That They Might Lovely Be

by David Matthews

  ‘I shall need your help on the two-man saw before dinner, Hubert. The tree is down and much of the bucking done but I want manageable logs sawn ready for splitting. Can you see your way to rolling up your sleeves?’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Hubert shortly. Delia sensed that he would not step back from any implied challenge from his father.

  ‘There’d be jobs for the girls too, raking the twigs and leaves.’

  ‘I cannot understand, Frederick, why you could not have left the tree until the autumn when the leaves would be down and far less to clear.’

  ‘Better now than leaving it to high summer.’

  ‘When my husband has a project in mind, Anstace, there is no holding him back. Patience is not a Simmonds’ virtue.’

  ‘I’d be happy to help with the raking.’

  ‘Should we not work on Measure for Measure?’ asked Delia.

  ‘You notice that, in Delia’s hierarchy of desirable occupations, even Shakespeare tops labouring in the garden,’ said Hubert.

  ‘I think I have the measure of Isabella so I’d rather rake,’ said Anstace.

  ‘That’s because she’s a nun,’ said Delia. ‘It’s Anstace’s ambition to become one too.’

  ‘No, it’s not!’ remonstrated Anstace, laughing. ‘Not really. But when I was little I muddled them up with pictures of Elizabth Fry and other Quaker heroines. It was the demure dress, I suppose. And then, I think I thought how lovely it might be to live quietly in a convent and never have always to be on the move, staying with different relations.’

  ‘I can understand the abhorrence of relations,’ said Hubert. ‘Our Minton cousins are ghastly. But joining a Holy Order seems quite a drastic step to take just to escape your extended family.’

  ‘Isabella is described as “enskied and sainted”. I rather like that.’ Anstace steered the conversation back to the play. ‘And then she’s tripped up by both Angelo and the Duke.’

  ‘Is that the line you’ll take?’ asked Mrs. Simmonds. ‘I have to say, I find this play an odd choice. I wonder what Miss Pumphrey was about. It is awkward in many ways, neither tragedy nor comedy, and, besides, I am not at all sure that the full text should be accessible to the youthful reader.’

  ‘It is only Anstace who reads an unexpurgated text. She has an edition lent her by her aunts. My copy is the one handed-out by the school.’

  Anstace felt she ought to reply to Mrs. Simmonds’ sharp look.

  ‘I’d rather decide for myself what bits to miss out.’

  ‘Good for you, Miss Catchpool,’ said Hubert. ‘I can’t remember anything about Measure for Measure (not sure if I’ve even read it, to be frank) but Shakespeare has always struck me as a master in concealing the truth of the matter behind a load of protective metaphor, so I can’t see you coming to much harm. Tell us more about your “enskied and sainted” Isabella. You ought to listen, Delia, I don’t imagine you’ve done half the studying that Miss Catchpool has.’

  Anstace would rather not have had the teatime conversation focused on her in this way. She felt all the more awkward on sensing that Mr. Simmonds, lightly tapping the edge of the table with his fingertips, would far rather they rose from the table so he could resume his labours. However, not to give an opinion when asked for one would have been ‘lame’, the term she and Delia shared for anything ineffective.

  ‘The thing is, a nun does not expect to fall in love, especially when she’s talking to a monk (even if he is in disguise). Her brother’s about to be executed so she has a great deal on her mind. I don’t think she really knows what’s happened to her and, actually, I’m not sure Shakespeare does either. And that’s why we never hear whether she accepts the Duke’s proposal of marriage or not. I have a feeling she’ll accept but only on her own terms. If the Duke thinks he’s going to have a conventional marriage, wedded to a former nun, then he’s mistaken. I think the marriage just stands for stable resolution. It’s the device Shakespeare uses for Isabella to save the Duke.’

  ‘Bravo. There’s a sequel to be written,’ said Hubert.

  ‘Whatever Isabella’s situation,’ said Delia, ‘she wouldn’t promise whatever she had to promise to save her brother’s life. I call that unfeeling.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree—speaking on behalf of all brothers.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ Anstace continued, ‘she doesn’t know what sort of love she ought to be feeling. She finds it impossible to reconcile the human and the spiritual sorts. I feel sorry for her. She’s out of her depth.’

  ‘So am I!’ said Delia.

  ‘Frankly, I’m glad to hear it, my dear,’ said Mrs. Simmonds. ‘As I said, it’s awkward and not entirely suitable, whichever way you look at it. I cannot, for the life of me, see why Miss Pumphrey thought you girls could have the necessary experience to engage with such ambiguous morality.’

  ‘Women’s suffrage,’ said Mr. Simmonds as he stood up. ‘I imagine she is all in sympathy. Here’s another barrier to knock down.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Hubert, ‘she thought the play might give her pupils an experience that life had not. Isn’t that what literature is supposed to do?’

  ‘Delia, you and Miss Catchpool may choose to do what you wish to do before dinner but Hubert and I need to tackle the walnut.’

  Nodding to his son, Mr. Simmonds made his exit, filling his pipe from the pouch in his waistcoat pocket as he did so.

  That evening, it was the acrid fug from Mr. Simmonds’ pipe, which drove Anstace and Delia out of the tiny drawng room back into the front parlour, which had served as a dining room. The gaslights were lit for them to read by but, tired from their exertions, a companionable silence largely prevailed. Hubert popped his head around the door to say good night as he was taking a turn down the lane before going to bed; he would be leaving early the next morning.

  ‘Come and stay again at Whitsun, Miss Catchpool,’ he said, out of the blue. ‘The village always wakes up at Whitsun.’

  She thanked him and said she’d love to, wishing him good night.

  ‘So that’s what brothers are like,’ she said to Delia, as they heard his footsteps disappearing up the lane.

  Thursday, 28 May 1914

  Four weeks later, his casual invitation to Delia’s friend was far from Hubert’s thoughts as he cut across the lawns of the Big House at the top of the village. It had been another fine day and there was still enough light in the western sky to lay darker shadows onto the thickening dusk. As he bounded up the terrace steps, he could hear a gramophone playing, wobbling its way through a stringy melody, and he saw, behind the looped curtains which draped the French windows, figures swaying in motion to the music.

  Hubert hesitated. There were only half a dozen or so people in the drawing room before him. From the sounds of merriment, he had thought there were more. This was a more intimate affair than he had expected. His natural confidence, which had come of age at Cambridge, suddenly wobbled as he reappraised the significance of what he was about to do. Centuries of hierarchical deference were to be swept away. He did not even have to muster his strength and take a run to clear the social hurdles set out before him; the hurdles had already been knocked clear and the track lay ahead, straight and firm underfoot. Some might think it heretical that he, the son of a lowly village schoolmaster should hobnob with the master at the Big House as a guest and an equal. In fact, it was cause for celebration. This was liberation. To emphasise this conclusion, he stepped back to pluck a crimson rhododendron bud from the bush at the base of the terrace. It lolled a little precariously from his buttonhole but this symbolized rather nicely, he thought, the new social intercourse he was appropriating.

  As Hubert stepped through the French windows, his arrival was immediately noticed by the master of the house, Geoffrey Cordingley. He came forward and, grabbing Hubert by the elbow, dragged him into the room.

  ‘Simmonds! I thought you’d lost your nerve. Here, come and meet these fellows.’

  The other guests appeared to be d
ressed with a more peculiar lack of uniformity than dinner and dancing, however informal, would have suggested. In his white tie and tails, Hubert realized he was overdressed. Geoffrey Cordingley had not passed on his decree that, in his mother’s absence (Lady Margery was dining in town with her sister), he and his guests should slump into a Bohemian disregard for etiquette. Dinner was to be a cold collation when the serious business of the evening (practising the country dances in preparation for the Tenants’ Whitsun Ball) had begun to pall.

  ‘We’re in need of you, Simmonds. I’m all at sixes and sevens over “The Dashing White Sergeant”. Don’t fail me. You told me you are quite the expert nonpareil in these matters. ‘Geoffrey waved him into the room to meet the others.

  ‘How do you do, Simmonds?’

  ‘Ah, Jenkins.’

  ‘Yes, you know Jenkins. But do you know his two sisters, the famous Misses Jenkins, both of Girton? They’re both fiendishly intelligent—as anyone at Girton has to be—but none the less thoroughly decent chaps. And not a bit terrifying,’ he added under his breath.

  ‘Not a blue-stocking shared between them!’ laughed one of the other men.

  ‘I can assure you, Mr. Simmonds,’ said one of the Jenkins sisters, in a flat, measured tone, ‘that Mr. Petrie has absolutely no knowledge on which to base that statement. It’s pure speculation.’

  One of the other girls tittered rather too loudly.

  ‘My cousin, Lillian Kingsnorth, here to make up the numbers you know—’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Oh Geoffrey, you beast!’

  ‘And this is her sister, Ada, who is, you must understand, the most responsible person in the house. Ada, we are sure, has an interview with my mother tomorrow morning at twenty-past-twelve precisely, on her return from town. It will be like sitting in front of the Inquisition. She will have to give a detailed account for this evening’s proceedings. I, at least, shall have to behave myself. We are all expected to be perfectly proficient in at least five dances. My mother insists. I believe she thinks it is my feudal duty but although these Whitsun Balls have been going on for as long as I can remember, I can never keep the steps in my head from one year to the next. I’ve told her I’ll play along. But this far and no further. If Europe goes to blazes, I’ll not be calling in the men from the fields to form a company. We’ll have a dance but not a muster.’

  ‘The way we’re going, not sure there’s much difference, old chap,’ said Jenkins.

  ‘The thing is,’ continued Geoffrey, ‘we must all be nice to Ada. Whether the rest of us are allowed luncheon tomorrow will depend upon her report. I expect you to be especially obsequious, Simmonds.’

  ‘I cannot believe that I shall have the least difficulty,’ he said, bowing with a flourish, like some eighteenth-century dandy, in Miss Kingsnorth’s direction.

  Although his mock gallantry was rewarded with another peal of giggles from Lillian Kingsnorth, the elder sister looked sour. Hubert guessed Lady Margery had chosen her spy with discernment. He wondered if she knew of his lowly background.

  The other two men, Petrie and Jarvis, were Cambridge chaps whom Hubert had met once or twice in Cordingley’s rooms. The eight of them, Hubert thought, made an ill-assorted bunch, exactly what one might expect Cordingley’s studied unorthodoxy to gather about him.

  Ada Kingsnorth had not taken to her cousin’s guests. Geoffrey had not helped. She had heard him tell Petrie or Jarvis (she had not worked out which was which) that his Kingsnorth cousins were a tribe of slow girls. ‘Lillian is the youngest and is under the impression that she need only laugh at everything to be excessively charming. I do believe her mother, my father’s sister, has told her to set her sights on me. Can you imagine anything so fruitless, dear boy?’ Smarting, Ada wondered how he would have described her.

  Ada Kingsnorth enjoyed country dancing and was rather good at it but, once she realised that the others had no intention of taking it seriously, and that she was not even going to be allowed this entertainment, she became increasingly irritable. Neither Nancy nor Gertrude Jenkins, so each swore, had ever danced a step in her life and, with Geoffrey’s encouragement, these two left-footed sisters turned every sequence of movement into anarchy. The schoolmaster’s boy, for that was who Mr. Simmonds was, did his best, she had to acknowledge, to impose some discipline on the proceedings but eventually he too capitulated under Geoffrey’s relentless mockery. She could not understand why Geoffrey had invited him if not to make use of any rustic skills the young man might have. It irked her exceedingly to see the pattern and design of the old dances degenerate into a mere romp.

  Nancy, the elder Miss Jenkins, a tiny dab of a woman, claimed she could only count to the music when wearing her spectacles, and this provided much amusement particularly as they refused to remain on her nose for long at a time.

  ‘I can only think with a pen in my hand’—said Jarvis, boldly attempting to strip-the-willow—’a particular fountain pen I had as a boy.’

  ‘He lost it when he was about thirteen!’ said Jenkins.

  ‘And I’ll tell you what, Simmonds is a hummer,’ Geoffrey had shouted. ‘Catch him at anything intellectual, you know, and he’ll be humming some drivelling music-hall tune under his breath!’

  ‘Then we’ll have you drummed out of the examinations, Mr. Simmonds,’ laughed Gertrude Jenkins. ‘You’ll be forced to sit them in isolation, as if in quarantine with some ghastly disease. Humming is a decidedly subversive habit!’

  ‘Now subversion is something that Simmonds can’t yet be accused of,’ cried Geoffrey. ‘He has yet to prove that he is not as ardent a status-quoite as dear Ada! I, on the other hand, am the revolutionary!’

  There was much laughter and the gramophone seemed to lurch its way through the tunes with increasing aplomb as the evening’s merriment become more intoxicating. At one point, Geoffrey attacked his friend from behind and muzzed his hair violently. Hubert swung around laughing so that, for a moment, Geoffrey was able to hold the other man’s face between his hands.

  ‘Hubert Simmonds,’ he said quietly, ‘are you as conventional as you’d have me believe?’

  Hubert’s only defence against such sudden intimacy was his best smile. Geoffrey echoed it with a wry twist of his own lips but, in the second before he took his hands from Hubert’s face, he drew his thumb gently across the other man’s lips. ‘Say nothing, Hubert Simmonds. Say nothing.’

  It was after this exchange that Hubert gave up on trying to sequence the dance steps for the others. He was sorry to abandon Miss Kingsnorth, as he felt she had appreciated his efforts, but Cordingley was too compelling a force. If the young squire could throw aside form and order, why should a mere schoolmaster’s son not do the same? The accident of their both being up at Cambridge, with only a year between them, had already blurred the social distinctions. Why not take Cordingley’s cue and throw off all discipline? Hubert found himself aroused by the idea of discarding restraint, and subjugating inhibition.

  Perhaps it is this, he thought, which charges my friendship with Cordingley. He laughed.

  The chaos into which the dancing slid was exacerbated by the lack of space. The Big House did not have a ballroom but Geoffrey had improvised by folding back the screen between two reception rooms and pushing various items of furniture to the wall. It had been done in the past but not for many, many years and only then in a much more orchestrated manner under Lady Margery’s supervision.

  At one point, there had been a skidding into a table and Geoffrey had railed against the furnishings.

  ‘The house is crowded with this stuff. It’s all baronial mid-Victorian, heavy colours and dark wood. I am surrounded by the solid clutter of bric-a-brac and worn, brocaded plushness!’ He aimed a kick at the offending article.

  Reared on her mother’s reverence for her old home, Ada Kingsnorth remonstrated with him over what she saw as a sacreligious disregard for the rooms’ proper functions and his rough handling of their contents.

  ‘Oh, Ada! We’re fifty ye
ars behind the times in this place. Look around you. It’s the heyday of Victorian prosperity with industry tamed, the Empire obedient and Prussia no more than a rumble in the belly of Europe.’

  ‘That’s no reason to kick the chesterfield. It’s been in the family for years.’

  ‘My family. And I can do with it as I choose. If I like, I could dance the St. Bernard’s waltz in this tablecloth.’

  Sometime in the small hours, the last vestiges of decorum disappeared. Gertrude Jenkins, whose Bohemian garb of orange and turquoise had been startling from the outset, was now rendered particularly bizarre by her inability to keep the broad band of black velvet she wore around her head from slipping over her eyes, with its ragged ostrich plume sprouting at any angle. Giving substance to his threat, Geoffrey emerged from the hallway, bare-chested, draped in yards of chenille, pulled from the long table, as if it were a toga. He struck a Roman pose or two and then, opting for swooning damsel, threw himself into Hubert’s arms, demanding that Simmonds lead him through whichever dance was creaking from the gramophone. Ada looked on with ill-concealed disgust. She was glad that Lillian had already taken herself to bed.