In Pale Battalions (46 page)

“How did you know which train I’d be on?” I said.

“I didn’t. I’ve been here since six.”

“There was no need.”

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He started the car. “Oh, but there was. I know you think I’m a blind and insensitive clod—and at times I can be—but you’re mistaken if you think I’ve been unaware of all that’s happened this week.”

“What do you mean?”

“A mysterious benefactor. Sitting tenants. A flying visit to London. Why don’t you tell me what it’s all about? And don’t say you’d never met Mr. Willis before.”

Tony’s timing was, as ever, impeccable. It was one of his greatest gifts. I suppose it also embodied his Englishness—his rather old-fashioned, buttoned-up, ironical manner that could master the strongest emotions. He’d known better than to demand an explanation when all I’d offered was a transparent pretence that Willis was a stranger. He’d bided his time when I’d returned from Fowey clearly still distracted. Now he’d somehow divined that his time had come.

We stopped for dinner at a country hotel south of Bath and, in the end, spent the night there. I recounted Willis’s story and explained as best I could why till then I’d kept it from him. I described my experiences in Fowey and enlarged on what Grace Fotheringham had said to me. And later, safe in his arms in the small hours between midnight and dawn, I told him what I should have told him when he first asked me to marry him twenty-three years before.

“Now you see,” I murmured at the end of all my confessions,

“why perhaps you should have heeded the village gossip.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” he replied, kissing me. “I always knew you had secrets. They made you different from the rest. They made me love you.”

“Would you have married me if you’d known I was a deserter’s daughter?”

“You know I would.”

“And if you’d known I was responsible for Payne’s death?”

“That too. If you
were
responsible.”

“Why do you say
if
?”

“Ask yourself why Olivia didn’t accuse you of it when I told her I intended to marry you. You can’t believe she held her tongue out of affection for you.”

“I’ve never understood why she said nothing. But I’ve always been grateful.”

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“Then don’t be.”

“Why not? She didn’t say anything, did she?”

“No. Not then.”

“What do you mean—‘not then’?”

“I mean she told me later.”

I sat upright in the bed and stared at him. “You knew?”

He smiled disarmingly. “What there was to know, yes.”

“When?”

“Early in ’53, when we heard she was dying. I went down there alone, remember? Well, that’s when Olivia chose to tell me.”

“You said nothing about it.”

“Perhaps now you’ll understand it made no difference. I knew you’d tell me yourself in the end. I was happy to wait. Besides, I realized that if Olivia had chosen to hold the accusation back until then, confronting you with it would only serve her ends. Now you have told me, I see that I was right.” For fifteen years, I realized, I’d manufactured reasons not to tell my husband something he already knew. I’d left him to pit his love for me against the worst that Olivia could imply. I’d thought him obtuse and unobservant where he’d been patient and sensitive. I’d been a fool. “What did she say?” I asked him at last. It was time, I knew, to hear the worst.

“When I arrived, Nurse Buss told me Olivia had been unusually alert all day and was eager to see me. I went up to her room alone.

She had her bed by the window, where she could look at that picture of her first husband’s, surrounded by shawls and potions and scraps of food. The place gave me the creeps.

“For a moment, when I went in and saw her lying there, so wizened and still, I thought she was dead. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. Burning, bitter eyes. She told me to sit down and pour her some whisky. I obeyed. Even at death’s door, she retained her power to command. Then she began talking, between sips of whisky, urgently and fluently—at least at first. As Nurse Buss had said, she was alert—unnaturally so. The reason was the need she felt to talk. I’d been brought there for only one reason—to hear what she had to say.”

three

This has been the worst year of my life. Entombed in an empty house with only that harridan of a nurse for company. The windows rattle at night and the rain rushes like needles against the glass. Here I lie now, sick, dying, old, worn to a husk: there is nothing here for you to envy or admire. Or so you think.

How is Leonora? How is the knight on his white charger who carried her off into a happy ever after? You sit before me and smile politely and ask how I feel, but you don’t want to know. You really want to know when I’m going to die. That’s it, isn’t it? When is this frayed old remnant of a woman going to oblige you by vacating her fraud of a life?

If I had the energy, I’d laugh in your face. There was a time when I could have wrapped you round my little finger, a time when you would have been my plaything. Yes. Smile as much as you like. You would have been. I can see your mouth quiver with distaste. You find the thought disgusting. But you wouldn’t have then.

None of the others did.

All men and most women are fools. My mother was a fool, who gave herself to an Italian dancing instructor and got me for her pains. I, on the other hand, learned from other people’s mistakes. I didn’t model nude for so-called artists because the money was good.

Oh no. There was more to it than that. I was cleverer than the whole pack of them, but they wouldn’t have thanked me for letting them know it. What they wanted of me was the hire of my body. I 312

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was superb. Still am in foolish Philip’s painting. He only realized I’d ensnared him when it was too late. I let him have his fill of me—visually. He could ask me to sit or bend or lie before him and I would. I would pose for him in any position—and some were not for painting. And he would stand beneath the dais, pretending to study proportion, six inches from my breasts, and would see my eyes move to the bulge in his trousers. But he could not touch me.

Disgusted? I said you would be. I see you look away, but I see also the thin film of sweat on your stiff upper lip. Go on, look at the painting. I was magnificent—wasn’t I?

He married me because he had to touch me. And once he’d married me, he couldn’t bear to. I made sure of that. I betrayed him, with other artists of course, but most splendidly—most obscenely—with his own sister. That destroyed him, as it was meant to. It’s her I’m looking at in his painting. At least, I believe that’s what he intended. For all our sakes, it’s as well he didn’t finish the series. I should think he was drunk when he went over the side of the ferry.

It would have been unlike him not to be. I was waiting for him in our cabin. Perhaps he couldn’t face me. I didn’t raise the alarm till morning. Something that may once have been him was washed up on the coast of Normandy three weeks later. I believe his sister identified him. She was suitably distraught.

The desirable young widow of a notable artist: it wasn’t a bad transformation. And my reputation wore so much better than Philip’s. Lizzie Kilsyth introduced me to Edward at one of her soirées. He was in a morbid swoon of bereavement at the time, but was still able to recognize my beauty as a desirable acquisition. He looked on me as he would a Wedgwood vase: elegant, expensive and a sound investment. Water ran through his veins: passion was to him a foreign country. I didn’t mind that. He made me Lady Powerstock and left me free to find pleasure where I would.

What was it that drew me to my own step-son? There were obvious factors: his youth, his good looks, the time that hung so heavily here during the early years. Above all, of course, because it was forbidden. He saw me looking at him: I let him. I hinted—only hinted, with an oblique word here or there, angled like a glass to reflect the sun—that the woman in the painting was indeed me and could, in certain circumstances, be his.

I’m talking about Leonora’s father. Dead old men were once

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young and handsome, virile and vulnerable. Did I say dead? Let’s pretend he’s dead—for a little longer. He wasn’t dead then, not to my suggestions. That’s all that really matters. He spied on me from the observatory, if you can call it spying. I took care to undress in the window, where I could be seen through the telescope, to undress slowly, to pose, if you like, thinking of the agonies of mind and body he would be going through, watching me.

Then Miss Leonora Powell walked demurely into his life—and he was lost to me. He’d been tempted: we both knew it. Later, when I told his wife of it, she refused to believe me. I think truly she couldn’t imagine it. But I don’t think John ever forgot. When he went away to the war, I came to hate Leonora for her purity and her loyalty. I tested both qualities—and found them nauseatingly im-pregnable.

I’ve never loved anyone in my life except myself. You ought to know that. It’s true of more people than would care to admit it.

Those who do admit it earn my respect. That, I suppose, is what marked Ralph Mompesson out from the rest. That and the fact he was twice the man the Honourable John Hallows could ever be. He didn’t hide his desires. He was proud of them. We met him at a fund-raising event about the time Edward decided to parade his patriotic soul for inspection by taking in convalescent officers, one or two of whom I enjoyed. They were generally too conscience-stricken to enjoy me.

Avert your gaze if you like, Captain Galloway. You don’t fool anyone. If you’d come here then, you’d have worshipped me too: I’d have made sure of that. Maybe you’d have fallen in love with me, like that young idiot Cheriton. He shot himself here, you know, blew his brains out with a pistol. And why? Because he was afraid of going back to the war? Oh no. That would have been too sensible.

He shot himself because I told him Ralph had been my lover. Can you imagine? He even left a note, which, mercifully, nobody read.

Sometimes the stupidity of your sex surprises even me.

But Ralph was different. I’ll grant him that. A woman’s man, you might say. The plan he evolved to acquire Meongate would have worked, though it would have benefited me more and him less than he supposed. But it had his swaggering, cocksure elegance: it would have worked. We knew John hadn’t died in France and that Leonora’s pregnancy by him could be used to destroy both them 314

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and Edward. We would have been their joint beneficiaries, master and mistress of Meongate. Then I wouldn’t be croaking out my last days over cheap whisky in a cold house. Pour me some more. And have some yourself. You look as if you need it.

Somebody murdered Ralph, somebody who knew what would happen if he wasn’t stopped, somebody who outwitted him—and me. But only in a sense. Theirs was a truly pyrrhic victory. The police didn’t know where to look, but I knew who the murderer was.

There was only one man desperate enough to have done such a thing: the Honourable John Hallows. He knew my mind better than most. I’ll admit it was clever of him. But foolish as well. By killing Ralph, he made sure he could never come back, made sure he would have to stay in hiding for the rest of his life.

When your battalion camped in the grounds in the spring of 1944, I had you marked from the first as Leonora’s knight errant. I watched from an upper window when you met for the first time.

And all those other times? Did you really think I didn’t know what was going on? All those letters via the post office? I knew. I knew everything. So I had plenty of opportunity to decide what to do when you finally deigned to tell me you wanted to marry her. I could have told you enough to frighten you off. Be in no doubt of that. Instead, I said nothing. I let you marry. I let you have children.

Now I’ll tell you what you’ve married. Now, at last, you can have my wedding present.

Leonora’s mother went away and obligingly died giving birth.

To the very end, she preserved her saintly air of self-sacrifice. Her friend, the schoolteacher, Miss Fotheringham, proposed to raise the child herself. I could have let her. But I didn’t. At first, she resisted, so I was obliged to discredit her. Her headmistress was indecently eager to believe that I had letters suggesting Miss Fotheringham and the child’s mother had formed an unnatural attachment. To avoid any breath of scandal, Miss Fotheringham was dismissed from her post and the child consigned to me.

You pretend indifference, but I can see you want to know. Why did I take her back? Why? Because the war was over and my murderous step-son could feel free to show himself at last. He would want his daughter to remind him of his wife. He was too insuffer-ably decent to forget her. When he looked for her, he would have to come to me. And when he came I would show him no mercy.

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Why didn’t he come? He’d chosen to defy me, but I had the only thing left for him to cherish: Leonora. She suffered on his account.

I don’t deny that. But still he didn’t show himself. It’s too late now.

An obscure suicide? Probably. And yet, and yet . . . Sometimes, I dream he’s up there in the observatory still, looking at me, always looking. Is he out there somewhere, do you think? It doesn’t matter.

I’ve won anyway. He’s won nothing. Nothing, do you hear?

After Edward’s death, I learned from his accountant that he’d invested heavily in American stocks during the war on Ralph’s advice. Good advice when given. But since 1929 the shares had been worthless. I was suddenly obliged to marry for money. Sidney Payne, you understand, was a brutal necessity. Nothing else. When he went bankrupt, the necessity left our relationship, and of brutality I had no need. It was at my suggestion that he looked to Leonora for satisfaction.