‘But I met you off the ferry and spoiled your plans.’
‘Not exactly. I didn’t have any plans. Meeting you made me realize how futile my journey was. I still had no idea where to look. When we returned to Meongate, I was no better off.’
We had come to the end of the path. It faded away amongst some gorse bushes where the sloping ground steepened towards the clifftop. We stopped and looked at each other. ‘When I made my own foolish proposal, I now see you had no alternative but to reject it as you did.’
She smiled faintly. ‘None, Tom. None at all. I’m sorry. Shall we go back the way we came?’ We began to retrace our steps. ‘I felt that unless I made the rejection conclusive, you would persist, which could only have hurt both of us. So I told you I was pregnant and left you to jump to the obvious conclusion: that Mompesson was responsible. For me, it was only a foretaste of what everyone would think.
‘But it solved nothing. I was left to keep my appointment with him that evening, with all that it entailed. I had run out of time and hope. So, as a last, desperate throw, I slid a note beneath your door. I went to the observatory and trained the telescope on Mompesson’s window. I hoped that you would go there, that what you would see might make you understand that I was his victim, not his mistress, that it might prompt you to save me from him.’ She glanced at me. ‘But I suppose that’s not how it looked.’
I felt shamed by the faint hope she’d placed in me. ‘For someone as trustworthy as John said I was, it might have been enough. But no, it’s not how it looked. Not to me.’
‘When I heard that Mompesson was dead, I thought I’d gone too far, that I’d driven you to murder for my sake.’
‘Nothing so noble. A drunken night in a barn is all I was equal to.’
‘Then a different suspicion formed in my mind.’
‘That John killed him?’
‘Yes. At first, it seemed absurd, but, after all, who else? Was that his real purpose in coming back – to protect me from Mompesson?’
‘I’m certain he saw Mompesson as a threat.’
‘As I am. When you told me that the observatory had been unlocked, I felt sure it must be so. I had locked it after setting the telescope. There was only one other key, which I’d last seen in John’s possession.’
‘Why should he have gone there?’
‘Because he knew he would be safe there, able to monitor the comings and goings of the house, able to spy on Mompesson. Maybe he saw something that night that finally convinced him Mompesson had to die.’ She paused and, in the space before she began again, I imagined what he might have seen.
‘More than ever, I had to speak to him. And, at last, I guessed where he’d gone. I read his mother’s chapter in the Diocesan Committee Report – and knew it was the connection I’d been looking for. You almost guessed yourself – until Inspector Shapland interrupted us. I’m sorry I had to deceive you in order to make my departure, but I couldn’t afford to explain what I was doing.’
‘I understand that now.’
‘I made my way to the Mermaid Inn. There I met Mr Fletcher. When I told him who I was, that I knew John was alive, hiding somewhere in Portsmouth, he seemed to soften towards me. He told me where John had been living, but warned me that I was too late: John had gone. And so it proved. I left the note in the hope he might yet return.’
‘It doesn’t look as if he will.’
‘Grace is my oldest friend. She is the only person in all the world I could trust with such a secret. And I could no longer bear it alone. So I came to her and she did not disappoint me.’
‘She knows everything?’
‘Everything I know. We have invented a convenient fiction for the ears of her neighbours. It has won me peace, for a while.’
‘And John?’
‘I cannot bring him peace if I cannot find him. and where now can I look?’
‘Where indeed?’ Wherever he’d gone, this time, he’d left no clues, no trail for us to follow. ‘If he did come back to save you from Mompesson, he’s done what he set out to do.’
‘But at what cost?’
Her words hung in the reflective, salt-soaked air. Our steps began to skirt the village church nestled in its hollow behind overgrown stone walls. Its offered age-old absolution struck at me across the centuries. Hernu’s Farm, so long ago, when Hallows had reached, with faltering grasp, towards loyalties and loves that eclipsed the war we were caught in. I’d not known then what promptings he would follow, what battle he was really fighting. And now? How much did he know of all the ways I’d failed him? Meongate – his home and my entrapment – had seen a more certain parting than any distant battlefield.
Leonora turned off the path and went down through the narrow gate into the churchyard. I did not follow as she entered the church; felt, instead, wordlessly excluded from her unanswered thoughts. What had she done, after all, but keep faith with her husband as the Church’s vows required? But they would not understand, no pious congregation would defend, the lengths she’d gone to. Hers could only ever be a secret confessional.
I stood with my back to the porch, gazing past the ancient, crooked gravestones and the brambled hedge towards the sea. What I felt was self-reproach leavened by doubt. I should never have believed what I had of Leonora in her dealings with Mompesson, could never have done had I not known what desires Olivia awakened in me. I had judged another as I would have feared to be judged myself. But the doubt remained: a dark corona was Hallows, as it always had been, from first encounter to last, oblique farewell. I had failed him, in the test I never knew he was setting. What test had he also failed?
‘I think I’d like to go home now.’ I jumped at the words: Leonora had emerged from the church in silence and materialized at my elbow.
‘Yes, of course. Let’s go back.’ We made our way out on to the path. ‘If you’re sure that’s what you want.’
‘What else can I do?’
‘Come back with me to Meongate. I feel I’ve wronged you. If I’d been less suspicious and more trusting, this might have been avoided. Now I’d like to make amends.’
‘Don’t blame yourself, Tom. We’re all accountable. If John felt driven to kill Mompesson, it’s because we left him no choice. But I can’t come back with you, not if I’m to keep John’s secret. And it must be kept, mustn’t it?’
‘I hope it can be.’
‘Tell Lord Powerstock you found me, but not how. I don’t think he’ll quibble with my reasons for remaining here. Since I cannot tell him the truth, he will have to believe the worst of me.’
‘What about Shapland?’
‘Tell him as little as you need to.’
‘He may call you as a witness at the inquest.’
‘He has no reason to. But if he does – so be it.’
‘You realize that the likeliest verdict will be to pin the blame on poor Cheriton?’
‘I do. But what choice do we have?’
‘None.’ I shook my head at the hollowness of the word. There was, as Leonora had said, no choice: no choice of falsehoods once the truth had been suppressed; no choice of roads that would not lead to bitterness and ruin.
Ahead of us, the path widened into a metalled track past the entrance to East Dene. There, walking slowly towards us down the drive, was Grace Fotheringham. She glanced anxiously in our direction. ‘Is all well?’ she called.
‘As well as can be,’ Leonora replied. She looked at me before continuing. ‘I believe Mr Franklin and I have said all there is to be said – and that he is now content to leave.’ I hung back as she moved ahead to meet her friend.
Nobody spoke in the interval that followed, but I sensed in the silence an air of conclusiveness, almost of dismissal. Now that they stood together, I felt excluded by their friendship, become once more the unlooked-for stranger. I walked past them down the lane, then stopped and turned back to face them. ‘Goodbye then,’ I said, and, even as I pronounced the words, I knew it was just that: a final leave-taking. I would ne
ver see Leonora again.
‘Goodbye, Tom,’ she said. The breeze had died. The lane was still, in the unique, mellow, passing stillness of early afternoon. I wondered for an instant how the scene might look to any vaguely curious passer-by. Then Leonora stepped forward and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Go with my blessing,’ she said, so softly I could believe Miss Fotheringham had not heard, nor had been meant to.
I took her hand, awkwardly, uncertain what she might take the gesture to mean. Some hint of the closeness we might have known? Some fellowship with her for sharing John’s secret? What did it mean, after all, that moment now passed when we might have become more to each other than we ever now could? Nothing, beyond a curtain unopened, a corner unturned.
I released her hand. She looked at me gravely, the sad, open greyness of her eyes forever forbidding the tears we might once have shared. There were no words left. I turned and walked away from them, down the broadening lane between the thatched cottages. I didn’t look back until I’d passed the post office and the turning that led to Sea Thrift. And when I did look back, they were but two shapes, blurred by distance and growing strangeness, two symbols standing for all that I still did not understand.
The bell on the post office door rang as a customer emerged and broke the spell: a stout lady, dressed in black, cradling a Pekinese dog in her arms. Banality was all about me, more certain than any shadow. I walked on down the lane and, this time, did not look back. This time, the curtain closed and I turned the corner.
What was I to do? The question wouldn’t leave my head as the little train jolted back across the island, was still with me as I stared from the ferry rail at the seagulls wheeling behind the boat. Now I knew Leonora’s secret, I was as helpless as her, bound to Hallows by love or loyalty but left to guess the role he’d played in all that had happened.
We drew into Portsmouth Harbour past the towering grey flanks of anchored warships and I glimpsed, swaying at its mooring further ahead, Nelson’s Victory, patched and painted remnant of another war in another time. England had expected too much of her soldiers in my war and I no longer knew where my duty lay. Once the ferry had docked, I headed straight for the Mermaid. There was nowhere else to go.
* * *
I was back – sooner than I might have expected – in the room where Fletcher lodged his secrets, with the budgerigar and the geraniums in the window-box. The bureau was open again, the photograph of Miriam unconcealed. Fletcher lit his pipe and poured me a glass of rum. He listened, patient and undismayed, to my account.
‘Do you think you can handle the inquest the way she wants?’ The question was simple and direct, unvarnished by doubt or scruple.
‘Probably, now you’ve got the police off my back.’
‘I haven’t. They’ll have seen you come back here.’
‘But they won’t know where I’ve been and, even if they did, it wouldn’t help them. We couldn’t tell them where Hallows is and they’ve no reason to suspect he’s even alive. We must keep it that way.’
‘For how long?’
‘At least until after the inquest. Then … well, I don’t know. What are you suggesting we do? Turn him in?’
‘No. But you must have asked yourself: Where’s he gone? What’s he doing?’
‘I don’t know.’ This was the true sum of the mystery. Abandoning the war in order to protect Leonora, even if it meant murdering Mompesson: that much I could understand. But what next? To stay hidden for ever was worse than … My gaze shifted to the window, sought its middle distance in which to frame my projection of what he’d done. What had Leonora said? ‘A calmness about him, a detachment.’ It had been no accident. He had planned it all, even to my following him to Meongate. It was his purpose we had served every step of the way. But what was his purpose?
‘I see you’re thinking the same as me.’ Fletcher’s words snatched my attention back from the window. ‘If he killed Mompesson to save Leonora, how can he save himself? And if he can’t, what will that do to her?’
‘He loses every way. We all do. If he returns to her, he will face a charge of desertion, maybe murder too. If he doesn’t, then what was the point of it all?’
‘I don’t believe he will come back, or stay in hiding. Nor do you.’
Fletcher had touched the heart of my suspicion. Suddenly, I felt cold. ‘No. Not really. It is as you say.’
Neither of us spoke. We had arrived at the end of our ponderings. For Hallows, we both felt certain, there was no way back. Whether he died in France, brutally, in the gruesome night of no man’s land, or later, at a time of his choosing, keeping faith with the people he loved, made, in the end, no difference. There, in that back room of the Mermaid Inn, as Fletcher watched me solemnly through his pipesmoke, I guessed how it was for Hallows. Whilst Mompesson was there to threaten us, his covert, secretive life was justified. Now, with Mompesson gone, honour could be found only in death.
Fletcher let me out the back way, into the alley behind the yard. ‘One thing,’ he said, as he unbolted the gate. ‘Since you mentioned his name last night, it’s been bothering me: Inspector Shapland.’
‘What about him?’
‘I know him. He gave evidence at the trial: Machim’s and mine. Nothing crucial. He’d run to earth some of our associates. Dogged, efficient. I’d have thought him retired by now.’
‘Recalled for the duration, I gather.’
Fletcher nodded. ‘Then it fits. As you say, no fool. He’ll remember me.’
‘There’s still nothing for him to go on.’
‘No. But be careful. Don’t come to see me again.’
He meant it, in his guarded, dispassionate way; meant that, whatever secrets we shared, they bestowed no intimacy. Once I’d shaken his hand and he’d closed the gate behind me, our association ended. The past retreated into the shadows of his silence.
NINE
I REACHED DROXFORD as night was falling and booked into the Station Hotel: brick-built, ivy-clad, run-down and empty, some distance from the village and as far from Meongate. An obscure location suited my purpose.
Next morning, the confrontation couldn’t be deferred. I walked up to Meongate through the lanes, remembering my first arrival but a few weeks before, when Charter had met me and bowled me along in the trap. There had been that day a note almost of gaiety. Now it was gone for ever.
And Charter wasn’t there to meet me that morning. Only Fergus, straight-faced as ever. He told me I would find Lord Powerstock in his study.
He didn’t seem surprised to see me. He might, I reflected, have sat there in his chair all the time I’d been away, preparing his look, not of disapproval, but of perpetual disappointment.
‘Have you seen her?’ he asked in a voice bereft of expression. ‘We have received a letter.’
‘I’ve seen her. She is well, but does not wish to return.’
‘So the letter said. And perhaps it is better so.’
‘It will certainly solve some of your problems.’
‘You did not go to the police, then.’
‘No. It wasn’t necessary. I found her without them.’
‘And what do you intend to do now?’
‘I intend to leave this house, Lord Powerstock. Until the inquest, I cannot leave the area. But as soon as I’m able, I will remove myself from your lives.’
‘I think that may be for the best.’ In his reticence, there was no diminution of his bitterness. His beleaguered family pride was about me, like an acrid presence in the air. I had not done as he had wished. But, to have done so, I would have needed to be as blind as he had made himself.
I stood before him a moment longer, teetering on the edge of some further remark, some reference, however fleeting, to where I’d been and what I’d found there of the wife he’d once adored but had somehow failed to know. But it was useless. I could tell by the set lines of his face: he would not admit such knowledge. Without another word, I turned and left the room.
I intended, without further a
do, to collect my belongings and go. But, in the hall, I paused to sift through some letters left on a silver tray to see if any were for me. There were three, but only one looked urgent. It had arrived that morning; a thin War Office envelope. I tore it open.
Marriott, it seemed, had been as good as his word. It was a curt summons to a medical board in Aldershot the following Monday. And, though Marriott might have thought it would come as a blow, he was wrong. For the first time, a return to active service had its attraction.
I pocketed the letter and made for my room. I packed hurriedly, eager to be away now that I knew more than I wanted about those who lived – or had lived – at Meongate. I went into the bathroom to wash before leaving. As I raised my face, dripping, from the basin, I was aware of a presence in the room behind me.
I wheeled round, towelling the soap from my eyes. There was nobody there: I cursed my own nerves. But then a shadow cast by the light from one of the bedroom windows, the window I couldn’t see through the doorway, moved, a dark, shifting patch on the patterned carpet. I caught my breath and stepped forward.
As I did so, Olivia came to meet me. She stood, framed by the doorway, smiling placidly with that hint of a sneer so peculiarly, so perpetually hers. She was wearing a cream dress, full-skirted but close-fitting about the bodice and waist, with her hair let down to her shoulders. She posed, not deigning to disguise her awareness of her own beauty, presented herself to me where the filtered sunlight played on her dark hair, where I could admire, despite myself, the lush maturity of her looks, where I could still, despite everything, be made to feel – and be seen to feel – the physical tug of her attraction.
In Pale Battalions - Retail Page 25
