Free In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard

wouldn’t be swayed. “Right,” he said. “Well, you heard, Mr. Mayhew. They go under the hammer with the rest.”
    So the deed was done. All the way back to Wells in the car, Tony vented the resentment he thought I should feel at Payne for the profit he would make from Meongate, for the fact that he who had never lived there should become its owner and I who was born there should receive only two unpleasant, unwanted paintings. I did not care. Payne was welcome to all of it. I had endured the final torment that Meongate held for me and would happily have paid any price to be able to turn my back on it for ever—as I believed I had done.
    Three months passed, three months in which I cast off all shreds of the anxiety Olivia’s bequest had momentarily inspired in me. It wasn’t difficult. There was much to occupy my mind. The Queen’s coronation had been fixed for the second of June and I found myself in the thick of planning for a street party to celebrate the event. I’d taken on more than my share of baking for the occasion and, by the Sunday before, had fallen badly behind. Noting my testy mood over lunch, Tony made a magnanimous offer.
    “Would it help if I took the little ’uns down to Stoberry Park for the afternoon? With us out of your hair, you could make some head-way in the kitchen.”
    So I was left alone, which was, as a matter of fact, unusual, what with a husband, two children and Mrs. Jeffries coming in every other day. It was the last day of May, soft, grey and windless, with the garden looking moist and somnolent through the kitchen window. I thought of Tony, puffing after a ball in the park when he would rather have been dozing at home over a newspaper, smiled and set to with the mixing bowl.
    About half an hour later, there was a knock at the back door. A tall, sombre, rather shabbily dressed man was standing there. He
     

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    apologized for coming to the back; there’d been no answer at the front. At first, I took him for a salesman: encyclopaedias, or sewing machines. I said I was busy.
    Then he said: “It’s about your father.”
    I looked at him and saw only a slightly down-at-heel stranger on a Sunday afternoon. But his words had sufficed to resurrect a buried life. I remember the thoughts that flashed through my mind as I confronted his impassive, imploring gaze. All the years through which I’d prayed in vain for some knowledge of my vanished father—and now, when at long last I’d learned to live without it, learned that it was better to abandon an impossible dream, now, when what would once have been so precious seemed merely un-timely, now, whether I would or no, I was to hear of him.
    “What do you mean?” I said. “My father died many years ago.”
    When he replied, it was as if he were reading an entry in a register, the same register you and I scanned at Thiepval. “Captain the Honourable John Hallows. Missing, presumed killed in action, Mametz, 30th April 1916.”
    “Who are you?”
    “My name is Willis. I’m an old friend of your father. I saw the notice of Lady Powerstock’s death. It prompted me to look you up.”
    “I placed no notice.”
    “No. A Mr. Payne did so. He gave me your address.”
    “What do you want?”
    “A few minutes of your time—if you can spare it.”
    “I told you: I’m busy.”
    “Too busy—for just a few minutes?”
    There was no threat or insistence in his tone. His manner was almost apologetic. Yet, welling within me, I could feel the contending forces of caution and curiosity, the reluctance of my new-found, mature, stable life struggling to suppress the child’s lifetime quest for truths so long denied her. We stood in silence, whilst my mind raced around opposing notions: Olivia is dead, your father dead, Meongate lost, its contents sold and you are free: close the door on this visitor from your past. And yet, and yet, now may be the only chance you’ll ever have, the only chance to know: hear