Army Wives

by Catherine Jones

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Jenny always loved her life as a British Army officer - until she married one. Now, faced with yet another move from one set of married quarters to another, with three unruly children and the paraphernalia of family life in tow, not to mention husband Nigel, who won't do anything to alienate the Establishment, Jenny is fed up with being an army wife.

The discovery that Jenny's ex-husband Jamie, is married to Jenny's new neighbour and friend Fiona is another blow, for Nigel bitterly resents this evidence of Jenny's past on his doorstep and their marriage stumbles from bad to worse. In desperation, Jenny strikes out for independence and starts her own small business. At last she can plan for her life as a human being again and not just as a wife and mother. But the Army has other ideas. . .

Discover Piatkus Entice: temptation at your fingertips - www.piatkusentice.co.uk

Release date: June 6, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 288

Sample

Had the wives living on the officers’ married patch known what an impact Jenny Walker was going to have on their lives, they would have paid more attention to her arrival. As it was, most of her new neighbours barely gave the removal van a second glance as it drew up outside 23 Slim Road; it was a common enough sight on the patch – there was always someone moving in or out. Certainly Jenny, turning into the driveway of her new home, was completely unaware of arousing any interest at all amongst her neighbours.

At number 16, Gabriella Devereaux lay contentedly on her changing mat, patiently waiting for her mother to apply the baby lotion and then stick down the tabs of the clean nappy. While she waited, blowing bubbles and cooing, she examined her feet and then casually stuck one in her mouth. Pandora, unaware of her daughter’s charming antics, was staring out of the window of the nursery, idly wondering about the new arrivals further down the road, although she was just too far away to get a really good view of the goings-on. All she could see was the lorry parked outside the driveway. She hoped the new people would be her sort; she’d found it hard to settle down in this cul-de-sac, and didn’t have much in common with many of the other wives. Fiona Bain at number 25 was an exception, and she knew a couple of the colonels’ wives in the next road. Pandora also had plenty of friends up in London, but life would be much more tolerable if she wasn’t so lonely here. She longed for Rupert to get posted away from the Ministry of Defence and back to his Regiment, but they had only been here for four months, and it would be nearly two years before they were due to move again. She sighed and turned her attention back to Gabriella.

Next door, at number 18, Marian Cunliffe had also seen the arrival of the removal van and was standing behind her swagged net curtains being unashamedly nosy, knowing that no one could see her blatant curiosity. She hoped that the new family would have some nice children for little Emily and Charlotte to play with, not loud and boisterous boys. There were enough of those already in the road. As she watched, she saw a Volvo estate drive up and pull in behind the Pickfords van. A striking, very slim woman got out of the driver’s seat and opened the rear door of the car, allowing three young children, two girls and a boy, to erupt. The woman leant against the car, giving her new house a long, appraising look as her offspring raced into the garden, shrieking and yelling in excitement. Marian decided that perhaps she would not encourage Emily and Charlotte to become too friendly – the girls were obviously wild. She brushed an imaginary cobweb off the curtain, then turned back to her room and continued to fussily straighten the already tidy bedclothes.

Annette Hobday, who lived at number 21, was busy feeding muesli to her daughter Victoria in the dining room at the back of her house, and missed the arrival of the newcomers and their furniture van. Not that she would have been particularly curious anyway. She regarded other people’s business as their own affair, and neither was she prone to listening to gossip or repeating it. Nevertheless, she was a popular person around the patch, and the mothers appreciated the no-nonsense way she ran the mother and toddler group. She was being lobbied to carry on running it when Victoria moved on to playgroup next term. Annette knew she would be letting people down if she didn’t, but she was rather hoping to get a part-time job to fill her empty mornings. Besides which, why should she do a voluntary job if she could get paid employment instead? She knew this wasn’t what the Army would consider to be the right attitude – but stuff it, they needed the money.

Outside number 23, Jenny Walker perched on the warm bonnet of her car and decided that her new quarter, a 1930s semi, looked spacious and very appealing from the outside. She already knew that they’d been allocated a Type IV quarter, but it was much better than she’d imagined. She liked the hanging tiles and the bow windows. Not that it would have mattered if she had loathed the place; it would still be her home until the Army moved her on again. She wondered if her new house would look quite so attractive viewed in pouring rain and not in the bright, clear sunshine of early April. Even so, she had an instinctive feeling that the family would be happy here; she hoped she was right. One thing she particularly liked was that it was almost the last house in the cul-de-sac, which meant that it was wonderful from a road-safety point of view. Her children had lived almost exclusively on little-used roads and were accustomed to being able to ride their bikes outside the garden. Jenny had worried that moving to a quarter so near London, they would have traffic racing past their front door day and night. She stretched, ran her fingers through her short dark hair and gazed down the road at the other identical houses, their upstairs windows peering over their identical privet hedges. She saw a net curtain twitch and smiled wryly to herself, wondering how long it would be before the first of her new neighbours, overcome by curiosity, tramped up her path with some spurious excuse or other to find out who she was.

She strolled up the path to press her nose against a downstairs window. She cupped her hand over her eyes to cut out the reflection, but the curtains were half drawn and the deep shadow cast in the room made it impossible to discern any detail. She followed her children round to the back of the house, where the two girls were improvising a game of hopscotch on the patio paving and her son, aged four, was trying to climb a tree. She looked at her watch. Eight fifty. Ten minutes before the Estate Warden would turn up to commence the ‘march-in’ procedure. She tried again to see into the house, this time through the big French window that opened into the garden. She thought she could make out a fireplace, and she noticed that the curtains were a dreary shade of oatmeal – but at least they were neutral. She shuddered as she remembered the quarter she had been allocated a few years previously, with its orange curtains and carpets clashing with the red chair covers. It was like living in a nuclear reactor, she had complained. But as nothing was due for exchange or replacement, she had been told she’d have to lump it.

The three removal men settled down in their cab to another bacon butty and flask of tea. They were regulars on the Germany-to-UK run and knew that it would be at least an hour before they would be able to make a start – the time it took for the house to be inspected for damage and faults and all the paperwork to be completed. They felt sorry for Mrs Walker, moving on her own with three kids. It didn’t seem right to them that her husband was being kept behind for military manoeuvres, but then they didn’t understand how any woman would let herself be pushed from one place to another as often as these army wives did. There was no way they’d put their wives through this, they decided – not that their wives would have let them. A distant church clock struck nine times, and simultaneously two men turned into the driveway and walked, in step, up the path.

Two hours later Jenny was standing in the kitchen, gazing despairingly at the growing mound of packing cases.

‘Where do you want this one, missus?’ said the bearded man in Pickfords coveralls. Jenny snapped out of her reverie and made a valiant attempt to be cheerful and look as though she knew what she was doing.

‘Er, put it in the girls’ room. No, on second thoughts, the spare room.’

‘OK. Do you want the other boxes marked “linen cupboard” to go in there too?’ said the man.

‘Yes, and anything marked “hall cupboard”.’

God, thought Jenny, this’ll take days to unpack.

The three removal men carried on ferrying Jenny’s possessions from the van into the house. As they did so, they wondered how she was going to sort the place out on her own. She didn’t look big enough to be able to cope with hefting home a bag of shopping, let alone moving these boxes around; she ought to have had a ‘Fragile, Handle With Care’ label stuck to her. In fact, she was remarkably robust, very fit and highly efficient, but she did nothing to dispel the illusion that she was weak and feeble if it made life easier for her. It had worked like a charm for her in the eight or so years she had served in the Army as an officer. She knew how to make her big brown eyes look as if they were about to fill with tears, to get the soldiers racing to her aid. Equally, if help was unwanted, she could smile politely while her eyes sparked a warning that anyone stepping too close would regret it. Jenny was no fool; she could go for femininity or feminism, whichever was most to her advantage.

At that moment, Jenny’s three young children hurled themselves through the front door, excitedly exclaiming about the play park they had discovered at the end of the road on the corner of a little alleyway.

‘… and there are loads of swings and a roundabout too,’ shouted Elizabeth, the eight-year-old, drowning the voices of her smaller brother and sister.

‘Oh good,’ said Jenny. ‘Then you’d better run along and amuse yourselves there. I’ve got a million things to do and I don’t want you lot getting under my feet.’ As an afterthought she added, ‘And don’t go too far, and be careful crossing the road. I’ll call you when it’s lunchtime – how do you fancy fish and chips today?’

‘Hooray,’ yelled the children in unison and then, just like the tide going out in Morecambe Bay, they disappeared out of the door again, almost bowling over two of the men staggering into the house with a tremendously heavy sofa bed. Jenny apologised, and supervised its positioning before pulling off the acres of protective wrapping. She then gathered up all the paper and bundled the mass of rubbish outside the front door for the men to take away in their van. The more she got rid of while they were here, the better. She knew she could not rely on the dustbin men to take it away these days.

As the men continued to-ing and fro-ing, Jenny returned to the kitchen and gazed again at the crates, boxes and piles of articles wrapped in paper, dejectedly wondering where to begin. Her innate cheerfulness was being pushed to the limit. She realised that unless she moved the washing machine to its proper space under the worktop, she was not going to be able to manoeuvre the cartons away from the cupboards to allow her to put stuff away. She grabbed hold of the heavy Hotpoint and tried to shift it.

‘Bugger the Army,’ she shouted at it, the end of her tether almost reached, as with all her strength she had only budged it a couple of inches across the floor. ‘It’s not fair!’

‘Too bloody right,’ a very plummy woman’s voice said from the front door. Jenny spun round and walked into the hall to see who the sympathiser was. Standing in the open doorway was a tall, attractive woman in her late thirties, holding a tray with a teapot, milk bottle and a couple of mugs; obviously a fellow army wife. Jenny instantly recognised the wives’ ‘uniform’ – navy pleated skirt, Laura Ashley frilly blouse, navy Guernsey and string of pearls. In this instance the ensemble was topped off by a velvet headband controlling her visitor’s immaculate shoulder-length auburn hair. There was something about her simple but smart appearance that made it unlikely that she was the frilly-curtain twitcher down the road. Jenny, in tatty, faded jeans and a sweatshirt that needed a wash, as did her hair, spiky with lack of care, felt extremely scruffy.

‘Hi,’ drawled the stranger, ‘I’m Fiona Bain from next door.’ She indicated with her head that she meant the other half of the semi. Jenny congratulated herself about the curtain-twitching. ‘I thought that you’d be ready for this and I wondered if you needed a hand.’ She proffered the tray.

‘Gosh, thanks.’ Jenny smiled. She’d been gasping for a cup of tea for ages but the kettle hadn’t surfaced yet. ‘It’s exactly what I need.’ She smiled rather bleakly. ‘I’m Jenny Walker.’ She led Fiona into the kitchen and motioned her to put the tray down on a pile of packing cases.

‘I don’t suppose you could help me shove the washing machine across to here, could you? I can’t get to the cupboards till I move it out of the way.’

‘Sure thing.’

‘Watch your clothes on that corner.’ Jenny pointed to a jagged edge which was the inevitable result of too many moves.

‘Isn’t your husband around? Don’t tell me he’s had to report for duty already?’ They started to manhandle the awkward appliance into position.

‘No,’ grunted Jenny with the exertion. ‘He’s had to stay on with the Regiment to run an exercise in Germany and he won’t be here for another two weeks.’ With a last heave from both of them, the machine slid into position. Jenny straightened up.

‘Phew, thanks. I don’t suppose your husband could lend me a spanner so I can get it plumbed in?’ she added, resting against the sink.

‘He’s in the States for a fortnight, but if I can find one you’re welcome to borrow it. I’m not entirely sure where he keeps that sort of thing. He does all that stuff himself.’

Jenny wasn’t the least bit surprised. She started to pour out the tea.

‘Clever you being so practical,’ added Fiona.

‘It’s only a question of tightening the nuts up properly.’ Jenny giggled. ‘I wouldn’t mind tightening the nuts of some people in the Postings Branch at the same time.’ Fiona roared with laughter.

‘So how did you get conned into doing the move on your own? I’d have thrown my teddy in the corner if they had suggested this sort of thing to me.’ Fiona leaned her long, elegant body against a cupboard. Jenny looked at her new neighbour’s cool grey eyes and smooth, unwrinkled skin – she didn’t look the sort who was prone to tantrums. But she could probably freeze hell with one look if she wanted.

‘You know what it’s like – they take a dim view of bolshie wives. And the man taking over from Nigel was coming from Ireland and he could only move his family over if I moved out, and … Well, it’s rather complicated, but muggins here got the short straw.’

‘I’d have still said “on your bike” if they’d asked me to move on my own with kids.’

Jenny thought that it would have taken a brave man to make Fiona do anything she didn’t fancy.

‘I should’ve done, but Nigel’s Commanding Officer came up to me at a dinner night when I’d had three sherries and rather too much red wine and gave me the “I’m sure an old hand like you can manage it” routine. I got the hard sell about the Regiment needing him, and in a fit of weakness I agreed. I wish I hadn’t,’ said Jenny morosely. ‘I wanted to go and see the CO the next day when I was stone-cold sober and say forget it, but Nigel said I couldn’t because it’d make him look such a bloody fool.’

‘Poor you,’ said Fiona, knowing that she would never have agreed to that sort of altruism. ‘Listen, I’ll push off now and let you get on. Don’t worry about lunch, I’ll rustle something up for all of you; did I see three children?’ Jenny nodded. ‘Twelve thirty, then?’

‘You can’t possibly do that,’ said Jenny, overwhelmed by the generosity of her neighbour, whom she barely knew.

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Fiona firmly. ‘See you later.’ She left before Jenny could argue further.

Jenny poured herself a second cup of tea, and feeling now as though she could at least get through the day, ripped the tape off the first of the packing cases and made a start. Fiona returned home and decided that Jenny was probably going to be fun to have as a neighbour, and at least she had a sense of humour. Perhaps she ought to have a dinner party in a few weeks to get to know them better. She wondered what regiment Nigel Walker was in. Not that it really mattered, but if he was in something downmarket like the REME, her husband might take against him. She despaired of James’s snobbery – he was only a gunner himself, when all was said and done. The way he carried on was more fitted to the cavalry or the Guards. Still, assuming Nigel met with James’s approval, it might be fun to have some people round to supper. She could invite the Devereauxs and the Ross-McLeods and perhaps the Hobdays – Annette Hobday was always good value at a party. She would mention it to Jenny when the poor woman had had a chance to get straight.

Fiona did not dwell on the mechanics of Jenny’s move. She knew from her own experience exactly what would have been involved: hours spent scrubbing window frames with a toothbrush and bleach to shift mould, days bruising knuckles against wood-chip wallpaper, trying to eradicate every grubby fingerprint, and worst of all, the chore of cleaning the oven so it gleamed like new – not a dot of burned-on fat to be seen anywhere. The horrors of moving house had to be entirely eradicated from memory between times, like childbirth, otherwise it would be impossible to complete the process more than once.

It was hard to believe, thought Jenny as she carried on unpacking, that it was only three days since she had been desperately scouring away any evidence of her family’s existence at 32 Sennelager Strasse. Already life in Germany seemed a distant memory now that the worst of the move was over. Although unpacking was as bad as packing, at least there was no deadline. No one would come and check up on your standards, like they did when you moved out. Jenny shuddered as she thought about the ‘march-out’ inspection, as the Army called it. No matter how often she underwent the process, she was never going to get used to the humiliation of every corner of her house (but no longer her home) being inspected for cleanliness before she handed back the keys. That was what made moving from one place to another so stressful. That was what made her like a bear for two weeks beforehand, and so exhausted afterwards. For a solid fortnight she seemed to have done nothing but clean and scrub, scour and polish – and when she wasn’t doing that, she was yelling at her family not to mess it up again. Was it any wonder that so many army marriages ended in divorce?

Her first one had – foundering on the rocks of too-frequent separation followed by rows when they were together. For a moment Jenny wondered about her ex-husband: what he was doing, how he was getting on – who he was getting on. She’d heard he’d married again, and part of her felt a twinge of envy. There were no two ways about it, he’d been a phenomenal lover. It was a shame he’d also been a prize-winning, pompous, sexist chauvinist. She hoped his new wife didn’t want a career as well as a husband. He hadn’t allowed Jenny that luxury, and she didn’t think the years would have altered his attitude. That was what had finally made her leave; the realisation that she loved her job more than him.

Jenny curtly dismissed him from her mind. She hadn’t thought about him for years. She vaguely wondered why she thought of him now.

As Jenny moved about the ground floor of her house, arranging her possessions, she noticed the phone, sitting in a corner under the stairs. She wondered when Nigel would be able to ring her so that she could tell him about the new place – and that the move had gone as well as could be expected. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t his fault that he’d had to go off on manoeuvres, although Jenny had a sneaking feeling that he’d found the prospect of three weeks in the field infinitely preferable to cleaning and packing. At least he’d had the decency to look totally shamefaced when he’d driven away in his Land Rover the previous Monday, leaving her and the children to deal with the removals and the march-out on their own.

Susan, a civilian friend who lived near Oxford and who’d housed Jenny and her homeless family over the weekend, had remarked that Nigel had been very canny when he’d allowed himself to be co-opted on to the exercise like that.

‘That’s not fair,’ Jenny protested loyally, refusing to air her own suspicions. ‘He helped me tremendously.’

‘Oh yes? So why were you so knackered when you got here on Saturday? I’m amazed you were in a fit state to drive from the port.’

‘I slept on the ferry,’ said Jenny, as if that fact expiated Nigel’s abandonment of his family at such a critical moment. ‘Besides which, he had his own problems at work. His Commanding Officer is a complete wanker, and Nigel’s having to wet-nurse him, hand over his Squadron to his successor and get everything ready for this exercise.’

Susan wasn’t convinced. She stopped chopping vegetables for the Sunday lunch and said, ‘So that makes it all right then. Nigel’s CO can’t look after himself so you have to cope with all this and three children single-handed. Face it, Jenny, if it wasn’t for absolute bricks like you, the Army would fall apart at the seams.’ Before Jenny could interrupt, she went on, ‘And don’t tell me that it’s your duty, or you owe it to the Army, or any other claptrap, because the Army couldn’t give a stuff. As soon as they’ve no further use for Nigel, he’ll get the chop, just like the other few thousand who also thought they’d signed on for life.’

‘What on earth makes you think that? They’ve said there’s going to be no more redundancy,’ Jenny said, with a hint of frost in her voice. She didn’t like the Army being knocked, especially by an outsider.

‘And you believe them?’ The sarcasm was heavy.

‘Of course I do. They’ve always said that they won’t change conditions of service for people already in.’

‘Oh, rot! They’re looking at every way to make cuts. Even if they don’t get rid of yet more people they’ll have to find ways of decreasing the budget. They’ll bin the boarding-school allowance before you can say knife, and the next thing that’ll happen is that the rent for quarters will be increased to approach reality. Let’s face it, apart from the odd bit of peacekeeping, what role is there for the Army these days.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Jenny felt irritated, but she knew that a lot of what Susan said was right. She wasn’t going to admit it, though. They’d been friends for a long time, but that didn’t give her the right to be so critical. As Jenny stared at Susan’s pleasant, honest face, she wondered for an instant if perhaps she was too closely involved with the Army to see its problems now that it had neither a clear enemy nor a role. It had been the linchpin of her life for getting on for sixteen years, and she was deeply loyal to the organisation and the people.

Susan met Jenny’s stare and was unperturbed. ‘If you ask me, you’ve got to get Nigel to give up the Army. The quality of life was never brilliant, but at least there were some perks as compensation, but what is there now?’ She paused to allow Jenny time to answer, but Jenny only shrugged. ‘You can’t go on shunting your family around like this. Look at the children: Lizzie’s been to three schools now, and she’s only eight – and that’s not counting playgroups. It’ll be the same for the other two, and it’s not fair on them. And don’t tell me you knew what you were doing when you got married, what it would involve. You chose the life but they didn’t, and it’s very selfish of you to keep on inflicting it on them.’

Jenny wasn’t about to concede that Susan’s point had struck home. It wasn’t fair on the children, and it wasn’t only they who had a rough deal. Her mother, who lived alone in Devon, hadn’t seen her grandchildren for two years. Her house was too small to accommodate Jenny and the children, but she’d been too frail to make the journey to Germany. It had been much the same story with Nigel’s parents in Edinburgh, although there the problem was a financial one. They simply didn’t have the money for an expensive air fare, and their Scots pride refused to allow Nigel to pay for the tickets.

‘But even if I agreed, which I don’t, that this is no life for the family, I’m never going to get Nigel to leave. The Army means everything to him. And what would he do if he came out?’

‘The same as John did,’ said Susan briskly, ‘look for a job.’

It was this no-nonsense approach which had made Jenny notice Susan when they had met on their first day as officer cadets. They’d been friends ever since, and had gone out with their future husbands as a foursome. Then Susan’s husband, John, had decided suddenly, after several years in uniform, that the Army was not for him, and had left to work as a personnel administrator for a firm in Oxfordshire. They had lived in one place for twelve years, in a rambling old house with some rather peculiar Victorian extensions which had been added before planning permission had controlled that sort of thing. On the outside the house was not very attractive, not ugly but lopsided, although it was festooned in a wisteria that disguised its faults, but the inside was spacious, airy and light, with numerous high-ceilinged rooms. Susan and John were so well established in their village that in the summer John played cricket for the pub and Susan helped with the teas. Their two boys had only ever lived in one house and had known all their school friends since they had graduated from the mother and toddler group in the village hall. Every time Jenny went to stay with them, she came away longing to settle down in her own home. She especially coveted the huge pine table in the blue and yellow kitchen – she longed for one just like it. Family life revolved around it; homework, discussions, meals and all other events took place there. At the other end of the kitchen were an Aga and a sofa. It was a home, not just where Susan lived. It was all so very different from the uniform walls of magnolia emulsion in the succession of dreary quarters with tiny kitchens, ancient cupboards and chipped gloss paint that Jenny had had to tolerate.

Standing in yet another inadequate kitchen and unpacking the sixth packing case that morning, Jenny asked herself if she really wanted to go through this every two years or so until Nigel reached fifty-five and was put out to grass. Another nine moves at least, probably more. She was interrupted by one of the removal men.

‘Where do you want your husband’s woodworking stuff? The garage?’

Typical man, thought Jenny. Why do they always believe that saws and hammers are boys’ toys?

‘No thanks. You can put the workbench and the tools in the dining room. The other stuff can go in the spare room.’

Jenny suddenly realised tha. . .