Soldier's Wife - Hardcover

Joanna Trollope

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385618034 ISBN 13: 9780385618038

Publisher: Doubleday, 2012

Synopsis

Book Description Does marrying a soldier mean marrying the army? The topical new novel from this number one bestselling author. Product Description Dan Riley is a major in the British Army. After a six month tour of duty in Afghanistan, he is coming home to the wife and young daughters he adores. The outside world sees those reunions as a taste of heaven after months of hell. But are they? Can a man trained to fight adjust again to family and domestic life? And how will the family cope, if he can't? To what extent can Alexa, Dan's wife, sacrifice her own needs and fulfilment to support his commitment to a way of life that demands everything not just of him, but of her and the children as well? This novel takes a keen look at the home lives of the modern Army. What happens when love and a vocation collide, head on? About the Author Joanna Trollope is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed bestselling novels. Sh has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia's Daug

About this title

About the Author:

Joanna Trollope is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed bestselling novels. Sh has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia's Daughters, as well as a number of historical novels. Born in Gloucesterhire, she now lives in London. She was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen's Birthday Honours List.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER ONE

Even before her eyes were open, Isabel could tell that the house was awake. The water was thumping away in the pipes behind the wall in her bedroom, as it had done ever since Maintenance—now contracted out to some civilian firm in Liverpool that Isabel had heard her mother say was useless—had come to stop the shower leaking, and she could also hear the twins twittering away somewhere, in the sort of birdspeak they had developed for private communication.

It was annoying, really. It was annoying to be the last awake, and not the first. Isabel had discovered that if she could steal a march on the day—even by fifteen minutes—she could manage it better, get a grip on herself. At school—best, really, not to think about school if she could help it—she had devised this method of taking charge of herself deliberately and methodically, as a way of dealing with homesickness. Wake before everyone else, go through the wretched mental photo gallery of home and Mum and the twins and the dog, and the smells museum of the kitchen and Mum’s sweater drawer and the awkward cupboard where the bed linen lived, whose door would never shut, then gulp, sniff, wipe eyes, sit up, and breathe. Breathe and breathe. Eyes shut, then eyes open. Swallow. Find hairbrush and begin to brush, reminding herself how amazingly lucky she was to have long, thick, straight hair and not the curly or frizzy kind that got you despised for something that you couldn’t possibly be blamed for in the first place. Put hairbrush back. One more deep breath. Up.

Isabel put her fingers lightly across her eyelids, and opened her eyes slowly behind them. She was not, of course, at school. She was at home, in her own bedroom, at number seven, the Quadrant, Larkford Camp, Wiltshire, which had been home now for nearly two years. Before that home had been a bit in Germany, and a bit in Yorkshire and a bit in London, and before that, when it was just Mum and Isabel on their own, a bit in another part of London in a high-up flat with the top of a tree right outside the windows, which Isabel believed she remembered with a passionate nostalgia. There’d also been schools to go with all these places, school after school.

“Five schools by year six,” Mum had said to Isabel, trying to make the case for boarding school. “It’s too much. It’s too much for you. It isn’t fair. You make friends and then you move and lose them. Don’t you think you’d rather have continuity, even if it means sleeping away from home?”

Isabel didn’t know. Even now, technically settled into boarding school, she didn’t know. She wanted to feel steadier, she wanted to please, she understood that if Dan got a promotion they might move again—but then, if he didn’t, if they didn’t, why was it necessary for her to be away from home when home wasn’t, after all, changing? And then there were the twins. The twins went to a local nursery school, and when they were five would go to the local primary.

“But the twins—” Isabel began.

Mum looked at her. Isabel could see she understood and hadn’t got a real answer. She just said, “We—can’t plan, you see. Not if we want to stay together. As a family. But if you go to boarding school, at least you know—I know—that one thing, at least, will go on as before. That’s all.”

In Isabel’s experience, it was only the small things that went on as before, like the smell of the linen cupboard and the twins’ refusal to eat anything orange and the way one fingernail on her left hand grew at a very slight angle. The big stuff, like what was going to happen next, to all of them, was always a giant question mark hanging in the air, affecting everything, every mood. And even when the question mark was answered, it was always replaced by another one. Like today. Today was a big day, a day they had been looking forward to for six months, a day that was circled on the kitchen calendar, and for which the twins had made a huge messy paper banner randomly stuck with patches of shiny colored paper and scraps of pink feather from a dressing-up boa.

Today, Dan was coming home from Afghanistan, with his whole battery. That, Isabel knew, meant about a hundred soldiers. Plus Dan. Plus all the other soldiers, from the other batteries, from the regiment. Planes and planes of them, all coming home together, in transports like flying sardine cans, Dan said, only huge. So Dan’s coming home took away the question mark of would he be killed or wounded while he was away, which was a huge relief because Dan had always been kind to Isabel, and she appreciated that. But now there was another question mark in place of the would-Dan-be-killed one, and that, although not as awful, was still a deep anxiety.

Isabel took her hands away from her face and stared hard at the ceiling above her. People at school talked about what might happen to their soldier fathers a lot. Nobody was supposed to look at or listen to the news at school, but people did, all the same, and then whispered about it. There’d been a helicopter crash in Afghanistan last term, and the radio announcer had said, “All killed. The relatives have been informed,” and Libby Guthrie, whose father was in the Army Flying Corps and who had gone quite white, said, “Oh, phew. Relatives have been told. So we’re OK, then.” They’d all screamed then, and got hysterical with relief, jumping about with their arms round each other, and Isabel had felt an intense, brief, heady sensation of belonging.

But she didn’t feel that now. She felt very separate and very apprehensive. Dan was coming home and Mum would be thrilled and the twins would be thrilled, and she would be pleased. But what, the new question mark asked, would he be like?

In the kitchen, Alexa had the fridge door open. The interior was immaculate, the contents arranged with precision and by category. The kitchen floor—Army-issue vinyl printed to resemble outdated Italian floor tiles—shone. So did the windows. The walls, which she had painted pale blue herself, although she knew she would have to return them to magnolia when they left the quarter, were smear-free except for the twins’ exuberant Welcome Home Daddy poster. There were flowers on the table, the tea towels were ironed, and her hair, still damp from the shower, had possibly never been cleaner. Her friend Mo had been round the evening before on her way to an Army Benevolent Fund early Christmas fair—“Twenty quid for tepid curry with the Old and Bold—you’re so lucky you can’t get a babysitter and come with me”—and had shouted with laughter at the flawless state of the house.

“God, we’re pathetic. What do we think we’re doing? Last time Baz got back from exercise he was completely, utterly filthy, and as rank as a polecat, and there I was, spotless in every crevice, not a hair on my body. I ask you!”

Alexa said, surveying her manicured hands—no varnish, but no torn cuticles, either—“I suppose it’s relief. And excitement. And—” She stopped.

“And what?”

“Army habit. Keeping up appearances. Smart at all times.”

Mo gave herself a quick glance in Alexa’s hall mirror. She pulled down the hem of her embroidered sweater. “I should be wearing a dress. To satisfy the Old and Bold. They’ll be in Jaeger and regimental brooches, comme toujours.”

“You look great,” Alexa said.

“Better on a horse, though. It disguises my low center of gravity.” She leaned forward and gave Alexa a quick kiss. “I’ll be thinking of you tomorrow. It’ll be weird but wonderful. Have a row to clear the air as soon as you can—it’ll get him out of his cave. We usually schedule it for day four.”

Alexa picked a booklet out of a tidy pile on the hall table, and held it out. “That’s what Welfare recommend, only more circumspectly.”

“What on earth’s that?”

“Homecoming,” Alexa said. “Welfare briefing on how to manage men going away and then men coming back again.”

Mo didn’t try to take it. “What a hoot.”

“None of it’s a hoot.”

There was a small pause, and then Mo opened the front door. She blew Alexa a second kiss. “But we have to get on with it, don’t we? The house looks a peach and so do you. Lucky Major Riley.”

The door had slammed behind her, and Alexa heard the second slam of her car door, and then the car reversing and roaring away as if she were late to catch a train. Dan said Mo was at her happiest in an emergency, and Alexa had opened her mouth to say that maybe the visible and urgent expenditure of energy was more like a coping mechanism, and had then, for no reason she was very proud of, shut it again. Dan admired people who coped in emergencies. Emergencies were, after all, what he was trained for. And that was just one of the many things she had had to learn.

Something else she had learned now lay before her in the fridge. The food for a man sated with nourishment in foil pouches. Simple proteins—steak, chicken—beers, fruit and vegetables, powerfully mature Cheddar. He would probably eat nothing for a day or two—although the beers would vanish and no doubt much of the bottle of supermarket whisky she had bought—and then he would eat ravenously, whatever straightforward, un-messed-about food she put in front of him, liberally doused in Tabasco sauce. The British Army, she sometimes thought, could absorb as much Tabasco sauce as Avery Island, Louisiana, could produce. The twins played shops with the rinsed-out miniature Tabasco bottles provided in every twenty-four-hour Army ration pack...

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0385618034
• ISBN 13: 9780385618038
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320