That They Might Lovely Be

by David Matthews

  ‘Do you know, Rector, in my weaker moments I could half-believe that some hostile fate has been at work, bent on destroying all that I hold dear. Is that fanciful? Blasphemous even? Perhaps you think I am guilty of that vulgar error of presuming that my life has some cosmic significance. I am not so simple-minded. But I do see quite clearly reflected in my own troubles—petty, familiar, parochial though they may be, though you may think them—issues of supreme importance. I am not alone. We are all under threat.

  ‘I have seen my fair share of trouble in the past—it is no secret—and I have not flinched from it because I have known it is the way things are. We do not dwell in paradise. And I am not sure that I’d care to, to be frank. Life is a fight and though I’ve been dealt some savage blows, I’ve known where I have stood and I have never for a moment weakened my resolve to hold my own. Until this business … I am not a coward, Rector, but I now find my resilience undermined.

  ‘And today,’ she continued, ‘I feel old and I feel frightened because I suddenly find myself wondering whether I have the strength to carry on, and wondering too who will carry on when I am dead. I shall die, you know.’ She paused, not so much as to brood momentarily on her own mortality as to marshal her reserves in the face of it. When she began again to speak, he noticed there was a sharper, more belligerent note in her voice.

  ‘There has been a malevolent force at work. (I shall not name names. Not yet.) It has sought to snatch away that to which it has no right, seeking to cheat me of all I have striven to achieve. The discovery has shocked me, shocked me deeply, and—if I must be honest—confused me. I am not used to confusion. It bewilders me and I fear I may have lost the steel to fight just when it is most incumbent upon me to lead the charge.’

  Her fingers were plucking at the worn fabric on the arm of her chair. Her eyes darted from side to side but never once settled on her listener. It was clear she was at sea in uncharted waters. Loose thoughts, like dangerous pieces of wreckage, were washing against her consciousness.

  ‘I have never underestimated your profession, Rector.’

  He wondered for a brief, terrifying moment whether she were going to call on him for an exorcism, she looked so wild. But then she found within herself a thin, staccato laugh to turn against her own earnestness.

  ‘I am all awry. It is a shocking thing and it has never happened before. I should like to blame old age but I have been old for years now. It may be that I am going to be ill, but I don’t think so. No, in truth, I think it is that I have just woken up and seen things as they actually are. It has been a shock. I am afraid I have been complacent. I believed I had the measure of the world, however terrible it showed itself to be. I have been a fool too and that is unpardonable.

  ‘I have always been suspicious of heaven as a notion. I think it encourages surrender. It is easier to settle for being a victim if heaven awaits. If all we care for is heaven, we are unlikely to deploy our resources effectively to challenge the evils of this world. Your predecessor—the Reverend Dacre, you know— agreed with me. He knew exactly what society required of the Church. We saw eye to eye on nearly everything. He was a great support to me during those difficult war years. Dacre was a first-rate lieutenant. He never counselled capitulation. He never suggested renouncing this world for the next. He knew I was fighting for all that I held dear and that there could be no wavering. To doubt, to question: those were luxuries I could not afford. Even when I recognized my own son as the enemy, I closed in for combat. And I had my victories.’

  Lady Margery leaned back in her chair for a moment and closed her eyes. Edward Jackman continued to give her what he felt she needed: his silence to feed on while she gathered what strength she could muster to peel off this preamble and expose the hard stone at its centre.

  ‘Rector, Mr. Jackman.’ She did not look at him but gazed at a point over his left shoulder where her own portrait of some fifty years previously was hanging. And although she used his name, it was to herself that she now made her justification as, he guessed, she had made it previously when settling other crises.

  ‘There have been Cordingleys in Kent since before the Conquest. My own family, though ennobled, is not nearly so old. The Cordingleys are of Old England, the rootstock. What happens when the stock fails? Any child in Kent could tell you. The leaves yellow and the fruit drops. The harvest is lost. The garden dies. Swollen, scented plums shrivel and sour; pears, apples and cherries all wither and the harvesters can carry the bushels from the orchard in one hand. All kinds are grafted onto the one stock, do you see? When Old England becomes cankered what hope can there be?

  ‘I have practised good husbandry. Don’t doubt it. When I married, I set to work to clear the weeds and enrich the soil. The family had neglected itself. Whole farms were mortgaged. The place had been left to run its course.

  ‘Did you know that Henry the Fifth’s mother was a de Bohun? My own mother’s family, spelled B-O-N-E, is grafted in there somewhere. I used to know the family tree right back. During the season, I took more pleasure, as a girl, from tracing the cousinage of the young men and girls around me than ever I did from dancing. But I came to learn that we, the brilliant aristocracy, were newcomers. Old England had the first claim. My nephew, you know, took a wife from America, a Boston heiress. It was a mistake. I knew so at the time but they were all so taken with her chatter and fortune. He died before she had ever learned how to conduct herself. She returned to America, taking the title and her little boys with her. There is an English earl in Boston who has sold his ancestral home. They have turned it into some hospital for the hopeless.’

  This thought held her for a moment and then she stirred and focused on the clergyman before her.

  ‘I saved Dunchurch, Mr. Jackman. I kept Mount Benjamin intact and, with the estate secure, the village was safe. Nothing changed. Everyone knew their place. My husband really did not have the capacity to make difficult decisions … but he was loyal. And his sister’s marriage, as it happens, turned out to be advantageous. Her husband, Kingsnorth, was an astute if not a wholly disinterested adviser. We believed in good management and foresight, Rector. And steely resolve to see off the predators. There was nothing less than the preservation of Old England at stake. Here, do you see? If only in this quiet corner of Kent, Old England would be safe with me, held in trust for my children and my children’s children.

  ‘But then I never expected the threat to come from my son, my only child. That required hard pruning.’

  Her voice had risen bravely and she fixed his eye. He did not need her to expand the point. The magnitude of her disappointment was clear to him. She had only borne the one child and he had lived (it was said) dishonourably. There was nothing so extraordinary in that; plenty of heirs, from the best families down the ages, had been dissolute or vicious. Geoffrey Cordingley, though, had recently died childless and before his time. It would not be surprising if Lady Margery blamed her daughter-in-law for the lack of an heir. Perhaps that was the cause of the rift between them, though there were rumours of financial wranglings over the inheritance, too.

  And then there was the story of the west window, erected by Lady Margery more to insult her son, who had refused to fight and gone to prison for it, than to honour the men of the villages who had died. How would she have felt if her son had fallen in Flanders? That his was a needful sacrifice, his blood ploughed into the land to ensure fertility? Yes, he appreciated Lady Margery’s loss and believed she deserved some commiseration. But she was not alone; the war had blasted more hopes than hers.

  However, all this speculation seemed far removed from the significance of Bertie Simmonds’ singing in the church. Whilst Lady Margery seemed lost in her thoughts, the Rector was aware of a certain emptiness in his stomach; it was well past lunchtime. He decided to break the silence.

  ‘Hard pruning, you say. We need not unpack that metaphor now for surely, with your son’s passing, those difficult times can be put behind you.’

  The thread on
the arm of her chair snapped. Her hands were suddenly still; on her fingers, the ring-stones in their clumsy, overwrought settings gleamed heavily in the midday light. When she spoke, it was clear that whatever she had been pondering had been put aside. She spoke now in a purposeful tone, brisk and to the point.

  ‘His death raises all sorts of questions. There is the succession. The Kingsnorths certainly have legitimacy in their favour but they are all brainless or flighty, except for Ada and she has married an ironmonger. I am, however, minded to disregard legitimacy in favour of the bloodline now that I have found Geoffrey’s son.’

  ‘Good God, Lady Margery, what can you mean?’

  ‘I may need your support. He will need to be rescued.’

  ‘But who? Where is this boy? And what does Mrs. Cordingley… ? Does she have… ?

  He stared at her, spluttering with incredulity.

  ‘The boy, Mr. Jackman, of course, is Bertie Simmonds.’

  It was nearly three o’clock before the Rector returned to the vicarage where his wife had had cook delay luncheon which was now a dried joint of beef and a tired Yorkshire pudding.

  He had left the Big House convinced that Lady Margery was deluded. He had been unable to untangle fact from supposition following her declaration that Bertie Simmonds was not the schoolmaster’s young son but her grandson. She had quite obviously convinced herself that a liaison between her own son and Miss Simmonds had resulted in the birth of the child with the subsequent subterfuge of passing the boy off as the young mother’s half-witted brother. The Rector could not follow her reasoning; it was simplest to accept that she had lost her wits.

  Hetty, as her husband knew, always struggled to keep a confidence. Though no wild gossip, she could never hold her peace when she believed, as she invariably did, that another would benefit from what she could disclose. ‘You may find it a comfort to know…’ was her standard preface to an indiscretion. However, the sight of his ruined lunch and his profound irritation with Lady Margery’s lunatic claims propelled him toward confiding in his wife. She was so evidently agog for news and so primed to side with him against Lady Margery, that telling her all that had passed, after she left Mount Benjamin, was simply the natural thing to do. He comforted himself with the thought that Hetty was most unlikely to divulge the ravings of a woman no longer in her right mind.

  ‘The more I think about it, the angrier I become!’ Edward Jackman said, letting his cutlery clatter onto his plate. He pulled his napkin from his waistcoat and threw it down on the table. Mrs. Jackman was not unused to his petulant rages, but they were normally provoked by something she had done. She froze while the shadow of the raptor passed over her.

  ‘Angrier and angrier!’

  ‘But, Edward, will that help?’

  ‘Good God, Hetty! Of course it won’t help! I doubt if anything I can do will help. And an excellent piece of beef ruined. I can’t eat another mouthful. I shall become ill!’

  ‘No, p-please, Edward, don’t.’

  ‘Can I help it? She practically demanded I march into the schoolhouse and whisk the boy away. She’d have the whole family denounced as enemies of the state, kidnappers of the Cordingley heir. Whatever I do, there’ll be the most appalling to-do.’

  ‘For all we know, she may be right.’

  ‘What can you mean, Hetty?’

  ‘Why, Delia Simmonds may be the boy’s mother. There’s always been talk of it. Mrs. Simmonds is so old, you see Edward.’

  ‘Are you serious? I have scant regard for Simmonds; he’s awkward and opinionated and in the general run of things I should not be sorry to see some of the stuffing knocked out of him. But if Lady Margery makes her accusation public, and gossip supports her, he’ll have to resign. I doubt if his wife would live through it. And what of Miss Simmonds? Her reputation will be sliced and slivered and fed to every dog in the county.’

  ‘Only if it’s true, dear. There’ll be a birth certificate somewhere.’

  ‘There’ll be scandal.’

  ‘What does Lady Margery want with little Bertie anyway? Perhaps she does believe me after all that there was a Miracle!’

  ‘Your blasted miracle is immaterial. The boy was wrong in the head and will remain so, in my opinion. Being able to sing and talk won’t change that.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Perhaps that’s the proof that he’s got Lady Margery’s blood. He’s as batty as she is. No, Hetty, I don’t think she cares anything for the boy, not for himself. I doubt that she’s ever spoken to him. Why should she have? This notion of hers has sprung from nowhere, but it was inspired, I’m sorry to say, by last night’s business. I don’t blame you, particularly. You heard what you heard. It’s Mrs. Cordingley who will need to account for her role in this miracle palaver. Lady Margery was hinting at some duplicitous behaviour there, too. Though I find that hard to credit. I tell you, this could have far-reaching consequences.’

  ‘But will you let it, Edward?’

  He knew that she was really asking whether he would allow her Miracle to run its course. It was tempting. Although this singing was a ridiculous complication, it could serve to draw attention from the far more destructive aspects of the situation. He sighed.

  ‘I shall do my duty, Hetty. And so must you.’ He rose and patted her shoulder. ‘Let’s abandon lunch and ring for tea and Simnel cake. I shall have to see Simmonds before Evensong, if only to tell him what’s afoot, but perhaps I shall leave calling on Mrs. Cordingley to you. She can explain the business of the boy’s singing directly to you. It will help you understand.’

  ‘And if she makes me “understand” what will be the price of my apostasy?’ Asking this question was the most defiant step Hetty Jackman had ever taken.

  ‘Pooh-pooh, Hetty. Don’t be silly. Leave words like “apostasy” to me for my Sunday sermons. Such things need never concern you. Just do your loyal duty.’

  She knew this was unfair. She wished that her husband railed at her, even struck her, for to embrace martyrdom in the face of naked hostility was not unattractive.

  She had experienced something momentous and she needed to understand it. If her husband and priest dismissed it, refusing to accord it any significance, where did that leave her? She knew the answer with black clarity: it left her in danger of taking a wrong turn. Her instincts had never been sure.

  Frederick Simmonds had told Gladys that they were at home to no one. By mid-morning it had been apparent that the rumours, heralded by the doctor’s visit the night before, had blown around the village and been picked up by the idly curious and inveterately inquisitive alike. Knots of children, assuming a studied nonchalance in an attempt to avoid their headmaster’s notice, kept gathering across the road from the school buildings; they were soon shooed away by Gladys. The visits from two or three neighbours, uncharacteristically concerned, calling to see if anything was amiss, if they could help in any way, were blocked on the doorstep with the information that Mrs. Simmonds was unwell again and that Miss Simmonds had unfortunately scalded herself and needed to rest; the truth could be most advantageous.

  When the Rector called during the afternoon, Gladys knew he could not be treated so dismissively. He was shown into the snug while Gladys went to see if Mr. Simmonds was ‘in’ to the Rector.

  The schoolmaster had been surveying his livestock behind the paddock, considering whether both pigs should be slaughtered when the time came. He had almost succeeded in subduing his exasperation at the turn events had taken by thinking of the fresh pork, and the meals of faggots and flead cakes which followed a killing. Husbandry always soothed him.

  At the best of times, a visit from Jackman was unwelcome. Although the school had passed out of the control of the Church of England on Mr. Simmonds’ appointment, the Rector was still Chairman of the Managers and was wont to interfere in the running of the school. His hostility toward the digging of the swimming pool had been typical. Frederick Simmonds was not sure that his temper could withstand being called indoors to be subjected to a homily from the R
ector inspired by Bertie’s troublesome behaviour. It was sure to be that.

  Nothing could have prepared him for what the Rector actually had to say, however, nor for the uncharacteristic sympathy with which he appeared to deliver his news. He was blunt and to the point, but there was genuine concern in his face.

  ‘I have to tell you, Simmonds, to be prepared for some scandal, Miss Simmonds too. I have been with Lady Margery this afternoon and she has got it into her head that your boy is her grandson. That Miss Simmonds is his mother.’

  Frederick Simmonds felt his world lurch. Ten years conflated into a moment and he knew again the cocktail of fury, embarrassment, irritation and revulsion which had unsteadied him when Delia first wrote from Weston-super-Mare with the news of the child. Were they still at sea? Had there been no safe mooring? Rocked by the force of the Rector’s news, he was lost for words and could only stare, wild-eyed, at the other man.

  ‘I know. I know. Sheer lunacy, I fear. You’ll have to weather it, Simmonds, as best you can.’

  The schoolmaster nodded slowly. He knew, however, that the Rector’s trite advice would count for little if his family were swamped by prurient gossip. How would Delia react? Muriel, his wife, how would she cope? And he, what shameful business would he have to recall? If they were washed back in the deluge, would they surface uninjured?

  ‘It may come to nothing,’ the Rector continued. ‘Lady Margery may reconsider the business about the boy. She may not be well. This may all be some passing fancy. However, I have to say that she has a notion that you have set yourself against her and her family.’ He paused before adding, ‘And she is not without influence.’