Talk
‘When I called round this morning, the South Lodge looked like a florist’s with daffs and jonquils on every surface. I said, “My goodness, Mrs. Cordingley, are these all for the church?” “If you want them, Mrs. Childs,” she says. She’d gone out in all that rain on Monday and picked everything she could. I call that gracious. And she not even a regular church-goer. I said as much. “Mrs. Cordingley,” I said, “that’s very gracious of you.”’
‘Of course the Quakers do nothing with their Meeting House at Easter.’
‘Nor Christmas. Plain and simple, they say.’
‘Not that Mrs. Cordingley is particularly Quakerish. I have noticed, on more than one occasion, that she has a weakness for hats.’
‘Though there’s no one for her to dress for now, of course. Not with Mr. Geoffrey’s passing.’
‘She’s still a young woman.’
‘“That’s very gracious,” I said. And I meant it.’
‘Did you see the flowers Mrs. Jackman brought in? Two large boxes donated by Lady Margery. She has been very generous this year. The man from that flowershop in North Street delivered them to the rectory first thing this morning.’
‘Hothouse blooms. I don’t hold with them. Carnations in March!’
‘But I heard Mrs. Jackman say to the doctor’s wife—because she was all for taking them for the pulpit, which is what Mrs. F. always makes a beeline for—Mrs. Jackman says, “No.” She says, “No. Lady Margery wants them used in a lovely floral tribute under her new west window.” She was most insistent.’
‘I’d like to have seen Mrs. Jackman putting Mrs. Furnival in her place.’
‘She’d never do anything to fall foul of Lady Margery.’
‘I think it’s a shame. I really do. Her Ladyship makes all that fuss about the west window but you’ll not see anything on her own son’s grave except what his widow’s planted. We all know Mr. Geoffrey had his ways but you’d think his own mother could forgive him in death.’
‘Some things are hard to forgive. My Eric could never bring himself to doff his cap to him. I’m not saying he blamed him for blowing his legs off below the knee but when you’ve been crippled for King and Country before you’re twenty-one, it’s hard to pass the time of day with a man who failed to do his duty, even if he does live in the Big House.’
‘Big House! Lady Margery wouldn’t have him under her roof. It’s why he and Mrs. Cordingley lived in the South Lodge. All that talk about it being a cosy little love-nest is a load of tosh. It was Lady Margery. She wouldn’t have him back in the Big House, even if he was her only son.’
‘Only son but not her heir now he’s gone.’
‘What’s to become of the place when she goes? Will she sell up, do you think? They do say that the stars from the new Talkies are buying up our big country homes. Imagine if we had a famous actor living in the Big House! American glamour! Perhaps they’d whisk you away to Hollywood, Mrs. Childs.’
‘No one would whisk me anywhere, Mrs. Baxter, thank you very much. Mount Benjamin will stay in the family, make no mistake. One of the Kingsnorth daughters is my guess. Old Mr. Cordingley will have made some provision for his nieces.’
‘And where will that leave the village? I doubt those ladies have a bean to rub together. You can’t keep a place like the Big House running on the rents these days. Someone with a bit of lolly needs to take it on.’
‘I don’t see Lady Margery going anywhere soon. And no reason why she should.’
‘Except for all the money she’s thrown at the new west window and the Easter flowers, there’s not much else she spends. You only have to peep inside the cottages at the back of Blean Wood. They’re a disgrace.’
‘You’ll not see much spent anywhere these days. You can’t blame Lady Margery for the way things are. We’re lucky things are picking up after the General Strike.’
‘Churchill should never have put us back on the gold standard, that’s what my Eric says.’
‘Gold standard or not, Lady Margery’s not so much thrifty as stingy. And I’d say so to her face. Since the war, she’s been really tight-fisted.’
‘You can’t spend what you haven’t got.’
‘What’s with all her airs and graces then? What do they say, noblesse oblige? I don’t see her particularly obliging. Mrs. Cordingley, now, is much gentler natured. She’s obliging. She’s been everso attentive to Mrs. Simmonds in her trouble what with that little boy they’ve got.’
‘Queer that they called him “Bertie”. The elder, the one who was killed, had been “Hubert”. It was Victorian, unimaginative and downright macabre to give a new baby the name of a dead sibling. It’s no surprise he’s simple.’
‘Mrs. Cordingley was sweet on the dead one, and she’s known Miss Simmonds since they were at school together. That’s why she takes an interest.’
‘You say she’s obliging and, I must say, she’s always happy to pass the time of day but she keeps herself very much to herself, does Mrs. Cordingley. Thompson’s Jenny does her cleaning and a bit of general work and she told our Gladys that there’s hardly any visitors to the South Lodge. Neither now nor when young Mr. Cordingley was alive … Though she does write. There’s always letters to post.’
‘She’s never happier, it seems to me than when she’s in her precious garden.’
‘Well I hope it’s enough for her now she’s been widowed. She’ll as like as not find herself a deal lonelier now she’s been left. You can only get so much companionship from dahlias and delphiniums.’
‘And she’s still a young woman.’
Chapter Three
Saturday, 19 April 1930
If that was Mr. Hoyle practising the organ for the Easter services, Hetty Jackman was surprised that she had not heard him shuffling about between the pews, grunting as he stooped to retrieve a dropped psalter, muttering as he hung a kneeler on its hook. As it was, the organ just drew a deep quavering breath and then the lilting, lifting melody to Samuel Crossman’s lyric for Passiontide eased its way down the nave and up into the rafters. Perhaps it was because the sudden sound caught her just as she was threshing the petals from Clare Furnival’s flowering cherry, that Hetty Jackman felt peculiarly sensitive to the power of the chords. They struck her like an admonishment. She stopped, brushing the delicate pink debris from her hands, and looked about her.
In stark contrast to the appalling weather during Passiontide the previous year, recently the days had been warm and bright. The late afternoon light quickened the stained glass in the west window but it was too weak to penetrate to the eastern end of the nave or lighten the transepts. The gloom in the body of the church was only relieved by the faint effulgence of the vases of spring flowers and the dull gleam from the burnished lectern: its eagle wings spread out, its head thrown back and to the side, its claws clamped to the sturdy pedestal. Nothing stirred.
The tune was played again and repeated, this time with more of the harmony added. Then, quietly (so quietly it was almost ghostly) a reedy voice, hesitantly, picked out the words.
‘My song is love unknown,
My Saviour’s love to me,
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, That for my sake…’
It was actually rather lovely in the way that a child’s untrained voice can be. One ignores any minor musical imperfections. Hetty Jackman’s curiosity was piqued. She thought just to peep into the quire to see which of the village children was singing and who was playing, for this was not the sort of thing she’d have expected of Mr. Hoyle. Not wanting, of course, to be seen, splattered as she was with pale, bruised petals, she moved stealthily up the south aisle.
She glanced quickly over her shoulder just as the clouds must have lifted. Suddenly, the west window seemed to swell with colour. The calm, armoured angel held aloft a broad pennant, emblazoned with the cross of St George, while the three young men, representing each of the armed services gazed heavenward. At their feet, t
idily dead, were their corporeal selves. It was a magnificent tribute to those from the villages killed in ‘the war to end all wars’ and it always made Hetty Jackman’s heart flutter a little faster every time it glowed in brighter light. The beautiful faces of the three servicemen burned with such virile serenity she could not help but believe they had laid down their lives just for her.
‘He came from his blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed-for Christ would know.
But O, my friend,
My friend indeed,
Who at my need
His life did spend!’
The singer was growing more confident; the voice was uncannily piercing although the articulation was curious. Who was the child? What child could sing those words with such plangent feeling? The familiar story of the last week of Christ’s life leapt to life, verse by verse through Crossman’s words, and (so she would later maintain) seemed to attach itself to her. She was thrilled. Stirred by a reckless zeal she abandoned all furtiveness and fairly strode up the nave.
‘… What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run…’
Hetty Jackman could now make out that it was a woman playing the organ; it was Mrs. Cordingley. She knew she sometimes practised in the church (she had collected the keys once or twice over the past year) but, with her Quaker connections and not being a regular Sunday attender, Hetty Jackman was surprised she had any affinity with traditional Anglican hymnody. It was unexpected but what was even more extraordinary was the child who was with her; the child who had been singing was Bertie Simmonds, Bertie Simmonds who had not spoken a word since he was toddling, Bertie Simmonds, the schoolmaster’s simple son.
Hetty Jackman uttered a thin scream and fled.
She was not a woman who could afford to look a fool but, as she hurried back to the rectory, it came upon her more and more forcefully that she had really witnessed something remarkable which, once made known, could only—surely — rebound on her with credit: a boy of ten or eleven, whom the whole village knew to be dumb, if not an idiot, had been heard to sing a hymn in God’s house on the eve of Easter. It was a sturdy Miracle. Others, like Clare Furnival, might call hiccups of good fortune ‘miracles’ but Hetty Jackman knew that what she had just experienced was altogether quite otherwise. It was a Miracle and she was sole witness to it.
She reached her front gate, hugging herself so tightly she almost stumbled. She was desperate to possess this extraordinary occurrence; she would guard it jealously. That did not mean she would secret it away, like some miser, only indulging in the memory privately. Far from it, the value of what she had heard and seen was in the way others would fête her. But this had to be on her own terms; hers was the story to tell. She wondered whether it would be prudent to telephone The Gazette immediately or wait until Monday morning. It would depend entirely on the course Mrs. Cordingley would choose to take. That Mrs. Cordingley might complicate her Miracle was something that Hetty Jackman suspected. Mrs. Cordingley had always worn, draped like a rare fur stole across her shoulders, an air of the unconventional. Her marriage and then her early widowhood had served to set her apart from the village. In addition, wisps of rumours, which Hetty Jackman had never quite fathomed, linked her to the Simmonds family and this incident with the boy might indicate a further tangle. Much marked her out as the sort of woman who might interfere in another’s Miracle.
‘I have witnessed a Miracle to the Glory of God,’ Hetty Jackman said aloud. The words rehearsed well. Merely repeating them under her breath gave her the confidence to be even more daring. She decided she would have had a presentiment to explain her presence in the church; it would add lustre to the relating.
She knew she ought to tell her husband everything without delay. It was inconceivable that she should do otherwise, but her nerve began to falter at the prospect. Entering the rectory, she stopped in the hall, held between the slow ticks of the clock. She looked about her, trying to connect the even timbre of her home with what she had just experienced.
Although the church was as familiar to her as her own hallway, the rolling rush of the organ, the breathless treble floating above it and three sainted heroes watching from the west window had now imbued the church with a strange holiness. Yet she had been there. She had stepped into a space from which she could not, would not now step back, even if to take the next step seemed impossibly bold.
There was nothing of sufficient moment in her own home, however, to hold her back. It struck her that the very ordinariness of what she saw about her was now repellent: the umbrellastand with Edward’s soft hats on the rack; the long, spotted looking-glass, and—worst of all—the large portrait-photograph of her mother, framed, smiling and smug, hanging on the wall opposite. Hetty could never remove her coat, adjust her hat, or pin a brooch to her lapel without seeing, over her shoulder, her mother mocking.
Still she faltered. Edward was likely to laugh at her—it was always his way—but surely she could weather that and, indeed, this might make him regard her with some respect. No, it was the fear that her Miracle might be appropriated by others, by Clare Furnival and twisted against her to make her an object of ridicule throughout the village which was the greatest impediment to action.
On the hallstand was a vase of forsythia, fanning out proudly from the neck of a brown pot. The flowers spoke to her no less equivocally than if there had been a host of noble angels perched on the oak table. She heard Clare Furnival’s cruel words of that morning when all the ladies of the congregation were busy decorating the church for Easter. ‘Forsythia? I think not, Hetty. There are so many daffodils in the rest of the church I think we can safely banish yellow from the Lady Chapel. Whites now … purer colours … I think my flowering cherry would be perfect. And isn’t your forsythia just a shade wind-blown, just a shade past its best?’ There was a score to settle and what she had just witnessed would vanquish her foe far more satisfactorily than sabotaging a flower arrangement.
‘God’s will be done,’ she said, and instead of tapping on the Rector’s study door, she left the rectory and crossed the village to the Furnivals’ home. Clare Furnival should be the first to be struck by her Miracle.
Dr. Furnival was there when Hetty Jackman presented her Miracle to his wife. He paid little attention to the spiritual tangle the Rector’s wife chose to weave around her tale. For him, the only significant feature was her certainty that Bertie Simmonds had been singing. This was not just of interest to him as a doctor. He also wanted to discover how this news would strike the schoolmaster and his handsome daughter. He wasted no time and left to call at the schoolhouse.
Delia Simmonds had assumed, on opening the door to him, that the doctor had called, though unbidden, to enquire after her mother. He had taken to doing so more recently.
‘Mother will no doubt be delighted to see you, though unexpected,’ she had said with that light sardonicism which was her invariable tone with him, conscious as she was that he found her attractive.
‘Actually, Miss Simmonds, it’s Bertie I’ve come to talk about. I need to speak to your father but would prefer a word with you beforehand.’
‘You had better follow me into the kitchen then for Father’s in the drawing room getting up a fug on his pipe.’
‘You know, Miss Simmonds, that Bertie has come to interest me rather perversely’—(and he chuckled as if this interest, of course, were only a minor matter, little more than a hobby for a man of his intellect)—’in direct proportion to your father’s insistence that medical science can do nothing for him. I am something of an amateur expert in the new ideas of psychoanalysis coming out of Germany and have suggested to Simmonds, more than once, that we try the young lad under hypnosis. Every time, he’s been against it. With nearly forty years of teaching behind him, your father considers himself sufficiently well versed in the psychology of children to know that hypnosis (actually I think “quackery” was t
he term he employed!) would serve no purpose. He is convinced … he has convinced himself … that the boy is an incurable mute. He seems to think that Mrs. Simmonds’ advanced years, when she gave birth to Bertie, are to blame. You, Miss Simmonds, can see, I am sure, how that obdurate fatalism (especially in such an intelligent man as your father) is like a red rag to a bull to a modern man of science such as myself.’
‘Are you here to lower your horns and charge again, Dr. Furnival? If you are, I’m afraid I cannot be of any help to you.’
She continued her preparations for her mother’s supper, a soft-boiled egg and some toast. Probably Bertie had been up to some mischief and this resurgence of ‘interest’ from the doctor was a preamble to some interference in his discipline. She was wrong.
Furnival said, ‘Bertie was singing today.’
The large copper kettle she was lifting slipped from her grasp. She did not scream but the scalding water sloshed from the spout and top as it fell and, though she jumped back, drenched her legs. Water flooded the floor.
Accidents live in the memory in astonishing detail. The senses, primed by sudden catastrophe, note everything but it is only later, in periods of calm, that all can be recalled. She staggered; her knees folded and her shoulders collapsed forward as if she had been winded. She put out a hand to steady herself and leaned heavily on the top of the kitchener, searing her hand on the hotplate. A full, laboured minute seemed to pass before her nerves screamed. The great copper kettle had clattered onto the quarry tiles and lay there, rocking back and forth on its side with the motion of the water left inside it.
Furnival was up and at her side, pushing a chair forward to support her. She fell back onto it holding up her hand in horror; it was already livid and blistered. Her dragging breath turned to shrill cries.
‘My legs! My legs!’
With her good hand, she began to pluck at her shins where the boiling water had soaked her stockings. Furnival dropped to his knees; his hands beneath her skirt, he started to peel her stockings from her thigh. Then her father burst in.
That They Might Lovely Be Page 6