That They Might Lovely Be

by David Matthews

  Delia began to interpret what Geoffrey was saying. It was not that everything could be taken from them as—one imagined—it was being taken from the people of Belgium; it was that the value of what they had and whatever they were able to retain would be lost forever. If Hubert wanted death, then convention, stability, moral certainty were all overturned. The concept was preposterous. The compass needle would spin wildly, as if unmagnetized; North would be lost. Yet this upheaval was clearly what Geoffrey envisaged. He was convinced that Hubert would join up and he believed he would get himself killed. What would follow would be inconceivable. She just knew that, if Hubert were no longer in her circle to whisper, tease, argue, and laugh with, she too would be lost. He gave her a structure to live within.

  She imagined him now standing over there in the bay window. It was not just that he was her elder brother (playmate, ally, confidant), he was also (everyone recognised it) admirable. She could not search out the right adjectives because she had never been in the habit of heaping praise on her sibling. But anyone could tell. Anstace had known it from the start. She had seen how fine he was. And so, if Hubert, now in silhouette against the lace curtains, were to be gone, snatched just as clouds now passed across the sun and dulled the room, she would be bereft. Living would be less worthwhile; she was sure of it.

  Geoffrey was seeing things more clearly. The war was already here; it was trampling now through every city street, on the cobbles of every market square and over every village green. It would come knocking on the front door of the schoolhouse and Hubert would be standing there, hair tousled, in his stockinged feet. He would answer the summons good-humouredly, with a shrug and a stretch, throwing aside the book he had been reading, curled up in the windowseat. It would not be a heedless, spontaneous act for, she could see it, he had been preparing himself for some such call even during boyhood. Why had she not recognized how susceptible he would be to the trumpet’s reveille? Why had it taken Geoffrey to make her see?

  Geoffrey waited for her. All he could do was stir and stir the tea in his cup and stare into the vortex. The swirling liquid slopped into the saucer.

  She spoke. He looked up.

  ‘I need him,’ she said.

  The mute, pleading misery in his eyes was acutely eloquent. Without understanding the full moment of what it meant, she said, ‘You love him.’ Suddenly her own emotions too were illuminated for her. ‘I love him too,’ she said. But behind this declaration was another thought: I can love you.

  This notion had slid in, as a cat wraps itself around one’s skirts, all quivering and perpendicular. Geoffrey had come to her as a friend and an equal. He could have suggested meeting in the lea of one of Cambridge’s most imposing colleges; he could have suggested a walk across some dramatically desolate stretch of fenland; they could have dined somewhere opulent; they could have … her imagination exploded with alternatives to Saffron Walden’s poky tearoom. Instead, he had invited her somewhere unexceptional because he had not wanted anything externally dramatic to deflect from what he wanted to communicate. He needed her as an ally to save Hubert from himself but, she was sure, he also wanted her as a friend and friendship was a bud that could blossom in time.

  Geoffrey has come to me, she thought. He has come to me to help save Hubert. I must not fail him. I cannot afford to fail him. But if I cannot afford to fail Geoffrey what influence, in all honesty, can I wield? Hubert is my elder brother. He is genial, often considerate; recently, he has been almost magnanimous. But he is essentially aloof. It has always seemed perfectly appropriate that neither I nor Mother nor Father would feature, to any remarkable degree, in the future Hubert might conceive for himself. We are always in his wake. So is it likely that we would now be able to exert any real influence over him? Yet, if I fail, what would that do to the way Geoffrey feels about me?

  There was, however, another source from which they could enlist support.

  ‘Come with me to Joachim Place. To Anstace’s aunt’s house. Come tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t see how Anstace can help. It’s not the way things are.’

  Delia did not understand what he meant but it was reassuring to know that he had chosen to rely on her rather than anyone else.

  ‘Her aunt, Dorothy Lean, is a Quaker. You know that. All Anstace’s people are Quakers and they hate the war. They’re pacifists. None of their men will fight. They’ll have arguments and alternatives which may sway Hubert. We can glean ideas from them.’

  Delia felt it was an inspired idea and Geoffrey found the way her face lit up at the suggestion, naïvely endearing. Perhaps there was something comforting in talking to her, after all. In a perverse way, it was like talking to Hubert, or some pale emanation from him, and it gave him hope. There could be nothing lost in hearing what the mistress of Joachim Place had to say.

  He paid for their tea and they left, the muffins untouched.

  Sunday, 27 September 1914

  Anstace Catchpool had given her Quaker connections an account of Geoffrey’s vigorous but ineffective intervention to dissuade Petrie from volunteering. The story had been told, retold and picked over among these Friends for whom a pacifist resistance to aggression was a central tenet of their Christian philosophy. The fact that Geoffrey Cordingley had been assaulted while remonstrating and not responded with his own violence, added an extra lustre to the tale for them and a number of Friends had felt a stab of envy when hearing of Geoffrey Cordingley’s heroic witness to the pacifist cause. Under these circumstances alone, he would have been welcome at Joachim Place. The fact that he was also a friend of Anstace’s meant that his visit was doubly valued.

  Dorothy Lean was Anstace’s ‘Saffron aunt’ so described to distinguish her from her Bournville aunt and the Canterbury aunts, all of whom she had lived with at different times during her nomadic childhood. Now that her formal education at the Stephen Langton School in Canterbury had been completed, Anstace was inclined to spend more time with Dorothy Lean, her late mother’s sister, at Joachim Place.

  Although, with her husband, Dorothy Lean was a member of the Society of Friends, her temperament was too volatile and her tastes too extravagant to fit the sober stereotype of the Quakers. Childless herself, she sought out the company of young people, especially those who had something to say for themselves. It had been she who had coined the term ‘lame’ to describe the limp or ineffectual. She enjoyed Anstace’s company and had been only too pleased to have her niece’s friend stay at Joachim Place.

  On his arrival, Dorothy Lean herself ushered Geoffrey into her elegant drawing room. An elderly spaniel, with a passing resemblance to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, snuffled up to him before taking a snooze on the hearth rug. Past the brocade William Morris curtains, Geoffrey looked out onto a perfect croquet lawn; a couple of mallets lay at one end, thrown down by some disconsolate players. A gardener was working the herbaceous borders, dropping weeds into a large canvas trug. On the mantelpiece, a fine black-marble clock stirred itself into action, fluttering through the preliminaries before announcing the hour with Westminster chimes. The room held the reverberations for a moment or two afterward.

  At first, Dorothy Lean, Anstace and Delia sat while Geoffrey roamed the room. Their talk had not gathered the same emotional charge which Delia and Geoffrey had experienced. Pacifism in the abstract had diverted them from that.

  ‘It’s not a question for me of conscience.’ Geoffrey turned back to his hostess. ‘It’s a question of common sense. Where, precisely, is the sense in enlisting? It simply means putting oneself in mortal danger whilst enduring one of the most barbaric experiences known to Man.’

  ‘I know you’re upset, Geoffrey Cordingley, but you won’t find any comfort in brittle flippancy. And there’s no point in simplifying the issue. You can’t counter something you refuse to face. We must all grasp the fact that for many men—and some women—this chance to take up arms is the most exhilarating thing which has ever happened to them.’

  Geoffrey recalled
those occasions when his mother had quizzed him about something he had done to which she had taken exception. At such times, she had always made it clear that he was the focus of all her disappointments. However minor the initial misdemeanor, it triggered a tirade which seemed to lay responsibility for every mishap which had ever affected her at his door. In contrast, this Bohemian, Quaker lady, despite a sharpness in her tone, regarded him in quite a different light. All beaded and shawled, she had seated herself on the edge of an upholstered ottoman in the centre of the room, as if she were the resident sibyl and he a supplicant at her shrine whom she needed to nudge firmly up to the mark. To her, he was worthy of encouragement.

  ‘“You can’t counter something you refuse to face”,’ Geoffrey repeated her words as if weighing them up, while considering how much of what he faced he wished to reveal. ‘I’ve no doubt you’re right. But, in some circumstances, perhaps the only feasible modus vivendi is an oblique one. I’m not sure that I, for one, have the courage to out-face everything I fear. And I’m sure there are many heroes who would have quailed before the enemy if they had fully appreciated their predicament.’

  ‘Of course you don’t have that sort of courage. You have far too much imagination. That’s perfectly clear to me. People with that sort of courage are always insufferable simply because they cannot see what they’re about. But there is always a middle way between bluster and surrender. Now stop prowling and talk to me properly.’

  She might have patted the ottoman; the invitation to be intimate, despite the authoritative stance she was taking, was unmistakable. To Geoffrey, with his nerves all on edge, the desire to kneel before her and make a full confession was compelling. To find release in this way would be delicious. Though she could ignore the presence of Delia and Anstace, he could not, however. He was not ready to turn out all the cupboards and empty all the drawers, to have everything examined in the bright afternoon sunlight. He continued to stand.

  Anstace, he saw, was watching him with an intensity which implied a personal stake in the outcome of this interview with her aunt. She would share, of course, his concern for Hubert. Geoffrey had noticed the familiarity developing between the two of them over the summer, but the squirms of jealousy he felt had been largely subdued by the total absence of any coy flirtation. They had enjoyed each other’s company; no doubt Anstace liked Hubert immensely but then who could not? Nevertheless, Geoffrey had not been wholly comfortable with Delia’s suggestion of drawing Anstace in as an ally. He found himself twisted with the dread that, while Hubert might withstand the claims of his affection, he would succumb to Anstace’s. The cost of saving Hubert from himself would then be terrible to bear.

  And then, quite suddenly, it was as if the angle of the mirror were tilted so that he no longer saw himself reflected. Saving Hubert should not be motivated by his own jealous possessiveness. It would surely be doomed if it were. Hubert’s beauty was not for his sole appreciation. Anstace, Delia, Hubert’s parents too, and all others who knew him and had regard for him must be courted as friends not rivals, believers not infidels. Most surely he loved Hubert because the man was so worthy of others’ admiration. He must embrace the possibility that, in saving Hubert, he lost him to himself.

  He picked up Dorothy Lean’s earlier point.

  ‘“A middle way,” I suppose so. It’s not as if we had to deflect Hubert from some specific cause or other. He’s not really driven by the national argument, by patriotism.’ He saw Dorothy Lean looking quizzically at him. ‘No, he’s not. He’s intelligent enough to know that England is as keen to knock Germany back into its box for her own global interests as she is to avenge Belgium. You may be right that he sees something exciting in the fighting— there may be an element of that—but I don’t think it’s significant. He’s a civilized man. But fighting will provide diversion from the humdrum. That’s what has stirred him, I think. Hubert is looking for some path to ecstasy, in the literal meaning of the word. We need to show him that that can be experienced outside the machinery of mortal combat.’

  Geoffrey continued to talk. As much to myself, he thought, as to these three women. I hope I do not sound pompous.

  A word from one of them or some nodding assent would occasionally nudge him onward but he now relished this opportunity to construct his public case. He described his anger when he saw Coxeter and poor, light-headed Petrie playing at soldiers. He had been sure they had been recruited in their cups. He raged at the way other men enlisted, drunk on patriotism. He ranted freely against the ‘Mother Country’, with which his own mother—Lady Margery—identified herself so keenly, and the repressive paternalism with which it was partnered. He railed against the snobbish hierarchy of village life (calling for corroboration from Delia) which would (if it could) undermine his friendship with Hubert, a man easily his intellectual equal. He saw the hierarchy of rank which shaped the Forces as a symbol of all that should be thrown away if freer living were to be achieved. He was passionate about Friendship and vaguely translated his feelings for his friend into a paradigm for this ideal, on which a new society could be founded. His rhetoric was quite masterly when he declaimed against the Old Prejudices with which they had to do away…

  ‘Bravo! Bravo, young man! Now you have got all that out of your system, you can starting thinking sensibly and practically about what you are to do.’ Dorothy Lean interrupted him before he got into an eloquent tirade on social politics.

  Geoffrey was grateful for the interruption. He had presented a simulcrum of honesty but to go any further down that path would have been to compound the cowardice. He had omitted Love. He felt exhausted.

  Dorothy Lean saw the weariness suddenly weigh down upon him. ‘Now sit down,’ she said. ‘Listen to me for a moment. Come. Sit. Pacifism, you know, like every “-ism”, is not too sacred to be shaken out, now and again, turned over and aired. Who better to do this than we women? We are not expected to shoulder a rifle ourselves. We are less likely to be dazzled by the bright, majestic light of war. And I think that the Quaker men have found something of this feminine perspective within themselves. They have found a way to be pacifists without being crippled by a sense of guilt or cowardice. Your eloquent protestations against the war suggest to me that you remain uneasy, yourself, about a pacifist stand. You are hiding something behind the fine speechifying.’

  Geoffrey was sitting cross-legged on the rug. Although fondling the spaniel’s ears, he attended with a fixed concentration to what Dorothy Lean was saying. Her perspicacity was discomfiting.

  ‘Let that be, however. You need to understand this. One thing we pacifists have discovered is that there can be no compulsion. There can be no effective ‘conscription’, if you like, to the pacifist’s cause because to choose this course is too contrary, too alien for most young men. Your fine arguments are all very well—I subscribe to many of them myself—and, when preached to the converted, are wonderfully affirming. But they will not deflect a warrior. And some men, I believe, are made that way. All we can do is seek to protect them from themselves. This becomes well nigh impossible in times of war.

  ‘Geoffrey Cordingley, the only thing you can do is decide for yourself—and decide honestly—the course that you alone must take. As for your friend, for Delia’s brother, you can applaud or deplore the road he takes, in his turn, but you can do little besides. Honesty, I would contend, is the only sure virtue at these times when each man has these stark choices laid before him. Each has to choose his path and it is well if he chooses honestly, recognizing those private ghosts—as I believe you do— who are likely to travel with him whatever the path. Of course, we Quakers have prayer to guide and support us but that too will fail if there is no personal honesty.’

  In the silence that visited the room, he realised that his hope that she might have provided an answer, that she might have fulfilled the oracular role he had imagined for her, would come to nothing.

  He wondered how her philosophy would be regarded by the self-important officer on the
hunter who had struck him down. He and his comrades-in-arms would find this notion of personal choice and integrity ridiculous. ‘We’re at war, man!’ he could hear him say. ‘This is no time for nancying about with your conscience, flirting with Honesty. Leave all that stuff to us. You just join up and defend your Country, your mothers and your sisters from the rapacious Hun.’ Far from being the mouthpiece of profound wisdom, Dorothy Lean would carry as much influence as some fairy creature from the pantomime, moralizing ineffectively in the face of catcalls from the pit.

  And yet, he thought: she is right. What good will it do any of us, including Hubert, if I merely wring my hands and weep into a teacup. I shall have less stature in Hubert’s eyes, less weight in any argument, less personal definition if I simply consign myself to railing against others’ actions. There is no merit in inactivity. I must confront my own choices and face Hubert not as a supplicant but as an equal.

  As the afternoon dwindled away, he took his leave. Anstace showed him out. There was a keen east wind blowing which prohibited talking further at the front door but she held out her hand and then held his for a moment in her clasp.

  ‘I am sorry if you found my aunt unusually direct. She has a way with her which I know is not to everyone’s taste. But she means well. And thank you so much for sharing your worries. It’s so confusing for all of us but we all mean well. And if you like, if you have not been put off by my relations, there are other people I know whom you might like to talk to. I can introduce you to a cousin of mine, Philip Baker. He runs a training camp at Jordans in Buckinghamshire for pacifists who want to volunteer for ambulance work at the Front. It might be something. Goodbye, Geoffrey. Goodbye.’

  She did not give him time to reply but turned and shut the door against the wind. He pulled his collar up and strode down the street to the station, pondering Anstace’s intuitive understanding that he would now need something more substantial with which to grapple.