The Soldier’s Wife

CHAPTER 10

Sunday evening. I weed my garden while Millie plays on the lawn. She tries to make a daisy chain, but her fingers aren’t yet clever enough and the stalks keep splitting right through. She leaves the daisies lying there, and plays for a while with her ball, practising throwing and catching. The ball is striped with colours and makes a vivid blur as it falls.

The day cools as the sun sinks down. I pull my cardigan close around me. Evenings can be cold on Guernsey, even in high summer—there’s often a freshness in the air, a chill that blows off the sea. A little movement of air shivers the leaves of the mulberry tree, and shadow clots and thickens beneath the elms in the hedge that shield the top part of our garden from the garden of Les Vinaires. The sky is purple as amethyst and streaked with rose-coloured cloud, and I can hear a nightingale in my orchard over the lane, its song spilling out like bright water-drops.

A distant growl of aircraft noise disturbs me. I look up. Six planes are circling in the sky above us. I can see the markings on them. I know they are German aircraft.

The pier is in my mind—the bombing, the shooting, the blood. My heart lurches.

‘Millie. Come indoors at once.’

She doesn’t move.

‘Millie!’

‘But my ball just went over the hedge. It was my best ball, Mummy …’

‘Do as I say,’ I tell her. ‘Go to the den we made under the stairs. Go this minute.’

‘Is it the Germans? Will they kill us?’

‘Just do as you’re told, Millie.’

I call to Blanche from the passageway but she doesn’t seem to hear. I rush upstairs. Music spools down from her bedroom: she’s playing Irving Berlin on her gramophone. Cheek to cheek. I rush straight in, without knocking. She’s standing in the middle of her bedroom floor, startled, slightly shame-faced. I briefly wonder if she’s been dancing in front of her mirror, practising moves, as I would do at her age: conjuring up a shiny, scented future, and a louchely handsome partner to hold you close in the dance.

‘There are German planes coming over,’ I say. ‘Go to the den with Millie. Now.’

‘But my record …’

‘Blanche, just go,’ I tell her.

She hears the edge in my voice. She leaves the gramophone, races downstairs. As I follow, I hear the disconsolate sound as the music slows and runs down.

Evelyn is in her armchair in the living room, knitting.

‘You should go and shelter with the girls. You’d be safer there,’ I tell her.

She doesn’t get up. Her sherry-brown gaze flicks briefly over my face.

‘There’s no need to worry, Vivienne. You always were a worrier …’ She speaks so slowly, each word precisely enunciated. I’m frantic with impatience. ‘You always did get yourself in a state over every little thing.’

‘This isn’t a little thing, Evelyn …’

She ignores this, goes on knitting. Her face is still, unmoved, as though nothing I’ve said has touched her. There’s a sound like screaming in my head.

She clears her throat.

‘Eugene always says as much. Worry, worry, worry.’

I tell myself that she doesn’t mean to criticise. That she doesn’t really mean some of the things she says any more.

‘Just come and shelter,’ I say.

‘I’m not going to hide away, Vivienne. I’m hurt that you thought that I would. Somebody’s got to make a stand.’

‘Please, Evelyn. Just in case something happens …’

‘I’m not going to let the Hun move me about,’ she tells me. ‘Where would we be if everyone did that?’

There’s nothing more I can say to persuade her. I leave her in her chair.

I watch the planes from the window. They fly low, towards the airfield, and vanish beyond the wooded brow of the hill. They must have landed. I watch the sky for a long time, as the west flares red with sunset, then deepens to a lingering indigo dark; but they don’t take off again.

In the end I tell the girls to come out from under the stairs. I wonder if it has happened: the world cracked open.

Monday afternoon. There’s a commotion from outside the door—Blanche jumping off her bicycle, flinging it down. She’s been to town to see Celeste. She bursts through the door, her blonde hair shimmering, flying out like a flag.

‘Mum, Mum. We saw them. They’re here.’ She’s breathless, the words tumbling out of her; she’s flushed and thrilled with the drama of this. ‘We saw the German soldiers, me and Celeste.’

‘I hate the Germans,’ says Millie, staunchly.

‘Yes, sweetheart. We all hate them,’ I say.

‘They’re ever so tall, Mum,’ says Blanche. ‘Much taller than island men. One of them bought an ice cream and tried to give it to me. I didn’t take it, of course. It was a strawberry cornet.’

Millie stares at Blanche, a little frown deepening in her forehead. I can tell her opinion of the Germans is being slightly modified.

‘I like strawberry cornets,’ she says.

‘They were very polite,’ says Blanche. ‘There was one who had his picture taken with a policeman. He said he wanted to send it back home to his wife …’

She pulls The Guernsey Press from her bag. We open the newspaper out on the table and read. There are a lot of new rules. There will be a curfew: no islander should be out of doors after nine o’clock at night. All weapons must be handed in … Reading this, I think with a prickling of fear of Johnnie, of his brother’s shotgun that he kept in a box beneath his bed: I wonder what he has done with it. The use of boats and motorcars is banned, and all our clocks must be put forward one hour.

As I read, I’m seized by a feeling I didn’t expect. It’s shame—a dirty, contaminated feeling. That this is happening to us. That we have allowed it to happen. I try to reason with myself, to tell myself that we can live with these regulations, and now at least the girls can sleep in their rooms, because with the Germans here, there won’t be any more bombing. But still the shame seeps through me.

I go to talk to Evelyn. I put my hand on her arm.

‘Evelyn, I need to tell you something important. I’m afraid that the Germans have landed on Guernsey,’ I say gently.

She looks up at me, her mouth pursed and tight. She puts her knitting down in her lap.

‘I don’t like cowardly talk,’ she says. ‘We mustn’t give in. We mustn’t ever give in.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I tell her. As though it’s my fault. ‘But it’s happened. The Germans are here. That’s what we have to live with now.’

She stares at me. Suddenly, there’s a flicker of understanding in her face. She starts to cry soundlessly, slow tears trickling down from her eyes, that she doesn’t try to wipe away. The sight tugs at my heart.

‘Evelyn, I’m so sorry,’ I say again.

I find her handkerchief for her, and she rubs at her face.

‘Does that mean we’ve lost the war, Vivienne?’

‘No. No, it doesn’t mean that,’ I say, with all the conviction I can manage.

Then suddenly her tears stop. She folds her handkerchief precisely and puts it away in her pocket. There’s a sudden purposefulness to her.

‘We ought to tell Eugene at once,’ she says. ‘Eugene will know what to do.’

I put my hand around her; her body feels at once stiff and brittle.

‘Evelyn—Eugene isn’t here, remember? Eugene’s away with the army.’

‘Well, find him, Vivienne,’ she says. ‘We can’t manage without Eugene.’

She picks up her knitting again; like dandelion seeds on the air, the memory of her sorrow has drifted away.

I change the time on our clocks. Then Blanche and I drag the mattresses back up the stairs.

Once Millie is tucked up in bed, Blanche comes to find me, in her dressing gown and pyjamas. She says she wants me to plait her hair, so it will curl in the morning.

She sits on the sofa beside me, with her back towards me. I start to plait her hair, which is silky and cool in my hands. The lamplight shines on its different colours—caramel-blonde, with pale buttery streaks where the summer sun has bleached it. I love doing this: it’s a way of touching that still feels comfortable for her. We don’t touch very often now—she’s withdrawn from me a little, being fourteen. I breathe in the scent of her—soap, and rose-geranium talc, and the sweet, particular, musky smell of her hair.

‘D’you know what it’ll be like, Mum?’ Her voice rather small and uncertain. ‘It’ll all be different, won’t it?’

I should be able to tell her: it’s what a mother should do—prepare her children, warn them. But I don’t know, can’t imagine. There is nothing I have ever been through that could prepare me for this.

‘Yes, it’ll be different. Well, a lot of things will be different.’

‘Will it be like that for ever?’

She has her back towards me and I can’t see her expression.

I don’t say anything.

‘Mum. I want to know. Will the Germans be here for ever? Is that what it’ll be like now?’

‘I don’t know, Blanche. Nobody knows what will happen.’

‘I’ve been praying about it,’ she says.

‘Oh. Have you, sweetheart?’

There’s a streak of religious devotion in Blanche, that I always find a surprise. We go to church every Sunday; for me, it’s mostly out of habit. But Blanche is devout, like Evelyn: she reads the Bible and prays. There’s a part of her that’s frivolous, loving dancing and stylish clothes, and a part that I only see sometimes, that’s reflective, rather serious.

‘It’s hard, though, isn’t it, Mum?’ she says now. ‘To know what to pray for—with everything that’s happening.’

‘Yes. It’s hard.’

‘I prayed that we’d go on the boat, and then we didn’t,’ she says.

There’s an edge of accusation in her voice. I know she’s still angry with me.

‘Sweetheart—that was a hard thing too. When I had to decide.’

She ignores this.

‘And sometimes I pray that we’ll win. But I expect the Germans do that too …’

‘Yes, I suppose so …’

‘Celeste reckons we’re going to win the war,’ she tells me. ‘She told me that. She said we mustn’t give up hope. But how can we, Mum? How can we possibly win?’

There are pictures in my mind: Hitler’s Victory March up the Champs Elysées in Paris, which we saw on a newsreel at the Gaumont in town. The massed ranks of Nazi soldiers surging onwards, like a force of nature, like a storm or flood—utterly invincible.

I fix a rubber band around the end of her plait.

‘You ought to go to bed,’ I say.

She stands and turns to face me. With her hair in a plait she looks younger, her cheeks full and flushed, like a child’s—like when she was only seven, and still played in the Blancs Bois with Johnnie. Her face is troubled. She turns and goes up the stairs.

The next morning I clean my bedroom. It isn’t long since I last cleaned it—I just need something to occupy me. The work isn’t very vigorous, but my heart is beating too fast.

My bedroom is a pleasant room. The wallpaper has a pattern of cabbage roses, and there’s a taffeta eiderdown on the big double bed, and on my dressing table, all the special things I’ve collected: a perfume bottle that has a dragonfly glass stopper; my silver hairbrush and comb; a music box that I’ve had since I was a child. The music box was my mother’s. It has an Impressionist painting on it, two girls at a piano in a hazy, pretty room, all the colours running together as though they are melting and wet. It plays Für Elise, the sound at once ethereal and clunky, because you can hear the abrasion of all the tiny parts inside. The music always calls up a feeling of sweetness and yearning in me—a window open, a muslin curtain billowing, brown hair blown over a mouth—conjuring up the lavender scent of the past. Just a trace of memory, and a longing I can’t satisfy. Playing this music is the nearest I can come to the mother I lost.

This bedroom is at the front of the house; from the window, you can see out over my yard, and the roof and front garden of Les Vinaires next door. I dust the sill, looking out. Connie loved plants, and her garden is full of the loveliest things—honeysuckle, and fuchsias, and Oriental poppies, their colours singing together, scarlet and amber and pink, so vivid, and fading so quickly, just one day in flower and then a bright blown litter of petals over the lawn. But the garden is looking neglected already, grass straggling into the borders, the roses gangly and reaching out over the path, all the neat boundaries blurring and lost—everything grows so fast in high summer. I remember Connie saying, ‘Keep an eye on things for me, won’t you, Viv?’ I feel guilty that I’d forgotten. I ought to try and do something—weed the borders, cut the grass. I tie a knot in my handkerchief to remind me.

A sound comes through my open window—the chunter of an engine drawing nearer down the lane. My pulse quickens. Someone must be disobeying the rules and using a car; whoever it is may be endangering us. I wait to see who will drive past.

But as I watch, a German vehicle draws up at Les Vinaires. Two men in uniform get out. They stand talking for a moment in the profound wet shade of the lane. A little wind ruffles the leaves and the shadows of leaves dance over them. I feel a sense of shock, my heart drumming, to see these invaders standing there, surrounded by the secret gardens and orchards of these deep valleys. Just as Blanche said, these men are tall, much taller than island men. The sunlight glints on their buckles and jackboots and the guns at their belts. They look entirely out-of-place in the leaf-dappled light, amid the cowpats and the potholes, between the hedgebanks with their jumble of leaves and entangled flowers and briars.