The Soldier’s Wife

‘Yes.’

I’m so grateful to Angie, for helping me out yet again. She’s always been so good to me—she makes my marmalade, smocks Millie’s dresses, ices my Christmas cake—and I know she’ll be welcoming to Evelyn. There’s such generosity in her.

She puts out a hand to Evelyn.

‘Come in, then, Mrs de la Mare,’ she says. ‘We’ll take good care of you, I promise.’

We enter the cool dark of her kitchen. Angie takes Evelyn to the settle by the big open hearth. Evelyn sits on the edge of the seat—tentative, as though she fears it won’t quite take all her weight, her hands precisely folded.

I put her bag on the floor. A chicken scuttles in and starts to peck at the bag. I keep tight hold of Alphonse’s basket.

‘I don’t know how to thank you, Angie,’ I say.

She shakes her head a little.

‘It’s the least I could do. And never doubt that you’re doing the right thing, Vivienne. With those two young daughters of yours, you don’t know what might happen.’ Then, lowering her voice a little, ‘When they come,’ she says.

‘No. Well …’

She leans close to whisper to me. Her skin is thickened by sunlight and brown as a ripening nut. I feel her warm nicotine-scented breath on my cheek.

‘I’ve heard such terrible things,’ she says. ‘I’ve heard that they crucify girls. They rape them and crucify them.’

‘Goodness,’ I say.

A thrill of horror goes through me. But I tell myself that this is probably just a story. Angie will believe anything. She loves to tell of witchcraft, hauntings, curses: she says that hair will grow much quicker if cut when the moon is waxing, that seagulls gathering at a seafarer’s house may presage a death … Anyway, I ask myself, how could such atrocities happen here, amid the friendly scratching of chickens, the scent of ripening tomatoes, the summer wind caressing the leaves—in this peaceful orderly place? It’s beyond imagining.

Maybe Angie sees the doubt in my eyes.

‘Trust me, Vivienne. You’re right to want to get those girls of yours away. She’s right about that, isn’t she, Frank?’ I turn. Frank, her husband, is standing in the doorway to the hall, half dressed, his shirt undone and hanging loose. I can see the russet blur of hair on his chest. I’m never quite sure if I like him. He’s a big man, and a drinker. Sometimes she has black eyes, and I wonder if it’s his fists.

He nods in response to her question.

‘We were saying that only last night,’ he says. ‘That you’d want to keep an eye on your girls, if you’d decided to stay. You’d want to watch your Blanche. She’s looking quite womanly now. I don’t like to think what might happen—if she was still here when they came.’

He’s looked at Blanche, noticed her—noticed her body changing. I don’t like this.

‘It would be a worry,’ I say vaguely.

He steps into the kitchen, buttoning up his shirt.

‘Vivienne, look, I was thinking. If it would help, I could give you a lift to the boat.’

I feel an immediate surge of gratitude for his kindness. This will make everything more straightforward. I’m ashamed of my ungracious thought.

‘Thank you so much, that would be so helpful,’ I say.

‘My pleasure.’

He tucks in his shirt. A faint sour smell of sweat comes off him.

‘The other thing is …’ I say, and stop. I’m embarrassed to be asking more: they’re already doing so much. ‘I was wondering if you could maybe look after Alphonse? I ought to have had him put down, but Millie was distraught.’

‘Bless her tender heart. Of course she would be,’ says Angie. ‘Of course we’ll take poor Alphonse in. He’ll be company for Evelyn, with all of her family gone.’

‘Thank you so much. You’re a saint, Angie. Well, I’d better be off …’

I go to kiss Evelyn.

‘You look after yourself,’ I say.

‘And you, Vivienne,’ she says, rather formally. She’s sitting there so stiffly, as if she has to concentrate or she might fall apart. ‘Give my love to the girls.’ As though she didn’t say goodbye to them just before we left. As though she hasn’t seen them for weeks.

I pat her hand, and thank Angie again, and hurry back down the hill. I can’t help thinking about what she said, about what the Germans could do. I tell myself she’s wrong—that it’s just a salacious story. In the Great War we heard that the Germans were cutting the hands off babies, but it proved to be just a terrible rumour.

Yet the pictures are there in my mind and I can’t push them away.

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_4efd8e95-2022-5ad6-a1be-197cfb7fb727)

The streets of St Peter Port are quiet. Some of the shops are boarded up, and there’s a lot of litter lying and shifting slightly in little eddies of air. The sky has clouded over, so it has a smudged, bleary look, like window-glass that needs cleaning. It’s a grey, dirty, rather disconsolate day.

Frank drops us at the harbour, wishing us luck.

We see at once why the streets were empty: all the people are here. There’s already a very long queue of silent, anxious islanders, snaking back from the pier and all along the Esplanade. We go to a desk set up on the pavement, where a flustered woman ticks off our names on a list. She has a pink, mottled face, and disordered hair that she keeps distractedly pushing out of her eyes.

We join the queue. People are sweating in woollen coats too cumbersome to pack up: they take out their handkerchiefs, wipe the damp from their skin. On this clammy summer day, the winter colours of the coats look sombre, almost funereal. Some people don’t have suitcases, and have tied up their belongings in neat brown-paper parcels. A bus arrives, and children spill down the steps; most of them have labels carefully pinned to their coats. They have a lost, dazed look in their eyes. Older children officiously clutch at younger brothers and sisters, responsibility weighing on them, clasping at a coat collar or the cuff of a sleeve.

Millie stares at the children. She frowns. She holds very tight to my hand.

Blanche is wearing her coral taffeta dress beneath her winter coat. She unbuttons her coat and runs her hand over her skirt, trying to smooth out the creases in the glossy fabric.

‘Oh, no, Mum,’ she says suddenly.

Her voice is full of drama; my heart pounds, hurting my chest.

‘What is it?’ I say sharply.

‘I think I’ve forgotten my Vaseline. My skin will get all chapped.’

I feel a little cross with her, that she frightened me like that.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘We’re all sure to have forgotten something.’

‘It does matter, Mum. It does.’

We stand there for what seems like a very long time. The queue is orderly, subdued: nobody talks very much. Seagulls scream in the empty air above us, and there are many boats at anchor; you can hear the nervous slap and jostle of water round their hulls. The sun comes briefly out from the cloud, throwing light at everything, then rapidly snatching it back; where the sun isn’t shining on it, the sea looks black and unspeakably cold. I can’t see the boat that will take us to Weymouth—it must be moored out of sight. The only vessel that’s moored to this part of the pier is quite a small boat, not much bigger than the fishermen use, tied up where stone steps lead down from the pier to the sea. I wonder vaguely who it belongs to.

More and more people come, with their coats, their suitcases, their bulging parcels of precious belongings: with the fear that seems to seep like sweat from their pores.