In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard

it was impossible for me to believe, after all the barren years at Meongate, that I could discover affection—even love—as fortuitously as I had. That night, I looked at myself in my bedroom mirror and thought: No! It cannot be true.
    He sees in me merely an amusing way to pass the weeks he must spend here. I am deluding myself.
    Yet we spent more and more time together, saw each other, os-tensibly by chance, more and more often. He would meet me by the river, strolling before breakfast, or pass me in the lanes and offer me a lift in his jeep. He told me about his family, his early life, his work before the war, his plans for when it ended. Of myself, I said nothing and he asked little, as if he knew I was not yet ready to speak.
    What he could not know was my secret dread that, sooner or later, Olivia would tell him more than he could bear to hear, that she was only tolerating our friendship in order to heighten the pleasure of ending it.
    There was, besides, another end in view: the unspecified but ever-imminent date of the invasion, when Tony’s battalion would embark for France and my hopes pass, with him, across the sea. One Sunday afternoon early in June, when we took a picnic up on to old Winchester Hill and sat on the sunny slope of the down, looking out across the valley towards Meongate, he spoke of our inevitable parting.
    “The balloon will go up in a few days,” he said. “On Tuesday, to be precise.”
    “You mean the invasion?”
    “Yes.”
    It seemed incredible to think of it there, on the sheep-cropped turf, skylarks’ song and heat haze rising about us, our picnic laid out on a chequered tablecloth, the Hampshire countryside nestling below.
    “I could be shot for telling you as much.”
    “Then why are you telling me?”
     

I N P A L E B A T T A L I O N S
    41
    “Because I don’t want to creep away like a thief in the night. As a matter of fact, I don’t want to leave at all.”
    “It was bound to happen.”
    “The men are restless—keen to get it over with. But I wish waiting here could last all summer.”
    “So do I.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. You’ve made me happier than I could ever have imagined.
    And now it’s goodbye.”
    “But not for good. I intend to return.”
    “You don’t have to say that.”
    “I mean it. I intend to return—and ask you to marry me.”
    “What?”
    He smiled. “I think you heard me.”
    It was a dream of something I yearned for but feared could never be mine: the prosaic bliss of loving companionship. It was the happiness I had briefly known in those weeks projected into a future I had believed forever denied me. All these things he offered me—and all these things I still suspected Olivia could snatch away.
    “Why are you crying?”
    “Because what you promise me—what I so dearly want—can never be.”
    “Why not?”
    “There’s so much about me you don’t know.”
    “There’s nothing I could learn about you that would change my mind.”
    “Isn’t there? Isn’t there really?”
    “No, Leonora, there isn’t. All you have to do is trust me. All you have to do is wait for me to return—and accept me when I do.”
    So trust him I did, for me a more novel experience even than love. Two days later, on Tuesday, 6th June 1944, the villagers of Droxford awoke to find the trucks that had clogged their lanes and the troops that had camped in their fields vanished. Since hearing them roll down the drive at Meongate just before midnight, I had sat awake in my room, confronting the strange, restored silence of Tony’s absence. Only six weeks before, I could never have imagined any alteration to the sealed life Olivia had forced me to lead. Nor had it altered—save in the hope I had vested in him, save in the trust he had inspired in me.
     
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R O B E R T G O D D A R D
    “He’s gone then,” said Olivia over breakfast.
    “What do you mean, he’s gone?” I replied. “They’ve all gone.”
    “You know what I mean.” There was sudden