Читать книгу The Soldier’s Wife - Margaret Leroy - Страница 19

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.