Gus made a sudden movement, ducked as if he was avoiding Dan in some way, and bolted into the kitchen. Dan followed him. ‘Gus?’
He was leaning against the fridge, the door of which was speckled with tiny black magnetic letters. Above his shoulder Dan could read a message, probably left by one of his sons. ‘Welcome Home Dad’ it read. ‘We are so proud!’ The ‘proud’ was in capital letters.
‘Gus, come on. Get yourself decent and we’ll go for a beer. Nothing we can’t sort that way. You know us!’
Gus rolled himself against the fridge door until his back was turned to Dan and his forehead was resting on the smooth enamelled surface. Then he said, his voice slightly strangled by his position, ‘You don’t know me.’
Alexa had left the house randomly tidy. There was no washing up in the sink, and the beds were made, but there was a scattering of toys here and there, and little heaps of dirty laundry, and trails of crumbs on the kitchen table, and a jar of honey, open, with a knife stuck in it.
None of these things, Dan thought, would signify anything in themselves. None of them indicated anything more than the normal hurly burly of family life with three children and a dog – in equally normal times. But these times were not normal. What had been merely disorientating about coming home had suddenly, like some hideous genie billowing from a lamp, expanded into a horrible and frightening scenario that he had no idea, right now, how to manage. The mild disorder Alexa had left behind assumed, in his present frame of mind, an unpleasant sense of foreboding, as if the crumbs and the knife in the honey were messages of defiance, of – of distance. Add all that to Gus’s behaviour and his outright rejection of comradeship, companionship, an hour ago, and there seemed little that was reliably comforting at this precise moment except that dear old dog, watching patiently in his basket for Dan to suggest that they might do something – anything – together.
‘Give me ten minutes,’ Dan said to Beetle.
He went purposefully across the kitchen and switched on the kettle. Then he swept the crumbs off the table into his hand, removed the knife from the honey jar and dropped both into the sink. He picked up a hair slide from the floor, and a small plastic rabbit wearing nothing but a flowered apron, looked at both for a moment and put them down on the table with idiotic reverence. Two pieces of modern expendable trash, but trash that belonged to the twins. His twins. Who were now in the back of their grandfather’s car, in the seats that usually lived in the back of his car, being driven away from him to London. And he was here, in his military married quarter, on his own.
He made a mug of tea and carried it into the sitting room, Beetle following at a respectful distance. He sat down on the sofa, picked up the remote control, aimed it at the television, and dropped it again. It was awful, being here alone, awful, and he’d been in the house for fifteen minutes. He had the night to get through, and the next two nights, never mind the days, never mind the distraction of a run across to Headley Court. He put his tea down on the carpet by his feet and put his head in his hands.
He’d had a conversation one night, in Helmand, with Mack, after a gruelling day which they had got through by some miracle without anyone losing a limb – or a life. They were exhausted, both of them, and exhilarated, propped against ammunition crates while the stars rose and the temperature dropped in the sudden desert night.
‘They’re so good,’ Dan had said of the men. ‘So good. Just making what they need out of what they have.’
There’d been a short silence and then Mack had said ruefully, ‘And they worry that they may have been ruined for normal life.’
It had been an even longer time, Dan remembered, before he could say half-jokingly, emboldened by the strange intimacy and relief of the moment, ‘Well, have we been?’
Had he been? He raised his head slowly and looked about him. This room had been made as it was by the efforts of someone else, not him. But because of him. ‘Because of you,’ Isabel had said, over and over. ‘You made our lives like this! You sort it.’ His brain felt like mush. Where was that clarity and purpose of thinking that had carried him through all the months away, the gorgeous adrenaline rush of blood draining out of the organs and flooding the heart and brain and muscles, until you quite saw how Atlas could hold up the heavens as if they weighed no more than a blanket. Nothing like it. Nothing.
He stood up abruptly, knocking his tea over. Beetle tensed from his waiting and hoping position just inside the door. Dan aimed a violent, pointless kick at his mug and watched it shatter messily in the fireplace.
‘Leave it,’ he said to Beetle. ‘We’re going for a walk.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Just being able to walk to the Tube station was exhilarating. Exhilarating but uneasy too, complicated by old feelings of guilt and new ones of disorientation, plus an apprehension that she would shortly wake from this bizarre dream and find herself back in the kitchen at Larkford, with the domestic machine waiting to be kick-started and a shopping list yet again in her head.
The twins, to her astonishment, had agreed to her going out. In fact, disconcertingly, they had agreed with alacrity, and she had left them actually in her parents’ bed, in their pyjamas, with their hair brushed, being read to by her father. In the kitchen, her mother had been stacking the dishwasher with plates that had been very nearly entirely cleaned of supper. Her parents were, no doubt about it, glowing with undisguised triumph. Twenty-four hours in London with a few grandparental rules and regulations and hey presto, darling but insufficiently insistent daughter, two good little girls who did not have to be told more than twice not to jump on the sofas, now did they?
‘Enjoy yourself, darling,’ Elaine said. ‘Time off at last. You could do with it.’
She had hardly looked up as she spoke. And the twins had waved only sketchily from their nest of enormous adult pillows. They certainly hadn’t cried, or begged her to stay, and when Dan had rung earlier to say goodnight to them, they had been rather languid and offhand with him, as if a single day of rides in taxis and visits to cafés serving chocolate milk had already ruined them for the dowdy merits of the everyday.
‘Are you OK?’ Alexa said to Dan, almost out of habit.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’m fine.’
‘What are you doing?’
There was a brief pause and then he said, ‘Clearing up. Sorting out. Walking Beetle.’
‘He’ll love that.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m – I’m fine, too. We went on the London Eye. They adored it. They were dancing, so happy. And now I’m, well, I’m going to meet Freddie Stanford’s girlfriend.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘She asked me,’ Alexa said.
‘You girls,’ Dan said. He was clearly trying to sound indulgent. ‘You and your network.’
‘Well. Yes.’
‘And are you seeing Jack?’
‘Not,’ Alexa said, ‘that I know of.’
Now walking towards Great Portland Street Tube station, she endeavoured to allow the exhilaration of her brief and unaccustomed liberty to overcome the guilt of not being quite straight with Dan. She was indeed going to meet Freddie Stanford’s girlfriend, in Freddie Stanford’s girlfriend’s flat, but Kate Melville would be there too, of course, and it was with Kate that she had made the plan. And although she had not yet made a plan to see Jack, she intended to, and had already left a message for him to say so. Three nights in London. Two complete days. And the second day, as far as the twins were concerned, had already been commandeered by her parents. They were planning to take the girls to the zoo, they said, and although it would be lovely, of course, if she came too, she was not to feel she had to. The licence this conferred was both heady and confusing.
‘It’s so weird,’ she planned to say to Jack, ‘to be given freedom and not know what to do with it.’ And he would reply, reassuringly, she was sure, ‘You, Mrs R, are just thoroughly out of practice!’
Mel Cooper, Freddie Stanford’s girlfriend, had said take any old train going east to King’s Cross, then take the Piccadilly Line south to Holborn, and it’s ten minutes’ walk to my dad’s flat. Mel’s father, a barrister and a member of Gray’s Inn, had taken a job in Hong Kong for three years – very lucrative, his daughter said – and left his flat, in an undistinguished postwar building off Theobald’s Road, for Mel to use in his absence. It was there, in the second bedroom occupied by not much more than a bed and Mel’s father’s antiquated exercise bike, that Kate Melville was now living, she said that morning on the phone to Alexa, while she looked for a flat for herself and the boys.
‘Won’t they stay where they are?’ Alexa said tentatively, hardly liking even to consider the question, let alone ask it. ‘At school, I mean?’
‘No,’ Kate said. She sounded rather more like her old self, practical and decided. ‘No, with knobs on. If I’m the one who leaves and the Army goes on paying the fees, then the children, in their eyes, belong to Gus. I’m not having that. I’m not stopping him seeing them, but he can’t be the main carer. He never has been and he can’t start now.’
Alexa had pursued the conversation no further then, standing wedged between the bed and the window in her parents’ spare bedroom. They’d all three slept in that bed the night before, and however unsettled it had been, however often she had been woken by the twins’ apparent need to sleep horizontally across the bed with their feet in her face, it had been, strangely, a relief. When she opened her eyes at intervals and saw the coppery night-time glow of London round the edges of the curtains, rather than the blank black darkness of Wiltshire, she had felt nothing but a sense of a burden being lifted.
She felt the same now, walking up Procter Street and Drake Street towards Theobald’s Road. If she could set aside her feelings about Dan and somehow manage to banish, just for a few hours, the toothache of anxiety about Isabel, she could, perhaps, be for this evening the person she really was, under all the onion layers of relativity in her life. She would, she thought, stop somewhere and buy wine and flowers. Eight o’clock at night, and there were places still open all around her, selling wine and flowers. Life, she thought, needn’t stop just because darkness had fallen. Any kind of darkness, in fact.
Mel Cooper was as tall as Alexa, with modishly lavish hair falling glossily over her shoulders. She was wearing knee boots and a brief knitted dress, and Kate, already holding a glass of wine when Alexa arrived, was not in her usual uniform of a purposeful dark skirt suit, but instead in leggings and a tunic, with her hair skewered on top of her head with a couple of scarlet slides. It was, Alexa thought, shedding her coat, handing over the roses and the bottle, like stepping into a women’s-magazine prototype of girl bonding: soft lights, some kind of gentle folk rock playing, a big sofa, wine glasses, a fat candle burning in a miniature bucket. It wasn’t at all like evenings in Larkford, even in Franny’s kitchen or Mo’s sitting room, however welcoming both might be. In their case, the women were all together because being together was dictated by an absence. In their conversations, however supportive or confiding they were, the men who were not there but whose occupations caused their women and children to be there pervaded the gatherings like shadows, present even if never or scarcely mentioned. Here, in this undistinguished and functional urban flat, any indication that it belonged to an absent man was obliterated by the life of the current occupant. She lived here in her own right, and by that same right had invited her boyfriend’s senior officer’s estranged wife to stay for a few weeks. The military hierarchy inherent in the whole thing plainly meant nothing to her, Alexa was to discover, any more than Freddie’s devotion to his troop did. She came forward, smiling a wide and confident smile, took Alexa’s coat from her, said, ‘Hi, I’m Mel,’ and managed, by the very way she moved, to indicate that there would be no codes of conduct here, merely an undemanding and satisfying female evening together.
‘Wow,’ Alexa said admiringly, looking at her.
Mel laughed. From the sofa, from which she had not risen to greet Alexa, Kate said, ‘I told you Freddie had great taste.’
Alexa looked around her. ‘This is so nice.’
‘My father,’ Mel said, ‘has no eye for anything beyond books and music. He wouldn’t even notice if I painted the whole place pink. All the same, I’ve restricted myself to just this room.’
‘Some pink.’
‘Freddie hates it.’
‘It doesn’t exactly seem to stop him coming!’ Kate said from the sofa.
She had her shoes off, Alexa noticed, and her feet were bare, the toenails painted almost black. Alexa said to her uncertainly, ‘You look great.’
Kate patted the sofa cushion beside her. ‘Come and sit down. I’m sorry I was so awful the—’
Alexa made a hurried, dismissive gesture, cutting her off. ‘You weren’t.’
‘I was. I was wild with rage and I had no business taking it out on you.’
‘Here,’ Mel said. She was holding out a glass of wine to Alexa. Alexa took it and sat down, not entirely relaxedly, next to Kate’s gothic toenails.
‘Where do we start?’ she said.
‘I was saying sorry,’ Kate said.
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Alexa said. ‘I suppose I’m still adjusting, rather—’
‘To being out of there?’
‘You make it sound like a prison.’
‘Well,’ Mel said easily, folding herself up into an armchair, ‘it’s not a prison exactly, but it’s certainly different.’
Alexa edged back against the sofa cushions. She said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at Larkford.’
Mel ran a hand through her hair and let it fall across her face again. ‘No. You wouldn’t have. Freddie adores it, of course, but it’s not for me. Not in any way.’ She paused, and laughed, and then she said, ‘So not,’ and took a swallow of wine.
Alexa said, ‘Then how did you meet Kate?’
‘Here,’ Kate said. ‘In London.’
‘London?’
‘Work,’ Mel said. ‘I went to talk to her charity.’
‘You—’
‘I work in psychiatry,’ Mel said. ‘At the education and training centre of the Royal College. We go and talk to people about our training courses. I went to talk to Kate.’
Alexa glanced at Kate. Kate was looking at Mel.
Kate said casually, ‘She was great.’ She stretched herself on the sofa in a way Alexa had never seen her do before, easy and deliberate. ‘We had coffee afterwards,’ she said, ‘and the soldier stuff just came out, didn’t it?’
‘My friends can’t believe it,’ Mel said. ‘Me, dating a soldier! I met him at a wedding. A complete classic, meeting a man at someone else’s wedding. I said, at first, no way, soldier boy, but then he turns out to be really bright and really well-read, in fact, he’d be pretty perfect if he wasn’t obsessed with this Army thing.’
Kate looked at Alexa. She said, smiling, ‘Would you like to say, what a surprise?’
Alexa didn’t look back. Instead, she said to Mel, in a voice she knew betrayed her eagerness, ‘So what will you do about it, this Army thing?’
Mel tossed her hair back again. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘He can go and play soldiers. I’m staying here. I had a look at that camp and I thought, no way, Melanie, no way are you going to live like that. We had dinner with some of them,’ – she looked at Kate – ‘you know, Colonel Macsomebody.’
‘Mackenzie.’
‘And they were sweet and lovely, but it was, like, out of the Ark, and everyone was talking in this weird language, and all the wives kind of knowing their place, all in order of rank and stuff, I mean archaic. I said to Fred afterwards, if we have a future, babes, it’ll be in London, or at least somewhere I can work. I didn’t get a degree to moulder on Salisbury Plain being a Stepford wife who’s thrilled when some high-up notices her. I mean, no thank you.’
Kate said comfortably to
Alexa, ‘D’you want to hit her?’
Alexa said nothing.
Mel smiled at her. ‘Kate says you’re brilliant at it.’
‘Only,’ Alexa said, unable to keep a flash of temper out of her voice, ‘because she’s feeling guilty—’
‘I am not!’
‘Well, then,’ Alexa said, ‘show a little decent remorse.’
‘About what?’
Alexa looked at her glass. ‘About what you left behind.’
Kate sighed, and pushed herself a little more upright. ‘OK, then,’ she said. ‘How’s Gus?’
Alexa went on looking at her glass. She said, deliberately unhelpful, ‘How do you think?’
There was a pause. Mel quietly sat more upright too. Kate said, less comfortably, ‘I can’t be his mother, you know.’
‘There’s a difference,’ Alexa said sharply, ‘between loyalty and mothering.’
‘I have been loyal,’ Kate said. ‘There isn’t another man. That was just a couple of dinners.’
‘Gus doesn’t think so. He thinks it was much more. You haven’t bothered to give him the peace of mind of knowing that much at least, have you?’
Kate looked at Mel. She said sardonically, ‘I told you, didn’t I? The perfect Army wife.’
Mel didn’t reply. She leaned forward and said to Alexa, ‘You took him in, didn’t you?’
Alexa nodded. Mel said to Kate, ‘When you dump someone, you leave a lot of work for other people to do, you know.’
Kate bent forward suddenly, her forehead almost touching her knees. Alexa said, bending too, to see her, ‘Are you all right?’
Kate brought her free hand to her eyes. Her shoulders were shaking slightly.
Mel got out of her chair and came across to the two of them. She said to Kate, ‘Was it just the Army?’
Kate said to her knees, ‘He’s mad about it. It’s his whole life.’
‘He’s mad about you,’ Alexa said.
‘Then why take me for granted?’ Kate cried. She sat up abruptly and swung to look at Alexa. ‘And before you tell me he didn’t, he did. Just as Dan takes you. What they do is paramount. The country loves them for it, the media praises them for it, they’re in a win-win situation just by being in uniform with a dirty, dangerous job to do. But what about us? This isn’t the fucking nineteenth century! We’re educated women with a contribution to make and the Army just doesn’t care how many of us it … wastes.’
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