The Soldier’s Wife. Margaret Leroy
stealing.
The bonnet is open. One of the men from Les Vinaires is there, the scarred man I saw in the window, peering under the bonnet. I see him too late. I’d have done anything to avoid him, but I can’t turn back now: I know it would look like cowardice, and I’d hate him to think I was scared. He’s tinkering with the engine, muttering under his breath; then he opens the door, climbs in and tries the ignition—still with the bonnet up. The engine turns once, splutters, dies. He gets out, kicks a tyre, and swears, a rushed volley of German expletives. With a part of my mind, I’m thinking, Good—he may have stolen the car, but at least he can’t make it go … But I’m frightened too, and the prayer that Angie quoted to me slides into my mind. Oh, Lord, help me … I stand there, uncertain, apprehensive. I have to walk past him to reach the gate to my yard. I’m wishing more than ever that I’d thought to come back through the fields.
He turns, sees me. He has a shocked look: he stares, as if I am a ghost or apparition. As though I am the one who is out of place, who shouldn’t be there. The scented wind blows about us; it billows my skirt, then wraps it back against my body and pushes a strand of unruly hair into my mouth. My face feels hot, I know I’ve gone red, and I hate this. My heart stutters. I think he is going to shout at me or threaten me.
‘I apologise,’ he says. His English accent is very good, as good as Captain Richter’s. His face flushes slightly, almost as though he’s ashamed.
I don’t know what to say. I feel stupid, wrong-footed—clumsy, as though I use up too much space, as though my feet and hands are too big for my body.
‘That’s all right, it doesn’t matter,’ I say—the automatic response. Then I feel my hand fly to my mouth, as if to stop myself from talking.
He inclines his head in a little bow, and turns and goes into the house.
There’s a small scolding voice in my head: You’re letting the side down, you handled everything wrong. You shouldn’t have said it didn’t matter—you shouldn’t have spoken at all. Everything matters, nothing’s all right. It comes to me that this will be the shape of it, of our new life under the Occupation: always these troubling, frightening encounters—leaving you feeling that you’ve transgressed, and given something away.
Later, from my bedroom window, I watch as the scarred man comes out with one of the younger men, the one who has the kind of skin that peels in the sun. The young man has a tool box. He mends the car—deftly, with no fuss. The scarred man climbs in and turns the ignition: I hear the car start up. Through the car window, I can see the ironic smile on his face. The thought ripples in me that I know certain things about him. How he loathes machines, feels they oppose him, will never do his will: how this helplessness makes him angry. How he can lose himself in reading a book or a letter—frowning, running a finger absently over his brow. I know the look he has when he thinks that nobody is watching: how he will light a cigarette and leave it lying there, and roll up his shirtsleeves, doing these things unthinkingly, unaware of what he is doing. This knowledge makes me uneasy. It’s as though I am party to a secret that I never asked to be told.
Before the man drives off, he glances up at my bedroom window. Almost as if he knows I am looking, expects me to be looking. My heart thuds. I draw back into my room.
August. The island has never been lovelier, all our gardens lavishly flowering, the sky high and bright, a fresh salt wind off the sea. The Belle de Crécy roses are blooming in my back garden, drowsy with bumble bees, the flowers opening helplessly wide and spreading out their perfume.
Before the war, on such beautiful days I’d have taken the girls to the beach—perhaps to Petit Bôt with a picnic, Millie perched in my bicycle basket. Blanche and I would cycle down the lane that leads to the shore, a lane that is shadowed and secret with branches that meet overhead, and musical with the singing of the streams that run down to the water there; and then suddenly coming out into light at the end of the lane, to the beach that is held between tall cliffs like a jewel cradled between cupped palms, to the sleek wet sand and the glistening jade-green clarity of the sea. Or perhaps we’d go to Roquaine Bay, where the soft sand is perfect for sandcastles, or up to the north, to Vazon, with its wide clean air, all its spaciousness, or to the Forts Roques, the savage black rocks that rise from the water like broken teeth. You could always find a sheltered spot there, a patch of sandy grass where you could spread a rug for a picnic. There’d be crickets, and rock pools with emerald crabs, and delicate tamarisk flowers.
But we can’t do these things any more. The beaches are forbidden to us. They’re mined by the Germans, in case our army comes to take our island back—something that none of us thinks will happen. Our island is a prison.
Every evening I turn on the BBC news on the wireless, listening with a weight of lead in my chest—the news is all terrible. The Luftwaffe are bombing English airfields. Churchill calls it the Battle of Britain: he says that the Battle of France is over, the Battle of Britain has begun. Evelyn listens with me, though I don’t know whether she understands—whether what she hears makes sense to her. Sometimes as she listens her face seems to melt and tears spill over her face. Her emotions are always so near—as though with the passing of the years some defence she had, some outer protective shell, has been scoured and worn away in her.
‘That’s terrible, Vivienne,’ she’ll say.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ I tell her. ‘But we mustn’t give up hope.’
I don’t know why I say that, when I have given up hope myself. Sometimes in the evening we hear the Nazi bombers coming over from France, and then their fighter planes going up from the Guernsey airfield, to escort the bombers over England. When we hear them, I think we all send up a quick, fervent prayer for our aircrews who will meet them—even those of us who’d never normally pray. Will they hold off the Luftwaffe? How long can they hold out against the invasion of England? How long before Hitler crosses the Channel? We know it must happen sooner or later. It’s only a matter of time.
Often I think about Eugene—wondering where his division is, praying that he’ll be kept safe. But at these times when I think of him, he feels almost a stranger to me. I tell myself it’s because he’s so far away now, and because we don’t receive any letters or any news of our men. Most women with husbands at war must feel this—the sense of distance, of separation. I don’t entirely acknowledge, even in the deeps of my mind, that it was like that when he lived here too. When he’d sit at the breakfast table fenced off behind his newspaper, as though I was nothing to him, as though I didn’t exist. When he’d say, We’re rehearsing tonight, don’t wait up, I could be home on the late side … Sounding so easy and casual, yet I’d sense the sharks darkly circling under the surfaces of his words. When he’d lie in our bed, turned away from me, never touching. I don’t admit that we were strangers long before he left.
Millie seems mostly unbothered by the Occupation, though sometimes I hear her reprimanding her ragdoll: ‘If you’re naughty, I’m going to tell the Nazis. And when I tell them they’ll come and bomb you to bits …’ But Blanche is still unhappy that we didn’t go on the boat. She spends too much time in her room. Mostly she listens to her Irving Berlin records, but one day I go in and she’s just sitting there, pulling at a fraying thread on her cuff: not doing anything, staring blankly in front of her. A sudden sadness tugs at me, grief for the things she is missing out on because of the Occupation—dressing up, being taken to dinner, being bought flowers—that whole gorgeous charade of courtship, the gilded time of a woman’s life. She worries me. Sometimes I almost wish she were little again, like Millie. When they’re small, it’s so simple: you only have to buy them a bun or some aniseed balls, and they’ll be content.
One day at the end of August, she does some shopping for me, at Mrs Sebire’s grocery shop, up on the main road near the airfield. She comes home bright-eyed, hair flying, a smile unfurling over her face: everything about her is smiling.
‘Mum. You’ll never guess what happened. Mrs Sebire wanted