Read Online In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard - Free Book Online

Tony. The answer is yes. Let’s begin our future—tomorrow.”
    Even now, I can hardly believe the speed and extent of the transformation the following days brought. Tony’s sister Rosemary welcomed me to her home and family with the kind of natural, understated warmth I’d never previously encountered. She insisted 46

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    that the wedding be delayed by a few days so that she could arrange some sort of reception and bustled me out to a shop she knew to buy a dress. It seemed she had foreseen her brother’s marriage longer than he had himself and had hoarded ration coupons for the purpose.
    Thanks to Rosemary, I was able to embark upon married life in a state of bemused, unthinking rapture. Nor did the changes stop there. Tony’s best man, Jimmy Dare, an army friend, offered him a managerial job at his father’s clothing factory in Wells in lieu of a present and, within the week, we were house-hunting there. By the time I next saw Olivia, we had bought the house in Ash Lane where you were to be born.
    We had returned to Meongate to collect the remainder of my belongings. Already, I felt something of a stranger there, unable to imagine, now that there was so much more in my life, that it had once been bounded by the walls of that house. To compound the sensation, Olivia had hired a live-in nurse, a Miss Buss, who received us coldly and left me in no doubt that she would brook no interference in her management of affairs.
    After we’d loaded the car, I went back to bid Olivia farewell. I found her in the conservatory, reclining behind dark glasses, seemingly indifferent to our visit.
    “I’m going now,” I said.
    She did not reply.
    “I just want to say . . . how grateful I am.”
    She removed the dark glasses and looked at me quizzically.
    “What have you to be grateful for?”
    “You could have tried to stop me. You could have tried to make Tony think—”
    “Think what?”
    “I’m just grateful you didn’t. That’s all.”
    “You needn’t be.” She slid the dark glasses back onto her nose, as if to deny me any glimmer of insight into her unfathomable act of charity. I was grateful, but also suspicious, and she rewarded neither impulse.
    “Miss Buss seems very efficient.”
    Again, there was no response.
    “Well . . . Goodbye then.”
    Once more, no response. This, her implacably shielded gaze in

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    47
    formed me, was the end of my servitude, but not an end I was to be allowed to relish. I walked slowly out of the conservatory and stepped free of the power by which she had held me, but the moment of my release was tinged with doubt. I was free, but no nearer understanding why.
    Later, I began to think that Olivia might not have been as charitable as I’d supposed. By saying nothing, she had sown a secret between Tony and me. Perhaps she realized at the outset that its revelation would not prevent our marriage. Or perhaps she sensed that a secret between us would grow more threatening, not less, with the passage of time. Either way, I had been as prepared as I could be to tell Tony everything that had happened but, thanks to Olivia, had not needed to. I would never be as prepared again.
     

four
    Ronald’s birth in 1948 set the seal on our marriage and gave Tony the son he so greatly desired. Jimmy Dare’s father offered him a partnership to celebrate the event. For my own part, your birth in 1952 somehow meant more, simply because you were a daughter to whom I could be the kind of mother I had lacked myself. It was then, I suppose, that I finally, if unconsciously, decided to discard my past, not merely to forget it but to consign it to non-existence. In the world that Tony had made for me, doing so seemed not just possible but inevitable.
    Olivia remained at Meongate. I did not visit her, nor she me.
    Periodically, Tony would go down to check that the house was in reasonable order. That was our only contact—and that was how I wanted