The Solider's Home: a moving war-time drama

by George Costigan

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s waste, Jacques.’

  The farmer in him stirred. ‘Have you got a hungry cow?’

  She nodded at the inanity of his question.

  ‘Bring it. Please.’

  ‘O.K.’

  Simone sent a package enclosing the framed photograph of them at the station and a letter from Jack to help distract him from their new address. Knowing it would fail and that she felt feeble.

  Jacques wrote once a week, telling his son about the chickens, the pup, the silence in the woods. About Sara’s beast gorging itself. Telling him to take care of his mother. By the time it had become a routine he believed he had achieved something. Whatever this existence was, he was ‘coping’. He daren’t judge it by his feelings for he tried so hard to allow himself none. Until her card came to remind him he had forgotten their son’s birthday. Remorse overwhelmed him and he realised he needed Sara to come so he could choke it out to her.

  He had to wait a fortnight and she came with news of far worse.

  Jerome had died.

  Then

  Dear Jacques,

  David and I will marry soon now. I beg your understanding, because I want it more than anything – and I need it.

  I have an office job – in a printing company – yes, a subsidiary of the one that publishes David’s books. It’s hard to write when you imagine every word of it will bring negatives to someone you love.

  I don’t know how to betray you kindly. When I don’t feel I am.

  Simone.

  One weekend in late Autumn Sara came alone, saying Zoe was staying the night with a school-friend. And so, finally, did these school-friends.

  ‘It’s not right,’ he said as they lay naked.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be anything other than itself.’

  He tried to think like that – but he couldn’t stop thinking of need.

  His. Jerry’s. Ardelle’s. Sara’s.

  David’s.

  Simone’s.

  Jacques’.

  They performed as best they could and the warmth in the sleep afterwards was the best of it. Sara walked home and decided she wouldn’t return for a month. She didn’t expect him to come to see her, and he didn’t. She waited another month and then she and Zoe found the house empty, the dog and chickens gone and two letters cob-webbed on the table. One from America, opened and the other, with a waiting envelope, written by him, unsealed.

  Jacques,

  Jerry was jailed for four years.

  Your son is well and happy in his new school though he misses Wayne.

  I am pregnant.

  Please bless us.

  Simone.

  Dear Simone and David,

  I am so happy for you both. It was unsigned.

  ‘Mamman?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know where he is.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s a secret place.’

  Sara took her daughter’s hand. ‘Show me.’

  ‘I don’t want to see.’

  Sara followed the pointing hand, walked down the frosting slope and there he lay. Cold. And face down.

  The funeral was long gone by the time Simone opened Sara’s letter.

  Sara burnt the few clothes, boxed the letters, the two paintings, the framed photo of them at Maurs station, the collage and the few plates and, leaving it all upstairs, closed up Janatou and her heart and walked back to her daughter and ageing mother.

  ENID

  1988

  81

  EARLY MAY. Friday evening. Just gone four-thirty. Or ‘almost five and twenty-to-five,’ as both her parents would have said.

  At the bus-stop with five teenaged stragglers. Four girls, one shuffling lad.

  Enid didn’t teach any of them, knew no names. Netball practice? Dawdlers. Detention?

  No. Unlikely any of us teachers would volunteer to monitor that of a Friday evening… Perhaps these were the latch-key kids? Or those with neither desire nor impetus to rush home. One way to find out and Enid was not going to do that.

  They ignored her. The ancient teacher, invisible.

  She listened not to their conversation but to their language, their use and gleeful abuse of it. Slang. Was that derived from slung, she wondered. Words thrown?

  Enid listened for examples of it, but their chatter was coded so as to all but forbid her entrance. Fine. That suited, too.

  Their bus appeared in the distance, Worsley to Swinton. Then on, for her, to Pendlebury.

  Tickets, passes, coins were found and rubbed. Primed.

  Something about a Friday.

  Odd but she now recalled some man called Fordyce, or similar, announcing, if she remembered correctly, ‘The weekend starts here.’ ‘Ready Steady Go!’ In her very early thirties. When people danced. Shook. For a brief moment there was Dusty Springfield. Making black and white television feel as though it were in colour. The bus squealed to a stop and the small scrum gathered impatient and spuriously excited, then opened to offer her – the ageing ‘Miss’ – to get on first, a practised display of ‘respect’, and when she demurred, it clattered chaotically upstairs. As though it had never ever done such an exciting thing before…

  Enid sat downstairs, beside an exhausted woman obliterated by what Enid presumed was weekend food shopping. For a small platoon.

  Nine stops – let thought loose. Loosen.

  Anniversary of father’s death, soon. Tend their grave. That sweet ritual.

  You have, like J.B. Priestley, been here before. Anything make tonight any different? No… Well, I have never shared a bus-seat with someone with quite so much shopping.

  Papers to mark, essays to read, lessons to plan. Much Ado About My Life. Church on Sunday. Back Monday, five past nine, urging a comprehension of the difference between metaphor and simile into fourteen-year-olds. One of the young ladies careened down the stairs, called, ‘Night, Miss,’ and swung off the bus, running and swearing at her friends upstairs.

  So many things you never did, Enid.

  I hope we reach my stop before this poor woman has to negotiate her way past me and off. I don’t want to watch, witness, her struggle; and if I offer to help I’ll needs go all the way to her house.

  Ye Olde Pendlebury Offie.

  A banal contradiction in terms, but what is life without the detail? O.

  ‘Under New Management’. Well, let us believe they will still sell my Vendredi Vouvray.

  She pushed at the door. ‘Barp-Klack.’

  Enid was shocked, harshly, out of her routine. No soft tinkle of a bell on a spring.

  It had said, and it repeated itself lest she be in doubt, as she let the door close, ‘Barp-Klack.’

  A hideous noise. An unnecessarily loud, metallic, somehow inhuman, noise.

  The lay-out of the shop had been modernised. Making its title yet more idiotic. The wines now separated by country of origin. There were scattered half-barrels containing ‘offers’. A sprinkling of sawdust on the floor. Really? Were people likely to spit? Or bring their horses in here, perchance?

  She located her ritual tipple, then spotted the same in a new glass-doored fridge. O. Then saw a chilled Chablis.

  For once, Enid… And for no good reason. Beyond a warm, thinning, memory.

  Pleased, she headed towards the young man, reading at the counter, his hair languishing seemingly off only one side of his head. Indeed, the other side of his head appeared to have been recently shaved. Odd. When he looked up (and almost smiled) he had a ring in his nose. Someone new pushed at the door.

  ‘Barp-Klack.’

  ‘Barp-Klack.’

  The young man, whose hair appeared to be partially cobalt, made no reaction to the door, only took her bottle and pointed a hand-held black plastic pistol at it, which glowed red and emitted another atonal noise, making the till spring open with a third variation of what to Enid sounded like frankly, schoolboys trying to fart.

  Surprised at herself she blushed at the thought,
and at her using the actual word too, and, a nervous reaction, she laughed.

  The young man looked up. He took her ten-pound note and the till trumped gratefully when he closed it. He handed the grinning old thing her plonk and her change. He did not wrap it in its usual soft tissue paper but slid it into a thin white plastic bag. A tube with handles.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘No worries – enjoy.’

  He looked vaguely puzzled by her politesse, but went briskly back to his reading. A comic book. Enid didn’t move. And wasn’t sure why.

  ‘Ought else, love?’

  He could have been a pupil two years ago. She wondered if, in his head, he’d spelled the word, ‘Owt.’

  ‘No, nothing, thank you.’

  The new customer approached with his purchase. ‘Right…’ the young man said.

  With that bizarre fashionable inflection making it sound like a question was being asked, when it couldn’t be.

  Enid turned, still puzzled, still wondering if there was more she needed, wanted or ought to say. The door greeted her pulling it.

  ‘Barp-Klack.’

  She would like to jam it open so it couldn’t ever offer it’s unmusical greeting or farewell again.

  But now came a droning single-note buzz from behind the counter and the young man tutted wearily, ‘Make up your mind, love – in or out?’

  Enid left. ‘Barp-Klack.’

  She placed her bags and keys on the piano.

  Open this bottle before you do anything else, madam.

  Mademoiselle, you should say. Being a pedant.

  Drink to not being a pedant? Good luck with that…

  She poured a first Friday evening glass. The chilled liquid was oddly warming. Again.

  Her flat brogues she eased off. These stockings really are too thick, but you can’t have teenagers, of either gender, distracted by varicose veins.

  Enid unclipped her grandmother’s pink cameo brooch from her neck and opened a single top button of her blouse.

  Mm, Chablis.

  O but it was worth paying the extra for the real thing. Once a Friday came. And what a school-teacher’s phrase that is, she thought. Were I to write about this life I lead, have lead, am leading – that would pass muster as a reasonable title. She sank into her father’s eternally comfortable armchair. It had fitted him and now her.

  One more sip before I draw my bath.

  Curious phrase. I wish I knew its provenance...

  She put Mendelssohn’s, ‘Songs Without Words’ on the radiogram. I must replace that stylus at some point. Yes, scratchy but fondly perfect, Felix.

  Poured some salts beneath the hot tap. The art-work on the box promised a bliss of Scottish purple-heathered relaxation and by the end of a long week Enid was prepared to believe it. Scotland in a box, why not believe it?

  The thought passed through her as she was undressing that she had become what someone of her age and background would call a spinster. Possibly elsewhere, some crueller place, an old maid. And, as she hung up her teaching uniform, tweed suit one, in these gay 80’s, she had also asked herself again – all these years after Val – whether she was at heart a lesbian. A closet one. That, she believed, was current idiom. In denial? Possibly, but her increasingly infrequent fantasies being in and of a hetero-sexual tone had dissuaded her. To her relief. A little late to start too much new now, she thought.

  She ran some cold, stirring up, like a child, bubbles.

  Like Chekhov’s Sonia she was plain and she knew it. Be-spectacled now – she laid them on the toothbrush shelf – and hair in-a-bun too, Enid. Just run and turn the music up a notch. The curtains are all drawn. ‘Large naked female pads about Pendlebury.’ Heavens!

  For some reason she could never fathom she had placed a large mirror at the tap end of the bath so when, as now, one lowered oneself in, or later hauled oneself out, lobster-red and with what her mother called ‘corned-beef legs’, it was impossible to ignore the sagging of the spare tyres. It was, she thought, an odd kind of cruelty; relieved again as now she slid below its angle and into the scented heat. O. Oh. Mmm.

  Long ago she had accepted solitude as her lot, and a single pat on the back was surely due here, for she had, in the phrase, worn it well. Even used it well. As a defining part of her professional persona. No false modesty naked in a bath, Enid! She knew how good a teacher she was, and how her students did well. She had the results to prove it.

  And now – now that ‘achievement’ was, paradoxically, a reason to stop.

  Go.

  These league tables, these ladders of excellence, and this latest smokescreen christened Parental Choice. It was people playing politics with Education. Despicable. That woman.

  Oh, shh Enid, leave her.

  Don’t spoil a cold Chablis in a hot bath.

  ‘We put our shoulders to the wheel, else we’re hopping a free ride.’ Her father.

  Life wasn’t so very bad. A yearn now and again. But, like normal.

  An ugly phrase, she thought.

  O.

  O but there is nothing like a bath.

  A Greek beach? A heated swimming pool?

  Yes, pedant, but I have neither the mentality nor, frankly, the body to lie, or lounge, in any public place.

  And I don’t own a swimming costume.

  Mum and dad must have bought me one once. Well, she would have. But I have never paid for one. Yet this immersion, this enfolding touch-all heat, it truly suits me. Especially of a Friday. With a glass. Her gaze lingered on the ceiling. Unchanged. Undecorated since…

  Her only home.

  Their first home. Council estate in Pendlebury. Where Mum and Dad met. At a church dance.

  ‘He made a bee-line for me,’ said her mother when Enid had asked. When they talked.

  As we did. As we had to, us two, the whole war.

  ‘Why is it a bee-line? Shouldn’t it be a crow-line; as in, “As the crow flies”?’

  ‘Well, as maybe – but he made a bee-line as in I were like honey.’ And Mabel had blushed.

  Enid always loved it when her mother blushed. It meant it was true.

  ‘Met at a dance, and we knew. Well, I did. And I could see he did! That whole massive question mark laid aside in an evening. In a dance if I’m being soft. And I wish the same for you, you know I do.’ And that would be followed by a squeeze of my hand.

  ‘Other problems, mind. My father. Your Grandpa Cliff; you don’t really remember him. He was – prejudiced.’

  Her mother always lowered her voice when she said that word. The two of them, in their own house and still she whispered. A memory that tickled still.

  ‘Because Daddy was Irish. When we told them, and us so proud of each other, and we said we wanted to wed he said, ‘A Paddy with a pick? A miner? Mabel…’ And he left the room. Left my mother crying. Pat, your daddy Pat, he followed Cliff and we all heard him say he couldn’t and he wouldn’t waste breath trying to stop Cliff thinking as he did – just to inform him the only member of his family invited to their wedding would be Mabel. I was shocked and proud at the same moment. Swinton Town Hall. February 12th,1932. It rained. He came around, eventually, your Grandpa. Mainly because of you, Enid.’

  Then there would be a tiny quiet in the story-telling.

  ‘And we got this, our council house, and your Daddy worked Agecroft Colliery and we thought, we hoped, and I certainly prayed that because he was a miner, and they’d said miners were ‘vital’, that he wouldn’t be called.’ Then there was always a longer quiet. And that quiet always ended with an action beginning.

  Baking, ironing, doing the crocks… Distraction. And she would eventually say, ‘But he was.’

  Enid stirred the bath with one foot. With such large toes, she thought. Again. Closed her eyes to better concentrate on greeting the movement of heat. Feel the tiny waves meet her. Explore her. Move with her stolid flesh. Loosen it. Or feel as though they could.

  ‘But he was. Called. And left me here with y
ou. And you – you always loved books…’

  Her mother would say that in a tone of some wonder, as to where, genetically, such an impulse could have sprung from. Virginia Woolf ’s father, Stephen, once said to her, ‘Child, how you gobble…’ Meaning books. I was the same. And now, still. Forever, I believe. She, Virginia, was loved but lived mainly loveless. I felt.

  And who loves you, Enid?

  My parents did. Do, in their peace. Mrs Cowley did. Mrs Cowley!

  Oh, the passion in her classroom! If I were writing that thought, passion would have a capital ‘P’. And embossed like the Book of Kells.

  I have tried, too hard, to do that. To be that passionate. And, failed, I do believe. My students respect me, and – she took another drink – so they should – but they don’t adore me. I adored Emma Cowley. For the radiation of her love of Language. Because ‘words make stories and stories transport.’ And that – the lifting above and away – to Emma Cowley, that was a Holy act. She moved me. Changed my life. Set it on this course, certainly.

  Enid stretched.

  Pressed her toes into the metal. This old iron bath. Marvellous. How it holds the heat. That hotel, where was it, Bordeaux, that modern plastic thing – oh no no no.

  Mrs Cowley slipping me summer-holidays Jane Austen. At ten. And still meeting me, with new ideas (and fixed ideals) when I went on to Monton, to the posh grammar school. Encouraging me. That was love. Heck, she even praised my dreadful teenaged poems! And she lived to read my first book, my fictionalised biography of Mum.

  O, there was A Moment. We had fulfilled each other. And, and she suggested I might now call her Emma. Sealing an eternal circle of love.

  Mum.

  My mum. Talking to Eileen, her neighbour, every Thursday. ‘She likes to clack,’ her mother always said of her. As though she didn’t. No. She was ‘chatting’ – Eileen clacked.