In Pale Battalions (50 page)

“What happened?” I said quietly.

I knew he would tell me. He’d taken me there because both of us needed to hear his story and only in that place could it be told.

Only there, in that moment, could understanding be mine, as only now can it be yours.

John could not teach me to paint as well as he did. That, I fear, is not a transferable gift. But one art he did succeed in teaching me: that of living with one’s own imperfections. Had I possessed it when 338

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younger, life might not have proved so fraught, but, by the same token, I would never have met him—or you. So, be assured, I am not about to bemoan my lot.

I believe I convinced even myself that I had a vocation for the priesthood. When I discovered that it was really only a sensual addiction to the forms and rituals of worship, I should have abandoned the cloth at once. Instead, I allowed myself to be snared by my own faith. Why surrender something which I could so easily simulate? The answer, I fear, lies nearer the heart of my addiction.

Let brevity be the soul of candour. I was choirmaster at a cathedral school, arrested one day on a charge of having committed an act of gross indecency with a boy chorister. Arrested and subsequently convicted. It scarcely matters that I was falsely accused, since I was, undeniably, tempted. So, though not strictly guilty, nor was I strictly innocent. Two years’ imprisonment may have been a harsh punishment, but I cannot claim that it was entirely unjust.

What I failed to appreciate was that my punishment did not end with my release: it merely entered a more subtle phase. I came to Polruan because it was far from home and because I had once spent a happy holiday here as a child. It seemed an ideal refuge. But scandal’s wingèd chariot swiftly overhauled me. I became a marked man, reviled by one and all. Even when neighbours were not whispering about me, or warning their children against me, I imagined that they were.

On Sunday, 18th November 1962, I resolved to make a dramatic exit from this vale of tears. It was a day of wind and rain. When I stood here, late that afternoon, on the very edge of the cliff, the gale tearing at my clothes and the spray stinging my face from the crashing surf below, I knew that I had only to take one step, one small step, and the rocks and surging waves would take me in their arms and bear me away. The coastguard look-out was unmanned.

The light was failing. Nobody would be out walking in such weather. Nobody would see me—or care if they did. That day, I yielded to temptation. I stepped from the brink.

John was sitting where we are sitting now. I had failed to notice him in the rain and gathering darkness. He had watched in silence as I stood on the edge of the cliff and summoned my courage to leap. He must have wondered what my intentions were, must have

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assumed—until the very last moment—that they could not be what they seemed.

As I made to jump, he seized me round the waist. We fell side-ways, away from the sheer drop, onto shelving ground where there were boulders and bracken to cling to. Even so, I nearly took him with me. But his strength was that of ten men. He hauled me back up to this platform, where we crouched, panting for breath, and the rain fell in torrents. My clothes were ripped, my hands bleeding from the sharp rock, my face washed in rain and sweat. I began to weep. He dragged me to this bench and made me take some whisky from his hip flask, let me gather my wits and catch my breath.

I looked at him: an older man than me, no less shabby or desperate, to judge by appearances, but with a glint in the eye some would call crazy, others a passion for life. His very spirit shamed me.

“You’re Eric Dunrich, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard people gossiping about you. I expect you can guess what they say. Is that what brought you here?”

“Yes. Death seemed to offer some kind of solution.”

“It never does that, my friend. Death is only ever a defeat. Why defeat yourself ?”

“I already have done. Didn’t you listen to what they said?”

“I could hardly not. But do you seriously suppose there’s a man in this village—me included—who hasn’t at least one secret to hide that’s every bit as shameful as anything you’re supposed to have done? What you fear isn’t the truth about yourself, but the preju-dices of others. They’re worthless, believe me. Accept an offer of friendship. Begin again.” I said nothing. I was too shocked at my own susceptibility to what he had said. What was my iron resolve worth if it could be so easily undermined by a stranger? It was laughable.

After a moment, he spoke again, more earnestly than before. “If you want to go through with it, I won’t intervene a second time. But if you decide not to, you’ll be doing me a favour as well as yourself.”

What I said next was out of embarrassment at my own weakness as much as resentment that my grand gesture had been frustrated. “Why should you care?”

“Because this has happened to me before,” he replied. “I once 340

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offered a friend a way out of certain death—and he refused. By stopping you just now, I was giving both of us a second chance.”

I stared at him incredulously. “You make a habit of this?”

“Far from it,” he replied. “The man I refer to had suffered much on my account. I offered him the only thing I had: my life in exchange for his. I offered to die in his place. But he refused. I’ve never stopped wondering what would have happened if he’d accepted, never stopped imagining how it would have been. But he didn’t accept. He turned his back and walked away to his death. It stayed what it always was. A dream. An illusion. A lie I told to others and to myself. For my sake as well as yours, don’t turn me down a second time.” As you see, he was successful in his plea. We heard each other’s confession, Mrs. Galloway, then and later. The unfrocked priest and the unshriven sinner: a pretty combination, do you not think?

Judge not, that ye be not judged? Let him who is without sin, et cetera? None of that suffices, I suspect. Then what? He would have died for his friend, but his friend was too great a friend to let him. I know that he came to you with a lie, another man’s story, a tragedy marginally different from his own, yet I beg you not to think harshly of him. His errors were borne, not of cowardice, but of love. He wished only to give you the memory of a father to be proud of. It is not an unworthy wish. All that he told you was true, save in that one particular. All that he learned from exile was barren, save in that one pretence.

He painted the third Bartholomew in order that he might face squarely all that was worst in himself and best in the woman he loved. Yet what he achieved transcended his purpose. It is why I so dearly wanted the picture and why, now that you have given it to me, I have broken my pact of secrecy with a long-dead friend.

Driving home from Polruan that evening, I pulled off the road halfway across Dartmoor and got out to watch the sunset: a fading slash of red on the horizon far to the west, somewhere beyond Cornwall. A breeze was getting up on the moor, tugging at the gorse and bracken and draining the warmth from the day. But I was in no hurry to return to the car. My mind was still on Eric Dunrich’s parting words as I’d left Seaspray Cottage an hour or so before.

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We’d hung the third Bartholomew in a place of pride, on the chimneybreast in the tiny, congested sitting room. I took a final, wistful look at it, then turned away and walked out to the front door, where Dunrich was waiting for me. He was smiling broadly, with something akin to exultation suffusing his features.

“You’ve seen it too now, haven’t you?” he said. “You’ve seen it in her face. She’s forgiven him, Mrs. Galloway. I am glad of it. Not merely because he was my friend, but because he was the finest man I ever knew.”

Tyne Cot is still and silent in the hottest hour of the day, its gravestones massed in obedience to the purposes of the dead and the pretences of the living. In all its vast immobility of names, nothing moves save two figures progressing slowly down the sloping avenue towards the lych-gate and the Passendale road beyond.

Leonora Galloway has completed her story. She has made her peace with the past and paid her debts to the present. She walks erectly, almost proudly, as they leave the cemetery and move towards the car. By contrast, her daughter Penelope seems hunched, bowed and thoughtful in the face of too much knowledge. She unlocks the car, climbs into the driving seat, leans across to open the passenger door for her mother and starts the engine.

Before climbing into the car herself, Leonora takes a last look back at the cemetery beyond its perimeter wall. On the Memorial at its summit, she knows that the sun still etches in shade the name of one of the missing, whilst far to the south, at Thiepval, another name commands its place on a lofty pillar. Two names for the same lie—if a lie forgiven should be called a lie. This, then, is where her search ends. And where did it begin? She remembers it well, to this day: Droxford railway station, all those years before. But now, for the first time, another fragment of that memory crystallizes in her mind.

A woodland path, a shady summertime route back to Meongate.

Charter carried her on his shoulders. She pulled at the straw of his hat. The sun-patched grass between the stretching boughs was as green as the trimmed blades at Tyne Cot, the shadows of the arching branches as deep as those beneath the pillars at Thiepval. He made her laugh. She cannot remember how, but he made her 342

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happy, for that brief space, after the sadness of parting. At the edge of the wood, by the stile that led into the grounds of Meongate, he lifted her down, sat her on the rail and leant beside her, recovering his breath and mopping his brow. He must have said something to amuse her, though all she can remember is laughter—his and hers.

Leonora climbs into the car and closes the door. She has a train to catch, a home to return to, a present to re-join—and a long forgotten promise to keep.

“How does it make you feel, Mother?” says Penelope as she pulls away. “The knowledge that, in the end, he deceived you?”

Leonora’s attention is elsewhere. When she replies, it is in response not to her daughter’s words, but to her great-grandfather’s.

“I will.”

“Will what?”

“Be happy.”

Then , scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.

Great death has made all his for evermore.

If you enjoyed Robert Goddard’s

In Pale Battalions
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NEVER

GO BACK

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never go back

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one

If he had flown back with Donna, of course, it would have been all right. If her flight had been delayed by a couple of hours, it would have been enough. If he had simply turned right instead of left coming out of the cemetery, he would probably have got away with it.

But it was not all right, it was not enough, he did not get away with it. In the end, the ifs and therefores amounted to nothing. Fate had set a trap for him that day. And he walked obligingly and unwittingly straight into it.

Thus did a decade of good fortune for Harry Barnett come to an end without him even realizing it. Marriage and father-hood had proved during those years to be the sweetest of surprises. He regretted coming to them so late, but the circumstances that had brought Donna and hence their daughter, Daisy, into his life made the delay inevitable. He had never been one to dwell on missed opportunities. The present—and their future as a family—were his to enjoy.

The recent death of his mother had failed to puncture his contentment. A swift and gentle exit at the age of ninety-three was no cause for anguish. Her race had been run to a dignified finish.

Harry’s links with his birthplace had effectively died with her. He had returned to Swindon to arrange her funeral and to clear out the house she had lived in for more than seventy years. The Council would want to put another tenant in as soon as possible. The fact that 37 Falmouth Street held so much of Harry’s past could not stand in their way. Nor would he have wanted it to. It was time to move on.

That morning, Donna had flown back to Seattle, where Daisy had been staying with her grandparents. Mother and daughter would drive home to Vancouver tomorrow. Harry planned to join them in a week or so, when he had disposed of his mother’s clothes, crockery and furniture. It was not a task he was looking forward to. But it had to be done. And there was no one to do it but him. Such was the lot of an only child.