Gunner Rigby, shorn red hair barely visible beneath his side hat, stood stiffly to attention in front of Dan’s desk. Behind him, equally stiffly, stood Paul Swain and the regimental sergeant major. All six eyes were fixed on a point on the wall behind, just above Dan’s head.
Dan himself, also in battledress, was seated. He had nothing on the desk in front of him apart from the rug, in Hunting Robertson tartan, that Paul Swain spread on it for interviews, to remind the interviewees of the supreme importance of regimental loyalty.
‘Are you listening to me, Rigby?’
‘Suh.’
‘I don’t want you to have to go to the CO. Leave starts after PT tomorrow, as you know, and if you have to go and see the CO he is likely – in fact, bound – to tell you that your leave will be permanent. If you can’t be open with me, Rigby, you will be facing discharge from the Army before the end of the day. Is that clear?’
‘Clear, suh.’
Dan leaned forward, his forearms on the desk, his hands linked. ‘Shall we go over it, one more time?’
Rigby said nothing. His gaze at the wall did not waver.
‘You and Gunner Wharton were asked to a party. The invitation was sent by text message, and the word “party” had a capital T. Is that correct?’
‘Suh.’
‘I am unfamiliar with the jargon, Rigby, but I gather partying in this context means drugs will be available, and a capital T indicates the presence of crystal meth. The use of this substance also indicates that there will be no women present at such a party, only men.’
Gunner Rigby gave a small shudder but remained mute. Dan sighed. He said, looking at his linked hands, ‘I am aware, Rigby, that Gunner Wharton has no appetite for a girlfriend. I have no idea, and do not wish to know, if you share his tastes. I am aware you have been a good friend to him and shielded him from abuse and stuck up for him, all of which I commend. But it is taking that loyalty too far to refuse to admit your participation in whatever went on at that party that night.’
Silence.
‘You should not have gone,’ Dan said. ‘And you should not have taken any drug of any kind. If you do not admit to your wrongdoing, you will find yourself out on your stupid, stubborn, bloody ear.’
Still silence.
‘One last chance, Rigby. You can’t, I think, save Gunner Wharton, whatever you do. But you can save yourself.’
Suddenly Gunner Rigby blurted out, ‘I’m a good soldier, sir!’
‘You are. So, I might add, is Gunner Wharton. But it doesn’t stop you being complete and utter arseholes, does it?’ He raised his eyes and leaned back in his chair. ‘Tell me what happened, and I can help you. Stick to your bone-headed denial and misplaced loyalty, and I can’t.’
‘I’m a good soldier,’ Rigby said again, almost in a whisper.
‘Then be one. Tell me.’
Rigby sighed. His body seemed to sag briefly, and then he straightened again so hard that his thin, pale neck, rising above the open collar of his battledress, was almost corded with the effort. ‘Suh.’
‘Nothing?’
Rigby stared mutely ahead.
Dan stood up slowly. ‘Very well, then. Off you go, Rigby.’
‘Suh.’
The RSM barked something unintelligible. Rigby jolted himself into a salute and then swung round and followed the RSM out on to the main floor of the offices as briskly as if he had received a reprieve rather than a sentence.
‘Bloody hell,’ Dan said disgustedly to Paul Swain.
‘A complete shambles.’
‘Can you imagine, throwing away an entire career for the sake of an evident lie told by someone else? They were at this party, they took this stuff, they—’
‘Please! Don’t go there, Dan,’ Paul Swain said.
‘The whole episode’s just a heap of shit, frankly.’
Paul Swain moved down the room towards his own desk. He said as he went, ‘And he wasn’t wrong. He’s a good soldier. So’s poor sodding Wharton. Part of our best gun crew.’
Dan said sadly, ‘The cause doesn’t really have to be right, or winnable, does it? We saw that time and time again in Helmand. Men will choose to die in battle with their mates rather than flee to survival. They only need to feel loved and valued by each other to fight for a cause they don’t know about or care about. I’d bet my bottom dollar Rigby isn’t gay. But he’s lonely. Usual hopeless chaotic family situation. Wharton befriended him. Wharton’s funny and quick and most of the boys love him. He’s their camp mascot. Rigby cannot bring himself to fail him.’
Paul Swain stooped to reactivate his computer. He said, ‘You did all you could.’
‘So did his subbie.’
‘Poor guy.’
‘Why poor?’
Paul Swain grimaced. ‘Girl trouble.’
‘What, Freddie? I thought he’d got a gorgeous girl.’
‘He has. She is. But she’s one of those independent ones. Wants civvy life and an Army boyfriend.’
Dan was silent. Paul looked down the room at him. ‘Dan?’
‘Yup.’
‘Dan, I repeat, you did all you could for Rigby. All.’
‘Wasn’t enough.’
‘It was more than most would have done.’
Dan put his hands briefly over his face. When he took them away, he said, ‘It still wasn’t enough. Seems—’ He stopped.
‘Seems what?’
Dan shrugged. ‘Seems the story of my life right now.’
‘Hello, there!’ Jack’s text read. ‘Anyone at home? Lights seem to be on but no reply. Call me.’
Alexa flipped her phone shut and dropped it into her pocket. She was halfway round the supermarket, the huge one right in the garrison village, so close, in fact, to her friend Prue’s married quarter that Prue said she could see what was on Buy One Get One Free without stirring from her kitchen window.
‘It’s a lovely quarter,’ Prue said, ‘but it’s a truly horrible location. Welfare should try living on the flightpath of every drunken soldier.’
Alexa had hoped to find Prue at home for a therapeutic cup of coffee before she tackled the weekly supermarket shop, but Prue’s house was locked and silent, almost reproachful, it seemed to Alexa in her current mood, to a person without a job and in dire need of another perspective. If she’d thought it through, of course, she’d have remembered that Prue would be out. Mondays through Thursdays, Prue worked as a physiotherapist at the local military hospital, where she provided, it appeared to Alexa, as much a counselling service as a physically therapeutic one for her soldier patients.
‘They’ll tell me all sorts of stuff, big stuff, but they won’t report it. They think any plea for help will go on their reports. And they are really suffering. Lots of it is relationship stuff. If that’s going badly, they can’t cope with anything. I’ve had them break down on me while I’m trying to sort them. A loyal girl is more important to them than she’ll ever know.’
A loyal girl, Alexa thought, dumping packets of pasta into the trolley. A loyal girl, faithful and firm in allegiance. Faithful, yes, as far as she was concerned, tick. Firm in allegiance, half a tick. Maybe, actually, no tick at all. Did firm in allegiance mean not screaming at your husband among the dirty dishes that he, not three weeks out of the juggernaut of boredom and terror of active service, was utterly failing you in every aspect of a loving partnership? Did it mean controlling yourself, subduing yourself, repressing yourself, until you felt yourself to be not only at breaking point but a mere distorted shadow of the woman he’d married?
She looked at the serried rows of tea packets. Every kind and colour of tea, packaged to make you feel that nothing stood between you and self-enhancement but the purchase of a neat, bright box. Calm, some of the boxes promised, easy sleep, relaxation, serenity, tranquillity. Just add boiling water. Lie back in your recliner chair with a steaming mug and hey presto, what was unmanageable becomes manageable. In her pocket, her phone bleeped again.
‘Hello,’ Jack t
exted. ‘I know you’re there. Call me or I’m coming to get you.’
Alexa dialled. ‘What does valerian taste of?’
‘I have no idea. It’s a rhizome.’
‘In my hand,’ Alexa said, ‘it’s a box of tea bags.’
‘From the Latin, valere, to be strong.’
‘It’s trying to be strong,’ Alexa said, putting the box back, ‘that’s all but finishing me off at the moment.’
‘Why haven’t you rung me?’ Jack demanded.
‘I have.’
‘No. Categorically not. For over a week.’
‘I’m shopping.’
‘You can talk to me with your other hand. How’s Izzy?’
‘Bad,’ Alexa said.
‘And you and Dan?’
Alexa said nothing.
‘Ah.’
She pushed her trolley up against a shelf of shiny sacks of dog food.
‘Is that why you haven’t rung?’ Jack asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘A row? Or, should I say, the row?’
‘I don’t think,’ Alexa said again, ‘that I can talk about it. Even to you.’
‘My God. That bad?’
‘I feel so bad. Furious with him. Furious with myself. Why aren’t I coping? I live in this camp with hundreds of women who are coping. Even those poor Fijian wives in the blocks cope better than I do. I don’t know how they endure it. They can’t even drive, to get off the base, for God’s sake. They have a good old catfight every so often and clear the air, and instead I simmer and mutter and then explode and yell at him like a madwoman.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes.’
‘D’you want to tell me about it?’
‘Only,’ Alexa said, leaning against a vast sack of complete diet for the older dog, ‘if you can reconcile me to what I feel and what I’ve done and turn Dan back into someone who can entertain one single idea other than the Army.’
Jack put on a fluting female voice. ‘There were three of us in this marriage. Him, me and the Army.’
‘I don’t feel like being teased today.’
‘Lex,’ Jack said, ‘please stop being so melodramatic. I think I’ll come down to darkest Wilts and take you out on the lash.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘You worry me.’
Alexa took her shoulder away from the sack of dog food. She said, ‘I tried to see my friend Prue before I began on this. She’s a physio. Her brother’s an Army surgeon, still out there. He told her in an email that he’s cut off more arms and legs in the last three months than he’d expect in a lifetime on civvy street. And the awful thing is that these shattered limbs aren’t accidental, like they used to be. They’re intentional. They mean to maim. They mean to maim our boys.’
‘Our boys?’
‘Yes. Boys from the British Army.’
‘What,’ Jack said, ‘are you trying to say to me?’
Alexa sighed. ‘That with all that in Dan’s head, how’s he ever going to hear me?’
‘Did you tell him about the job?’
‘Yes,’ Alexa said.
‘And?’
‘He looked appalled. He didn’t really say anything. I’d been screaming and I cried. He got me a brandy. I thought maybe we’d cleared the air a bit, anyway, and tried to talk to him this morning, you know, trying to build a bit, but he was back in the cave, as they say, with these boys of his on their drugs charge. I am stuck, Jack, really stuck. I can’t think what to do next, I can’t—’
‘Why don’t you come to London?’ Jack said.
‘The twins—’
‘Just for a day?’
‘Dan’s leave starts tomorrow.’
‘Oh,’ Jack said heartily, ‘great. Super great. The famous POTL. Post-Operative Tour Leave. Weeks of it. Things’ll look up. You’ll see. No uniform, different mindset.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Course they will. Wonderful. Call me in a day or two.’
‘And you?’ Alexa said. ‘And … and Eka?’
Jack gave a brave imitation of a laugh. ‘Eka? She is in a palazzo in Bologna with a man who owns a shoe factory. An old palazzo and an old factory and an old man. Very old.’
‘How—’
‘Sixty-one.’
‘Not very—’
‘Shut up,’ Jack said. ‘Go back to your teabags. Think outside the box. Start again. New day, new Dan. Leave and life start here.’
‘OK.’
‘Darkest hour before dawn. You’ve done the worst bit. It’ll get better now and you and Dan can go together to rescue Izzy. Clouds roll away. Dawn breaks. Sun rises—’
‘You shut up now,’ Alexa said.
‘You’ll see, Mrs Riley,’ he said, ‘you’ll see. You’ll look back on these three weeks and wonder what on earth all the fuss was about.’
Showering after games, Isabel abruptly felt, if not exactly happy, at least much less unhappy. It had been an unexpected afternoon of quiet triumph, all because Chloe Miller, always picked as goal shooter for netball, had had to go to the surgery to have an ingrown toenail dealt with, and Miss Hoxton, who usually looked right through Isabel as if Isabel only existed in her own solitary imagination, had suddenly focussed on her and said, in her commanding, cheerful PT way, ‘You take Chloe’s place this afternoon, Isabel. Let’s see what you’re made of.’
At first, Isabel had been horrified. She wasn’t one of the naturally sporty ones in her form in the first place, and had only earned a place in the team – sometimes – by marking her opponent so doggedly that she was deemed grudgingly to be useful. But she had never aspired to be goal shooter. She wasn’t collected enough, or steady enough, and invariably stood at just the wrong place or at the wrong angle.
‘No objections,’ Miss Hoxton said briskly. ‘How will we ever know what you can do unless you try? On that court. At the double, please. And no discussion from any of you, thank you.’
And then something almost miraculous had happened. Isabel’s instinctive panic had resolved itself into an unheard-of focus and energy. She had found herself in the circle with an equally anxious girl who represented no threat, and she had caught the ball, smoothly and without fluffing, every time it came her way, and had put it neatly and cleanly into the net on four separate occasions. She had scored four times. Four. Her side had won, four nil. At the end of the game she had bungled nothing and achieved everything. On the way back from the netball courts to the school buildings, several people had banged her on the shoulder and said nice, congratulatory things, and Libby Guthrie, running past, had even turned to smile and give her a thumbs up. It was the first smile Libby had thrown her way since, since – well, since then.
Isabel stood in the shower, eyes closed, drenched in thankfulness. When she was alone, after, she would text Mum and say with appropriate nonchalance that she had done quite well at netball that day and people seemed to like her a bit, in consequence. She turned so that the water – never hot or fierce enough – could run down her back. Apart from texting Mum, it was going to be quite important not to show anyone that she felt her triumph that afternoon had brought her any kind of salvation. She mustn’t mention it, or even look at all pleased. She must compose herself with all the quiet apology she had been trying to convey recently, and if anyone said anything, or was friendly, she mustn’t leap on them like Beetle if offered a titbit, all wagging enthusiasm. She must, she resolved, just let any rehabilitation the afternoon had brought happen of its own accord.
She turned off the shower. In the next cubicle two people had obviously been showering together, which was strictly forbidden. She recognized their voices – Libby Guthrie and a new girl who everyone was very keen on, on account of her acceptable kinds of prettiness and cleverness and her remarkable prowess as a gymnast. The two were talking in a familiar, breathless way about the boys they were or were not going to allow as friends on Facebook when the new girl said, in her light, attractive voice just faintly spiced with an Australian acce
nt, ‘She was OK, today, wasn’t she?’
‘Who was?’ Libby said. Her voice was slightly muffled, as if she was towelling her hair.
‘Isabel.’
‘Isabel!’
‘Yeah. Well, she was OK, right? Cool score, yeah?’
Libby grunted a reply that Isabel could not catch.
‘Come on,’ the new girl said. ‘Come on. She’s OK, isn’t she? You can’t carry a grudge for ever, can you? She’s a bit pathetic, but she’s OK, right?’
‘What?’
‘I,’ the new girl said in her laconic, offhand way, ‘don’t mind her. Do you?’
There was a pause. In it, Isabel stood, naked and dripping and frozen to the spot.
‘I think,’ Libby Guthrie said at last, ‘that if I were you, and I thought anything as mental as what you’ve just said, I’d keep pretty quiet about it.’
There was the sound of someone being given a shove, and a brief small cry.
‘OK?’ Libby said. ‘Get it?’
The twins were drawing after lunch, at the kitchen table. Flora was drawing her usual tiny, contorted pictures in the corners of sheets of paper, and Tassy her preferred huge abstract scrawls that often swept over the paper’s edge and across on to the table. Alexa, on her way upstairs to distribute ironed laundry among the bedrooms, had left them comfortably bickering about the text from Isabel that she had read out to them. It had been a very factual text about her netball triumph, and at the end she had written, ‘Don’t ring. I’m fine. A bit busy.’
‘She was the winner,’ Tassy said to her sister, kneeling up on her chair in order to be able to use her whole arm for a great swirl of red wax crayon.
Flora, her nose almost on her minute, crabbed scribbling, said nothing but just breathed noisily, as she was wont to do, through her mouth.
‘At football,’ Tassy added.
‘No,’ Flora said.
‘Yes!’
‘No.’
‘Yes, yes, yes! She was the winner at football.’
Alexa paused on the stairs to listen. After a second or two, Flora’s audible breathing stopped long enough for her to say, ‘Neckball.’
‘Football!’
‘Neck—’
There was the sound of a car pulling up outside. Alexa called down, ‘Twins! Daddy! Daddy’s back!’
The Soldier's Wife Page 13