Soldier's Daughters (27 page)

Susie had the door open and the kettle on by the time Maddy reached the doorstep.

‘Come in, come in,’ called Susie, on hearing the footsteps. She came out into the hall. ‘Here, let me take Nate,’ she said, lifting the half-sleeping child out of Maddy’s arms. ‘What are you doing home? You’re not due back for weeks yet,’ she added.

Maddy eased her back again. ‘No, well… slight change of plan.’

Susie gave her a curious glance but said nothing. Maddy followed Susie into her tidy sitting room, where the twins were lounging on the sofa, watching
Shrek
.

‘Girls,’ said Susie as she laid Nate on the floor, ‘keep an eye on this one for us. Maddy and I are going to be in the kitchen.’

The twins squealed with delight at being given a real live doll to play with and instantly slid off the sofa to be closer to their charge.

‘And be gentle,’ instructed Susie. ‘You’re not to pick him up or cart him around. Let him wake up in his own good time. Understand?’

The girls nodded.

‘He’ll be fine,’ said Maddy. ‘He’ll squawk if he gets fed up. Nate lets people know when he’s not completely happy – loudly.’

The two women went into the kitchen, where a pot of tea was steaming gently on the counter.

‘So, why the change of plan?’ asked Susie as she poured the tea.

‘This and that,’ said Maddy. Much as she wanted advice from Susie she still, even after a day thinking about her predicament, hadn’t managed to formulate a way of saying ‘I think my husband might be having an affair’ without sounding like some sort of hysterical drama queen.

‘Did being waited on hand and foot get a bit suffocating?’ asked Susie as she reached for a carton of milk.

‘Hmm,’ replied Maddy, noncommittally.

Susie put the milk back down again and narrowed her eyes slightly. ‘More than that?’

Suddenly, the weight of worry, coupled with a completely sleepless night and an argument with her mother about her sudden departure, got too much. She felt a bubble of despair well up inside. A sob escaped.

Susie gasped. ‘Maddy, what on earth is the matter?’ She got up from the stool and hugged her friend, which made Maddy’s tears flow faster. ‘It’s not the baby?’ she questioned as the awful thought struck her.

Maddy shook her head.

‘And it isn’t Seb?’

But at that Maddy’s crying renewed in intensity.

‘Maddy, Maddy,’ soothed Susie, rubbing her back. But Maddy seemed inconsolable, so Susie rubbed steadily and made sympathetic noises until finally Maddy began to calm down. ‘There, there.’ She reached for the box of tissues on the top of the fridge and handed them to Maddy, who took a handful and blew her nose.

‘I’m sorry,’ she gulped.

Susie shook her head. ‘There’s nothing to be sorry for.’

Maddy forced a wet smile. ‘You don’t need my problems.’

‘No? I think I ought to be the judge of that. Want to talk?’

Maddy blew her nose again and tried to pull herself together but juddering sobs kept escaping. She cradled her mug and stared at it.

‘I suppose I owe you an explanation,’ she murmured.

‘Sweetie, you owe me nothing.’

Maddy blew her nose a final time and then reached for her handbag, lying at her feet. Silently she extracted the phone and after a few seconds she handed it to Susie.

There was a pause of a couple of seconds as Susie read the text and then said, ‘Bloody hell,’ followed by, ‘Who is it from?’

Maddy shook her head and shrugged. ‘No idea. I don’t even know if it’s true. I mean, it could be someone being spiteful, trying to wreck Seb’s life because they’ve not made the cut with the rowing team or something.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ said Susie, but her tone sounded doubtful.

Maddy looked at her. ‘You don’t think so.’ Her eyes welled up with tears again.

‘Maddy,’ said Susie, almost desperately, ‘I don’t know what to think. Truly.’

‘He’s been away an awful lot recently.’ Maddy twisted the tissue in her hand. ‘So many weekends.’ She gazed at Susie, willing her friend to contradict her, to say that, of course, Seb wasn’t the sort to stray, but Susie nodded in agreement. ‘So it could be true, couldn’t it?’

‘We don’t know this.’

Maddy sipped her tea. ‘So this is why I came back. I don’t want my mum to know – not till I know the truth. Mum…’ Maddy paused. ‘Mum thinks…’ She paused again, not wanting to sound horribly disloyal to her mother. ‘Mum isn’t Seb’s number one fan. She thinks I could have done better than marrying a soldier.’

‘An officer,’ corrected Susie. ‘And a fine athlete and an Oxford graduate.’

‘Even so…’ said Maddy. ‘And I knew if I stayed with my parents I couldn’t have pretended all was tickety-boo when…’ She glanced at her phone. ‘When it might be anything but.’

‘I understand,’ said Susie. She sipped her tea. ‘God, this is a mess and Seb’s only just flown out to Kenya. When’s he due back? When will you be able to talk to him? Are there any comms out there?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Not unless I go through official channels and I can’t do that – I can’t expect the chief clerk or Andy to relay a message to him about something like this.’

‘Maddy,’ said Susie, gently. ‘Look, I don’t want to sound like an old misery but have you thought about what you’ll do if…?’

Maddy stared at Susie and finished the sentence for her. ‘If it’s true?’

Susie nodded.

Maddy sighed. ‘I wouldn’t be hurting like this if I didn’t love him so much. And I do, Susie. I can’t imagine life without him. I’d stick with him. I’d take him back in a trice. I don’t want him to go… leave me. And the children…’

‘Do you think it’d come to that?’

Maddy looked at Susie, desperation written clearly on her face. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what I’m up against. I don’t know who this person is. I can only assume it’s someone he met rowing.’ She gave a bark of mirthless laughter. ‘After all – he’s got previous. It’s how we met. So this is probably some young single athlete, all bronzed skin and drive and ambition, full of health and vim and vigour. Not a knackered mother whose figure has gone to pot and who has the energy of a tired sloth.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Susie. ‘You’re lovely and you know it.’

‘Hmm.’

Susie sipped her tea. ‘You sure it’s a rower?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘No, but it seems logical.’

‘It’s just…’

Maddy’s brow creased. ‘It’s just what, Susie?’

‘No, it’s probably nothing.’ Susie took a gulp of her tea.

‘Susie?’

‘It’s just that friend of Sam’s, the one who came to your Sunday lunch party, was here, and if you remember, she was adamant she didn’t row and wasn’t ever likely to.’

‘Who? Michelle?’

Susie nodded.

‘What did she want?’

‘To see you.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘She didn’t really say. She was a bit odd, though.’

‘No change there, then,’ said Maddy. ‘She was bloody odd the other time she was here. I couldn’t see why a lovely girl like Sam would want her as a friend. She hardly said a word. In fact, I thought she was more than odd, I thought she was rude and moody.’

‘So maybe she wanted to apologise to you.’

Maddy shook her head. ‘Unlikely, especially as I had a bread-and-butter letter from her, thanking me. If she felt the need to say sorry for being such a mardy-moo she could have said so then.’

‘I suppose. The thing is, when she found out you weren’t here I gave her your phone number.’

Maddy stared at Susie. ‘The house phone?’

‘I don’t know. I gave her the babysitting circle list, which has got both your numbers on it. I don’t know which one she put into her mobile. It could have been the house phone, but it could have been your mobile, it could have been both. God, if I’m right, Maddy, I am so sorry.’

‘But… but… it can’t be her. She doesn’t row, she said so, so she could never have met Seb before that lunch party. It doesn’t add up.’ Maddy was bewildered. ‘No, it can’t be her.’

But Susie wasn’t so sure. She’d seen how Michelle had looked during that second visit and the words ‘shifty’ and ‘furtive’ kept popping into her mind. Along with ‘deranged’, not that she was going to tell Maddy. Maddy had enough to contend with already.

The A330 Airbus droned southwards and Sam put her Kindle down on her tray-table then closed her eyes. She was bored with reading and anyway she hadn’t been concentrating properly on her book and had kept finding that she had to scroll back a few pages to pick up a lost thread in the plot.

She knew why: her mind was full of other stuff. Her thoughts kept yo-yoing between Michelle and her problems, and what she was going to find out in Kenya. The CO’s briefing had been pretty unequivocal about what they might expect. He hadn’t beaten about the bush when he’d opened with, ‘Right, first off, almost everything you will encounter in the bush is out to kill you.’

Colonel Notley had gone on to talk about the deadly results of getting bitten. It seemed that everything from insects to lions had a taste for humans. Then there were the other dangers: the sun could burn you to a crisp in minutes; the chances of getting septicaemia from scratches or cuts were monumental; and, finally, if you were foolish enough to have sex with any of the locals you were more than likely to end up with HIV or some other STD. Frankly, thought Sam, the CO hardly sold the place as the holiday destination that civvies thought it was – although civvies got to hang out in five-star resorts.

‘Of course,’ the CO had said, ‘I would hope that both you and your soldiers will steer well clear of the local women or, ahem, men… but I want you to drum it into every last man-jack, or woman, in your command that if we do find anyone consorting with the locals we’ll take a very dim view of it.’ He clicked a slide to show a map of the area. And then another slide with a larger-scale map showing the main camp in the middle – and, as far as Sam could ascertain – bugger all else. ‘Featureless’ and ‘back of beyond’ were words that sprang to mind.

He’d gone on about various other aspects of the exercise and had finished with, ‘This exercise is to test the soldiers of the battalion in basic infantry skills, to test us, the officers, in our leadership skills, to test how we interact with the other units in the battle group and to test the command and control of higher formation. It will be hard, it will be hot, but, if we all follow standard operating procedures it should not be dangerous.’

But that was the thing…
should not be dangerous
kind of implied that it could be. And although Sam had known when she’d signed up that being in the army meant that her job description could include stuff like ‘getting shot at’ she hadn’t really thought about risks like snake bites or being a lion’s lunch. She wasn’t sure if the butterflies that were now flapping away in her stomach were as a result of excitement at going to a foreign and rather exotic country or fear about what the country might have in store.

It didn’t help matters that the colonel had also briefed them about the kit that was permanently stored out in Kenya and the state of it. The vehicles, apparently, were relatively new – well, new compared to the lot they’d replaced – but the succession of soldiers who went through the exercise area felt very little responsibility with regard to them and thrashed the engines and took them across terrain in a way they wouldn’t dream of doing to their own battalion vehicles. Sam had been warned that she and her team would probably be working around the clock to keep everyone mobile.

Hot, suffering dodgy conditions and probably overworked – whoopee. Still, the other advantage of being in the back of beyond was that she wouldn’t get plagued with daily calls from Michelle wanting a shoulder to cry on. Sam felt a bit mean as she thought this but, honestly, Michelle was pushing their friendship to the limit.

Michelle rang the Fanshaws’ number for the fifth and, she’d promised herself, final time. It was answered on the third ring.

‘Hello, Maddy here.’

Maddy! Michelle was so stunned at getting Maddy and not Seb that she slammed the receiver down. Shit, what was she doing back? Susie had said she’d be gone for ages, weeks at any rate. Michelle stared, horrified, at the phone on her desk as if she expected it to morph into a cobra or something else unpleasant.

Then she began to calm down and she thought more logically about the situation. If Maddy were home and Seb was now, presumably, in Africa – or would be imminently – maybe it was the perfect moment for the two of them to have a little chat. After all, wouldn’t it be doing Maddy a kindness to put her in the picture about the sham that her marriage had turned into? Michelle looked at her diary. Good, the weekend was free. Maybe she’d take a spin down to the country.

Immi was awoken by the bing-bong of the aeroplane’s tannoy and the guy sitting next to her shuffling about. She wondered how long she’d been asleep. Long enough, she thought, judging by the vile, stale taste in her mouth as she swallowed. She reached for her compact to check her appearance. Oh, God, she’d dribbled. She had dried drool down her chin. Hastily she tidied herself up and ran a comb through her hair.

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ said the squaddie next to her. ‘You’re still the best-looking soldier on the plane.’

‘Thanks.’ She preened slightly.

‘Still, given what the rest of us look like, that isn’t saying much.’

Immi stuck her tongue out and good-naturedly told him to piss off.

She felt the plane lurch slightly; a second bing-bong rang out.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the pilot speaking to inform you that we’ve started our decent into Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. We should be on the ground in about thirty minutes. I hope you have enjoyed the flight.’

Well, no, she hadn’t, thought Immi, but she didn’t think the RAF would be likely to listen to anything she had to say about the dozen or so suggestions she had as to how their service could be improved. Decent soap and soft loo roll in the lavs would be a start.

She amused herself for the limited remainder of the trip by thinking up all the other ways the RAF could begin to rival commercial airlines and was almost surprised when she felt a hefty thump and realised they’d touched down. She was thrown forward in her seat and bounced off the one in front as the pilot applied reverse thrust and the brakes. Another thing to add to the list – be gentler to the passengers.