The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  “May I?” she says.

  “Yes, of course.”

  She winds the handle. The music sounds like the chiming of many tiny bells, chill and silvery as ice or glass. Blanche sways slightly, in time. Almost any music will make her start to dance—even “Für Elise” on a music box.

  I feel a pang for my daughter. It should be Blanche who’s dressing up, not me.

  “Blanche. You never went to another of those parties with Celeste.”

  “Like the party at Les Brehauts, you mean?”

  “Yes. Aren’t they happening anymore?”

  “Oh yes, I think they still have them,” she says.

  “I don’t mind if you want to. Really. As long as you’re safe. As long as you get a lift home.”

  “I’m fine, Mum.”

  “But you seemed to enjoy it when you went . . .”

  “Well, it was fun at the time,” she says. “I liked the dancing. But I prayed about it afterward, and then I decided it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

  “Oh. Did you, sweetheart?”

  It still startles me—this streak of religious fervor in her.

  “The thing is, they ask you out, the German boys,” she says. “But that wouldn’t be right, would it, Mum? To have a German boyfriend?”

  This surprises me. I didn’t know she thought this.

  “Well, that depends,” I say vaguely.

  “I wouldn’t want to do that,” she says. “And you wouldn’t like it either, if I did that.” Her gaze is on me, blue as summer skies. There’s such clarity in her.

  “Well, obviously there are people who wouldn’t approve. But if he seemed a good person . . .” My voice trails off.

  “But you can’t tell, can you really?” she says. “I mean, you can’t be sure.”

  “What about Celeste?” I ask. “Is she still going out with Tomas?”

  Blanche nods.

  “She likes him a lot,” she says. “I really don’t think she should, though.”

  “Does she know what you think? About it not being right?”

  “Yes, of course, Mum. We talk about everything, me and Celeste. We don’t have secrets,” she says. “But she says I’m wrong, she says he’s not like the others.”

  “Well, maybe she’s right—maybe he isn’t like the others.”

  The music from the music box slows as it comes to an end, and you can hear the clunking and whirring of all the tiny parts inside. Blanche closes the box.

  “I still wouldn’t do it,” she says. “What I think is—how can you ever really know someone? How can you ever be sure what they’re like?”

  “But don’t you think you can tell if someone is a good person? Even if they’re on the opposite side in a war?”

  She gives me a doubtful look, as though I just don’t get it.

  ONCE THE GIRLS and Evelyn have gone to bed, I sit in the kitchen and wait for him. Shadow heaps up in velvet folds against the walls of my room, and doubt creeps into me. I see it all so clearly now, that this was a wild, irrational notion—rash, impulsive, all wrong. And as I sit there in the shadow, I make my decision. I will tell him that he can’t come in—that I have changed my mind. Because our relationship is wrong for so many many reasons. He will understand; or at least, he won’t be surprised. Perhaps I should take off my shantung dress and put on something more workaday. Perhaps I should blow out the candles that I have lit upstairs in my room.

  I hear his knock. My heart lurches. I go to open the door.

  He doesn’t quite smile at me. I see at once that he too is nervous, and this touches me: I know I can’t tell him to leave. I have already chosen my path.

  “Vivienne . . .”

  I love the way he says my name—slowly, like a caress.

  He comes in, stands in front of me in the passageway. I feel a flicker of desire at his closeness—but more diffuse, more ephemeral than the desire I felt before, when he ran his finger down my face. Just a thread. A whisper.

  I turn and lead him up the stairs, intensely aware of all the people who are asleep in this house. I show him where all the creaks are, murmur to him where not to tread on the stairs. My heart beats fast, like a thief’s. I am a thief in my own house.

  I open the door to my room and usher him in. I close the door behind me and turn the key in the lock. The sound is eloquent in the quiet between us.

  He stands there in the candlelight, looking and looking at me, as though he will never look anywhere else. I’d expected to feel self-conscious, even ashamed, in this moment, yet an absolute joy startles me, that we are here together. I have a sense of infinite freedom in this little room—we could do anything here, in this place where the war doesn’t come. When he takes me in his arms, the joy floods me, and a sense of his infinite preciousness, as I run my fingers across his face and feel the bones beneath the close-cropped skin of his head; as he moves his hands all over me, possessing me with his touch.

  Before, with Eugene—years ago, when we sometimes still used to make love—I was always somehow outside it, withdrawn, observing myself. Looking down from the ceiling, remote, untouched, removed—split in two, part of me doing, part watching. But here, now, all of me is present in every touch, every caress. I’m intensely aware of the hardness of his body, the scent of his skin all around me, his mouth exploring my mouth; and the movement of his hand on me, so I am shaken and shaken, as though I am falling apart. He puts his hand on my mouth. “Shh,” he says, “shh”; and then him inside me, my body wrapped all around him, hiding myself in him, hiding him in me.

  Afterward we lie together, quietly. I open my eyes and see that my room is just the same as before, and this astonishes me. I feel as though I have traveled a great distance or entered a different country.

  His uniform is lying on a chair. The sight jars, reminds me of all that I’ve chosen to put from my mind. I look away. I tell myself—all that is part of another life, his life when we are apart. It says nothing about who he really is, here with me in this room.

  He kisses me, his mouth just grazing mine.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  I feel a sudden light happiness. It seems so strange that he should thank me, when he has given me so much.

  I lie with my head on his chest, listen to the quiet beat of his heart. He has his hand in my hair. We say nothing, and the silence is the sweetest thing. I hadn’t known that sex could take you to a place of such peace.

  And then I hear the sound I dread—footsteps, and someone trying my handle, and then a knock at my door.

  “Hide under the covers,” I tell him.

  I wrap my dressing gown around me and unlock the door.

  I’m so afraid that it’s Blanche—that she will look past me into my room and at once understand everything: why I was wearing my best shantung dress, the conversation we had. But it’s Millie, in her candy-stripe pajamas, her feet big and ponderous in her knitted bed socks. Her eyes are wide and staring but I don’t know what she sees; her face is dazed, unfocused.

  “Mummy, there are bees. There are bees in the house.” Her voice thin, shrill, brittle.

  She’s still living her nightmare. The reflections of my candles are held in her eyes, in tiny immaculate images.

  “No, sweetheart. It’s just a dream.”

  “They’re in my bed, Mummy!”

  I crouch down, hold her. Her heart pounds against my chest, as though her heart is my heart. There are smudges of blue shadow around her eyes.

  “There aren’t any bees,” I tell her.

  “Mummy, there are bees in my hair. I can hear them. . . . I ran and I ran but I couldn’t escape.” Her voice is a thin, bright, juddery thread.

  I stroke her hair.

  “It’s just a dream,” I tell her. “There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

  “Can’t you hear them buzzing?” she says.

  I take her back to her room. Guilt washes through me. I wonder if this is my fault, that she is troubled like this. Did she see something, hea
r something? I listen carefully, make an extravagant show of looking in every corner, to prove there are no bees. Then I sing her to sleep. I don’t think she saw Gunther. But the sense of peace has left me, its smooth still surface fractured, splintered into a thousand glittery shards.

  When I get back to my bedroom, he has dressed.

  “Is she all right?” he asks me.

  “Yes. She’s asleep now. I don’t think she saw anything.”

  He takes me in his arms.

  “Vivienne. Will we do this again? I would love to see you again, my dearest. Would you want that?”

  His questions flood me with happiness.

  “Yes. Please . . .”

  But Millie’s nightmare has troubled me. I feel the enormity of what we have done, of what we are planning to do.

  “Gunther. Can we really do this without anyone knowing? Can we really keep it secret? It has to be completely secret—from Evelyn, from the girls. From everyone . . .”

  “We’ll be very careful,” he says.

  I take him down to the door. I watch him as he leaves, walking across the gravel—walking back into his other life. There’s a silver spill of moonlight over my yard, so bright he casts a shadow.

  I go back to my room. My body, my damp bed, smell of him. I’m missing him already.

  Chapter 35

  WE WORK OUT the rules. I leave a signal for him—an empty flowerpot on my doorstep—to let him know that it is safe, that everyone is in bed here. If he does come to my house, it is always exactly at ten; if he hasn’t arrived by quarter past, I go up to bed on my own.

  I have lived for so long in a house of women. I’m astonished to have a man again in my bed, so grateful for the warm weight of his solid body, the subtle scent of his skin, his difference. I’m astonished, too, by the way I am with him. I always think of myself as being so shy, so reserved, yet with this man I will do anything—open up, be shameless. It’s as though I have a different body when I am with him, as though I am changed by his nearness.

  After we make love, we always talk for a while, me with my head on his shoulder. In the gentle light of my candles, the room seems secret and separate—a cave in a forest, a boat on a shifting sea. You can hear all the creaks and stirrings of the old house settling down to sleep, as a boat will creak at anchor.

  He takes two cigarettes, lights one for him and one for me. Mostly we talk about the past—which is safer than the present.

  “What were you like when you were a child?” he asks me. “Tell me about your childhood.”

  He blows out smoke. The peacefulness of the moment laps around us. I love to see him here, in my bed, loving the things I know about his body: the patterning of hair on his chest, the way his spine shows through his white skin, the cords of his wrists, a kind of grace in his gestures—and the startling smile that will suddenly light up his face. He feels familiar to me already, as though he is part of me, as though I have always been waiting for him.

  I tell him about Iris, about growing up in the tall thin house in Clapham, about the aunts who brought us up.

  “My mother died very suddenly, when I was three,” I tell him. “She had pneumonia.”

  He puts his arm around me, pulls me close. He waits.

  I’m remembering. It’s suddenly so vivid to me. I can smell the chill, antiseptic smell of the sickroom. There’s an ache that seems to rise like dough in my chest.

  “We were taken in to say good-bye—me and my sister,” I tell him.

  I find I am starting to cry. As though the hard shell that protects me has been softened by his presence. I haven’t spoken about this grief for years.

  He wipes the tear from my face with one warm finger.

  “You were so young,” he says quietly. “To have to face such a thing.”

  It’s all there in my head, with a sudden, troubling precision.

  “She looked strange. She didn’t look like my mother anymore. . . . I’ve learned since, how, when you go to see someone who’s ill, sometimes you know, you can tell . . . You know that they will die soon. You can tell, they look different.”

  “Yes, I have seen that,” he says.

  “I suppose I saw that in my mother,” I say. “Though I had no way of understanding it.”

  He strokes my hair. The touch, the rhythm, soothe me.

  “That was very difficult for you,” he says. “For your mother to die when you were still so young. . . . I have felt from the beginning that there was something hurt in you,” he tells me. “Something withdrawn, reserved. Waiting to be drawn out. Even from that very first time I saw you in the lane.”

  “Did you? Did you really think that, even then?” I say. “Tell me . . .”

  Afterward, I am glad that I told him about my mother. I don’t understand why this should be so consoling, but it is. As though telling him has freed me.

  AT NIGHT, OUR intimacy seems completely natural to me, as though it is all intended, as though this is how my life is meant to unfold. But sometimes I’ll see him during the day—in the requisitioned Bentley, or with the other soldiers, perhaps laughing with Hans Schmidt or Max Richter, in that loud, rather raucous way that men will laugh with other men—and the realization of what I am doing slams into me.

  I’ll think, What is he like with those other people, those enemy soldiers, doing whatever they do to keep our island under control? Do I really know him? What does it mean to know someone? And whenever I think this, I’ll hear Blanche’s voice in my mind: How can you ever really know someone? How can you ever be sure what they’re like?

  One day I ask him about his life.

  “I know so little about you really,” I say.

  “What do you want to know?” he says.

  My head is a tangle of questions, and I can’t pull out the right one. I retreat to something safer.

  “Tell me about Germany. I’ve never been there,” I say.

  I’m lying turned toward him, looking at him. On the dressing table behind him, the dragonfly on my perfume bottle is lit up by the candlelight, so it looks as though it’s burning. His face in profile is featureless, black, against the fiery wings.

  “Some of Germany is beautiful,” he says.

  “Tell me about the beautiful parts,” I say.

  “Bavaria is beautiful,” he says. “My wife’s uncle lives in Bavaria. We would go there in the summer—before the war, before it all began. There is no air like the air of those forests. The pines, the smell of juniper. There is no silence like that silence.”

  I try to imagine them—those great forests, the scent of juniper and pine. I’m ignorant, like a child. I know so little of the world.

  “Berlin presses down,” he says. “All the big buildings, and people living on top of one another. I don’t like to spend too long there. I like to go far away. Not to have to think about things . . .”

  I remember the poem I chose for him. I have desired to go / Where no storms come. Perhaps it wasn’t quite such an inappropriate choice as I’d thought.

  “I like to draw and paint there, in Bavaria,” he tells me. “To set up my easel on a mountainside. To have a whole day of quiet there, with my charcoal or my paints . . . There are moments when you don’t have to try, when there is no struggle. You are there in the place where you should be, and everything flows like water, the scene forming under your hand.”

  I think how everyone has a dream that sustains them, a thought that begins, When the war is over . . . And for him the dream is there, amid those forests and that silence. That is where he has left a part of himself—on a mountainside in Bavaria, with his easel and his brushes and his little tubes of colors; with the scent of juniper and the silence.

  I say this to him.

  “That is where you would be now—if you could choose,” I tell him.

  He is quiet for a moment.

  “No, Vivienne,” he says then. He turns to look into my face. There’s such intensity in him. “You see—maybe as you said you know so little about me.
Of all the places that I could choose, I would be here, in this bed.”

  Chapter 36

  THERE’S A LETTER on my doormat, in an envelope that has no name or address. I wonder who dropped it off here, and why they didn’t stay to speak.

  I open the envelope. There’s a single sheet of paper inside it, folded in half. I open it out. The room tilts around me.

  The message is made from newsprint letters cut from the Guernsey Press and glued down on the paper. The letters are crooked, at drunken angles, as though stuck down haphazardly, all in a rush. But the message is horribly clear: Viv de la Mare is a Jerrybag!!!

  I put the letter down quickly on the hall table, as though the touch of it could hurt, as though it could sear me like acid. But I know I can’t leave it lying there. I take it to the living room, and crumple it up, and throw it on the fire. The paper opens out as it falls, and catches light, a red line of flame running around it. As I watch, it flares and blackens and collapses into ash. I can’t think—don’t want to think—who could have sent it.

  The floor creaks behind me as Evelyn comes into the room. She sits carefully in her chair and pulls her knitting from her basket.

  “Something’s burning,” she says. “What’s burning there? I can smell it. Something’s burning in the grate.”

  “It’s nothing, Evelyn,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

  “Who’s burning a letter?” she says.

  She can see the charred paper in the grate. I poke the fire, break up the ashy fragments. Even now it’s completely burned, I still see it in my mind’s eye. The skewed newsprint letters, the ugly word.

  “It’s not a letter,” I say. “It’s nothing. Just an old drawing of Millie’s.”

  I suddenly wonder how Evelyn knows it was a letter. Did she see it on the doormat? Did she see the person who brought it, from her bedroom window, which looks out over the lane? But I can’t ask if she saw anyone, can’t find out who left it here, because I’ve already told her that there wasn’t a letter at all.

  She starts on her knitting. Her fingers move briskly, her knitting needles make a quick stern sound, like a reprimand.