In Pale Battalions (2 page)

To the left, French, marked with crosses, to the right, British, marked with plain stones. The stone appears white and painfully bright in the ever strengthening sunlight. Beyond the fir trees that bound the cemetery on three sides, the valleys of the Ancre and the

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Somme rivers roll away in restful curves where once such bitter struggles were fought and so many men were killed. The two women stand at the top of the steps and look down at the orderly scene.

It is Penelope who breaks the silence. “I realize I can’t imagine what it’s like to remember nothing of one’s parents, but I would like to try. You’ve never given me that chance, you know, never talked about your own childhood at all, even when pressed.” “I wanted you and Ronald to have the stability and security I lacked. I certainly didn’t want my childhood to cast a shadow over yours. By telling you nothing about it, I suppose I could pretend it never really happened.”

“Was it really so bad? Knowing you were illegitimate, I mean.”

“Illegitimacy is a small matter in this, Penny. Nowadays, smaller than ever. Lady Powerstock did her best to torment me with it, of course, but she had a far more effective hold over me than that.”

They begin to retrace their steps. Instinctively, Penelope knows better than to urge her mother on. She has herself no memory of Lady Powerstock and whenever Leonora has spoken of her—which has not been often—it has been with this same guarded bitterness.

Now, however, it seems she is willing to say more. Sure enough, when they are clear of the Memorial, she resumes.

“I’ve wanted to come to this place for more than fifty years, ever since my grandfather told me it existed and that my father was commemorated here.”

“What stopped you? Finding out he wasn’t really your father after all?”

Leonora smiles. “You could say that was the reason.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, you know, but did you ever find out who your real father was?”

“Oh yes. I found out.”

The two women turn on to the gravel drive, their feet crunching on its surface, and move slowly away from the Memorial, back towards the entrance. This time, Penelope cannot restrain herself.

“Who was he then, my grandfather?”

“That, in part, is what I planned to tell you on this holiday. But I should warn you: it’s a long story.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve waited a long time to hear it.”

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“And it’s as much about me as my father.”

“I’ve waited a long time to hear that as well.”

They reach the taxi and climb into the rear seat. Monsieur Lefebvre starts back towards Amiens. He does not enquire if they have enjoyed their visit, nor does he trouble to listen to the older of his two passengers as she begins talking in her flat, suppressed, English voice.

“We’ve never had much time to spend with each other, have we, Penny, you and I? I sometimes worry that I haven’t been the mother a good daughter deserves.”

“I never wanted for anything.”

“Except the warmth that comes from knowing me for what I really am. Tony’s death was a shock, of course, but it was something else as well: it was the end of a long pretence, a pretence that my life before marrying him did not exist. I persuaded myself that you and Ronald would be happier not knowing all there was to know about me—and in Ronald’s case I’m sure that’s true. But actually, of course, I was the one who wanted to forget. Now, I think, it’s time to remember.” Half an hour later, as Monsieur Lefebvre slows in traffic on the outskirts of Amiens, Leonora has not finished. He is dimly aware that she is still talking and that his other passenger has said nothing since they left Thiepval, but he pays her words as much heed as he does the wide and lazy river Somme where it passes beneath the road bridge. He speeds on, immune to the past, whilst Penelope, who is not, continues to listen. For Leonora has not finished. In truth, she has only just begun.

one

Childhood memories fit their own intricate pattern. They cannot be made to conform to the version of our past we try to impose upon them. Thus I could say that Lord and Lady Powerstock and the home they gave me at Meongate more than compensated for being an orphan, that a silver spoon easily took the place of my mother’s smile. I could say it—but every recollection of my early years would deny it.

Meongate must once have been the crowded, bustling house of a cheerful family, as the Hallowses must once have been that family.

Every favour of nature in its setting where the Hampshire Downs met the pastures of the Meon valley, every effort of man in its spacious rooms and landscaped park, had been bestowed on the home of one small child.

Yet it was not enough. When I was growing up at Meongate in the early 1920s, most of its grandeur had long since departed. Many of the rooms were shut up and disused, much of the park turned over to farmland. And all the laughing, happy people I imagined filling its empty rooms and treading its neglected lawns had vanished into a past beyond my reach.

I grew up with the knowledge that my parents were both dead, my father killed on the Somme, my mother carried off by pneumonia a few days after my birth. It was not kept from me. Indeed, I was constantly reminded of it, constantly confronted with the implication that I must in some way bear the blame for the shadow of grief, or of something worse, that hung over their memory. That 10

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shadow, cast by the unknown, lay at the heart of the cold, dark certainty that also grew within me: I was not wanted at Meongate, not welcomed there, not loved.

It might have been different had my grandfather not been the grave, withdrawn, perpetually melancholic man that he was. I, who never knew him when he was young, cannot imagine him as anything other than the wheelchair-bound occupant of his ground-floor rooms, deprived by his own morbidity, as much as by the lingering effects of a stroke, of all warmth and fondness. When Nanny Hiles took me, as she regularly did, to kiss him goodnight, all I wanted to do was escape from the cold, fleeting touch of his flesh. When, playing on the lawn, I would look up and see him watching me from his window, all I wanted to do was run away from the mournful, questing sadness in his eyes. Later, I came to sense that he was waiting, waiting for me to be old enough to understand him, waiting in the hope that he would live to see that day.

Lady Powerstock, twenty years his junior, was not my real grandmother. She was buried in the village churchyard, another ghost whom I did not know and who could do nothing to help me. I imagined her as everything her successor was not—kind, loving and generous—but it did me no good. Olivia, the woman I was required to address as Grandmama in her place, had once been beautiful and, at fifty, her looks were still with her, her figure still fine, her dress sense impeccable. That we were not related by blood explained, to my satisfaction, why she did not love me. What I could not explain was why she went so far as to hate me, but hate me she undoubtedly did. She did not trouble to disguise the fact. She let it hover, menacing and unspoken, at the edge of all our exchanges, let it grow as an awareness between us, a secret confirmation that she too was only waiting, waiting for death to remove her husband and with him any lingering restraint on her conduct towards me. There was an air of practised vice about her that was to draw men all her life, an air of voluptuous pleasure at her own depravity that made her hatred of me seem merely instinctive. Yet there was always more to it than that. She had drawn some venom from whatever part she had played in the past of that house and had reserved it for me.

My only friend in those days, my only guide through Meongate’s hidden perils, was Fergus, the taciturn and undemon

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strative
major-domo
, “shifty” as Olivia described him and certainly not as deferential as he should have been, but none the less my sole confidant. Sally, the sullen maid, and humourless Nanny Hiles both went in awe of Olivia, but Fergus treated her with an assurance, bordering on disrespect, that made him my immediate ally. A cautious, solitary, pessimistic man who had expected little from life and consequently been spared many disappointments, perhaps he took pity on a lonely child whose plight he understood better than she did herself. He would take me on covert expeditions through the grounds, or down to the wooded reach of the Meon where he fished of a quiet afternoon, or into Droxford in the trap, when he would buy me a twist of sherbet and leave me sitting on the wall outside Wilsmer’s saddlery whilst he went in to haggle over a new bridle for the pony. For such brief moments as those, kicking my heels on Mr.

Wilsmer’s wall and eating my sherbet in the sunshine, I was happy.

But such moments did not last.

It was Fergus who first showed me my father’s name, recorded with the other war dead of the village, on a plaque at the church.

Their Name Liveth for Evermore, the inscription said, and his name—Captain the Honourable John Hallows—is all that did live for me. I would stare at it for what seemed like hours trying to con-jure up the real living and breathing father that he had never been to me, seeing only those stiff, expressionless, uniformed figures preserved by photographs in back copies of the
Illustrated London News
, glimpsing no part of his true self beyond the neatly carved letters of his name.

As for my mother, of her there was no record at all, no grave, no memorial of any kind. Fergus, when I questioned him, prevaricated. My mother’s grave, if she had one, was far away—and he did not know where. There were, I was to understand, limits to what even he could tell me. Whether he suggested it or not I cannot remember, but, for some reason, I decided to ask Olivia. I cannot recall how old I was when it happened, but I had followed her into the library, where she often went to look at a painting that hung there.

“Where is my mother’s grave?” I said bluntly, partly intending the question to be a challenge. All hatred is, in time, reciprocated and I had come to hate Olivia as much as she hated me; I did not then appreciate how dangerous an enemy she could be.

She did not answer in words. She turned aside from that great, 12

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high, dark painting and hit me so hard across the face that I nearly fell over. I stood there, clutching the reddening bruise, too shocked by the pain of it to cry, and she stooped over me, her eyes blazing.

“If you ever ask that question again,” she said, “if you ever mention your mother again, I’ll make you suffer.”

The mystery of my mother thenceforth became the grand and secret obsession of my childhood. My father’s death, after all, had a comforting simplicity about it. Every November there was an Armistice Parade in the village to commemorate the sacrifice of Captain the Honourable John Hallows and the many others like him. Though not permitted to join the Brownie troop that took part in the parade, I was allowed to go and watch and could imagine myself marching with all the little girls who, like me, had lost their father. But, at the end of the parade, they went home to their mothers; I could not even remember mine.

Sometimes, though, I thought I could remember her. It was impossible, of course, if what I had been told of her was true, but Olivia had succeeded in making me doubt everything I had not personally experienced, and there was one dim, early memory, seemingly at the very dawn of my recollection, to sustain what I so wanted to believe.

I was standing on the platform at Droxford railway station. It was a hot summer’s day: I could feel the heat of the gravel seeping up through my shoes. A train was standing at the platform, great billows of smoke rising as the engine gathered steam. The man standing beside me, who had been holding my hand, stooped and lifted me up, cradling me in his arms to watch the train pull out. He was stout and white-haired. I remember the rumble of his voice and the brim of his straw hat touching my head as he raised his free hand to wave. And I was waving too, at a woman aboard the train who had wound down the window and was leaning out, waving also and smiling and crying as she did so. She was dressed in blue and held a white handkerchief in her right hand. And the train carried her away. And then I cried too and the stout old man hugged me, the brass buttons on his coat cold against my face.

I recounted the memory to Fergus one day, when we were returning from a mushrooming expedition. When I had finished, I asked him who he thought the old man was.

“Sounds like old Mr. Gladwin,” he replied. “The first Lady

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Powerstock’s father. He lived here . . . till
she
sent him away.” By
she
Fergus always meant Olivia.

“Why did she do that?”

“She’d have had her reasons, I don’t doubt.”

“When did he go?”

“The summer of 1920, when you were three. Back to Yorkshire, so they say. A proper caution, was Mr. Gladwin.”

“Who was the pretty lady, Fergus?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Was she . . . my mother?”

He pulled up and looked down at me with a frown. “That she was not,” he said with deliberate slowness. “Your mother passed away a few days after she had you. You know that. No amount of wanting is going to make you remember her.” “Then . . . who was the pretty lady?”

His frown became less kindly. “I told you: I don’t know. That Mr. Gladwin, he was a close one. Now, look to that napkin or you’ll pitch your breakfast into the lane—and mine with it.”

If the pretty lady wasn’t my mother, who was she? What was old Mr. Gladwin, my great-grandfather, to her? There were no answers within my reach, just the secret hope I went on harbouring that maybe my mother wasn’t really dead at all, just . . . sent away, like old Mr. Gladwin.