The Soldier’s Wife. Margaret Leroy
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match Blanche’s taffeta dress. Then I head back down the High Street: I have left my bike against a wall in the lower part of the road.
‘Vivienne! It is you!’ I feel a warm hand on my arm. ‘I called you but you didn’t turn. You looked like you were off in a dream …’
I spin around. It’s Gwen.
She smiles, a little triumphant—as though I am something she has achieved. Her gaze—chestnut-brown, vivid, shining—rests on my face. Her frock has a pattern of polka dots and little scarlet flowers. It’s so good to see her I’d like to put my arms around her.
‘I didn’t know if you’d gone or not,’ she says. ‘It was all so sudden, wasn’t it? Having to choose?’ She dumps her heavy bag of shopping down on the pavement, rubs a sore shoulder. ‘So you’ve decided to stick it out?’
I nod.
‘Cold feet, at the last moment,’ I tell her. ‘A bit pathetic really. We actually got to the pier. Then we went back home, and someone had broken in and stolen some of our things …’
She shakes her head wearily.
‘It happened to a lot of people,’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t think it of islanders, would you?’
‘It was horrible,’ I say.
She puts her hand on my arm again.
‘I’m so glad, though, Vivienne,’ she tells me. ‘I’m just so glad you’re still here.’
Her warmth is so welcome.
‘Look—are you in a rush?’ she says.
‘Not at all.’
‘We’ll have tea, then?’
‘I’d love to.’
We have a favourite tea shop—Mrs du Barry’s on the High Street. We take the table we always choose—the table right at the back that has a wide view over the harbour. There’s a crisp starched tablecloth, and marigolds in a glass vase; the marigolds have a thin, peppery scent. The shop is almost empty, except for an elderly couple talking in slow, hushed voices, and a woman with eyes smudged with tiredness and a baby in her arms. As she sips her tea, the woman rests her cheek against the baby’s head. I feel a surge of nostalgia, remembering the sensation of a baby’s head against you—how fragile it feels where the bones haven’t fused, and how hot and scented and sweet.
‘Gwen—how did you decide?’ I ask.
‘Ernie wouldn’t leave,’ she tells me. Gwen and Ernie live at Elm Tree Farm, in Torteval; they have a big granite farmhouse and a lot of fertile land. ‘Not after all those years of work. “I’m damned if I’ll let them take it all away from me,” he said.’
‘Well, good for him …’
Her bright face seems to cloud over. She pushes back her hair. A haze of anxiety hangs about her.
‘How can you ever know what the right thing is? How can you ever know?’ she says.
‘You can’t. I keep wondering too. Whether I’ve made an awful mistake …’
‘Johnnie can’t bear it, of course, being stuck here, kicking his heels. Poor kid. He simply can’t bear that he was too young to join up.’
‘I can imagine that. How he would feel that …’
I think of her younger son, Johnnie—how impulsive he is, how he’d yearn for action. I’ve always been fond of Johnnie, with his exuberance, his wild brown hair, his restless, clever hands. He and Blanche would play together a lot when they were small—making mud pies and flower soup, or building dens in the Blancs Bois—until at seven or eight, as children will, they went their separate ways. Then I taught him piano for a while, though he often forgot to bring the right music, and scarcely practised at all. Until he discovered a talent for ragtime, which I could never play. He had the rhythm in him, and there was no stopping him.
‘But I wasn’t going to let Johnnie go to England on his own,’ says Gwen. ‘Not after … Well …’
She doesn’t finish her sentence. Her eyes glitter with unshed tears: the stricken look crosses her face. Brian, her elder son, was lost at Trondheim, in the Norwegian campaign. After it happened, I would panic sometimes when I was with her; afraid of the gaps in our conversations, as though they were cliffs you could fall from, afraid of saying his name. Once I told her: I’m so frightened of reminding you, I don’t want to make you upset … And she said, Vivienne, it’s not as though you’re reminding me of something I’ve forgotten. It’s not as though I don’t think of him every moment of every day. The only time I don’t think of him is when I’m fast asleep—then every morning I wake up and I have to learn it again. So let’s just get on with it …
‘I want to keep Johnnie close,’ she says now.
I put my hand on her wrist.
‘Of course you do,’ I say. ‘Of course you wouldn’t want him to go …’
Perhaps I’m lucky that both my children are girls. When I was younger, I felt I’d love to have a son, as well; but war changes everything. Even the things you hope for.
Mrs du Barry brings our tea. The quilted tea cosy is shaped like a thatched cottage, and the milk jug has a crochet cover held in place by beads. There are cakes on a silver cake stand—Battenberg, cream slices, luxurious chocolate eclairs. I take a slice of Battenberg. We sip our tea and eat our cake, and watch as the sun sinks down in the sky and spreads its gold on the sea.
Gwen sighs.
‘Johnnie’s such a worry—what he might get up to,’ she says. ‘He’s been a bit wild since it happened. It’s not really anything he’s done—just what I feel he could do …’
‘It’s such a short time,’ I tell her.
‘He worshipped his brother,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
I remember Brian’s memorial service—how Johnnie didn’t cry; how he stood to attention, his face white as wax, his body so rigid, controlled: making me think of a cello string stretched too tight, that might suddenly break. He troubled me. I know just why Gwen worries so about him.
‘He longs to do what Brian did,’ she tells me. ‘He wears Brian’s army jumper. And he’s got a box of Brian’s things—his binoculars, and his shotgun that he used for shooting rabbits, and his famous collection of Dinky cars that he kept from when he was small. The box is Johnnie’s most precious possession; he keeps it under his bed …’
I feel a tug of sadness, for Johnnie.
We’re quiet for a moment. It’s getting late, and Mrs du Barry hangs the Closed sign on her door. My hands are sticky with marzipan from the Battenberg cake, and I wipe them on my handkerchief. The spicy scent of the marigolds is all around us.
And then I ask the question that looms at the front of my mind—vivid as neon, inescapable.
‘Gwen. What will happen?’
She leans a little towards me.
‘They’ll overlook us,’ she says, too definitely. ‘Don’t you think? Like in the Great War.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Nobody bothered with us, during the Great War,’ she says.
‘That’s true enough. But that was then …’
‘I mean, what difference do we make to anything? What use could these little islands possibly be to Hitler?’ There’s a note of pleading in her voice: perhaps it’s herself as much as me that she’s trying to persuade. ‘Maybe he won’t think of us. That’s what I hope, anyway. You’ve got to hope, haven’t you?’
But her hand holding the teacup is shaking very slightly, so the