She picked up the evening paper. Don’t ring them, Eric had said. Don’t. She opened the paper and stared at it, unseeing, without her spectacles on. She wouldn’t. It was the least she could do. And the least was so much better than, as in the past, the wrong thing.
CHAPTER THREE
Dan was so thin. When Alexa, unable to conceal her shock, pointed it out as he emerged from the shower, he gave a little bark of laughter and shook water out of his hair. He said deprecatingly, ‘We all look pretty shabby.’
‘You didn’t,’ Alexa said, misunderstanding him. ‘You got home shaved, laundered—’
Dan ran a thumb down his visible ribs. ‘I meant this. The fitness—’
‘Oh,’ Alexa said, and then, as if correcting a mistake, ‘Of course.’
‘The body armour weighs a ton. And then all the kit. The heat—’
‘Sorry, Dan. I know.’
He smiled at her. He said, quoting, “Selfless commitment”.’
‘Don’t remind me.’
‘What comes next?’
‘“Respect for others”,’ Alexa said, quoting the military mantra and trying to keep the smallest hint of disrespect out of her voice. ‘“Integrity, loyalty, discipline and courage”.’
‘Word perfect, Mrs Riley. You’d make a fine soldier.’ He leaned forward and kissed her mouth.
When he took his mouth away, she said, ‘Lunch?’
He shook his head. ‘Seeing someone.’
She intended not to say ‘Who?’ and failed.
He moved past her, wrapping a towel around his waist, and made for their bedroom. ‘Gus.’
‘But you saw Gus—’ Alexa said, and stopped.
Dan didn’t reply. He dropped the towel on the bedroom floor and began to dress, rapidly and neatly, but not in battledress, she noticed. He was putting on barrack dress – khaki drill trousers, shiny shoes, the blue ribbed sweater that looked like a garment belonging to a dated Action Man.
She said, ‘Why formal? Why barrack dress?’
He didn’t turn round. He was buttoning his epauletted shirt in front of the mirror which – Army issue again – had never been long enough for people of their height to see themselves in, except in sections.
‘Two CO’s orders. He doesn’t want us going berserk just because we’re home.’
‘Oh,’ Alexa said faintly.
She looked at Dan’s back, then she looked at their bed. She had been married to Dan for seven years and she still could not always look at their bed, or him, with much equanimity. Four days ago, when he got home, he had carried her up there – carried her, all five foot ten of her – and he’d hardly said a word. He wasn’t saying many words now, either.
‘But – but can’t someone else do whatever you have to do? Won’t the sergeants supervise all the unpacking and sorting of stuff?’
‘Of course.’
‘But—’
Dan turned round. He had his red-and-blue side hat in his hands. He said, ‘I need to see Gus.’
‘OK.’
‘And the young officers. Set them up a bit not to wreck their leave. Sort out their money. Remind them about drink driving. You know.’
‘And Gus?’
‘You know about that, too.’
Alexa looked at the ceiling. A water stain like a great, blurred grey cobweb covered one corner, where a pipe from the water tank in the attic above had leaked six months ago. Gus was Gus Melville, another battery commander, another major, a friend of fifteen years’ standing.
‘My bezzie mate,’ Gus often said of Dan, standing beside him, almost leaning on him. ‘The man with whom I can, and do, speak in tongues.’
Dan put his side hat on with precision, without glancing in the mirror. He came round the bed and put his hands on Alexa’s shoulders. He said, looking straight at her, ‘My ears are still ringing.’
‘I know. I didn’t mean—’
He bent, very slightly, to kiss her again. ‘All those boys of mine,’ he said. ‘That big slug of Scots folk dying to get home. But they’re useless. Their risk threshold is completely out of whack. I’ve got to talk to them before they go, or they’ll get arrested. Or die on the roads. And I’ve got to talk to Gus.’
She stood aside. ‘You go.’
He paused for a second. Then he said, ‘I’m not with it yet. Bear with me,’ and ran down the stairs at the speed of an adolescent setting himself a record.
The front door slammed shudderingly. Alexa went slowly along the landing and into the twins’ bedroom, and picked up a slipper and a doll and a length of mauve Christmas tinsel from the floor. The twins were at nursery school until lunchtime. Isabel was back at boarding school after half-term. She had gone back with another child, driven by another mother, and she had not looked out of the car window as they pulled away, but had seemed to engage in animated conversation with the other girl as if to indicate that home, where all the rest of her family was now reunited and together, was of no real consequence to her. Alexa had turned to Dan. He’d held her.
‘She’ll be OK,’ he’d said.
‘I don’t think so. She hates it. Hates it.’
‘Everybody hates saying goodbye. Look at us.’
She’d glanced up at him. ‘Dan?’
But he was already looking somewhere else. He was thinking about something else. The arms that were round her were still holding her, but remotely, as if her body was anyone’s. She gently detached herself. Dan had said that deployment on active service made you long for extremes, either the supreme domesticity of home when you were away from it or the violence of action and danger when you were back. You couldn’t just halt the pendulum, he said, you couldn’t stop it crashing from side to side, often out of control. Even if it sometimes hit her – or the children – as it swung.
It was over an hour until she needed to collect the twins. They would run out of school towards her, on a high, and then squabble in the car, because they were hungry. She had planned to say, ‘Daddy’ll be there at lunchtime,’ but she couldn’t, because he wouldn’t be. He’d be with Gus and the other officers, in the officers’ mess, with the silver Chinese dragon on the table and the sentimental narrative paintings of regimental defeats and moments of noble and fruitless heroism on the walls, drinking soup and speaking in tongues, that Army patois of acronyms and specific slang which was as bonding and exclusive as the twins’ private cheeping. He would not be thinking about the twins. Or her. He would be – as they all described it – in the zone.
She looked round the room. She had painted it corn yellow and put up cork boards for the twins’ energetic and random artistic efforts. Their beds, German and ingeniously converted from their original cot form, had been a present from her parents. Two little beds, two fleece dressing-gowns, two sets of slippers with animal faces on the toes, two hairbrushes, one plastic pot of hair slides and clips, umpteen soft toys. It was, as she stood there holding the slipper, the doll and the mauve tinsel, eerily quiet. She hadn’t left a radio on downstairs and Beetle, disappointed at not being taken with Dan, would be burying his suffering in sleep, in his basket. The silence, now that she was really listening to it, was enormous.
Of course, the telephone hadn’t rung for four days. Neither the landline nor her own mobile. All her friends, respectful of her and Dan’s reunion, were carefully leaving them alone. So were his family, and her parents. They would all be imagining the household alive and vibrating with relieved energy – even, as Mo had pointed out, the energy of rows. They would be visualizing meals together, and walks together, and hilarious subterfuges to get to bed together with a pair of lynx-eyed three-year-olds in constant attendance. They would not be picturing this solitude, this silence. The only person Alexa could think of in a similar position, except that both her children were away at school, was Gus’s wife, Kate Melville – although Kate worked in London three days a week and had never – loudly – let the inflexibility of the Army stand in her way. Today was one of her London days. She would not have
altered that, even for Gus’s homecoming.
Alexa bent and put the doll on a bed and the slipper beside its pair. Then she balled up the tinsel and put it in her pocket. Kate Melville was energetic and impressive and focussed, but she did not seem to need Sara and Prue and Franny and Mo as Alexa did; she did not appear to suffer from doubts about validity, or visibility. She ran a cancer-research charity in London, and in her crisply expressed opinion, her work had all the importance and consequence of her husband’s.
‘Gus may wear the uniform,’ Mo said of the Melvilles, ‘but Kate wears the trousers!’
Alexa went slowly downstairs and into the kitchen. Beetle remained in his tight curl, in his basket, but a faint tremor of his tail acknowledged Alexa’s entrance. Dan would probably come back after lunch and collect him, to take him up to the battery offices, and she would see Beetle being completely fulfilled by this small attention. There was a lot to be said for emulating the attitude of a Labrador – take what’s on offer with a glad heart, and if nothing’s on offer, go to sleep. Franny’s boys were like that, robust and cheerful, easy to handle and prone to sleeping when bored.
‘Too sad,’ Franny’d say, looking at them. ‘Pure cannon fodder. Cookie-cutter Andys, both of them. My genes didn’t get a look in.’
Alexa took her telephone out of her jeans pocket. Maybe she’d ring Franny. But then, if she rang Franny there’d have to be some good reason, however small, for doing so, otherwise Franny would immediately guess what was the matter.
‘Give him time,’ she’d say. ‘They are on Planet Afghan when they get back. Give him time.’
And she’d be right. Only the afternoon before, out in the garden with the twins so that Flora could show her father that she had learned to propel herself on the swing by herself, a woodpecker – unexpected, out of season – had suddenly started drilling into a tree fifty yards away, and Dan had let go of Tassy, whose hand he was holding, sprinted across the grass and dived under the garden table. The twins, shrieking with delight, had thought it was a game. Alexa had known that it wasn’t. When Dan crawled out and stood up, shaking and shamefaced with the little girls jigging and squeaking round him, Alexa had wanted nothing so much as to hold him and comfort him. But that would have been the last thing he wanted. He simply stood there for half a minute, mastering himself, and then he said to Flora, ‘OK, now, show me,’ and walked past Alexa back to the swing as if she hardly existed.
She looked down at her phone, pressed the buttons to reach her Favourites list, and dialled, on impulse.
‘I should be in a meeting,’ Jack Dearlove said, without preamble.
‘Are you?’
‘No. Instead I’m not eating a prawn-mayonnaise sandwich that is sitting on my desk.’
‘Oh, Jack—’
‘It never ends, this battle with the body. I put my bathroom scales in a suitcase behind a whole lot of stuff in my bedroom cupboard and then I got them out again. Pitiful. How’s the hero?’
Alexa looked out of the kitchen window. ‘Thin. And spaced. Not with me in spirit.’
‘But in body?’
‘None of your business.’
‘So that’s OK then. Give him time.’
‘I am.’
‘Give him,’ Jack said, ‘loads of time.’
Alexa felt a sudden urgent desire to argue. She swallowed hard. ‘I need to talk to him.’
‘Nothing that can’t wait?’
‘Well,’ Alexa said, ‘there’s all the old stuff. Isabel’s homesickness, Flora’s eye, the state of the car, more lumps on Beetle. I suppose that can all wait till he can switch his sights round to us again. But—’
‘But what?’
‘There’s something else,’ Alexa said.
‘You’re not pregnant!’
‘Work it out, Jack. If I was, I’d be huge by now.’
‘I meant—’
‘By someone else?’
‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘it happens—’
‘Not to me.’
‘OK. Sorry.’
‘Frustration is one thing. Fidelity is quite another.’
‘I said sorry,’ Jack said. ‘What other thing, then?’
Alexa looked across the kitchen. On the dresser which she had bought for ten pounds at a car-boot sale in Wincanton, propped against her cherished row of polka-dotted pottery mugs, was a long white envelope. She cleared her throat. Then she said, precisely, ‘I have been offered a job.’
‘Good for you.’
‘No, Jack,’ Alexa said. ‘A proper job. Full-time assistant head of languages at a private school near by, with a real salary and real responsibilities.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s nearly as good as the job I had when I met Dan. It means health insurance and perhaps a place for Isabel—’
‘You can’t do it,’ Jack said.
‘What?’
‘You can’t. You have the twins, and Dan’ll get posted somewhere or start a course in Shrivenham or something. You know you can’t.’
There was a short silence. Then Alexa said, ‘Are you listening to yourself? Or are you just thinking about that sandwich?’
‘I am thinking about you.’
‘And telling me that I can’t even consider—’
‘You can’t.’
Alexa closed her eyes. ‘I’m having a pretty awful day. And you are making it much worse. I think I’m going to ring off.’
‘Do that,’ Jack said. His voice had none of its usual warmth. ‘Just do that. And see if it makes you feel any better.’
‘I really thought that you, of all people—’
‘You chose Dan,’ Jack said, interrupting. ‘You chose this life, you traded freedom for security, you know you did. When the twins are bigger or Dan gets a regiment or something, then you can think of working. But not now.’
‘What’s come over you?’
‘Reality,’ Jack said. ‘Hunger. Anxiety about you. Facing living with the consequences of my own decisions. All of it. None of it. Fed-upness. Thursday. I don’t know. I only know that you can’t indulge yourself right now, so don’t burden poor bloody Dan with it, fresh from being bombed out of his skull.’
She heard the line go dead. She looked at the screen on her phone. ‘Call ended,’ it said with the kind of complacent obviousness that seemed to be the chief hallmark of modern technology. She put the phone back in her pocket. She was shaking slightly and found she was swallowing hard and repeatedly, as if to keep something uncontrolled – rage? tears? – at bay. She crossed the room to the dresser and picked up the envelope. It was addressed to her, Mrs Alexa Riley, and it had the school’s name and elaborate crest printed in the top left-hand corner in dark blue. She knew the contents by heart, and there was absolutely nothing to be gained by rereading them. In the space of five minutes Jack had managed to take her enterprise in even applying for the job, and her achievement in being offered it, and reduce both to a handful of dust. You can’t, he’d said, and by implication, it wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be fair to the man who has, quite simply, rescued you.
Alexa unhooked the car keys from their place among the mugs on the dresser, and motioned Beetle to follow her. He sat up, but hesitated, indicating that if he stayed where he was, Dan might return to collect him, which was, if it was all the same to her, his preferred option.
‘Only if Gus is coming back this way,’ Alexa said to him, reading him. ‘He went with Gus, you see. I have the car and I thought you might like to collect the twins with me.’
Beetle stayed where he was, his tail quivering apologetically. Dan’s dog, attuned to Dan, for all his manners and kind-heartedness.
‘I wish I was like you,’ Alexa said to him. ‘I wish what I had was always enough.’
Beetle lay down again in his basket and propped his chin on the edge. He was going faintly grey around his muzzle and sometimes his eyes had a blueish milky film to them. He was ten; quite an age for a Labrador.
Alexa knelt down by his basket, fil
led with sudden fear and remorse. ‘You know how important you are, don’t you?’
Beetle looked embarrassed. He gave her outstretched hand a brief lick.
Alexa stood up again. ‘Won’t be long.’
He didn’t look up as she left the room.
Dan had left the driving seat of the car pushed right back, as was his wont, and the mirrors re-angled to suit the seat’s new position. There was also a chocolate wrapper on the floor, as well as a Lottery scratch card and an empty can of Red Bull. The radio was tuned to Heart FM, or something she never listened to, and there was a pair of men’s aviator sunglasses with a broken earpiece in the shallow well above the dashboard. The only thing that was heartwarming in her present frame of mind was a Simply Red CD in the disc player, the Stars album, produced in 1992 when neither she nor Dan had had any idea that the other one even existed. He’d given her the album on their third date, because he said that the words of one of the songs was what he felt about her already.
‘Listen,’ he’d said. ‘Listen to this. The line about not believing in much but utterly believing in one other person. That’s me. That’s how I feel. I believe in you.’
Alexa adjusted the seat and the mirrors and started the engine. It was ten minutes to the children’s school, through the garrison village – beauty and tanning salon, off-licence, video store, small supermarket, barber, Gurkha Variety Store – and out into the shallow hills that ran down towards the main road that led eventually, through Dorset and Devon, to Cornwall. On good days, the idea of a road running all the way down to Cornwall was exhilarating, like being in an airport and seeing Shanghai and São Paulo listed on the Departures board, but on bad days, such a road seemed merely to taunt her with the confirmation that escape was not for her, that her present choices were entirely circumscribed by her earlier choice, which she had made without really having any idea of the consequences.
It had been a history teacher at that long-ago boarding school who had pointed out to her class that patterns in life and events are only visible in retrospect. Life lived day by day, he explained, appeared a shockingly random business, and it was only looking back that gave a clear view of the steady rise and fall of cause and effect. He had been a white-haired man in an old-fashioned tweed suit and a green corduroy waistcoat, the retired headmaster of a local prep school, and he talked to the girls he was teaching as if he was merely musing, thinking aloud as he wandered up and down in front of the blackboard. Most of his pupils thought he was just a caricature old granddad, but a few of them, including Alexa, had a sense that they were in the presence of a mind that knew too much to be shocked or surprised by any revelation. Alexa had even been able to talk to him about the violent homesickness caused by being at school on the other side of the world from her parents, and he had simply said, looking at her kindly but dispassionately, that she should try to enjoy these years before she had to shoulder the burden of making her own decisions.
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