‘Please do not cry, Geoffrey. Not without telling me why you are crying. Please.’ She bent over so that her face was close to his, her cheek just brushing his, just caressing the stubble which coarsened his skin.
He turned his head toward her but the effort was painful and he started to cough: light, dry bleats which nevertheless wracked him. As his face melted into hers she let her lips brush his. He drew in his breath sharply and closed his eyes against her gaze.
‘I want to tell you,’ he said and, though barely audible, it was as if he was shouting from the depths of some unfathomable cavern. ‘I want to tell you … that I have loved you … that I have found I love you … love you … although we have never … and I am grateful … so grateful … although we have never … that you have never sought a … consummation—’
‘Geoffrey. Geoffrey.’ She knew that she did not even need to articulate his name. They had reached that point when it is enough just to will meaning for it to be registered. But into his name she threw all the warmth, all the embrace, all the enfolding that she could muster. He must not leave her without knowing, feeling, understanding that he was held. ‘Geoffrey. Geoffrey. There was never any need.’
‘Never. Any. Need.’
This time, she had to help him shift his position as the coughing took him. She wiped the sweat from his clammy forehead. She wiped his cheeks but the two-day growth caught at the cloth and left tares of lint on his face.
‘I shall have to shave you tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps.’
She waited while he struggled to frame what he needed to say.
‘Perhaps we might … have had a child … if I had been able.’
‘Perhaps. But Geoffrey, have you never guessed?’
‘Guessed?’
‘That you do have a child.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘Bertie. If he is not yours whose can he be?’
What followed was terrible. He seemed to shrink from her at the same time as trying to throw himself onto her. The impulse to catch her and pull her straight was opposed by an equal force of repulsion.
What had she said? Was it so frightful? Anstace was frightened. There were forces now, raging within his weakened frame which she knew she would have to fight if he were to die in peace. What had she unwittingly unleashed?
‘Did she say so? Did Delia say so? How? How? How?’ And with each monosyllable his voice stretched more and more until it was a shriek of pain or the hooting of some tortured creature.
‘Stop it! Stop. Stop,’ cried Anstace. ‘I saw her. That’s all. I saw her in Weston-super-Mare that summer when she was pregnant.’
She held him as closely as she could but he still shuddered within her embrace, convulsed with a nervous quaking, the aftermath of great emotional feeling.
‘I. Loved. Him. I loved him. Not … Not … Not…’
‘Delia?’
‘Never. She. Hated me. For it.’
‘Then I don’t understand.’
The fury suddenly left him. Whatever it was, had flown. He fell limply back against the pillows and it felt as if her arms were encircling something no more substantial than a space, a tract of air still somehow demarcated but nothing corporeal.
‘Don’t go, Geoffrey. Not like this. Wait. Let the truth settle.’
‘Why did you not … ask?’
‘I thought: no need. I thought I knew enough to let it all rest quietly. I wanted to let you rest quietly.’
‘Ah, Anstace. And so you did. And. So. You. Did.’
‘Until now. Geoffrey, Geoffrey.’
‘Time enough. For rest.’ His eyes sought hers but swiveled rapidly from side to side as if scanning blindly. She bent closer still, so she was almost lying over him. His words were little more than an exhalation.
‘Know it. Not my boy. I have never. Could never. Only Hubert. Only Hubert.’
‘Only Hubert,’ she echoed. Her repetition of the name inspired Geoffrey and, as he breathed more comfortably, his lips framed the first syllable over and over again. He no longer saw her or the room in which he lay. His sight was turned inward, reappraising in rapid sequence those precious moments which he had inhabited with the man he had adored. Anstace let herself rest against the back of the chair and watched a succession of emotions pass across his face, animating him for the last time. She could only guess at what he was recalling. She could only assume he was reliving authentic experiences and that he was not, in this last hour, the subject of hallucinations.
He had told her once in their early days, soon after she had rescued him, that he valued her as someone whom Hubert had loved. She had remonstrated with him gently, explaining that she still wondered what she had really meant to Hubert. She told Geoffrey that sometimes she thought she had imagined the lovemaking and that she and Hubert had never had those days when the war was at its peak. But Geoffrey had persisted, telling her that he wanted to experience Hubert’s love, even vicariously, even as one might immerse oneself in a luke-warm bath just to know that the body of the beloved had been washed before by the same waters.
For a time, he had questioned her obsessively, almost indecently, about every aspect of her relationship with Hubert. She had not minded. The telling fashioned the memory. Gradually, as his health had improved, Geoffrey’s dry thirst for Hubert had been slaked. Anstace assumed he had found his own emotional equilibrium as he recovered physically from the deprivations of prison life. They finally settled into the companionable cohabitation which converted into a marriage. ‘Our Ruskin marriage,’ he had laughingly called it. She had smiled. After all, it brought her back to Dunchurch.
Where was Geoffrey now, though? His eyes continued to flicker, focusing on images no one else could see. His lips moved, either to some silent conversation or in silent prayer. It was impossible to tell. She did not want to move abruptly or do anything which might disturb what now possessed him. She felt that whatever it was must be left to run its course, like a fever, to break finally and leave a deep, dreamless peace. She would wait and hope that at the end, he would emerge knowing her, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for no more than a moment, as she really was.
It was not to be. Geoffrey Cordingley was dead before the dawn.
She did not summon anyone but continued to sit by his body, holding his cold, damp hand in hers, as the thin light seeped up from the eastern sky.
She found herself replaying Geoffrey’s agonised repudiation of any relationship with Delia which could have begat Bertie. Had he been telling her the truth? Or was the truth too terrible to admit even on his deathbed? She had thought to comfort him with some thought that he had seeded the future but instead she had distressed him acutely. Had it been cruel to tell him he had a son only when it was too late ever to know him?
She had to hope that it had been good memories of Hubert which dominated his last unconscious hours.
She wondered if, somehow, he had confused Hubert with Bertie and Delia and had not understood what she had been trying to tell him.
As Anstace rose from Geoffrey’s bedside, straightening the counterpane and sheet around his shoulders, it was an image of Bertie, unbidden, which seemed to give her energy, easing her own tired, stiff limbs. Geoffrey’s confused denial of Bertie quickened her own feelings for the boy. With Geoffrey denying him, he seemed even more lost, even more forsaken than he had been before. She was resolved to devote herself to his son.
Monday, 25 March 1929
A week later, the weather broke with one of those heavy squalls which assault early spring with the ferocity of an autumn gale.
The east wind whistled through the broken pane in the top of the latticed window. Its shrill, breathy note rose and fell against the stronger rush of wind outside, snatching at the trees, racing between the outbuildings, slamming the crumbling wooden door in the old wall so that the hinges would drop again, sucking the mortar from the chimney stacks and bruising all the Easter flowers. Anstace looked out across the southern e
dge of the park to the avenue of horse chestnuts. Although they were only newly in leaf, the branches were still caught by the gusts of wind and pulled and plagued until their joints groaned.
An old magnolia, planted by Geoffrey’s grandfather, was in bloom on the other side of the high brick wall which separated the South Lodge from what had once been the kitchen garden. The top ten feet of the tree were visible from Anstace’s upstairs viewpoint. Sitting at her desk, as she was now, she had watched the spear-shaped buds, furred like an almond, swell and split. The waxy petals, pure white except where they had drawn up the purple stain from their base, had then spread out for the sun, like water lilies on a blue lake. The loose blooms were now vulnerable and would be damaged by this bluster. Only the late blossoms, still tightly in bud, encased in their protective calyx on the dipping branches, would remain unscarred.
This was cruel weather to come after the warm spell had coaxed everything into early flower. The Church Ladies, calling to proffer sympathy following Geoffrey’s death, had remarked upon the numbers of daffodils in bud and hoped they might pillage her garden for their Easter decorations.
‘We haven’t been blessed with such a show for Easter for ever so long. Even Mrs. Furnival’s cherry will be out. Could you, do you think, spare some of your lovely daffodils for the church?’
And now a week before the festival, there was this devastation. Anstace decided to go outside and garner as many daffodils in bud as she could, before they were damaged further. If she kept them in the cool, dark shed that should arrest their opening and keep them for the church.
Armed with a trug and a pair of stout scissors, she left the lodge by the back door. This side of the cottage was little more than twenty feet from the kitchen-garden wall and well-sheltered even in this gusting wind. But, as Anstace rounded the corner to pick the daffodils and narcissi at the front, she was confronted by the power of the driving wind head on. She staggered, and ducked her head against its force. Then, moving forward, she saw that whole drifts of flowers had been beaten horizontal. Many were already too bedraggled, torn and spotted to be worthy of the church display but they could still brighten up her house. She cut rapidly, as if harvesting a crop, gathering both the open flowers and everything else which showed even just a flash of yellow or cream through the opening sepals. She just left the tight, vertical buds which might still withstand the inclement weather.
It was exciting, seeking to cheat the destructive energy, which assailed her garden, of its spoils. She would not allow the blooms to be lost. This was no wilderness. Hers was a garden where artistry and plantsmanship had exerted their influence and prevailed. The drifts of daffodils and narcissi, the carpets of mottled-leaved celandines, the aconites, which had erupted through the rough grass beneath the fruit trees, and the colonies of mauve anemone blanda and the white, dapple-leaved pulmonarias all constituted the first full-scale orchestration of colour. Later, as the herbaceous plants came into bloom, they would be superseded from mid-May by a richer symphony. Colour would answer colour; tonal lines would be sharpened by contrasting accents; form and movement would add structure. Everything would be managed this year; she had planned it carefully: a confluence of her skill with the dictates of nature.
Despite all her careful plantmanship, there was little she could do, however, if the weather broke into unseasonal patterns. It was immensely disappointing to see the long-awaited beauty, the fruits of her artistry, all dashed but she kept despair at bay with the knowledge that the seasons would take their course and that the next year would see a resurgence, often more brilliant for the waiting, of those plants which had been curtailed. Her design remained inviolate. Each year, she would strive to take the garden closer to perfection whilst knowing she would never see that absolute realized.
The rain spat up at her from the puddles spreading across the stone-flagged path. She had not bothered with her galoshes and her shoes and stockings were soon sodden and her skirt, saturated from where it had dragged across the path as she stooped to cut, hung heavily about her legs. It did not matter. She waded out across the sticky earth to reach the flowers in the heart of the beds. The trug was soon overflowing and she had to resort to collecting the flowers in galvanized buckets before she had stripped the garden of what only yesterday morning had been ranks of gleaming colour.
She straightened up, turning against the wind, and blew the rain from her nose, wiping the hair from her eyes with the back of her hand.
Bertie was standing on the other side of the garden, pressed into the great yew hedge to keep out of the weather, motionless, watching her. He hugged himself from the cold, his hands tucked under his arms, chin drawn down like a bony cormorant.
Or like, she thought, an angel too long brooding over a forgotten grave, engulfed by the churchyard jungle.
His face remained expressionless even when he realised she had seen him, so she held out the bucket of flowers to him and beckoned with her head toward the side of the lodge. He did not move. She beckoned again and he ran out from his cover and took the two buckets from her. Together, they hurried inside.
‘It’s just the two of us. I’ve sent Jenny over to the Big House to help Mrs. Childs. Come into the kitchen. We need to dry off and it’s warmest by the range. Come on in, Bertie. You’ll catch cold if you haven’t already. Daft fellow, staying out in that rain. How long had you been there, hiding in the hedge? You could have knocked on my door, you know. What we need is a mug of cocoa and somewhere — if I can find it — there’s cake or ginger biscuits. Here, while I am doing that, will you put these in water?’
She watched him as he took the flowers one by one from the buckets, carefully separating the heads where the petals had locked together. He laid them out in their different kinds on the deal table, arranging them in sheaves so all the heads spread out one beneath the other. Those still in bud were pushed to one side.
She fetched some jugs from the scullery and then, standing behind him, told him their names.
‘These are King Alfred all bright yellow and trumpet. These are called Madame de Graaf or Alice Knights, I can’t remember. These are Weardale Perfection and these are my favourite, Gloria Mundi. The little tiny ones—I just couldn’t resist picking some although they are best left growing through the lawn—are hoop-petticoat daffodils.
‘I want to keep everything which isn’t open for the church. We’ll put them back in the buckets and I’ll store them in the shed in a minute. But we can enjoy the ones in bloom, can’t we? We can put them in the jugs and stand them all over the house. How do you want to arrange them? You do it. Then we’ll have a hot drink.’
He did not know where to start, at first. He bent over the table, his face close to the flowers, and breathed in their scent. He looked up and saw Anstace smiling at him. A fleeting smile tucked the corner of his mouth then he held up one flower and, looking at her, his eyebrows asked the question.
‘Weardale Perfection,’ she said. ‘Into the jug with it!’
And then again, as he chose the different flowers,
‘Madame de Graaf or Alice Knights … King Alfred … Madame de Graaf or Alice Knights … King Alfred … Madame de Graaf or Alice Knights. Gloria Mundi. King Alfred. Weardale Perfection. Madame de Graaf or Alice Knights. Weardale Perfection. King Alfred. King Alfred. Alfred. Madame de Graaf or—Gloria Mundi, Gloria Mundi. Gloria Mundi. Hoop Petticoat. Hoop Petticoat. Hoop.’
Quicker and quicker he went until she could not keep up with him. Anstace was laughing and laughing and Bertie was crying with delight. The roll call slid into glossolalia.
‘King de Graaf. Alice Perfection. Madame de Mundi, Weardale. Perfect. Graaf de. Knights. King de Mundi. King Perfection. Hoop. Hoop…’
‘Hoop! Hoop! Hoop!’
‘Gloria Mundi and Allelujah’ she said, ‘and Amen because you’re talking to me, my darling. You’re talking to me!’
A shadow passed across his face but the sincerity of her tone and the sparkling of her eyes dispelled it. She
held out her hands across the table and he took them in his, making a bridge over the jugs of daffodils. The milk in the saucepan began to billow and froth.
‘Cocoa!’ she said brightly, determined to make nothing more of the moment; it was too fragile to nurse.
‘Hoopettycoot.’
The words came out haltingly, run together on a monotone. He looked at her, hesitant, wary.
‘Oh Bertie, that’s very good. That’s very, very good.’ Her resolve to be matter-of-fact abandoned, she said, ‘Come here and let me hug you!’
She found him dreadfully wet. She made him peel off his jersey but his shirt was no drier. She fetched Geoffrey’s overcoat for him to wear while his clothes dried, draped in front of the range.
The rain had darkened his hair and made it curl. Again there was that similarity to Hubert. The unexpectedness of the memory snagged her, but the boy noticed nothing; he was enjoying the ginger biscuits. She let silence carry them along companionably while she wondered what she ought to do and whether she should tell anyone. But what would she say? ‘He said Hoop Petticoat once.’ That was all. No one would be stirred by a story of daffodils garnered from the winds and a picture of a kitchen table strewn with gold, whilst a kettle sang and the scent from damp clothes mingled with the flowers’ perfume until they stood in a steamy paradise.
She remembered that one of her Catchpool cousins had been cured of a stammer through singing. Why might it not also work for a mute? There could be no better reason to use one’s voice than to sing. First, she would help him learn to sing and then she would tell Delia.
That They Might Lovely Be Page 5