Apple Blossom Time (35 page)

Pansy looked down into the drawer. ‘Daddy could never find a pair that suited him.’

Then she began to cry. I held her in my arms and let her cry on until she couldn’t do it any more. When she lifted her head, the right shoulder of my blouse was sodden. Pansy’s skin was blotched and her nose had a drip on the end.

‘I’m not sad,’ she insisted, wiping her nose with a man’s big, white linen handkerchief. ‘It’s just that I miss him so dreadfully. I’m not really sad. Daddy was tired. He’d had enough living. He’d been here long enough. And I know he’s happy now, with Mummy. It’s just selfish to cry.’

And when we’d finished, the vicarage looked as unlived in as a film set for
Gaslight.
The late Victorian furniture was lumpish and unlovely, but gleaming with polish. The rugs had been beaten. The curtains had been brushed. All the traces of Pansy’s past had been burned or carted off. We wandered from room to room.

‘Well, I hope the new man likes it,’ I remarked. ‘And I hope he can stomach Mrs Attwood’s cooking.’

‘He won’t care,’ answered Pansy. ‘Clergymen never do. It’s only their wives who care where they live. It’s funny, but I always used to think that this was my home. Now I realize that it was no different from a farm tied cottage. I never had any right to live here.’

I picked up her suitcase. Pansy took Jonathan by the hand, tucked her father’s huge bible under the other arm and left, without locking the door.

*   *   *

‘Such a pity,’ Kate remarked. ‘I always hoped that Mr Millport would hang on long enough to marry Geoffrey and me.’

‘Kate! That’s an appallingly selfish thing to say.’

‘I know. But it’s true. Someone new won’t be the same at all.’

‘You are getting married, then?’

‘I suppose so. Some day.’

She held out her left hand. On the fourth finger sparkled a diamond solitaire of gorgeously vulgar beauty.

*   *   *

The Belsen trials began in Lüneburg in September. Martin was spared that. His photographs were evidence enough, though other men had to stand in front of a court and testify to what they had seen and heard and done in that nightmare place. Martin was posted to Aldershot, to a holding unit, and expected a posting back to Germany later in the autumn. In the meantime, he came home as often as he could.

We spent hours just walking. He didn’t mind my being with him. He didn’t shun me, as I’d feared he might. We walked. We talked a little. We sat on the grass with our faces turned to the sun. He seemed to need me near. But he never touched me with love.

I ached for him. He was so close and the memory of the night we’d spent together was torment. What you’ve never had, you never miss. How true. But now I knew what I was missing. Martin and I had shared something beautiful and I longed for his body. More than that. I longed for evidence that we still meant something to each other. A look. A word. A touch. Was that too much to hope for?

It was as though we were separated by a glass partition. Martin looked through it and saw me, but I was as unreal as a reflection. It seemed as though he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. I was there and my presence didn’t make any sense to him. He wandered alone on the other side, in a fog of memory. His gaze was focused on his own horizon and I didn’t know where that was.

Martin had seen things and done things that set him apart from day-to-day life. The evidence was in his eyes. He had looked into the pit and the darkness was still there. I could sense his pain – see it, feel it, touch it – but he would not let me share it.

‘Let me carry it with you,’ I would have begged. ‘That’s what love is all about.’

But the words stayed in my head. He didn’t want to hear them.

We must have looked, as we strolled in the early autumn sunshine, with eighteen inches of space between us, like two old friends. If that was what he wanted, it would have to be sufficient for me. I was too proud to complain. No-one who saw us together would have guessed how much I wanted him.

But I had all the time in the world. I could wait for Martin for ever, if I had to.

*   *   *

Princess Augusta’s Own, I discovered, had been amalgamated in the military upheavel of 1924, with the Duke of Clarence’s Loyals, to form a new regiment, Princess Augusta’s Loyals. Then again, in 1937, they had been reformed, with Queen Caroline’s Royal Regiment, to become the Queen’s Loyal Regiment (Augusta’s Own). Good grief – what a ridiculous muddle! Who, after all these changes, could possibly recall one man, more than a quarter of a century ago? The trail was stone cold.

With more hope than faith, I wrote to the regimental headquarters of the Queen’s Loyals, asking for details of my father’s service. The reply, from the regimental secretary, was polite but unhelpful. He confirmed the dates which I had given, and no more. What he had not written lay like a stain across the page.

‘They’re embarrassed, of course,’ Geoffrey said with a snort, when I told him. ‘They don’t want to admit what happened. It was barbaric. Thank God, in this war, doctors showed more sense and senior officers more compassion. At least, I hope they did. Mind if I have a look at the letter?’ He was quiet for a moment as he read it. It didn’t take long. ‘Well, well. J S P Carterton, Major (Retired) – still around, eh? I remember the bugger well. Thick as two short planks. He was a member of the field general court martial that tried your father.’

*   *   *

‘Don’t be daft,’ Martin argued, when I told him. ‘Go and see him? What good would that do?’

‘None, probably. But I’m going.’

‘All the way to Bedfordshire? Good God – what a waste of time. Is your journey really necessary?’ He quoted the propaganda slogan with a wry grin.

‘That’s what Tom said. He thinks I’m looking for a job. Said it would be a waste of time and money, chasing dreams, only end in tears, blah, blah. He actually forbade me to go – can you credit it? He tried to act the heavy father. How ridiculous. He seems to think I’m still ten years old.’

‘I suppose you want me to go with you, damn you.’

‘Of course not. I can manage better on my own. Anyway, Carterton will probably throw me out on my ear.’

‘Then I’d better be around to pick you up.’

I looked for the spark of humour that might once have accompanied those words, but it wasn’t there.

*   *   *

He kept me waiting and that annoyed me. Martin and I had had a pig of a journey. Anyone would think there was still a war on. The sooner Mr Attlee’s government kept its promise to nationalize the railways, the better, if that journey was anything to go by. It certainly couldn’t be any worse.

I was in a fever of impatience to meet Major Carterton, to talk to him, to make at least
some
progress. And he couldn’t be bothered to get back from lunch in time for our appointment. The clerk in the orderly room took one look at my expression and decided that it wouldn’t do to keep me hanging around, so he showed me into the office and made me a cup of sticky army tea to keep me occupied.

I had a good nose round while I was waiting. The cubbyhole of an office that Major Carterton’s relatively humble status as a retired officer allowed him was decorated – practically wallpapered – with regimental pictures. Behind his desk was a print – probably taken from a gigantic and hideous oil painting in the officers’ mess dining room – of some bloody last stand on the North-West Frontier. The attacking Pathans were fiendishly ugly and the last British soldiers, back to back in their broken square, preternaturally calm, considering they were about to be disembowelled. Why do all regimental paintings depict great defeats?

Hung three deep around the remaining walls were photographs of his serving days. The army had been his life and it still was. Afraid to let go, he’d found himself a little retired niche in this military backwater, spending his days doing damn all.

Here was the football team of ’27, the year they’d won the army cup. Only soldiers play football, but there is always an officer in the centre of the pictures. There was the polo team, runners-up to the 9th/12th Lancers. Here the colonel-in-chief, the Princess Royal, presented a new standard. There the officers and sergeants posed outside an ivy-clad building. Year after year. The buildings changed. The faces changed. The images were the same.

There was my father. January 1918. Regimental officers posed outside a château whose walls were pocked by machine-gun fire. Captain now, I see. Dead men’s shoes … He wasn’t the laughing boy who’d tried to feed Tom’s puttees to a dog. Perhaps the formality made him look older. Hat on straight. Immaculately fitting tunic. Polished Sam Browne belt. He was standing towards the back of the group, but I could imagine the boots and breeches. Conibear had kept a miraculous shine on his boots, I had read, but Conibear had been gutted by a shell splinter. Poor devil. I wonder who kept a shine on the boots after that. The hat peak shaded his face, but it wasn’t the shadow that had made the hollows below his eyes and the lines around his mouth.

I read the names printed beneath the picture and counted along the rows, second row, fifth from the left. And there – I looked at the man just coming through the door and then back at the picture – oh, yes, there was Major Carterton, who had sat in judgment on my father.

He was exactly as I’d imagined from Geoffrey’s description. That is, he was completely nondescript. He hadn’t changed all that much from the pictures behind him, either. A little jowlier, not much. Middle height. Thin, sandy hair. Pale eyes. Tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. Regimental tie. It was like talking to a military puppet. I could imagine the Chief of the Imperial General Staff with his hand up the poor man’s vest, making him move.

‘My dear Mrs Kenton, you’ve been kept waiting.’ He said it as though someone else entirely was to blame.

‘Yes,’ I answered shortly.

‘Do sit down.’ He indicated a chair that placed me across the desk from him, like a supplicant. ‘As I understood your letter, you’re enquiring about an – an episode…’

‘Episode? You mean my father’s death?’

He shuffled his bottom on his chair, fiddled with a pencil, straightened his blotter, as though we were discussing some indecency.

‘A regrettable episode … It was – it was a very long time ago.’

‘I know that. It was before I was born. My father never saw me.’

That really made him squirm.

‘I don’t think I’m in any position to help you.’

‘You tried him. You condemned him.’ Damn – I hadn’t meant to be so aggressive. Not at first, anyway, not until I had to be. I’d meant to get him on my side, win him, not alienate him, but, somehow, it hadn’t worked. I couldn’t stand the sight of him.

‘Not alone. You talk as though it was my sole responsibility. I can’t be blamed. I was merely a member of a properly constituted field general court martial. There were no irregularities, let me assure you.’

‘But why? What happened? No-one will tell me why.’

He stood up and, walking over to a glass-fronted cabinet, pulled out a fat, red-bound book. ‘You’ve had a wasted journey, Mrs Kenton. Before you set off, it might have been sensible to have consulted a copy of the
Manual of Military Law.
’ He flicked through. ‘Read this.’

‘“You———, do swear that you will well and truly try the prisoner [or prisoners] before the court according to the evidence,”’ I read, following where his finger pointed, ‘“and that you will duly administer justice according to the Army Act now in force, without partiality, favour, or affection, and you do further swear that you will not divulge the sentence of the court until it is duly confirmed, and you do further swear that you will not, on any account, at any time whatsoever, disclose or discover the vote or opinion of any particular member of this court martial, unless thereunto required in due course of law. So help you GOD.”’

‘Rules of Procedure, 1907, para. 111. That is the oath I swore when the court martial was convened. So you see, Mrs Kenton, there’s really nothing I can tell you.’

‘I
can
read,’ I snapped. ‘There’s nothing here to say that you can’t at least tell me what my father is supposed to have done. There must be papers, written records. Where can I see them?’

‘I think you’ll find that you can’t.’ He thumbed through that hateful book again. ‘Ah, yes, here we are, paragraph 98 – preservation of proceedings…’

I read for myself again. ‘“The proceedings of a court martial (other than a regimental court martial) shall, after promulgation, be forwarded, as circumstances require, to the office of the Judge-Advocate-General in London or India, or to the Admiralty, and there preserved for not less, in the case of a general court martial, than seven years, and in the case of any other court martial, than three years.”’

‘There are no records, Mrs Kenton. They are long gone.’

I could have wept. Or screamed. Or throttled him. Possibly all three. Instead, I picked some imaginary fluff off my skirt, looking down until my trembling lips were under control. ‘I see. So the army wins again.’

Just for a moment, the puppet showed some humanity. ‘I didn’t make the rules. I’m only a simple soldier. I merely followed orders.’

‘That’s an excuse used rather too often these days, don’t you think – in Germany, for example.’

‘It’s all in here.’ He waved the red book. ‘All in here.’

*   *   *

‘What a waste of time,’ I ranted, ‘and money. You were right, Martin. I should have stayed at home.’

‘Not exactly,’ said Martin. ‘While you were banging your head against a brick wall…’

‘Not a wall. A jelly. Every time I hit him, he just wobbled and carried on.’

‘… I was chatting with the clerks in the orderly room. Good lads. They didn’t see any harm in letting me have a look at the regimental history – volumes of it, but I was only interested in a couple of months. Apart from Carterton, the other members of the court are dead. But I’ve got the names of the padre and the medical officer here. Let’s hope they’re still alive.’

The old Martin would have grinned in triumph. Clever old me, he’d have teased, getting more by the back door than you with your frontal assault. And I’d’ve punched his arm and called him a clever clogs.