The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  Millie runs off, shrieking. I open the French window and go out to intervene, but they’re too quick for me. Blanche disappears around the side of the house, chasing Millie. I hear the crunch of their feet on the gravel, then a thud, a silence, a scream.

  Evelyn shakes her head.

  “Trouble’s coming, Vivienne.”

  Blanche rushes in to find me. She looks worried.

  “Mum, you’d better come.”

  Millie has tumbled on the gravel. On her hands, the grazes are shallow, but there’s a nasty gash on her knee, ragged, dirty, and bleeding profusely.

  I put her in the bathtub to try to clean out the cut. Normally I’d have put salt in the bath to disinfect the wound, but salt is very precious now. The gash still has a dirty look; there’s gravel stuck in the broken skin that I can’t wash out. I know the wound needs antiseptic. I pick up the bottle of TCP, but Millie’s face dissolves.

  “No! It’ll hurt! Mummy, no!” Her shoulders shake with sobs.

  I can’t face holding her down. I tell myself that the cut will probably heal just fine anyway.

  A KNOCK AT my bedroom door wakes me, dragging me up out of sleep. I turn on my lamp and go to open the door, my body slow and lumbering.

  It’s Millie. Her wet face shines in the lamplight; her lashes are clotted together with tears.

  “Mummy. My leg hurts.”

  I put out a tentative finger to touch her knee. The skin is hot, inflamed. Millie cries out at my touch. I’m cross with myself. I should have been firmer and disinfected the cut.

  “I’ll take you back to bed,” I say, “and we’ll think what to do in the morning.”

  I’m restless, I can’t get back to sleep. After a while, I get up and listen outside her room. She’s still crying, but I decide to leave her. The sobs sound drowsy; I know that soon she’ll sink down into sleep and it’s better not to disturb her.

  During the night the weather breaks, and the rain is there in my dream. I dream that there are gaping holes in the roof of Le Colombier, and the rain has come in, and my entire house is flooded. I wade slowly through my living room, which is knee-deep in water and lit by a pure, chill, aquamarine light. Things from my life float past me on the shining flood: my poetry books, dolls from Millie’s dollhouse, my mother’s music box. They’re all drenched with water, ruined, but in the dream I view all this with equanimity; the depradations of the flood water don’t concern me at all—the way it stains, rots, devastates. I just let everything drift past me. I take a kind of voluptuous pleasure in not struggling anymore, in giving in to what must happen.

  IN THE MORNING, it’s still raining, with a heavy pewter sky.

  As Blanche goes to work, she turns toward me in the doorway, sweeping her hair back, tying a chiffony scarf around her head. Her skin is golden from yesterday’s sun and she smells of rose geranium talc.

  “Mum, is Millie all right? I heard her crying,” she says.

  “I’m not sure,” I tell her. “I’m rather worried about that cut on her knee. I probably ought to try to get the doctor to call.”

  But I’m reluctant. I don’t really want to leave Millie. And it would take an age to contact him. I’d have to cycle up to his house and hope that he or his wife were there; or I could try and ring from the nearest phone box, which is almost as far.

  Blanche is frowning, her blue anxious gaze on my face.

  “Well, you will if you’re worried, Mum, won’t you? Promise me you will.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Something at the edge of my vision makes me suddenly turn. The window at Les Vinaires is open. I see something in the darkness of the room beyond the window, a paleness that I can’t make out—a face, or the sleeve of a shirt. I feel a quick impotent rage. I hate this, the way the men who live there know the most intimate details about us. As though the Occupation entitles them to see straight into our lives.

  Blanche’s eyes glitter with tears.

  “It was my fault, wasn’t it?”

  “No, of course not, sweetheart. You were both just fooling around. It’s just unlucky she fell on the gravel.”

  “I shouldn’t have gotten so cross,” she says. “But you know what she’s like, Mum, don’t you? She looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But she can be such a pain in the neck.”

  She walks off, pulling her gabardine close around her, though it’s raining hard, and I doubt the coat will keep her dry for long.

  Chapter 27

  THERE ARE FOOTSTEPS on the gravel and a knock at the door. My heart thuds.

  But it isn’t who I thought: it’s Captain Richter, his black hair plastered slick against his skull by the rain.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. de la Mare, but one of us overheard you talking.”

  Fear has me by the throat. Have I done something wrong, broken some rule that I didn’t even know existed?

  His clever dark eyes are on me.

  “One of us heard you say that your daughter was hurt.”

  His voice is emollient as lanolin; he has seen the fear in my face.

  “I was a doctor, Mrs. de la Mare, in my other life. Before . . .” He opens out his hands, makes a small, rather helpless gesture that seems to encompass everything—the war, the Occupation, all of it. A gesture that says there are no words for these things.

  “Oh,” I say.

  I try to imagine him as a doctor—no uniform, no gun. It’s hard to do.

  “Would you like me to examine your daughter?” he says.

  I look at him uncertainly.

  “I worked as a surgeon, at the Rudolf-Virchow Hospital in Berlin.” He smiles slightly. “Though I’m sure that surgery won’t be necessary.”

  When he came here before, he warned me about the curfew. I remember his stern look, the razor-thin line of his mouth. Now he’s offering to examine Millie. I’m unnerved, wrong-footed. I don’t know how to be with these men.

  I hesitate. But then I remember how Millie sobbed in the night.

  “It’s her leg,” I tell him. “She fell on the gravel. I’m worried it might be infected. Why don’t you come in?”

  In that moment, as I invite him into my house, I have a sudden queasy sense of misgiving. An urgent voice comes in my head, scolding me, outraged, appalled. What on earth do you think you are doing? This man is your enemy. You’re trusting him with your daughter, but he isn’t on your side. . . . But I can’t go back now.

  Millie is on the living room sofa, her sore knee propped on a cushion. She looks up as we go in; in spite of the pain, her face is bright with curiosity.

  “Millie, my name is Max. I am a doctor,” he says.

  She gestures extravagantly at her knee, enjoying being a patient, enjoying the drama of this.

  “It hurts,” she says.

  He examines her, touching the skin around the gash, bending her knee. She flinches away from his touch. A splinter of doubt swims in her eye when he hurts her, and I have an urge to rush forward and pull her away.

  “So how did you cut yourself, Millie?” he says.

  “It was Blanche. She chased me,” she says.

  “My daughter also likes chasing and running,” he says. “And teasing her big brother . . .”

  He must have seen everything that happened from the windows of Les Vinaires. I feel a little surge of hostility toward him.

  But Millie is at once intrigued.

  “How old is she? Does she fall over?” she says.

  “She is six. And yes, she does fall over.” His voice softens, talking about his daughter. “She is always running and rushing. She cannot be still.”

  He stands up, turns to me.

  “The cut is infected, as you thought,” he tells me. “She needs medicine.” He takes a brown glass bottle out of his pocket. “These are called sulphonamides. They will help her fight the infection. Are you willing for me to treat her?”

  I nod.

  “Millie, can you swallow pills?” he asks her.

  “Of course I can. I
’m four and a half,” she tells him.

  He hands me the bottle, explains how she should take them. He says good-bye to Millie. Above us, I can hear Evelyn creaking around in her room; I’m praying she won’t come down just yet. I take him out to the door.

  I think about his being a surgeon, and somehow that makes sense to me. A surgeon would need to be rather distant and dispassionate—and I’m aware of a kind of remoteness in this gloomy, cynical man. He’s an observer, someone who watches from the margins—separate, withdrawn, but seeing everything.

  “Do you miss your work in Berlin?” I ask him. Feeling a sense of social obligation—a need to be polite, now I am indebted to him.

  “I miss it very much.” His expression darkens; his face has a hollowed-out look. “But many people are missing things in these troubled times, as we know. The ones who make the decisions have other plans for our lives. As always.”

  I’m startled. Should he be saying this to me? Is he criticizing Hitler? What do these men, these soldiers, really think about the war?

  “It is like that for all of us,” he says. “None of us can be where we would want to be. . . .” Then he shrugs slightly, backing off from that moment of revelation, as though he’s a little embarrassed that he has given something away. “But in the circumstances, we consider ourselves fortunate to be here, on your beautiful island,” he tells me. “We are, all of us, grateful. . . . Though I imagine you view our presence here rather differently.” His smile is clever and self-deprecating.

  “Thank you so much for your help,” I say.

  I open the door and glance nervously up the lane, to be sure that no one can see him coming out of my house. He turns and leaves me, stepping fastidiously between the puddles. The rain has stopped now; the dark fallen leaves are shiny as leather with wet.

  I wonder who told him that Millie was hurt, who heard us talking. Was Captain Lehmann watching our house? Did Captain Lehmann send him?

  Chapter 28

  I PICK ALL THE fruit on my land. The apples I store on cardboard trays in the shed, and I bottle up the plums from the plum tree in my garden, but the Comice pears from my yard we eat at once—they won’t keep. Millie refuses to eat the skins, and I peel and slice the fruit for her; the grainy flesh is oozing with syrupy, viscous juice.

  The wind is blowing from the north, and birds come in on the wind, making their way to the warmer lands where they will pass the winter. Our island lies on one of the main migration routes in Europe, a route that leads south down the western fringe of the land. At night you can hear the fluting calls of waders in the darkness, and sometimes the crying of geese, like lost souls, harsh and desolate.

  A day comes when a sudden storm blows in from the sea. I’m cycling home from Elm Tree Farm when clouds mass and boil above me. There’s a sound like many people running in the lane, and a rustle along the hedgebanks, and then the rain streaks down. I’m instantly drenched—I’ve left my raincoat behind. I curse the unpredictable weather of these islands, feeling that crossness familiar to every housewife, when you’ve left your washing on the line and now you’re far from home, and all your hard work will be wasted.

  My bicycle slows and grinds on the ground. I can tell my front tire has gone flat. I get off, swearing under my breath. Millie and Evelyn are on their own, and I don’t like to leave them for long. I push my bicycle down the road and start out on the lengthy walk home. A German truck passes me, driving straight through a puddle, so water plumes up and splashes me, all over my face and my front. This feels malicious, deliberate. My dress and cardigan are sodden, and water seeps into my shoes. I feel so tired, suddenly—exhausted, dragged down by it all: by Evelyn, querulous, losing her mind; by Blanche, still angry with me because we didn’t go on the boat; by the Occupation, the shortages, and all the rain-soaked washing on my line—these things muddled up in my head, all utterly beyond me.

  Another vehicle approaches. Damn. I turn my face away as it passes, not wanting to get splashed all over again.

  I hear the car stop, then reverse. I glance up. A familiar black Bentley gliding back toward me. Captain Lehmann is driving. He stops the car beside me, and leans across to the passenger side and winds the window down. My heart slams around like a tennis ball in my chest.

  “Mrs. de la Mare. May I give you a lift?”

  I can’t imagine how messy I look. My hair is plastered to my head and across my face, in rats’ tails. Water runs along my part and drips down onto my nose. I push the wet hair out of my face. I try to shake my head, but I can’t quite manage it.

  “You have a puncture, I think,” he says. “So why not let me help you?”

  “I can’t do that.” But my voice doesn’t sound very sure.

  “Why can’t you do that?” he says.

  I don’t want to think why he’s being so insistent, when of course he knows my answer perfectly well.

  “I really don’t think I should,” I say.

  He watches me as I hesitate. I feel he will wait forever.

  “Anyway, my bicycle . . .”

  “You could leave it here,” he tells me. “I can send one of the boys to pick it up.”

  “But you must be busy, you must have things to do. . . .” Though as always I’m baffled imagining what those things might be.

  I see a slight smile in his eyes when I say that, as though he knows I am conceding something.

  “Nothing that can’t wait,” he says.

  “And you weren’t going that way . . .”

  “I can easily drive to your house,” he says.

  “I really shouldn’t. . . .”

  He reaches across the passenger seat and pushes open the door.

  I climb into the Bentley that used to belong to Les Brehauts. I ought to be angry, that Mr. Goubert’s car was requisitioned, I ought to say no to this lift; but I feel so tired and cold and wet, and it’s such a long way home.

  Captain Lehmann is looking at me—at my dripping hair, the goose-pimpled flesh on my arms, my wet clothes sticking clammily to me.

  “Mrs. de la Mare. You are shivering. You should borrow my coat.”

  “I can’t do that,” I say.

  “I think you should. You don’t want to get pneumonia. Especially when you have people who depend on you,” he says.

  That, at least, is true enough.

  When I don’t say anything, don’t protest, he reaches around to the seat behind him. He takes his coat and wraps it around my shoulders, pushing it down between my body and the back of the seat. His nearness shocks me. He slides his hand under my hair at the nape of my neck, easing out my hair where it’s been caught under the coat collar. He does this scrupulously—not missing a single strand, but scarcely touching my neck, just grazing me with his fingertip. His skin is warm against me. I can hear his breathing; I’m sure that he can hear mine. Neither of us says anything.

  He starts up the car again. The coat is long, it rucks up at the small of my back. But it’s warm and close on my shoulders.

  “This is kind of you,” I tell him, as formally, politely, as I can. My voice has too much breath in it.

  He shakes his head slightly, as though denying that this is kindness at all.

  “How is Millie?” he says.

  “She’s fine now. Thank you for asking.”

  “Max came to see her?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought that Max would be able to help her,” he says.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  The thought ripples in me that he wants me to know this: he wants to tell me that he was the one who sent Max. He knows that nothing would draw me to him like his concern for my child. This thought makes me feel happy, in a way that I don’t want to look at.

  I turn from him, stare out the window. It’s a long time since I saw Guernsey from the inside of a car. The storm is passing over, the world filling up with color: the drenched grass a startling feverish green beneath the white of the sky, wet rowan berries shiny as a woman’s lipsticked mout
h. The windows steam up with our breathing, so the countryside blurs, its colors running together, as though this land is insubstantial, about to dissolve. He winds his window down a little, so the cool air will clear the window glass.

  He is silent for a while. The scrape of the windscreen wipers fills in the silence between us. The damp brings out the smells of things—the wet wool of my cardigan, the musk of my wet hair. I turn slightly toward him, watch his heavy, solid body, the way his hands move on the steering wheel. I remember the feel of his fingertip on the back of my neck—warm, terrifying. He’s driving very slowly.

  “So, the chocolate,” he says. As though he is continuing a conversation we’ve had. “Did you eat it yourself or did you give it all to your children?”

  “I ate some of it,” I tell him.

  “And did you like it?” he asks.

  I remember the melting sweetness of it—the portion I kept for myself.

  “Yes. It was delicious.”

  “Even though you were so reluctant to take it?” he says.

  I don’t look at him, but I hear the smile in his voice.

  “I didn’t say no because I thought I wouldn’t enjoy it,” I say.

  The words hang there between us.

  The wind is tearing the clouds apart. Light pours over the land, so everything’s lit up, sparkly. He wipes the mist from the inside of his window with his sleeve. The colors of the countryside dazzle—the copper and bronze of the turning leaves, a field of tawny dandelions, leggy as girls. We pass a fabulous vine that tumbles over a wall, its leaves all the colors of flame, but soft.

  “This landscape is like a watercolor,” he says. “I would like to paint this landscape.”

  I’m immediately intrigued. “You’re an artist?”

  “I wouldn’t presume to call myself that,” he says. “But I like to paint when I can. Just for my own pleasure.” He hesitates for a moment, as though searching for the right words to express what he feels. “I find it good to leave my daily life behind for a while.”

  I recognize that impulse—when you crave a safe place, a haven. Like me with my piano and my poetry books. But it isn’t quite what you’d expect a soldier to say.