In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  My only friend in those days, my only guide through Meongate’s hidden perils, was Fergus, the taciturn and undemonstrative major-domo, ‘shifty’ as Olivia described him and certainly not as deferential as he should have been, but none the less my sole confidant. Sally, the sullen maid, and humourless Nanny Hiles both went in awe of Olivia, but Fergus treated her with an assurance, bordering on disrespect, that made him my immediate ally. A cautious, solitary, pessimistic man who had expected little from life and consequently been spared many disappointments, perhaps he took pity on a lonely child whose plight he understood better than she did herself. He would take me on covert expeditions through the grounds, or down to the wooded reach of the Meon where he fished of a quiet afternoon, or into Droxford in the trap, when he would buy me a twist of sherbet and leave me sitting on the wall outside Wilsmer’s saddlery whilst he went in to haggle over a new bridle for the pony. For such brief moments as those, kicking my heels on Mr Wilsmer’s wall and eating my sherbet in the sunshine, I was happy. But such moments did not last.

  It was Fergus who first showed me my father’s name, recorded with the other war dead of the village, on a plaque at the church. Their Name Liveth for Evermore, the inscription said, and his name – Captain the Honourable John Hallows – is all that did live for me. I would stare at it for what seemed like hours, trying to conjure up the real living and breathing father that he had never been to me, seeing only those stiff, expressionless, uniformed figures preserved by photographs in back copies of the Illustrated London News, glimpsing no part of his true self beyond the neatly carved letters of his name.

  As for my mother, of her there was no record at all, no grave, no memorial of any kind. Fergus, when I questioned him, prevaricated. My mother’s grave, if she had one, was far away – and he did not know where. There were, I was to understand, limits to what even he could tell me. Whether he suggested it or not I cannot remember, but, for some reason, I decided to ask Olivia. I cannot recall how old I was when it happened, but I had followed her into the library where she often went to look at a painting that hung there.

  ‘Where is my mother’s grave?’ I said bluntly, partly intending the question to be a challenge. All hatred is, in time, reciprocated and I had come to hate Olivia as much as she hated me; I did not then appreciate how dangerous an enemy she could be.

  She did not answer in words. She turned aside from that great, high, dark painting and hit me so hard across the face that I nearly fell over. I stood there, clutching the reddening bruise, too shocked by the pain of it to cry, and she stooped over me, her eyes blazing. ‘If you ever ask that question again,’ she said, ‘if you ever mention your mother again, I’ll make you suffer.’

  The mystery of my mother thenceforth became the grand and secret obsession of my childhood. My father’s death, after all, had a comforting simplicity about it. Every November there was an Armistice Parade in the village to commemorate the sacrifice of Captain the Honourable John Hallows and the many others like him. Though not permitted to join the Brownie troop that took part in the parade, I was allowed to go and watch and could imagine myself marching with all the little girls who, like me, had lost their fathers. But, at the end of the parade, they went home to their mothers; I could not even remember mine.

  Sometimes, though, I thought I could remember her. It was impossible, of course, if what I had been told of her was true, but Olivia had succeeded in making me doubt everything I had not personally experienced, and there was one, dim, early memory, seemingly at the very dawn of my recollection, to sustain what I so wanted to believe.

  I was standing on the platform at Droxford railway station. It was a hot summer’s day: I could feel the heat of the gravel seeping up through my shoes. A train was standing at the platform, great billows of smoke rising as the engine gathered steam. The man standing beside me, who had been holding my hand, stooped and lifted me up, cradling me in his arms to watch the train pull out. He was stout and white-haired. I remember the rumble of his voice and the brim of his straw hat touching my head as he raised his free hand to wave. And I was waving too, at a woman aboard the train who had wound down the window and was leaning out, waving also and smiling and crying as she did so. She was dressed in blue and held a white handkerchief in her right hand. And the train carried her away. And then I cried too and the stout old man hugged me, the brass buttons on his coat cold against my face.

  I recounted the memory to Fergus one day, when we were returning from a mushrooming expedition. When I had finished, I asked him who he thought the old man was.

  ‘Sounds like old Mr Gladwin,’ he replied. ‘The first Lady Powerstock’s father. He lived here … till she sent him away.’ By she Fergus always meant Olivia.

  ‘Why did she do that?’

  ‘She’d have had her reasons, I don’t doubt.’

  ‘When did he go?’

  ‘The summer of 1920, when you were three. Back to Yorkshire, so they say. A proper caution, was Mr Gladwin.’

  ‘Who was the pretty lady, Fergus?’

  ‘That I don’t know.’

  ‘Was she … my mother?’

  He pulled up and looked down at me with a frown. ‘That she was not,’ he said with deliberate slowness. ‘Your mother passed away a few days after she had you. You know that. No amount of wanting is going to make you remember her.’

  ‘Then … who was the pretty lady?’

  His frown became less kindly. ‘I told you: I don’t know. That Mr Gladwin, he was a close one. Now, look to that napkin or you’ll pitch your breakfast into the lane – and mine with it.’

  If the pretty lady wasn’t my mother, who was she? What was old Mr Gladwin, my great-grandfather, to her? There were no answers within my reach, just the secret hope I went on harbouring that maybe my mother wasn’t really dead at all, just … sent away, like old Mr Gladwin.

  I, too, was shortly to be sent away, to preparatory school in North Wales. It was the junior wing of Howell’s, which some of the girls found austere and rigorous but where I felt at home from the very start. There were no shadows at school, no unspoken secrets from the past threatening to overtake me. It was the holidays I came to dread, the times when I knew I would have to return to Meongate to find Olivia waiting for me with her menacing smile, to find my grandfather even more frail and uncommunicative than when I’d left, to find Fergus a little less forthcoming each time with the priggish young lady he thought I was becoming.

  Being sent away to boarding school at the age of eight meant I knew virtually nobody in Droxford – of my own age or any other. That, I suppose, is why I did not learn sooner about the murder at Meongate, why I was ignorant for so long of that fragment of our family’s mystery.

  I think it was the Cribbins boy who first told me. He used to help with the gardening during the summer holidays and was one of the few village children I had anything to do with. One warm, overcast afternoon, Cook gave me a glass of lemonade to take out to him in the orchard where he’d been put to cutting back brambles. We stood talking while he drank it. He asked me what the house was like inside.

  ‘Haven’t you ever been inside?’ I retorted, a touch haughtily, for Howell’s had trained me well.

  ‘No fear,’ he said between gulps. ‘My dad’s told me.’

  ‘Told you what?’

  ‘’Bout the murder.’

  ‘What murder?’

  ‘Don’t you know, Miss? There were a murder done at Meongate, years ago. My dad told me.’

  ‘Oh that?’ I replied. ‘Of course I know about that.’ It wouldn’t have done to let him see that it had been kept from me.

  The obvious person to ask for information was Fergus. I found him polishing the silver in the pantry.

  ‘Murder, you say? Well, maybe there was and maybe there wasn’t. What would Cribbins know?’

  ‘Stop teasing, Fergus.’

  He laid down the knives he had been cleaning and stooped close to my ear. ‘I’m not teasing,’ he whispered. ‘She’d
skin me alive if she heard me talking about it. It’s a subject best left alone.’

  He knew better than to think I would leave it alone. The following afternoon, I tracked him down on the riverbank, at his favourite spot for fishing, where I could be certain we would not be overheard.

  ‘Well? You can tell me here.’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘About the murder.’

  He grunted and flicked his line. ‘They’re not biting today.’

  ‘Fergus!’

  ‘I can see I’ll get no peace till I tell you. It was during the war. One of his lordship’s guests. Shot in his bedroom.’

  ‘Which bedroom?’

  ‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t yours. It was one of those that are shut up.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘I told you: a guest. I forget his name.’

  ‘Who killed him?’

  ‘They never found out.’

  ‘Gosh. You mean it’s never been solved?’

  ‘Not to this day.’

  ‘How exciting.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it exciting.’

  ‘You wouldn’t call anything exciting.’

  He smiled. ‘Well, take heed of this: don’t mention it to her. She’d not thank you for it.’

  ‘Was the murdered man a friend of hers, then?’

  Fergus chuckled. ‘She doesn’t have friends. You should know that. Now, clear off before you frighten away all the fish in the river.’

  I taxed Fergus several more times on the subject but learned nothing. I dared not even ask anybody else. Cook and Sally had been handpicked, it seemed, for their avoidance of gossip. Perhaps, in Olivia’s eyes, it compensated for their other deficiencies. They, I felt certain, would not help me. Besides, only to Fergus was I prepared to admit how little I truly knew of my family’s history. Hints and snatches of hazy memory were all I had to go on.

  I must have been a plague to Fergus with all my endless, unanswerable questions. Which room was the one where the murder was committed? Which room was my parents’? Why were there no pictures of them? Where was my mother buried? What did she look like? Why was Mr Gladwin sent away? Who was the pretty lady? He would just tap his nose, say he couldn’t remember or couldn’t tell me, then distract me with one of his puzzles involving string and matchsticks.

  Even the little he did give away would probably have ensured his dismissal had Olivia known of it. Returning from one of her trips to London, trips which grew ever more frequent as the years passed, she would first ignore me, then subject me to withering inquisitions. What had I been doing? Who had I been talking to? What books had I been reading? Occasionally, as I grew older, she would ask my opinion of a new dress she had bought, or of some sparkling addition to her jewellery. Sometimes, I would make the mistake of admiring the item.

  ‘It looks well because I wear it well,’ she would reply. ‘On you it would be … wasted.’

  I never noticed Olivia take any interest in art, as distinct from adornment, with the exception of the picture that hung in the library. She often went there and since she read nothing beyond fashion catalogues it can only have been to look at the picture. It was a dark, horrid, rather perverted piece depicting a man in chain mail entering a castle bedchamber to find a naked woman awaiting him, draped across the bed. Looking at it used to make me shiver.

  I could never quite explain my aversion to it to my own satisfaction until one day when Olivia was away and Sally had the afternoon off. I crept up to her bedroom in secret, just for the pleasure of defying her by trespassing there.

  I remember the blue velvet curtains were drawn against the sun but were stirring slightly in the breeze from the half-open window behind them. Their heavy movement moved blocks of sunlight across the wide bed and the dressing table, on which stood a vast array of perfume bottles and cream jars, tortoiseshell-backed brushes and silver-framed mirrors: all the paraphernalia of Olivia’s preserved appearance. I wished only, in that moment, to be standing in my mother’s bedroom knowing she would shortly return, the lipsticks and combs belonging to her, not to this woman I hated. But it could not be. Olivia was the only mistress Meongate knew and I was her enemy. I looked at the layer of dust and powder Sally had left on the mirror – and smiled grimly.

  As I turned away from the dressing table, my eye was taken by a painting hanging on the opposite wall. I caught my breath. It was surely a copy of the one in the library. But no. When I inspected it more closely, I saw that, though the scene and characters were the same, they were differently arranged. The man was now also lying on the bed, caressing the woman, kissing one of her breasts while fondling the other. The woman was looking slightly to one side and her face … I jumped back, startled. The woman’s face was Olivia’s when younger, Olivia’s when her beauty did not need the props it now relied on. In the painting, she lay naked, as I had never seen her, but her expression was one she often wore. It was her very own patented blend of boredom and hatred.

  For what must have been several minutes, I stared at the picture, transfixed, struggling to fathom the meaning of what I saw, repelled yet drawn by all that was blatant both in its placement – there, in a lady’s bedroom – and in what it depicted – the writhing, coupled limbs, the man’s mouth pressed to the woman’s yielding breast; above all by the sneering indifference of that face I felt sure I knew.

  For days afterwards, I could not rid my mind of the painted image of Olivia. When she sat opposite me over dinner, passing disingenuous remarks to Lord Powerstock between mouthfuls, all I could see was her naked pillaged form. When I walked into a room and found her there and she looked up to note my presence with a cool, reproving glance, all I could see was the averted, cynical gaze of the woman in the painting. And when I looked again at the picture in the library, I saw it in a new light.

  Who was the artist, I wondered, why did he choose Olivia as a model? I could not ask even Fergus to tell me that. I could only add it to the list of unanswered questions held in my mind.

  Soon, besides, my curiosity found another target. I had felt no interest in the hexagonal gazebo that stood above the wing of the house – the door to which, reached by a flight of spiral stairs, had always been kept locked – until Fergus let slip one day that my father had used it as an observatory and that his telescope, so far as he knew, was still set up there. I at once became determined to see it. I badgered Fergus to give me the key and, at length, he yielded, on condition that I breathed not a word of it to anyone. I agreed: it would be our secret.

  The observatory itself, when I crept up there, proved to be a disappointment. Just a few pieces of dusty furniture and an old brass telescope mounted on a pedestal. But what the telescope enabled me to do was quite a different matter. It let me escape from Meongate. When I’d learned to train and focus it, I could watch the squirrels as they climbed the trees in the park or the rabbits as they hopped warily across the paddock. I could study a shepherd moving his flock on the slope of the downs or, after dark, gaze endlessly at a sky dense with stars. I could sit there, safely hidden, imagining my father noting down the arrangement of distant constellations, wondering if he had been the one to leave the half-empty box of matches on the shelf, crying softly sometimes when all the doubts and sadnesses weighed me down and I wished for nothing but to be able to look through the telescope and see him, hand in hand with my mother, patrolling the lawns of his rightful home.

  Wishing and dreaming was all I could do to bring them back. To my schoolfriends, I claimed that my father had been posthumously awarded the DSO and that my mother had died of a broken heart. I described her as the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. As far as I could tell, they believed me. Sometimes, I almost believed it myself. After all, at Howell’s I could pretend whatever I liked. Only when I returned to Meongate did the pretending have to stop.

  TWO

  THE FIRST TIME I heard about Thiepval was a day I shall never forget. It was a Saturday in August 1932, a day of humid, oppressive warmth, thund
er threatening but never arriving, a clammy air of menace thickening round Meongate as the day lengthened. Olivia was to give a party that evening. Previously a rarity, there had been several such events that summer, the guest of honour and Olivia’s principal dancing partner on each occasion being Sidney Payne, the wealthy Portsmouth builder.

  I was fifteen then, possessed of sufficient false airs and fragile graces to take a scornful view of this sudden introduction of raucous gaiety. The day of my return from Howell’s for the summer holiday, I had been introduced to Mr Payne: an ugly, dark, puffy-faced man with slicked-down hair and a pencil moustache. I hated him from the first, not merely because of his sweaty vulgarity and greedy, pig-like eyes, but because I sensed Olivia had marked him out as the kind of none too choosy, moneyed man she might look to for support in her declining years. This rash of parties, this invasion of coarse strangers that came in their wake, was not for his benefit, though he might have thought it was, but for hers. Olivia was looking to the future.

  That Saturday afternoon, I paid a visit to my grandfather. I would not normally have done so, but preparations for the party were in full swing. Lord Powerstock’s secluded rooms offered me a refuge. My excuse was that I had not seen much of him since returning from Howell’s and he, for his part, looked unusually pleased to see me. He was seated by the window in his wheelchair, a rug across his lap, his face grey despite the sweltering heat, his gaze vaguely focused on the pages of a magazine he was turning with the one hand he still had the use of.

  ‘Hello, Grandpapa,’ I said. ‘What are you reading?’