The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  SO, LITTLE GIRL—what is your name?”

  “Millie de la Mare,” she says.

  “Come here, Millie de la Mare.”

  He speaks her name elaborately, each syllable exact.

  He beckons her to come forward, where she can’t so easily see my face. Before she moves, she gives me a questioning glance. I nod. She steps toward him.

  He is easy with children, I can tell that. He crouches down to talk to her, so his face is level with hers, so he’s not talking down to her. It occurs to me that he must have children of his own, that he will have rocked those children tenderly in his arms—this man who has just shot down my friend Kirill like an animal.

  “Do you like chocolate, Millie?”

  She doesn’t know what the right answer is. She half turns to me; I nod slightly.

  “You shouldn’t look at your mother when you answer my questions,” he says. “Or I won’t know which of you is answering.” The voice is perfectly reasonable, but I can hear the threat in it. “So—I ask again—do you like chocolate?”

  “Yes, I like chocolate,” she says.

  He holds his cigarette in his mouth. He takes some chocolate out of his pocket, unwraps it. In the silence, the rustle of silver paper sounds unnervingly loud. He breaks some off, gives it to her. I see how it softens immediately in the warmth of her hand.

  “Can I eat it?” she says.

  She’s trying so hard to be good, but she doesn’t know what the rules are.

  “Yes, of course.” He smiles. “It’s for you, Millie de la Mare.”

  She eats, and licks the smear of melted chocolate from her palm, so her mouth is smudged with it. I have a stupid urge to tell her to wipe the smudge from her face.

  He’s still crouching there, his face level with hers.

  “I can tell you’re a good girl,” he says to her. “That you don’t tell lies. That you always tell the truth. That is right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Telling the truth is very important, isn’t it?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sure your mother has told you that you should always tell the truth.”

  She nods.

  “You have a big house. You have certain secret places and hiding places in your house,” he says.

  She doesn’t say anything. Even from behind her, I can tell how tense she is, how warily she watches him.

  Fear has me by the throat. I’m terribly afraid for her—because she will be left without me, when I am taken away. Blanche is almost a woman, Blanche can look after herself. But Millie is so small still—too small to lose her mother.

  “There is a room at the top of your house at the back,” he says to her. “A secret place that you go to up some narrow stairs.”

  “Yes,” she says, uncertain, wondering what is coming. “Mummy calls it the back attic.”

  I can’t see her face, but I sense the confusion in her—she knows that this is important, but she doesn’t know what she should say.

  “The back attic.” He repeats the words, as though they are unfamiliar to him. “I think the back attic must be a good place to play,” he says.

  Here at last is something she can respond to.

  “Yes, it’s very nice,” she says. Her voice eager, helpful.

  He takes a long drag on his cigarette, his eyes never leaving her face.

  “When did you last play in your attic, Millie?” he says.

  She’s trying to think, so hard: I know how her face will look, creased up with trying, with thinking, the little frown drawn with blue indelible pencil on her brow.

  “I like to play in the attic,” she says carefully.

  “Did you play in your attic today, or yesterday?” he says.

  I hold my breath. I know what she will say. I remember exactly what I told her. Mummy said I shouldn’t go there. Yesterday, Mummy said I mustn’t play there anymore. She said it was our secret. . . . I’m so sure she will say this, it’s almost as though I can hear the words already, spilling out like water drops, innocent and shining and pregnant with disaster.

  He is watching me. As he speaks to her, he keeps raising his eyes to me, studying me. I clasp my hands fiercely together. I know that he can see the trembling that goes through me.

  Millie still hesitates.

  “Did you?” he says. “Did you play there today, or yesterday?” His voice is stern, insistent.

  “I play in the attic every day,” she tells him.

  “Now, I think that you aren’t alone when you play in the attic,” he says. “Who do you play in the attic with?”

  “I play there with my friend,” she says.

  The man’s eyes have a hard gleam.

  “And who is your friend?” he asks her.

  She thinks for a moment. I sense the fog of anxiety that comes off her, as though it has a sulfurous edge that I can taste on the air. Then she clasps her hands and puts her feet neatly together. I see she has made a decision. I know, with a cold, sick certainty, that she is going to tell him that Kirill was here.

  “My friend is called Simon. He’s nearly nine,” she says. Her voice is measured, precise, and just a little too high.

  All this time, the man watches me. I keep my face utterly still, but all the breath I didn’t know I was holding rushes out of my mouth. I pray he doesn’t hear this.

  He stares at her a moment more, then he shrugs slightly, straightens. He drops his half-smoked cigarette and grinds it under his heel, as though it holds no more interest for him.

  He goes to the door of my house, shouts an order. The other men come out of the house, move rapidly off to the lorry. One climbs into the cab, the others clamber up into the back. One of them kicks at something, and I know it will be Kirill’s body—he’s kicking Kirill’s body aside, to make more room for his feet.

  “I will be watching you, Mrs. de la Mare,” the captain shouts at me as he goes.

  He climbs up into the passenger seat of the cab. The engine bursts into life; they drive off.

  The shock of their sudden leaving unravels me. The world is spinning around me: I lean on the table and wait till it comes to a stop.

  Evelyn is still weeping.

  “They killed him, didn’t they?” she says.

  I kneel beside her on the gravel.

  “It wasn’t Eugene they shot.”

  “That’s such a sad death, Vivienne. He died all alone, there was no one to give him comfort. My poor sweet boy. Such a sad, sad death,” she says.

  I take her into the house. She cries soundlessly, desolate, hanging on to my arm. I take her upstairs and help her into her bed.

  Millie is waiting for me downstairs. Her eyes are raw holes in her white face.

  “Did I answer the questions right?” she asks.

  “Yes, sweetheart. You were very brave.”

  I put my arms around her. Her body is rigid.

  “Will Simon get into trouble?” she says.

  “No, he won’t get into trouble. You said the right thing.”

  “But what if the Germans put Simon in prison?” she says.

  “They won’t, I promise. Simon hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “But Kirill didn’t do anything wrong and they still shot him,” she says.

  My throat is constricted with tears, and for a moment it’s hard to speak.

  “Trust me, sweetheart,” I say then. “Simon will be all right. The Germans aren’t bothered with Simon.”

  She pulls me down to her, holding my face close to hers. Her breath has a sickly sweet smell from the chocolate the man gave her. She speaks into my ear, her whispered words brushing my skin.

  “I know that Kirill was in the back attic,” she says. “I heard him coughing. That was our secret, wasn’t it? The secret you told me about? When you told me not to play there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t tell the secret. Was that right?” she says.

  “Yes, that was right,” I tell her.
>
  “I didn’t know what to say. I knew they’d be angry with us if they found Kirill had been here, but I didn’t want to get Simon into trouble. It was really hard,” she says.

  “Yes, I know,” I tell her.

  “Mummy. Kirill is dead, isn’t he? They killed him, didn’t they?”

  I think of the soothing things we say to comfort children. Everything’s all right, there’s nothing to be frightened of. Those terrible things you saw weren’t real—they were just a nightmare, a dream. There are no monsters, there’s nothing there in the dark. Go to sleep now. . . . There’s nothing I can say to her.

  LATER, WE GO to pick flowers.

  There isn’t much blooming in my garden now, because of all the vegetables, so we pick wild flowers from the hedgebank—speedwell and red valerian—and tie the flower stalks together with string. I think of the posy that Kirill once gave to me. We cross the lane into my orchard. Around us, the summer morning is as it was before—the hazy, silvery sunlight and all the singing of birds. But everything is changed now. I can’t live the way I did before. I can’t be the person I was.

  The grass is crushed where his body fell, and there’s a dark stain on the ground, where his blood sank rapidly into the earth, and the trunk of the tree where I once stood with Gunther is spattered with darkening drops. Millie is poised and still, but her face is absolutely white. I think, He will never see them again, all those places he told us about, all the things he longed for—the birch forest, the quiet rivers. He will never go back to the workshop where he made his violins—that are made with so much care, that are so small, so fragile, so very easy to break, and yet sing out so clearly.

  “Shall we say a prayer?” says Millie.

  But I don’t feel able to pray.

  “We’ll say a prayer inside our heads,” I tell her.

  We place the flowers of speedwell there, on the stained earth.

  Chapter 77

  AT NIGHT, WHEN the girls are in bed, I sit at my kitchen table. I go through it all again and again, and the questions slice through me like blades. Was it Gunther who betrayed us? Could he have done such a thing, in spite of all that has passed between us—all the loving, the tenderness, all that we have shared? Is he capable of such treachery?

  As I think these things, I draw in breath as though I’m drowning.

  At ten o’clock, I hear the familiar soft knock at my door.

  He comes in, and I shut the door behind him. We stand looking at each other. Usually we kiss, and then I take him up to my room. But he doesn’t move. Perhaps he immediately reads something in my face, something that troubles him. He doesn’t bend down to touch me or kiss me, just stands there. He looks different, in a way that I can’t quite define or express.

  “You seem so tired,” I say, noticing this.

  “Yes. I am tired.”

  He rubs a hand over his face. His hand moves jerkily, as though his body isn’t fluent anymore.

  He clears his throat, as if to say something.

  “Vivienne . . .”

  He swallows, as though this thing is too hard for him to say.

  I know I have to be the one to say it.

  “Something happened here today, in my orchard,” I tell him.

  “Yes,” he says.

  But his tone is somehow dismissive. An icy sliver of doubt runs through me, hearing this.

  “A man was killed,” I say. “Shot. One of the slave workers.”

  “Yes, I heard,” he says. Nothing more.

  His awkwardness, his reticence, tell me all I need to know. That he knew about Kirill, that he realized. How could he not have known—hearing the coughing, seeing me with the breakfast tray, knowing I wasn’t telling the truth when I said that Evelyn was ill? That he realized and just did his job. That it was a difficult choice, but his duty was to his country. Bad things happen in wartime. You have to be careful, you don’t want to step out of line. Killing is easy—to start with, maybe not so easy. But after a while, it is very easy to kill. . . .

  And in that moment I decide.

  “Gunther,” I say, in a shred of a voice. “I need to tell you something.”

  He nods, just a slight, curt movement of his head. His face is serious, resigned, as though he has given up somehow. As though something has died in him. It’s almost as if he expected this—it is all preordained, he knows it and expects it, he just has to make his way through it.

  “Gunther. I don’t think I can do this anymore. I’m so sorry.”

  He says nothing. His silence is terrible.

  “It’s too difficult. Too confusing,” I say. There’s a pain in my throat, as though saying this has hurt me.

  I’m willing him to read my mind, to put everything back as it was. I want him to know why I am saying these things. I want him to explain that it was nothing to do with him, that what happened to Kirill wasn’t his fault—that he wasn’t the one who betrayed us. But I can’t ask directly—because to ask him if he knew and told would be to reveal too much—to reveal that I harbored Kirill here. The fact that could put me and my children in danger—the fact that Kirill gave his life to conceal.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, helplessly.

  With him standing so close, I feel the two things at once—the need to push him away from me; and the yearning for his touch, so familiar, so sweet. He was my refuge from all the fear and horror of these times—the place where I hid, the place where the war didn’t come. But now the war is here between us: Kirill’s terrible death is here between us.

  “If that is what you want . . . ,” he says.

  His voice is clear, but sounds as though it comes from far away, like a voice heard over water. He shrugs slightly. His eyes are blank, as though he has withdrawn from me already. I can’t bear the coldness, the distance, in his face.

  I nearly say, No, it’s not what I want. It’s what has to happen, but of course it’s not what I want. But I don’t say anything.

  I reach out, needing to touch his arm, to soften the harshness of this; and he steps away, as though he can’t bear my closeness.

  I want him to protest. I want raised voices—for our parting to be messy, full of overt pain: accusations, a sound of things tearing apart. Not just withdrawal and restraint. It seems all wrong that it ends like this—with this silence, this absence.

  He bows briefly, with that old-fashioned courtesy he has, and turns from me.

  But as he goes, he stumbles and stubs his foot on the sill of the door. He curses under his breath—a quick, hushed, furious torrent of curses in his own language. His hands are balled into fists; I see how the veins stand out like knotted string on the backs of his hands. Then he goes to the door and closes it quite quietly behind him.

  Even as I hear the click of the door, I feel the loss surge through me.

  I sit at my kitchen table. I tell myself that this pain will lessen, diminish. That this is the very worst moment. That one day it won’t hurt so much. But I can’t imagine how that could ever happen.

  Chapter 78

  ON MONDAY EVENING, Blanche comes home with some peaches, a treat from Mrs. Sebire. I remember the first time she did this, in the early days of the Occupation, when she was just beginning her job at the shop. I was a different person then.

  She puts the fruit down on the kitchen table.

  “Why are there flowers in the orchard?” she asks me, rather accusingly.

  I turn to her. She was sure to notice them sometime—but, stupidly, I haven’t worked out what to say.

  “Mum, haven’t you seen them? Somebody’s put some flowers under a tree. I just noticed.”

  Her quizzical stare, blue as summer, is on me.

  “And there are black spots all over the tree trunk,” she says. “How long has all that been there?”

  I feel the pain and shock of Kirill’s death searing through me again.

  “I put the flowers there,” I say.

  She waits for more.

  “Why?” she asks, when I
say nothing.

  “Something sad happened,” I say. “Yesterday, when you were at church. One of the slave workers was shot there.”

  “What?” she says. “But that’s awful. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I thought the less you knew about it the better,” I say.

  Her eyes are bright and curious. She’s feeling both the sadness and the drama of this.

  “Mum, this wasn’t all something to do with Millie’s ghost, was it?” she says. “That ghost she used to talk about last summer?”

  “Blanche, I don’t want to tell you more than that. Trust me. It’s safer that way.”

  “That means yes,” she says. “All right, Mum, don’t worry. But I did start to wonder about Millie’s ghost, whether he was one of the men from one of those horrible camps.”

  “Blanche, we have to keep this to ourselves. I mean it.”

  She gives me a slight complicit smile.

  “I’ll forget you ever told me,” she says. “I won’t say a word to anyone.”

  She turns from me, unbuttons her cardigan, flings it down on a chair. She’s too casual, too unconcerned.

  “It’s important, Blanche.”

  “It’s all right, Mum. I understand.”

  I’m still worried I’m not getting through, that she doesn’t understand how secret we have to be, how careful. Perhaps when I say what happened to Johnnie, she will see.

  “There’s something else you need to know,” I tell her. “Johnnie’s been arrested.”

  She whirls around to face me.

  “Johnnie?” Her voice is hoarse. Her face crumples. Her reaction startles me: I didn’t expect that this news would upset her so much. I was careless: I wish I’d found a way to break it to her more gently.

  I put my arms around her. I can feel her agitation, everything inside her spinning around like a top.

  “He’s in prison in St. Peter Port,” I tell her. “People think it’ll be all right—he’ll probably just be sent to prison in France.”

  “Was it one of his stupid, stupid schemes?” she says.

  “They found Brian’s gun in his room,” I tell her.

  “Johnnie’s such an idiot.” Her voice blazes with anger. “How could he be so stupid? Why doesn’t he realize that he matters to people?” she says.