In Pale Battalions (7 page)

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 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.

42

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

“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 that. 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 playing 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 me, 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 sporadi-cally 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 can 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,

I N P A L E B A T T A L I O N S

43

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.

44

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

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 N P A L E B A T T A L I O N S

45

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 world.

“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 46

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

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 onto 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.

“Miss Buss seems very efficient.”

Again, there was no response.

“Well . . . Goodbye then.”

Once more, no response. This, her implacably shielded gaze in

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47

formed me, was the end of my servitude, but not an end I was to be allowed to relish. I walked slowly out of the conservatory and stepped free of the power by which she had held me, but the moment of my release was tinged with doubt. I was free, but no nearer understanding why.

Later, I began to think that Olivia might not have been as charitable as I’d supposed. By saying nothing, she had sown a secret between Tony and me. Perhaps she realized at the outset that its revelation would not prevent our marriage. Or perhaps she sensed that a secret between us would grow more threatening, not less, with the passage of time. Either way, I had been as prepared as I could be to tell Tony everything that had happened but, thanks to Olivia, had not needed to. I would never be as prepared again.

four

Ronald’s birth in 1948 set the seal on our marriage and gave Tony the son he so greatly desired. Jimmy Dare’s father offered him a partnership to celebrate the event. For my own part, your birth in 1952 somehow meant more, simply because you were a daughter to whom I could be the kind of mother I had lacked myself. It was then, I suppose, that I finally, if unconsciously, decided to discard my past, not merely to forget it but to consign it to non-existence. In the world that Tony had made for me, doing so seemed not just possible but inevitable.

Olivia remained at Meongate. I did not visit her, nor she me.

Periodically, Tony would go down to check that the house was in reasonable order. That was our only contact—and that was how I wanted it.

Early in January 1953, Miss Buss reported that Olivia’s health was failing, a month later that she was not expected to live more than a few days. It was Miss Buss who suggested Tony should go down rather than me: she thought I might upset her patient. I didn’t contest the point: I was grateful to be spared a final meeting.