In Pale Battalions (6 page)

Indeed, should you attempt to leave, I will feel obliged to inform the authorities of the part you played in my husband’s death. In return, you will do what I ask—in everything. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She came and stood behind my chair. “It occurred to me you might conceive the absurd notion that I had misled you concerning your parents. If so, you may be interested in the document in front of you on the desk. Read it.” I picked up the small, crumpled brown envelope that rested on the nearest edge to me and drew out the contents: a telegram, addressed to Lord Powerstock, dated 4th May 1916.

“WAR OFFICE REGRETS TO INFORM YOU YOUR SON

CAPT JOHN HALLOWS MISSING PRESUMED KILLED 30

APRIL.” So Olivia was right. He’d died more than ten months before I was born. He wasn’t my father.

Perhaps she thought I would plead with her to tell me who my 34

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real father was, but I knew her well enough to judge she would never tell me, even if she knew. I replaced the telegram on the desk and walked slowly from the room, clinging to what little dignity was left me.

The inquest into Payne’s death found that the fall downstairs had brought on a cerebral haemorrhage, aggravated by the amount of alcohol he’d consumed. The verdict was death by misadventure.

Nobody seemed sorry he was dead, least of all Olivia. Even the odious Walter appeared largely indifferent, mouthing platitudes and glutting himself on sandwiches when he came back to the house after the funeral. Olivia made it clear to him that he wouldn’t be expected to visit us any more. She’d even arranged for his father to be cremated, a rarity in those days, as if to ensure there would be nothing left of him, not even a grave, to attract attention.

I moved through that time in a trance, numbed by all that had happened and what it meant. I had lost the parents I’d dreamed of, been handed in exchange only desolate betrayal to explain my very existence. Such a past I could not face. I thrust the knowledge of it into a recess of my mind, along with the memory of my seven-teenth birthday, along with all the other questions I’d once sought answers to but now forgot.

Angela Bowden wrote to me from Howell’s, saying she’d heard of Payne’s death from her father and was sorry I’d left the school so abruptly: would I like to visit her whilst she was at home over Easter? I did not reply. Not only would Olivia have forbidden me to go—I did not want to go. The world had shamed and assaulted me.

So I hid myself from the world. I became, as time passed, more of a domestic servant than a daughter of the house. I exchanged, in other words, a role I no longer had a right to for one that Olivia imposed upon me. I grew, as she intended, timid, reclusive and introspective, above all obedient to her every demand.

Suborned by the threats Olivia held over me, I never once asked myself, far less her, why did she hold me there? It would have been easy enough to cast me adrift. The very passivity of her loathing for me suggested that as the obvious course. But no. She wanted, almost despite herself, to keep me at Meongate, under her control, within her orbit. There was some motive for her domination of me that went beyond anything I so far knew. There was some purpose it served, rooted in the mysteries of that house.

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In time, Meongate came to comprise our world. By seeing no one and going nowhere, we could both pretend—for different reasons—that Sidney Payne had never existed. Later, long after the most assiduous of village gossips must have abandoned the subject, our defences remained in place. Isolation had become a state of mind.

three

Only seven years after the Prince of Wales’s speech at Thiepval, the Second World War came to contradict his brave message of peace. It came as a rare portent of change in the fixed and cloistered life we led at Meongate, yet, at first, it made little impact upon us.

Olivia received several official letters about the possibility of housing evacuees, but after she’d written to “somebody who would remember her,” the letters ceased. Sally took a job in a munitions factory in Portsmouth: Olivia did not replace her. When it reached her ears that, as a young, able-bodied, unmarried woman, I would be required to do some form of war work, she persuaded her doctor to write a letter saying that her infirmity necessitated my constant attendance on her. This was not a difficult fiction to sustain, since, without Sally, there was plenty for me to do and, besides, Olivia seldom left the house. Not that there was anything physically wrong with her. She simply hated the onset of old age and the loss of her beauty, which nothing could now disguise. Thus vanity drove her—and me with her—into a life of seclusion. The war did not merely pass us by: it actually increased our isolation.

All that changed in the months before D-Day, 1944. The lanes around Droxford were lined with camouflaged trucks and tanks.

Searchlights were set up on the downs. Troops were encamped in the fields. Meongate, I sensed, could not long remain immune.

One fine morning towards the end of April, returning through the orchard from an early stroll, I came upon a stranger in the

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grounds. I saw him from some way off: a tall, rather angular figure in army uniform—an officer, to judge by his cap. He was leaning against one of the apple trees, smoking a cigarette and gazing towards the house where it was visible beyond the rhododendron glade. He had his back turned and did not seem to hear me approaching, so, when I was about ten yards from him, I snapped a small twig off a low branch of the nearest tree. He spun round, clearly surprised.

“What the . . . Oh!” He smiled. “Good morning.”

My first impression was that he was older than I’d thought.

Handsome, undeniably, with a flashing smile, but there were touches of grey in his trimmed moustache. I identified him as a captain from the three pips on his epaulettes, assessed him, in that moment of first acquaintance, as just one anonymous representative of the military. What he made of me, in a shapeless old coat and walking shoes, clutching a handful of cowslips, I dread to imagine.

“What brings you here, Captain?” I said.

“Do you live here, Miss?”

“Yes.”

“Then allow me to explain. My name’s Galloway.” He held out his hand and I shook it peremptorily. “My battalion’s moving into this area later today. The fact is I’m reconnoitring for somewhere where they can camp.”

“I’m Leonora Hallows,” I said, as frostily as I could manage.

“My grandmother owns this house. She doesn’t welcome visitors.”

“I was thinking we might tuck ourselves away down here—well out of your way.”

“Even so—”

“Actually, Miss Hallows”—he smiled again—“strictly speaking, we don’t require the landowner’s consent. Obviously, we’d prefer to go where we’re welcome, but . . .”

“I see. When will your . . . battalion . . . be arriving?”

“Around tea-time—as unobtrusively as possible.”

“I’ll alert my grandmother.”

“I’d be obliged.” He looked back at the house. “It’s a fine building.”

I moved alongside him. “I’m so glad you approve.”

“A good deal of history attached to it, I dare say.”

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“My family has lived here for over a hundred years.”

“I noticed a Hallows on the war memorial in the village churchyard. Your father?”

I looked at him suspiciously. Such detective work suggested he had more than reconnaissance on his mind. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

He returned my stare. “Is that why you’re reluctant to assist the military?”

I bridled. “Who said I was reluctant?”

“Excuse me. I shouldn’t have asked you that. Your motives are no business of mine.”

“No. They’re not. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go in. I’m sure I can leave you to find your own way out.”

“Of course.”

I walked away towards the house, moving quickly and without looking back, so that he could be sure I’d taken offence. I was determined not to let him see how confused I felt in the wake of our encounter. He was the first total stranger I’d talked to in years—courteous, good-looking and well spoken. I’d have been attracted to him even if I hadn’t dreamt so often that just such a man might one day rescue me from my sealed and solitary life.

I conveyed the news to Olivia over breakfast.

“No choice, eh? Well, they can come—but they needn’t expect a welcome. Be sure they understand that. I don’t want to see them—any of them.”

“Won’t that be rather difficult?”

“No. You will ensure they keep their distance.”

“Very well.”

“Not that it matters. In a few weeks, they’ll all be gone—mostly to their deaths.”

Olivia’s words recurred to me when, later, I stood at the front door and watched the cavalcade of canvas-backed trucks drive past the house and out across the park. The periodic thuds and thumps of bombing raids on Portsmouth had hitherto been our only direct contact with the war. Now there were callow young soldiers marching across our lawn to their last safe haven before . . . A jeep pulled up and Captain Galloway jumped out. He saluted smartly.

“No problems, I trust, Miss Hallows?”

“None as yet, Captain.”

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“If there are, let me know.”

“I’ll be sure to.”

There were no problems: he made sure of that by consulting me about every detail. Where their tents were to be pitched; how they might avoid ploughing up the lawns; whether the noise bothered Lady Powerstock: there was always some pretext for us to spend a few minutes strolling and talking. He was polite, punctilious and charming, as eager to hear me talking about the flowers that grew around their encampment as he was to speculate about what he might do in the post-war world. All my aloofness was de-molished and soon I came to realize that I had made my first friend since schooldays.

One morning, when I was walking into Droxford, he stopped to give me a lift in his jeep and told me what impression Meongate had first made on him.

“I’m a Londoner, born and bred, but I’ve always dreamt what it must be like to live in a house in the country. I suppose I should have come straight to the front door when I arrived, but I couldn’t resist looking around. You’re very lucky to have such a home.” “It’s cold, isolated and lonely.”

“It didn’t seem so to look at. When you surprised me in the orchard, I was wondering what you were like. I didn’t expect to find out so quickly.”

“Why should you have wondered that?”

He smiled. “Well, I took the liberty of asking a few questions in the village. They told me that you and your grandmother were somewhat . . . reclusive.”

“What else did they say?”

“That your father died in the last show.”

“And?”

“Oh, I forget.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“All right, then. They said I’d find you unapproachable and un cooperative.”

“And you did.”

“Only at first.”

We had come to the village. He pulled up and I climbed out. I felt a sudden impulse to acknowledge what he must have been told about me. “I am all the things they say of me.”

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“Now it’s I who don’t believe you.”

Why didn’t he believe me—or the gossip about me? Later he would tell me how, appearing behind him in the orchard just as he’d been dreaming of Meongate and its younger occupant, I’d sown myself and my mystery in his mind, never to be dislodged.

But if it is always difficult to understand how anybody as dull as oneself can fascinate another, so it was impossible for me to believe, after all the barren years at Meongate, that I could discover affection—even love—as fortuitously as I had. That night, I looked at myself in my bedroom mirror and thought: No! It cannot be true.

He sees in me merely an amusing way to pass the weeks he must spend here. I am deluding myself.

Yet we spent more and more time together, saw each other, os-tensibly by chance, more and more often. He would meet me by the river, strolling before breakfast, or pass me in the lanes and offer me a lift in his jeep. He told me about his family, his early life, his work before the war, his plans for when it ended. Of myself, I said nothing and he asked little, as if he knew I was not yet ready to speak.

What he could not know was my secret dread that, sooner or later, Olivia would tell him more than he could bear to hear, that she was only tolerating our friendship in order to heighten the pleasure of ending it.

There was, besides, another end in view: the unspecified but ever-imminent date of the invasion, when Tony’s battalion would embark for France and my hopes pass, with him, across the sea. One Sunday afternoon early in June, when we took a picnic up on to old Winchester Hill and sat on the sunny slope of the down, looking out across the valley towards Meongate, he spoke of our inevitable parting.

“The balloon will go up in a few days,” he said. “On Tuesday, to be precise.”

“You mean the invasion?”

“Yes.”

It seemed incredible to think of it there, on the sheep-cropped turf, skylarks’ song and heat haze rising about us, our picnic laid out on a chequered tablecloth, the Hampshire countryside nestling below.

“I could be shot for telling you as much.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

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“Because I don’t want to creep away like a thief in the night. As a matter of fact, I don’t want to leave at all.”

“It was bound to happen.”

“The men are restless—keen to get it over with. But I wish waiting here could last all summer.”

“So do I.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You’ve made me happier than I could ever have imagined.