In Pale Battalions (17 page)

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“Why yes. Of course.” She paused. “I keep it . . . in my bedroom.”

It couldn’t be. Not so simple a device. We were discussing a venue to view a picture. Nothing else. Yet I knew it was not so. The sun came out and splashed across the wall beside us. Suddenly, the body on the bed was floodlit, but Lady Powerstock paid it no heed, merely smiled, seraphically, serenely, in the slow, secret satisfaction of a calculated moment.

“Shall we say . . . after tea—this afternoon?”

What could I do but agree? A refusal would have signalled my suspicion that more than a picture was being offered. Besides, something else I didn’t care to admit to drove me to accept.

“You know where my room is?”

“Ah . . . yes.”

She smiled again. “Good. Until later then.” She moved away, as if to leave, but paused by the bookshelf where I’d been and plucked down the book I’d been reading. “Have you seen the essay in this volume by my husband’s first wife?” She must have known I had.

“Yes. I was looking at it when you came in.”

“I thought you must have been. Sad, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes. Very much so. But it’s good that you and Lord Powerstock should have been able to . . . make up for each other’s loss.”

She replaced the book on the shelf. “That’s not quite what I meant. I think it rather sad that the Diocesan Committee should have put its name to this . . . convenient fiction.”

“Fiction? Surely the lady did work among the poor?”

“She was certainly a regular visitor to Portsea.” So saying, Olivia moved to the door and opened it. “The question is: why?”

The sunlight faded from the wall and the room grew cold.

Outside, the wind gusted a scatter of leaves across the flagstoned terrace.

I missed lunch and went for a long walk round the lanes to clear my head. The weather was in a washed-out, windless lull, though the dark clouds bunching over the downs to the west were ominous.

My return journey, perhaps inevitably, took me through the village. With my mind still on the book in the library and Olivia’s dismissive remark about it, I diverted into the churchyard and ambled

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amongst the stones, in search of . . . what I knew I would find. A four-square, railed-off memorial to three previous Lords Powerstock and there, in its shade, a smaller, newer stone: IN LOVING MEMORY OF MIRIAM ABIGAIL

HALLOWS, LADY POWERSTOCK, DEAREST WIFE, MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, TAKEN EARLY TO HIS

ARMS, 30TH MARCH 1905, AGED THIRTY-EIGHT

YEARS—GREATLY LOVED AND SORELY MISSED.

Hallows had never spoken to me of her, yet how often must he, as a younger man, have come to look at this stone, one of the few reminders of his mother, and wondered . . . how it would have been had she lived? I turned aside and made for the kissing gate into the path that led towards Meongate.

As I did so, a figure emerged from the south door of the church and glanced towards me. It was Leonora, calm and regal in a plaid dress and dark cape. She smiled, but only faintly.

“We meet here again,” she said.

I doffed my hat. “But this time
I
am surprised. May I walk back with you to Meongate?”

“Of course.” We went out onto the field path that led down towards the river. “Were you examining the family plot?”

“I noticed it—in passing. The memorial to John’s mother is very moving.”

“I think they all felt it so unfair that she should die as she did.”

“I imagine it must always be risky to work in such areas. Do you know Portsea at all?”

She looked at me. “Not at all.”

“Surely we weren’t far from it on Wednesday.”

“No. I believe not.”

We made our way down over the river and up through the woods to join the lane that bridged the railway line and curved east towards Meongate. There, still a mile or so short of our destination, we were caught in one of the heavy showers rolling in from the west. We took shelter in a Dutch barn just off the road and sat on two bales of straw watching the rain sheet across the fields beyond.

It was an opportunity I’d yearned for but also dreaded: a chance to offer Leonora some alternative to the proposition from 114

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Mompesson which she seemed unaccountably bound to accept. It was too soon, of course, too great a presumption on her bereavement, but her words in the rhododendron glade, echoing so often in my mind, had convinced me that unless she understood the depth of my feeling for her, she would soon be lost to me for ever.

I muttered some semblance of a casual remark. “I don’t think it’ll rain for long.”

“Sometimes,” she said softly, “I think it’ll rain for ever.”

I looked at her. “Do you miss him so badly?”

She glanced away. “More than I can say.”

“For you it is bound to be worst. But it might help you to know that I miss him too. The men under his command mourn him still.

One said as much in a letter to me recently.”

She looked back at me, her voice full of the tears she would not allow to flow. “It’s worse than you can possibly imagine.”

“I’d like to try to understand.”

“I realize that. But I don’t think it’s possible.”

“Why not? I hope I’m not being presumptuous when I say that I think John would not have wanted you to mourn him . . . too long.

Would not have wanted you to . . . abandon life.”

“No. He would not have wanted that.”

“This war won’t last for ever. When it’s over, we’ll all have to re-build our lives. Perhaps we should start now. Perhaps we could do so . . . together.”

It wasn’t how I’d intended to put it, but Leonora had the good grace not to condemn me for that. Her response, instead, seemed weighted with the sadness which, for all her misfortunes, still seemed, at its core, unaccountable. “You were my husband’s friend, Tom, and therefore you are my friend. More than that I cannot offer.” “Such things take time. I’m not trying to take John’s place: nobody could do that. But I do think I could restore something to your life, as you could to mine. If you ever felt able to consider . . . matri-mony, I’d be deeply honoured.” She rose from the bale and walked slowly to one of the pillars supporting the roof, put one arm about it as she turned to face me as if to anchor her thoughts as much as her body. “You are a good man, Tom. Too good for what is happening here. I can never marry you. Please understand that.”

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I too rose to my feet. “But that’s precisely it. I don’t understand.

There’s nothing wrong in the idea of a young widow . . .”

“I am pregnant.” She spoke the words softly but decisively, stopping my words and thoughts in their tracks.

“What?”

“I am three months pregnant. I presume I need not tell you what is wrong in the idea of a young widow being three months pregnant when her husband is more than four months dead.”

I could not speak. I did not know what to say.

“I had hoped to spare you the information. I had hoped you would leave Meongate before concealment became impractical.”

Resentment flared within me. “It’s Mompesson, isn’t it?”

“I have told you what I felt you were entitled to know. That is all.”

“He’s already told me he intends to marry you. And now I’ve no doubt you will marry him, since you’re carrying his child.”

She looked momentarily shocked by what I’d said, then recovered herself. She took a deep breath and looked straight at me.

“The subject is closed. Now please excuse me. I’m sure you’ll understand that I would prefer to walk back to Meongate alone.”

It had stopped raining. She walked out into the lane and moved slowly away in the direction of Meongate. I did not follow, but shouted after her before bitterness could stem my anger: “I’m glad John’s not here to see Mompesson seduce first his stepmother, then his wife.” But Leonora did not look back. She walked on at a steady pace and passed from view.

I lit a cigarette and smoked it, leaning against the pillar where she’d stood. I had no wish to catch her up, no wish to be insulted again, as I felt I had been. It was not her fault that I’d hoped for so much, not her intention that I should have been made a fool of, yet, in my heart, at that moment of bleakest resignation, I blamed her for every facet of my humiliation. I forgot all the many things that were at odds with what I now believed about her and Mompesson. I remembered only the friend I felt she’d betrayed and the vision of a future which was now denied me.

By the time I’d finished the cigarette and crushed it against the pillar, I was determined to be rid of Leonora and all the other occupants of Meongate who so fascinated and repelled me. It seemed the only way to preserve some vestige of my dignity, the only course 116

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by which I could still honour Hallows’s memory. Swallowing the worst of my resentment, I headed back.

I reached Meongate in the middle of the afternoon. The wind had died and the house was in silence: a mood of siesta was upon the place. I went up to my room, glad of seeing nobody on the way, and lay on my bed, staring at the floral-patterned curtains and the washed blue sky beyond my window. I fell into a light and troubled slumber.

Something was crawling towards the bed: I could hear it slith-ering, slowly and painfully, across the carpet. With a clutch of panic, I knew that it was Hallows, blind and bleeding, dragging himself back from no man’s land, as on that night when he did not return.

“Hallows?” I spoke his name as I lurched from the bed and stared, with waking eyes, at what had been only a dream. There was nothing there, except . . . a white envelope on the carpet by the door.

I moved across and picked it up. It must have been slipped beneath the door while I slept. I tore it open. A key fell out onto the floor and I was left holding the note it had been wrapped with.

“Tom: this is the key to the observatory. If you wish to understand what is happening in this house, go there at seven o’clock this evening. L.”

I slipped the key into my pocket and, almost without thinking, burned the note in the grate. I had not expected to hear from her again, but, now that I had, my resolve to have done with her vanished before the frail hope that all could yet be made right: I would do as she asked.

I looked at the clock: it was a quarter to five. Then I remembered my appointment with Olivia. Why not keep it, I thought, if only to see Mr. Bartholomew’s famous picture and tell her that I was leaving.

I washed and changed and made my way to the wing of the house. Still, silence reigned. I passed the stairs to the observatory and came to the door where I’d seen Mompesson but a week before.

I knocked, as he had not.

“Come in.” It was Olivia’s voice, but muffled by distance.

I opened the door and went in. The room was empty. “Lady Powerstock?”

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“Is that you, Lieutenant?” Her voice came from an adjoining room, to which the door stood ajar. I took it to be the bedroom.

“Yes. You said I might see the picture.”

“Of course. It’s on the wall facing the window. I’ll join you presently.”

I turned to where she had said. It was unmistakably a companion piece to that in the library, its heavy gilt frame blending with the richly patterned bronze wallpaper. I walked across to study it.

A sequel, she had said, and she had been right. The same bedchamber of some mythic castle, the same sickly, morbid air of medievalist obsession, but gone a little further, sunk a little deeper into the mood of the place and the portrait of it. The woman on the bed had rolled over and now lay supine, one knee raised to preserve a hint of modesty. The man in mail had knelt upon the bed and stooped across her, his head lowered to kiss her left breast. She had grasped his left hand and placed it over her other breast. It was a depiction of sexual conquest at once total and tantalizing, tantalizing because the woman’s face was angled away from the man, gazing out of the picture with an air of abstracted superiority, as if she, as much as the artist, were merely a spectator, merely an observer of somebody else’s deception. Was it Olivia? I looked at the face and knew I could never be sure, knew that that—as much as any brush-stroke—was the painter’s triumph.

“What do you think?”

I turned to see that Olivia had emerged from the adjoining room and stood looking at me, as intent upon my reaction as I was upon the picture. She wore a pale green, silken dressing gown, loosely tied at the waist, with her hair let down as I’d only seen it once before.

“I was resting after a bath. I’d forgotten you were to call.” The lie was as transparent as the gown hinted at being, where the sunlight shone through its shifting folds from the window behind her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“It’s no matter. Do you like the picture?”

What could I say? Blatancy silenced me with its hideous, unconfessed appeal. “Your husband must have been a remarkable man.”

“But a troubled one. Deeply troubled, especially towards the end—as these pictures imply.”

She moved as she spoke, turned slightly so that the gown stirred 118

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and parted momentarily to reveal a bare and rounded thigh beneath. Our conversation was a sham, a mannered prelude to something I could not believe would happen and something she was determined should not be hurried. “He drowned—I believe.” “Yes—as was fitting.”

“In what way?”

“Philip was a drowning man all his life.”

She moved closer and stood beside me, gazing at the picture with a rapt attention that hovered on the edges of declaring its falsehood. There was a heady scent in the air now she was near me, the perfume she wore blending its allure with the warmth of her body. I looked at her, not the picture, at the proud and beautiful profile of her face, the long and haughty neck, the rise and fall of her bosom beneath the gown, the caressing touch of the silk where it moulded the unconstrained roundness of her breasts. I looked at her, as I was meant to, and fought desire with failing strength.