Alexa waited for a moment and then she said to Mel, ‘What’ll you do about that?’
‘About what?’
‘About what the Army wants of you if you stick with Freddie.’
Mel crouched down so that her face was on the same level. ‘Freddie won’t be like that.’
‘He will. He will, he’s a soldier.’
‘No,’ Mel said, ‘they’re not like that now. Of course, there are some who find girls prepared to behave like their mothers. But most of them, if they want a girl with her own life, they’re going to have to accept that we might marry them, but we’re not marrying the Army. And on the whole they do. If I said to Fred that I’d changed my mind and wanted to live on the patch and have a Labrador puppy for Christmas, he’d think I’d gone mental.’
Kate gave Alexa’s arm a clumsy pat. ‘Sorry.’
‘Stop that. Don’t.’
‘And thank you for looking after Gus.’
‘Don’t do that either.’
‘I have to, you’ve been wonderful, you’ve been a life-saver. I expect he’d have been hospitalized or something, if you hadn’t taken him in—’
‘Stop it!’ Alexa shouted. They both looked at her. She put her glass on the floor and then both hands over her face. From behind them she said, ‘He’s gone home. In an awful state. We had … had a kind of scene, him and me. He tried to kiss me, and I yelled at him. Dan doesn’t know.’
‘What?’ Kate said.
Alexa took her hands away. Mel was standing again now.
‘What?’ Kate said again.
‘He was lucky I didn’t slap him.’
‘He tried to kiss you?’
Alexa sighed. ‘Only because he’s missing you. It was nothing to do with me being me. I was just a female mouth in his line of vision.’
‘Oh my God,’ Kate said, flinging herself back against the cushions. ‘I don’t know what to think—’
Mel said unexpectedly, ‘This isn’t about you.’
Kate stared at her.
‘It’s men,’ Mel said. ‘It’s soldiers. It’s all this soldier stuff that messes with their heads.’ She looked at Alexa. ‘You OK?’
Alexa nodded tiredly. She got slowly to her feet. ‘I think I’ll go.’ She glanced at Kate and said, ‘I needn’t have told you.’
‘Why did you?’
‘To show you what a state he’s in. I might understand why you’ve gone, but you’ve got to understand what you’ve done. Not just to Gus, but to us. And don’t say sorry again. Just do something. Do something about Gus.’
Mel went across the room and retrieved Alexa’s coat. She said, holding it out for her to put on, ‘Fred thinks the world of your guy.’ She smiled at Alexa. ‘Come and see me at work. I’ll show you what we do.’
Alexa pulled her coat up round her shoulders. She glanced at Kate, now huddled up on the sofa, knees bent under her chin, holding her bare feet. ‘I get it, you know,’ she said to her. ‘I really do. It’s … it’s just that you have another life to go to, and at the moment I don’t seem to have. I’ve let it slip away, somehow. I’ve …’ She paused and then she said to Mel, ‘Lovely meeting you. And – and, good luck. All I’d say about marrying into the Army is that you actually have to live it to know it. But if you and your generation can change the smallest thing, I’ll be the first one cheering. I just doubt you can, I really, sadly do.’
Mel smiled at her again. She flicked her hair. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘come and see me. OK?’
When Alexa rang to say that she would like to come down to Wimbledon, Eric Riley sent George out to buy flowers. She would not be bringing the twins, she said, because they already had a date to be taken to the zoo, and she hoped that wasn’t very disappointing. Eric, grasping the receiver and raising his voice as if it needed to carry all across London to be heard properly, said she’d be more than welcome and not to worry about the children this time. ‘Not much to offer them here, any road,’ he’d shouted. ‘Two old men and a brew. Better off with the lions and tigers. Dan loved the zoo when he was a nipper.’
George returned with a bunch of pink Peruvian lilies and box of cupcakes. Eric looked at them both dubiously. ‘You sure?’
‘No,’ George said. ‘It was the lady in the shop who said.’
‘You’d get talked into buying anything. No bloody mind of your own.’
They put the lilies in a jug and the cupcakes on a plate that had belonged to Eileen, edged in gold and patterned with violets. Both looked incongruous in Eric’s sitting room.
‘Doesn’t look right.’
‘She won’t care.’
‘She won’t care, but I bloody do. First visit in years and we can’t get it even half right.’
‘Perhaps I should have bought champagne.’
‘Champagne? At bloody coffee time?’
‘I dunno.’
‘No,’ Eric said, ‘you never do. You never bloody do.’
Alexa arrived wearing a tidy mackintosh borrowed from her mother and carrying an elaborate umbrella from the same source, which she left to dry on the communal landing outside Eric’s front door. Eric, afraid it would be nicked, made a fuss about bringing it in and wedging it across his bath under a homemade washing line he did not wish Alexa to see, on which his socks were drying in lugubrious pairs. It was a full ten minutes before the three of them were settled in the sitting room, Alexa next to the Peruvian lilies, and looking, they both observed, weary and distracted. Peaky, Eric said out loud. Alexa had tried to laugh and pushed her hands through her hair and said that sharing a bed with two three-year-olds who were never still wasn’t exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep.
George made tea for his father, and coffee for himself and Alexa. He used his mother’s best teacups, put the milk in a jug and then everything on to a tin tray with a picture of Windsor Castle on it. He was hoping that Eric would let the conversation develop a little and that all of them could settle to being together again for a while, before he made their announcement, but he should have known better. Over sixty years of intermittent life with his father should have taught him that if Eric had something on his mind, something he needed to say, he was unstoppable in saying it.
‘Good heart,’ George’s mother always said of him. ‘Can’t fault him for heart. But he’s got the tact of a bull in a china shop.’
Eric had hardly waited until Alexa’s coffee cup was in her hands. He had taken a fortifying gulp of his own tea and then leaned slightly forward, elbows out and hands on his knees, and said that he and George had come to a decision. George attempted to slow him down, to suggest that a few questions about Dan and the children might be in order first, but Eric had raised a hand to flap him aside as if he was an irritating insect, and had proceeded to talk a little louder and a little faster, almost closing his eyes, the better to focus on saying what he was determined to say.
The thing was, Eric said, they could see that it wasn’t too easy at the moment. None of it. For any of them. Problems all round, as far as he could see, and now Dan wanted promotion and that’d mean a whole new fandangle of moves and courses and whatnot. So he’d put his thinking cap on. And so had George, in so far as he was any bloody use for thinking, and it seemed to them that what Alexa and the children needed was a home, not another godawful quarter that’d be inspected for kicked paint and cracked windows, but a proper home, a house that belonged to them where no one could tell them what bloody colour to paint the walls.
But there was a difficulty. Eric knew that. It was the difficulty that had beset every bloody soldier since the dawn of time. Money. Soldiers were always in debt. Always had been. And it was worse for officers, of course, what with their champagne lifestyles on beer money, keeping up appearances, all that bloody nonsense. He suspected Dan and Alexa had no savings. He didn’t know a soldier with savings, but – and it was a big but – he and George were exceptions. In the last ten years, they’d saved a bit, both of them, because – not to put too fine a point on it – o
f having nothing much to spend it on. They’d always thought they’d go on saving and when they popped their clogs they’d leave whatever they’d saved to Dan and Alexa and the children.
‘But,’ Eric said, grasping his knees and turning his bright-blue gaze directly on Alexa, ‘we’ve decided that you’d have more use for the money now, that you need the money right now, to help buy a house with, doesn’t matter where, so you and the kids, at least, have some stability whatever happens to Dan. So that’s what we’re offering, that’s what we want to do. We’re going to give you the money for a deposit on a house.’
He sat back then, jubilant, the offer out there, fair and square. He looked at George and winked. He looked at Alexa. He was beaming. ‘Well?’ he said.
She hadn’t touched her coffee while he was talking. She didn’t touch it now. Instead she reached out unsteadily to put it down next to the lilies, and the cup rattled in the saucer. And then, without warning and horrifying both of them, she burst into tears.
Jack Dearlove had bought himself a beer and Alexa a glass of white wine. He’d found a good, quiet table at the back of the bar, even with armchairs, and not on the route to the toilets. He thought he might drink his beer quite fast and get another in before Alexa got there, not because he needed to brace himself after the way she’d sounded on the phone, but more because he thought they might be in for what he privately termed a Long and Deep, and he wanted to be able to concentrate on her and not on how much he would like to be able to get up and fetch a second beer.
After all, he hadn’t seen her since that unsuccessful visit to Isabel’s school. They hadn’t even telephoned each other much, partly out of tact on his part, with Dan being home, and partly, if he was honest, because he had been working very hard and also because he had met someone. As tall as Eka, as thin as Eka, but not, mercifully, as commercially valuable as Eka and thus more available. Maia’s availability was something Jack was trying to work on with all the restraint he could muster.
When Alexa walked in, wearing some depressing middle-aged raincoat thing, Jack was rather shocked. She didn’t just look tired, she looked kind of defeated, beaten. And even he could see that her hair needed attention. The whole bar was full of terrific hair, amazing hair (Maia, unlike Eka, had fantastic long straight hair), but Alexa’s just looked dingy.
‘I am very, very pleased to see you,’ Jack said. ‘But I have to say that you don’t look too hot. Lukewarm to off-cold, I’d say. And can I ask what you’re wearing?’
‘It’s my mother’s,’ Alexa said, pulling it off. ‘I don’t have a raincoat. And it was raining.’
‘Ah,’ Jack said. ‘I got you wine.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Drink it quite fast and I’ll get you another.’
Alexa sat down in one of the armchairs. She picked up her wineglass, put it down again, untouched, and said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Come again?’ Jack said.
‘You can’t imagine.’
‘Try me. Actually, let me finish this and get in another and then try me.’
‘I’m so pleased to see you.’
‘No crying, Lex. Do not cry. I do not do women crying, unless it’s after sex and they’re so grateful.’
‘I’m not—’
‘Well, sniff and stop. Go to the loo or something while I get my beer.’
Alexa said, out of the blue, ‘Eric and George offered me the deposit on a house today.’
Jack sat down abruptly in the chair next to hers. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘I know.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I howled my eyes out and said they were completely wonderful but I didn’t know if I could accept it, and they said why not? and I said things were so bad and we simply weren’t communicating and I was at my wits’ end, and Eric said was I going to leave him? and I said I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know anything and then I rushed out and forgot Mum’s umbrella and it was all awful.’ She paused and then she said, ‘And they’d bought cupcakes.’
‘Don’t cry again. You can’t cry over cupcakes.’
Alexa said sadly, ‘They are such lovely men.’
Jack took a gulp of beer. Then he said, ‘You must have terrified them.’
‘I think I did—’
‘Have you rung them since?’
‘No, I—’
‘Alexa,’ Jack said with emphasis. ‘Alexa.’ He leaned forward and peered into her face. ‘Where’s the girl I knew?’
‘I’ve lost her.’
‘Don’t be so self-pitying. Don’t be so fucking sorry for yourself.’
Alexa stared at him. ‘Jack!’
‘Well, I mean it,’ he said. He could feel his face reddening. He could feel something close to rage beginning to boil up inside him. He leaned closer, close enough to speak to her with vehemence without causing drinkers at nearby tables to turn round and stare.
‘Well, Mrs Riley,’ Jack said, ‘you have to decide what love is, really, don’t you? I mean, is it about loving Dan and wanting him to have whatever he seems to need to make him feel whole, or is it about being loved yourself? And if it’s the latter, and only, honestly, the latter, what makes you need to put that first?’
Alexa had pulled back a little. When he finished speaking, she said in a much more decided voice, ‘And why just me? Why doesn’t everything you’ve just said apply to Dan?’
‘That’s better.’
‘But why?’
‘It does apply. It just manifests itself differently. I expect the poor bugger’d like to slit his wrists right now.’
‘Jack,’ Alexa said, ‘what is all this about?’
Jack inspected his beer bottle. There was about half an inch left. ‘Decisions. Decisions. You want a house? OK, you go for it. You want a job, you find one. You want Isabel out of that school, take her. You want Dan to be happy, stop wanting him to behave like some bloody metrosexual touchy-feely New Man fantasy. You like him being a soldier. You think being a soldier is sexy. You think Dan is sexy for being a soldier. No,’ he said, holding up a hand and getting to his feet. ‘No. You are not saying another word. I’m sick of them. I’m sick of all this whiny, going-round-and-round-the-bloody-houses, girly thinking-aloud claptrap. I am going to the bar to get another drink. You are going to drink your wine and ring those poor Rileys and say sorry for behaving like a lunatic, and when I come back – no, no, don’t speak, don’t utter – I want to do the talking. I’m going to talk and you are going to listen. I’ve got something to tell you. And she’s called Maia.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Stephanie Marshall, junior physiotherapist at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court, not far from Epsom Racecourse, was crossing the staff car park on her way to her own car when she saw him. He was obviously services, being in khaki trousers and an epauletted ribbed sweater, but he was sitting under a tree on the ground and he didn’t seem to have a coat, and it was, after all, late November, and although it was quite a nice day, it wasn’t the right kind of day or weather for sitting outside and on the ground.
Stephanie had joined Headley Court when the new rehabilitation wing had opened. Eight million, it had cost, but it had this fantastic twenty-five-metre hydrotherapy pool, with a floor you could raise and lower, and generally amazing facilities. And the guys were amazing, too. And the girls. It was a girl she had been working with that afternoon, Captain Patsy Philp, twenty-five years old and a double amputee with only one leg and one hand. There’d been two physios with her, one on each side, getting her walking for a news team who’d come down from London with television cameras. The reporters had watched her for a while and then they’d asked her how she felt. She feels like shit, Stephanie wanted to say, it’s harder than you can possibly imagine, you stupid boys, thinking you’re doing your bit by just wearing Help the Heroes T-shirts, but Patsy had managed a smile and had said, with no evident show of emotion, ‘It’s tricky. It’ll take more than a couple of weeks b
efore I’m running upstairs again.’
Stephanie had wanted to hit the TV crew. It made you like that, working here. It made you so proud and defensive of the people you were treating, and if you weren’t careful so contemptuous of all the civvy people just waltzing about taking their arms and legs for granted. There’d been no service people in her family, none at all, until her brother got this bee in his bonnet about joining the RAF, and now here he was at Headley Court, working in the prosthetics workshop, and because of him, she was here too, and it had changed her life, it really had. It had completely changed her way of thinking.
Which was why she wasn’t just going to ignore that bloke sitting on the ground under a tree. She’d seen enough, now, to know that not all the wounds were visible. They’d got people in now who couldn’t remember anything or decide anything, bleeds to the brain, you name it. She’d swung her car keys in her hand so that their jingle would alert him to her approach and went towards him, and when she was only a yard or so from him, he jerked up and on to his feet as if he’d been almost asleep or something and was reacting to a trained instinct.
‘It’s OK,’ Stephanie said. She was glad her coat was open, showing him her white medical tunic underneath. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were all right.’
He was a good-looking bloke, tall, fortyish probably. He wasn’t wearing a rank slide or anything, but he’d be an officer of some kind, Stephanie reckoned – major, probably. He seemed a bit dazed.
She said again, ‘It’s OK. It’s just that we’re used to people needing a bit of help, here. I was making sure you didn’t. That’s all.’
He smiled at her at last. He seemed to be focussing a bit better. He said, ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. I was just – digesting what I’d seen in there. That’s all.’
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