like to think it through; I would like to weigh everything up. But there’s no time for any of that.

  I swallow hard. My throat is thick with fear. It’s the moment I can’t go back from.

  “Kirill.” My voice sounds almost normal, just a little too high. “If there was a way to get out—if I could find someone to help you escape—would you want that?”

  I see a brief light in his eyes.

  “Yes,” he says. “Yes, Vivienne.”

  Panic grips me, now that I’ve said it—fear for him, and for me.

  “Think about it,” I tell him. “You’ve got to think about it carefully. If you try to escape and they find you they will shoot you in a heartbeat. You know that.”

  He starts to reply, but his cough drowns out his words. It masters him, has its claws in him. He struggles to speak, as though this has to be said, as though he is running out of time, but he has no breath.

  At last the coughing subsides.

  “Vivienne. If I stay in the camp, I will not live,” he tells me.

  “I can’t keep you with me now,” I say. “I’ll have to work out how to do this. There’s someone I need to talk to.”

  He nods.

  “Come to the barn tomorrow,” I tell him. “I’ll meet you there. I’ll see what I can do.”

  I take him over the lane. The food—or my promise to him—has given him a little strength: he can walk now. He shivers, yet a thin heat comes off his body. His hand is light as the brush of a falling feather on my arm.

  Chapter 70

  GWEN’S KITCHEN DOOR is open: she’s at her sink, peeling potatoes. She turns, takes one look at my face. Her own face darkens. She puts down her scraper and lifts up her apron, wiping her hands.

  “Viv, what is it? What’s happened?”

  “Gwen, I need to see Johnnie,” I say.

  A frown comes to her forehead.

  “He’s trying to fix the tractor,” she says. “Up past the hayfield. Viv, can I do anything?”

  “I just need to have a word with him,” I tell her.

  She reaches out to me, puts her damp, urgent hand on my arm.

  “Don’t get him involved in anything, Vivienne.” She knows me so well: perhaps she can read something of my purpose in my face. Her voice has a high note of pleading.

  “There’s something I have to ask him,” I tell her.

  She doesn’t try to stop me. She leans against her sink and watches me as I go, her arms wrapped tight around her body.

  I walk around the back of the farmhouse, past the greenhouses that have a warm scent of tomatoes, past a field of grass grown for hay that ruffles and parts in the wind, as though a hand is stroking it.

  I see the tractor on the track by the hedge. Johnnie has his head in the engine. He looks up, startled to see me.

  “Auntie Viv?”

  He straightens. His fingers are blackly stained with oil; he rubs his hands on a rag, distracted, his face a question.

  “There’s something I wanted to ask . . .” My voice is creaky, thin. “I’ve got a problem, Johnnie.”

  I’m speaking very softly, though there’s no one to hear. The wind whispers at the ragged edge of the hayfield. Johnnie takes a step closer, waits for me.

  “There’s a man from the work camp. Kirill—his name is Kirill.” I think how I don’t know his surname, and had never thought to ask. “He comes from Belorussia. We’re friends. Last year he would come to my house for a while, and I would give him a meal.”

  Johnnie’s eyes widen. He says nothing.

  “Then for a long time I didn’t see him,” I say. “I worried what might have happened. I mean, you know what those places are like. . . .” My voice is serrated with panic: the words spill out, tumbling over one another. “He came back yesterday evening. He’s ill, he’s terribly ill. I’m so frightened for him. If he stays in the camp, he’ll die. I know that. You can just tell that . . . Johnnie, I can’t let him die. . . .”

  I realize my face is wet.

  Johnnie is embarrassed.

  “Don’t cry, Auntie,” he says, helplessly.

  He pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket, hands it to me. I scrub at my face, but the tears still fall.

  “Johnnie. Can you help us?”

  For a moment he says nothing. There is utter silence between us and in the land around us, all still and empty, the fields, the lanes, the woods: depth on depth of quiet. I hear the shushing sound the wind makes in the field of tall grass.

  Johnnie’s face works.

  “I might be able to.” He looks wary.

  I’d hoped for something definite, something practical and clear.

  “You said you had plans to help some slave workers escape.” My voice is shrill, and rather accusing. “You said you might have safe houses.”

  “We’re getting there,” he says. “But we’re not very organized yet. On Jersey they’ve got a whole network. . . .”

  “So could you help us?” I say again. Still wanting a different answer.

  “Maybe.”

  “The thing is, Kirill speaks very good English. A man in his village taught him. Someone who’d worked in a university . . .”

  Something new comes into Johnnie’s face when I say that, as though this changes everything.

  “Good enough that he could pass for an islander?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “That makes all the difference,” he tells me, his face brightening. “If he could live as one of us . . .”

  “He could. I’m sure he could. I mean, islanders would know, of course. They’d hear his accent—he has a bit of an accent. But I think the Germans wouldn’t be able to tell.”

  “It’s what they do on Jersey,” says Johnnie. “There’s a handful there who’ve escaped. They don’t try to hide them, they live in plain sight, as farm laborers. . . . It’s the only way.”

  He’s tracing random crescents in the mud with the toe of his boot: planning, puzzling, working it out.

  “It would be best to keep him hidden for a while,” he tells me. “He’ll need an identity card, of course, and that takes time to make. There’s a man in town who does them. And there’s somebody up in St. Sampson who I think would take him in. Better really if you don’t know the exact details . . .”

  “He’s coming back to my house tonight. You could come and take him then,” I say.

  But Johnnie shakes his head. Seeing that, I feel the world lurch around me.

  “No, not tonight, Auntie. We’ll have to move him in the daytime,” he says.

  “Why? Why in the daytime?” My heart cantering off.

  “For a start, we can’t risk being out after curfew. And it’ll take a while to get him where he needs to be.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, like I said, it’s best to do these things in plain sight. Bang in the middle of the working day. Jerry’s much more likely to stop you in the evening. He’ll reckon you’re up to something.”

  I clasp my hands tight together, so Johnnie won’t see the trembling that passes through me.

  “Auntie. Could you keep him with you for just one night?” he says.

  Oh God.

  “There are the Germans next door,” I tell him. But I can scarcely speak above the hard dull thumps of my heart.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” he says. “I mean, it’s not as though they’re going to actually come in your house. . . .”

  I don’t say anything.

  “In a funny way it helps that they’re there,” he tells me. “It works to our advantage. No one would think you would take the risk. They’d never suspect you of harboring someone—not with the Germans that close.”

  I can’t tell him how close they really are; can’t tell him about Gunther and just how perilous this is. I know this is unfair to Johnnie—if he’s going to help me, he needs to fully understand the risk. But I can’t do it.

/>   “Do you have anywhere you could hide him?” he asks me. “Some kind of nook in the house?”

  I think of the attic, where Millie and Simon sometimes play.

  “We have a little back attic—it has a different staircase. It’s not properly secret, but it’s not immediately obvious.” I try to remember whether he used to play there with Blanche, but those times are a far country, an image glimpsed through a prism—tiny, rainbow-colored, remote. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been up there. . . .”

  “And do you have clothes he could wear?”

  His eyes are ardent and gleaming now. This thrills him—putting the jigsaw together, fitting in all the pieces. I see, with a jolt of misgiving, that this is still a game to him.

  “He could have some old clothes of Eugene’s. They’ll be too baggy on him, but they’d be about the right height,” I tell him.

  He nods.

  “Nobody must know,” he says. “Not Blanche. Not Millie. Nobody. That’s the safest way for everyone.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  His eager gaze on me.

  “So can you do that, Auntie?”

  I think of all the danger—to my family, to Johnnie—edging out, like ripples where a stone is dropped into a pool, stealthily, secretly. But then I think of Kirill: how he came to find me.

  “Yes, I can do that.”

  “Keep him tonight, and I’ll be with you first thing in the morning. I’ll have to bring the horse and cart—this tractor’s on its last legs. I’ll find something to hide him under. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I promise.”