In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  He chuckled. It surprised me, this show of light-heartedness from someone who’d hitherto seemed only grim and unyielding. ‘There are many reasons why you should answer me, Mr Franklin. Not the least of them is that I see now you will not be deterred by mere silence. Something more is required to satisfy you.’

  ‘Only the truth.’

  ‘Only?’ He chuckled again. ‘Wait here.’ He walked past me and moved into one of the other rooms leading off the passage. There, he switched on his torch again. I heard him open a door and fumble with something, then strike a match. There was a brief whiff of gas in the closed air, then a flood of light as he adjusted the lamp.

  I followed him in. The room was in no better repair than the kitchen, bare-boarded and unfurnished save for a truckle-bed, a crude dresser with enamel jug and bowl standing on it, a frayed easy chair and a thin coir mat beside the bed. Fletcher crossed to the window and drew a stained canvas curtain across it, then turned back to face me.

  ‘What do you know of Mr Willis?’ he said.

  ‘I found a letter addressed to him – in Mrs Hallows’ hand.’

  ‘And you opened it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a plea for him to contact her. But he doesn’t live here any more, does he?’

  ‘Breaking and entering. Reading other people’s letters. That doesn’t seem appropriate behaviour for an officer and a gentleman.’ The sarcasm was undisguised but mild: there seemed a weariness even in his hostility.

  ‘You left me no choice. I have to find Leonora. All other considerations are secondary. And you know where she is.’

  ‘Do I?’

  I crossed the room and handed him the crumpled letter. He scanned it briefly. ‘Do you mind if I sit down, Mr Franklin? This is the only chair.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ I saw him wince and put a hand to his right thigh as he released the stick. ‘Does the leg bother you?’

  ‘Somewhat. Especially when I have to turn out at night on a fool’s errand.’

  ‘A dockyard accident?’

  ‘No accident. But let that pass. You think this letter proves I know where Mrs Hallows is.’

  I sat down on the truckle-bed and faced him across the room. ‘I’m not interested in proof. I know it to be so. This man Willis lived here, presumably at your invitation. Why you should rent rooms here in secret, rather than have him lodge at the Mermaid, I don’t know. Unless he’s a political crony you don’t want to be seen with.’

  ‘Political?’

  ‘Perhaps you were in prison together.’

  ‘You know about that too?’

  ‘I looked up back copies of the local paper. The seditious gathering at the Mermaid in November 1904 is reported in detail. As is your subsequent conviction.’

  ‘If it’s truth you’re after, you won’t find it in a local rag that says whatever the Admiralty tells it to.’

  ‘Then why don’t you tell me the truth?’

  ‘Because I’m finished with politics and delusions about changing society. Because I’m finished with the past.’

  ‘Yet you keep Miriam Powerstock’s photograph in your bureau. She belongs to your past, doesn’t she? She must have died while you were in prison.’

  At last my words reached some part of his secret self. ‘Yes, she did.’ He looked around the room, as if assessing the bleakness of our surroundings. Somewhere outside, a bottle smashed. There was a shriek, then silence again. ‘But my grief is my own. It’s none of your concern.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. Leonora is looking for Willis. I’m forced to conclude that he’s the father of the child she’s carrying. She came to you to find him. Why? Your only connection with the Powerstock family is your friendship with the first Lady Powerstock. So it must amount to something more than private, forgotten grief. Mustn’t it?’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Mrs Hallows came to see me yesterday, in search of Willis. I gave her this address, though I warned her that he’d probably already left it. As you can see, I was right. When you told me she was pregnant, I thought, like you, that Willis must be responsible, so I came here to see if there was any trace of him. All I found was a broken window – and you.’

  ‘Where has she gone? She says in the letter that you know.’

  ‘I know how she can be contacted. She told me in case I saw Willis before she did. From what I’ve seen of her, she’s in no danger. You need feel no concern for her welfare. But I promised to tell her family nothing if approached by them. I’m bound by that promise. As a gentleman, you should understand my position.’

  ‘I’m not a member of the family.’

  ‘You amount to the same thing. You’re of their class: that’s why you’re their guest. I owe them nothing. I owe you nothing.’

  ‘Isn’t Leonora one of their class as well? Yet you seem to owe her something.’

  He leant forward in his chair. ‘You’re a clever young man, Mr Franklin, though not as clever as you think. So take my advice: leave it alone. You spoke of grief. That’s all this chase will bring you. That’s all there is waiting for the Powerstocks. In finding me, that’s all you’ve found.’

  ‘I told you before. I’m in too deeply to stop now.’

  ‘Then don’t say you weren’t warned.’

  ‘I won’t. But if you won’t tell me where Leonora is, at least tell me what sort of a man this Willis is. Not much of one, to judge by what I’ve seen.’

  ‘Unworthy of her, would you say?’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘Well, who wouldn’t be?’ A smile hovered on his lips. ‘If you really want to know about Willis, then I’ll tell you. But not here. This room’ – he looked around it – ‘makes me feel uneasy. It’s obvious he’s not coming back here. Let’s go somewhere else.’

  ‘Very well.’

  He levered himself from the chair and reached up to turn out the lamp. No more was said as we made our way out. I stood beside him as he padlocked the door, then followed him down into the yard. He was panting from the effort by the time we reached the foot of the steps, but didn’t pause before turning into the alley.

  ‘Are we going back to the Mermaid?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Another pub, where I’m not known. You can be anonymous in a crowd, anonymous and safe.’

  We turned down a side-alley and already I was lost. It was a narrow, cobbled path threading between the backs of jumbled terraced houses, heading vaguely northwards. Water trickled down a central gutter and Fletcher’s stick troubled him on the slimy cambered stones. Nevertheless, we made good time.

  A rat darted across our path at one point and Fletcher pulled up sharply. He began glancing round at the rough walls of the alley and the dark spaces beyond.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No.’ He looked back at me. ‘Where did you pick up your shoulder wound, Mr Franklin?’

  ‘The Somme.’

  He nodded. ‘How long were you out there?’

  ‘Just over a year. Since the spring of last year. Long enough.’

  ‘But you’ll go back?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  It was a strange question to be asked: unheard of in respectable circles. From Fletcher it didn’t seem odd at all. But I had no intention of revealing my doubts about the war to him. ‘Duty, Patriotism. The war still has to be won, you know.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘I believe there’s no alternative.’

  He moved so suddenly I didn’t know what was happening, far less have time to resist. I was pinned against the wall beside me by the weight of Fletcher’s body, my left arm trapped and my right held behind my back. His strength was as formidable as he’d said. As he tightened the arm lock, my wounded shoulder protested and I cried out. I heard his stick clatter into the gutter, then the flash of a blade before my eyes silenced me.

  For a moment, there was only the cloud of our panting breath in the air between us and the knife held beneath my chin. I forgot the pain of my shoulder and thought instead of
the absurdity of cheating death on the Somme only to meet it in an alley in Portsea.

  Then he spoke, his voice a whispered rasp in my ear. ‘I could kill you now, Franklin, as easily as they gut fish on the dock. I could kill you and leave you here and nobody would ever know.’

  The irony of it all emboldened me. ‘Then why don’t you? I couldn’t say I wasn’t warned.’

  His grip tightened. The knife drew nearer. I closed my eyes, expecting in that moment that he would do as he said.

  Then I was free. Fletcher released me and I nearly pitched forward on to the cobbles with the shock of it. I looked towards him but he had swung round and cried out and flung the knife down the alley in a sudden frenzy. It rattled to rest somewhere in the darkness. Then he lurched against the wall, felt for his stick, found it and pushed himself upright.

  It was raining. I remember noticing the sheen on the stones for the first time, feeling the drench of it mingling with the sweat on my face, seeing Fletcher turn towards me through the mist of its falling.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  I felt strangely calm, strangely unmoved by the proximity of death. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be stopped. You said so yourself. There were only two choices: to kill you or to tell you. And to tell you is to kill something in me – a love, a memory, an illusion. So let it die.’ He moved towards me and stopped as I drew back. ‘Don’t worry. I have no more weapons. We’ll go on to the pub. You’ll feel safe there – and so will I.’

  I kept my distance as we proceeded. Slowly, my nerves began to settle. I said nothing. This time, Fletcher did all the talking.

  ‘It would have been easier if you’d meant what you said. But you didn’t. You’re no more the dutiful patriot than I am, though no doubt you were, before you saw what it meant. For me, prison and a game leg. For you, war and a smashed shoulder. We’ve drawn much the same in the lottery, I reckon.’

  We went on a little way in silence. Then he began again. ‘You said there was no alternative. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I was a fool for ever trying to find one. But life plays tricks on you, as you’ll discover. It doesn’t let you be sensible – all the time.’

  We came to the end of the alley and joined a narrow street, curving past the high walls of the Dockyard. We walked on the other side. Fletcher glancing up at the wall opposite as he went.

  ‘That’s where it began,’ he said after a while. ‘His Majesty’s Royal Naval Dockyard – Her Majesty’s then. It should have been just a job of work. But it became something more, something worse.’

  ‘How long did you work there?’

  ‘Nearly thirty years. It sounds a long time, doesn’t it? Sometimes, looking back, it’s like it hardly happened. Seven years’ apprenticeship as a shipwright. Another five to become established. Then a charge hand. I’d have made it to foreman in the end.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘No. Because I met Donald Machim. He came down from Clydeside after the engineers’ strike collapsed in ’98. He had a trade they wanted, but I don’t think they knew what they were taking on. He soon saw I had something he could work on: intelligence, restlessness, call it what you like. I read too much to make a respectful dockie for life, you see. And Machim was amazed by how docile the workforce was. Unions had never got a look-in at the Yard and the Admiralty wanted to keep it buttoned up. Machim was determined to end that and brought me round to see it his way.’

  We’d passed several pubs already, but still we kept on along the road tracing the Dockyard wall. And Fletcher kept on too, tracing his past as we went. ‘Pompey was even worse then than it is now: disease, poverty, squalor. Grafting for sixty hours a week you didn’t have time to think about it. But Machim did. And what he thought made sense.

  ‘His chance came in 1904. A lot of men were laid off that autumn, but he’d heard talk of a huge new battleship to be built the following year. So he reckoned that was the time to strike, when the men were discontented and the Admiralty couldn’t afford a prolonged dispute. Not that it ever came to that. The meeting at the Mermaid was to have been the start. Instead, it was the finish. There were some naval artificers in the audience – so it was said. That gave the police the excuse they needed to break it up and charge us with sedition.

  ‘I never saw Machim again after the trial. I spent two years in Winchester Gaol, then came back to Portsmouth. By then, the Yard was busier than ever before, building Dreadnoughts to fight the Germans. I was a marked man, regularly turned down for work. Eventually, I was taken on when the St Vincent fell behind schedule, but there were men who’d worked under me years before who hadn’t forgotten their grudges, others who’d been set back by the trouble after the Mermaid meeting and still blamed me for it: it was the opportunity they were waiting for. One dark night in February 1908 they took their revenge. I was making my way to the gate at the end of my shift when they set on me. I never saw who they were. They threw me into Number 15 Dock, which was drained and empty. That’s how I injured my leg. That’s how they made sure I never worked in the Yard again.’

  ‘It seems drastic.’

  ‘It was. But I’d committed the cardinal sin.’ He smiled. ‘I’d been proved right. Or, rather, Machim had. When work started on the first of the Dreadnoughts, the Admiralty introduced a new bonus system. But it was a fraud. For all their hard work, the dockies ended up worse off than ever. They should have listened to us.’

  We turned abruptly off the road past the Dockyard wall and headed down a busier, noisier street, towards a brightly lit alehouse.

  ‘This is Prospect Row,’ said Fletcher. ‘You’ll find plenty of your brave fellow patriots in uniform in the houses along here.’ His meaning was obvious: shabbily dressed girls lolled in doorways, drunken sailors came and went. We hurried past them and turned into the pub.

  ‘The Fortune of War,’ Fletcher announced. ‘As you can see, it’s well named.’

  It was a low-ceilinged, smoke-filled barn of a place, crammed with carousing groups of soldiers and sailors, filled with their gabbling and singing. A piano was thumping out a sea shanty and a bemused young soldier, girl in tow, brushed past us as we entered. Too much laughter, too much drink, too much false, tinny jubilation: I knew what lay ahead for so many of them, didn’t begrudge them their snatched consolation. But even without Fletcher’s gaunt shadow at my shoulder, I couldn’t have felt part of it.

  A barmaid came past with a tray of empty glasses. Fletcher caught her eye and ordered some drinks. We took them to an alcove table away from the worst of the noise and smoke. Above us, on the wall, was a black-bordered portrait of Lord Kitchener, around us the seething, desperate unawareness of many who would share his fate.

  ‘Why have we come here?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a popular pub with the Forces: matelots waiting for a ship, tommies waiting to cross the Channel. I wanted to see how much you’re really a part of it. The answer is hardly at all.’

  ‘You said you’d tell me about Willis. Where does he come into all this?’

  ‘You’ll know soon enough. I’ve never even tried to kill a man before. You have to understand why I might have made an exception in your case.’

  ‘Very well then. You’ve spoken about Donald Machim. What about Miriam Powerstock?’

  ‘That’s where it begins and ends. You know that. You’ve already guessed. I met her at Father Dolling’s Parsonage in Clarence Street. Trafalgar Day, 1894. I used the gymnasium he ran next door, sometimes went to his lectures, argued with him about politics. That Sunday he invited me to tea before evensong. Not that I went to his services, as he well knew. But Dolling was a good man: he disliked the cosy conventions. That’s why they got rid of him in the end.

  ‘And Miriam came to tea too that day. Dolling had introduced her to the parish after they met at a garden party the Bishop of Winchester gave. Her Christianity was like Dolling’s: uncompromising. She helped him run the Sunday school. It was, she told me, her attempt to give someth
ing back. She never told me how her husband felt about her Sundays in Portsea, but I’ll bet he didn’t like them.’

  ‘You and she became friends?’

  ‘Yes. Let’s say that. We became friends. At first, I thought she was just another titled lady slumming it. But after they pushed Dolling out, she changed. She began to understand what I’d known all along: that there were plenty of people who wanted Portsmouth to stay as it was. Her own husband, for instance. He was on the board of Brickwood’s, the brewery that owns the Mermaid. Still is. Ironical, don’t you think?’

  ‘Did he know you were acquainted with his wife?’

  ‘Not till I was arrested. Besides, I wasn’t really, not at first, not for a long time. But, in the end, before the end … you could say I loved her.’

  He stopped speaking. Through the din behind us of laughter and smashing glass, his silence echoed down the desolate years. He had loved her. And I did not doubt that she had loved him too.

  ‘I last saw her a few hours before the Mermaid meeting in November 1904. She warned me it was a mistake. She didn’t trust Machin. She thought him too much the unfeeling revolutionary. And she didn’t think the authorities would let us get away with it. She was right on both counts. I should have listened to her. I wish I could listen to her now.

  ‘She wrote to me in prison, of course. But Powerstock wouldn’t let her visit me. Besides, she was ill by then, though I didn’t know it. Smallpox – picked up in some stinking tenement, working to help people who weren’t even grateful. Such a waste. A waste of a life. Rather like my own, I suppose. Her father wrote to me telling me she was dead. Otherwise, I might never have known.’ He broke off, seemed, with a physical effort, to wrench his thoughts back to the present. ‘But you want to know about Willis.’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘Franklin! Christ, what are you doing here? – in mufti too.’ A figure blundered into my chair and leant unsteadily over me: khaki greatcoat, glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, drunken cast to the face, lock of hair tumbling over his forehead. I struggled for recognition. ‘Thought you’d bought it.’ He slumped down in an empty chair beside us and slammed his glass on the table. ‘Who’s your chum?’