The Soldier’s Wife. Margaret Leroy
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agitated. She puts down her knitting; her crêpey hands flutter like little pale birds.
‘Evelyn—I couldn’t not open the door. The man’s living at Les Vinaires now.’
‘Fraternising is an ugly word. An ugly word for an ugly deed,’ she tells me severely.
‘Evelyn, I wasn’t fraternising. But we have to be civil. Stay on the right side of them. They could do anything to us …’
She’s implacable.
‘You’re a soldier’s wife, Vivienne. You need to show some backbone. If he comes to the door again, don’t you go letting him in.’
‘No. I won’t, I promise.’
‘Never let them in,’ she says. Ardent. ‘Never let them in.’ As though the maxim is something to cling to amid all the chaos of life.
She picks up her knitting. But then she puts it down again, looks vaguely in my direction. There’s a sudden confusion in her face, a blurring like smoke in her eyes.
‘Tell me who that was again—the man who came to the door? Who did you say he was, Vivienne?’
I can’t face repeating everything.
‘It was one of our neighbours,’ I tell her.
‘Oh. You and your neighbours.’
She takes up her knitting again.
As darkness falls, I go out into the yard to take some vegetable peelings to the compost heap. Out there, I pause for a moment, breathing in the night air, all the sweet mingled scents that bleed from the throats of the flowers. I can smell the flowering stocks in the borders in my back garden, and the perfume of my tobacco plants, which always seems richer at night. The sky is profound, the shadows are long, everything turning to blue. From the Blancs Bois, where the entangled trees are drawing darkness to them, I hear the call of an owl-shivery, like a lost soul haunting the wood: unworldly.
There’s a table-lamp lit in the kitchen of Les Vinaires, and the blackout curtains aren’t drawn yet. Lamplight spills across the gravel of my yard, leaching the colours from everything it falls on, so the petals of the geraniums in the pots beside my door are a sickly amber, without brightness. I look in at the window, see the man who is sitting there, at Connie’s kitchen table. He’s in his shirtsleeves, he has his top shirt button undone. At first glance I think it’s Captain Richter, who came to our kitchen door: but then I see it’s the other man, the scarred one. The lamplight falls on him, illumines one side of his face. I can see his scar quite clearly, the jagged line of it, the pink, frail tissue that doesn’t match the rest of his skin. He seems different from when he came in the vehicle, sitting there alone in the light of the lamp—pensive, less authoritative.
As I watch, he pushes up his cuffs—mechanically, not thinking about what he’s doing. His mind is somewhere else entirely. He’s reading something—a book, a letter; I can’t see what it is, the table is just below the level of the windowsill. I think it must be a letter: only a letter could hold him as this does—for whatever it is, it takes all of his attention. Some new expression flickers over his face: there’s something there that displeases him. He frowns; he runs his finger abstractedly over his brow. I think, This is how he looks when he’s concentrating. Blue smoke from a cigarette resting in an ashtray wraps around him and softly curls and spirals in front of his face. He’s alone; and I know he feels alone: he is utterly unaware of me watching him. He has the look of a man who doesn’t know he is looked at.
I feel a sudden curiosity about his other life—the life he has when he isn’t being a soldier: his home, the people who matter to him. I wonder what it is like for him to be here—with all around him the unfamiliar island night. Landscapes are most themselves, most separate from us, at night: and even to me, who has lived so long in this secluded valley, the Guernsey night can feel a little alien—the cry of the owl so lonely, the dark so dense and deep. I wonder about him—where he comes from, what he longs for. Is he a little homesick, as I was when I first came here? It’s a word we use so lightly, but I think of what I learned then—that homesickness is a true sickness, a longing like grief, for what has been lost or taken away. I can still feel it from time to time, just a trace of that yearning: it comes with a memory of lamplight, of pavements under rain, of the scorched smell of the Underground—all the scents and sounds of London, its humming, sultry energy. I wonder what he longs for.
I stand there watching him. I will him to look up, to look out of the window at me. It’s like a child’s game—as though I could make him see me, as though he is my puppet. I have the power now, in this moment—just the tiniest sliver of power. Because I am looking in on him, and he doesn’t know, doesn’t see me.
But he doesn’t move, doesn’t stir, his eyes are on what he is reading. I slip back into the house. I feel troubled, but in a way I couldn’t put into words. As though things are not quite as I thought they were.
I go to bed, but for a long time I can’t sleep.
My mother died when I was three. I remember how we were taken into her bedroom to say goodbye—me and Iris, my big sister. The room smelt wrong. Her bedroom had always had a scent of the rosewater she wore: but now it held a harsh, sore-throat smell of disinfectant. And my mother looked strange, somehow blurred, as though her face were made of wax and had started to melt. I was a little frightened of her. I wanted to leave the room, to be anywhere else but there. And she gripped my hand too tightly, and she was crying, and I didn’t like that.
I don’t remember much from the weeks and months that followed—except that for the funeral I had to wear a stiff black dress that was made of some itchy fabric, and people told me off for scratching. After my mother’s death I was mute for a while, simply refusing to speak at all: or so I’ve been told, though I don’t recall that part of it. There’s a fog in my head when I think of those months—I don’t remember much at all from those times. Except for the music box that was mine to keep, that I would play for hours, the music perfumed with memories of her. And there are little images in my head of the house where we lived, off Clapham Common, at 11 Evington Road—a tall, thin, rambling house that was never quite asleep, that would go on settling and creaking all through the night; and the hidden, enclosed garden with whispery, overhanging trees and the leaves of years piled up under them; and the aunts who looked after us, Auntie Maud and Auntie Aggie, who were kind but weren’t my mother, so when they combed my hair it hurt. I always remember that—how they pulled too hard at the tangles, not gently easing out the knots as my mother had done.
I was a nervous, frightened child, frightened of so many things—thunderstorms, and the edges of railway platforms; spiders, even the tiny ones that ran all over the terrace at the back of the house, and, crushed, left a smear like a blood stain; afraid above all of the dark. I was always afraid of the dark. Once Iris and I were playing teacher and pupil. I was five, just a little older than Millie is now—and Iris was the teacher, and was very strict and stern, and she decided I’d been bad, and locked me in the coalshed. It was a concrete shed, no windows, the door close-fitting to keep the coal dry—not even a thread of light from under the door. I remember the darkness, sudden and absolute, the fear that broke over me like nausea, the rapid panicky skittering of my heart. It was so dark I thought at first I had my eyes shut—that they’d been stuck shut somehow—and I put up my hand and found my eyes were open, I could feel the bristly fluttering of my eyelashes. I learned in that moment that there are different darknesses. That there is ordinary darkness—like the night in the countryside,