The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  Before I turn the corner, I look behind me again, but the tattered man has vanished, as though he had never been there. As though I conjured him up from some dark place inside me.

  THE NIGHTS ARE drawing in, and Millie and Simon can’t play out after school. Sometimes she goes up to his house, and sometimes he comes down to ours.

  When they’re playing together around the house, it’s all too much for Evelyn.

  “My head hurts. Such a racket,” she says. “So many comings and goings.”

  I tell them to be quieter, but my warnings just slide off them.

  Evelyn overhears them singing in German: “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.” They’ve been learning German Christmas carols at school. She raps her knitting needle on the arm of her chair.

  “Stop that at once,” she says.

  Millie flushes.

  “Sorry, Grandma.”

  For myself, I think it’s good that they’re learning German: we may face a long future of Occupation, and if they can speak the language they will be better prepared—though I’d never say that to Evelyn.

  “Evelyn, they learned it from Miss Delaney. It doesn’t mean anything,” I tell her.

  “Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” says Evelyn. “Of course it means something. The Hun may have come to Guernsey, but we’re not letting him into our house.”

  I turn from her, my face hot.

  I send them to play in the small back attic, where they can’t be heard. Evelyn settles back to her knitting. I don’t see the children again till I call up the stairs for Simon, to tell him it’s time to go home.

  “Did you have a good time, sweetheart?” I ask Millie, after he’s gone.

  She nods vigorously.

  “Simon was a varou,” she says. “He had fur and very big teeth.”

  I ask her to repeat this—I don’t recognize the word.

  “A varou, Mummy. You know. You know what a varou is.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  She gives me a dubious look, as though she can’t believe my ignorance.

  “A varou looks like a man, except by the light of the moon—then . . .”

  She puts back her head and gives a shivery wolf howl.

  “Oh. A werewolf,” I say.

  “Yes, of course. The varou bit me. Look.”

  She holds out her arm, rather proudly. I can see the fading white toothmarks. I’m appalled.

  “Millie—you shouldn’t let Simon bite you.”

  “Don’t worry, Mummy. There wasn’t any blood.”

  “I should hope not.”

  “Anyway, it was just a game. It was only pretend. He isn’t one really,” she says.

  “No—well, of course not.”

  “But shall I tell you a secret, Mummy?”

  I nod.

  She pulls my face down close to hers and whispers in my ear. “Simon knows where there’s a real varou,” she says.

  “Millie, werewolves aren’t real. Not ever.”

  She ignores me.

  “This varou is real,” she says. “The varou I’m talking about.” Her mouth is very close to me: I feel her moth breath on my face. Her whispery voice is dramatic, intense. “He prowls down the lane that leads from St. Pierre du Bois to Torteval. He has a barrow full of parsnips that he pushes along. And he likes to eat bad children.”

  There’s a thread of fear in her voice.

  “Oh. And how does Simon know this exactly?”

  “His big brother told him,” she says. “It’s really true, Mummy.”

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

  She shakes her head, emphatically.

  “Simon’s big brother knows lots of things,” she tells me. “Simon’s big brother made a biplane from cartridge paper and glue. It can really fly. Simon showed me.”

  I feel angry with Simon, and Simon’s big brother, for frightening Millie like this.

  JOHNNIE COMES TO see me, with a jar of apple chutney from Gwen and a bag of spinach, just picked. We sit at my kitchen table and drink some mint tea I’ve made. He’s never said anything more about the swastika scheme, but there’s an uneasiness between us now. There are small awkward gaps in the conversation and something reserved in his eyes.

  To fill in one of the silences, I ask him about the men I saw at Nathan’s house.

  “They’ll be workmen from Holland and Belgium, the ones you saw,” he tells me. “They’re bringing lots of workers in from the Continent. Hitler’s building a ring of concrete all around the island,” he says.

  I ask what I couldn’t ask Gunther.

  “But why, Johnnie? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like they really expect the RAF to attack; but nobody thinks that’s going to happen. Nobody thinks that Churchill is bothered about us at all. We’re just a little island.”

  Johnnie shrugs.

  “Well, that’s what they’re doing,” he says. “That seems to be Hitler’s plan. Those workmen you saw in St. Peter Port—they don’t get treated so badly, they get a bit of a wage.”

  I think of the men I saw—how thin they were, how the salt wind made them shiver.

  “They looked as though they were treated quite badly enough,” I tell him. “They looked as though they didn’t eat.”

  He shakes his head. There are little lines between his eyes, precise as if cut with a blade.

  “It’s worse in the work camps—far worse. You know, like the camp they’ve been building up on the hill near the cliffs. Up above Les Tielles.”

  “I didn’t know,” I tell him. “I never go that way.”

  “The men are there to fortify the clifftop. The camp up there is a brutal place. They scarcely feed them at all.”

  At once I understand.

  “I saw a man in a field,” I say. “He was very thin. I think he was eating a cabbage stalk. I thought he was just a scarecrow, till he moved and I saw his face.”

  “He was probably from the camp,” says Johnnie. “Those men are really wretched. They’re from Poland or Russia, most of them. They’re like slaves, the people who work there, treated like slaves. Worse than slaves. They beat them.” A shadow crosses his face. “I’ve seen a man hanged from a tree there. The body was hanging for days.”

  A shudder goes through me.

  “There are Algerians too, and Gypsies. You should go and see for yourself, Auntie. You ought to know what’s happening here on our island,” he says.

  “Yes. I probably should. . . .”

  But I’m saying that only because it’s what Johnnie expects me to say. The thought of going to the camp appalls me. What good would it possibly do to go and see for myself? It’s all too big for me. I can’t change it, none of us can, it’s all beyond us, we can’t stop it from happening. . . . Yet my reluctance still shames me. I know that it’s a weakness, that I feel this.

  “No man should be treated like that,” says Johnnie. “You hear things, don’t you? Things people say—that they must be there because they’ve committed some terrible crime. Florrie Gallienne at church was saying that. But what could any man possibly do, to deserve such punishment? We’re looking into it, me and Piers. We’re going to do what we can.”

  The mention of Piers unnerves me.

  “Johnnie, what can you possibly do? It’s this great war machine—you can’t stop any of it.”

  He ignores me.

  “In Jersey they’ve started already. They’re setting up a network to help some of the workers escape,” he tells me. “Safe houses and so on.”

  This seems extraordinary to me.

  “But where would they go?” I ask him. “None of us can escape. There’s no getting off these islands. We’re all just stuck here now.”

  “They live as islanders,” he tells me.

  “Until when? Until the war is over?”

  “Until we win,” he says.

  JANUARY. STORMY WEATHER. Up on the hill at Les Ruettes, the windows are crusted with salt, though you’re still a mile from the sea there. It’s a strug
gle to keep my house warm enough: there’s a wind like a knife, which cuts through closed windows and doors. We all have chilblains.

  I wait with all the other mothers in the playground. Everyone looks a little more shabby, a little more darned. The wind rattles the ivy leaves on the wall of the school behind us.

  Here too the talk is of the slave workers.

  “Have you seen all those poor workers they’ve brought in to do their building?” Gladys is frowning. “They must treat them terribly badly, they look half-starved,” she says.

  “They must be so cold in this weather,” says Ruthie Duquemin, Simon’s mother. “They sleep in those horrible camps, and they only have rags for their clothes.” She shivers, as though she can feel their coldness in her own body.

  “But they’re all prisoners, aren’t they?” says Susan. Unlike the rest of the mothers, she’s made a bit of an effort: she’s wearing powder and lipstick, and she still has an easy elegance, even in her threadbare coat. “So they must be criminals, mustn’t they? They’ve all done something. They must have committed some crime.”

  “It’s still pretty awful, the way they treat them,” says Gladys. “It isn’t humane.”

  Susan pulls her coat closer around her.

  “What we have to remember is, we don’t know the whole story,” she says. “They must have done something serious, to be treated as badly as that.”

  I remember what Johnnie said—What could any man possibly do, to deserve such punishment? But I don’t say anything.

  “And they look so unhealthy,” says Vera. “They’re probably riddled with lice.” Her face is pinched and tight, clenched against the icy wind.

  There’s a murmur of agreement.

  Susan clears her throat briskly.

  “It’s awful for them, obviously, but the truth is, they could be infectious. They could be spreading diseases. To be entirely frank, we could do without them on our island. We’ve got enough to put up with already,” she says.

  “Poor wretches,” says Ruthie, Simon’s mother. “It’s not their fault they’re here.”

  She has a troubled look: there’s a frown in her fern-green eyes. I know she’s upset by the conversation. I ought to join in and support her, but I can’t work out what to say.

  “You’ve got to feel sorry for them,” she says.

  I start to say something, agreeing, but my voice is sucked in by the wind and Vera speaks above me.

  “But what can you do? I heard about this woman on Jersey. She took one of the slave workers into her house, and the Germans found him there.”

  “What happened?” asks Gladys.

  Vera says nothing for a moment. The wind in the ivy leaves behind us makes a cold hard sound.

  “I heard they shot her,” she says.

  A little charge runs through the group, an electric current of fear.

  “People who do that kind of thing make trouble for everyone,” says Susan. “Putting the rest of us at risk.”

  Vera nods.

  “There’s nothing we can do. We just have to knuckle down and get on with our own lives,” she says. “Look after the people we’re responsible for. I mean, it’s sad for them and all that—but it’s nothing to do with us. We’ve got our own lives to lead.”

  I’m about to speak when the school bell rings for the end of the day. The women turn toward the building, the children flood out of the door. Millie rushes up to me and I bend down and she flings her arms around me.

  “Did you play with Simon today?” I ask.

  “Yes, of course. He’s my friend.”

  We ease back into our ordinary lives. But I feel a small hot flicker of shame, that I didn’t manage to speak.

  I WALK UP the hill to Les Ruettes, with some of the turnip jam I made with the carravita I bought. There are snowdrops in the hedgebanks—meek supplicants, hanging their heads—and you can smell the sweet vanilla scent of winter heliotrope, but spring still seems a distant promise. Above me, rooks roll and tumble, like torn black rags on the white rushing stream of the sky.

  It’s chilly in Angie’s kitchen; her fire gives out only a thin paltry warmth. The wind rattles the elder against her window; the sound seems too significant, as though someone is out there, someone who wants to get in. Cold air creeps under her door, and makes little swirls and eddies in the dust and dead leaves in the corners, which haven’t seen a broom for weeks. Before Frank died, her kitchen was always gleaming and immaculate.

  She’s grateful for the turnip jam.

  “Really, you shouldn’t. You’re too good to me, Vivienne.”

  She looks older, haggard, a fine graph paper of lines around her mouth and her eyes. I ask how she is and she shakes her head a little. Usually she’ll say something cheerful—Not so bad, Vivienne, mustn’t complain—but she fixes me with her sad clear eyes.

  “It’s over a year now,” she tells me. “I should be getting over it, but I’m not. I miss him so much, it’s killing me.”

  I put my hand on her arm.

  “A year’s such a short time,” I tell her. “When you’ve lost someone.”

  “I don’t know, Vivienne. I feel I need to pull myself together. I mean, it’s not as though it’s just me. Thousands of folk are going through this.”

  It’s quiet between us for a moment. I think of all the things she used to tell me about—the strange old things she still half believes in, the stories of the islands: about the fairy settlements that are connected by underground roads; how the body of a drowned man thrown up by the sea demands burial; how the flower of the hawthorn should never be brought in the house. But now she is often silent, as though words don’t come so easily to her, as though she has to dredge them up from some deep place inside her.

  I tell her about the man I saw in Joseph Renouf’s field.

  “I’ve seen them too,” she tells me. “They seem to let them out at times—I think they must turn a blind eye, let them scavenge on the farms. That way I suppose they don’t have to feed them so much.”

  Her lips are chapped and bleeding. She dabs them with a handkerchief.

  “They’re treated so badly,” I say.

  Something dark moves over her face.

  “It’s even worse on Alderney,” she tells me. “Jack told me. Jack’s doing some work on Alderney now. . . . Well, I explained to you, Vivienne. He has to make ends meet, he has all those growing children to feed. . . .”

  I wonder what on earth the Germans can want with Alderney. It’s such a small, bleak, windswept island, with hardly any good soil.

  “What’s happening there?” I ask her.

  “There aren’t any islanders there anymore,” she tells me. “Everyone went to England. Jack found a dog running wild—it had to be shot, poor little thing.”

  “But what do the Germans want with the place?”

  “They’re building bunkers on Alderney, and the camps are worse there,” she says. “Jack told me. There are four camps, and the men there are starving, he said. The men have high voices, they make a sound like birds. . . . People do, when they’re starving, Jack told me. I didn’t know that. Did you know that, Vivienne?”

  I shake my head. Chill fingers of air reach out into the room. The elder tree knocks at the window.

  “The ones who work there are beaten, they’re treated like animals,” she says. “Worse than animals, even . . . Jack told me this thing, and I can’t get it out of my head.” She leans in close; her breath—secretive, nicotine-scented—brushes my face. “There was a man,” she says, “who fell into the concrete-mixer there, and the Germans wouldn’t stop the machine, and the man was buried alive. Jack saw it happen. He told me. . . .”

  THAT NIGHT, I ask Gunther about Alderney.

  “People say . . . People talk about Alderney,” I tell him. “A friend of mine told me . . .” I clear my throat, which is suddenly thick. “She said that people are starving there. There are rumors of bad things being done. Do you know what’s happening there?”

 
His face is shuttered.

  “There are work camps on Alderney,” he says. “They’re nothing to do with us. It’s as I told you, Vivienne. It’s the Organisation Todt.” He strokes my hair. “Darling, let’s not worry about them. Please. Don’t bring them into this room.”

  He doesn’t know, I tell myself. It’s nothing to do with him.

  Chapter 46

  THE WEATHER CHANGES. We wake to white sunlight and washed blue skies. There’s a froth of blossoms in my orchard, and in the grass beneath the trees a scattering of pale windflowers. The evenings lengthen, so Millie and Simon play out for a while before tea. There are glossy lacquered celandines in the hedgebanks, and narcissi, sherbet-scented, dance in the fields. The Blancs Bois shakes and shivers with birdsong.

  Angie tells me there are mushrooms—big meaty chanterelles—in Harry Tostevin’s fields near the top of the cliff. So one Saturday I leave Evelyn and Millie and cycle up to the clifftop. The air smells of the changing seasons, carrying the green fresh scents of pollen and sap and the coconut smell of the flowering gorse, and it’s so warm I don’t need a cardigan. The grasses sway in a light wind, as though a hand is stroking them. Up at the top of the lane I can see the shine of the sea, and from here the waves seem tiny, the water scarcely moving at all. My body is fluid, easy, in the warmth of the sun. I think of Gunther: the thought ripples in me that in spite of everything I am happy.

  I leave my bicycle lying where there’s a gap in the hedgebank. It’s muddy here; the damp earth sucks at my shoes. I find wonderful chanterelles, in hidden ditches and shadowy, damp hollows under the hedge. In the shade the dew hasn’t dried yet, and my shoes and the cuffs of my blouse are darkened with wet. The mushrooms have a rich, earthy smell; I fill my basket with them. I’m planning how I shall cook them, with a knob of butter I’ve saved. I feel my mouth filling with water as I think how good they will taste.

  I’m vaguely aware of something approaching, troubling the peace of the day. A distant disturbance, a man’s voice shouting. As the voice comes nearer, I hear that he’s shouting in German. The shouting draws rapidly closer, and I hear the sound of many footsteps tramping down the lane. I feel a resentment—that something should intrude on the peace of my morning. I have an instinct to hide, but I’ve left it too late, I just stand there. I watch as a gang of workers passes in the lane. There are about a dozen of them. They must be going to the clifftop, to build Hitler’s ring of concrete that Johnnie told me about. Their appearance appalls me. They are dressed in rags and their bones stick out through their skin—their collarbones, the bones of their wrists. They shuffle, not lifting their feet, and their backs are hunched over, pressed down, as though they carry some terrible weight. There are two guards, who have different uniforms from the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, the gray uniforms we are used to—these are brown, with swastika armbands.