Читать книгу The Soldier’s Wife - Margaret Leroy - Страница 13

The streets of St Peter Port are quiet. Some of the shops are boarded up, and there’s a lot of litter lying and shifting slightly in little eddies of air. The sky has clouded over, so it has a smudged, bleary look, like window-glass that needs cleaning. It’s a grey, dirty, rather disconsolate day.

Frank drops us at the harbour, wishing us luck.

We see at once why the streets were empty: all the people are here. There’s already a very long queue of silent, anxious islanders, snaking back from the pier and all along the Esplanade. We go to a desk set up on the pavement, where a flustered woman ticks off our names on a list. She has a pink, mottled face, and disordered hair that she keeps distractedly pushing out of her eyes.

We join the queue. People are sweating in woollen coats too cumbersome to pack up: they take out their handkerchiefs, wipe the damp from their skin. On this clammy summer day, the winter colours of the coats look sombre, almost funereal. Some people don’t have suitcases, and have tied up their belongings in neat brown-paper parcels. A bus arrives, and children spill down the steps; most of them have labels carefully pinned to their coats. They have a lost, dazed look in their eyes. Older children officiously clutch at younger brothers and sisters, responsibility weighing on them, clasping at a coat collar or the cuff of a sleeve.

Millie stares at the children. She frowns. She holds very tight to my hand.

Blanche is wearing her coral taffeta dress beneath her winter coat. She unbuttons her coat and runs her hand over her skirt, trying to smooth out the creases in the glossy fabric.

‘Oh, no, Mum,’ she says suddenly.

Her voice is full of drama; my heart pounds, hurting my chest.

‘What is it?’ I say sharply.

‘I think I’ve forgotten my Vaseline. My skin will get all chapped.’

I feel a little cross with her, that she frightened me like that.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘We’re all sure to have forgotten something.’

‘It does matter, Mum. It does.’

We stand there for what seems like a very long time. The queue is orderly, subdued: nobody talks very much. Seagulls scream in the empty air above us, and there are many boats at anchor; you can hear the nervous slap and jostle of water round their hulls. The sun comes briefly out from the cloud, throwing light at everything, then rapidly snatching it back; where the sun isn’t shining on it, the sea looks black and unspeakably cold. I can’t see the boat that will take us to Weymouth—it must be moored out of sight. The only vessel that’s moored to this part of the pier is quite a small boat, not much bigger than the fishermen use, tied up where stone steps lead down from the pier to the sea. I wonder vaguely who it belongs to.

More and more people come, with their coats, their suitcases, their bulging parcels of precious belongings: with the fear that seems to seep like sweat from their pores.

‘Will I have my own room at Auntie Iris’s?’ Blanche asks me.

‘No, sweetheart. It’ll be a crush. You’ll probably have to sleep in the back bedroom with the boys.’

‘Oh,’ she says, digesting this. It isn’t quite what she’d hoped for. ‘Well, I don’t mind. It might be quite fun, really, sharing a room.’

‘What does London look like?’ says Millie.

‘You’ll love it,’ says Blanche. She relishes being asked this—she loves being the expert on London. ‘The women have beautiful clothes, and the trains go under the ground, and there’s a park with pelicans …’

I understand Blanche’s yearning for London: sometimes I long for it too, even after all these years away, remembering the thrilling hum of the city, the people so different from island people, so much more vivid and purposeful, the yellow lamplight on smoky streets, the slow brown surge of the Thames. I remember too the sense of possibility—of a world that’s freer, wider, more open than this island. I share her excitement for a moment, allowing myself a spark of hope—that there could be good things about this, in spite of the war. A new freedom.

‘Can we go and see Buckingham Palace?’ says Millie.

She has a Buckingham Palace jigsaw that Evelyn gave her for Christmas.

‘I’m sure we will,’ I say.

To my relief, the queue begins to edge forward. Then I see that the people at the front are going down the steps from the pier and over a gangplank onto the boat. The small boat. It can’t be. They can’t expect us to go in that, all the way to England.

‘What is it, Mum?’ says Blanche, urgently. She’s heard my quick inbreath.

‘Nothing, sweetheart.’

She follows my gaze.

‘It isn’t a very big boat, Mum.’ A little uncertain.

‘No. But I’m sure it will be fine. I’m sure they know what they’re doing …’

She hears the apprehension in my voice. She gives me a questioning look.

The queue inches forward, silently.

In front of me is a solid middle-aged woman. Round her neck she wears a fox fur, which has a glass-bead eye, a predatory mouth, a lush russet tail hanging down. Millie is intrigued: she stares at the fox. A smell of mothballs hangs about the woman; she will have taken her best winter clothes out of storage. Next to her is her husband, who seems rather passive and cowed. You can tell she’s the one who makes the decisions.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ I say.

She turns and gives a slight smile, approving of my children.

‘It was just that I was wondering—is that the boat?’ I say.

‘Well—that’s what it looks like,’ she says.

She obviously takes trouble over her appearance; she has plucked her eyebrows out then pencilled them carefully in, and her face is heavily powdered. Her hat is fixed with a silver hatpin like a pansy flower.

‘We’ll never all get on that,’ I say. ‘They should have sent something bigger. Didn’t they realise how many of us there would be?’

The woman shrugs.

‘To be honest—excuse my language—but I don’t think they give a damn about us, in England,’ she says.

‘But—you’d think they’d have sent some soldiers. I mean, there’s no protection for us. We could meet anything on the journey …’

‘We’re expendable, let’s face it,’ says the woman. ‘They’ve given us up for lost. Well, I suppose Mr Churchill’s got an awful lot of things on his mind.’

She’s sardonic, resigned. I wish I could be like that—perhaps it’s a good way to be: not to expect very much, not to struggle against what is happening. But she doesn’t have children with her.

She pulls out the pansy hatpin and fans her face with her hat. Sweat has made thin runnels in the powder on her face. She turns back to her husband.

Panic moves through me. Millie’s hand is so tiny and helpless in mine: everything feels so unguessably fragile, so opened up to disaster—the bodies of my children, the flimsy little boat. I have to protect my children, I have to keep them safe; but I don’t know how to do that. I think of the boat, packed tight with all these people, edging its way across the wideness of sea, all that shining waste of water between us and Weymouth; of the dark secret threat that lurks in the depths of the sea.

I’m scarcely aware of the moment of decision—as though I perform the action almost before I think the thought. I find myself pulling Millie out of the queue, dumping the bags down beside her.

‘Stay there,’ I tell her.

I go to grab Blanche’s arm.

She’s startled. She turns to me jumpily.

‘Mum. What on earth are you doing?’

‘We’re going back home,’ I tell her.

She ignores what I say, or doesn’t hear me.

‘Mum.’ Her voice is splintered with panic. ‘We’ll lose our place in the queue.’

‘We’re going home,’ I say again.

‘But, Mum—you said we had to go now, or we couldn’t go at all.’ Her eyes are wide, afraid.

Millie tries to pick up her carpet bag, but she’s only holding one handle. The bag falls open and all her things tumble out—her knickers and liberty bodices, her candystripe pyjamas, her beloved ragdoll—all her possessions, intimate, lollipop-bright, spewing out all over the grubby stone of the pier. She starts to cry—shuddery, noisy sobs. She’s frightened and cross, and ashamed that she made the things spill.

‘Shut up, Millie. You’re such a crybaby,’ says Blanche.

Millie, outraged, sobs more loudly. There’s a slight cold drizzle of rain.

I gather up Millie’s things and try to brush the dirt off them. Everyone’s eyes are on me.

‘Mum, you can’t do this,’ hisses Blanche, in an intense whisper. She’s torn—desperate to make me listen, yet mortified at being involved in such a public scene. ‘We’ve got to get to England.’

‘The boat’s too small. It isn’t safe,’ I say.

The rain comes on more heavily. Rainwater soaks my hair, runs down my parting, runs down my face like tears.

‘But nothing’s safe any more,’ she says.

I have nothing to say to that.

‘And I want to go. I want to go to London.’ Her voice is shrill. ‘You said we were going to go. You said.’

I’m trying to gather up Millie’s things.

‘Blanche, for God’s sake, just grow up. This isn’t all about you. Can’t you think of somebody else for once?’

Immediately I’ve said it, I regret it. I shouldn’t have told her off like that. I have snatched her dream away from her: I know she’s upset, and afraid. But the words hang between us, sharp as blades, and I can’t take them back again.

I straighten up, put my hand on her shoulder. She shakes me off and stands a little aside, as though she is nothing to do with us. Her face is a papier maché mask: it’s set and white and looks about to dissolve.

I usher them back, past the queue of people. I don’t know how to get home, I haven’t thought this through, haven’t thought beyond this moment—just wanting to turn my back on the boat, the journey, the treacherous heave and shine of the sea.

We walk along the Esplanade, heading away from the pier. I don’t know if there are any buses going to St Pierre du Bois. Maybe all the buses are busy bringing the children here, to the harbour. The mist and rain are blowing in so you can’t see far over the water, the horizon edging nearer, everything closing in, closing down. They’ll have a wet, choppy crossing.

And then, with a rush of relief, I see a vehicle I recognise: it’s Angie’s brother, Jack Bisson, in his ramshackle van. Jack works as a handyman; like Angie, he’s resourceful, he can fix anything—burst pipes, loose slates, a cow that’s struggling to calve. I wave, and he comes to a stop beside us and winds his window down.

‘We were going to go and then we decided not to,’ I say.

‘She decided not to,’ Blanche mutters behind me. ‘Not us. Her.’

Jack has quick dark eyes like a sparrow and Angie’s warm wide smile. His bird-like gaze flits over us. He nods, accepting what I’ve said.

‘Mr Bisson—I know it’s an awful lot to ask—but I don’t suppose you’re going our way? You couldn’t give us a lift?’

‘Of course I could do that, Mrs de la Mare. Just you hop in,’ he tells us.

He drops us in the lane just above Le Colombier.