In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard Page A

vehemence in her tone. “You surely didn’t suppose I was ignorant of your dalliance with the brave captain?”
    So she had known all along. I replaced my cup in its saucer with deliberate precision and said nothing.
    “What did he tell you? That he would come back for you? He won’t. You may be sure of that. Whether to a German bullet or a French whore, it makes no difference: you’ve lost him.”
    Her words hurt me but did not sway me. I would not let her see how desperately I wanted to believe in him. Still I said nothing.
    “Even if he did return, it wouldn’t be for long, because then he’d have to be told the truth about you. So you see: you lose him either way.”
    Then my hope betrayed me. “How do you know I haven’t told him the truth already?”
    She rose from the table and walked to the window, then looked back at me, a cryptic smile playing at the edges of her mouth. I returned her gaze with as much composure as I could muster. Neither of us spoke. There was no need for words. In that house, between Olivia and me, silence had always been the stage for our bitterest encounters. It spoke loudly enough to me of her contempt and to her, no doubt, of my defiance.
    In the months that followed, Tony’s letters, arriving sporadi-cally care of the village post office, became my most precious possessions, to be cherished and preserved, read and re-read until they threatened to fall apart at the folds, pulled from their hiding place and scanned whenever confidence threatened to desert me. They told me what Olivia sometimes made me doubt: that he loved me and would, one day, come to claim me.
    What his letters did not tell me was whether he was in any danger. As to that, I had only the newspapers to guide me and the map Mr. Wilsmer put in his shop window to chart the progress of the invasion. He must have wondered why I stared so often and so lengthily at the coloured pins he stuck in it and can have had no idea that I was simply trying to guess which pin was Tony’s regiment.
    As time passed and the war ground on, my anxiety faded. There was a sense in which, subconsciously, I did not want Tony to return,
     

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    a sense in which the hope sustainable in his absence was preferable to the moment, however it arrived, when he learned the truth about me. The uneventful lapse of days at Meongate seemed strangely bearable now that I no longer thought I would remain there for ever.
    Another spring came, but, with it, no battalion to camp in the orchard. The war in Europe ended. The danger was past but the waiting continued. Then, in early July, a telegram:
    “AM HOME. WILL ARRIVE DROXFORD STATION NOON
    TOMORROW. ALL MY LOVE. TONY.”
    He would be with me in less than two hours! I willed myself to show Olivia no glimmer of the consternation I felt. As far as she was to know, when I left the house later that morning, pannier basket on my arm, it was on the most trivial of errands. Yet when I sat waiting on the station platform, absurdly early, for Tony’s train, I knew that it was, in truth, the most important of my life. My mind travelled back across twenty-five of my twenty-eight years to the same spot, waving goodbye then to a past I did not understand just as I was waiting now to greet a future I dared not hope for.
    Suddenly, there he was, stepping down from the open door at the end of the train as it lurched and steamed to a halt. A slim, rather inconspicuous figure in an ill-fitting suit. At first, I didn’t think it could be him. Then he tossed away his cigarette in just the way he had that first time in the orchard and flashed me his greeting smile.
    I should have hugged or kissed him. Instead, we halted a little apart and stared incredulously at each other.
    “I’m back,” he said at last.
    “You’ve lost weight.”
    “I’ll soon put it on again.”
    “I expected you to be in uniform.”
    “I stayed with my sister last night. This creation is courtesy of the