The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  I’m surprised.

  “Blanche—I didn’t know you saw him. . . .”

  “Well, I don’t. Not really . . . Well, just sometimes,” she says.

  “What do you mean—just sometimes?”

  “He likes me, Mum. You know . . . Really likes me.”

  She looks stricken.

  “I didn’t know, sweetheart,” I say.

  “Why did he let them find it? Why didn’t he see?” she says.

  Later I hear her crying in her room. She doesn’t often cry. I knock and go straight in. She’s sprawled out on the bed, as though she’d been flung from a height. Her face is distorted with weeping, a soaked handkerchief balled in her fist. I sit beside her, put my hand on her arm.

  “Blanche, he’ll be all right. I really think he will. It’s happened to other Guernsey people. They’ve come safe home again. . . . And you know how upbeat Johnnie is, how nothing gets him down. . . .”

  She sits up. I put my arms around her and she clings to me for a moment. Her face is damp, her eyelashes clumped together. Then she pulls away and scrubs at her face with the handkerchief.

  “Sorry to be so pathetic,” she says.

  “Sweetheart. You don’t have to say sorry for being sad,” I tell her.

  She blows her nose.

  “Bother. I bet I’ve gone all red,” she says.

  I push back a strand of hair that has fallen over her face. It’s wet with her tears, like drowned hair.

  “The thing is, Mum,” she says then. “It’s just that sometimes somebody goes. And you realize just how much you’re going to miss them. That you won’t know quite how to keep going when the person isn’t there. . . . Mum, what is it?” She stares at me, eyes widening, alarmed. “Don’t do that. Please.” Her voice is shrill. “You’re my mum. You mustn’t cry. I hate it when you do that.”

  Chapter 79

  THE DAYS SHORTEN. The land is mellow and fruitful, the hedgebanks heavy and rich with rose hips, blackberries, elderberries. The Brent geese fly in from Siberia and graze in the fields near the shore: you can hear their strange creaking cries in the night. The apples in my orchard swell. There are figs on the fig tree on my terrace, and mulberries on my mulberry tree, that darken to a luscious red so deep that it is almost black. The mulberries are easy to crush and we eat them straight from the tree, so Millie’s lips have a permanent stain of vivid, wine-dark juice. The island is full of ripeness, of completion.

  I still see him around, as summer sifts down into autumn. I’ll glimpse him from my bedroom window, walking up the path between the borders at Les Vinaires; or when I’m tending the chickens I might see him talking with Max or Hans in the garden. A couple of times I pass him in the lane. My heart pounds. I don’t know what will happen. But it’s easy—too easy. He nods politely, and then avoids my gaze—it’s as though we are almost strangers, people who just know each other by sight, people who happen to live in neighboring houses. As though we never loved each other at all. Once I glimpse him through the window in the darkening evening, sitting at the table, writing a letter by candlelight—for we have no electricity in the evenings now. He’s deep in thought, his sleeves rolled up. I wonder what he is thinking: I feel something is withdrawn in him, that he is not entirely present. I wonder if in his mind he has retreated to Bavaria, to the stillness of that mountain landscape he loves, where he would paint and have a whole day of quiet: where he could shape his picture precisely as he wanted it, everything flowing like water, the scene forming under his hand.

  EVELYN WORRIES ME more than ever. She spends so much of her day asleep now, or in the hinterland between wakefulness and dream, and sometimes I wonder what she sees in her sleep—if the past is more real, more vivid, to her, than the present; if she sees all the people and scenes of her past, all crowding into the house. Then at nighttime sleep will elude her, and I’ll find her wandering in the house or garden in her nightclothes, and I’ll take her hand and guide her back to her bed.

  One day when I’m cleaning the living room, she suddenly looks up at me. Her face is thoughtful and alert, as though she sees me clear.

  “So, Vivienne, my dear,” she says. As though something has just occurred to her. Almost as though she’s continuing a conversation we’ve had. “Eugene’s away at war, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ve been on your own all this time?”

  There’s tenderness in her voice. Her eyes on me are sweet and blue as a child’s.

  I nod.

  I suddenly remember what she was like when she was younger, before old age began to dull and fracture her mind, to steal so much away from her. How she was brisk, sometimes acerbic, but her forthrightness always tempered with a practical down-to-earth kindliness.

  I kneel beside her chair.

  “It must be lonely,” she says. “So lonely for you without him. What a struggle for you, bringing up Blanche and little Millie and looking after me . . . And in wartime too . . . And, my dear, I know I’m not always the easiest person in the world.”

  I try to speak, but my throat is tight with tears.

  “I’m so sorry, my dear, that you’ve been so lonely like this. . . . And maybe even when Eugene was here. . . . Well, I saw it sometimes, Vivienne. That he wasn’t always as good to you as he could have been,” she says.

  I’m amazed. I suddenly wonder if she knew about Monica Charles.

  She puts her hand on mine, and her touch is gentle, a mother’s touch.

  “Maybe I haven’t always understood. I’m so sorry, Vivienne. . . . So sorry for everything.”

  And then there’s a blurred look in her eyes again, their clarity clouding over like an end-of-summer sky, and she drifts off to some other place.

  I wrap her blanket around her, trying to swallow my tears, so they don’t fall on her.

  JOHNNIE, AS PIERS predicted, is sent to prison in France for a year.

  I visit Gwen often. Her kitchen is cleaner than ever, everything polished, scrubbed, scoured. She’s always so busy and driven, as though with all her striving she could make everything turn out well.

  “He’s been lucky—I know he’s been lucky,” she says.

  She rubs her hand over her face. She has a new, dramatic streak of white in her hair.

  “Well, yes, in a way,” I tell her.

  On the table between us, there’s a vase of chrysanthemums, in those dusty colors they have that always look a little forlorn. She moves her hands on the tabletop, tracing random pathways through the petals that have fallen there. She makes me think of Johnnie, the way she can’t keep still. It’s as if she has taken his restlessness into herself.

  “I really think that, Viv. We’ve all been lucky,” she says. “People have been shot for less, I know that. But, my God, I miss him. It’s like losing part of myself. The best part . . .”

  I put my hand on her arm.

  “It’s less than a year to go now,” I say. “I know it seems like forever, but it isn’t really.”

  She nods.

  “That’s what I keep telling myself. The thing is, I can talk to Johnnie like nobody else,” she says. “Ernie’s my rock. He’s such a good man. Hard-working. But you know what men can be like—he doesn’t really talk to me. But Johnnie would talk, we would talk for hours. . . . I want him back,” she says.

  IT’S DARK IN the evenings now, and Millie and Simon can’t play outside anymore. After school, they play in Millie’s bedroom. Millie adamantly refuses to play in the attic. She has a fixed idea that she’ll get Simon into trouble with the Germans if they go there, and nothing I say can reassure her.

  We pick the apples in my orchard. The girls help me, a little wary, watching out for wasps. We sort through the apples meticulously, removing all the blemished ones that won’t keep: these I will bake in the oven with some of Gwen’s clover honey. I lay out the rest of the apples on cardboard trays in the shed, where it’s cool and they will keep well. Each one is precious.

  When the fruit have
all been picked, Harry Tostevin comes with his saw to fell my apple trees. We’ll need this wood for fuel, to see us through the winter months. Everywhere, people are doing the same, cutting down the trees that made our island so beautiful. I watch as Harry fells the first tree: there’s a tearing sound as its branches catch on the other trees as it topples, then a deep dull thud as it hits the ground, and its many soft brown leaves shiver on for a long time after its fall. After that I can’t bear to watch anymore, as he cuts down the tree under which I first talked to Gunther—the tree where Kirill died, which was splashed with drops of his blood. But I can’t escape the sound of it. I think of all the stories of Guernsey ghosts I’ve read to Millie: I wonder what spirits will haunt our island in generations to come. Will Kirill haunt my orchard, restless and troubled in this faraway place, forever trying to find a way back to the homeland he loved?

  Afterward, the land where my orchard grew is ugly—scarred with stumps, where once there was so much blossom and fruit. Harry chops the wood into logs and we store them in my garden shed. At least we have fuel for the winter now.

  You do what you have to do.

  I CAN’T HEAR the click of Evelyn’s needles. I look in on her, but she isn’t asleep. She’s unraveling her knitting. She slides the needles out of the stitches and pulls on the strand of wool. She does this as carefully, as assiduously, as when she is making something.

  I go to her. I put my hand gently on hers. She moves her hand away from mine. She goes on pulling at the wool, undoing her work. It’s so horribly easy to do: the wool is still crimped where the stitches were, but it’s rapidly losing its shape, like something melting.

  “You don’t want to do that, Evelyn. After putting in all that work,” I say.

  “But I have to, you see, my dear. I have to.”

  I can’t bear to see her do this. I’d like to take the knitting from her, to save what she has made. But I can’t remove it from her by force.

  She pulls and pulls at the wool. At last there’s just a messy heap of crinkled wool in her lap.

  She gives a little sigh, as though something has been completed.

  “There,” she says. “It’s all done now.”

  Her voice is calm, her movements measured; there’s none of that agitation that so often hangs about her.

  I don’t know what to do now, whether to take the wool from her. But she holds the heap of it out to me. There’s a surprising, unfamiliar peacefulness in her face.

  “There you are then, Vivienne,” she says.

  IN THE DAYTIME I keep busy, I try not to think. I make sausages from haricot beans and a cake with grated carrot. I look after my chickens and tend my vegetable patch: I pick onions and leeks, and the first brussels sprouts of the year. I clean the house and darn our clothes and take up the hems of some of Blanche’s old frocks for Millie—keeping everything going. And all the time I long for him—that longing that is just a fact of the body, like a sickness.

  I sleep a lot, even during the day. I have such a hunger for sleep. When Millie is at school, and Evelyn is sitting quietly, and for a while nobody needs me, I creep up to my bedroom. I kick off my shoes and lie down under the covers. My head just touches the pillow and I immediately fall asleep, the drowsiness like a drug in me. I’ve heard that sadness can take you like that.

  I make an oil lamp from an old Brasso can. Every evening, by the light of the lamp, I read a story to Millie from Angie’s book of Guernsey tales. I read about healing wells and ghostly funeral processions. I read about hearth fairies, and the duty we have to tell family news to the bees. I read how cobwebs can stanch bleeding, and how the seagull is viewed with mingled awe and suspicion, for in its wide-ranging flight it perceives many mysteries that are hidden from men, and how a cloud of midges over water signifies rain.

  And I read the story I first read when I was falling in love with Gunther, the story about the man who took the boat to Sark and shot at the duck who was really a girl. How she was wounded.

  Chapter 80

  ONE FRIDAY MORNING, once I’m back from Millie’s school, I take Evelyn’s toast and cup of tea up to her room. I open her door and see at once that something is wrong. I usually find her sitting up, wearing her tea-rose silk bedjacket, but today she still seems to be sleeping. Her body is sprawled across her bed, as though she tried to get up and fell back. Her breathing is noisy, her mouth gaping open; the bones in her face seem too clear.

  “Evelyn,” I say. Then louder, frightened: “Evelyn.”

  She doesn’t stir.

  I put my hand on hers. I shake her slightly. I can’t wake her. There’s something troubling about the look of her wide-open mouth.

  It could take hours to get the doctor to come. I’d have to cycle up to his house on the main road, or I could ring him from the nearest phone box, but that would take almost as long. I remember what Gunther said to me, when he thought it was Evelyn coughing—that Max would come and examine her if ever she was ill. I remember how kind Max was to Millie.

  I go out into the chilly brightness of the morning. I run around to Les Vinaires, rush up the path between the flower borders. Michaelmas daisies are growing there, tatty and straggly as weeds; they snatch at my legs as I pass them.

  Hans Schmidt answers the door. He must have been eating breakfast: his lips are glossy with grease. He speaks before I can open my mouth.

  “You wish to see Captain Lehmann?” he says.

  I realize they must all know about our affair. Well, of course they would. It’s not important.

  “No. Captain Richter,” I say.

  Hans goes to fetch him. I’m aware that I am listening out for Gunther’s voice. There’s a burst of loud male laughter from the back of the house: I think one of the voices could be Gunther’s but I can’t be certain—he never laughed in that noisy, raucous way when he was with me.

  Max comes into the hall. He’s in his shirtsleeves.

  “Mrs. de la Mare.” He’s reading my face: he is solicitous, concerned.

  I’m so glad to see him. I remember when he first came to my door, how I refused to shake his hand. How that seemed a matter of principle, seemed the right thing to do—the good thing. It’s all so long ago now.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I say. “It’s my mother-in-law. I think . . .” I hear the catch in my voice. “I think she may be dying. I wondered if . . .”

  “I’ll come at once,” he says. He doesn’t bother to fetch his jacket, but comes as he is, in his shirtsleeves.

  HE MOVES VERY softly in Evelyn’s room, speaking with a hushed voice. I can tell how he eases back into being a doctor again, how the part suits him. He takes her pulse, tests her reflexes, pulls back an eyelid and looks into her eye.

  “I think you are right,” he tells me, speaking very quietly. “I think it won’t be long. She has had a stroke. There is no treatment. I’m very sorry.”

  I nod.

  “I thought it was something like that. Well, thank you so much for coming.”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?” he asks me.

  “It’s kind of you to offer, but I think I’ll be all right,” I say.

  “I’ll see myself out,” he tells me. “You must call again if you need me.”

  “Yes, I will. Thank you.”

  I sit with Evelyn and hold her hand. Her skin is dry and cold against me; her body moves very slightly with her noisy, labored breath. I stay like that for a long time. I listen to the tick of the clock, to the tiny settlings of my house. Slow brown leaves drift past the window, and wood pigeons huddle on the sill, their small eyes pink and vacant—untroubled by our presence, as though there were no one here at all. The morning is very long. Evelyn’s face is expressionless, and white as the pillow she lies on.

  Toward noon she stirs and opens her eyes. She looks straight at me, as though she sees me clear, and that at least I am grateful for—that for this moment she is herself, not blurred and diminished by age.

  She’s trying to speak.
I bend down to her, desperate to hear. She murmurs something, but her mouth won’t move properly. I think she says “Eugene,” but I can’t be sure. A shudder passes through her, into my hand—and then nothing.

  I close her eyelids and fold her hands on her chest. I think how I can’t reach Eugene to tell him his mother is gone—how one day he will come home from fighting and find his mother buried. How sad he will be that he wasn’t here to grieve for her when she died.

  I cry for her, yet I’m glad that she could slip away so gently. This at least was a quiet death, a death in the fullness of time.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Max comes back to my door. Perhaps he’s noticed the other people who’ve called at my house through the day—the local doctor confirming the death, and Mr. Ozanne with his horse-drawn cart, to take the body away.

  “Mrs. de la Mare.” He has a look like a question.

  I nod slightly.

  “My mother-in-law has died,” I say.

  His face is serious.

  “Then may I offer you my condolences,” he says.

  “Thank you for coming to see her,” I say.

  He shrugs slightly, as though to say this was nothing.

  He hesitates for a moment, his eyes on me, trying to read me, as though I’m some wild, timid creature he doesn’t want to scare off.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” he says, rather quietly. “We are leaving your island—Gunther and I.”

  My heart judders. Somehow I never expected this: it’s as though I’d believed that Gunther would always be here. Maybe I’d thought, deep inside, that I could always change my decision. That there was time. That there would always be time.

  “Leaving?” I say stupidly.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are they sending you?”

  He has a slight rueful smile.

  “The Eastern Front, unfortunately. This is not good news for us. Also, winter is coming.”