Read Online The Soldier's Wife by Joanna Trollope - Free Book Online

unarticulated grief and shock. At twenty-five, Alexa found herself not so much free to choose as floundering in a marsh of utterly unwanted autonomy. She remembered looking down at Isabel in her cot, humped up on her knees in her preferred sleeping position, and thinking that if it wasn’t for the need to provide for her, there really would be absolutely no point in troubling to draw another breath.
    They moved to a cheaper, smaller flat at the top of a North London building whose redeeming feature was a pair of immense old plane trees outside, which grew to the height of the roof. Alexa found a day nursery for Isabel and spent her evenings either marking or sifting through the chaos of invoices and legal letters and trying to work out how she was to settle the debts Richard Maybrick had accumulated in his short life, and of which she had known absolutely nothing. He had left no will – it had not crossed either of their young minds to consider needing anything so elderly or depressing – but he had left three credit cards, maxed to their limit, and not a single useful asset beyond his personal possessions in the shared flat. He had also, Alexa discovered, been in the process of negotiating an unsecured and outrageously expensive loan to finance his time on the Isle of Cumbrae.
    The only person who knew of her situation was Jack Dearlove. She was insistent that no parents should be told, nor the school where she worked. It was agreed between them that if Jack lent her the money to settle, and cancel, the credit cards, she would repay him within a year. No hurry, he said,
please
, two years, three years, don’t cane yourself. ‘A year,’ said Alexa. ‘A
year
. I have to be free of it.’
    â€˜Don’t – don’t think badly of him,’ Jack said. ‘I’m sure—’ He stopped.
    She’d looked down at Isabel, sitting placidly on her knee picking studs of chocolate out of a brioche, and said furiously, ‘Oh, don’t worry. I don’t think badly of
him
. It’s myself I’m angry with. For believing him, in the first place.’ She paused and then she said, half smiling, ‘And I’m proud of myself for digging us out of the pit he left us in. I’ve – I’ve
worked
myself free.’
    And sixteen months later, the debt triumphantly repaid and a party invitation reluctantly, recklessly accepted, there was Dan. A
coup de foudre
, of course, but then there were so many subsequent reasons for not just dismissing it as no more than that. Dan’s life, his personality, his father, his grandfather, his dog – all a seduction. There was everything to like about Dan, there was everything to yield to in the certainty of his work and his situation, never mind the unbelievable luck that such a personable man had got to the age of almost thirty without acquiring a wife and children.
    Alexa swung the car into the narrow road in front of the twins’ nursery school, with its bright fence of stylized wooden flowers and the banner in the window which read ‘Happy Days!’. She pulled over to the kerb and switched off the engine. She remembered, briefly and with a pang at her own naivety, being deeply stirred, during her early encounters with some of Dan’s friends, with a beguiling senior officer, by a sense of the
rightness
of Army life. She took the key out of the ignition. She’d heard Claire, the Brigadier’s wife, say in an interview once, ‘As the wife of a soldier, you just adapt your skills and career ambitions to the Army,’ as if doing so was no harder than making supper out of whatever you could find in the fridge. It was wonderful, while it lasted, to believe that, heady and inspiring. And agony to feel theconviction slipping away as the other real urgencies of life raised their voices, ever louder, especially one voice which seemed to ask her, over and over, ‘Why, after Richard, did you think