In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  He returned my stare. ‘Is that why you’re reluctant to assist the military?’

  I bridled. ‘Who said I was reluctant?’

  ‘Excuse me. I shouldn’t have asked you that. Your motives are no business of mine.’

  ‘No. They’re not. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go in. I’m sure I can leave you to find your own way out.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I walked away towards the house, moving quickly and without looking back, so that he could be sure I’d taken offence. I was determined not to let him see how confused I felt in the wake of our encounter. He was the first total stranger I’d talked to in years – courteous, good-looking and well spoken. I’d have been attracted to him even if I hadn’t dreamt so often that just such a man might one day rescue me from my sealed and solitary life.

  I conveyed the news to Olivia over breakfast.

  ‘No choice, eh? Well, they can come – but they needn’t expect a welcome. Be sure they understand that. I don’t want to see them – any of them.’

  ‘Won’t that be rather difficult?’

  ‘No. You will ensure they keep their distance.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Not that it matters. In a few weeks, they’ll all be gone – mostly to their deaths.’

  Olivia’s words recurred to me when, later, I stood at the front door and watched the cavalcade of canvas-backed trucks drive past the house and out across the park. The periodic thuds and thumps of bombing raids on Portsmouth had hitherto been our only direct contact with the war. Now there were callow young soldiers marching across our lawn to their last safe haven before … A jeep pulled up and Captain Galloway jumped out. He saluted smartly.

  ‘No problems, I trust, Miss Hallows?’

  ‘None as yet, Captain.’

  ‘If there are, let me know.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to.’

  There were no problems: he made sure of that by consulting me about every detail. Where their tents were to be pitched; how they might avoid ploughing up the lawns; whether the noise bothered Lady Powerstock: there was always some pretext for us to spend a few minutes strolling and talking. He was polite, punctilious and charming, as eager to hear me talking about the flowers that grew around their encampment as he was to speculate about what he might do in the post-war world. All my aloofness was demolished and soon I came to realize that I had made my first friend since schooldays.

  One morning, when I was walking into Droxford, he stopped to give me a lift in his jeep and told me what impression Meongate had first made on him.

  ‘I’m a Londoner, born and bred, but I’ve always dreamt what it must be like to live in a house in the country. I suppose I should have come straight to the front door when I arrived, but I couldn’t resist looking around. You’re very lucky to have such a home.’

  ‘It’s cold, isolated and lonely.’

  ‘It didn’t seem so to look at. When you surprised me in the orchard, I was wondering what you were like. I didn’t expect to find out so quickly.’

  ‘Why should you have wondered that?’

  He smiled. ‘Well, I took the liberty of asking a few questions in the village. They told me that you and your grandmother were somewhat … reclusive.’

  ‘What else did they say?’

  ‘That your father died in the last show.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Oh, I forget.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘All right, then. They said I’d find you unapproachable and uncooperative.’

  ‘And you did.’

  ‘Only at first.’

  We had come to the village. He pulled up and I climbed out. I felt a sudden impulse to acknowledge what he must have been told about me. ‘I am all the things they say of me.’

  ‘Now it’s I who don’t believe you.’

  Why didn’t he believe me – or the gossip about me? Later he would tell me how, appearing behind him in the orchard just as he’d been dreaming of Meongate and its younger occupant, I’d sown myself and my mystery in his mind, never to be dislodged. But if it is always difficult to understand how anybody as oneself can fascinate another, so it was impossible for me to believe, after all the barren years at Meongate, that I could discover affection – even love – as fortuitously as I had. That night, I looked at myself in my bedroom mirror and thought: No! It cannot be true. He sees in me merely an amusing way to pass the weeks he must spend here. I am deluding myself.

  Yet we spent more and more time together, saw one another, ostensibly by chance, more and more often. He would meet me by the river, strolling before breakfast, or pass me in the lanes and offer me a lift in his jeep. He told me about his family, his early life, his work before the war, his plans for when it ended. Of myself, I said nothing and he asked little, as if he knew I was not yet ready to speak. What he could not know was my secret dread that, sooner or later, Olivia would tell him more than he could bear to hear, that she was only tolerating our friendship in order to heighten the pleasure of ending it.

  There was, besides, another end in view: the un-specified but ever imminent date of the invasion, when Tony’s battalion would embark for France and my hopes pass, with him, across the sea. One Sunday afternoon early in June, when we took a picnic up on to old Winchester Hill and sat on the sunny slope of the down, looking out across the valley towards Meongate, he spoke of our inevitable parting.

  ‘The balloon will go up in a few days,’ he said. ‘On Tuesday, to be precise.’

  ‘You mean the invasion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It seemed incredible to think of it there, on the sheep-cropped turf, skylarks’ song and heat haze rising about us, our picnic laid out on a chequered tablecloth, the Hampshire countryside nestling below.

  ‘I could be shot for telling you as much.’

  ‘Then why are you telling me?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to creep away like a thief in the night. As a matter of fact, I don’t want to leave at all.’

  ‘It was bound to happen.’

  ‘The men are restless – keen to get it over with. But I wish waiting here could last all summer.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve made me happier than I could ever have imagined. And now it’s goodbye.’

  ‘But not for good. I intend to return.’

  ‘You don’t have to say that.’

  ‘I mean it. I intend to return – and to ask you to marry me.’

  ‘What?’

  He smiled. ‘I think you heard me.’

  It was a dream of something I yearned for but feared could never be mine: the prosaic bliss of loving companionship. It was the happiness I had briefly known in those weeks projected into a future I had believed forever denied me. All these things he offered me – and all these things I still suspected Olivia could snatch away.

  ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘Because what you promise me – what I so dearly want – can never be.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s so much about me you don’t know.’

  ‘There’s nothing I could learn about you that would change my mind.’

  ‘Isn’t there? Isn’t there really?’

  ‘No, Leonora, there isn’t. All you have to do is trust me. All you have to do is wait for me to return – and accept me when I do.’

  So trust him I did, for me a more novel experience even than love. Two days later, on Tuesday, 6th June 1944, the villagers of Droxford awoke to find the trucks that had clogged their lanes and the troops that had camped in their fields vanished. Since hearing them roll down the drive at Meongate just before midnight, I had sat awake in my room, confronting the strange restored silence of Tony’s absence. Only six weeks before, I could never have imagined any alteration to the sealed life Olivia had forced me to lead. Nor had it altered – save in the hope I had vested in him, save in the trust he had inspired in me.

  ‘He’s gone then,�
�� said Olivia over breakfast.

  ‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’ I replied. ‘They’ve all gone.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ There was sudden vehemence in her tone. ‘You surely didn’t suppose I was ignorant of your dalliance with the brave captain?’

  So she had known all along. I replaced my cup in its saucer with deliberate precision and said nothing.

  ‘What did he tell you? That he would come back for you? He won’t. You may be sure of what. Whether to a German bullet or a French whore, it makes no difference: you’ve lost him.’

  Her words hurt me but did not sway me. I would not let her see how desperately I wanted to believe in him. Still I said nothing.

  ‘Even if he did return, it wouldn’t be for long, because then he’d have to be told the truth about you. So you see: you lose him either way.’

  Then my hope betrayed me. ‘How do you know I haven’t told him the truth already?’

  She rose from the table and walked to the window, then looked back at me, a cryptic smile at the edges of her mouth. I returned her gaze with as much composure as I could muster. Neither of us spoke. There was no need for words. In that house, between Olivia and I, silence had always been the stage for our bitterest encounters. It spoke loudly enough to me of her contempt and to her, no doubt, of my defiance.

  In the months that followed, Tony’s letters, arriving sporadically care of the village post office, became my most precious possessions, to be cherished and preserved, read and re-read until they threatened to fall apart at the folds, pulled from their hiding place and scanned whenever confidence threatened to desert me. They told me what Olivia sometimes made me doubt: that he loved me and would, one day, come to claim me.

  What his letters did not tell me was whether he was in any danger. As to that, I had only the newspapers to guide me and the map Mr Wilsmer put in his shop window to chart the progress of the invasion. He must have wondered why I stared so often and so lengthily at the coloured pins he stuck in it and could have had no idea that I was simply trying to guess which pin was Tony’s regiment.

  As time passed and the war ground on, my anxiety faded. There was a sense in which, subconsciously, I did not want Tony to return, a sense in which the hope sustainable in his absence was preferable to the moment, however it arrived, when he learned the truth about me. The uneventful lapse of days at Meongate seemed strangely bearable now that I no longer thought I would remain there for ever.

  Another spring came, but, with it, no battalion to camp in the orchard. The war in Europe ended. The danger was past but the waiting continued. Then, in early July, a telegram:

  ‘AM HOME. WILL ARRIVE DROXFORD STATION NOON TOMORROW. ALL MY LOVE. TONY.’

  He would be with me in less than two hours! I willed myself to show Olivia no glimmer of the consternation I felt. As far as she was to know, when I left the house later that morning, pannier basket on my arm, it was on the most trivial of errands. Yet when I sat waiting on the station platform, absurdly early, for Tony’s train, I knew that it was, in truth, the most important of my life. My mind travelled back across twenty-five of my twenty-eight years to the same spot, waving goodbye then to a past I did not understand just as I was waiting now to greet a future I dared not hope for.

  Suddenly, there he was, stepping down from the open door at the end of the train as it lurched and steamed to a halt. A slim, rather inconspicuous figure in an ill-fitting suit. At first, I didn’t think it could be him, then he tossed away his cigarette in just the way he had that first time in the orchard and flashed me his greeting smile.

  I should have hugged or kissed him. Instead, we halted a little apart and stared incredulously at each other.

  ‘I’m back,’ he said at last.

  ‘You’ve lost weight.’

  ‘I’ll soon put it on again.’

  ‘I expected you to be in uniform.’

  ‘I stayed with my sister last night. This creation is courtesy of the government.’

  ‘It’s very …’

  ‘Chic?’

  Then we laughed and, suddenly, he was whirling me in his arms. Suddenly it was true: he’d come back for me.

  We didn’t head for Meongate. Instead we walked slowly, by the field path, towards Droxford, hand in hand in the midday heat. It should have been idyllic, but my anxiety, so long submerged, had re-surfaced and my torn mood did not escape him.

  ‘Does your promise of last year still hold good?’ he said.

  ‘You know it does.’

  ‘Then why so pensive?’

  ‘Because I warned you then that there are many things you don’t know about me. Now you’ll have to know them. They may change your mind.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘For one thing, the Captain Hallows whose name you noticed in the churchyard was not my real father. It was somebody else – I don’t know who.’

  ‘You did read my letters, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘Then how can you believe such a thing would affect me? I love you, Leonora.’

  I stopped and hung my head. Illegitimacy, after all, was only a pale rehearsal for what I had to tell him. ‘There’s more. A man called Payne—’

  ‘I know about him.’ He smiled. ‘My first night in the White Horse, one of the local wiseacres gave me the gen on friend Payne. It’s really of no consequence.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘I intend to marry you, Leonora. Invite a whole cupboardful of skeletons to the ceremony if you like. It won’t make any difference.’

  ‘My grandmother—’

  ‘A dragon – I know. But you’re over twenty-one. We don’t need her consent.’

  ‘It isn’t that.’

  Suddenly, he grasped me by both shoulders. ‘Listen. I’ll go up there now and tell her: I’m marrying you whatever she says or does.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No! My mind’s made up. You go on and wait for me in the White Horse. I shan’t be long.’

  Before I could speak, he’d set off back across the field. ‘Tony! Wait!’ I shouted after him. But he didn’t stop.

  I stood where I was for some minutes after he’d disappeared from view. I could have gone after him, of course, could have forced him to listen to my account of events, but I didn’t. I had planned for a year how to put it to him and now I’d let the opportunity slip. I’d surrendered the stage to Olivia.

  At length, I trailed into the village and went to the White Horse as he’d told me to. I bought a ginger beer and sat by the window, sipping my drink and gazing out at the street. This is the worst waiting of all, I remember thinking. Our love survived a year apart, but can it survive Olivia’s few, well-chosen words?

  I must have fallen into a reverie. Suddenly, sooner than I’d expected, he was standing beside me. He must have come in the back way, because he’d already bought a drink and was holding it up in front of him, as if proposing a toast. He was smiling broadly.

  ‘What did she say?’ I heard my voice break with the words.

  ‘The question is: what do you say? I picked up a special licence in London. We could be married there tomorrow. My sister would be delighted to put you up. She’s looking forward to meeting you.’

  ‘But … what about Olivia?’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll want to attend.’ He sat down and chinked his glass against mine. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘What did she tell you – about Payne?’

  ‘Nothing. I told her I intended to marry you and she said, “Do as you please”. I wouldn’t call it a blessing, but it was good enough for me.’

  ‘She said nothing?’

  ‘Other than that, not a word. So, is it on for tomorrow?’

  My thoughts could not seem to grasp what he had said. Olivia had told him nothing, absolutely nothing. I had given her the chance to ruin me – and she had stayed her hand. It made no sense and yet, with Tony’s smiling face before me, it seemed to make all the sense in the wor
ld.

  ‘Leonora?’

  ‘Tomorrow? Oh, yes, Tony. The answer is yes. Let’s begin our future – tomorrow.’

  Even now, I can hardly believe the speed and extent of the transformation the following days brought. Tony’s sister Rosemary welcomed me to her home and family with the kind of natural, understated warmth I’d never previously encountered. She insisted that the wedding be delayed by a few days so that she could arrange some sort of reception and bustled me out to a shop she knew to buy a dress. It seemed she had foreseen her brother’s marriage longer than he had himself and had hoarded ration coupons for the purpose.

  Thanks to Rosemary, I was able to embark upon married life in a state of bemused, unthinking rapture. Nor did the changes stop there. Tony’s best man, Jimmy Dare, an army friend, offered him a managerial job at his father’s clothing factory in Wells in lieu of a present and, within the week, we were house-hunting there. By the time I next saw Olivia, we had bought the house in Ash Lane where you were to be born.

  We had returned to Meongate to collect the remainder of my belongings. Already, I felt something of a stranger there, unable to imagine, now that there was so much more in my life, that it had once been bounded by the walls of that house. To compound the sensation, Olivia had hired a live-in nurse, a Miss Buss, who received us coldly and left me in no doubt that she would brook no interference in her management of affairs.

  After we’d loaded the car, I went back to bid Olivia farewell. I found her in the conservatory, reclining behind dark glasses, seemingly indifferent to our visit.

  ‘I’m going now,’ I said.

  She did not reply.

  ‘I just want to say … how grateful I am.’

  She removed the dark glasses and looked at me quizzically. ‘What have you to be grateful for?’

  ‘You could have tried to stop me. You could have tried to make Tony think—’

  ‘Think what?’

  ‘I’m just grateful you didn’t. That’s all.’

  ‘You needn’t be.’ She slid the dark glasses back on to her nose, as if to deny me any glimmer of insight into her unfathomable act of charity. I was grateful, but also suspicious, and she rewarded neither impulse.