The Soldier's Wife (15 page)

Chapter 30

E
VELYN CALLS OUT
to me from the living room.

“Vivienne? Is that you, Vivienne?”

She's in her armchair, with her knitting. I go to her.

She gives me a stern look.

“Clemmie Renouf dropped by when you were out,” she says. “She brought the parish magazine.”

“Did she?”

“Clemmie Renouf told me something I didn't want to hear.”

My heart pounds.

“She saw you in a car, with the Hun. She said it was definitely you.”

I briefly wonder if I should deny it.

“It was one of the German officers from Les Vinaires,” I tell her. “He saw I had a puncture. He gave me a lift.”

“Clemmie Renouf said you were smiling.”

“Evelyn. That isn't a crime,” I tell her. “The man gave me a lift. It was raining. I'd only just left Gwen's place. I needed to get home to you and Millie.”

“A great big smile,” she says.

“He wanted to help. It's just a question of human decency,” I say.

“Yes, it is,” she says. “A question of decency.” Speaking slowly, weighting the words with significance. “And Clemmie said another thing. She said you were wearing his coat. His
army
coat. Tell me it isn't true, Vivienne.”

Oh God
.

“Clemmie can't have seen properly,” I tell her. “Like I said, it was pouring with rain. The windows were all misted up.”

But I feel terrible that I'm lying to her.

Evelyn pulls her back very straight. Her eyebrows, thinly penciled in, are lowered in a frown.

“You were letting the side down, Vivienne. Eugene wouldn't stand for it.”

“It's such a little island,” I tell her. “We have to find a way of getting along.”

She shakes her head.

“He wouldn't let it happen. Eugene always knows what's right. . . .” Her words trail off. Her gaze flickers suddenly around the room. Doubt creeps into her voice. “Vivienne—where's Eugene?”

“He's off fighting, remember?” I say gently.

Her face has that opaque look, like a pane of glass misted over. A question gathers between her eyes, in a delicate sketching of lines.

“Is he, Vivienne?”

“Yes. Look . . .”

There's a framed photograph of Eugene on the mantelpiece. I took it with my Kodak camera, just before he left. He's in uniform, and staring straight at the lens, and there's a seriousness about him—a recognition that this is a solemn moment. Though I don't know if he really felt that. Perhaps even in this moment he was acting, playing the part of the resolute soldier going off to war.

“Here he is—just before he went off with the army,” I say.

“Oh, Vivienne. He looks very smart,” she says.

“Yes, doesn't he?”

“When did this happen?”

“It happened last autumn,” I tell her. “Just before the outbreak of war.”

“Oh. Oh. Did it? You know, Vivienne, sometimes I don't remember things very well. . . . So Eugene's gone to war, you say?”

“Yes. We're all very proud of him. . . .”

“He's
gone,
Vivienne?”

Panic flares in her voice. Suddenly she starts crying. Her tears arise so suddenly—a minute ago she was angry, and now the tears come. It's as though her emotions are all too close to the surface, her feelings raw, like broken skin, so the slightest touch can hurt her. The tears make glistening snail tracks in the powder on her face. This is so terrible for her—that she keeps forgetting he's gone, and then has to learn the pain of it all over again.

I wipe her face, as you would with a child. She slumps in her chair: she looks small and lost. I put my arm around her.

“Everything's all right. Don't cry.”

All the anger has left her—she's spent, wrung out now. I feel so guilty that I upset her and made her cry. I feel so guilty about everything.

Chapter 31

I
'M WORKING AT
the bottom of my garden, in the part of our land that leads off around the back of Les Vinaires. There's a low hedge between our gardens here, and a little gate in the hedge. I'm digging up part of the lawn to make a vegetable patch. It's hard work. Millie was with me to start with—digging with a kitchen spoon, collecting worms in a jar—but now she's gone off to play in the house. She's left the jam jar on its side, and the captured worms have found their way out and are secretly gliding away. The sun is warm on my skin: in this sheltered corner, summer seems to linger. There are still a few flowers blooming: an autumn-flowering clematis in my hedge; dahlias, dusty pink, drooping their soft heavy heads; a few of my Belle de Crécy roses, peeling back their silks, and smelling so sweet they leave an ache in you. Bees fumble in and out of the throats of the flowers.

I've stopped for a moment, breathing heavily, resting my weight on my spade, when a shadow falls across me. I jump.

“Vivienne.”

I turn.

Captain Lehmann is there. He's come in through the gate in the hedge. I notice how my name sounds different in his mouth—foreign, almost glamorous.

“You startled me,” I tell him.

“Yes. I saw that. I'm sorry,” he says.

He's always apologizing to me.

Today he has a purposeful look—the air of someone who is about to go and do something important. He looks entirely wrong in my garden: his presence here makes the whole day feel a little dreamlike, unreal.

“You have a beautiful garden,” he says.

“Thank you.”

I'm wearing a baggy old jersey of Eugene's that's rather hot for the day. I can feel the sweat on me—under my arms, on my face. I tuck an unruly damp tendril of hair behind an ear. I feel messy and disheveled—he's immaculate, cool, remote from me.

“This flower is beautiful,” he says. He gestures toward the clematis that is growing up through my hedge. The flowers are a rich cream color, the stamens red as garnets. He reaches out, touches a petal; I watch his finger moving across the open vivid bloom. There's a slight catch in my breath. I wonder if he hears it.

“You like gardens?” I say. “You have a garden at home?”

He shakes his head.

“We have no garden, in Berlin. We have only a balcony. My wife has some potted plants there, and a bird in a cage.”

An entire little picture is conjured up by his words. I think, This is what he was seeing in his mind's eye when I glimpsed him reading a letter through the window in the evening—his wife, the balcony, the bird in the cage.

“It sounds very nice,” I say. Polite. Helpless.

He shrugs slightly. His eyes are on me, his gaze gray as wood smoke, requiring something of me.

“I would prefer to have a garden,” he says.

I feel my face burn. The smell of my roses licks at us like the tongue of an animal.

You can't see this part of the garden from Evelyn's bedroom, or the living room. But I feel intensely uneasy, thinking how appalled she'd be if she glimpsed us standing here, when she's already so suspicious of me. I turn my back toward my house, as though that makes me safer, like an infant who hides her face in her hands and believes she can't be seen.

“Have you always enjoyed this—to grow things?” he says.

“Yes. Even when I was a child.” I clutch at the lifeline of something that feels safe to talk about. “Just the fancy stuff—not vegetables. I used to spend my pocket money on packets of flower seeds.”

“When you were a child . . . ,” he says. He smiles, as though the thought pleases him.

“I loved the drawings on the packets,” I tell him. “I remember buying love-in-a-mist because I liked the name and the picture.”

The minute I've said it, I'm so embarrassed, because of the name of the flower. But he has a perplexed look, not understanding the words.

“There's a plant that we call love-in-a-mist,” I tell him.

Talking about it, I remember it suddenly, with such clarity. Standing in front of the rack of seeds in the ironmonger's off Clapham Common, choosing the packet with its enticing blur of blue-petaled flowers.

“But they never came up like they promised,” I say. “I'd have such high hopes, then I'd just get a few ragged plants that didn't ever flower. I've learned to grow flowers since then, of course.” The words tumble out of me: I can't stop. I feel drunk, light-headed, and there's an unpleasant cold trickle of sweat down my back. “But I'm going to have to change, of course—I'm going to have to dig half of them up and plant something we can eat. I should have started already, probably. But it's difficult—I really love my flowers.”

“Yes, I can see that,” he says.

“The thing is—I'm not very practical,” I tell him. “It would be useful now, with the shortages and everything, if only I were more practical, if I were a different kind of person. I suppose I wasn't really designed for such times.”

He smiles slightly, but I see a kind of sadness in his eyes.

“There are very few of us, Vivienne, who were designed for such times.”

He's silent for a moment. I hunt desperately in my mind for something else to say, but after my outburst there's nothing left in my head. I feel as if I am underwater—it's the damp on my skin, the watery surge of the wind in the trees in the hedge, the way I can't breathe.

I hear the slight click as he clears his throat.

“There was something I wanted to ask of you, Vivienne. A favor.”

There's a different tone in his voice; he's hesitant, unsure. Hearing this, my mouth dries up.

“You may remember I told you I like to draw,” he says. “I wanted to ask if you would sit for me.”

That was why he seemed so purposeful, coming in through my garden gate.
I
was his purpose.

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked,” he says.

He's retreating rapidly. I can tell he is a proud man.

“No, no, it's not that,” I say.

“It was wrong of me.”

“I didn't mind you asking. Really.”

He takes a step away from me, everything in him withdrawing.

“Good afternoon, then, Vivienne,” he says.

He's distant and formal again. He turns to go back through the gate.

I swallow hard.

“It would have to be . . .” My throat feels thick. My voice is very quiet.

He turns quickly back toward me.

I'm not looking at him. I'm studying my hands, the staining in the lines of my palms, the black crescents of earth in my nails.

I try again.

“It would have to be when Millie and Blanche are asleep. It would have to be late. Maybe ten o'clock?”

I can feel his eyes on me, can feel the warmth of his gaze.

“Thank you,” he says.

I don't dare look up as he leaves me.

Chapter 32

I
HEAR THE SOFTEST
knock on my door. I let him in.

“Vivienne.”

He says my name rather slowly, as though he doesn't want to let go of it. Around us is the gentle quiet of the slumbering house, where everyone else is sleeping.

I take him through to the living room. He looks around, and I suddenly see the familiar room through his eyes. For a while now, only women have lived here, and I see how feminine it is—all the lily-of-the-valley chintz, the tasseled tiebacks, the dahlias in a white jug. Everything draped and flowery. He seems too solid, too male, for this place.

He has a drawing pad and pencils in a leather case, and a bottle of brandy, which he holds out to me. It has a French label. It looks expensive.

“This is to say thank you,” he says.

It seems an age ago that I tried to refuse his gift of chocolate.

I take two brandy glasses from the china cabinet—the only ones that weren't smashed on the day we nearly went on the boat. I put them on the piano. He pours the brandy. As he hands me my drink, he touches his glass to mine; the bright, assertive clink of glass is loud in the silence between us. I gulp the brandy and feel it warming me through, feel my edges soften.

He's looking at my bookshelves.

“You have many books,” he says.

“Yes.”

“So who do the books belong to? Are they yours or your husband's?” he says.

“Mostly mine. Eugene didn't much like reading.” I've used the past tense—I'm not sure why. “I brought most of them from London.”

“Could you lend me a book, perhaps?” he asks me. “To help me practice my English?”

It's one of those moments, again—wondering where I should draw the line. But how can I refuse him this, when I invited him in—to draw me, to drink brandy?

“Which one would you like?” I ask him.

“Which is the best book here?” he says.

I smile.

“That's an impossible question,” I say.

He waits.

I take down one of my favorite books, a volume of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. But this isn't a sensible choice for someone who isn't a native English speaker—the language the poet uses is rather eccentric and strange.

The book falls open where there's a ribbon bookmark, at a place where I have so often opened it before.

“May I?” he says.

I hand it to him.

“You can correct me,” he tells me, “if I read it wrong.”

He starts to read, quietly, carefully, stumbling slightly over the words:

I have desired to go

Where springs not fail,

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

And a few lilies blow . . .

He pauses, looks up at me. “
Sided?
Is that a real word?” he asks me.

He has that rather affronted look, which always makes me smile.

“Kind of. But it's an odd way to use it,” I tell him. I feel stupid that I chose such an inappropriate poem. “Maybe that wasn't a very good choice. He's quite a difficult poet.”

“No, Vivienne, it was a very good choice,” he tells me.

He turns back to the page.

And I have asked to be

Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

And out of the swing of the sea.

The silence after he's spoken seems to hold on to the words, as you might hold water between your hands—just for an instant, a precious moment, before it all leaks away.

“Did I read it right?” he asks me then.

“Yes. Yes, you did.”

But his reading has brought a kind of yearning sadness to the room, a desolate feeling. I don't know where this comes from.

“I like that poem. That is a beautiful poem,” he says.

“That was always my favorite,” I tell him, trying to push away the sadness, my voice bland, ordinary. “We studied it at school.”

“How old were you when you read this poet at school? Fourteen, fifteen?”

“Yes. Something like that.”

He smiles, as though the thought pleases him.

“What were you like, at fourteen?” he says.

I don't know how to answer.

“Like everyone else, I suppose . . .” Then I feel he deserves something better than this—more precise. Because I remember exactly what I was like—I hated being fourteen. “Well, no. That's wrong.
Not
like everyone . . . I was always being reprimanded, for looking out the window in a dream. For not concentrating. And I was horribly shy, a bit clumsy, all elbows and knees. . . .”

His eyes rest on me, warm, interested.

“I used to envy the other girls. The shiny ones. The ones who seemed poised and perfect,” I say. “There are always those girls—you know, the ones whose stocking seams were always straight, whose hair was perfectly waved.”

“Yes. There are always those girls,” he says, shrugging a little. As though he knows exactly what I mean about the shiny girls. As though they don't really interest him. I feel a sudden light happiness, which I know I shouldn't feel.

“You can borrow the book if you want,” I say. “So you can practice your English.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

He riffles through the pages, flicks back to the title page. I see him look at the place where I have written my name:
Vivienne Mary Collier,
then
Collier
crossed out and
de la Mare
written in. He runs his finger across the writing, as though he expects it to have a different texture from the rest of the page. As though he thinks he will learn from it, from the feel of my name on his skin.

He puts the book in the pocket of his jacket.

“Thank you, Vivienne,” he says again.

I feel the intensity in his gaze. I turn from him.

“Where do you want me to sit?” I ask, keeping my voice light, casual.

He gestures toward the sofa. I seat myself, suddenly self-conscious, pulling down my skirt and awkwardly arranging and rearranging my legs. He sits opposite me on a chair. He takes out a pencil and rests the drawing pad on his knee.

“Where should I look?” I ask him.

“If you could turn a little to your left . . . ,” he says.

I turn.

“Like this?”

“Yes. That's perfect. So the lamplight will fall on your face.”

To start with he's mostly looking at me, just now and then marking the paper. He holds up his pencil, squints, works out the proportions of my face. It's disconcerting to be looked at so intently. I'm glad I'm not quite facing him, that I don't have to look in his eyes.

“So, exactly how still do I have to be? Am I allowed to talk?” I ask.

He smiles slightly.

“Yes. For the moment,” he says.

But then I can't think what to say, can't think of anything intelligent.

“Have you always liked to draw?” I ask.

The question is too obvious; it makes me sound stilted, naïve. But he answers it very seriously.

“Not always. I drew all the time as a child, but then of course life intervened, as it has a habit of doing. I began again a few years ago, when I reached forty. I longed to have some time that was just my own. I thought, If I don't do this now, I never will.”

He must be in his mid-forties now. I feel how old we are, both of us, how much we have seen.

“Getting older is strange,” I say. “It isn't at all how you think it's going to be.”

He looks at me quizzically.

I'm not sure quite why I said that. I try to explain.

“I'll soon be forty myself,” I tell him. “Yet sometimes I feel as if I'm still waiting for my life to begin.” I'm speaking slowly, working out exactly what I mean. “I spend so much time waiting. Waiting for Millie to start school, so I'll have a bit more spare time. Waiting for Eugene to come back home . . .” I hesitate, wondering if I mentioned Eugene because I felt I
should
: not sure if I feel that, if I miss him. “Waiting for the war to be over . . . But life doesn't wait—it trickles between your fingers, trickles away. . . . Does that sound stupid? I'm sure it sounds stupid.”

“No, it doesn't,” he says.

“Do you ever feel that? Well, no, you wouldn't, of course. Men's lives aren't like that, are they?”

“Maybe not,” he says.

“Sometimes I've envied that—the way men's lives are more about doing than waiting. Sometimes I feel as though the real things are passing me by. As though I've been pushed to the margins of life. Sometimes I've even envied Eugene—going off to fight.”

“Maybe war isn't quite as you imagine,” he tells me. “Much of war is waiting. Much of it is feeling life trickling away.” He has a slight crooked smile. “Though it has its better moments. . . .”

He's stopped drawing, the pencil poised over the page.

“Vivienne. I'm drawing your mouth now, so you will have to be quiet,” he says. He looks down at the paper again, marks it. “I'm just tracing in your upper lip now.”

I'm suddenly very aware of my mouth. My face is hot. There's a new little pulse at the side of my mouth, which I didn't know was there. I wonder if he can see it.

He stares at my mouth and draws in silence. I'm aware of the tiniest sounds in the room, a moth that beats at the lamp shade, a log that sparks in the grate. They seem crystal clear and dangerous to me.

At last he puts his pencil down.

“You can look at it now,” he tells me.

I get up and go to him. He stands, puts the drawing down on the piano for me to see. I sense a slight nervousness in him—he cares what I will think.

“It's rough, it's just a sketch,” he says.

But I see he is being self-deprecating. It isn't rough: it's all there, very precise. I can tell he sees me clearly—the mole on my chin, the frown lines coming in on my forehead, my wayward hair that escapes from the hair grips and curls around my face. As though he sees me as I am. In the drawing, my mouth looks big and I know that's true, though I don't like it: I envy women with neat small mouths that look like little buds. I think maybe I have been wrong about him—maybe he doesn't really admire me at all. I would have welcomed a little flattery.

“It's very accurate,” I say.

“Some of it, perhaps,” he says. “But I haven't drawn this part quite correctly.” He touches the paper with one finger, traces out the line of my cheek on the page. “I tried, but I couldn't capture it. This part of your face is very lovely. This curve.”

He takes his hand from the paper. He reaches out to my face and moves his finger very slowly along the curve of my cheek. His touch takes all words from me. We stand like that for a moment, his finger on my skin. His heat goes right through me.

He lowers his hand, steps back from me. I can't bear him moving away like that, can't bear the distance between us.

“Can I keep the picture?” I ask him. Wanting to hold on to something of the evening, something of him. My voice seems to come from far away.

He's surprised. Pleased.

“Yes, of course. Yes.”

He hands it to me.

“I ought to go,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Your brandy?” I pick up the bottle.

“Keep it. It's for you,” he says. “But may I come and drink it with you again?”

“Yes . . . The day after tomorrow—you could come then.”

He gives a little sigh when I say that, as though something is settled. Yet the words mean nothing—it was all decided when he touched me.

Afterward I hide the brandy at the back of the cupboard, where nobody will see it, and I tuck the drawing away in one of my poetry books. I can still feel the place where he moved his finger over my face, as though my skin has come alive.