In Pale Battalions (30 page)

“You and she became friends?”

“Yes. Let’s say that. We became friends. At first, I thought she was just another titled lady slumming it. But after they pushed Dolling out, she changed. She began to understand what I’d known all along: that there were plenty of people who wanted Portsmouth to stay as it was. Her own husband, for instance. He was on the board of Brickwood’s, the brewery that owns the Mermaid. Still is.

Ironical, don’t you think?”

“Did he know you were acquainted with his wife?”

“Not till I was arrested. Besides, I wasn’t really, not at first, not for a long time. But, in the end, before the end . . . you could say I loved her.”

He stopped speaking. Through the din behind us of laughter and smashing glass, his silence echoed down the desolate years. He had loved her. And I did not doubt that she had loved him too.

“I last saw her a few hours before the Mermaid meeting in November 1904. She warned me it was a mistake. She didn’t trust Machim. She thought him too much the unfeeling revolutionary.

And she didn’t think the authorities would let us get away with it.

She was right on both counts. I should have listened to her. I wish I could listen to her now.

“She wrote to me in prison, of course. But Powerstock wouldn’t let her visit me. Besides, she was ill by then, though I didn’t know it.

Smallpox—picked up in some stinking tenement, working to help people who weren’t even grateful. Such a waste. A waste of a life.

Rather like my own, I suppose. Her father wrote to me telling me she was dead. Otherwise, I might never have known.” He broke off, seemed, with a physical effort, to wrench his thoughts back to the present. “But you want to know about Willis.” “Yes. I do.”

“Franklin! Christ, what are you doing here?—in mufti too.” A figure blundered into my chair and leant unsteadily over me: khaki greatcoat, glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, drunken cast to the face, lock of hair tumbling over his forehead. I struggled for 200

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recognition. “Thought you’d bought it.” He slumped down in an empty chair beside us and slammed his glass onto the table. “Who’s your chum?”

Now, at last, I recognized him. It was Marriott, a platoon commander when I first joined the regiment in France, invalided home before Loos, one of those shallow, arrogant young men whom the war seemed unable to touch, with a resilience founded on lack of thought. I made some faltering introductions, he and Fletcher eyeing each other suspiciously.

“I’m in barracks down the road,” Marriott said, visibly excluding Fletcher from the remark. “I didn’t know you were in town.”

“I’m not—officially. I’m still convalescing: came home in July with a shoulder wound.”

“Bad luck. Can’t wait to get back, I’ll bet.”

“Is that what you’re doing—going back?”

“Yes and no. Bit of a swine, actually. I’d like to be back in the thick of it, of course, but the powers that be have other ideas.” He tweaked back the lapel of his greatcoat to display a green gorget-patch on the tunic beneath. It was the tab worn by staff intelligence officers. I winced inwardly at the thought of Marriott having a hand in strategy, but clearly he was untroubled by such reservations. “Experience is what they need at GHQ these days, I suppose.” I nodded sagely. “Reckon you’ll be fit soon?”

“I should think so.”

“I could have a word with the MO if you like. We can’t afford to have fellows like you sitting things out. Not now we’ve broken through.”

Fletcher interrupted. “What do you mean, Captain—‘broken through’?”

Marriott turned to him with a patronizing smile. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

Fletcher’s mouth was set in a sullen line. “I do, yes. But do you?”

Marriott too was becoming nettled. “What did you say your occupation is?”

“I wait—for the country to come to its senses and realize the sacrifice of thousands of lives isn’t worth a politically fraudulent objective. By which I mean what you would call victory.”

Marriott looked as though he would choke. He glared at me as

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if I were responsible for what Fletcher had said. “You’re mixing in strange company, Franklin. What’s this fellow to you?”

“A friend.” The words came almost unbidden, but easily, as if they were waiting to be spoken, waiting to test me by what they implied.

“You should choose your friends more carefully.” He thought for a moment, whilst Fletcher regarded him calmly. “But then you always did have some unsound acquaintances.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You hung around with Hallows a lot, as I remember. A disgrace to the regiment, with all his defeatist talk. Look what happened to him. There’s a lesson to be learned . . .” He had been raising his glass to drink when Fletcher leant across the table and seized his forearm.

“If there’s a lesson to be learned, Captain, it’ll be wasted on a fool like you.” The glass fell back onto the table with a clatter and nearly toppled over. Suddenly, there was another man standing beside me: a young army officer, stockily built, with an earnest look.

“Is everything all right, Guy?” he said to Marriott.

Fletcher released Marriott’s arm and rose awkwardly from his seat. “Everything’s fine,” he muttered. Then he seized his stick, brushed past the man and headed for the door.

I made to follow him, but Marriott rose abruptly and blocked my path. With Fletcher’s departure, he seemed to have recovered his confidence. “What the devil are you doing drinking with a blighter like that, Franklin? The man’s some sort of pacifist.” “Is that really any of your business?”

“Yes, it damn well is. He could be a German spy for all I know.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’ve a good mind to fetch the police.”

Marriott’s friend came to my rescue. “Forget it, Guy. He was probably just squiffy. Come and have another drink.”

With a reluctance that was mostly show, Marriott brushed at his sleeve, picked up his glass and moved out of my path. “All right. But I won’t forget this, Franklin. I think I will have a word with the MO

about you.”

“You do that.” I paid him no more heed. I hurried to the door, was momentarily blocked by an incoming drunken trio, then gained the street. I looked up and down, but there was no sign of 202

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Fletcher. Unless—yes, there he was, standing by a lamp-post back the way we’d come. He saw me, then moved on, not waiting for me to catch up, and, before I could, he crossed the next street and turned down a side-alley.

I had no need to worry; he didn’t mean to lose me. The alley led between two warehouses and, at its end, I could see a narrow wharf giving on to a reach of the harbour. There, reclining against a bol-lard and gazing out at the calm water, I found him. The night was windless but still wet, the rain turned to gathering mist. It was quiet on the wharf, with only the wailing sirens of distant craft in the harbour to break the silence. He looked up at the sound of my approach and nodded in acknowledgement.

“Why make a scene like that?” I asked. “There was no need.”

“There was every need. His kind sicken me.”

“Aren’t I his kind?”

“No more than Willis.”

“Willis?” I remembered then what the boy in Copenhagen Yard had said. “Is Willis in the Army too?”

“He’s a deserter.”

Then I thought I understood. “So you hired those rooms to shelter him. Hence all the secrecy. But why? What is he to you?”

“I felt I owed it to him.”

“And how did he come to be acquainted with Leonora? The Powerstocks know nothing of him.”

“Don’t you understand yet, Franklin? Willis was in your regiment.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“Yes you have. By his real name. Hallows. Captain the Honourable John Hallows.”

I stared at him, not in disbelief but in awe of my own reaction.

Hallows’s face in the cheval-glass in Olivia’s bedroom was there, calmly watching me, at the edge of the waters that lapped in lazy mockery about the wharf. He was not dead. Somewhere, he still lived and breathed and kept his counsel. And somewhere too my sense of loss was stung by something worse: if he lived, he could not be the man I thought I knew. If he lived, he was diminished, and I with him.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” Fletcher continued. “I don’t think I

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would have told anyone else. I wish it had been someone like Marriott who came looking instead of you.”

“Hallows is alive.” I could only voice the thought, inadequate, shallow, awesome as it was.

“Yes,” said Fletcher. “Hallows is alive. Dead to his family, his country, his regiment. Yet stubbornly, inconveniently, alive.”

“But . . . how?”

“That I can’t tell you. He came to me in June and I agreed to shelter him under a false name in those rooms I rented on his behalf. He said that he had deserted, but was presumed dead; that he just wanted time to think, to be alone. I gave it to him. It didn’t seem much.” “Why did he come to you?”

Fletcher smiled. “Of all people, you mean? That’s the strange thing. He was still at school when Miriam died and I’d have thought he knew nothing of me. But it seems she confided in him where she couldn’t confide in her husband. It was a secret he intended to keep for ever—would have done, but for the war and whatever drove him to cut and run. Alone and frightened in the country that had once been his home, I suppose he turned to the only other . . . exile . . . he knew, or knew of. He must have reckoned that, for his mother’s sake, I wouldn’t turn him away, must have judged by what she told him of me that I wouldn’t hold desertion in the face of this war against him. And he was right. I think he was surprised to find me still alive, still living at the Mermaid, still waiting for him.” “Waiting?”

“Yes. When he walked in from nowhere, when he explained who he was, when he confessed with relief what had brought him to me, I realized that I’d been waiting for him ever since Miriam died. For eleven years I’d waited for some message from her. Then, suddenly, her messenger was standing in front of me.” I walked to the edge of the wharf, moving slowly to stem somehow the flood of consequences that Fletcher’s words had released.

“Leonora has known this all along. She is pregnant by her own husband, but her husband is meant to be dead. How did he contact her without the rest of his family knowing?”

Fletcher’s reply came from behind me as I gazed out across the 204

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gloomy, turbid water. “I don’t know. He claimed nobody but me knew he was alive. Had I thought otherwise, I’d have been more anxious. As it was, I calculated that nobody would be looking for a dead man. Even so, Copenhagen Yard was only a temporary berth. I advised him to leave Portsmouth, head north, lose himself in some big city. He was too near home here for peace of mind—his or mine. Now I think he wanted it that way. He told me the war was too awful to bear, and that was easy to believe, but now I think there was more to it than that. There was some purpose to his flight beyond a horror of war.” Swiftly, I was discerning what that purpose might have been.

“When did you last see him?”

“Friday the fifteenth. I went round there once a week to check how he was. I advised him again to leave Portsmouth. He said that he would but I didn’t believe him. Last Friday, when I went, he wasn’t there. It was unusual. He never went out during the day. But I didn’t think too much of it until I read in the evening paper on Saturday about the murder at Meongate.” So now we had come to it. “You think Hallows did it?”

“All I know is that a man was murdered at Meongate and Hallows disappeared. Make of that what you will.”

“If the police knew Hallows was alive, they would suspect him.

He could well have had reason to kill Mompesson. And . . . there are other things.”

“Yesterday, Hallows’s wife came to see me. I had no idea she knew of me, far less that Hallows had been in touch with her. I linked her anxiety with the murder. I told her where she might be able to find her husband. But we know now that she was too late.

And we also know why she was so anxious to contact him. Perhaps she’d not told him she was pregnant. Perhaps . . .”

I turned back to face him. “Where did she go? Where can I find her?”

“She said she was hoping to stay with a friend on the Isle of Wight—a schoolteacher there. I have the address. You’re welcome to it. Maybe you know why she wasn’t going back to Meongate.”

“I think I do. She would have been forced to name the father of her child. And she could not give that name if she was to keep his secret.”

He pushed himself upright and moved closer. “I didn’t know I

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was sharing a secret. What I did wasn’t for Hallows, of course, or his wife. It was for . . . someone else.”

“For Miriam?”

“For her sake, for her secret, I’d have killed you in that alley.”

“What stopped you?”

“She did. She wouldn’t have wanted that. No secret can be kept for ever. That’s why you found me, in my buried life. That’s why you’ll find Hallows. Not because of a murder. Nor because you’ll know where to look. But because, eventually, he won’t want to stay hidden. There’s no comfort in hiding, my friend. Nor much in revelation. But, at least, there’s the honesty of being in the open, of seeing the enemy, of looking him in the eye, squarely, without flinching.” “Who is the enemy?”

“I wish I knew. For a while, I thought you were. But now I see you’re just another victim like me. Like Hallows.”

Fellow victims. That was our shabby fellowship, our share of whatever Hallows’s fate was. We walked in silence back to the Mermaid. Too much had been said for further speech. And, as we went, I trawled my memory of all that had happened for some clue to explain it. Hallows’s papers had been found on a corpse in no man’s land. Had he, then, planned his escape? If so, why had he encouraged me to go to Meongate after his death? What thoughts ran through his head as he lay on the truckle-bed in Copenhagen Yard?