‘It’s a liberty,’ Mr Stonelake had said, ‘not to have to live with the results of your own mistakes. You won’t see it now, of course, but when you look back, you’ll see it as one of the great freedoms of childhood.’
But she had, instead, ached for childhood to be over. At some level during those years at school, she had decided that the only way of getting through this period of her life was to accelerate herself somehow to the next stage, to hurry childhood and its dependency up by starting to take her own decisions, make her own choices. As an only child, there were, after all, only adults in her intimate world, and they seemed to make rules that suited themselves, rules that others then had to fall in with. And the falling in had, it was plain to Alexa, everything to do with money; the sooner she could pay for herself, the sooner she could decide for herself. Looking around at the worlds of work that she knew – diplomacy because of her father, teaching because of school – it seemed obvious to opt for learning to teach some of the languages she had acquired during the travels of her childhood. Even the Mandarin she had picked up in Hong Kong was an up-and-coming language, and then there was her Spanish from Buenos Aires, and the French she had excelled in at school. She allowed her parents to congratulate her on her admirable A-level results and then she announced that she was going to teacher-training college.
Her parents were horrified. Morgan had visualized the next phase of his daughter’s life taking place in medieval libraries in Cambridge; Elaine had had a hazier vision of a punt on a dawn river, with Alexa wearing a ballgown and accompanied by a young man straight out of Brideshead Revisited. Neither castle in the air featured anywhere remotely as prosaic as a teacher-training college.
‘But you can’t. Without a degree—’
‘I’ll get a degree,’ Alexa said. ‘I’ll do a degree alongside gaining qualified teacher status. It will take three years. I can do it in London.’
Elaine said wildly, ‘But who will fund it?’
Alexa looked at her coolly. She knew her mother had worked before her marriage, but her own rigorous view of work led her to consider Elaine’s wifely supporting role during the last twenty years as not even beginning to count as work. She transferred her gaze deliberately to her father.
‘You will,’ she said.
There had been a few seconds of suspenseful silence, and then Morgan had said courteously, meeting his daughter’s eyes, ‘Of course.’
She knew they were disappointed. Whatever grandiose ambitions they had harboured for her were plainly difficult to relinquish, ambitions that manifested themselves in the – to her eyes – ridiculous formality of their domestic lives and the unbending stateliness of her father’s bearing, even when encountered in a dressing-gown and slippers. There was nothing for it, Alexa decided, but to show them what muscular application she was capable of and what Real Life, as she termed it to herself, was all about. She deliberately chose a modest college in South London and was allotted a room in a hall of residence which had not seen one iota of modernization since it was built in the mid-seventies. She focussed on work, radical culture and mild political activism, on a sartorial diet of street markets and second-hand shops, and a physical one of anything in her local supermarket with a reduced label on it. She emerged, after three years, with a first-class degree and the offer of a job in the language department of a significant London girls’ school. Her parents, by then newly retired and installed in their careful flat on the Marylebone Road – within walking distance, Alexa noted, of Harley Street and its attendant range of private medical services – took her out to dinner in Mayfair to celebrate. Her mother was in grey silk and pearls. Alexa wore embroidered jeans and a second-hand fur jacket. Her father, his champagne glass slightly raised towards his daughter, made an elegant speech about parental pride and the satisfaction of being proved wrong by one’s only and much beloved child. The child in question heard him in silence.
The following year, the day after being offered promotion, despite her youth, to assistant head of department, Alexa had joined her childhood friend Jack Dearlove at a jazz café on the Fulham Road and been introduced to Richard Maybrick. He was OK, Alexa thought – nice enough, nice enough looking, cleverish, but he couldn’t hold a candle to her exhilaration at being promoted. He was just part of the audience that night, another smiling, congratulatory face in a pleasurable sea of them, and if he didn’t take his eyes off her, well, hey, that was just how it was that evening. She could have got high on tap water that night, she could have swung from the moon. She had rung her parents to tell them the news and her father had said, for the first time in her life, ‘I am so proud of you.’ Not ‘I want this for you’ or ‘I wish you would do it this way,’ but simply and at last, ‘I am so proud of you.’
The next day, Richard Maybrick was at the school gates. He took her out for supper, explained that he had read geography at Newcastle University, where he met Jack, and was now interested in becoming a marine biologist. He came to the school gates five times in the next ten days, and then he asked Alexa to come up to the Lake District with him at the end of term, for a week’s fell walking.
She had gazed at him. ‘Fell walking?’
‘Yes.’
‘In what?’
‘Boots,’ said Richard Maybrick, and reached under the café table. He put a stout paper carrier on the table. ‘These. Your size.’
‘Wow,’ she said. She looked at the bag. ‘How do you know my size?’
‘I looked,’ he said. ‘I bet I know your dress size too.’
‘And my bra size?’
‘I can guess.’
‘Are you – moving in on me?’
He smiled. He had a wide smile and strong, even teeth. ‘If you’ll let me.’
She’d looked back at the carrier bag containing the boots. There was suddenly, after all the years of endeavour, of solitary enterprise, of ostentatious frugality, an unspeakable appeal about surrender. She could put her feet into those boots, chosen by Richard, and be taken up to the Lake District, where she had never been, by Richard, and then follow Richard up and over those mountains and hills, as if – as if she was, for a heady moment, just handing the responsibility of being herself to someone else. From where she sat, right then, the prospect seemed to promise a new and unexpected kind of liberty. She put her hand on the carrier bag and pulled it towards her. ‘OK,’ she said.
Learning to love Richard Maybrick had been a profound but unalarming experience. His parents worked in medical research, his sister was a doctor and he himself was in no hurry about anything. He laid his emotional cards on the table, made it plain that they would not change, and then waited to watch – not see – if she picked them up. It was all so easy, in retrospect: his strange, distant, industrious family, his personal ease, his support for her ambition. He had been brought up with working women, and expected, he said, nothing else. When he gained a place at London University’s Marine Station on the Isle of Cumbrae in Scotland, it did not cross his mind to suggest that Alexa make any changes to her life and work. He would, he said, commute to the best of his ability, and he’d bend his mind to that just as soon as he’d got these headaches sorted. His sister had said they were probably eyestrain but that he wasn’t to leave it. So he wasn’t, he said. He also felt slightly sick a lot of the time. He was smiling as he spoke. There was, after all, plenty to smile about. He had been accepted at the Marine Station and Alexa was twelve weeks pregnant. Even commuting while he did his second degree wouldn’t be a problem, he assured her. Problems and Richard Maybrick were unknown to one another. Promise? Promise.
Even now, Alexa couldn’t look back on those two years with any equilibrium. Richard’s visit to the doctor about his headaches had segued immediately into a taxi ride to University College Hospital and then, almost before he had time to communicate what was happening to Alexa, to an operating theatre for the removal of an astrocytic tumour, grade four. And after that, the skies fell in. Richard came home, went for X-rays and scans, was o
rdered back to hospital, came home, was scanned again and sent back to surgery, over and over in a grisly rollercoaster ride of anxiety and waiting and fear. Alongside him, Alexa worked and tried to remember that she was pregnant, constantly shuttling from school to hospital or home, to an empty bed, or one in which Richard lay waiting for a reason to resume his habit of steady optimism. Isabel was born in one London hospital, attended by her distressed maternal grandparents, while her father lay on the operating table in another, attended by his sister, who was burdened with her own unkind superfluity of medical knowledge. By the time Isabel had started to pull herself up against armchairs and sofas, her father was dead and her odd, hardworking, undemonstrative paternal grandparents and aunt had retreated from her life, and her mother’s, in a complete paralysis of unarticulated grief and shock. At twenty-five, Alexa found herself not so much free to choose as floundering in a marsh of utterly unwanted autonomy. She remembered looking down at Isabel in her cot, humped up on her knees in her preferred sleeping position, and thinking that if it wasn’t for the need to provide for her, there really would be absolutely no point in troubling to draw another breath.
They moved to a cheaper, smaller flat at the top of a North London building whose redeeming feature was a pair of immense old plane trees outside, which grew to the height of the roof. Alexa found a day nursery for Isabel and spent her evenings either marking or sifting through the chaos of invoices and legal letters and trying to work out how she was to settle the debts Richard Maybrick had accumulated in his short life, and of which she had known absolutely nothing. He had left no will – it had not crossed either of their young minds to consider needing anything so elderly or depressing – but he had left three credit cards, maxed to their limit, and not a single useful asset beyond his personal possessions in the shared flat. He had also, Alexa discovered, been in the process of negotiating an unsecured and outrageously expensive loan to finance his time on the Isle of Cumbrae.
The only person who knew of her situation was Jack Dearlove. She was insistent that no parents should be told, nor the school where she worked. It was agreed between them that if Jack lent her the money to settle, and cancel, the credit cards, she would repay him within a year. No hurry, he said, please, two years, three years, don’t cane yourself. ‘A year,’ said Alexa. ‘A year. I have to be free of it.’
‘Don’t – don’t think badly of him,’ Jack said. ‘I’m sure—’ He stopped.
She’d looked down at Isabel, sitting placidly on her knee picking studs of chocolate out of a brioche, and said furiously, ‘Oh, don’t worry. I don’t think badly of him. It’s myself I’m angry with. For believing him, in the first place.’ She paused and then she said, half smiling, ‘And I’m proud of myself for digging us out of the pit he left us in. I’ve – I’ve worked myself free.’
And sixteen months later, the debt triumphantly repaid and a party invitation reluctantly, recklessly accepted, there was Dan. A coup de foudre, of course, but then there were so many subsequent reasons for not just dismissing it as no more than that. Dan’s life, his personality, his father, his grandfather, his dog – all a seduction. There was everything to like about Dan, there was everything to yield to in the certainty of his work and his situation, never mind the unbelievable luck that such a personable man had got to the age of almost thirty without acquiring a wife and children.
Alexa swung the car into the narrow road in front of the twins’ nursery school, with its bright fence of stylized wooden flowers and the banner in the window which read ‘Happy Days!’. She pulled over to the kerb and switched off the engine. She remembered, briefly and with a pang at her own naivety, being deeply stirred, during her early encounters with some of Dan’s friends, with a beguiling senior officer, by a sense of the rightness of Army life. She took the key out of the ignition. She’d heard Claire, the Brigadier’s wife, say in an interview once, ‘As the wife of a soldier, you just adapt your skills and career ambitions to the Army,’ as if doing so was no harder than making supper out of whatever you could find in the fridge. It was wonderful, while it lasted, to believe that, heady and inspiring. And agony to feel the conviction slipping away as the other real urgencies of life raised their voices, ever louder, especially one voice which seemed to ask her, over and over, ‘Why, after Richard, did you think acquiescing to another man’s life would be, in the end, any different?’
She opened the car door. The children would be lined up inside the classroom, pent up like puppies, waiting for the hysterical moment of collection. Those twins, her and Dan’s children, whose needs were as valid as their father’s. Or hers. She got out of the car and locked it.
‘Hiya!’ someone called.
She turned. A girl in a pink faux sheepskin jacket was waving from the entrance to the school front garden. She was familiar, the wife of someone in Dan’s battery – Ros? Rosie? – someone presumably going through exactly what Alexa was going through right now. She smiled back, filled with a sudden rush of fellow feeling. Ros or Rosie shouted with forced cheeriness, ‘Nothing stops for the school run, does it?’
Alexa put her car keys in her pocket and straightened her shoulders.
‘Nor should it,’ she said, and laughed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dan was stopped halfway up the battery offices stairs – deep-blue vinyl treads, paler blue walls – by the regimental adjutant, a spare and eager young man who gave the impression of being permanently poised to sprint somewhere.
‘Part one orders are through, sir,’ he said breathlessly. ‘You’ll find them on your email. Leave starts in ten days, after regimental PT. A Friday, that is. Sir.’
‘Thank you, Nick.’
‘And the CO says we can sleep some of the boys and girls of 40th regiment tonight. He says why not? More bar profits.’
‘Thank you, Nick.’
‘And your BK is waiting to speak to you in your office, sir.’
‘I know that, Nick, thank you. That’s why I’m on my way up there.’
‘Of course. Sir.’
Dan nodded to show that the exchange was over, and proceeded up the stairs to the battery command floor. It was soothing up there, an area of rigid protocols and hierarchies, where every man knew his duty and his place, and the walls were comfortably lined with photographs of every battery commander the regiment had had since 1845, as well as those of more recent glories. Outside Dan’s own office hung a colour photograph of the latest regimental recipient of the Military Cross, complete with its blue-and-white ribbon: a modest young gunner of extraordinary bravery who was unable to articulate anything very much except that he wished to be left to get on with life as one of the lads and in no way to be made a fuss of. He could not, Dan reckoned, have stood more than five foot four in his stockinged feet, and was two months short of his twenty-second birthday. He had a mother in Parkhead in Glasgow and a brother in a young offenders’ institution, and no idea where his father was. The lieutenant in charge of the troop reported that the father hadn’t been seen in twenty years and that the mother regularly saw too much of the bottle.
In Dan’s office, Paul Swain, his battery captain, was on the telephone. He was a thickset man in his forties, once a regimental sergeant major and now a late-entry captain whose own photograph, displayed modestly behind the door, bore the little silver oak leaf awarded for being Mentioned in Dispatches. He stiffened slightly in acknowledgement as Dan came in, said to his phone, ‘Yes. Yes, fully agreed. Sorted,’ and put the phone down. He said, ‘Gunner McCormack’s going to lose that foot.’
‘Shit,’ Dan said.
‘He’ll get less than nine grand a year for that as compensation.’
‘Double shit. Poor bugger.’
‘Sounds chirpy enough, though. Says he’s always got another foot.’
Dan bent to move the cursor on his screen to access his emails. He said, ‘Let’s hope his attitude carries him through the next stage, poor blighter. I’ve just been in the gun park. They live, breathe and eat th
at hardware, don’t they? Every bolt gleaming. You’d never think those guns had spent the last six months in the dusty arse end of nowhere.’
There was a brief pause, and then Paul Swain said lightly, ‘Missing it?’
Dan looked steadily at his screen. He said, ‘Here they are. Part one orders. And it’s not going to be eight weeks’ leave in one slug. Look. A month, then back here, then another month.’
Paul Swain came to look over Dan’s shoulder. He grunted.
Dan said, ‘Probably wise. The lads’ll only blow all their money and then get into trouble.’
Paul grunted again. He said, ‘I’ve got a farm to see to. I want to take the kids shooting rabbits.’
Dan turned to grin at him. ‘More jam to make?’
‘Chutney this time of year, Major. I make a first-class chutney, I’ll have you know.’
Dan looked back at the screen. ‘It’s a rum old cycle to handle, this, isn’t it? Three or four years of being on ops, then relax, then start training, then hard training, then ops again—’
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