The Soldier's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Maths,’ she wrote. ‘Gotta go.’

  She put her phone back in her pocket and unlatched the cubicle door. There was nobody by the washbasins and it was quiet, except for the sound of someone peeing from a cubicle at the far end. Isabel paused to lean over a washbasin and examine herself in the mirror. Nobody would ever, ever, in a million years, think she was pretty. Would they?

  Lying in Isabel’s bed, under a washed-out duvet cover from Isabel’s childhood, appliquéd with an anthropomorphized mouse dressed as a ballerina, Morgan Longworth contemplated an extraordinary evening. When he’d arrived, unannounced as planned, he’d found his soldier son-in-law lying on the floor under a mound of plush animals, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, while his twin granddaughters – what was the real situation with Flora and her spectacles? – conducted some sort of stately ritual with a plastic tea set over and around his body. Dan had sprung up, scattering hippos and pandas, and Morgan had found himself being welcomed with the bemused amazement he would have expected had he just landed from Mars. He had shaken Dan’s hand, kissed the twins, patted Beetle’s head, explained that this visit was merely an impulse rather than an emergency of any kind, and indicated that a cup of tea would be very welcome after the drive from London.

  He had asked where Alexa was. Dan said, as if there was nothing to be inferred from it, that she was sleeping.

  ‘Like this!’ said Tassy, casting herself down on the floor to demonstrate.

  ‘Like this!’ Flora shouted, copying her.

  Dan made tea and offered his father-in-law some toast. Morgan had declined the toast, and had sat at the kitchen table watching while Dan settled the twins in their chairs and embarked upon the complicated business – which Morgan remembered as being, in his experience, infinitely simpler and less messy – of special mugs for milk, and the right plastic plates, and toast and butter and the correct jam – no, not that one, not that one, the red one, the red – and having the toast cut into the exact and only shapes in which it could possibly be eaten. What, Morgan wondered, could be going on in Dan’s head, cutting toast into stamp-sized squares? How, exactly, did one change mental gears so entirely fundamentally? He had taken a swallow of tea and cleared his throat. ‘Might – might we wake Alexa, do you think?’

  When Dan had gone upstairs with a cup and saucer – Morgan noticed that his hand had hovered over, and rejected, a mug – the twins had plainly felt it was their duty to entertain him.

  ‘Are you,’ Tassy had said, her mouth full of toast, ‘the granddad?’

  ‘I am indeed,’ Morgan said. ‘I am one of your two grandfathers. You know me perfectly well.’

  Flora said conversationally, ignoring his last remark, ‘We have one called Eric and one called George.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘So you,’ Flora said, jam now even on her spectacles, ‘can be the spare one.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Are you called Eric?’

  ‘No,’ Morgan said. ‘My name is Morgan. You know that. I am Grandfather Morgan.’

  For some reason, the twins had found this wildly funny. They had looked at each other and collapsed laughing, Tassy’s mouth still packed with toast. Morgan had felt unaccountably foolish, somehow, sitting at the other end of the table in solitary and ridiculous state with his tea, so he had got up and brought a chair to sit between the twins and suggested that they stopped cackling and finished their toast.

  Flora had turned her single visible blue eye on him. ‘Gruffalo Morgan!’ she said, entranced by her own wit and daring, and it had seemed to Morgan that the only option open to him was to join in, so that when Alexa appeared, escorted by Dan with evident solicitude, they were all three laughing and, Morgan realized later, examining the sleeves of his cashmere cardigan, lightly and universally jammy.

  Alexa didn’t look well. She seemed surprised to see him, but not that surprised, giving the impression that she was in a place that was almost beyond the capacity for reaction. Morgan explained his impulsive wish to see them all, and when Alexa said where’s Mum, replied untruthfully that she had a migraine and had decided to go to bed as the best – indeed, the only – way to defeat it. Alexa seemed to accept what he said in much the same way as she accepted his being there, and then she absentmindedly helped herself to a square of Tassy’s toast, and Tassy shrieked in protest, precipitating one of those scenes that Morgan would later describe to Elaine as being absolutely foreign to the parents of only children. For one thing, two protesting children make twice as much noise as one.

  What followed had been, to begin with, rather enjoyable. Dan had made a covert phone call or two, and then he had suggested that Morgan might like to meet his CO and had driven him off to the garrison – behind the wire, no less – to a large Edwardian building called Ranpur House, where the CO and his pretty wife had been extremely welcoming and provided whisky and soda in a room – further memo to tell Elaine – that could only have belonged to a soldier, with pictures hung in completely straight lines and miniature cannons on the mantelpiece. His whisky had been handed to him in a cut-glass tumbler of satisfactory weight, an agreeable dog had decorated the hearthrug and the conversation took the comfortable turn of allowing him to pontificate – self-deprecatingly – on foreign affairs without feeling the constraint of Elaine’s publicly loyal but privately sceptical eye upon him. When they finally left, Colonel Mackenzie had said to Dan, ‘Love to the lovely Alexa,’ and Mary Mackenzie had added, almost too eagerly, ‘Oh mine, too!’ and Dan had smiled in an easy, slightly proudly proprietorial way that indicated – seemed to indicate, anyway – that he knew himself to be a lucky man in untroubled possession of a complete jewel.

  When they returned to the Quadrant, however, the jewel was not in evidence. The kitchen table was laid – rather sketchily, to Morgan’s eye – for supper, and there was a pan or two on the hob, but Alexa was absent. Dan appeared to be entirely undisconcerted by this, and settled his father-in-law in the sitting room with a newspaper before vanishing upstairs. It was twenty minutes or so before Alexa appeared in the doorway and said that it wasn’t much, she was afraid, but that supper was ready.

  Morgan got to his feet. ‘Darling. You weren’t expecting me—’

  ‘It’s just ham and salad, really. Sorry.’

  ‘I didn’t come for food. Don’t be sorry. I came to see you.’

  Alexa had looked at him for a moment, as if weighing something up. Then she said, ‘I know. All the same.’

  He took her elbow, as if to escort her to the kitchen. He said encouragingly, ‘And it’s been so good to catch up with Dan for a bit.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s told me a lot of what went on. One wishes it didn’t look so hopeless, but of course, history is against us.’

  Alexa had said nothing further. In the kitchen, Dan was uncorking wine and there were candles on the table, and a bowl of potatoes from which steam was gently rising.

  ‘Potatoes!’ Morgan said, in the tone of voice he might use to say ‘Caviar!’

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ Alexa said despairingly.

  ‘A rare treat,’ Morgan said, ‘I promise you. Your mother never buys them. No potatoes, no cream, no white bread, no biscuits.’

  Dan pulled out a chair for him. He said, too heartily, ‘Welcome to Liberty Hall, then, Morgan!’

  And then – well, then an atmosphere had descended on the table as chilling as if a miasma of dry ice had mysteriously been pumped into the room. His own voice, endeavouring to cajole or encourage his daughter and son-in-law into conviviality, sounded ever more forced, and the effort to make more noise than the sound of knives and forks on plates grew unbearable. He had been full of theoretical initiatives on the journey down, buoyed up by the conviction that the situation on the ground would prove infinitely more tractable than it appeared from the anxious distance of London, but now that he was here, he felt both out of his depth and painfully without ideas or ammunition. The walls of silence he was ba
ttling were, plainly, not excluding him, but they were manifestly there between Alexa and Dan, and he simply had no idea how to penetrate them. He ate his ham, praised the potatoes again, drank his wine and harangued himself, silently, for having had the ludicrously misguided notion that he would be a more effective negotiator without Elaine. Spearing a piece of underripe tomato with his fork, he wished with all his being that she would suddenly materialize, at this terrible meal, to help him out. Goaded by the futility of this wish and by the sight of his daughter pushing food round her plate like a turbulent child, he said suddenly to her, ‘Why don’t you come up to London?’

  Her head jerked up. ‘What?’

  ‘Mum and I would love it. Please do. Just for a night or two. Come to London.’

  Alexa gazed at him. Then, after a moment or two, she switched her gaze to Dan. She said – too peremptorily, Morgan thought – ‘Can you look after the twins for a couple of days?’

  Dan shifted very slightly in his chair. He picked up his wine glass and said to his father-in-law rather than to his wife, ‘I was planning to go to Headley Court this week.’

  ‘Headley Court?’ said Morgan.

  ‘Yes. To see some of our boys who got invalided out, the last six months—’

  ‘Terrible injuries,’ Alexa said.

  Morgan did not like her tone. He said to Dan, ‘This week?’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘With Gus Melville,’ Alexa said to her father.

  Dan muttered, ‘I could always go alone.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alexa said, ‘no need for that, I’m sure.’

  Morgan hesitated. He thought of the spare bedroom in the flat at Marylebone Road with its padded coat hangers and monogrammed bed linen. He turned to his daughter. ‘I meant, darling, why don’t you and the twins come? We don’t see anything like enough of you, as it is. You can come back to London with me. I can drive you all.’

  Alexa looked at Dan again. She said to him, still hardly pleasantly, ‘Could you manage to look after Beetle, do you think?’

  He didn’t look back. He emptied his wineglass and set it back on the table with a slight bang. He said tersely, ‘Of course.’

  Alexa turned to look at her father. She gave him a wide smile, possibly the first smile of the evening, even if it lacked conviction. ‘We’d love to,’ she said.

  And now here he was, under the mouse ballerina duvet, conscious of a great external stillness – how used he was, he thought, to the perpetual hum of London – and an immense internal turmoil. There was no sound from the other side of the bedroom wall, only a distinct absence of noise that managed somehow to convey tension rather than slumber, and no sound either from that strange, enclosed, military world outside his window. In the room at the other end of the landing, his small granddaughters were sleeping with the abandonment of the very young. Below, in the kitchen, Beetle would be curled up tidily in his basket. In London, Elaine would no doubt also be sleeping, possibly in the centre of their bed rather than on her accustomed half, in one of the cream silk nightshirts he liked to buy her from a shirtmaker in Jermyn Street, and somewhere twenty miles away, his oldest granddaughter, Isabel, was, he hoped, not awake and miserable in a school dormitory that did not, he fervently trusted, resemble in any way the one he’d had to endure over sixty years ago in a scarcely heated preparatory school in Berkshire. He had tried to introduce the topic of Isabel at supper, and Alexa had merely said, in a tone that encouraged nobody to pursue the matter, that he had better ask Dan, as Dan had taken charge of the situation now and would shortly come up with a solution. Dan had looked very much as if nobody should ask him anything further on any topic whatsoever, so Morgan had simply reiterated how pleased Elaine would be at the news that Alexa and the twins were coming to London, and had then got to his feet and begun to stack the plates on the table as an indication of how much he now wished the evening to be over.

  Which it was, but without the subsequent balm of sleep. He turned restlessly on to his side. Could one take three-year-olds to Madame Tussaud’s? The zoo, certainly. The penguins would enchant them. Come to think of it, the penguins would enchant him, too. As, indeed, did the prospect of the company of the twins and of manageable little expeditions – the tops of buses, the London Eye, cafés serving strawberry milk shakes. He thought even the cream sofas could be accommodated. And, perhaps, alone with Alexa, he could persuade her to talk more. Perhaps, without each other, she and Dan could find a way – forward? Back? Around, even, whatever was the matter?

  He picked up his wristwatch from the bedside table and peered at the illuminated dial. Two twenty-two. He put the watch down and closed his eyes with resolution. If only – if only the two of them hadn’t looked, that evening, in their various ways, so lonely.

  ‘I really don’t want to talk about it any more,’ Alexa said.

  She was sitting on the edge of their unmade bed with her back to him, struggling into a T-shirt. Half-dressed himself, Dan stood, a sock in one hand, and watched her. Her pale, smooth back, lightly sprinkled with small dark moles, made him ache to look at. It was so familiar – so vulnerable, somehow – and at the moment completely out of bounds as far as he was concerned. If he knelt on the bed, as he would have liked to do, and touched her, or kissed her shoulder just beside the groove where her bra strap cut very slightly into her flesh, she would probably hit him.

  He backed against the nearest wall and lifted his bare foot to pull his sock on. ‘I haven’t gone back on anything,’ he said. ‘I’m still working on the Isabel thing. And I did want to take you away, you and the twins. I did. I do.’

  Alexa pulled the T-shirt over her head. She said, not turning, ‘And then you make this plan with Gus.’

  ‘I haven’t made it yet.’

  ‘And you spring this whole Headley Court thing on me in front of my father, so I can’t possibly say anything without looking completely heartless.’

  Dan lowered his foot to the floor. He said sadly, ‘That was just a bad mistake.’

  Alexa picked up the sweater that lay on the bed beside her and began to turn it impatiently to find the way in.

  ‘Lex.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Dan said, ‘maybe this is all for the best.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘You going to London for a bit. Me sorting my head out on my own.’

  ‘You won’t be on your own,’ Alexa said. She pushed her arms down the sleeves of her sweater. ‘You’ll go straight round to Gus and nothing will progress one millimetre.’

  Dan came round until he was standing in front of her. ‘What’s Gus got to do with it?’

  Alexa pulled the sweater over her head. She pushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘You tell me.’

  Dan bent a little so that he could look at her more closely. ‘No, you tell me.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Alexa said. ‘Your mate, your problem.’

  She looked away. Dan waited a moment, and then he said, in a voice that was nothing like as conciliatory as before, ‘Lex, what did you say to him?’

  Gus looked dreadful. He hadn’t shaved, and he was wearing a crumpled pair of desert combats with a manky zip-up pullover, and he had no shoes on, only heavy ribbed socks with threadbare heels. His house didn’t look much better. He hadn’t pulled the sitting-room curtains back, and all the sofa cushions were as dented as if someone had slept on them, and there was a slew of food cartons and bottles and cans across the kitchen table. There was even, Dan noticed, a beer can floating in the dog’s water bowl. The dog itself, a chocolate-coloured Labrador, was penned in the outside kennel, wearing the pained expression of one who is being punished for something it never entered its head to do.

  ‘Oh, mate,’ Dan said, looking in through the sitting-room door at the desolation, ‘I knew you shouldn’t have come back alone.’

  Gus looked past him at the sofa. ‘Didn’t quite make it to bed last night. Meant to. Must have passed out.’

  Dan took his arm. ‘Come on, now. Come o
n. Let’s sort you. Let’s clear up a bit.’

  Gus took his arm away. ‘You’re a champ, Dan. But no. No, thank you. I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘Better with two. Quicker.’

  ‘No,’ Gus said. ‘No. No, thank you.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘No!’ Gus shouted. He rubbed his hand over his chin. ‘No. Sorry. Thank you. My mess, my problem. I’ll sort it. I’ll shower and shave and sort it.’

  Dan turned from the sitting-room doorway. ‘As you wish, mate.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Gus said.

  Dan raised a deprecating hand. ‘No problem, Gus.’

  ‘I owe you,’ Gus said, slightly desperately, ‘too much already.’

  ‘No, you bloody don’t. Listen. I have a plan.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I have a plan,’ Dan said, ‘to go up to Headley Court. You and me. Alexa’s taking the twins up to London to see her parents for a day or two, so I thought we could use the time—’ He broke off. Gus was staring at him. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Why,’ Gus said, ‘aren’t you going to London?’

  ‘I wasn’t asked. There isn’t room.’

  ‘Why is she going to London without you?’

  Dan took hold of Gus’s arm again. ‘Man, it’s no big deal. She wants to take the twins away.’

  ‘I thought you were taking them away!’

  Dan let go. He put his hands in his pockets. He said shortly, ‘She doesn’t want that.’

  ‘Oh, mate.’

  ‘So I have a day or two to kick my heels. OK? You and me to Epsom.’

  Gus said sadly, not looking at him, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t? What else have you got to do?’

  Gus leaned against the nearest wall. His eyes were bloodshot, Dan noticed, his breath was awful. He said, averting his gaze, ‘Look, I can’t come with you, and that’s that. I can’t explain, but I can’t. You’ll have to accept it. I’ll sort myself out here, you’ll see. I’ll get a grip.’

  Dan moved a little closer. ‘Gus?’