In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  As I crossed the threshold, a reflection of the room behind me slid across my gaze in the cheval-glass by the window. It was no more than a movement, no more than a passing shape, in the mirror’s image, but yet wrong, at odds with what it should have been. I stopped in my tracks, watched for the split-second it took to resolve into a clear, discordant vision. The door from the passage – which I had certainly closed – stood open. And in its portal, framed and stern and staring straight at me, was Hallows. Only a flash, only a snapshot, of what might have been. Yet there he was. Captain the Honourable John Hallows, my dear friend, my forever absent host, stood watching me, expressionless but all-seeing.

  I cried out and wheeled round. There was nothing. There was nobody. The door was closed – or closing. Who could say the handle was not still faintly stirring? Not I. Not then. I’d dreamed vividly and violently enough of the war to know what tricks the mind could play, yet it had seemed, however momentary, a dreadful certainty that he was watching me and seeing what I was afraid to confront in myself.

  I raced across the outer room and flung the door open. There was nobody there, no trace or sound in the passage that might have been a person. I closed the door and leant against it, feeling my heart pound and sweat start out on my forehead. The vision had told me what my reaction confirmed: in the house that had once been his home, I was Hallows’ friend beyond any other tie. For me to give into the senses’ snares of that treacherous place was to betray him as well as myself.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Olivia came out of the bedroom behind me, her face as hard as her voice, sternly fastening a hastily gathered robe around her waist.

  ‘I can’t …’ I looked towards her but could not continue. The anger in her expression was moving swiftly towards contempt. She had seen nothing – beyond a sudden loss of nerve. I tried again. ‘I can’t … I can’t stay.’

  There was nothing to do but flee. I turned away from her withering look, opened the door and ran blindly down the passage.

  I needed a drink – badly. I went down to the drawing room and poured myself a large Scotch. It didn’t help much. Nor did a walk in the garden. The clouds were bunching and darkening again, presaging another stormy night. When I saw Cheriton heading towards me across the park, it made up my mind to return to the house.

  I entered by the conservatory, hoping to see nobody, but, as I made my way along the corridor past the billiards room, Thorley hailed me through the open door.

  ‘Fancy a frame, Franklin?’ he asked. He was pacing around the table, pointing balls aimlessly.

  I stepped inside the room. ‘Sorry. Can’t stop.’

  He chuckled grimly. ‘Know what you mean.’ He missed a corner pocket. ‘Know just what you mean.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He stooped over the cue again, then abruptly straightened up. ‘Hear that?’

  I listened. Faintly, through the high, blind-hung windows of the room, came the noise of a car engine. I knew at once it was Mompesson.

  Thorley smiled and slammed the cue into the rack on the wall. ‘It’s our American friend. Time I made myself scarce.’ He paused as he reached where I was standing by the door. ‘I don’t suppose … No. Forget it.’ He walked quickly out.

  I trailed after him and made for the back stairs. I had no wish to meet Mompesson. Already, I could hear a door slamming somewhere and Lady Powerstock trilling a greeting. Less than an hour before, she’d been … But my mind staved off the thought. What was the good of it? She’d taken from me my self-respect, but not yet all my honour.

  I kept to my room till seven o’clock, wondering whether to obey Leonora’s note or just quit that benighted house. The thought was a delusion: I knew all along that I would stay long enough to take up the veiled offer of a kind of truth. When the clock struck seven, the key was in my hand.

  I made my way to the wing of the house, confident in my assumption that Olivia would be downstairs, entertaining Mompesson over aperitifs; the coast was clear. I don’t know what I expected to find in the observatory. I think I had no idea. I think speculation had been erased by experience. Perhaps I hoped against hope that Leonora would have left evidence to exonerate herself; even, in some absurd way, to exonerate me.

  I climbed the stairs in silence, reached the door and slid the key into the lock. And the door creaked slowly open on its hinges: it wasn’t locked at all.

  Three steps led up to the observatory proper: a tall, narrow, hexagonal room with full-length windows beneath the copper roof that supported the weather-vane. An elegant brass telescope stood in the centre by a low stool. Otherwise, there was a cupboard, a small square table and a battered armchair: nothing beyond these sparse furnishings and scattered charts and pencil stubs to offset the impression of neglect that hung in the musty air. Not that the contents were what made the place, so much as the panorama it commanded, riding like a ship’s look-out on the back of the house facing the surrounding fields and hills while the garden and grounds stretched themselves out beneath. Away to the west the setting sun was obscured by banks of cloud. Nearer to hand, I could look across between slender chimneys to rows of windows along the back of the house or down into the garden to see Cheriton still wandering the lawns amidst strewn leaves and rose blossom; the wind twitched at his greatcoat collar and rattled the glass in the observatory window. At night, it would have been a fine cockpit for viewing the stars. Now, at twilight, it was ideal only for studying Meongate. And that – I began to think – was why Leonora had named such a time.

  I pondered her note. ‘If you wish to understand what is happening in this house …’ Where was understanding to be found in an abandoned observatory? It seemed to make no sense.

  Then I looked at the telescope. Strangely, the glass was not capped. Stranger still, it was not trained on the sky, but angled down towards the house itself. I touched the shaft: it had been locked in position.

  I leant forward and looked through the eyepiece. Sure enough, the telescope had been focused – and then locked – on one of the windows at the rear of the house on the upper floor. I peered closer.

  It was Mompesson’s room. He stood by the window, in a dark dressing gown, smoking a cigarette and gazing out at the garden, for all the world like a man relaxing after a bath. This, I told myself, could not be all I had been brought there to see.

  It wasn’t. He looked around suddenly and seemed to say something, either to somebody else in the room I couldn’t see or to somebody who had knocked at the door. Then he turned back and ground out his cigarette in an ashtray on the windowsill: the gesture seemed exaggerated, somehow symbolic, as if for the benefit of another.

  He propped himself against the sill and looked back into the room. I could see his lips moving, but still there was no glimpse of his interlocutor. The angle of the view meant I could only see about a quarter of the room; again, I questioned what the telescope had been trained on. Why Mompesson’s window? Elaborate proof of Lady Powerstock’s infidelity? If so, it was wasted on me, and, besides, Mompesson might at any moment join his companion in the obscured remainder of the room. The likelihood was that I would soon be looking at an unattended window.

  As if to confirm this would be so, Mompesson pushed himself off from the sill and walked towards the centre of the room. But his companion came to meet him before he had gone far – and it wasn’t Lady Powerstock. Leonora, dressed for dinner in a black evening gown, came into my view. She had known precisely when I should go to the observatory because she had planned what it was that I would see there. Mompesson paused by her right shoulder and took her arm as if to lead her elsewhere, but she stayed where she was and looked directly up towards me. She could not see me, of course, but she knew that I was there. And in her face I could imagine I read the message: ‘Now you have your answer.’

  Mompesson jerked at her arm – painfully, to judge by her expression – yet still she did not move. He turned and spoke to her and she replied without looking at him. Her gaze was
still to the window, angled fixedly towards me.

  Mompesson stood behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders with no sign of gentleness. Again, there was an exchange of words. Then he began to unbutton the back of her dress, slowly, with an air of leisure, almost of familiarity. When he’d finished, he tugged the garment free at either shoulder. Leonora stood still and expressionless as it fell in folds about her feet, yet her gaze remained fixed in my direction.

  What followed was frightening in its very in evitability, in its involvement of me – a mere observer – as a kind of participant. Because I knew that Leonora must know I was watching, because I sensed that between her and Mompesson there was nothing beyond a bizarre, carnal obligation; above all because I did not even try to intervene, I felt as defiled by my own inaction as by what I witnessed.

  Leonora stood and waited – and calmly watched me – as Mompesson undressed her, freeing each garment with measured deliberation, savouring each parting of fabric from flesh. When he had finished – when Leonora stood naked before him and before me – the mystery of her mind was intact, for she had neither consented nor resisted, but in her body no mystery remained. In so slender a woman, the fullness of the breasts and stomach could not be mistaken: it seemed, somehow, to heighten the obscenity of her lingering exposure.

  I could not stop myself watching, for what I saw was horrible and appalling, but something worse as well. In Leonora’s implacable gaze there was a hint of an accusation I could not entirely refute: that some part of me enjoyed what I was seeing.

  Then Mompesson moved out of my field of vision and, for the first time, Leonora released me from her look. She stepped clear of her discarded clothing and turned, with her back to me, in the direction that Mompesson had gone. In that instant, he reappeared, walking slowly towards her and smiling as he did so. In his left hand he held a leather strop. As I watched, some tremor ran through Leonora’s body.

  There was a noise behind me. I jerked back from the telescope and swung round. But there was nobody there. The door was closed as I had left it: I was alone save for my guilt, my fear that, more than ever, simply by spying and evading, I was implicated in the perversion and paranoia of that house. I turned back to the telescope. What would I see if I looked through the lens again? I closed my eyes and clenched my fists, determined not to look. In my mind, I still saw Mompesson swinging the strop, still saw the quivering curves of Leonora’s body as she waited. And then my resolve gave way. I had to know. I stooped and put my eye to the telescope again.

  They had gone. There was the window, framed in the lens, and part of the room beyond. But it was empty. Mompesson and Leonora had moved out of sight, leaving only a bundle of clothing on the floor to prove I had not imagined it all. I watched, in growing torment, but they did not return. Was this – I wondered – Leonora’s final reproof of me: to show me the distasteful prelude but deny me the unthinkable climax?

  From such thoughts I could only retreat. I blundered down the short flight of steps to the door, wrenched it open and hurled myself down the stairs. Once again, I could only flee.

  But not far. At the foot of the stairs, as I wheeled into the passage, stood Lady Powerstock. Grave and refined as I knew her not to be, decadently dignified in a low-cut evening dress and a necklace that glittered like her metallic smile.

  ‘Running again, Lieutenant Franklin?’

  I had lost all caution before the need to strike back at her. ‘Who wouldn’t run – from the depravity of this house?’

  ‘Are you sure you aren’t just hiding your own inadequacy in this tedious moralizing?’

  ‘I don’t understand you. I don’t understand any of you. Are you two happy to share that man – for God’s sake, like some hired stallion?’

  She frowned. ‘Which … two … do you mean?’

  ‘I suppose you’re too far gone to care. But why drag Leonora down with you?’

  ‘Leonora?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know.’

  Her eyes flared. ‘Know what?’

  ‘This is pointless.’ I pushed past her. ‘I’ll be leaving in the morning. I’ll be relieved to go.’

  ‘Nobody will try to stop you. We don’t want you here.’

  I walked on steadily, exerting myself to keep a seemly pace. When I turned the corner on to the landing, I felt the sudden relief of no longer having her eyes on me. I wanted nothing so much as to be away from her and her house. That, I thought, would be enough.

  I struck out down the drive as dusk began to deepen into darkness, leaving behind the lights of the house and hurrying away past the swaying, wind-stirred elms, glad to be out where the cold air with its hint of rain lanced away the worst of my humiliation.

  Only the wind, sighing in the leaves and branches, and one early, distant owl broke the silence that lay behind the determined trudge of my feet in the lane. Now the lights of Meongate had passed from view. Now, for a while, I was safe.

  By the time I reached Droxford, the long way round by the road, it was quite dark, but there were lanterns hung in the windows of the White Horse Inn and cheery voices within to offer me the solace I’d hoped for.

  I’d been in a couple of times during my stay, so received a passably warm welcome, ordered a jug of ale and retreated to a quiet alcove table, intending to drink myself into much-needed oblivion. But I was hailed from a chair by the fire. It was Thorley. He walked unsteadily across to join me, evidently several drinks the worse already.

  ‘Couldn’t face it, like me, I suppose,’ he slurred.

  ‘Face what?’

  ‘Come clean, old man. Has he got you by the short and curlies as well?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  He gulped down some of his drink: I smelt whisky. ‘I mean the bloody Yank. Mompesson.’ He was talking too loudly – a wizened old countryman by the bar sucked on his clay pipe and shot us a piercing look. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To keep out of his way.’

  I leant across the table towards him. ‘Keep your voice down, Major. You’re drunk.’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody drunk. I intend to get drunker still. Who wouldn’t? I thought this was a safe berth. Then Mompesson, with that syrupy, serpentine smile of his, pops up and gets me gambling for stakes I can’t afford. Now he wants to cash in my IOUs.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Not as sorry as me.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’m pushing for a medical board. At least if I’m back on active service, I’m out of his reach.’

  ‘That seems rather drastic.’

  ‘It’s what he’s driven me to. That’s why I tried to touch you for a loan.’

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t help.’

  ‘Never mind.’ He paused. ‘What’s he got on you?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t like him, that’s all.’

  ‘Have it your way.’

  And I did. Sober as I was, or drunk as I later became, I had no intention of telling Thorley what I was reluctant to tell myself: that the Powerstocks had made a fool of me and possibly Hallows as well. Now all I wanted was to be rid of them. But, in the meantime, trading drinks with Thorley didn’t seem so bad. None of what had happened had been his fault: both of us had had our weaknesses exploited. I was, I realized, no better than him, however objectionable I’d previously found him. we’d both been washed there by the tides of a war we were powerless to stop: it seemed almost a refuge to us. There are times – and that was one – when the world can seem dreadfully, unbearably unfair. If we’d been born twenty years earlier – or later – our nerves, our characters, our very lives would not have been called into question. Cometh the hour, cometh the men. But what about those who don’t measure up?

  So, in the false camaraderie of a drunken evening, swinging from mewling self-pity to coruscating contempt for ourselves and the world in general, Thorley and I helped each other through a few intoxicated hours, slurring and forgetting all the truths we’d rather not ha
ve known. Eventually, he fell asleep in the settle opposite me and I was left to drink on alone. Soon, I knew, the landlord would require us to leave and I would have to help Thorley back up the lanes to Meongate.

  It didn’t turn out as I’d expected. I remember looking at the clock over the bar around ten and glancing across at Thorley, who was too far gone to be stirred, but what happened next, in what order, at what time, waking or dreaming, I can’t exactly say. Even now, I’m none too sure how much of it took place and how much I imagined. A drunken fool is a poor witness. But, for what it’s worth, this is how it seemed.

  I decided to strike out for Meongate alone, before I could be asked to take Thorley with me. I went out the back way, into the yard behind the inn, where some horses were whinnying gently in the stable. The cold night air failed to clear my head. My legs felt unsteady and the world refused to stop whirling before my eyes. I stumbled to a corner of the yard and vomited. That seemed to help. As I turned round, intending to make for the gate on to the road, I saw somebody – a dark, swimming shape – move across the yard towards me, from the direction of the stable. I tried to hurry ahead in order to avoid them.

  I didn’t make it back to Meongate that night. I suppose there never was much chance that I would. I should have stayed at the inn and taken a room. But I didn’t. Instead, sleep found me elsewhere and dreams whirled after me with all the giddy force that closed eyes could not withstand.

  A cold drop of rain on the cheek roused me. I was awake instantly, with aching head and limbs, looking out from a bed of hay at the washed grey dawn of a September day. I had spent the night in a hay-filled barn, oblivious to all until the rain now sweeping across the fields had penetrated the leaking roof.

  I struggled up and staggered outside. The barn was in the corner of a field, on the other side of which a gate gave on to the lane. By the fold of the land, I knew I wasn’t far from Meongate, but I had no memory of getting even that close. I thanked the instincts of a drunken man and started across the field towards the gate. It had been a rough night, but I took comfort from the thought that I had only to collect my belongings from Meongate and I could be out of their clutches for good. That early, I judged there would be nobody about to see me come and go. The thought quickened my pace.