The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

  “Captain Richter,” I say. Though I’m not sure how to address him. Germany has no army now: presumably he doesn’t really have a rank anymore.

  “Mrs. de la Mare. Thank you so much for coming.”

  We sit. The waitress comes to our table. He orders tea for both of us.

  “You would like something to eat? A cake?”

  But I can scarcely swallow; I know I couldn’t eat.

  “No, thank you.”

  When the waitress has gone, he leans across the table toward me. His clear dark eyes are on me. There’s such seriousness in his face.

  “Mrs. de la Mare . . .”

  He stops, clears his throat, as though it’s too hard to say the words he has come here to say. Even for this poised, cynical man, who must have seen so many things.

  But I can read it all in his eyes.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” I say. “That’s what you came to tell me.”

  A shadow moves over his face.

  “Yes, I’m afraid Gunther died,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I knew he must be dead, when I got your postcard,” I tell him.

  “He asked me to come and find you, when he was dying,” he says. “I’m keeping my promise to him.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  For a moment we are quiet. The noise of the café around us seems to withdraw, to come from some great distance.

  Max takes out two cigarettes, lights them, hands one to me. As I take the cigarette, I see that my hand is trembling.

  He leans forward on his elbows, looking into my face.

  “There were things he wanted me to tell you,” he says. “He told me he thought you blamed him for the shooting of that Pole.”

  “He wasn’t a Pole,” I tell him.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” he says.

  “Yes. It matters.” I’m surprised by the anger that seizes me—that Max talks about him as though he was just some faceless prisoner. “He came from Belorussia. His name was Kirill. His village was in a birch forest. He was a craftsman, a very skilled man. He made violins.”

  My voice is too loud, too intense.

  Max leans back slightly and makes a small, soothing gesture with his hands, as though to pacify me.

  “Anyway. That man who was shot,” he says.

  But the anger is still in me.

  “I know to you it was just one incident, one little thing that happened. An unfortunate episode. It wasn’t that to me. To me it was all the brutality of war.”

  “Yes. Of course,” he says, placatingly.

  The waitress brings our tea. I try to pour, but my hand is shaking too much.

  “You should let me do that,” he says.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  He pours. He hands me my cup.

  I don’t drink. I’m waiting.

  He leans toward me again.

  “Gunther wanted me to tell you it was nothing to do with him. He knew you were hiding the man in your house.”

  “When did he tell you that?” I ask.

  “He told me when we were still on your island,” he says. “That when he came to see you one morning he realized what was happening. He would never have spoken to the OT about it. He wouldn’t have put you at risk. He wouldn’t ever have hurt you. It wasn’t Gunther who betrayed you.”

  “How do you know that?” I ask him. “How can you possibly be sure?”

  “I can be sure because I know where the information came from. It came from Hans Schmidt,” he tells me. “Schmidt saw something in your garden. He went to the OT.”

  I remember the fresh-faced blond boy who would sometimes mow the grass at Les Vinaires: the cat-lover.

  “Why didn’t Gunther tell me?” I say.

  “He was a proud man, Mrs. de la Mare. As I imagine you know. Once you’d decided your love affair was over, he would never have pleaded with you or begged you to take him back.”

  I don’t say anything. I know he is right.

  We smoke in silence for a moment. Then Max puts his cigarette down, resting it in the ashtray.

  “Mrs. de la Mare. I have to tell you,” he says, haltingly. “We didn’t know the things that were being done in our name. Many of us who served in the army, believing in our country—that we had to restore our pride, to recover the land we had lost—when we saw what had been done, we wept. . . . Not all of us. But some of us.”

  “How could you not have known?” I struggle. There are no words big enough. “I mean—even here, on Guernsey—you could see the brutality.”

  “You do your job,” he says. “You do what you have to do. You don’t always look around you. You don’t always think about everything.” And, when I don’t say anything: “You may feel that is wrong,” he says, “and you would be right to feel that. But that is how people behave. Most of us, most of the time. People behave as they are told to behave, as those around them behave. Generally, this is what happens. It is depressing but true. This is what we are like. . . .”

  “You must have known,” I say again.

  He opens his mouth as though to speak, but he doesn’t say anything.

  We are silent for a long time then. The cigarette burns in the ashtray where he has left it. He is utterly still, staring down at his hands.

  At last he stirs. He rubs his hand over his face, and looks around him again—at the sunlight, the red-tiled roofs, the bright blowing sky.

  “So, Mrs. de la Mare. Tell me what your life is like, since the war. Here on your beautiful island.”

  I hesitate. What should I tell him? But there’s an intimacy between us, because of what he has done for me, in coming here. I’m grateful to him: I am in his debt. I decide I will tell him everything—well, almost everything. I owe him that.

  “My husband came back from the war,” I say. “He was lucky, he survived. But we’ve agreed to live apart now.”

  “I am sorry to hear that,” says Max.

  “He lives here in town—he bought a flat with some of his mother’s money—and I still live at Le Colombier, with the children,” I say. “I give piano lessons—we get by. We couldn’t live together again, after everything that had happened. . . .”

  He nods slightly.

  “I can see it would be difficult,” he says, carefully.

  “And Blanche—do you remember Blanche, my elder daughter?” I say.

  “Yes, of course I remember her.”

  “Blanche is married now. She married Johnnie—the son of one of my friends. He was sent to prison in France for a while. They found a shotgun in his room.”

  Max shakes his head in a tired, resigned way, as at a revelation of stupidity. Perhaps at Johnnie’s stupidity in holding on to the shotgun, or at all the pettiness of the rules that governed our lives for so long.

  “When he came home they started seeing each other,” I tell him. “They married just last summer.”

  I remember the wedding, picture it. Blanche in the shapely pink suit she’d made, and a little felt hat with a veil. Her blond hair falling like water and the happiness lighting her face; and the amazed way Johnnie looked at her, as though he couldn’t believe his luck; and everyone singing, the sun shining bright, the whole church festive with flowers.

  “It was a happy day,” I tell him.

  He smiles.

  “And Millie is doing so well at school,” I tell him. “She says she wants to be a doctor. Of course it’s a very hard career choice for a girl. But I’d love to see it work out for her.”

  His face softens.

  “Millie is a beautiful child,” he tells me.

  And then we are silent again. And I know it’s up to me to break the silence, but for an age I can’t do it.

  At last, I make myself ask the question.

  “How did Gunther die?”

  I can scarcely hear my own voice.

  Max puts his hand on my sleeve.

  “It was in August ’44, at Kishinev in Romania. I was with him,” he tells me. “He didn’t die alone.
”

  “I’m glad,” I say. “I’m so glad that you were with him. So glad.” I can’t stop saying it.

  I notice that he doesn’t tell me quite how Gunther died. He doesn’t say, It was quick, he didn’t suffer.

  “I have something to return to you,” he tells me. “Gunther kept this always. . . .”

  He takes something out of his pocket. It’s the book of poetry that once I gave to Gunther. I hadn’t known that he’d kept it. Max hands it over to me. It has a worn, battered look, and there’s a stain on the cover that might be blood.

  I flick through. The ribbon still marks the page of my favorite poem. I open the book there.

  I have desired to be

  Where no storms come . . .

  The words blur. I can’t read anymore.

  I turn to the front of the book, where once I wrote my name. I see that Gunther has written his own name beneath mine, so our two names are together—as lovers will carve their initials together on the bark of a tree.

  And then the tears come.

  I cry for a long time. The grief possesses me, my body shaking with sobs.

  Max sits silently and waits. I’m so grateful for his quietness.

  When at last the crying stops, I’m aware of people glancing at me, disconcerted by so much emotion in this public place. But not surprised, for many of us have grieved.

  I am lucky, I keep telling myself. I have my precious children. I am so lucky. But still the pain of it washes through me. I can’t imagine how I will ever learn to bear it.

  I scrub my face with my handkerchief.

  “I have to go now,” I tell him. “Thank you. Thank you for coming, for making the journey. I don’t know how to thank you. . . .”

  He shrugs a little.

  “I was happy to do this,” he tells me. “Gunther was my friend.”

  We stand. He shakes my hand warmly.

  I go down the steps to the street. I undo the lock on my bicycle and set out on the long journey back, as the sunlight mellows with evening and the shadows reach over the road. Going home to Millie; and the little boy who I know will rush into my arms when I get there, whose gray eyes will shine when he looks at me, who will smile with Gunther’s smile.

  Bibliography

  Molly Bihet, A Child’s War, self-published, St. Peter Port, 1985.

  ———. A Time for Memories, self-published, St. Peter Port, 2005.

  Madeleine Bunting, The Model Occupation, HarperCollins, London, 1996.

  Sue Daly, Wildlife of the Channel Islands, Seaflower Books, Wiltshire, 2004.

  Marie de Garis, Folklore of Guernsey, self-published, Guernsey, 1975.

  Nigel Jee, Guernsey Country Diary, Seaflower Books, Wiltshire, 1997.

  R. C. F. Maugham, Jersey under the Jackboot, W. H. Allen and Company, London, 1946.

  John McCormack, The Guernsey House, Phillimore, Stroud, 1987.

  Roy McLoughlin, Living with the Enemy, Channel Island Publishing, Jersey, 2007.

  Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, London, 2008.

  William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Pan, London, 1960.

  Christopher Stocks, Forgotten Fruits, Windmill Books, London, 2008.

  Acknowledgments

  I am deeply grateful to Brenda Copeland and Elisabeth Dyssegaard at Hyperion; to my UK editor, Maddie West; to my agent, Kathleen Anderson; and to Laura Longrigg in London. Thank you all so much for your commitment to The Soldier’s Wife. And thanks as well to Mick and Izzie, who shared Guernsey with me, and to Becky and Steve.

  Among the books I read while researching this story, two deserve special mention—Madeleine Bunting’s brilliant exploration of the Occupation of the Channel Islands, The Model Occupation, and Marie de Garis’s enchanting volume, Folklore of Guernsey.

  A Conversation with Margaret Leroy

  Q: In The Soldier’s Wife you write evocatively about a specific time period and specific places. How much research did you have to conduct before (or during) the drafting of this novel? What do you find most liberating about writing historical fiction, and what parts of the process are the most demanding, or the most frustrating?

  I started by visiting Guernsey, where I’d never been, because I knew I had to love the place to be able to write the book. And I was enchanted. Though the island is quite small, it was easy to leave the more touristy bits behind and to seek out peaceful places, like the deep lanes of St. Pierre du Bois, where I decided Vivienne should live.

  Probably the biggest challenge in writing the book was to try to put myself back into the mind-set of the time. Today, the whole way we in Britain think about the war is hugely shaped by the fact that we won. But in 1940, people in Britain were absolutely convinced that the Occupation of the Channel Islands was just the start, that Hitler was about to cross the Channel and that Britain would be invaded and defeated, and they made their decisions in the light of that belief. I always tried to remember that, as Blanche remarks, the people in the story don’t know how it’s going to end.

  I found the historical research reasonably straightforward. My bible was Madeleine Bunting’s brilliant book, The Model Occupation. Researching the feel of the early 1940s was more challenging, but it was also richly enjoyable. For me, part of the appeal of the story idea was the glamour of the period. Not of course for the people involved, but for us now, at this distance, it’s such a romantic time—all that wonderfully nostalgic music, and the cigarettes, and the stockings with seams, and the sense of everything being incredibly fragile. I loved researching fabric patterns and perfume and cocktails, and the fashions that Blanche lusts after in her old copies of Vogue.

  When I was trying to re-create the day-to-day textures of life and the way women ran their households, it helped that I’d had a rural childhood, and that my mother was a seriously late adopter. When I was growing up, she still used a mangle to wring out her washing, and she kept her perishables in a safe in her larder, and she’d turn sheets sides-to-middle, and in the evening she’d get out her darning basket, just as Vivienne does. And there were things in my childhood home that dated from the 1940s, and that I’ve used in the story: Margaret Tarrant prints, coral necklaces, eiderdowns covered in slippery taffeta that always fell off in the night.

  Q: Three of your books—and now The Soldier’s Wife—have featured mothers as the protagonists, and often highlight (if not develop around) the complex relationship between mother and child. What do you find most compelling about this kind of character?

  Bringing up my two daughters has been my main preoccupation for the last twenty years of my life, and I like to see that experience reflected in the novels I read. This doesn’t happen all that often. Of course there are some authors, such as Jodi Picoult and Joanna Trollope, who write marvelously about parenting, but generally the subject matter of novels doesn’t really reflect the centrality of child-rearing in most people’s lives. As author David Lodge once rather nicely remarked, the novel is all about sex and hardly at all about parenting—whereas life tends to be the other way around. Yet I find the relationship between mothers and children to be so rich in story possibilities. And of course if your protagonist has children—if there’s a child who could be hurt by her actions—this raises the stakes. So, in The Soldier’s Wife, the risks that Vivienne takes are much greater because through her actions she will be endangering her own children.

  Another reason why most of my novels are about mothers and children is simply that children are such fun to write. In The Soldier’s Wife, Millie is probably my favorite character—this robust, vivid little girl who sees things very clearly, and who is a center of good in the story.

  Q: You’ve written that some of your ideas for novels have sprung from your own experiences as a mother. What are the biggest challenges when writing characters that share similarities with your own life? Do you find the writing process cathartic in that way, or is there some other benefit (or danger) from writing about what you know?

  Th
e seed of a story can come from anywhere. In the case of The Soldier’s Wife, it was planted way back in 1992, when the government papers related to the Occupation of the Channel Islands were released. I remember reading about the Occupation in the newspaper—this was well before I became a novelist—and thinking, That would make such a wonderful story. The ideas for other novels have come from television programs, or things that have happened to people I know. But for two of my stories, it’s true that the inspiration was something that happened to me. The River House began when we dropped our elder daughter off for her first term at college; and the idea for Postcards from Berlin came from a difficult encounter with a pediatrician when our younger daughter was ill. And I also drew on the experience of my daughter’s illness in Yes, My Darling Daughter, in writing about the loneliness of a woman who has a troubled child—though in that story the mother comes to suspect that her daughter’s troubles may have a supernatural origin.

  I’m not sure that writing a novel could ever be cathartic in the way that, say, writing a memoir or even a nonfiction article might be. So much happens between that first frisson—the moment of thrill when you think, I could write about that—and the finished story; there’s so much exploration and development, and by the time you’ve created your characters and written your story, you’ve left the personal experience that may have inspired it far behind. When I sit down to write I enter a place that’s quite different from my everyday world—that’s one of the things that is so blissful about writing; and none of my protagonists is exactly me—though each of my heroines probably does have little bits of me in her.

  Perhaps I should add, though, that I’ve just shown this answer to Mick, my husband, and he said rather wryly that I’m a lot easier to live with when I’m writing. So I guess in some way my storytelling does provide some kind of catharsis for me!