That They Might Lovely Be

by David Matthews

  ‘I suppose if we refuse to dance with them, Miss Kingsnorth, they are bound to dance with each other,’ Nancy Jenkins said, joining Ada by the piano to watch the spectacle.

  ‘I find them … ridiculous.’

  ‘I am inclined to agree with you. However, I imagine they find us de trop.’ After a slight pause, she continued, ‘I apologise, Miss Kingsnorth, for being such a poor sport. I made no attempt to sort out all those complicated steps to the dances. I am as ignorant of country dancing now as I was before and there’s nothing to be proud of in that. I had the chance to learn something new and I turned it down. And in such a mocking, scoffing way. You will think badly of me, and I can’t blame you. Mr. Cordingley encouraged me and I fell for it. I really am very cross with him. Is your cousin always like this?’

  ‘I believe some people find him diverting,’ said Ada.

  ‘Yes. He is certainly that. My sister and I are bored by charm but we are not bored by him. I think he attracts because he is dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ This was beyond Ada’s imagination. The evidence to the contrary was there before them. Her cousin was swathed in a tasselled tablecloth, resembling a cross between a Romantic tragic-hero and a dowager duchess. He was waltzing with a man from the village, whose Kentish vowels were unmistakable. Her cousin was ridiculous and embarrassing, objectionable and cavalier. How could he be dangerous?

  ‘He has the temperament of an anarchist,’ said Nancy Jenkins.

  Once his other guests had taken themselves off to their rooms and the servants were making all straight, Geoffrey insisted on walking Hubert back through the park. He still wore the tablecloth, though now it was thrown over one shoulder like a cloak. He extricated his arm from beneath the folds of cloth and flung it across Hubert’s shoulders.

  ‘You’re drunk, you know,’ smiled Hubert.

  ‘I do know. Deliberately so.’

  ‘Was the evening so unbearable?’ Hubert asked, as they swayed through the shrubbery.

  ‘Too ghastly. The wrong people. It’s always the way.’

  ‘I rather enjoyed myself.’

  ‘But you lost that exuberant buttonhole.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Geoffrey broke free and tugged another cluster of blossom from a bush. ‘Stand still.’

  The chenille tablecloth fell at his feet while his fingers worked ineffectually at Hubert’s lapel.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hubert laughed.

  ‘You’re right, of course. But keep still.’ He already had hold of Hubert’s lapel and now he simply raised his face and kissed him firmly on the mouth. Hubert was not taken entirely by surprise nor was he entirely passive. Geoffrey felt the softening of Hubert’s lips against his own but he pulled back. He stroked Hubert’s cheek with his fingers, registering the early growth of stubble.

  ‘Good night, Hubert.’

  ‘Geoffrey.’

  They stood apart now, an odd tableau: the one man still in his evening attire, the other half-naked, his braces dangling beside his hips, a froth of chenille at his feet. Nothing more was said and they parted making their separate ways to their different homes.

  A drunken kiss need have no significance and can be dismissed out of hand but Hubert was too honest to do so. Had his friendship with Geoffrey always had an element of flirtation about it? From the first, on discovering that a lad from the village was coming up to Cambridge, he knew Geoffrey had courted him. Another man might have been patronising or condescending but pulling social rank had never characterised Geoffrey’s behaviour. He had chosen intimacy instead.

  Perhaps I have been seduced, mused Hubert, but if that is the case then I have been complicit in it. Flattered by his attention, I never allowed him to see me as his inferior. When he kissed me, he knew he was kissing a friend.

  Hubert knew that he would never have moved to kiss Geoffrey, but he also knew that there had been nothing in his own behaviour to dissuade the other man from taking that step. Rather pompously, as he might have done when speaking to a master at school or indeed to his own father, he said aloud, ‘I bear equal responsibility for what has occurred.’

  Drunken or not, that kiss meant he and Geoffrey had crossed a significant line. Hubert was not unduly perturbed by the sexual and social taboos which they had awoken. He felt no guilt because their physical intimacy had nothing repellant about it. No, the issue was ‘what next?’ He liked Geoffrey enormously but he neither loved him nor lusted after him. Would Geoffrey say the same? If he had aroused a more powerful emotion in his friend, then Hubert was troubled. A more likely feeling, of course, would be embarrassment. A lightness of touch was needed. Things, he realized — registering a touch of irritation— were suddenly more complicated.

  There was no likelihood of the two men meeting until the following Saturday, when Hubert had been invited to join the Cordingley party at the tenants’ Whitsun Ball. Hubert reckoned he might lessen the awkwardness of their meeting if he took Delia and her friend, Anstace, with him. They would provide some temporary diversion, giving the two men space to manoeuvre around each other and find themselves.

  Whit-Saturday, 30 May 1914

  When Hubert, accompanied by Delia and Anstace, arrived at the Tenants’ Hall, on Whit-Saturday, the dancing had been in full spate for some time. Merriment had spilled over into the cobbled quadrangle. The twangy chords from the piano and the thinner, purer scrapings from the two fiddles mingled with the cheering and laughter of the revelers into a cacophony of exuberance. One of the great oak doors was half-open and a couple of young men were lounging in the space of light thrown onto the deepening dusk. Beyond them, the reels of dancers circled around and around. The music raced to a vigorous crescendo before leaving the dancers laughing with that breathless relief, which follows when the steps seem more for sport than courtship. The young men in the doorway were drawn back into the hall, presumably to claim a partner for the next dance, while others, flushed from their exertions, took their place, moving outside to taste the damping night air. An entwined couple, swaying unsteadily, disappeared into the shadowy recesses of the old stables.

  ‘Come along!’ Hubert grabbed each girl by the hand and ran with them across the courtyard. If he felt some nervousness at meeting Geoffrey again, he suppressed it under this front of illicit excitement. He had wooed the girls into coming with him to the Tenants’ Ball for, as the schoolmaster’s family were not the Cordingleys’ tenants, no invitation had been extended to them.

  There was no difficulty in being readily incorporated into the revelry. Both Hubert and Delia were known to many of the families and, although it had been some years since they and the youths from the village had shared the same schoolbenches, such childhood connections surface naturally enough in a climate of merriment. The country dancing was not conducive to conversation and so they could easily step their way through the country measures: natural cogs in the whirling community. Delia knew she was admired by a number of the local men, and she enjoyed being handed from partner to partner in the progressive dances, deliberately not looking ahead to see who the next man to take her hand would be. It was therefore a shock when, at the final measure, she found her hand taken by Mr. Cordingley. Her eyes still sparkled from the half-heard, flirtatious banter her last partner had spun her but something in Mr. Cordingley’s expression made her suddenly aware of her false position: an uninvited guest, dumped at the feet of the host.

  She found herself reddening, uncharacteristically. He, however, seemed afflicted by an awkwardness twice as debilitating as hers. He was staring at her with something akin to alarm and she saw him pale. Suddenly, Delia guessed his dilemma. He, of course, would have no idea who she was (why should he?). He must be assuming she was one of his people whom he could not, for the life of him, place. She guessed how embarrassing that might be if one had to shoulder all this patriarchal responsibility.

  In fact, Geoffrey had received a shock of physical intensity.

  He had been waiting fo
r Hubert to join the gathering all evening. The fact that he had not come at an hour when they might have easily exchanged a few words together gnawed away at him. He did not believe there had been anything in Hubert’s response to his overtures on the Thursday evening to suggest that his kiss had been unwelcome. However, Geoffrey had sufficient experience in homoerotic matters to know that inclination did not always find its way to an easy expression; yet, he dared to hope. He dared to hope that Hubert’s feelings matched his own because every time he allowed himself to be still or to daydream, his friend’s lovely face swam before his eyes. The physical memory of that midnight embrace made his fingertips tingle. He could still feel the line of Hubert’s jaw nestling in the palm of his hand. And this quickened an evocation from his other senses. He could smell the damp of the night air. He could hear their breathing. He could see the dark globes of the rhododendrons against the deeper shadows of the shrubs, even though the moonlight had drained them of their crimson.

  But he could not picture the man’s face. And it was that face which he longed to see again.

  Now, here, as the loathsome music staggered toward its close, in a woman’s garb, smiling quizzically up at him from his coy curtsey, for a horrible moment was Hubert. It is not Hubert. It is an obscenity. It is madness.

  Geoffrey was strangled by panic. Delia was gripped by embarrassment.

  The whole hall was bubbling with gaiety. The dancing had performed its purpose; partners had been divided, shaken-up and redistributed. Wives had danced with a neighbour’s strapping son and enjoyed the fleeting proximity. Timorous girls had passed from the secure clasp of familiar hands and found themselves taken in turn by strange men or slight acquaintances and exposed to pleasantries, some banal, some suggestive. Others had actually been linked to arms they had only dared dream of being held by. But Geoffrey Cordingley and Delia Simmonds seemed cocooned from it all, all animation suspended.

  It was she who freed them. Sticking out her hand in a confident appropriation of good manners, she introduced herself.

  ‘Delia Simmonds.’

  ‘Simmonds!’ His recoil was so extraordinary as to be comical. It gave her the opportunity to shift the whole exchange and she burst out laughing. The spell was broken. He understood it all.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry. I hadn’t the least idea who you were. I suppose I ought to have guessed.’

  ‘I haven’t been invited so there is no reason why you should. This is all my brother’s fault. He was sure you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Was he now?’

  ‘You know my brother. Hubert Simmonds.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ He continued to look at her in a way she found impossible to fathom but she persevered with conversation.

  ‘You won’t have me thrown out, will you?’ Her eyes had their own light but he missed the brilliance which her brother could throw into his smiling.

  ‘I should have invited you in the first place. It was quite remiss of me. Where is … Hubert? He has no reason to hide from me. I sent him a formal invitation, along with a few other chaps from Cambridge, to help me get through this gruesome business.’

  ‘Oh dear. I expect I have made it worse.’ They were somewhat in the way as others were manoeuvring themselves into another figure, ready for the next dance, so he gestured to her to step to the edge of the hall.

  ‘Not at all. In fact, you are my excuse to dodge the next dance or four.’

  ‘Do you dislike it? I think it’s rather fun.’

  ‘I can’t bear anything where one has to move in formation with others. It reminds me of the cadet corps at school: a beastly business. It turned many a decent fellow into either a tyrant or a marionette.’

  ‘No one takes country dancing seriously, though, do they? Part of the fun is getting tangled and no one minding.’

  ‘Is it? Perhaps you’re right, Miss Simmonds.’

  Delia detected creeping into his voice the same note of formal condescension she would use when talking to Smales, the carrier, or the coal man. She knew that her family would never ordinarily move in the same social circle as the Cordingleys but then this was their tenants’ ball, where social hierarchy was expressly waived (or at least blurred) for the duration of the event. And besides, had not the university thrown Hubert into the company of lords’ and magnates’ sons as their equal? Hubert had told her Cordingley had never once passed comment on the fact that a Canterbury grammar schoolboy from his village was up at Cambridge at the same time. Still, Delia felt she was not being taken seriously and it disconcerted her. At a loss for what to say, she looked around for her brother and saw him at precisely the same time Geoffrey Cordingley did.

  Hubert, with Anstace on his arm, had been making his way around the edge of the hall, behind the row of onlookers as ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’ spun into life. He waved when he saw that she has spotted him.

  ‘There’s Hubert,’ she said unnecessarily. But instead of the ease which she thought Hubert’s arrival would bring, Delia could almost feel the mounting tension knotting the man at her side. When he spoke, his voice slid into a higher register; he adopted an artificial, hectoring tone.

  ‘Simmonds, you bounder, I expected you hours ago. You have not been doing your duty. I invited you along—you know I did— to help me manage my feudal duties and relieve me of the necessity of dancing with each of my cousins but instead you sneak in late and then mingle’ — Hubert heard the verbs as sneering accusations—’with the crowd. Dangling some extra, unattached females to boot.’

  The air of jolly camaraderie, which Hubert had decided was the best garb for the evening, was stripped from him. He felt exposed. He also felt embarrassed that he was the cause of such rudeness. Delia and Anstace did not deserve to be slighted in this way. Perceiving an injustice, however slight, always quickened Hubert’s temper. A touch of righteous anger invariably helped him out of a hole. It did now.

  ‘I had no idea the conditions attached to your invitation were so strict.’

  Delia was familiar with the edge of defiance creeping into her brother’s voice. She had lost many any argument preceded by Hubert buckling his armour in this way. What was going on? She felt her awkwardness borne of social inexperience keenly. Anstace seemed quite unperturbed. Delia envied her composure. She believed she would have been able to share it, if only she had been brought up in a smart cathedral city rather than its dismal, rural hinterland.

  ‘Good evening. I am Anstace Catchpool. You must be Geoffrey Cordingley. Unattached and uninvited or not, we’ve had a lovely time. Thank you very much.’

  Geoffrey was in command of himself even before Anstace had finished speaking. This was not due so much to the smoothing of her good manners as to his rapid recognition that Hubert was not going to be silly or bullish. There was to be no wary circling nor any foppish prancing. The man, Geoffrey realized, is happy in his own skin. It was only at the end of the day, when he had more time to reflect on this meeting, that Geoffrey appreciated that the dominant emotion he had then felt was relief. It was a relief, and an almost inexpressible comfort, to be able to rest his own tortured identity against Hubert’s simple integrity.

  All Delia noticed was an immediate softening. Any bridling rancour which the men had been generating seemed to be replaced over the next few minutes by an affectionate understanding. She was surprised at how readily Hubert seemed to step back from conflict but Geoffrey Cordingley’s nervous gabbling was, she supposed, remarkably disarming. Rather perversely, she thought, it reminded her of the ridiculous way the mongrel at the farm would try to shrink into itself, flattening its ears and curling its tail between its legs when snapped at by the farmer or his son.

  ‘You are, of course, perfectly welcome. You must not take offence. I am behaving like a perfect heel and I apologise, I really do—unreservedly. I’ve just been saying,’ he brought Delia into the exchange, ‘how much I dislike these annual romps and they string me up until I lose all sense of propriety. I am delighted that Hubert brought you a
long. You see, Hubert, that I have already met your sister. It was fate! Thrown together at the end of the last dance. Now please do not tell me that you enjoy those dances where one finds oneself with a new partner after every couple of bars. Every minute requires a new calculation of who one is facing and how one should respond whilst—and I am afraid I simply can’t help it—too much of my attention is focused on the dampness of the palm I am holding. If ever anything was calculated to generate banal and utterly inconsequential conversation, it is the progressive country-dance. I can hear with horror the platitudes which spill from my mouth and see my awkwardness mirrored in the eyes of whatever hapless woman finds herself twirling or circling to my direction. But saying nothing, it seems, is regarded as fiercely impolite. One’s only escape is to feign breathlessness—’

  ‘Stop!’ said Hubert. ‘We understand.’ He caught the manic, self-deprecating drôllerie which Geoffrey threw out at them and held it. ‘Stop it, Geoffrey! You have an aversion to country dancing. We understand. Heaven knows why you continue to host such an event if you hate it so much.’ His easy laughter was like a draught of cool water to slake a thirst. Geoffrey smiled his gratitude, holding Hubert’s gaze while he relaxed his tone.

  ‘Miss Simmonds, Miss Catchpool, you appear to have more sense about you than Hubert here. He has lived in this village all his life and yet professes an ignorance of the way that things are done in the country. Please tell me that you understand why I am utterly powerless in the face of these perennial traditions.’

  ‘We probably don’t really understand,’ said Delia. ‘We’re not part of your village in the same way as the estate families are. A country schoolmaster’s family sits outside the world of the Big House. A bit like the doctor but without the social standing. But I still don’t see why you hate it so much. And anyway, isn’t it rather a small price to pay for all your advantages?’

  ‘I would surrender them tomorrow if you could tell me what they were.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. That’s disingenuous,’ said Hubert.