That They Might Lovely Be

by David Matthews

  I am not similarly cursed. Danger is always very real and more often than not I am genuinely frightened.

  I expect to be back at Dunquerque where order at last seems to have been imposed. I wonder if you have any news of Hubert. His training must be complete by now. I would give a great deal to see him and imagine that might not be so unlikely if he passes through Dunquerque.

  Your friend,

  Geoffrey Cordingley

  Wednesday, 2 December 1914

  Dear Anstace

  Your information from Delia was quite correct. I am to be given two days’ leave before heading for France at the end of next week. I owe it to my parents to see them before I go and then, yes, of course, there would be time to come up to Saffron Walden before I join the regiment. I shall telegram.

  Hubert

  Sunday, 6 December 1914

  Somewhere, a brass band was playing Christmas carols. Anstace was glad that not all trumpets and trombones had sacrificed their old repertoire for marches. It suggested that not everything, yet, had been diverted to the cause of war.

  ‘Terminus,’ she said, to herself. It was ridiculous really that these railway stations, which were all, essentially, places of departure, points where people arrived, turned around and then set off, once again, in a different direction to a new destination, should be labelled with such finality. She was determined that there would be nothing of ‘termination’ in this fleeting time she had managed to secure with Hubert. She hoped that he had not deliberately managed things so that the brief time they had together would help him disengage himself from her. He had already alerted her to this desire he seemed to have to cocoon himself from his friends. But surely he would not be so cruel as to cut her off completely.

  In fact, Hubert had not intended to leave himself such little time with Anstace. He had been granted forty-eight hours’ leave and had felt obliged to spend most of that time with his parents and Delia. However, he had not envisaged how tediously protracted the travelling would be. Train services across this southeast corner of England were being significantly disrupted by the locomotives requisitioned by the Army, transporting soldiers to the ports for embarkation. He had been left with no option but to telegram Anstace to meet him at King’s Cross before the final leg of his journey back to Malton Park.

  He saw her, sitting in the window of the Lyons tearoom, before she saw him. He would have been effectively camouflaged as merely another soldier in uniform milling about the concourse. She then saw him through the smear of condensation on the windowpane, his edges blurred, stepping free of the melée of travellers as he strode toward their meeting place.

  ‘Anstace. Well met,’ he said, pulling off his cap and sitting opposite her.

  ‘Your hair,’ she said, and could not help but put up her hand to his forehead where it used to fall thickly over his brow.

  ‘I know. I have no cause for vanity now.’

  Which is not true, she thought, for, despite the coarse stuff and rough cut of his uniform, his neatness of body seemed more pronounced. And, without the flopping hair, his expressive face was more exposed. There were small muscles about his temples which she had not noticed before, which registered the minutest nuance of thought.

  ‘Let’s have piles of toasted muffins. I’m starving,’ she said, determined that they would waste no time on inconsequential platitudes about being pleased to see each other and the rigours of their journeys. He laughed and she knew she had him back somewhere close to where they had been.

  ‘I agree. There’s something about sitting in trains and loitering on platforms for which toasted muffins is the only antidote,’ he said and gave the waitress their order. ‘And Mother was determined not to squander any fatted calf on the home visit of her only son. I think she’d have served me the thinnest gruel if Father had allowed her to get away with it. She is angry as only my mother can be. She bangs things and slams door but says nothing.’

  ‘Angry with you?’

  ‘With me. With Lloyd George. With Mrs. Pankhurst. With the world which has gone mad. But principally, currently, with me for conniving—as she sees it—in the madness.’

  ‘Was it all horrid?’

  ‘I don’t know.

  He looked up, startled by his own admission. ‘There’s a thing! I honestly don’t know.’ She saw that tightening at the side of his eyes and, smiling, raised her chin as if to challenge him to hit her with an explanation. He laughed.

  ‘I’ve told you in my letters. I’m not going to think about whether things are grim or horrid. They will be as they will be. It looks like my mental training has paid off! I have survived a couple of days at home and emerged unscathed. What greater test could there be?’

  ‘Oh, Hubert, if you paraded this ghastly good-cheer while you were at home, I’m not surprised your mother was angry. Her nerves must have been screaming.’

  ‘She’ll have thought me utterly careless, devoid of any humane emotion.’

  ‘But instead you’re just hiding those feelings.’

  ‘No. Instead, I am going to repress all resentment. I shall look out for and feed on everything bright and uplifting. It is to be my system.’ He looked at her directly. He was still smiling broadly and his tone of voice was still overlaid with a degree of self-mockery but his eyes told her that this was important. This was the real matter.

  ‘You will turn all to the good.’

  ‘I shall try. It is all there is.’

  ‘Hubert.’ If this was to be his crusade then his name would serve as its embodiment. ‘Hubert, if all you send me is a sheet of paper with your name at the bottom then that will be enough. I shall know what it is you are about but that it is too difficult to find the words—even if the right words exist—to tell me more and, if you do that, you will know that I am here, willing you forward, holding you steady with every bone and muscle. Will you do that?’

  ‘I will. “Anstace-Hubert, Hubert-Anstace” will be our correspondence and we can load the space between with what we choose. Thank you. I hoped you’d understand.’

  ‘I hope I do. I hope I can.’

  Spontaneously, naturally, they held each other’s hands. The wordless communing they promised themselves began its generation. Muffins and tea changed the mood and Hubert said, ‘It will confound the censors.’

  ‘They’ll hold your letter up to the light and turn it all over imagining some invisible ink.’

  ‘It was wrong of me to try to force your letter-writing to me into some straitjacket. I’m sorry about all that pompousness.’

  ‘It wasn’t pompous.’

  ‘I knew, you see, that I had to find a way, a modus operandi, and that I didn’t have long. It was all such a shock. The sleeping quarters, drill, being shouted at, standing to attention and saluting whenever an officer passed one by: such strange rituals on which to run the machine, but tried and tested, I suppose. Not for me to question or oppose. Not for me to stir. It would have been an arrogance. Just because I had the mental capacity to undermine the whole business did not mean I had the right to.’

  ‘My Quakers do that.’

  ‘Perhaps. But espousing an intellectual philosophy of pacifism is not the same.’

  ‘Moral too. Not just intellectual.’

  ‘The thing is, war is what human beings do. They always have done and probably always will. Paradoxically, to wage war is to demonstrate if not our humanity at least that we are human. And so, to practise my humanity, I need to be there where there is war.’

  ‘You’re right about paradox. “Humanity” and “humankind”: these words surely contradict what you’re saying.’

  ‘War forces good men to do evil. That is the destruction it wreaks.’

  ‘But Hubert, that could be you.’

  ‘Yes.’ He was utterly still. No pulse nor the faintest muscular tick was apparent in his face. She had to trust that he had confronted this horror and navigated his way through it.

  ‘So… ?’ she asked.

  ‘To remai
n impervious, to hold my innocence without becoming callous.’

  ‘How?’ she whispered.

  But he could not explain. He took her hand again and turned it over, letting his fingers run along the seams of her lime-green gloves. He picked up the teacup and let the light make the china gleam. He picked up a muffin and held it to his nose to experience the scent of butter and scorched dough. He drew his finger across the misted pane and let the moisture collect and run down in clear rivulets.

  ‘I don’t know. But I shall write to you.’

  Outside, there was a stirring. A major arrival or departure had provoked a toing and froing of porters and trolleys. Luggage, its owners scurrying in its wake, was shifted across the platforms. Travellers came together and dispersed, moving through the little rituals of greeting and farewell, oblivious to their fellows but yet creating a wide, tidal movement which had its own choreography. It was not Hubert’s train but it was enough to remind him that his time for departure had arrived.

  Anstace walked with him to his train, a local affair just taking him into Essex. They became self-consciously aware of the stereotype they might be presenting and, at first, connived to walk with as little distance between them to confound it. The train was ready to leave and the engine was belching and hissing in readiness.

  ‘If I were your lover, I’d kiss you now,’ he said, lifting his pack off his shoulder.

  ‘If I were your lover, I’d expect it. I’d lift my face to yours, like this, and place my hand on your arm to steady myself in my passion.’ She could feel the muscle swell in his arm as he held her to him.

  ‘Silly,’ he said.

  ‘Silly and so fond.’

  She had not been kissed before, not on the lips, not by a man who stirred her in the way that Hubert did. She registered a tingling at the first brush of his lips and then the pressure and the mobility of his mouth as her lips responded to his.

  ‘Anstace,’ he said.

  ‘Hubert.’

  The exchange of names was enough.

  As the wheels turned to the rotating pistons, and metal rasped on metal as the train pulled away, he leaned from the window and watched as she, and scores of others, drifted in the steam like genies retreating to their prescribed realms. Night had already fallen; the December cold bit thoroughly.

  ‘Shut the winder, Tommy. She carnt see yer now,’ someone said.

  Hubert turned, smiling apologetically, and took his seat.

  ‘Anstace.’

  Thursday, 10 December 1914

  Dunquerque

  Dear Delia

  Before Hubert left Cambridge, I got him to sit for a photographer. I have his likeness in front of me now. I can compare it to the man I saw early this afternoon, marching up from the docks.

  Yes. He is here and I have seen him. I cannot imagine how lucky that was. It would have been so easy for me to be busy elsewhere or even to have been distracted just as the new recruits marched through. Anyway, I saw him; he was marching along with the rest of them.

  It seems to be a rule that, when the new troops have disembarked and been lined up on the quay-side, they are marched away to the sheds in the briskest fashion. Here they will wait for the trains to arrive to carry them off to the Front. I expect the thinking behind this quick dispatch of the fresh troops is to expose them as little as possible to those other men, moving in the opposite direction. I mean the wounded who are brought into Dunquerque before being ferried back across the Channel to the hospitals at home. I knew that, if I was to stand any hope of talking to Hubert, I needed to get over to the holding sheds in case there was a decent interval before his lot were loaded onto their train.

  It was lucky that we were not particularly busy that afternoon. You get these lulls now and again. I was able to make my excuses and quickly fall-in alongside Hubert’s platoon as they were marched off. As I had hoped, he and the other soldiers were left to their own devices once settled in one of the sheds and I was able to seek Hubert out without any fear of getting under some sergeant-major’s feet or falling foul of an adjutant.

  The shed was full of soldiers, shifting their packs, sharing ‘a smoke’ and letting off steam. The sound reminded me of those summer days when your father brought the village children up to Mount Benjamin for their sports’ day, competing against the school from Herne Hill. The babbling! There was the same ring of excitement except several octaves lower. New recruits still have the naïveté of children.

  I asked one of the soldiers who had dumped his pack by the shed door if he knew where Private Simmonds might be. He didn’t know but another fellow overheard me and immediately started to shout.

  ‘Hey! Smiler! Visitor for you, old son.’

  That’s the nickname your brother has acquired: Smiler. That smile has obviously been freely shared over the past few months. But I was pleased that it still had the same brilliance when he turned it on me.

  He’s well. He seems in good spirits. He was pleased to see me but we only had half-an-hour or so before it was time for his departure. I don’t know where he’s going. They keep these things very hush-hush. It may not be that far away but, of course, I half-hope our paths do not cross again as that would mean he had been wounded. Having said that, I shall, of course, keep my ear to the ground for any news of his company and the engagements they are involved in.

  I know we had hoped that the war would have been over before Hubert had a chance to embroil himself in it. That was not to be. I am glad that I have seen him before this new phase of his life begins in earnest. He knows he goes into battle with the love of his friends and family close to hand.

  I expect the school is very busy preparing for Christmas celebrations. Have you mastered the left hand of those carols yet? I shall not be going home for Christmas. There is no talk of any ceasefire between these warring Christian nations. So much for Hail the Heav’n born Prince of Peace…

  I remain your friend,

  Geoffrey Cordingley

  Dunquerque

  Dearest Hubert

  I shall not send this letter. It will be as we promised. But it needs to be written or I need to write it because what I feel demands to be expressed.

  I think you guessed my indescribable pleasure at seeing you this afternoon. You were the first to proffer your hand and we performed that manly shake when all the time I wanted to wrap you in my arms and cover your face with kisses. I knew, of course, that that would not do. Your uniform is an effective barrier to any man-to-man expression of affection! And I hope you appreciated my restraint, even when we parted and I satisfied myself with clapping you on the back and sending you on your way with at least half my soul torn out and strewn across the cobbles in your wake.

  We called each other ‘Simmonds’ and ‘Cordingley’ and I did not mind unduly. It reminded me of when we first met at Cambridge and you were just another college chum. Those were bright times. We wore a different kind of uniform then, didn’t we? For all our quirks and idiosyncracies, we were still archetypal undergraduates: enthusiastically, blithely superficial.

  This summer was different. Things shifted for me. It was as if, when I looked up, I could—for the first time—discern a different landscape. I could pick out beautiful objects on a more distant horizon and envisage the journey to them. Of course any first steps were necessarily tentative. I hope they were not furtive.

  I wonder how aware you were. Did you know what I was really about? I think Delia thought I was just being rather daring, courting my local friends whilst my mother still glared out balefully from the drawing room at Mount Benjamin, her basilisk’s eye penetrating beyond the ha-ha, roving restlessly over the fields and lanes. All Mother’d have seen of course was the four of us, you and me, Anstace and Delia, drifting through the summer, punting on the Cam, picking cherries from the orchards at Home Farm, strolling companionably, engaging in earnest or trivial conversation, oblivious to the sun going down.

  For me, those long summer days were quintessentially a camouflage. Your
sister and her friend gave me the opportunity to secure your company. I was content not to overplay my hand although all I craved was you alone, entirely for myself, completely unencumbered by convention or custom or clothing. I thought I was being astute, biding my time until you turned and regarded me in the same way I regarded you.

  I despise predatory lovers, you see. They lack generosity or graciousness. I did not want to be ‘urgent’ or tiresomely pressing; apart from denting my own self-esteem, I suspect such behavior would have been counter-productive. Am I right?

  Unfortunately, my touching faith that time was on my side proved to be folly. ‘You and I’ could never be once all the nations of Europe were tugging at their chains and salivating for each other’s blood. There were mightier forces rushing forward, tearing through the silvered gossamer thread which was connecting you to me.

  But. Except. However. Seeing you this afternoon (for all that they had done their best to conceal your torso in that ghastly tunic and wrap your fine calves in those ridiculous puttees and shave your beautiful head of its luxurious hair) made me know that, come whatever may, love is not gossamer, nor silk but adamantine steel as unbreakable as any of the wire the armies stretch across their lines. It carries its own defiance. It can be pig-headed and irrational. It can—it does—challenge every convention and moral code and remain impregnable.