The Soldier’s Wife. Margaret Leroy
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Thanks, Angie.’
I smooth down the skirt. As she says, it’s pretty: the cotton has a pattern of flowers of many colours, yellow and cream and forget-me-not blue, like a blowing wildflower meadow. I don’t tell her why I’m wearing it.
She makes tea for us, in her big brown pottery teapot. Chickens scratch and bustle outside the open door.
‘So, have you seen much of them?’ she asks me.
I know she means the Germans.
‘They’ve requisitioned Connie’s place next door. There are four of them living there now,’ I tell her.
Angie snorts.
‘Requisitioned? They use all these fancy words, just to confuse us,’ she says. ‘Stole is what they really mean … But that’s rather close, isn’t it, Vivienne? You’ll be living in one another’s pockets. I wouldn’t like that at all.’
‘Well—at least they didn’t take our house …’
It’s her wash day. Her kitchen has a wholesome smell of laundry soap and damp linen. She’s nearly come to the end of her wash, she’s putting her clothes through the mangle before she hangs them out on the line. I see that she’s washing some shirts of Frank’s.
‘You wouldn’t mind if I just finished this off, Vivienne?’ she asks me.
‘No, of course not.’
She sees me noticing the shirts.
‘I thought I’d clear out his clothes,’ she says. ‘There’s plenty of wear left in them. I’m going to give them to Jack, my brother. He’s always grateful for hand-me-downs. They’re a bit hard-pressed, him and Mabel, with all those children to feed.’
I sip my tea, and watch as she moves the heavy arm of the mangle. Water flurries into the tray that catches the drips, in little spurts that fall in time with the rhythm of her movement.
‘So, Angie—are you …?’ The words are solid things in my mouth. ‘I mean—how is everything?’
She fixes me with her sad, steady gaze.
‘Not so good, to be honest, Vivienne,’ she tells me, very matter-of-fact. ‘But I know I shouldn’t complain. So many people have lost someone.’
‘That doesn’t make it any easier though,’ I say.
We are silent for a moment. From outside, you can hear the bubbling sound of chickens, and the bright whistle of a blackbird in the elder tree by her door.
Her appearance troubles me. Her face has an eroded look, as though years have passed since Frank died; as though those years like a river have washed over her and started to wear her away.
‘You must say if there’s anything I can do,’ I tell her, rather helplessly. ‘Just anything at all. I could bring you some meals, or something …’
She looks up at me. She pushes her hand through her hair, which is a wiry dark mass round her head—she hasn’t bothered with her curlers.
‘You’ve got a kind heart, Vivienne. And—seeing as you’ve offered—well, there is something,’ she says. She flushes, a little embarrassed, and I wonder why. ‘I need to choose some hymns. For his funeral tomorrow. The thing is—I don’t have much book-learning.’
She’s telling me she can’t read; it surprises me that I never knew this before.
‘Just tell me what to do,’ I say.
‘There’s a hymn book in the cabinet in the parlour,’ she says. ‘I wonder if you could bring it for me? Just while I finish my wash.’
I go to her parlour across the passage. When her house was built hundreds of years ago, this room would have served as the byre—people and animals all sleeping under one roof. It doesn’t feel homely like her kitchen. There’s a lumbering three-piece suite that’s shrouded in dust sheets, and the air is stale, with a thick sweet scent of lavender polish and damp: you can tell she doesn’t often open the windows in here. I find the hymn book, take it to her.
‘Is there a list of hymns in the book?’ she asks me.
I turn to the front, to the contents list.
‘Could you read through the first lines for me?’ she asks. ‘Just to remind me—so I can choose my favourites?’
I read the first lines of the hymns, with a little pause after each, while she considers it, all the time turning the handle, so the water from the mangled clothes splutters down into the tray. She listens scrupulously, with an intent expression.
At last we come to one that she likes.
‘There. Stop there, Vivienne. “Rocked in the cradle of the deep.”’ She rolls the phrase round her mouth, as though it is succulent, like some sun-warmed fruit. ‘I’ve always been fond of that one,’ she says.
‘Yes. Me too. Would Frank have liked it?’ I say.
She considers this.
‘Frank didn’t think all that much of religion, to be honest,’ she says. ‘He didn’t have much time for religious folk at all. God-botherers, he called them. Bible-thumpers. What he always said was—they’re just as bad as the rest of us … But I like a bit of religion myself. I think it helps you through.’
‘Yes, it can do,’ I say.
‘Are you a believer, Vivienne?’
The direct question unnerves me. I think how, right through my life, I’ve always liked going to church: how I adored the church Nativity play when I was a child—being an angel, with wings of frail muslin fixed to my fingers with curtain-rings, and a halo of Christmas tinsel; how I love the stained glass and the singing; how I can still find comfort in the familiar, resonant words; how I still pray sometimes. But I’m not sure how much I believe now.
‘Well, I suppose so,’ I say.
The drip of the water seems too loud in the stillness of Angie’s kitchen—louder than her voice, which is confiding, nicotine-stained.
‘When I was a child, my mother taught me a prayer,’ she says. ‘The prayer of the Breton fisherman, she said it was. It was the only prayer you ever needed, she said. Oh, Lord, help me, for Your ocean is so great, and my boat is so small. That’s a good prayer, isn’t it? Do you like that prayer, Vivienne?’
I think of waiting at the harbour. Of the little boat that I couldn’t trust, wouldn’t go in. Of the perilous, shining, unguessable immensity of the sea.
‘Yes, I like it,’ I say.
She nods.
‘I always thought that was a good prayer.’ A little rueful smile. ‘Except He didn’t help me, really, did He? He didn’t help me at all. Not this time.’
I leave her wringing out her dead husband’s clothes.
I walk home through the summer morning, feeling so sad for Angie, thinking how lost she seems, how much she has aged. Wondering what I can do to help her. I’m not really looking around me: I’m in a trance, abstracted, like when I was a child and didn’t come when I was called, and Aunt Aggie would shake her head at me: ‘You’re such a dreamer, Vivienne. You’re always off in cloud cuckoo land. You think too much, you need to live in this world …’
If I hadn’t been so preoccupied, maybe I would have noticed the car in the lane: maybe I would have turned in time, and made for the track through the fields, and come home by the back way. But I’ve almost reached the car before I really take it in. It’s not an army vehicle, but a big black Bentley, drawn up on the verge outside the gate of Les Vinaires. I recognise the car. It used to belong