From the drawing-room window, Delia watched him go but he did not turn back or wave in parting.
Friday, 16 October 1914
Hubert’s room in college overlooked a narrow backstreet and Geoffrey had long ago worked out which of the stone-mullioned, third-floor windows was his. Moreover, from the corner of the street it was possible, once dusk had fallen, to see if the gas was burning and thereby save a fruitless circuit, through the college gate, across the quadrangle and up the three flights of stairs, if he was not in.
There were plenty of men who would have invited Geoffrey that evening to dine with them in college. Instead, following Evensong in the college chapel, he had chosen to eat alone at Arundel House. Now, with dinner washed down with several glasses of wine, he was free to walk wherever he chose.
He had always been affected by this time of day at this season. It evoked, so potently, the succession of new academic years around which his life seemed to have been shaped, from his first years at prep school, then to Oundle and on to Cambridge. This was the time of year when change and uncertainty gave an extra charge to the emotions. The descent of twilight, with its own particular sensory badges, invariably brought about a wistfulness, almost a grieving for something he had lost. He could never name it. There was no substance to it. It was just a deep-rooted sense of the irrecoverable.
The turbulence he felt this October was more profoundly disturbing. The sinking sun brought a chill that anticipated a numbingly cold wind, which would blow across the East Anglian fens from Siberia. He had concluded three years at Cambridge, a conventional path followed by all young men of his class, by taking the momentously unconventional decision to join the Anglo-Belgian Field Ambulance. Nudged by a petulant decision to do something under his own volition, his initial curiosity had grown into respect and regard for Philip Baker and the Christian men he had gathered about him. He had joined in the training; it was now all but complete. He had committed himself to this extraordinary business of war. Who knew where he would be this time next year or even next month? Who knew what he would experience?
Geoffrey took pleasure from ambling along the lanes and sidestreets surrounded by flickering lights from the colleges, the cottages and the larger houses squeezed between them. They were like so many cells within a hive, each holding a busy, sociable, vital individual.
It was apparent though how decimated the place had become since the first rush to enlist. There was not the same bustle. The explosions of merriment which one had been used to hearing, walking along the arteries between the colleges, were fewer. Fewer feet tramped these cobbled lanes; instead they would be trudging ankle-deep through Flemish mud. Even the snatches of singing, picked up this Sunday evening, seeping through the glowing panes of the chapels’ lancet windows, seemed dipped in a thin melancholy.
The words of the Evensong response came unbidden into Geoffrey’s mind. ‘Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.’ He repeated them to himself, under his breath, as — drawn by the light from Hubert’s window—he sprinted around to the front of the college and, crossing the quad, made to bound up the twisting staircase. He paused, after the second flight.
‘… all perils and dangers of this night.’ His hand rested on the cold stone of the central pillar; it was worn smooth from generations of students. The steps too were softly sculpted by centuries of use. How many men, he wondered, had lived in this room, now occupied by Hubert, during their time at the university? These were the years when youth was superseded by manhood. This was where one should come of age. And yet, so many youths were choosing instead the crucible of the Front to make that rite of passage. They should not feel that they were choosing a better path. Geoffrey half-laughed at the way he was declaring these sentiments as if he were already through that stage himself, past his prime and staring his dotage in the eye. But he felt obliged to appropriate this gentle wisdom because so many, of maturer years, had rejected it. Hoary, mutton-chopped dons were now more likely to quote Henry V before Agincourt, as a spur to encourage young men to abandon their studies, than berate them for falling behind with their essays.
‘Geoffrey! What are you doing embracing the staircase?’ Hubert had come out of his room and was staring down at him.
‘Coming to see you. Catching my breath, you know. Should be fitter.’
‘I was just going out. Doesn’t matter. Come on up. Where are you staying? Have they let you out of that place Anstace packed you off to? What’s it called? Jordan’s?’
Hubert gave the sullen coals a poke and poured them both a glass of sherry.
‘Execrable stuff but thank you,’ said Geoffrey. None of Hubert’s questions warranted an answer. Geoffrey recognized them for what they were: brittle deflections. ‘Where were you going?’ he asked.
‘Just to the lodge. Letter for Anstace to post.’ He fished it out of his breastpocket and placed it on his desk. ‘I mustn’t forget it.’
‘Anstace.’
‘Yes, she wrote to me. She told me you had visited at Saffron Walden.’
‘Did she tell you we’d talked about you?’
‘Obliquely. How dull you all must have been!’
‘How little you know us.’
Geoffrey looked away from Hubert into the fire where the embers were beginning to catch. He knew then that what he had dreaded was inevitable. Nothing would ever be as it had been. Curiously, he was not as devastated as he had expected he would be. Perhaps he had always known that this would be the outcome. He turned to Hubert. ‘May I hold your hand?’ he asked.
He shifted over to where Hubert was sitting and squatted by the side of his chair, half-kneeling. Hubert regarded him seriously. He proffered his left hand, palm up.
Geoffrey said nothing. He took Hubert’s hand in his left and, with his right, gently traced the contours of its palm, the slight welts at the base of each finger, the knuckles, the long slender thumb and the torn cuticle around the nail. He let his middle finger circle the bowl of Hubert’s palm, spiralling to the centre. He rested his fingertip there as if over a stigmatum.
Hubert placed his right hand on Geoffrey’s head, smoothing back the hair from his temples. Geoffrey bowed beneath the slight pressure, pushing his head against Hubert’s touch.
‘You’re like some fond beast, coming to be stroked.’
‘Not so far from the truth, my dear.’
‘I’m going, you know. I have made up my mind.’
‘Ah.’ It was more an exhalation than an articulated sound. Geoffrey held Hubert’s hand tightly, squeezing it now between his two. ‘Hubert,’ he said.
‘There’s no point in going over it all again. You know how I feel.’
‘I want to tell you how I feel. I feel more alive when I am in your presence than I ever do at any other time. I feel charged with a sublime force when I can touch you. I crave your touch, Hubert. I dream of it. And I cannot imagine what it will be like when I lose you.’
‘I do not intend to be lost.’
‘No. You intend to find yourself. And, for the life of me, I cannot … I cannot understand why you feel this war is where you’ll do that. How can you be when everything of the individual is obliterated by the uniform?
‘But we have raked through all this many times before and I have to accept, because it is so patently true, that I value you, I prize you more than you do yourself. And I suppose that that is not at all strange. It must be what every lover feels. You know I want to be your lover.’
‘That cannot be. I do not even know if I want it to be—not in the sense that you do, not with our bodies. But even if I felt that way…’ and Geoffrey pushed his head into Hubert’s hand again, inviting a stronger contact. Hubert, half-chuckling, took a handful of Geoffrey’s hair and gripped it.
‘… even if I felt that way, I am not in a place now—having decided to go—to honour those feelings. I feel more monk than warrior, you see. I feel ready to be distilled. Tha
t’s how it is.’
Geoffrey looked up into Hubert’s face. He did not cry but tears welled up in his eyes and ran down his cheeks. His knee had gone numb and he shifted to one side so that Hubert, his fingers still entwined in his hair, accidentally pulled it, causing him to wince. As Geoffrey lurched to one side, he pulled Hubert with him and both men found themselves kneeling in front of the fire. Hubert let go of Geoffrey’s hair and wiped the tears from his face with his free hand. Geoffrey would not release his other hand but wrung it between his own.
‘Dear God,’ said Geoffrey. ‘This is almost unbearable.’
‘Almost.’
‘It is madness. All of it. All of us.’
‘It is where we are. It is what we have been dealt.’
‘Perhaps but this hand…’
He lifted Hubert’s hand and placed it over his heart then pulled him toward him so that their clasped hands were pressed between their two bodies.
‘… this hand, it seems to me, has been too ready to pick up the cards. Who shuffled them? Who cut the pack?’
‘Fool.’
‘Yes. If a fool, I am a devoted one, fit for a king’s entertaining.’
‘Let’s stand up, Geoffrey. What with your extended metaphors and this religious posturing, melodrama threatens.’
‘That would never do,’ said Geoffrey, as he disengaged himself from the other man and got to his feet. ‘But something else. Would you allow yourself to be photographed before you fall into the khaki so I may have your likeness? I’ll pay.’
‘You’ll have to. I haven’t a bean.’ But Hubert continued in a quieter vein, ‘Of course. I’d be pleased to.’
‘Then I shall leave you now. I’ll come and get you tomorrow morning. So. Good night.’
He kissed Hubert on the lips—the gentlest pressure as if kissing a sleeping child—and left.
‘Geoffrey,’ said Hubert to himself, as the door closed.
He picked up his letter to Anstace and tucked it behind the door-handle plate so he would remember to take it to the lodge first thing in the morning. He would stay in his room now for the rest of the evening. He turned the key in the lock and undressed, allowing himself to imagine, wonderingly, how he might have felt if Geoffrey had stayed and it had been his hands which twisted these buttons from their holes and pulled this shirt over his head, tugged these trousers and these undergarments down over his hips so he could step out of them and stand here naked on the hearth rug.
A coal crackled in the grate; there was a sizzling and sparks flared. Hubert’s body was illuminated by the sudden light and, for a moment, he saw himself in the abstract: Man, an embodiment, an incarnation of something wonderful.
Talk
‘The bank’s told Frobisher they can’t spare him. There’s more to defending King and Country than waving a bayonet, he was told. He’s probably too long in the tooth for active service but I think a desk job in Whitehall would have been rather fine.’
‘There are some advantages to having married an older man then, Dolly.’
‘More than I’d care to explain, Ada. I’m much happier with Frobisher than I’d be with Vera’s new beau. I don’t like a man to be needy.’
‘Don’t let Mother hear you talk like that. You sound far too experienced and worldly.’
‘She won’t hear if you don’t tell her, Ada. If you ever marry, you’ll know what I mean. Well, I assume you will. You’ll not want to lose your independence.’
‘Is that what Mr. Frobisher gives you?’
‘Independence, the occasional blind eye and lots of indulgence.’
‘You don’t at all sound like a newly married woman.’
‘Six months is long enough to know the ropes.’
‘I think your innuendo is rather disgusting.’
‘Do you, Ada? Are you not even a tiny bit intrigued?’
‘I am not.’
‘And is there no one visiting on a Sunday afternoon, making moon-eyes at you?’
‘The respectable men of our acquaintance have far more important things to do than take tea.’
‘Of course they have.’
‘Though Aunt Margery was talking to Mother last week about Geoffrey’s refusal to join up. She is beside herself. The three Sandys boys from Boughton have been given commissions and taken most of the farmworkers with them. There was a great sendoff last month with bunting and all sorts. Aunt Margery says she is ashamed to meet anyone from the County with Geoffrey behaving as he is.
‘And how is he behaving?’
‘He plans to drive ambulances or some such. Can you believe it? It’s a celebration of disaster and defeat.’
‘I suppose someone has to. There are bound to be men wounded.’
‘But one doesn’t have to advertise the fact. We should be dealing in victory and triumph. Geoffrey has responsibilities to the estate and the men who work it. How are they going to feel when their squire refuses to shoulder a rifle? I agree with Aunt Margery: it’s a disgrace.’
‘I can’t imagine Aunt Margery standing by and letting him.’
‘What can she do? At least Uncle Henry tied up the estate in that Trust so that she still has control. Mother said at the time— do you remember?—that she thought it a bit rum Uncle Henry didn’t let Geoffrey inherit when he became twenty-one but she thinks he knew what he was doing. She said to Aunt Margery, “Henry must have had some notion that your boy could not be wholly trusted.”’
‘I can’t believe Aunt Margery allowed someone else to run Geoffrey down.’
‘You’re wrong there, Dolly. She’s got no time for him. She’ll wash her hands of him completely if she could. She and Mother were all but conspiring how to disinherit him.’
‘Can’t see how they could do it, Ada. A Trust is a Trust.’
‘Nevertheless. You know what it might mean for us if they could.’
Chapter Six
Wednesday, 28 October 1914
‘I have been telling Frederick for months that we should have a telephone installed. School boards insist on it in some areas but there seems to be some notion that, if a school is not a certain size or the catchment area is insufficiently well-to-do … anyway, quite clearly Dunchurch does not qualify.’
Anstace’s arrival, though not unexpected as she had sent a letter, had provoked in Mrs. Simmonds an irritation which was little short of discourtesy. When she had first visited Dunchurch, earlier in the year, Anstace had found Mrs. Simmonds deliberately relaxed about domestic matters, as if they could not signify to a professional woman. Since the outbreak of war, however, she had become increasingly intolerant of anything which disturbed whatever equilibrium she had been able to salvage.
‘We should have put you off. I told Delia she should have done so, one way or another. You will not find us at all accommodating today. Of all the days in the year, a pig-day is the worst to pay a visit.’
‘I don’t mind in the least. What I mean to say is, please do not mind on my account.’
A series of deep lines creased Mrs. Simmonds’ forehead, puckering her eyebrows — the same fine eyebrows which her son had inherited. She was clearly exasperated.
‘Mind? It’s not a question of “minding”. Oh—’ She broke off, chopping at the air with her hand in irritation. ‘You’re here now and that’s that. You’ll find Delia in the shed. The shed behind the schoolyard, you know … It will not be pretty.’
Anstace had no idea what to expect. The significance of ‘pig-day’ meant little to her. Delia had always bemoaned the animal husbandry which she claimed had encroached upon her childhood in ways that Anstace could never imagine. Anstace had never had to collect the soft down, when a fowl had been plucked, and dry it for pillows and cushions. She had never had to start the day, before morning-school began, raking out the straw from the donkey’s stable or mixing the boiled vegetable peelings with meal for the pigs. Anstace could not possibly comprehend (such was Delia’s point) the level of rustic grubbiness to which her friend had to stoop as a
matter of routine. But this ‘pig-day’ seemed of a different magnitude. Anstace wondered how Delia would react to her encroaching upon it.
She crossed the schoolyard. A few of the older schoolchildren were clustered around the entrance to the shed, peering in and whispering to each other until Delia emerged and shooed them away, telling them to go home. They obeyed her with long faces and scuttled off. The older boys, touched their forehead, pulling at an imaginary cap as a courtesy to the lady, as they passed Anstace.
‘Ghouls,’ said Delia, nodding toward the children as her friend approached. ‘Hello Anstace. I thought I’d have done with this by the time you arrived but Ferris (he’s the pig-man) didn’t arrive until after lunch. He’s only got the one boy with him now. The other men have joined up. It seems they would rather bayonet Germans than slaughter swine.’
‘You’ve killed the pigs!’
‘Only Mr. Snodgrass. Ruby Runt is still with us.’
‘Poor Mr. Snodgrass. I’d have said a proper farewell, when I was here last, if I’d have known.’ Anstace had enjoyed the snuffling inquisitiveness of the pigs. She liked the way they seemed to use their flat snouts as organs of greeting, raising them as she peered into the sty, to wink and flex in her direction as if their pale-lashed eyes were just too rheumy and shortsighted to be relied upon. ‘What about Ruby Runt? Won’t she be lonely?’
‘I expect she’ll just enjoy her reprieve. She’s calmer now that the screaming’s stopped.’
‘Screaming?’
‘When we were little, Hubert and I tried to block out the sound by burying our heads under our pillows. A pig for the chop makes a horrible sound. They know somehow. I used to think it was a plea for mercy. It never worked of course—Ferris and his men would just push ahead to get the job done more quickly. I don’t know how they’d have reacted to a silent pig, which let itself be hoisted upside down and have its throat cut without a single squeal.’
Anstace paused on the threshold of the shed where the slaughter had taken place, where, presumably, she would have to see what remained of Mr. Snodgrass. Delia was wryly amused by her reticence.
That They Might Lovely Be Page 21