The Soldier’s Wife

They open the gate of Les Vinaires, walk up the path to the door. They seem too big for the garden. I notice that one of them has a clipboard in his hand. There’s a bang and a crack as the other man breaks the lock of the door.

Rage surges through me, and a hot flaring shame: that I can’t stop them, can’t protect Connie’s house from them. That I’m so utterly helpless.

In a little while they come out again, and go back down the path. My rage is blotted out by fear: it’s as though a small cold hand is fingering the back of my neck. Angie’s words are there in my mind. They crucify girls. They rape them and crucify them … What if these soldiers come in here and take our house, as well? They own us, they can do as they wish, they could walk in anywhere—there’s nothing to stop them, nothing.

But for now, they drive off.

Later I hear another engine. I rush upstairs to my bedroom, look out over the lane.

It’s a different vehicle this time, with four men in it—two in the cab, and two in the back. I watch as the men in the cab get out. One is spare and dark, with a hollow, cynical face, the other is rather broad-shouldered, with greying hair. The second man takes out a pack of cigarettes, taps it to release one, holds it between his lips as he fumbles for his lighter. I notice that he has a ragged pink scar on his cheek. I’m immediately curious. I wonder how he acquired the scar, what happened to him. Perhaps he fought in the Great War: his face has a lived-in look, and there’s a web of lines round his eyes—he seems old enough. I wonder what he has been through, what he has seen. How much this injury hurt him.

Then I push the thought away. These men are the enemy: I shouldn’t really be thinking about them at all.

The other two men are younger and both have fair hair. I guess they are lower in rank than the men who sat in the cab. They jump down, pull out kitbags. The man with the scar goes round to the back of the vehicle, and holds the cigarette in his mouth as he reaches in for his bag. The man with the hollow face pushes open the gate. All four of them seem more leisurely than the men who came with the clipboard. They look around with an appraising air—almost an air of ownership: and, seeing this, I feel a flare of impotent rage. They’re joking, laughing, their gestures expansive, easy. They have the look of men who have come to the end of a journey.

They walk down the petal-littered path between the overgrown borders. The roses snag on their uniforms as they push their way through the flowers; the hollyhocks, pale as skimmed milk, brush against their legs as they pass. I see that Alphonse is sleeping in a pool of sun on the path; it’s a favourite sleeping spot of his, because the stone gets warmed there. He’s curled in a perfect circle, as though he feels quite safe. As the men approach he wakes, and languidly stretches. One of the younger men crouches to stroke him, makes a fuss of him; the man has the kind of pink, freckled skin that peels in the sun. Alphonse rubs against the man and arches his back ecstatically, so I can see the supple bones rippling under his fur. I feel an irrational surge of fury with the animal—that he’s so easily won over, that he isn’t resisting at all.

The men go in and don’t come out again.

An hour or two later, I’m in my yard in front of my house, picking some herbs for a stew, when I see that the window of Les Vinaires that overlooks us is flung open. I can hear German voices through the window. I can’t tell what they’re saying—I know only a little German, just the words of some Bach cantatas, from when I was in London and used to sing in a choir. I can’t even judge the emotion from the sound of the words.

The thought slams into me—that we will be so exposed. When we are out in our yard, or if our front door is open, the Germans will hear our conversations. I wonder if they will understand us, if they speak English at all. But even if they can’t understand us, they will see what we do: whenever I come here to pick some herbs they will see. We won’t be able to hide from them.

The day feels unstable, feverish. The outward things—the sigh of the wind in my pear tree, the long light of afternoon slanting into my yard—all these things are just so, just as they should be: yet it feels as though there’s something strange on the air, subtle but troubling as a faint smell of scorching, or an insect whine that’s almost too high to be heard.

I will have to move these pots that stand beside my door. I will carry them through to the back of the house and put them out on the terrace. There I’ll be able to tend them without being seen.

But I stand for a moment, irresolute. Something in me is reluctant. I hear Evelyn’s assertion in my mind: I’m not going to hide away, Vivienne. I’m hurt that you thought that I would. I’m not going to let the Hun move me about. And in that moment I make my decision. I will leave my herbs and geraniums here—leave everything just as it was. This is the only protest I can make, the only way I can fight this: to live as I have always lived, not let them change me at all.

Millie stares at the cat’s bowl of food, which hasn’t been touched.

‘Where’s Alphonse?’

‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’

‘But it’s nearly night-time.’

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’m sure he’ll turn up. Cats always find their way home.’

But Millie is unhappy, a frown pencilled in on her forehead. I think, guiltily, that she’s worried because the cat was so nearly put down: she has a new sense of Alphonse’s vulnerability.

I read her a story, but she can’t sit still. She keeps jumping up and going to the kitchen, looking for him.

‘It’s the Germans, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘The Germans have taken Alphonse.’

‘I don’t expect so,’ I say.

‘I want him back, Mummy,’ she says. ‘And I want my ball back. Everything’s horrible.’ Her face crumples up like paper, and tears spill from her eyes.

I’d forgotten about the ball that she lost in the garden of Les Vinaires.

‘Millie, the ball’s not a problem. I can easily buy you another one …’

She ignores this. She rubs her tears away angrily.

‘Blanche says it’s the Germans. Blanche says the Germans eat people’s cats,’ she tells me. Her voice is shrill with outrage.

‘She was teasing you, Millie,’ I tell her. ‘I really don’t think they do.’

But I wonder if Alphonse’s absence is in fact the Germans’ fault—remembering the young blond man and how he petted the cat. Perhaps he has put out food for him. Cats have no loyalty.

I listen to Millie’s prayers, and tuck her up in bed.

‘You’ve got to find him,’ she tells me, sternly.

The sky through the living-room window darkens, to a rich cobalt blue, then to night. There’s a silver scatter of stars, a slice-of-melon moon. Still the cat doesn’t come home. It’s well after nine o’clock now. I think about the curfew, but the blackout curtains are already drawn at Les Vinaires, and everywhere is quiet.

I decide I will go out and look for the cat. I know I can be silent, and I’m sure I won’t be seen.

My back door isn’t overlooked from the windows of Les Vinaires. I go out that way, into the yawn of a black night. I cling to the hedgebank, creep along in the shadows, edge up the lane as far as the track that leads to Les Ruettes. I don’t dare call, but I’m hoping Alphonse will hear me—or maybe sense my presence, with that strange sixth sense that cats have.

There’s a sudden engine noise behind me. It must be German soldiers, now that islanders can’t use cars. I’m suddenly very afraid, my pulse racing, a cold sweat of fear on my skin. I slip through a gap in the hedge, crouch down in the field. The headlights sweep over the hedgebank and pass. I pray they didn’t see me. Then I hear the car slow and come to a stop. It must belong to the Germans who have moved into Les Vinaires.

I creep back to my house, and close the door on the night. Relief surges through me that at least I got home safely. Alphonse is on a chair in the kitchen, licking himself assiduously. I curse him under my breath.

I take him up to Millie. Her face shines.

But I can’t believe I did this. I think of something that the aunts who raised me were always saying to me, ‘Vivienne, you’re too trusting. You shouldn’t let people walk all over you. You shouldn’t be such a doormat … Your soft-heartedness will get you into trouble, one of these days …’ I think that perhaps they were right. I’ve been so stupid, so irresponsible, taking this risk for a cat, just because Millie was a bit unhappy.

* * *

I’m making my coffee at breakfast-time when I spill a jug of milk. Anxiety must be making me clumsy. I’m on my knees on the kitchen floor, wiping up the spillage, when there’s a crunch of boots on our gravel and a rapid knock at our door.

It’s one of the men from Les Vinaires, the spare dark man with the hollow face. His uniform, his nearness, make me immediately afraid. And mixed in with the fear, I have a sense of embarrassment, that I’m in my apron, a dishcloth in my hand, that he can see into my kitchen, which is messy with wet washing hung on the rail in front of the stove. I have some inchoate sense that I am letting the side down.

‘Good morning,’ he says. His English is very precise and measured. I can see him noticing my apron, and the pool of milk on the floor. ‘I’m afraid I may have come at an inconvenient time.’

I’m about to say, ‘That’s all right’, the automatic response to his concession. But it isn’t all right—nothing is all right. I bite my tongue to stop myself from speaking.

He puts out his hand. This shocks me. I think how they bombed the harbour when all our soldiers had gone; how they shot at the lorries so the petrol tanks would explode, when the men were sheltering under them; of Frank’s burnt and bleeding body. I shake my head; I push my hands in my pockets. I can’t believe he thought I’d be willing to shake his hand.

He lowers his hand, shrugs slightly.

‘I am Captain Max Richter,’ he says.

A sudden fear grabs at me. He has come here because I went out after the curfew. He saw me. My mouth is dry: my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

He makes a small imperative gesture, wanting to know my name.

‘I’m Mrs de la Mare,’ I tell him.

He waits, expecting more, looking enquiringly over my shoulder into the house.

‘Four of us live here—me, and my daughters, and my mother-in-law,’ I tell him, in answer to his unspoken question.

From my front door you can see into the living room. I notice him looking in that direction; I turn. Evelyn is in her chair, watching everything. He inclines his head, acknowledging her. She gives him a look as barbed as a fish-hook, then lowers her eyes.

‘And your husband?’ he asks me.

‘My husband is away with the army,’ I say.

He nods.

‘We will be your neighbours now, Mrs de la Mare,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘Now—you know the rules, I think.’

There’s a hard set to his face when he says this, his mouth thin as the slash of a razor. I find myself wishing that it had been the other officer who came—the scarred one. Thinking that perhaps he’d be less harsh than this man, and less correct and remote.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘You know about the curfew.’

‘Yes.’

My heart races off. I see myself being taken away, imprisoned. And my children—what will happen to my children? I still have my hands in my pockets. I dig my nails into my palms, to try and stop myself from trembling.

‘We hope for a quiet life here—all of us,’ he says.

‘We do too. Of course.’ My voice is too high, too eager. I sound naive, like a girl.

‘Don’t put us in a difficult position,’ he says.

‘No, we won’t,’ I say.

His cool, rather cynical gaze is on me. There’s something about his look that tells me he saw me in the lane.

‘I’m glad we understand one another,’ he says.

He lowers his hand towards his belt. Fear has me by the throat: I think he is going to take out his gun. But he pulls something out of his pocket.

‘This must be yours, I think,’ he says. ‘Perhaps it belongs to one of your girls.’

I see what he has in his hand. Relief undoes me, making me shaky and weak. It’s the ball with coloured stripes on, which Millie lost over the hedge. A little mirthless, hysterical laughter bubbles up in my throat: I swallow hard.

‘Oh. Well. Thank you …’

I stare at the ball. I take it. I don’t know what else to say.

‘I also have daughters, Mrs de la Mare,’ he says.

There’s a brief note of yearning in his voice. This startles me.

‘You must miss them,’ I say, immediately. Because he does—I can tell. Then I wonder why I said that, why I was sympathetic like that. I’m cross with myself—I don’t have to make any concessions, don’t have to give him anything. I feel entirely lost: I don’t know the right way to behave.

His gaze flicks back to my face. I know he can read my confusion. Everything’s messy, all mixed up in my head—the fear I feel, the stern set of his face when he talked about the curfew; and now his kindness in bringing back the ball.

‘Well, then. Good morning, Mrs de la Mare. Remember the curfew,’ he says, and turns.

I close the door rapidly. I feel exposed, in some way I couldn’t articulate or define. There are little red crescents in my palms, where I pushed my nails into my skin.

‘Vivienne.’ Evelyn is calling for me.

I go to her.

‘The Hun came in the house,’ she says. ‘You opened the door to the Hun.’

She’s 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.

CHAPTER 11

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.

PART II:

JULY – OCTOBER 1940

CHAPTER 12

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, where even on a night with no moon, as you stare things loom, take form; or the darkness of your bedroom—like the flimsy dark of the room I shared with Iris, with the murky amber lamplight seeping in under the curtains. And there is another darkness—a dark so profound you cannot begin to imagine it, cannot conjure it up in your mind. A darkness that blots out all you remember or hope for. A darkness that teaches that all that consoles you is false.

I don’t think I was in there for long. Auntie Aggie realised what had happened; scolded Iris, came and unlocked the door. But I don’t remember that clearly at all—the moment when she let me out into the cheerful day again. It’s the darkness I remember.

How much did that loss of my mother shape the course of my life? Hugely, I can see that now—though it’s taken me years to learn this. Now I even wonder if that was why I married the very first man I went out with—whether my decision had something to do with that loss. Wanting to have something settled; longing for safety, wanting to keep things the same—so frightened of change and uncertainty.

I was nineteen when I met Eugene, and still living in the house in Evington Road. I was working as a secretary, in an insurance firm in Clapham. I met Eugene at a church social; he was a bank clerk with the National Provincial bank, living in digs in Streatham that always smelt of broccoli. He’d been excited to move to London, but had hoped for something from it that it had somehow failed to give. He was already longing to go back to Guernsey when I met him. There was a faint mothball scent of disappointment that hung about him, though at first I wasn’t aware of it. He was a good-looking man—clear eyes, symmetrical features, sleeked-down hair—a clean-cut face that made him seem much younger than his years. Our daughters have that face as well, that open, candid look. And he was always very well turned-out—his business suits pressed with a razor-sharp edge, his shoes as shiny as mirror-glass. ‘He’s so handsome,’ everyone said. ‘He looks just like Jack Pickford. Well, haven’t you done well for yourself?’ There was something reassuring about his effortless, practised courtship of me—the yellow roses, the boxes of New Berry Fruits—a feeling that I could leave it to him, that he would take control, make the decisions. What did he see in me, I wonder? I don’t know, can’t imagine now—though he would always be very flattering about my looks, my clothes. He knows how to flatter a woman. Maybe my rather French-sounding name reassured him in some way, suggested I would fit in on his island. That may sound rather fanciful, yet people will often let themselves be guided by such things, making a weighty decision because some small hand beckons: I’ve seen this. Whatever the reason—he couldn’t wait to gather me up and bring me back to Guernsey.