The Soldier's Wife (21 page)

“Until when? Until the war is over?”

“Until we win,” he says.

JANUARY. STORMY WEATHER.
Up on the hill at Les Ruettes, the windows are crusted with salt, though you're still a mile from the sea there. It's a struggle to keep my house warm enough: there's a wind like a knife, which cuts through closed windows and doors. We all have chilblains.

I wait with all the other mothers in the playground. Everyone looks a little more shabby, a little more darned. The wind rattles the ivy leaves on the wall of the school behind us.

Here too the talk is of the slave workers.

“Have you seen all those poor workers they've brought in to do their building?” Gladys is frowning. “They must treat them terribly badly, they look half-starved,” she says.

“They must be so cold in this weather,” says Ruthie Duquemin, Simon's mother. “They sleep in those horrible camps, and they only have rags for their clothes.” She shivers, as though she can feel their coldness in her own body.

“But they're all prisoners, aren't they?” says Susan. Unlike the rest of the mothers, she's made a bit of an effort: she's wearing powder and lipstick, and she still has an easy elegance, even in her threadbare coat. “So they must be criminals, mustn't they? They've all done something. They must have committed some crime.”

“It's still pretty awful, the way they treat them,” says Gladys. “It isn't humane.”

Susan pulls her coat closer around her.

“What we have to remember is, we don't know the whole story,” she says. “They must have done something serious, to be treated as badly as that.”

I remember what Johnnie said—
What could any man possibly do, to deserve such punishment?
But I don't say anything.

“And they look so unhealthy,” says Vera. “They're probably riddled with lice.” Her face is pinched and tight, clenched against the icy wind.

There's a murmur of agreement.

Susan clears her throat briskly.

“It's awful for them, obviously, but the truth is, they could be infectious. They could be spreading diseases. To be entirely frank, we could do without them on our island. We've got enough to put up with already,” she says.

“Poor wretches,” says Ruthie, Simon's mother. “It's not their fault they're here.”

She has a troubled look: there's a frown in her fern-green eyes. I know she's upset by the conversation. I ought to join in and support her, but I can't work out what to say.

“You've got to feel sorry for them,” she says.

I start to say something, agreeing, but my voice is sucked in by the wind and Vera speaks above me.

“But what can you do? I heard about this woman on Jersey. She took one of the slave workers into her house, and the Germans found him there.”

“What happened?” asks Gladys.

Vera says nothing for a moment. The wind in the ivy leaves behind us makes a cold hard sound.

“I heard they shot her,” she says.

A little charge runs through the group, an electric current of fear.

“People who do that kind of thing make trouble for everyone,” says Susan. “Putting the rest of us at risk.”

Vera nods.

“There's nothing we can do. We just have to knuckle down and get on with our own lives,” she says. “Look after the people we're responsible for. I mean, it's sad for them and all that—but it's nothing to do with us. We've got our own lives to lead.”

I'm about to speak when the school bell rings for the end of the day. The women turn toward the building, the children flood out of the door. Millie rushes up to me and I bend down and she flings her arms around me.

“Did you play with Simon today?” I ask.

“Yes, of course. He's my
friend
.”

We ease back into our ordinary lives. But I feel a small hot flicker of shame, that I didn't manage to speak.

I WALK UP
the hill to Les Ruettes, with some of the turnip jam I made with the carravita I bought. There are snowdrops in the hedgebanks—meek supplicants, hanging their heads—and you can smell the sweet vanilla scent of winter heliotrope, but spring still seems a distant promise. Above me, rooks roll and tumble, like torn black rags on the white rushing stream of the sky.

It's chilly in Angie's kitchen; her fire gives out only a thin paltry warmth. The wind rattles the elder against her window; the sound seems too significant, as though someone is out there, someone who wants to get in. Cold air creeps under her door, and makes little swirls and eddies in the dust and dead leaves in the corners, which haven't seen a broom for weeks. Before Frank died, her kitchen was always gleaming and immaculate.

She's grateful for the turnip jam.

“Really, you shouldn't. You're too good to me, Vivienne.”

She looks older, haggard, a fine graph paper of lines around her mouth and her eyes. I ask how she is and she shakes her head a little. Usually she'll say something cheerful—
Not so bad, Vivienne, mustn't complain
—but she fixes me with her sad clear eyes.

“It's over a year now,” she tells me. “I should be getting over it, but I'm not. I miss him so much, it's killing me.”

I put my hand on her arm.

“A year's such a short time,” I tell her. “When you've lost someone.”

“I don't know, Vivienne. I feel I need to pull myself together. I mean, it's not as though it's just me. Thousands of folk are going through this.”

It's quiet between us for a moment. I think of all the things she used to tell me about—the strange old things she still half believes in, the stories of the islands: about the fairy settlements that are connected by underground roads; how the body of a drowned man thrown up by the sea demands burial; how the flower of the hawthorn should never be brought in the house. But now she is often silent, as though words don't come so easily to her, as though she has to dredge them up from some deep place inside her.

I tell her about the man I saw in Joseph Renouf's field.

“I've seen them too,” she tells me. “They seem to let them out at times—I think they must turn a blind eye, let them scavenge on the farms. That way I suppose they don't have to feed them so much.”

Her lips are chapped and bleeding. She dabs them with a handkerchief.

“They're treated so badly,” I say.

Something dark moves over her face.

“It's even worse on Alderney,” she tells me. “Jack told me. Jack's doing some work on Alderney now. . . . Well, I explained to you, Vivienne. He has to make ends meet, he has all those growing children to feed. . . .”

I wonder what on earth the Germans can want with Alderney. It's such a small, bleak, windswept island, with hardly any good soil.

“What's happening there?” I ask her.

“There aren't any islanders there anymore,” she tells me. “Everyone went to England. Jack found a dog running wild—it had to be shot, poor little thing.”

“But what do the Germans want with the place?”

“They're building bunkers on Alderney, and the camps are worse there,” she says. “Jack told me. There are four camps, and the men there are starving, he said. The men have high voices, they make a sound like birds. . . . People do, when they're starving, Jack told me. I didn't know that. Did you know that, Vivienne?”

I shake my head. Chill fingers of air reach out into the room. The elder tree knocks at the window.

“The ones who work there are beaten, they're treated like animals,” she says. “Worse than animals, even . . . Jack told me this thing, and I can't get it out of my head.” She leans in close; her breath—secretive, nicotine-scented—brushes my face. “There was a man,” she says, “who fell into the concrete-mixer there, and the Germans wouldn't stop the machine, and the man was buried alive. Jack saw it happen. He told me. . . .”

THAT NIGHT, I
ask Gunther about Alderney.

“People say . . . People talk about Alderney,” I tell him. “A friend of mine told me . . .” I clear my throat, which is suddenly thick. “She said that people are starving there. There are rumors of bad things being done. Do you know what's happening there?”

His face is shuttered.

“There are work camps on Alderney,” he says. “They're nothing to do with us. It's as I told you, Vivienne. It's the Organisation Todt.” He strokes my hair. “Darling, let's not worry about them. Please. Don't bring them into this room.”

He doesn't know, I tell myself. It's nothing to do with him.

Chapter 46

T
HE WEATHER CHANGES
. We wake to white sunlight and washed blue skies. There's a froth of blossoms in my orchard, and in the grass beneath the trees a scattering of pale windflowers. The evenings lengthen, so Millie and Simon play out for a while before tea. There are glossy lacquered celandines in the hedgebanks, and narcissi, sherbet-scented, dance in the fields. The Blancs Bois shakes and shivers with birdsong.

Angie tells me there are mushrooms—big meaty chanterelles—in Harry Tostevin's fields near the top of the cliff. So one Saturday I leave Evelyn and Millie and cycle up to the clifftop. The air smells of the changing seasons, carrying the green fresh scents of pollen and sap and the coconut smell of the flowering gorse, and it's so warm I don't need a cardigan. The grasses sway in a light wind, as though a hand is stroking them. Up at the top of the lane I can see the shine of the sea, and from here the waves seem tiny, the water scarcely moving at all. My body is fluid, easy, in the warmth of the sun. I think of Gunther: the thought ripples in me that in spite of everything I am happy.

I leave my bicycle lying where there's a gap in the hedgebank. It's muddy here; the damp earth sucks at my shoes. I find wonderful chanterelles, in hidden ditches and shadowy, damp hollows under the hedge. In the shade the dew hasn't dried yet, and my shoes and the cuffs of my blouse are darkened with wet. The mushrooms have a rich, earthy smell; I fill my basket with them. I'm planning how I shall cook them, with a knob of butter I've saved. I feel my mouth filling with water as I think how good they will taste.

I'm vaguely aware of something approaching, troubling the peace of the day. A distant disturbance, a man's voice shouting. As the voice comes nearer, I hear that he's shouting in German. The shouting draws rapidly closer, and I hear the sound of many footsteps tramping down the lane. I feel a resentment—that something should intrude on the peace of my morning. I have an instinct to hide, but I've left it too late, I just stand there. I watch as a gang of workers passes in the lane. There are about a dozen of them. They must be going to the clifftop, to build Hitler's ring of concrete that Johnnie told me about. Their appearance appalls me. They are dressed in rags and their bones stick out through their skin—their collarbones, the bones of their wrists. They shuffle, not lifting their feet, and their backs are hunched over, pressed down, as though they carry some terrible weight. There are two guards, who have different uniforms from the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, the gray uniforms we are used to—these are brown, with swastika armbands.

I watch them pass. My heart is loud in my chest.

One of the prisoners is limping. As I watch, he stumbles, falls. He's left behind; he tries to get up but he can't—he's too weak, too hurt, perhaps. One of the guards turns, goes back to the fallen prisoner. My first stupid, innocent thought is that at least he will help the man to his feet. But he's shouting something in German—you can tell he's cursing the man. The prisoner struggles to get to his feet, but falls back, helpless. The guard stands over him, hits him with the butt of his gun: hits him again and again, so I hear the sound of it, the gun hitting flesh, hitting bone. It's far too loud in the silent lane. The man on the ground moves slightly, puts his arm over his face in a small hopeless gesture of self-protection, but then his arm falls away. Bright blood leaks from his mouth. The guard lowers the gun and wipes the butt on the grass. I tell myself he will walk away now: perhaps the man could still live, perhaps when the work gang has gone I could go to him and help him. . . . But the guard takes a step back and starts to kick the man's head, kicks it open. I hear the sound of the crack of the boot on the skull. There's a lumpy red seep from the wound that I don't want to see or to think about—but my eyes are fixed there, and I can't drag them away.

I have a quick impulse to run to the guard, to stop him. I even take a few steps toward him, but something pulls me back—the thought of my children and Evelyn, the people who need me to care for them. A tremor goes through my body. I stand there, trembling, torn. The guard looks up, sees me, shrugs. He doesn't care that I'm there, that I'm watching everything he does. He's casual; he has no guilt. He kicks the man on the ground again, goes on and on kicking, long after the man on the ground is utterly still, the heavy boot breaking the broken head.

The blackbirds carry on singing, the flowers are holding up their vivid heads. I can't understand why the countryside looks just the same as ever, all bright with gilded springtime. This brightness seems an outrage to me.

The guard walks off, leaves the dead man lying—as though he is nothing, worse than nothing. I vomit into the ditch.

Chapter 47

M
ILLIE IS PLAYING
in the kitchen. She doesn't look up at me; she's intent on her play.

“See, Mummy, it's a wedding.” Her dolls are in a procession across the kitchen table. “I'm going to have a wedding,” she says. “I'm going to marry Simon. I'm going to wear a big fur coat with purple roses on.”

There's a splash of yellow sun on her, and all across my kitchen.

I put the basket of mushrooms down on the table.

“Ooh. Mushrooms. I love mushrooms. When can we have them?” she says.

I try to answer her, but my mouth won't seem to work properly.

Millie looks up at me then. She frowns.

“Your face looks funny,” she says.

“Does it?”

I can't say, Don't worry, it's nothing to do with you: can't begin to form the words.

“Mummy, tell me.” She's worried. She gets down off her chair and comes to wrap her arms around me. “Tell me what the matter is. Mummy, did you hurt yourself?”

“I just need a moment on my own,” I say. “Could you give me that, sweetheart?”

She takes her arms away from me. She stares at me. There's a frightened look on her face. This is something that I have never asked for before.

“Perhaps you could play in the garden? Just for a moment?” I say.

She goes, but keeps turning to look back at me. Her eyes are wide and alarmed.

I sit at my table. The dark, earthy scent of the mushrooms is filling me with nausea. The thing I saw replays in my mind: I can't interrupt it or make it stop. I hear it, see it, so clearly: it's more vivid, more real, than the things around me in my kitchen—Millie's scattered dolls on the table, the ranks of jars on my shelves. All these familiar, substantial things seem flimsy to me, unreal.

Shame washes through me, a bitter hot shame—that I didn't rush out and plead with the guard, didn't grab his arm and implore him to let the man go, didn't do anything. I go through it over and over. I tell myself, Of course I couldn't have stopped him. I'm a helpless, defenseless woman, and I have my family to think of, my family who depend on me. He would have hit me too, or shot me, or had me put in prison, if I'd done that. I made the right decision. . . . But knowing I couldn't have stopped him doesn't shield me from feeling the shame. It's as though by witnessing this terrible thing I have shared in the guilt of it, that it has become a part of me.

I sit at my kitchen table for a long time. At last, Millie comes and tugs fretfully at my sleeve.

“It's dinnertime. I'm
hungry,
Mummy.” Her voice high-pitched, aggrieved. “And I want to play with my dolls.”

I get up and carry on with the things that have to be done, moving slowly through the rooms of my house as though I am wading through deep water.

But later that day I go back to the lane by Harry Tostevin's field. Not for any clear reason: it's just some inchoate sense that I owe this to the man I couldn't protect. The body has been taken away. It's all just as it was before, as though nothing ever happened here.

I cycle slowly back through the flowering land and all the brightness of springtime. I have my eyes wide open, but all I can see is the dark.