The Soldier's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘In their own words,’ Stephanie said, ‘they’re awesome.’

  He said, ‘That’s what they say about all of you.’

  She made a deprecating gesture. She said, ‘Well, if you’re OK—’

  ‘I am. Thank you. I am.’

  ‘D’you have friends in there?’

  ‘Two of my men. Or, at least, men I know.’

  ‘They’re lucky to be in there.’

  ‘Don’t I know it.’

  She took a step back. She made a little rattling farewell gesture with her car keys. ‘I’ll let you get on, then.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She smiled up at him. ‘Take care,’ she said.

  George had done something he hadn’t done in years. He’d bought a bottle of whisky – it had some pantomime Scottish name but Lord knows, at that price, what it was made from, or where. He’d taken it home, and was sitting in his only and hardly comfortable armchair with his shoes off and the television tuned to a channel he would have died rather than admit to watching, drinking steadily.

  He wasn’t, at least, drinking straight out of the bottle. He had fetched a glass from the cupboard in his bleakly orderly kitchenette, a thick, cheap tumbler that had come free with something or other – the equally cheap microwave probably – and had poured the first slug out of the bottle and added a measure of water. Then it became too much of a bother to get up and walk six paces to the tap for more water, so he just sloshed the whisky into the tumbler undiluted, and stared at the pitiful, evidently cheaply made daytime quiz show in front of him, and tried to fight off the memories that always engulfed him when he let himself go like this, of that occasion in 1982, at Goose Green in the Falklands, when he’d spent a whole night alone with the body of a gunner, waiting – no doubt about it, either then or ever since – to die himself, not least because it seemed to him that it was the last word in disloyalty and cowardice still to be alive when his mate wasn’t. The memories were never conscious things. He never deliberately summoned them up. But when emotional upset or alcohol – or, most fatally, a combination of the two – weakened his defence against recollection, he was back on that cold and stony hillside with his heart breaking, and the sight of little white Argentinian flags of surrender popping up in the dawn light as if – as a last straw – to mock the utterly pointless waste and sacrifice of the boy who lay now across the gun trails at his feet, as lifeless as the ground on which he had fallen. They were demons, those memories, lying in wait for him, goading him to let down his guard by getting in a state and then, heedlessly, stupidly, fatally, throwing a tenner away on a bottle of gut rot. He despised himself, utterly and thoroughly, for giving in to them.

  He’d have stayed with Eric, if Eric had let him. After Alexa had gone, he thought his father might work himself into one of his rages, purple-faced and almost foaming with incoherent fury, but he had realized quite soon and with horror that Eric was almost in tears. His face was working and he was fumbling in his pocket for one of the huge old khaki handkerchiefs he still favoured. George had tried to put an arm round him, but Eric had flung him off and had then shuffled to the front door of the flat, knocking over the plate of cupcakes as he went, pulled it open, and made jerky, urgent gestures with his arm to indicate that George should leave him.

  George said idiotically, ‘What about the umbrella?’ and Eric had roared something incomprehensible, and had seized his son’s arm in a still-strong grip and had almost flung him out on to the communal landing.

  Crashing into the banisters of the stairwell, George had said, ‘But Dad, will you be OK? Will you—’ but the door had slammed behind him, and when he rang the bell repeatedly for re-admittance, Eric hadn’t even shouted at him to leave off, he’d simply said through the letter box, his voice unsteady with distress, ‘Just bloody leave me, lad, would you?’

  So George had left him and gone to see Uncle Ray, in the Gap Road Cemetery, who had had nothing to offer by way of explanation or consolation, and from there he’d gone to the pub for a whisky, and then to the supermarket for a bottle of their Spirits Offer of the Week, and here he was, shoes off, curtains pulled, sozzled and out of his stupid, nightmare-haunted mind by early afternoon on a perfectly ordinary Thursday. He aimed the remote control at the television and switched it off. The ensuing silence was terrible. He thought he might be about to weep too. He detested weeping. He picked up his glass and the smell of the whisky rose up and hit him with a nauseating force and he felt the lump in his throat rise up as well, through his whole skull, and then spill, hot and molten, out through his eyes and down his cheeks.

  It was a moment or two before George realized that the telephone was ringing. He got up unsteadily. It would be the old man, calling to say he had a new idea, he wasn’t giving up, he wanted George round there at once because he had cooked up a new scheme George was going to have to implement.

  ‘Dad,’ he said wearily into the phone.

  ‘George?’ someone else said.

  He hesitated. His tongue seemed to have swollen so that it almost filled his mouth. ‘Who … who …?’

  ‘Are you OK?’ the voice said. ‘Is that George?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ the voice said. ‘Good. Sorry if I woke you, or anything. I’m a friend of your daughter-in-law. I’m a friend of Alexa’s. My name’s Jack Dearlove.’

  On the way home, Dan stopped to buy coffee and a sandwich he then didn’t feel like eating. He filled the car with petrol while he was at it, and checked the tyres and screenwash, then he drove the car to the side of the garage forecourt, where he sat with the paper cup of coffee in his hand and the untouched sandwich (ham and mustard) on the passenger seat beside him.

  ‘Come on, sir,’ Tommy Stanway had said, leaning forward, grinning. ‘It’s not the end of the world, honest. At least now, when I’m out drinking my legs stay sober!’

  Tommy Stanway was twenty-six. He was a double amputee, both legs having been blown off by a booby-trap bomb in Helmand. When Dan had reached him, three hours before, he had turned one of his artificial legs upside down, with its boot in the air, and was using the sole of the boot to balance a mug of tea on. He was grinning.

  ‘I’ve got a good mentality, sir. Gunner mentality. There’s some Paras and Marines in here, and I’ll show them, I will. Me and Micky Munt, we’ll show them.’ He made a half gesture, as if he had been about to give Dan a consoling pat and thought better of it. ‘I’ve got football field ambitions,’ he said. ‘Remember? I was playing the night before – well, before life took a different path. I’ll get back out there, you watch me. I may be four inches shorter than I used to be, but I’ll be a hell of a goalie.’

  Micky Munt, missing a foot and a right arm and an eye, had told Dan that he thought he’d recently met the right girl. She was a soldier, too.

  ‘Women don’t seem to care about the way folk look, like blokes do. And she’s never known me with two of everything, has she? I’m good, sir. I’m fine. The only thing that gets me is that I feel I’ve let the boys down, coming home early like this. And the dreams, of course.’

  ‘The dreams?’

  The young men had exchanged glances. Dan noticed that Micky Munt’s remaining hand had an uncontrollable tremor.

  ‘Crazy dreams,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Legs and arms growing everywhere—’

  ‘Mad stuff. Just popping out of your body like something out of outer space.’

  ‘Relief to wake up, to be honest.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Will there be more operations?’ Dan said.

  ‘Lots, sir.’

  ‘We’ve got to keep the weight off—’

  ‘That’s a bloody battle.’

  ‘Can’t let the stumps get sweaty or you get sores, and the prosthetics are frigging painful—’

  ‘Get so hot, sir. You do, if you haven’t got half of you. I get hot just thinking about it.’

  Then they changed the subject and would not return to it. How was ol
d so-and-so? And X troop, and Y troop? Which troop had the most medals? Why wasn’t Dan on Facebook? Why didn’t he go on the Army Rumour Service website – they lived on it! They missed everyone and would come and personally duff up anyone in the regiment who wasn’t missing them back. They’d be sure to. Couldn’t tell what the future’d be yet, but they sure as hell had one. Tommy said he was thinking of teaching and Micky said what a bleeding pansy suggestion and hit Tommy lightly on his good arm, and Tommy said you watch it, you wait till I swing round your place in a specially adapted Porsche and see how pansy you feel like calling me then. You wanker.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ they both said to Dan. ‘We’re used to it. Shit happens, sir.’

  ‘What do you need?’ Dan said. ‘What can I get you? Smart phones?’

  They tapped their pockets. ‘Got them, sir. We need, we ask. Don’t worry.’

  Dan had stood up, towering over both of them. Tommy Stanway had once stood more than six feet in his socks. They grinned up at him. ‘Thanks for coming, sir.’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘You should see us play volleyball, sir. We sit on our arses and chuck ourselves everywhere. It’s a riot.’

  Micky Munt had put his one hand out to Dan and said solicitously, ‘You take care, sir,’

  Dan finished his coffee. It had been unsatisfactory, thin and bitter and carelessly made. He crushed the paper cup in his hand, picked up the sandwich and got out of the car to drop both in a crooked overflowing litter bin bolted to the peeling wall of the forecourt. Then he got back in the car, switched on the ignition and drove out of the garage as fast as if he were being pursued.

  There was nowhere, right now, to offload the excess energy of his emotions. He remembered an old soldier saying once, in an explosion of frustration after a complicated episode in his private life, ‘I just want to go overseas, under orders and – and kill someone.’ Dan wasn’t sure about random killing, but oh, would he, at this precise moment, have welcomed the orders! If he were to get back to Larkford and find an email instructing him to report for immediate deployment on any mission, however insane, he would obey it with a fervour he had no measure for. As it was, he was confronted with getting back to a house that would have done nothing for itself since he left it – bed roughly made, coffee pot in the sink, sitting room untouched since the television-and-takeaway session of the night before – and a dog longing for company and exercise. There might – or might not – be a message from Alexa. There’d been nothing that day from her to his mobile. He wasn’t actually sure whether he wanted to hear from her or whether this peculiar limbo land in which they currently seemed to be existing was preferable to the next stage, where decisions would have to be made and action taken. He beat the steering wheel with the flat of his left hand. She should have been with him today, she should have! If she’d seen those boys, seen their irrepressible cheerfulness and determination in the face of their injuries and disabilities, she’d get all her and Dan’s stuff into perspective, she’d see the difference between the mountains and the molehills, he knew she would, he knew it. He’d tell her about going out of the place in a daze and finding himself sitting under a tree, hardly knowing how he’d got there, and she’d understand. Of course she would. He’d tell her what faith the boys had in the Army, how they knew the regiment would always look after them, and she’d look at him as she used to do when they first met, when she spoke of what he did, what his colleagues did, almost with reverence. Of course she’d get it!

  Except equally, of course, she wouldn’t. Not now. She knew all the downs as well as the ups, the minuses almost better than the pluses. She knew that the camaraderie and the determination could be as divisive to those outside the charmed circle as they were uniting to those within it. He put his hand up briefly across his eyes. He didn’t think he’d ever let anyone see him cry and he wasn’t about to start. In any case, tears were in no way an appropriate response for what he’d seen and heard. The response Dan would at that moment have liked to be able to indulge in was to be ordered straight back to Afghanistan to find whoever laid the booby-trap bomb that had blown Tommy Stanway’s legs off, and skewer him to a mud wall with a bayonet.

  He turned off the main road and swung the car up the lane that led to Larkford. It was getting dark. Beetle had been shut up in the house for the best part of six hours and would have his legs crossed, poor old fellow. The lane was empty, except for a solitary smallish figure in a hooded fleece some way ahead, carrying a bag over one shoulder and walking with purpose. As Dan came up behind the person, it dawned on him that there was something familiar about their shape and gait, and the bag with its jingling charms. As he drew level, he slowed the car and pressed the button to lower the window on the passenger side. It couldn’t be – could it?

  Dan leaned across. ‘Isabel?’ he said incredulously.

  She turned her face a little, sliding it into her blue fleece hood. ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Walking,’ Isabel said patiently.

  Dan opened the door to let her in. ‘Hop in. I’m on my way home.’

  Isabel didn’t move. ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’m not going home,’ Isabel said. She sounded unemotional, as if she was explaining something very ordinary to someone she hardly knew.

  ‘Not—’

  ‘No,’ Isabel said. She began to walk again, not hurrying, but decidedly. Over her shoulder, she called, ‘I’m going to Franny’s! Rupert said I could!’

  And then she began to run.

  Mel Cooper’s office was at the far end of a long institutional corridor, and barely bigger than a cupboard. It was late afternoon when Alexa arrived, and Mel was spearing cubes of mango out of a plastic box with a small disposable fork, and talking on the telephone. She waved her fork at Alexa and smiled, and indicated a chair just behind her, upholstered in grey vinyl.

  ‘No chance, babes,’ she was saying into the phone. ‘Flat out all week, work presentation dinner Friday, can’t miss. You’re the one on leave. You come to me.’

  Then she listened for a moment or two, put another cube of mango in her mouth and said amiably round it, ‘Work it out, babes. Text me when you’ve decided.’ Then she laughed and said, ‘No. Never. I never miss you,’ and clicked her phone off and dropped it into the slew of papers on her desk. Then she spun her chair round, her knees almost knocking into Alexa, and said, ‘You came!’

  Alexa nodded. ‘I did.’

  ‘Where are the kids?’

  Alexa hesitated for a second, and then she said, ‘With my parents. I can’t be long.’

  Mel swung back to her desk. ‘Then come and look at this,’ she said, touching her keyboard. ‘Pull up your chair.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look,’ Mel said. ‘Look.’ She was staring at her screen. ‘I’m all fired up. We’re starting a new survey. Look at that. Well, I knew dopamine was a neurotransmitter –’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘– but I didn’t know it so imitated the effect of cocaine on the brain. Did you? And it’s stronger in men. It’s released when you solve a problem or win a game, so that might account for men getting obsessive about gambling or computer games.’

  ‘Or war,’ Alexa said.

  Mel turned to glance at her. ‘Or war,’ she repeated. ‘It’s hard to live with someone always seeking a dopamine high, the big kick of endorphins. That’s our study. That’s my new project. Finding or even training the right people. We’re embarking on a study of service kids having to live with traumatized fathers.’

  Alexa said, as lightly as she could, ‘Not before time.’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘And maybe,’ Alexa said, ‘it’ll help the wives too.’

  Mel made a small dismissive gesture with the hand not guiding her computer mouse. ‘They have the language,’ she said. ‘It’s tough for them, but they do have a degree of power. The kids have no power, not much language
and have to put up with the consequences of everyone else’s choices. So I’m starting with the dopamine.’

  ‘Why did you ask me to come?’

  Mel looked at her screen. ‘Why d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t a very successful evening, with Kate …’

  ‘Some things that needed saying got said.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘And,’ Mel said, ‘Kate said you were a good couple, you and your husband. If Freddie and I are serious …’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘He’s as good as they get,’ Mel said.

  ‘But?’

  ‘I want to work.’

  ‘And I,’ Alexa said with emphasis, ‘want to work.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you?’

  ‘I can’t. The uncertainty, the rules, the moving …’

  Mel said, her eyes still on the screen, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them. That’s what I plan to do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m doing this study. I’m going to specialize. I’m going to involve myself in my science applied to his profession.’

  Alexa leaned forward. ‘Did Kate …?’

  ‘Kate,’ Melanie said, ‘is going down to Larkford to see Gus. So you did hit home. She heard you.’

  Alexa looked truly startled. ‘Wow.’

  In her bag, her phone started its urgent vibrating. She said, scrabbling for it, ‘It’s probably my mother.’

  ‘She won’t go back to him,’ Mel said, taking no notice, her eyes still on her screen. ‘She’s done with all that. But she knows she left a car crash. She knows she’s got to sort it out a bit.’

  Alexa had her phone in her hand. ‘Missed call,’ it said implacably, and then, in slightly larger script, ‘Mrs Cairns.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Jack thought he had probably never been to Wimbledon proper. He’d only ever been to watch the tennis at the All England Club, trying to persuade Eka that there was global glamour there, despite all the old buffers in blazers and dated moustaches insisting that good manners should always prevail over spectacular, if occasionally discourteous, playing.