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

by George Costigan

  I kept calm enough as I asked for the person to identify themselves. When they wouldn’t, didn’t, I did use the word ‘coward’.

  That got a layered response.

  Miss Makin distracted – unheard of. Miss Makin personal – never. Miss Makin angry…

  I sat them all in utter silence. After twenty minutes and some coughing and fiddling beginning someone said, ‘It was Hughes, miss.’

  I said, ‘I am no longer interested in who and I have never held any place for ratters or ratting.’

  The silence sealed for the remaining twenty minutes, one whole carefully planned lesson, till the bell rang. And even then I made them wait, silent.

  O I was cross.

  Well, that was a warming memory.

  Father and I watched the World Cup Final together and I wondered (but again, did not ask) if the Irishman secretly hoped they would lose. When they won, he offered, ‘O dear God, knighthoods for football now.’

  The sixties.

  No-one offered me mind-expanding drugs. If I was invited to a party I believe I talked too little to hold anyone’s attention or interest; I didn’t smoke, never got hilariously or wildly drunk and when some poor soul was murdered at a Rolling Stones concert in a place called Altamont the newspapers, far too eagerly I felt, announced an end to all the Openness. There was something in their tone that induced a bizarre nostalgia in me for a thing I had not ever participated in. The incoming decade felt cold and vengeful, somehow. A sense of ‘You’ve had your fun.’

  I hadn’t.

  Would I, will I, ever?

  Vierzon. The flat-lands. Couldn’t live here. Just under half-way there.

  Lovely day so far. Enid even dozed.

  When Thatcher shuffled her cards and appointed Keith Joseph to Education Father simply said, ‘Well?’

  ‘What?’ I who knew nothing.

  ‘That – thing…’ I could see the effort not to swear as badly as he longed to, ‘That – Joseph – has a theory the poor shouldn’t have children. State-supplied condoms. That’s your boss now, Enid.’

  I was reduced to, ‘What do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘Educate yourself. For fuck’s sake, woman.’

  I did my best, father.

  Brive la Gaillarde, and hills.

  The roof-tiles turning from slate-grey to terra-cotta. Rurality; more animals than houses, more trees than people or cars. Bridges over sharply glistening rivers crossed and re-crossed and with each one England slid into a past as the train charged her into a future. A sudden tunnel.

  Why do tunnels always make me feel like a child again? Excited and scared.

  The train poured out into the widening valley of The Lot river.

  A sign. Department du Lot. Thirty-forty minutes more.

  At some point in our lives together the money I earned from book sales surpassed my Head of English salary.

  So, if I had told him, if I had shared, had he known, he would have had no need to even consider that gesture. Of buying the house.

  So, I need to learn to lose my secrets, because that one grieves me.

  Still. Feels I made him betray himself.

  And me?

  Enid, three years alone? Mrs Thatcher’s aim, she says repeatedly, is to take The State out of people’s lives. But she has tighter control over schools, colleges and universities than ever before. I feel a nasty – such a silly, lazy word, but accurate here to catch my feelings – a nasty change in education in progress. Once upon a time – and yes, now it feels like a fairy story – we believed schoolteachers, university lecturers, teacher trainers, local education authority officers knew best and could be trusted to act, not only in children’s and parents’ interests, but for the wider good. The government’s role was to provide sufficient resources. From the ‘victory’ over the Miners she and her ghastly Baker behave as though education is an Industry. And an ailing, near-bankrupt one. They denigrate our views, demand Value for Money; and impose ‘performance management’, all vile hokum – and to insist on ‘customer satisfaction’.

  Disgusting. My blood boils and I honour my father’s struggle, but.

  I will stop, I will cease my struggle with her force. This is why I am on this train, slowing into this pretty little town.

  She may have England and I will hope to share something better in Figeac.

  ‘Figeac. Monsieur Mesdames – la prochaine arrêt est Figeac.’

  Enid reached down her suitcase. The train’s brakes were applied. As the platform cleared of train and passengers an elegant black-haired woman strode towards Enid, hand outstretched, smile beaming.

  ‘Ms Makin?’ she said with no trace of a French accent.

  ‘It is. Enid. Zoe?’

  ‘Voilà. Bienvenue.’

  ‘Merci.’

  Before Enid noticed the handshake had melted into three tiny cheek-kisses and her suitcase was in Zoe’s hand.

  ‘Good journey?’

  ‘Very. Thank you.’

  ‘My car’s just outside.’

  The drive took them up through heavily wooded hills. Pine, chestnut, oak, plane trees, silver birch – till the road flattened into an upland plateau of tiny hamlets and scattered farms with curious locals stopping their late Friday afternoon work to see if they knew the car. Some of them did; to some of them Zoe raised a finger and to some a smile, too.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘If I might – what are you looking for?’

  ‘A place.Just a simple place.’

  Zoe turned to show Enid her smile. ‘Good. We don’t do a lot of Grand up here. Simple – we have plenty...’

  ‘Your English is terribly good.’

  ‘Thank you. It ought to be – I taught there for three years.’

  ‘Not English, surely?’

  ‘No! French.’

  ‘And your accent is flawless, too. Where, may I ask?’

  ‘Portsmouth.’ Zoe answered.

  There was a pause.

  ‘What?’ Zoe smiled, inviting Enid’s response.

  ‘No, nothing. Just wondered if you didn’t find it a touch – primal?’

  Zoe barked a laugh. ‘The tattooed hordes? And the men just as bad!’

  Enid said, ‘I only went there once – but – yes.’ Both women laughed.

  They drove on in pleasant silence and Enid sat back, taking in the view, until Zoe quietly asked, ‘And this ‘simple place’, is it for a permanent move?’

  ‘If I find it. Yes.’

  ‘Let’s both hope then.’

  Zoe thought, is this the spinster I might become?

  The bedroom was simplicity itself, the carefully spread English magazines on the bedside table notwithstanding. The window offered a dull view over the backs of neighbouring properties. Enid hung her clothes, arranged her few toiletries, pushed her case beneath the bed and heard new arrivals.

  On shelves all down the wide staircase were books and Enid was able to browse the titles, delay having to be social – and eavesdrop on the conversation below.

  ‘Like we said,’ Jim over-enunciated for this attractive hostess, nonetheless a foreigner, ‘we’ll sleep in our camper-van but take the meals if we may.’

  ‘Not a problem.’ Zoe beamed her best smile. ‘And no trouble finding the village?’

  ‘None at all. Lovely quiet spot.’

  ‘Well, certainly if it’s tranquillity you’re looking for – you’ll find it in abundance here.’

  Janet, relaxing with every long word this woman used, chimed in, ‘We’re just looking.’

  ‘Well, you’re very welcome,’ Zoe beamed, indicating armchairs. ‘Take the weight – is it ‘off your pins’?’

  Enid heard that Zoe knew perfectly well it was, and she then followed it with her piece de resistance, ‘And can I offer you a pot of tea?’

  ‘Oo, now.’ Janet purred. ‘That’d be champion, aye.’

  Everything the husband said came as a pronouncement. No need for the conversation to progress unless he had more to add.
r />   Zoe said, disingenuously. ‘‘Champion’? Then, tea for two.’ And she was gone.

  ‘Crikey Riley Jim – you’re not going to expect me to speak frog as good as that, are yer?’

  ‘I don’t expect you to speak English as good as that, love.’

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘Wasn’t she?’

  Enid slipped back up to her room, found her notepad and a pen and scribbled.

  There were more voices as she made it all the way downstairs. A younger couple were making the acquaintance of the older pair over tea and what looked like Bourbon biscuits. Enid nodded to them all, and sensing the outskirts of a linguistic panic arriving with her, said, rather loudly, ‘Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?’

  An almost audible sigh of relief.

  In the pause the younger man rose to cross the room and offer her his hand and his name, ‘Roy.’

  ‘Enid.’ The hand was warm, hard, almost calloused. A builder? ‘Sue.’ He displayed her warm smile proudly. The formality clearly impelled the other man to rise from his chair and offer, without the handshaking, ‘Jim and Janet – from God’s own country...’ Enid smiled. ‘Yorkshire?’

  ‘Like I said,’ he affirmed.

  Enid wondered why, at fifty-five she now wished a social trapdoor could open before her, into which she might slowly and ever so charmingly descend, leaving only the fragrant odour of discretion.

  Instead, she smiled, nodded, and was relieved when the Jim-man returned to his chair and she could veer away towards the big dining-room and the sanctuary of some more book-shelves. I have never understood how it is that I can be so very confident in front of thirty-odd schoolchildren and so very ill at ease with a tiny handful of adults. N’importe, she told herself. And, as you’ve come here looking for solitude – that’s correct.

  The room was dominated by a huge table, neatly laid for six she noted – so one more to arrive. Deal with. A glassed stable front door at the far end opened out into the village square and she could see a couple of old men sipping what perhaps was pastis, outside the café in the early evening light.

  A huge stone fireplace, topped by an oak mantelpiece had an ancient sword hanging above it. Enid felt it to be the only masculine thing she’d seen so far. Finding it difficult to imagine the kitchen would reek of men she concluded this bright woman and the mother she’d mentioned did not share this space with a man. Now. Perhaps the war had taken him; but to Enid’s entirely unpractised eye she found it hard to believe that weapon had featured in WW II. A grand-parental relic?

  Behind her the Englishmen were chatting routes and roads and the women were smiling and bored. There were a few paintings, none of which looked either original nor particularly interesting; until she came on a delicate line-drawing of a house. It could not have been simpler yet something in it – either the building or the sentiment moving the hand of the artist – arrested her. Accompanying it were two framed black-and-white photographs. The first, head on, showed the same house, classic box-simple farm-house; steps up to a front door, two windows on each of its three floors. Caves, ground and grenier. And looking isolated. The second had been taken with the edge of the house in foreground and focused on a stunning view, soaring to mountains in the distance.

  The flowers on the table and by the telephone were charming and, sniffing the air from the kitchen, Enid realised with some gusto that she was hungry.

  The last of their party came in from outdoors. He was holding a mobile phone, which looked oddly out of place here and from the expression on his face, was precisely that. His suit, though clearly of light-weight material looked formal. Zoe arrived from the kitchen to make these introductions. He greeted her with, ‘One hundred per cent correct, Zoe. No sign of a signal.’

  ‘It’ll come, but not this weekend.’

  He was American. Trim, middle-aged. Monied?

  He punched a button on his apparatus and it made a quiet version of the noise from the door of ye Olde Offey. Satisfied it was now inert, he laid it down.

  ‘Happily marooned,’ he faked and turned to shake hands. Zoe started with Jim and Janet and Enid felt a trace of embarrassment as Jim enjoyed displaying his determinedly cloth-capped approach to the foreign. Even as a foreigner himself.

  ‘Come to buy a chateau or two, then?’

  ‘I have as it happens, yeah.’ The man smiled easily enough. And, intriguingly, Enid didn’t believe him. She noticed Zoe’s eyes gleam, though. Natural enough.

  The American turned from Jim to include Janet in asking, ‘And yourselves?’

  ‘Oo,’ she smiled, also a little disingenuously, ‘we’re just dipping us toes in the water.’

  ‘O.K.’

  He said it slowly, as though translating her dialect into his, before adding, ‘Well, here’s good luck to us all.’

  Zoe introduced Roy and his wife and those pleasantries were exchanged. And led him towards Enid.

  ‘Jack Bentley,’ he said, extending a hand as warm as his smile.

  ‘Enid Makin.’

  As their hands parted Enid asked, ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Ah,’ he laughed slightly, disconcerting her, ‘I came from and I live in Louisiana.’

  There was a beat.

  Enid said, ‘You say that as though it isn’t entirely true.’

  He tilted his head, nodded and added a smile. ‘Quite so, yet it is perfectly true.’

  Enid accepted the conundrum and asked, ‘New Orleans?’

  ‘Yes! You been there?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ her deprecating tone meaning to indicate how very little travelling she’d done. ‘No, but it has always appealed to me. I couldn’t say why.’

  ‘The music?’

  ‘Possibly.’ A tiny look between them.

  Enid said, ‘Hard to comprehend isn’t it – an ignorant fondness?’

  ‘Need for Romance, isn’t it? Like Manchester. I’ve never been there, never seen it.’

  Enid raised an eyebrow, she hadn’t followed his thinking. ‘And you’re fond of it?’

  ‘Manchester England, England,’ he seemed to be singing, ‘Across the Atlantic Sea…’

  Enid had a sense of imminent embarrassment rising.

  ‘Hair.’ He said by means of an explanation, ‘Hair?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m no wiser.’

  ‘Musical,’ offered Roy. ‘Great album. That’s a song from it int it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh.’ Enid said, ‘Well, as a Mancunian, I should have known that. Passed me by.’

  The American nodded, then guessed, ‘Mancunian being – meaning – from Manchester?’

  Roy said, ‘It’s posh for Mank.’

  Enid offered him a soft smile and said, ‘Pendlebury is not posh.’

  ‘And let me guess, Mank is not posh for Mancunian?’

  ‘Correct,’ said Roy.

  ‘O.K. One last question then. What’s ‘posh’?’

  ‘Brass,’ said Jim, a smirk starting.

  ‘Ah,’ The American was again graceful in saying, ‘This is the two countries divided by a common language schtick, correct?’

  He turned to Roy and Sue, ‘And so where are you-all from?’

  Sue said ‘Leicester.’

  ‘And that’s one of those places only English people could pronounce from its spelling, right? Like—‘

  ‘Arkansas?’ said Enid, almost blushing.

  He grinned. ‘Touché...’

  Enid smiled back.

  Now, that was enough. She had been quick-witted, which she most assuredly did not believe she was, and she had survived so could this interview please stop right now, please. Before more were expected. Please?

  The man seemed to catch something off this brief quiet, and her rising blush, said, ‘Lovely old house,’ and picking up his phone he moved away enough to fake beginning a look-around. Enid, nodding in the direction of the sword, added, ‘Mm, it is,’ and, seemingly mutually relieved, they separated. She watched him for a second, sensing a pr
ivacy re-gathering. Yes, and perhaps that’s transference, my dear.

  Had she watched him longer she would have seen that after a cursory glance at the books he had stood, somewhat transfixed, by the framed line-drawing and even more so by the two photographs. He had no notion of how long he had been standing there when he heard Zoe’s call to the table. He willed himself into his sociable mood, pulled out a chair for Janet as she arrived beside him, and prepared himself for this longest weekend.

  Sara bustled around the table as best her ancient legs and, it felt to her, even older slippers, would allow. She received a medley of compliments for her soup, in French, English and atrocious Franglais, at all of which she smiled, muttered ‘merci’ and bustled out even a little quicker.

  She and Zoe served platters of chicken and lamb, put the best serving spoons in the vegetable tureens, chorused, ‘Bonne Appetite’ and retired to the kitchen; Sara to deal with the obscene addition to her mille-feuille pastry tart, and Zoe, her back against the cuisiniere, to chatter.

  ‘The American is rich, Mamman. And the younger couple are serious too.’

  Sara looked unhappily from the carton of crème anglais to her daughter. ‘What do you want me to do with this muck?’

  ‘Thicken it Mother. With this.’

  She pushed the tub of crème vert along the work surface. ‘This could be a good weekend; can’t you feel it?’

  ‘And how much more sugar in it?’ Sara was not to be distracted. ‘Too much – they’re all English. Except him. Mind you, he’s American. And they’re vast. But he’s slim. He won’t take custard.’

  ‘Good for him. I could make better. Eggs, milk, cornflour...’

  ‘I know! Tonight we comfort them, yes?’

  ‘And start tomorrow with the disgusting breakfasts?’

  Zoe replied by simply staring at Sara, with what she hoped was a fond but baleful air.