The Solider's Home: a moving war-time drama

by George Costigan

  Enid shocked herself that she even approached him, delighted herself she managed to make conversation, and some entirely new emotion entered her when he stuttered in making his responses. Nerves, he said, apologising. He felt confident discussing politics, much less so about himself. He was from Dijon. Older than her. Ten years older. Here studying architecture, prematurely bald, seemingly possessed of next to no personal vanity and this first conversation only became stilted when Enid realised she was thinking about her mother dancing that first dance. Smitten. On air.

  She thought she should not tell him what was beating in her. So she asked wider questions and bathed in his principles and passions. And when he asked, and she had to make blatant some of her feelings she said, truthfully, she liked his brain. He thanked her warmly and then added quietly that his heart had no faith in the rest of him.

  He had hers, on a string. For his honesty. Skipping home on the gossamer wings some song she’d only recently heard described, she couldn’t remember who had asked who if they might meet again – only that they would. The weekend.

  Time gaped empty till then.

  Classes, education, food. All passing detail.

  Lawrence? Fiction… And fiction, she had read Byron saying, ‘Was the talent of a liar.’ Quite right My Lord.

  This, Bertrand, this and only this was True. She could feel it. In bed Enid vaulted over all the gushing precious narrative details, whatever they were bound to be, so she might only enfold him in This Love and heal all of him and have him like her in return.

  Her friends could tell Something. They asked, she told them and an avalanche of advice followed.

  ‘Rush, girl.’

  ‘DON’T rush.’

  Lawrence said, ‘Do it. Let yourself fall in love, if you haven’t done so already. You are wasting your life.’

  The weekend.

  They walked the most beautifully drizzle-filled Saturday from Dovedale to Milldale and back.

  Stepping stones across the river Dove, Reynard’s giant cave.

  Tissington Spires. And Lover’s Leap, where a sign read –

  ‘There are many mysteries and stories surrounding the history of Lovers Leap, most of which are based around the heart broken lady who is said to have taken her life here and others of how a young disgraced but in love couple took their lives to be with each other.’

  They held hands leaving there.

  O such a baptism of the flesh. How could a hand hold all that heat? And hope. It did. For now. For starters.

  Enid wondered would they kiss, and wondered if he too was hoping they would. And she hoped she wouldn’t have to lead that first step across their own Lovers Leap. And if she did, what happened if she didn’t like it? She didn’t dare risk. Not today. And Glory be, there was no need. Too glad to concentrate on her hand in his, and when they had to part, his hand searching for hers. She longed for a kiss-gate to invade their path. And for him to not know its ritual. None did.

  Wet and yet almost too warm on the bus back, they parted French style with his three soft kisses very near her cheeks, and a look in each other’s eyes that was the essence of poetry she thought – the Uncatchable. She couldn’t capture it when she sat to try. But she loved the trying. No, she Loved the trying. The thinking on him.

  And their next time they would, could, be together.

  All of her friends came to a meeting concerned with some ‘fascist’ taking over Cuba. Enid wished for her Father to materialise and not only explain Latin American political history to her, but to see and hear her Bertrand and approve. ‘Good lad, Enid, there’s a fine lad.’ Just as vast and as simple as that. Approval.

  Which is why she had invited her friends. Oh no.

  Enid’s very virgin heart was suddenly seized. In a giant icy glove. Panic.

  Why had she asked them to come?

  Why? To boast, Enid. You bloody bloody fool. To have them be envious. Yes, only so they would like him and she could bathe in that glow. Traitor Enid. Traitor to him.

  Next instant. A fresh terror.

  One of them would be as dazzled as she had been and dazzle him and take him. And think nothing of it. ‘All’s fair in love and war.’

  Or, O God, the opposite.A fantastic hot contradictory idea. How might it feel if one of them did ‘fancy’ him and still he chose her, dumpy virgin Enid?

  Or – O No! – Worse. Much worse, the pits, my pits – they would all be bored by him. She would be utterly belittled by indifference.

  So. Is this what my affection, my attraction, actually is? A search for Status? O God I Hate growing up.

  As he stood to speak her heart beat ice. Fire. Ice.

  As he began, and as his voice didn’t waver, only grew in the strength of his convictions, an entirely new wonder flooded Enid.

  She didn’t care a fourpenny fig for what anyone else thought. Or did. Or tried to do. She liked him and she trusted herself.

  And – him.

  She stood, just watching him and not truly listening, on this highest peak of her life, on this glittering summit.

  She introduced him to her friends and none made any connection ‘of that kind’, nor he with them. His hand reached for hers to calm his stuttering. It did.

  So far D.H. Lawrence hadn’t described quite this particular rapture…

  Now.

  How to leapfrog everything else? How was that done? Bertrand gave off no confidence he knew. Enid knew she didn’t.

  Driven hard by their o so eager delight and desire and ignorance, they dared plan a must-be-silent night in her room.

  And I do lift my aching arms to you,

  And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,

  And I do weep for very pain of you,

  And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.

  Shocking and exciting each other first with kissing, with the cold wetness of their tongues, the fumbling with buttons, and it all happening without music and even for her, the ignorant, surely too too quickly. Enid had assumed he knew. Something. Had some experience. Suddenly some dimly court-yard-lamp-lit nudity, but better that than bald naked beneath her central un-shaded light-bulb – and finally swept up, rushing helpless and heedless from on to in her narrow single bed, their bodies wrapping, folding into huge impulse and his, yes, it was his, his acceleration and something private to him happened, something instantly wrong, unplanned, unwanted, chaotic. Sticky. Colding. And silent.

  And the worst, and most crucial, a total failure of words.

  Of the words, any words, to be bravely honest with the other. It was bad. Instant and solid bad.

  By the end of that night Enid had signed the Pledge in her head. She lay awake, pleading with the sun to rise and take him, release both of them. She knew he wasn’t sleeping. It was not good.

  The dew of the morning

  Sunk chill on my brow –

  It felt like the warning

  Of what I feel now.

  Thy vows are all broken

  And light is thy fame;

  I hear thy name spoken

  And share in its shame.

  He left her suddenly, long before dawn, without a drink or a word or another kiss and she washed and dressed and buttoned herself higher and put her head firmly down for the next two years, to be rewarded with the highest honour the University could bestow and, O what a Blazing Day for her, an offer of a research scholarship. One more year to study to be a Master of English.

  Mabel had her second stroke and it took her and all was over. She hurried back, phoned her old Headmaster and Mr Smith was ‘absolutely delighted’ to welcome her home. As a teacher.

  I wrote Mabel’s eulogy and began my life with Patrick.

  The Underground scrum to Victoria. No wonder they all dive for the seats she thought, holding to her strap with one hand, suitcase in the other

  No wonder they all dive for the seats she thought, holding to her strap with one hand, suitcase in the other; and new people kicking by her, so blatantly irritated by
it and her, this out-of-town frump; but all seemingly too de-humanised to make any actual eye-contact; not even so much as a baleful complaining eye.

  And weren’t we told, and believed, and cherished it, that these tube tunnels contained the very soul of the British spirit of the War? Community in a Blitz? All I can feel is Thank the Good Lord I never lived in this.

  The train down to the coast was magnificently rank. The ninth year of Mrs. Thatcher’s government and it was impossible to see through the never-cleaned windows; dead beer-cans rolled amongst the ancient hamburger packets colonising the floor, and only the terminally desperate would risk the lavatory. Enid listened, fascinated, as an articulate American woman queried the guard as to whether first-class was, by some British Quirk, a whole lot better.

  ‘Not really, dahlin’ – ’s all filfy.’

  ‘That was said almost proudly, sir.’

  ‘All Millwall fans now, luv. We’re crap and we know it. Tickets, please.’

  A seat on the ferry, an hour and a half and this adventure could truly begin.

  No-one could have noticed her toes squeaking pleasure inside her sensible brogues, or the way her knees rubbed together, but some might have wondered at the smile that kept creasing her face. This, she realised, is my fiftieth birthday present to myself. Only five years late.

  83

  A teenaged heart-broken First-Love gone bad Zoe re-opened the house at Jantou and spent sweet sad hours repairing in its solitude. Heat and dust rose around her, sitting on the doorstep, soaking in the view and the solace.

  She returned again, in happier times, summer holidays from University; walking there three times in one week to sun-bathe naked. She did her rather fine line drawings of the house and that autumn framed them and her photographs which now occasionally still caught her eye as she bustled through the salon to the kitchen. She recalled ‘the secret place’ but it no longer frightened her, since she now considered Janatou to be her secret place.

  Her English degree secured, Zoe returned from three years’ work experience, teaching in Portsmouth, and (Sara considered for want of anything better to do) fell in love with Gilbert. Sara had to own that he was a charmer – but she’d known a charmer herself and nothing could induce her to fully trust the man. Still, it wasn’t her life and her daughter was old enough and daft enough to make her own mistakes...

  They set up house together and slowly Gilbert’s parochialism began to be at first less than charmed by her travelled erudition, then embarrassed by it (since it had the self-regarding scent of boasting in it), then embarrassed by her and her refusal to conform to his notion of a role she was utterly unsuited to, and it was not long before he began to turn it into a mental stick to beat her with; and as verbal abuse threatened to include the physical, so Zoe rose to every bait. She became the victim of a headstrong determination not to be defeated by her own mistake. It became their shared obsession.

  She became addicted to their spiralling arguments, to the way her superior logic would lead inevitably to his heavier hand; and she was ghoulishly fascinated by the minute gradations of restraint he had to show in the actual striking of her, a restraint she shared, always stalling at scratching his face; of making their violence public. And, it was true, both craved the brutal orgasms that climaxed the confrontations. She became tunnel-visioned – determined to win. He would accept her. Without qualification. She would conquer his moods. She could vanquish and extinguish his rages. He would become cultured in some way.

  They were two years down this track when one July afternoon Sara called to see her daughter and heard, ‘I’m in the bath, won’t be a second.’

  Bustling in Sara called, ‘Nothing I haven’t seen before, Mademoiselle.’

  It was, though.

  Zoe’s ribs and upper arms wore livid bruises and ignoring her daughter’s shrill and demented denials, Sara demanded a neighbour give her a lift down to Maurs, where she marched into Gilbert’s bicycle repair shop and announced not only her daughter’s immediate departure from his life, but his imminent and certain denunciation to The Mairie, The Gendarmerie, the local papers and ‘from the bloody pulpit if needs be’, should he ever appear in her or Zoe’s eye-line again.

  Zoe was beyond fury with her mother’s ‘high-handed interfering’ – but there was a quiet in Sara’s, ‘That is never acceptable,’ that sobered her, and out of outrage grew a grudging gratefulness, and in time, an accompanying respect.

  Her considerable energies she channelled into money and pleasure. Skiing became an obsession and to fund it Zoe managed a series of shops, a make-up salon and ran a neighbouring village café for three years before the owner, a sour postman called Serge, refused to let her ‘modernise’ it – install hot-food facilities and perhaps even a television for the big sports occasions – and in a spectacular and still talked about fit of pique, she slammed out. Also still talked about was Serge’s instant installation of all her ideas.

  Her cousin, Marie-Jo was down from Paris. She worked for the Departement Nationale de Tourisme and had been charged with compiling a demographic report as to why quite so many English were crossing La Manche to set up home, or buy a second home, in France.

  ‘That’s not rocket-science!’ Zoe laughed.

  ‘Cheaper property, better food, better climate.’ Marie Jo chorused her top-of-the-head thoughts. ‘And actual culture.’

  ‘And they hate that Thatcher woman.’ Zoe assured her.

  ‘Oh yes. The ones who come here.’

  ‘So, we’re getting their champagne socialists?’ Marie-Jo made a mental note to write that up as ‘A Failure of Socialism.’

  ‘And what are you going to do now? Next.’

  ‘You’ve just given me the idea,’ said Zoë.

  She set up her Immobilier business and tirelessly scoured the surrounding countryside for properties for sale, offering the sellers ‘more competitive’ rates, building up her lists, and carefully targeting the English through ads in their quality newspapers, magazines and periodicals offering French Country Cuisine in her Chambre d’hôte – whilst house-hunting in paradise. Five years ago. And now, her first American had called. Mentioning the word chateau. Oh yes, please!

  Over the three and a half decades since Jacques’ barely attended funeral, the different Mayors of Lauresse and their committees sometimes mentioned they could claim unpaid taxe d’habitation and taxe foncieres on Janatou. But this always foundered on the question of from whom? With the result – no effort was ever made to find the owner.

  ‘It’ll fall down of its own accord one day,’ some wiseacre would say and someone who’d been there would mutter, ‘Not in your grandchildren’s lifetime it won’t…’

  Being so remote it represented neither health hazard nor danger. Forget it. More paper...

  When Janatou crossed her busy mind, Zoe considered it to be, in a way, hers.

  When Sara infrequently thought of it, she felt older yet.

  A foot passenger in Europe.

  Oiling my rusty French back to its uncomplicated efficiency will be a pleasure.

  And a further place to hide.

  O. From whom?

  No-one. No-one knows I am here. Then, hide what?

  Tout droit Enid, to the station.

  The vasty fields of France. I can see them through the clean train window. Do I assume that’s because we’re in a Republic?

  Having to live with Dad after Mum went. ‘Having’, Enid? Choosing, surely.

  Didn’t exactly feel like choice.

  The watching over his getting older.

  Finally, just me and the house. Claiming it’s sudden silence and solitude for mine.

  And Ownership.

  Leave that. That’s past now.

  Elvis Presley.

  He swept through the school so completely even I knew him by his Christian name alone.

  My second year of full-time teaching. And yes, he alarmed me. He became a competing obsession to my own; that these children develop a passion
for the language they would use for ever. He seemed to not only be re-writing it, but debasing it. ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, c-crying all the time…’ It was wanton. He sounded gleefully wanton.

  And by the time one had learned to quell him, to achieve and maintain an acceptable level of concentration in one’s class-room/ work-place, the young ladies’ skirts were rising, the boy’s hair descending and there was talk of a generation gap. It was surely a different youth from the one I had grown with. And so soon. I was hardly 25!

  A year or so later and Margaret Thatcher, now Mrs Thatcher, won her Finchley seat. I was idiotically disappointed to learn she was a Tory but she did beg the question, ‘Well, what was I?’ After Bertrand I lost any interest I may have feigned in politics and lazily I re-cycled, scatter-gun style, my Father’s belief in the Sanctity of working-class solidarity in an ageless struggle against ‘them’. So, I voted Labour yes, but thinking back, it was a shameful act. Containing no genuine thread of either interest or knowledge, nor even, more honestly, an opinion of my own. I had no great opinion on Elvis either for that matter, beyond a conviction he was of no practical use to a teacher of English Lit and Language.