Until then, we had managed, as so many others had also managed, to re-order our lives and rectify all that had grown warped and crooked because of the War. When Anstace got Bertie talking, it was like an eruption. Everyone started talking. Mrs. Jackman proclaimed it was a miracle! And then Lady Margery twisted it further.
It is absurd for Father to claim that it is merely a question of whether one chooses to listen to the talk or not.
‘Sometimes there’s no choice; one has to listen,’ Delia said aloud. The real question, she thought, was how one reacted to what one heard. But she was not prepared to argue the point.
She returned to the kitchen and the summer’s fruit. It would need preserving before the end of the day, whilst it was still freshly picked. Through the rhythms of her work, Delia’s mind replayed the events around that Easter, ten years before. There was nothing she could now undo but had she done right? Should they have sent Bertie away? It had hardly been a considered decision and, given all that they had endured, perhaps it had been a capitulation, something done in weakness for which they were now being called to account.
She sat at the long, deal table carefully picking the blackcurrants from the stems her father had cut from the bushes. The leaves had begun to wilt a little but they still released a pungent, woody scent from their bruising. Her fingers worked deftly, nipping the flower-end and stalk clean from each currant. She put to one side any damaged fruit; they would have it stewed or in a crumble over the next day or two. There was plenty left and she filled jar after jar, knocking each one on the table to settle the fruit before topping them up and placing them in the cooling oven for an hour or so to allow the fruit to ‘run’. Over by the back door, there were several trugs laden with ripe damsons. A dozen or so wasps circled lazily, drawn to the fruit where the skin was broken and the juices seeped. She looked at her hands where the cuticles and the new skin beneath the nails were now stained like a butcher’s.
‘Mellow fruitfulness,’ said Delia to herself, and she wondered at the irony of this rich harvest, at the ephemeral glory of fresh produce from the garden against the obligation to boil or salt it down before decay set in, in order to sustain them in the months to come.
This, she supposed, is the purpose of memory. We boil and sugar, we pickle, salt, and smoke our experiences, laying them down for future consumption. How does it work then? Is it the quality of the experience or the skill of remembering which creates a solid memory, a memory to get one’s teeth in to? For I seem only to have barren memories, shrivelled things good for nothing.
And what, she wondered, would be the abiding memories from this harvest time? Would it be the long summer evenings, stretching into a golden autumn, with the currant branches laid out for stripping and the damsons ready to fall when one shakes the branches, the apples and pears ripening along their cordons: a glut of fruit scenting the path along the old brick wall? Or would it be the destruction of the South Lodge, the smell of the charred timbers, and the sight of Anstace’s precious garden trampled flat under a blue sky pocked by the smoke from aeroplanes in deadly combat?
The weapons of war, she thought, are more likely to gather in the skies than any of Keats’ twittering swallows.
Talk
‘Dear ladies, so good of you to sit with my poor wife. But now, if you will excuse me … when the girl brings in the tea, would you, Mrs. Furnival, be so kind as to pour? Hetty, I fear, is in too nervous a state to coordinate pot and strainer.’
‘And you will not want hot water dribbled onto the mahogany.’
‘Quite so. Hetty, Mrs. Furnival will be mother. I shall leave you now to her kind ministrations. It is a full week, ladies, since her little scare but I hope that if, by chance, she speaks at all out of turn, you will not set anything by it. Little she says has any import. I shall slip away.’
‘Nor, to be perfectly frank, Mrs. Perch, has it ever. I see no reason to lower my voice because she takes nothing in these days. Just sits by the window wrapped up in her own odd thoughts. I daresay I shall go over and give her a little shake now and again just to make sure she does not drift too far away. Dr. Furnival, my husband, says that patients exhibiting this sort of behaviour need to be prevented from slipping away into their own imaginations. They are seldom good places. And I expect, if I might hazard a little guess, that you retain a certain interest in Hetty Jackman, in what she has to say? It is extraordinary how what happened ten years ago can suddenly be as significant as something which occurred only yesterday.’
‘There have been certain developments.’
‘But surely not, this time, any that Hetty Jackman has engineered. Oh! I believe she heard me. Don’t squirm, Hetty, it’s too ghastly. Perhaps she’s finally realised, poor thing, that her existence is simply incidental; this shrinking away from everything is an attempt to fade. Do you just want to fade, Hetty? Is that it?’
‘That would surprise me, Mrs. Furnival. Leopards don’t change their spots. It’s attention-seeking. Oh, yes. It was always her way. And I take it amiss. I take it very amiss. I have not forgotten that, when she did something similar ten years ago, it cost me my inheritance.’
‘It was silliness and thoughtlessness.’
‘Silly, thoughtless people can be the most dangerous of all. I think she knows that I have got the measure of her now. I believe my being here is making her uncomfortable. Despite being in her own drawing room, look how she writhes away from me when I approach, twisted up on the edge of her chair!
‘Oh! But here is the tea…’
‘Ah! Thank you, Rita. It is “Rita” isn’t it? Girls seldom stay long at the rectory and it is difficult to keep up with the changes of name.’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘Just here will do. I shall pour. You may go.’
‘You seem quite at home here, Mrs. Furnival.’
‘Not at home, my dear. Who could be with such a spectre in the wings? Now let me press you to a slice of seedcake, Mrs. Perch. It is, I must confess, of my own baking.’
‘Let me compliment you, Mrs. Furnival. Very light.’
‘We keep our own chickens so there are always fresh eggs, but I do pride myself on the quality of my sponge. It’s all in the beating.’
‘However—’
‘You have not come up from Canterbury to talk about my baking.’
‘Mrs. Furnival, you know I have no interest in rumour or gossip—’
‘Which is just as well, my dear, because I never give them the time of day.’
‘—but I do need to know if there’s any talk of developments.’
‘I am not sure what you know. There are, of course, no bodies. Besides the airman, of course. There was no one in the South Lodge when it was struck. That’s the real miracle, of course, rather than anything that Hetty Jackman may fancy. Mrs. Childs, the housekeeper at Mount Benjamin, had arranged to visit Mrs. Cordingley that very afternoon to discuss the billeting of the troops in the Home Woods. The commanding officer had complained that the men under canvas are over-run with ants. But then, Mrs. Cordingley telephoned that morning to say that she would not be at home after all as she and Bertie Simmonds would be away for a few days, a week at most, visiting his old school and please to help herself to any of the dahlias in bloom.’
‘And did Mrs. Cordingley say what took her away?’
‘My dear, you have spilt your tea.’
‘More has been spilt than tea, Mrs. Furnival. My sisters and I now have proof of what’s been going on for a year at least. The whole business is a gross affront to our family. That boy, Bertie Simmonds, never had any right, any right at all to be there, to be set up by my aunt as heir to the Cordingley estates. It is theft, trespass and fornication.’
‘Only speculation surely. That Mrs. Cordingley should … seems most unlikely. I know there has been speculation from the lower orders and inevitably one gets wind of it. The arrangements were so unusual, I suppose. But speculation surely rather than the other.’
‘It is fornication
. And Anstace Cordingley a woman old enough to be his mother. One good thing to come of this will be that I shall never again have to call her “Cordingley”. I never thought of her as family, not even by marriage. The name only came to her through my cousin, Geoffrey.’
‘That is, of course, the convention. Unless you’re saying that her marriage to your cousin was not comme il faut. Is that it?
‘“Comme il faut!” There was never anything comme il faut about Geoffrey. I have a better right to be called Cordingley than she. It was my mother’s name, by birth, after all. My sisters and I have a family interest and we have waited far too long. It’s about time that we should count for something. Well, now the time may have come.
‘Oh, she played a long game, there’s no mistake. But she will not succeed. The extent the Simmonds family are in it is not yet clear to me, but there’s no doubt they’ve played a part in this plot, hatched by that woman to appropriate what belongs to me and my sisters. We are the true Cordingley heirs.’
‘Yes, this is the enemy at work in our midst. They tell us that he is overhead, invading the skies, but I for one see more to fear in the low cunning and moral decadence that surrounds us. I wish we’d kept the last King. For all his silliness over that hard-faced woman, he was a man who stood by the old values and stands by them still, I understand. This is the real war. This is what we should really be fighting. You do see, do you not, Mrs. Furnival, that it is a fight? We should never have given an inch when this boy, Bertie Simmonds, was set up as some miraculous freak. As if miracles should ever hold sway!’
‘If this last were not a miracle, it was at least extremely fortuitous that the pilot did not crash into the soldiers billeted in the Home Woods.’
‘We’d have seen justice done if it had been one of the brave German fighters who obliterated the South Lodge.’
‘Surely you do not imagine the Germans are fighting your cause.’
‘This is not the time to argue the finer points with you, Mrs. Furnival. But I will say that it’s seldom clear who’s on whose side when there are principles to defend. And actions speak louder than words!’
‘Our talk seems to have caused some distress. Look. She’s worried the yarn on her cardigan and has worked a hole in her sleeve. Hetty! You must stop that. I am going to give you a little, sharp slap on your hand so you know it’s bad. There! And if there is anything to cry over, think about what Mrs. Perch has been saying. You can despair over that.’
‘I can no longer stay. Where have I put my gloves? Will you give my best to the Rector? I do not wish to disturb him. I sense victory in the air. Perhaps, before the year is out, I shall have reclaimed Mount Benjamin and taken up my position in the village and this foolish war will be over. We shall have made peace with the right side and the old order shall be back again.’
‘The first shall be first and the last shall be last.’
‘Be quiet, Hetty, Mrs. Perch does not care for your ramblings.’
Chapter Two
Friday, 21 April 1928
Delia Simmonds never carried work from the classroom; it was one of her father’s rules. If there was marking to do, she was to remain at her desk until it was done. This evening she had been enjoying reading her pupils’ accounts of the Courtenay riots. Of all the events they studied for Local History, this was the one which, every year, most caught their imagination. No wonder: a handful were descended from the labourers either killed, or caught and transported for their part in an insurrection only just slipping from living memory. She had fed their interest the week before by choosing Bossenden Wood for their nature trail so that, whilst gathering their botanical specimens, they could also chart where the skirmishes had taken place, giving verisimilitude to the account of the battle. No one could deny that the writing they produced as a result was impassioned, even if it were more subjective folk-memory than historical fact. Characters unknown to the official chronicler were revealed as significant players, draped in acts of private bravery.
It had been a lesson too for Delia. She had understood that the past was a collective experience, resonating beyond the received historical perspective. Anecdotes and memories had their own dynamic, fading or sharpening, as they chimed with the spirit of the age.
She enjoyed this time of day when she was able to drift into reverie or meander around an idea which may have come to her during the course of the day. Clearing the classroom and setting it up for the morrow was necessary work which no one could draw her away from. Its mechanical, routine nature provided the perfect context for aimless thinking.
How will these days of ours be remembered? she wondered, as she stacked the children’s exercise books. And what would be forgotten as effortlessly as it takes me to rub the chalk from the blackboard and then shake the duster free of the only physical evidence that anything had ever been written at all? Which of the children, passing through the country school, would leave a mark behind them or would they all fade as their forebears had done, generation upon forgotten generation. Many were just a name, inscribed by a spidery hand into parish registers of baptisms, marriages or burials. The census returns, locked away in London, only bequeathed a record of who resided where on a given day, ten years apart, perhaps adorned with a brief description of their status. True, the new war memorials paid homage to even the most lowly of The Fallen, preserving the names of hundreds of local men, but only a few of these would ever be more than an inscribed name, within a generation.
Perhaps remembering is an indulgence, she thought. What is the past that it should claim our attention? We flatter ourselves by celebrating the present with photographs—something our parents would only ever have done on rare occasions, dressed in their very best, polished and posed—but these will fade or serve merely to fill black-leaved albums, which in turn clutter seldom-opened drawers or the bottom of musty wardrobes. The uninitiated will murmur, ‘Who’s that? When was that? I don’t recall…’ and all will be forgotten. Isn’t it best that way? Isn’t it best to pull the door smartly closed behind one and stride off down the path, with not so much as a farewell wave? And if there are those, who come back from the shops to find the house empty or lift their head from a simple chore, like polishing the boots, to find themselves alone, so be it. Too many struggle to accommodate the present because the past calls out too loudly. We let what has been define too tightly what we are now.
She decided to counteract the children’s enthusiasm for their great-grandfathers’ futile bid for a Promised Land. She would be savage in her marking of their stories of The Courtenay Riots. They needed instead to be hungry for their own future.
She paused for a moment as the warmth from the low sun burnished the space she occupied: a patch of floor, quartered by the bars of the high west-facing window.
‘Summer is on its way, at last,’ she said, aloud. And it would be none too soon: another summer, another year to carry us further away.
Delia’s mild feeling of elation was checked to an extent when she entered the schoolhouse and found that Anstace was still there. It was not usual for Anstace to linger this late after visiting Mrs. Simmonds but here she was, sitting at the deal table talking to Gladys who was busy preparing dinner at the kitchener. Delia, momentarily taken aback, was not looking where she was going and almost slipped on a pile of dead daffodil heads just inside the door.
‘What on earth?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, miss. It was Master Bertie having one of his games. He shouldn’t have left them lying there like that. Let me get the broom. It won’t take a tick.’
‘Anstace. You’re still here.’
‘Good evening, Delia. I brought some flowers for your mother.’
‘How kind as always. It’s very late.’
‘I wanted to catch you. I came to find Bertie after I had said good-bye to your mother and he was here playing, whilst Gladys was working. He didn’t take any notice of me—’
‘I am sorry.’
‘No, no I didn’t mean that. I watched
him playing with those old daffodils. He was imagining they were people, I think, and I could see how, upside-down, the trumpets became skirts or long robes and the calyxes were like medieval headgear on top of the seedpod head — and I’m sure … We realised (didn’t we, Gladys?) that he was talking under his breath!’
‘What? Gladys?’
‘Well not to be certain, miss. Not so as you could hear anything.’
‘But his lips were moving. He was utterly absorbed, in a world of his own and I’m sure he was talking … I think that’s rather significant, don’t you?’
‘I have no idea. Did he say anything to you?’
‘No. Nothing. The funny thing was, I think he was embarrassed just as you or I would be if someone heard us talking to ourselves out loud. He blushed as if he’d committed some faux pas.’
‘How odd.’
‘But do you think it means he could speak if he wanted to? And that he just thinks he’s not supposed to?’
‘I have no idea. I doubt it. Will you be coming to see mother again soon?’
Anstace did not answer straight away, recognising the abrupt turn Delia had given the conversation.
‘I expect so. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Of course not. Now I must wash off the schoolroom.’
‘But do you think someone, some doctor, I mean, should see Bertie? It may be that whatever has locked up his speech is loosening.’
‘What a quaint idea. I’m not sure that any medical man would see things in that way.’
‘Of course they wouldn’t; they don’t use metaphors.’
‘So let’s wait and see, shall we?’
Anstace picked up her gloves.
‘I shall leave you then. I have not seen Mr. Simmonds. Remember me to him.’
‘There’s really no need. Let me show you out.’
‘I’ve put my hat down somewhere.’
That They Might Lovely Be Page 3