The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  Then I wish I hadn’t said that. I hear the whine and scratch of the cat, the other side of the door.

  “We’ve had a few tip-offs, we know all their names, where they live. We aren’t going to let them get away with it, Auntie,” he says. “We’re going around painting swastikas on their houses. To show them we know. Show them they should be ashamed.”

  “Johnnie. What good will that do? You’ll only get into trouble.”

  “You do what you have to do,” he says.

  It’s what he told me before. But there isn’t that bright certainty that I used to hear in his voice.

  “Have you told your mum and dad about this?” I ask him.

  “Not exactly,” he says.

  I think, So why are you telling me, Johnnie? The unspoken question hangs in the air between us. The words seem so solid, like tangible things—you could put out your finger and touch.

  Johnnie is studying the table, as though a secret were written there, some code in the grain of the wood.

  “Piers says—he says there are rumors about you, Auntie.” His voice so quiet I can only just hear. “About you and one of the Germans at Les Vinaires. Piers wanted to paint a swastika here, on the wall of Le Colombier. I said, No, of course not. I said of course he was wrong.”

  But there’s a question in his voice.

  A pulse is hammering in my throat.

  “Johnnie, you shouldn’t listen to rumors.”

  “Auntie. He says that you were seen in a car with one of them,” he tells me.

  I feel a rush of relief—that this is all he knows.

  “Oh, that,” I say. “Well, that’s true enough. The man gave me a lift. It was raining. I had a puncture.”

  He glances up at me. He has a bleak, desolate look.

  “It was raining, and I needed to get back to Millie.” I hear the pleading note in my voice. “Her grandma isn’t so good at looking after Millie now. Her grandma isn’t quite all there. . . . I don’t like to leave them for long.”

  He’s still looking at me so sadly, as though I have disappointed him. I hate this: I want to be good in his eyes, I don’t want to lose his respect. He doesn’t say anything.

  “What use would it have been, to walk all the way back in the rain?” I’m protesting too much, but I can’t stop. “I don’t see how that would help anyone. . . .”

  He shakes his head a little.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, really, Auntie. It wasn’t sensible. People could jump to the wrong conclusions,” he says.

  We are edging toward safety.

  “You’re right, it was a really bad idea,” I say. “But it was raining so heavily. . . .”

  He lets out his breath in a little sigh, as though he has decided to accept what I’ve said.

  “I told him,” he says. “I told him you’d never dream of doing anything that you shouldn’t. I said, You do realize this is my Auntie Viv we’re talking about.”

  We sit silently for a moment. The smell of the raw bloody meat is sickening. Nausea rises in my throat and I try to swallow it down.

  “So who spread the story?” he asks me. “That there was more to it than that?”

  “I don’t know, Johnnie.”

  “Is there someone who’s got it in for you? Someone who wants to get their own back for something they think you did? Someone with a grudge against you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  He’s still waiting. Waiting for a lifeline, something to haul him in to shore. I have to give him more than this.

  “But of course there might be,” I say. “There might be someone with a grudge. You know what island folk are like. People do hold grudges around here.”

  “That’s probably it, then,”—persuading himself—“somebody with a grudge against you, Auntie.”

  “Yes, I expect so.”

  “I told Piers you weren’t like that,” he says. “That you’d never let the side down. I said, She’s my auntie. . . .”

  When Johnnie has gone, I scrub and scrub at my kitchen table, but I can’t get out the stain from the coffee he spilled.

  Chapter 41

  THIS IS HOW it is, for a long time. This is my life now. I grow accustomed to secrecy, to hiding, to the life I share with Gunther, when we close the door on the war, on the world, and lie together in my bed, in the soft shuddering light of my candles. Sometimes I think of the story I read to Millie, just before the Occupation—the story of the dancing princesses, who at night went through their trapdoor and down all the winding stairs and through the grove of golden trees to a secret, separate world. This life begins to seem almost natural to me. Now he will stay with me most of the night and leave my bed very early, when the first white fingers of morning reach into the room. I feel such peacefulness, falling asleep in his arms. Sometimes I find myself thinking, This is how marriage should be.

  Often I am afraid—that another letter will come, or that one of Johnnie’s eager friends will paint a swastika on the wall of my house. I worry that someone who suspects me will whisper to Evelyn or Blanche, will tell them about me and Gunther. And when I think that, I feel how fragile everything is—how my whole life here could be torn apart. Sometimes, I’ll hear the letter box snap, and I’ll clamp my lips together to stop myself crying out. But there are no more anonymous letters.

  One day when I’m walking to Angie’s, I pass a big old oak that leans out over the lane. In the corrugated bark of its trunk, lovers have carved their initials with a penknife: VS, FL, the letters intertwined. Just for a moment, I feel such a pang of envy for couples who live an everyday life, who walk hand in hand in the lanes and leave indelible marks of their closeness, who can express their love in such an easy, ordinary way. Nothing furtive or hidden.

  All this while, the war seems distant from me. There are the shortages, of course, the restrictions, the curfew; but I’m not so aware of the power of the Germans, the way they govern our lives, here in my hidden valley, with my family and my lover. Gwen, at Elm Tree Farm, still hears the German soldiers in the night, marching and singing their martial songs: owning our island, owning the dark; but you can’t hear them here, in the peace of these deep lanes. I concentrate on the daily things. I tell myself this is what matters—to care for my children and Evelyn, to bring us through this somehow.

  I WORRY MOST about Evelyn. She seems to be losing weight, however much I cajole her to eat. She often has a blurred look in her eyes, as though everything is obscure to her, as though her life seems like the back of a piece of tapestry, and she sees not the pattern, but only the frayed ends and knots.

  One day she’s knitting in the living room; she looks up as I go in.

  “And who are you, my dear?” she says, pleasantly. “Who are you? I don’t think we’ve met.”

  I know it’s because her mind is going, but I’m still unnerved.

  “Evelyn. I’m Vivienne, remember?”

  But she doesn’t.

  “Vivienne,” she says thoughtfully. “Such a pretty name.”

  She’s nicer to me when she doesn’t know who I am. The thought depresses me.

  I go to put my hand on her sleeve, with some inchoate thought that my touch might remind her that I’m her daughter-in-law and bring her back to reality. She stares at my hand on her arm, surprised, a little disapproving—as though I have been too intimate. I snatch my hand away.

  “You must let me get you some tea, dear, after you’ve come so far,” she says. “You’re so good to come and see me. I think there’s some gâche in the larder. . . .”

  “Evelyn. This is where I live. I’m Eugene’s wife,” I say.

  She stares at me, shocked; she raises her thin, arched eyebrows.

  “No, I don’t think you are, dear.” Her voice is cold and clear—and stronger, as though her certainty gives her energy. “You’re wrong there. You see, Eugene never married. He has the highest standards.”

  There’s nothing I can say to that. I leave her sitting there.

  Fiv
e minutes later she calls for me.

  “Vivienne. I’ve dropped my glasses, and I can’t seem to see where they’ve gone. Could you be a dear and find them for me?”

  As though the strange little incident never happened.

  BECAUSE SHE’S SO frail now, Evelyn stops going to church. She’s too weak to walk there anymore, and the service tires her too much. I arrange for the rector to come and give her Communion at Le Colombier. I decide I will stay home with her. But Blanche still goes to Matins, and sometimes takes Millie too.

  “Mum, why don’t you ever come to church anymore?” Blanche asks me.

  “I don’t really like to leave your grandma,” I say.

  Her eyes are on me, blue as summer.

  “But it’s not just that, is it?” she says.

  I hesitate. Perhaps she’s right—perhaps Evelyn is just an excuse.

  “To be honest, I’m not sure how much I believe now, really,” I tell her. “With the war and all the suffering.”

  “But you could still come, Mum. You don’t have to believe all of it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  I wonder if my reluctance is partly because of Gunther; when he is so precious to me, yet everyone at church would think this love of mine was wrong—and wrong in so many, many ways.

  “Anyway, the war and suffering must be for a purpose,” says Blanche. “That’s what the rector said. It must all be part of God’s plan. There must be a purpose to it.” As though this is simple and clear to her.

  “I’m not sure, sweetheart.”

  I’m happy she has this certainty—envy it, even, that she can find some kind of order in all that’s happening in the world, all this terrible anarchy. But I don’t share it.

  I POLISH MY pictures and photographs. I wipe them with a damp cloth, then buff the glass with screwed-up newspaper, which always gives a good shine. I clean the Margaret Tarrant print in my kitchen, the Christ Child surrounded by angels with vast, soft, fretted wings. In the living room, I pick up the photo of Eugene. I haven’t cleaned it for a while—the glass has a blue pallor of dust. I stare at the picture, move my finger across it, as though the feel of the glass against my skin will somehow make him real to me. His image in my mind is losing its definition: sometimes I have to look at his picture to remember his face. I stare at the photograph, trying to learn him again. Pushing away the thing that I try not to think: that he’s become so remote to me, someone to whom I have little connection at all. That to think of being in bed with Eugene is like a betrayal of Gunther. That Gunther is my real husband, the one I am meant to be with, and my marriage a distant, unreal thing.

  “My darling boy,” says Evelyn, watching.

  “It’s a lovely picture,” I say.

  I clean it fastidiously, wipe every single speck of dust from the frame, as though that could make him clearer to me.

  Chapter 42

  THE DAYS LENGTHEN. There’s a fresh spring wind that rummages through my orchard, ripping at the blossoms, so beneath the trees the ground is drifted with a sleet of white. I tend my vegetable patch. I earth up my potatoes. I put up hazel pea sticks for my peas and runner beans, and cover them over with nets to protect them from the pigeons. I pick lettuces and radishes, and plant out the sprouts and cabbages that I have been growing from seed. I hoe around the vegetables regularly—weeds grow so fast in spring. I start keeping chickens. I buy the pullets from Harry Tostevin—Rhode Island Reds, with chestnut plumage and furtive orange eyes. Johnnie helps me build a run at the bottom of the garden, where our land turns a corner around the back of Les Vinaires. To my surprise, I find that I really enjoy the chickens: I like the ripple of sound they make as they bustle and chatter and fuss, love collecting the eggs that are softly brown and nestle warm in your palm. Millie helps me with the eggs and gives the chickens extravagant names, taken from her storybooks—Rapunzel, Cinderella. Angie gives me a lesson in how to prepare one for the table, how to pluck it and gut it. I know I can feed my family, and this gives me a full, warm, satisfied feeling.

  In May, we hear that there has been a terrible air raid on London: they say that more than three thousand people are dead. I’m so afraid for Iris and her family. I think of the horror of the bombing of St. Peter Port, think of that happening every night, all around you. Of the people caught in the fire storms; or sheltering in the Underground, hearing the devastation above them, wondering with every bomb that falls, Is that my house? Blanche’s eyes fill with tears when she hears the news. “Those poor, poor people,” she says.

  I WALK UP the hill to see Angie. It’s a breezy May morning, wet washing snapping on clotheslines in all the gardens I pass, and a powdery, nostalgic scent on the air, where the tight cones of buds on the lilacs are loosening and letting out their perfume.

  Angie isn’t quite meeting my gaze. She pulls at a thread on her sleeve.

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” she says. “So you’ll hear it first from me.”

  I wonder what is coming.

  “It’s Jack, my brother,” she says. “No one’s told you anything, then?”

  “No, Angie. Why would they?”

  She clears her throat.

  “The thing is—he’s doing some work for them. You know what I mean.” Her voice is ragged and secretive. “He’s working up at the airfield.”

  “Well, we all have to get by somehow,” I say.

  “He’s not proud of it, to be honest. But he has to feed his little ones.”

  I hear the pleading in her voice. She desperately wants me to be forgiving, not to mind.

  “Of course he does,” I tell her. “Of course that’s what matters the most.”

  “He’s got those four growing children, and hardly any land. Don’t think badly of him, Vivienne.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t think badly of him,” I say. “We all have to find a way to get through. All of us.”

  But she doesn’t seem to hear me. Perhaps she misreads my expression, seeing some uneasiness in my face—though I’m thinking of myself, not Jack. But the thing I could tell her to comfort her is the one thing I can’t say.

  “I know there are some who’d condemn him. There are nasty words for people who do what Jack is doing,” she says. “And to be honest, you can understand it. When you hear the news from London—it’s the worst thing in the world to feel that someone you love has helped.”

  I don’t say anything for a moment. I’m not quite looking at her. Someone I love has certainly helped.

  “I wouldn’t condemn him, Angie. Really.”

  But something about me troubles her; she isn’t reassured.

  SOMETIMES I SEE the other Germans in the garden of Les Vinaires, when I’m working in my chicken run, where the hedge is low and we can see into each other’s gardens. Hans Schmidt, the pink-faced, fair one, seems to be the gardener—though all he does is cut the grass and prune an occasional branch. When he is out there working, Alphonse will sidle up to him, and Hans will make a great fuss of him—kneeling down to him, rubbing between his ears—so the cat will purr and arch ecstatically.

  On warm days, Max Richter will sometimes sit out on the lawn with a book. It makes me uncomfortable, in spite of all his kindness when Millie was hurt. He is a watcher. I know he misses nothing.

  If he sees Millie in the garden, he will wave to her over the hedge. One day when she is skipping and I am feeding the hens, he calls to her.

  “Millie, let me show you something.”

  She goes to him. He reaches his hands across the gate toward her. His hands are loosely clasped together, and I see there is a butterfly fluttering between his folded fingers.

  “This is a beautiful creature,” he says.

  “It’s called a butterfly,” she tells him, slightly superior.

  “And does this butterfly have a special name?” he asks her.

  He parts his hands a little, just enough to let Millie see. Millie peers between his fingers. The sunlight glints on his boots, and on the gun that sh
ows at his belt.

  “That’s a Painted Lady,” Millie tells him. “They come all the way from Africa. My mother told me.”

  “It’s a pretty name,” he says.

  “Once I saw a Jersey Tiger,” she says. “They have tiger stripes on their wings.”

  “You have beautiful butterflies on your island,” he says.

  She frowns slightly, watching his hands.

  “You must be careful not to hurt it,” she says.

  “Yes, I will be careful.”

  “Do you have butterflies, where you come from?” she says.

  He smiles. “Yes, we have butterflies,” he says.

  They look at the butterfly for a moment longer, their dark heads bent together, his hair close-cropped, hers loose and messy and falling over her face, the sun shining on them. I watch them, and think of all the people dead in London, all the wrenching grief, all the innocent lives ripped apart, and I can’t put it all together, can’t make any sense of it.

  “I think you should let the butterfly go now,” says Millie, rather reproving. “They don’t like to be trapped like that. Wild creatures don’t like to be trapped.”

  “Yes, you’re right, of course,” he says. “But I’ve been careful not to hurt it.”

  He opens his hands. The butterfly flits lazily away. Millie goes back to her skipping.

  Later I hear the girls talking.

  “I saw you,” says Blanche. “I saw you talking to that German next door.”

  “He had a butterfly. He showed me,” says Millie.

  “Grandma will tell you off, if she sees you speaking to Germans,” says Blanche.

  Millie shrugs.

  “Grandma didn’t see us,” she says, limpidly. “And anyway, that’s not a German, that’s Max.”

  Chapter 43

  JUNE. WHEN GUNTHER comes to my door one night, I see that something has changed. He must have been drinking heavily. His eyes are too bright, his hands clumsy; a smell of alcohol leaks from his skin. And there’s something in his face, something used up, defeated.