In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Still here?’ he said, noticing me out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘The problem is: you’re still here. I know what you’ve done since coming to this house and I mean to put a stop to it.’

  ‘The hell you do,’ he began. That’s when I shot him, while he was still turning to look at me. It was a clean shot. He died instantly, with a fixed look of surprise on his face. He was a clever man, whose one mistake was to think he could treat me like a fool. But playing the fool and being a fool are two very different things. I don’t think he ever understood that.

  When I left the room, the house seemed quiet. Nobody had stirred. Or so I thought. Then, as I crept along the passage, I saw him. Cheriton, deathly pale, standing in the doorway of his room, wide-eyed and shivering. He looked at me as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. Whether he noticed the bloodstained towel, bundled, and slightly singed, in my hand, I don’t know.

  ‘I … I thought I heard … something,’ he stammered. ‘Like a … a shot.’

  ‘I heard nothing,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps you dreamt it.’

  ‘Perhaps. I dream a lot … these days.’

  ‘Go back to bed, young fellow. That’s my advice.’

  And off he went, meekly, without further ado, closing his door gently behind him. I went back to my room, cleaned the gun, hid it beneath the floorboards and burned the towel on the fire. I’d just climbed into bed when Fergus came knocking on my door to raise the alarm. Olivia had found Mompesson – as I’d expected she would. Her claim to have heard the shot was a lie, designed to explain why she’d gone to the room. As for Sally, I don’t blame her for backing up her mistress. She had her livelihood to consider, after all.

  I said nothing to Cheriton the next day. I hoped he would believe meeting me was a dream, if he remembered it at all. Now I think he probably did believe he dreamt it, as he may have thought he dreamt many things in that house. I must take my share of the blame for his suicide. We all failed him. It was a bad business.

  So bad I even considered confessing to the police, would you believe? The man they put on the case – a fellow named Shapland – came to question me two days afterwards. Cheriton’s death had knocked all the stuffing out of me. I didn’t want him to be blamed for killing Mompesson as well as himself, the conclusion which Edward and Olivia were both eager to draw, so I proposed to lay all the facts before Shapland and make a clean breast of it.

  It never came to that, entirely because of the fellow’s brass-necked insolence. I don’t know what fanciful theory he was cooking up, but he dragged in Miriam’s death and the old story that she had some connection with an industrial agitator named Fletcher. He had the confounded cheek to ask me if I thought Fletcher might have been John’s father, rather than Lord Powerstock.

  My immediate reaction was to throw the blighter out, but then he asked another question: what significant event had occurred at Meongate in the middle of June? My blood ran cold. He could mean only one thing by it. He knew, or suspected, that John wasn’t dead. Suddenly, Inspector Shapland became a dangerous man. Confession was out of the question if it might lead him to the truth. I told him it was past my bedtime and showed him the door.

  I was mightily relieved when the inquest failed to name Cheriton as the murderer. It eased my conscience more than a little. By then, there was nothing to be done but hold my tongue and trust that matters might turn out happily. Alas, they didn’t. Leonora died, Franklin was killed and John stayed in hiding. I’ve often wondered since where he might be, but now I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out. There’s nothing more I can do to help him. I’m glad, at least, that I was able to help you.

  If I had my time over again, I still wouldn’t hesitate to kill Mompesson. You were Leonora’s friend, so you’ll understand: I did it for her. She needed a helping hand – I gave her mine. When you’re my age, the risk of being hanged doesn’t weigh too heavy. And I knew there was only one way to deal with Mompesson. I’d met his type before, you see. He reminded me of a Russian nobleman I ran into in St Petersburg in the winter of ’61. I ended up killing him too. Did I ever tell you about that?

  SIX

  ‘EVEN HAD I not been indebted to Charter in so many ways, I would have kept his secret. When he died the following year, I found the derringer among his possessions and disposed of it, over the cliff, before it could arouse anybody’s curiosity. I admired him for what he’d done to help Leonora. I thought often of all the younger, better-qualified men at Meongate who might have gone to her rescue and reflected that only old Charter had had the nerve, and the sense to do what needed to be done. You should remember, if you ever think your father failed you, that your great-grandfather avowedly did not.’

  That, then, was Charter’s victory over Olivia. She’d wasted her life – and a portion of mine – seeking the man she thought had killed her lover: a foolish fate indeed for one so proudly impervious to feeling. Hatred had snared her where love never could. Yet it had also deceived her. In all her serpentine imaginings, she had never so much as glimpsed the truth. The rumble-voiced man with the white whiskers, who’d held me in his arms at Droxford station all those years before, had escaped her, to laugh away his days in his cottage by the sea. The fat old man they’d thought a fool had been too clever for all of them.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve shattered an illusion,’ said Grace. ‘Did you want so badly to believe that your father killed Ralph Mompesson?’

  ‘I suppose I did,’ I replied. ‘It seemed to make up for … everything else.’

  ‘You blame him for deserting you?’

  ‘A part of me did, when Willis first told me that he hadn’t died as I thought. But not now. Now I don’t blame anyone. It is enough … to know the truth.’

  As if to prove that the truth couldn’t hurt me any more, I persuaded Tony to drive all three of us down to Meongate the following day. It was a dare, if you like, a conscious act to exorcize all that the place had meant to me – and it seemed to work. It was the same time of year as when Tony and I had first met, and Grace had not been there since my parents’ wedding, so, for all of us, its associations were never worse than mixed.

  Droxford had changed less than I’d expected. We stopped at the White Horse, then drove round to the disused railway station and on, down the lanes, to Meongate.

  The Forest of Bere Country Club had once been my home, of course, but as we sat in the bar, formerly the morning room, looking out at the neat little putting green and the golf course beyond, I could not rid myself of the sensation that Meongate had gone, vanished to the last brick from beneath my feet, faded beyond the last haunting from my mind. They played bridge now in the bedroom where Mompesson had been shot, held committee meetings in the library where Bartholomew’s first painting had hung, drove tee shots over the remnant of orchard where I’d come upon Tony one distant spring morning. I was glad to have gone there again, glad to have found it cleansed of all my memories.

  When the waiter came with our sandwiches, Tony asked him whether Walter Payne still owned the club.

  ‘Yes, sir, though we hardly see him here. Lives in the Channel Islands now. Tax reasons, I believe.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Tony, with a rueful glance in my direction.

  ‘Still president of the club, though. Are you acquainted with him?’

  ‘My wife knew him’ – he gestured towards me – ‘a long time ago.’

  ‘When this was still a private house,’ I added.

  ‘You’ll have noticed lots of changes, then, I should think.’

  ‘Only for the better.’

  ‘Tell me,’ the waiter said, stooping over the low table conspiratorially, ‘do you remember the murder here? They say a wealthy American was done in.’

  ‘I believe so,’ I said levelly. ‘But that was before I was born.’

  ‘Unsolved, I gather.’ He winked. ‘They’re the best kind.’

  ‘As you say,’ I replied, glancing at Grace. ‘The very best kind.’

  EPILOGU
E

  Another day, another place. And yet the same, in memory and meaning. Dead flat, heat-stunned, a green warming pan beneath a dome of flawless blue. This is the Belgian hinterland on a warm, still afternoon of early October, blanketed with such motionless peace as only centuries of war can bring. This is a narrow turning off the Zonnebeke to Passendale road, flanked by fields of head-high, static maize or sleeky coated, cud-chewing cattle recumbent in their pastures. This is the end of Leonora’s story – and yet the beginning. This is where she has taken her daughter, at the close of all her confessions, to open one last portal on her father’s soul.

  This very morning, Leonora and Penelope Galloway arrived at Lille by train from Paris. There they hired a car, crossed the Belgian border and drove north, by roads dotted with the white oases of thickly planted war graves, to Ieper, a new name for the old, shell-scarred city of Ypres. Skirting the city walls as far as the Menin Gate, they had no time to inspect this other vast placard to the missing dead but drove on, north-east through Zonnebeke towards Passendale. Of the mud and mayhem synonymous with the discarded name of Passchendaele they saw no trace, perceived no sign, heard no whisper in the bright, clear air.

  Now they have arrived. A bend in the lane, then a long flint wall on their right and a delta of white-faced gravestones declaring itself on the gently sloping ground beyond. Sooner, vaster, brighter than expected, their destination prepares itself to meet them.

  Penelope pulls the car off the road and listens to the silence that follows and surrounds them as the engine dies. They climb out into the windless hush of the empty countryside and look across the road towards the farm fields of peacetime Flanders. A distant barn ripples in the heat haze and a cow by the nearest gate eyes them with long-lashed serenity. Behind them, the gravestones of Tyne Cot Military Cemetery await in immaculate, incongruous order.

  The two women stand for a moment in the flintstone lych-gate and gaze up the central avenue between the graves towards the Great Cross of Sacrifice where it gleams atop its pyramid of white stone. Then, without a word, Leonora turns and opens the small metal door set in the right-hand gate pillar. Within are lodged the bound registers of the cemetery, twins to those she consulted at Thiepval. Finding the one she wants, she begins to turn its crinkled pages.

  Penelope does not wait for her mother to find the entry she seeks. It is enough for her to know that here, under another man’s name, her grandfather is commemorated more fittingly than that other mistaken record of his death. She enters the cemetery alone and begins to walk up the long aisle between the graves, the grass beneath her feet green and damp from recent watering. Here, she has read, are buried 11,908 men who died in the Ypres Salient between August 1917 and November 1918. Here it is the sheer quantity of their headstones, pure white, lovingly tended, shrub-fringed and rose-adorned, that shocks as much as the altimetric lists of the missing at Thiepval.

  At the top of the avenue, she pauses beneath the soaring Cross of Sacrifice and looks back towards her mother, who is progressing slowly in the same direction. At first amazed, and later awed, by Leonora’s account, Penelope has begun, since leaving Paris, to resent her long exclusion from their family’s tragic history. She would have paid more attention to Grace Fotheringham if only she had known who she really was. She would have visited Meongate and Bonchurch. She would have come here sooner. She knows it is pointless to complain, yet still it seems unjust that she should have had to wait so long.

  Leonora smiled breathlessly towards her daughter as she approaches. ‘I found the entry,’ she says. ‘The register shows he was killed on 16th August 1917, during the advance on Langemark.’

  ‘Is he buried here?’

  ‘He may be. Many of the graves are unidentified. But it’s more likely he lies somewhere on the battlefield, like so many others.’

  Tyne Cot is itself the shape of a giant headstone, the graves in front of the Great Cross arrayed in serried rectangles, those behind fanned out on a terrace beneath the enclosing curve of the flint-walled Memorial to the Missing. Here, on stone panels, the names of 34,888 men who have no known grave are recorded. And here, amongst the division of the Northumbrian regiment to which he was attached, the two women find the name they seek: Lieutenant T. B. Franklin. Though that, of course, is not the name Penelope seems to see, written between the letters on the stone. Unable to disguise her thoughts any longer, she looks at her mother and says:

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’

  Leonora returns her gaze with soulful intensity. ‘I’ve given you all the reasons, Penny. The good and the bad. The vaguely noble and the frankly selfish.’

  ‘Somehow, Mother, none of them quite measures up.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d say that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve felt it myself often enough. Something always held me back, something beyond inbred caution and the wish to cherish it all as a secret between your father and me. I could never quite understand the instinct, but I always obeyed it.’

  ‘So why break your silence now?’

  ‘Because now I know what it was that I sensed. That’s why we’ve come here. That’s the last strand in my story.’

  The two women cross to a nearby bench and sit, gazing out across the dazzling expanse of gravestones towards the distant, invisible sea. Leonora’s story has already brought them immeasurably further than the 116 kilometres from Thiepval to Tyne Cot. Yet still, as Penelope is about to learn, it has one more step to take.

  Grace spent her final years where she would least have wanted to: a nursing home. Fortunately, she was largely oblivious to the fact. I should have visited her more often, but she’d retreated increasingly into her past, sometimes not recognizing me, sometimes taking me for my mother. In the end, I found excuses not to go and understood at last what she’d once told me: that few were lucky enough to enjoy old age with the style and splendour of a Charter Gladwin.

  Then, in contrast to Grace’s slow and sad decline, Tony died with devastating suddenness. That put my old friend out of my thoughts completely. When I heard of her death in the summer, I felt firstly relieved and secondly horribly guilty at the thought of my longstanding neglect of her.

  What never crossed my mind was that Grace might have mentioned me in her will. All her capital had gone in nursing fees, but her possessions had been put into store when she’d left Dolphin Square. From amongst them she’d reserved for me Willis’s painting, the third Bartholomew, which had served to reunite us nearly twenty years ago.

  To be honest, I hardly registered the fact until the very day the delivery van arrived. The driver and his mate carried their cargo into the hall, stood it against the wall, handed me a bill and left. Then I knelt before it and slowly stripped away the cardboard wrapping.

  And there, as I’d know it would be, was my mother’s face, shining more brightly than ever it seemed, in the pool of candlelight, amidst the shadows and suspicion, amongst the dim figures and dark purposes of that crepuscular scene. It was not simply a daughter’s adoration that made it easy to understand why she should have been loved. Serene and self-possessed, she entered Willis’s extrapolation of Bartholomew’s theme as one elevated beyond its reach. Perhaps that, after all, was Willis’s intention, to reflect in her beauty all the folly of those who had succumbed to Olivia’s snares.

  Kneeling there, in the hallway, I suddenly realized what I should do with Willis’s painting. It would only have depressed me, as I felt at the time, to have it about the house and Willis himself had promised it to Eric Dunrich. Therefore, I resolved, to Eric Dunrich it should be entrusted.

  From a regular exchange of Christmas cards, I knew that Dunrich was still ensconced at Seaspray Cottage, Polruan, with his hoard of cheerfully inferior paintings. Accordingly, I wrote him a letter, suggesting a date for a visit, and received a reply by return, crayoned in a sprawling hand on the back of a postcard. ‘The artist will abandon his fruitless toil in honour of the occasion. Delighted and flattered.
E.D.’

  Three weeks ago today, I set off at dawn, with my gift loaded in the back of the car. Early mist cleared to a mid-morning of startling, cloudless brilliance. It was one of those rare, peerless days which only spring or autumn in all their fickleness can breed, when the elements conspire to invest the English countryside with a casual, luminous beauty. That, or the undertow of my persistent grief, might explain the omens of significance I seemed to detect in every mile covered towards Cornwall and a batty old artist in his cottage by the sea. Whatever their origin, after I’d taken to the minor roads that amble south from Liskeard and began to glimpse the sea, winking and glinting at me through the folds and creases of jumbled farmland, those omens began to close in upon me.

  True to his word, Dunrich wasn’t painting on the harbour wall at Polruan, despite the favourable conditions. Instead, when I walked round to Seaspray Cottage, there he was at the window, bobbing up from a chair and waving when he saw me. The door was flung open and he greeted me with his remembered toothy grin.

  ‘Fair day attendeth fair lady,’ he declaimed. ‘It is, of course, the keenest pleasure to see you once again.’ He took my hand and bowed awkwardly. I mentally diagnosed rheumatism from too many days sitting in the wind and noted that his grey, spiky hair had turned white and his face looked thinner but that he was otherwise as puckish and sprightly as I recalled.

  ‘I have a present for you, Mr Dunrich.’

  ‘For me?’ His eyes lit up with childish glee.

  ‘But you’ll need to help me unload it. My car’s just down the road.’

  So it was that Dunrich himself carried the third Bartholomew into his house and unwrapped it on the table in his tiny lounge. If he’d already guessed what it was, his expression of surprise did not betray the fact.