Without company, he fell back into himself. His mind, he discovered, was wayward. He would attempt to discipline it, reciting his tale, but he would find himself stalling. ‘Giles Morland would find a place in the sun and sit rolling bandages. He would invariably whistle tunes from the music halls (a favourite was Lily of Laguna) sometimes breaking into song, putting on the most appalling cockney accent … sometimes breaking into song, putting on the most appalling cockney accent … sometimes breaking into song, putting on the most appalling cockney accent…’
And then, his thoughts would take a different path and head off into darker reaches, turning this way and that, twisting about with the insane logic of a nightmare.
Or he would find himself just too utterly weary to be bothered with anything and he would remain motionless, insensate, empty for great stretches of time.
Or he would touch himself, massaging his nipples or his groin, sometimes slowly as a deliberate act of self-seduction, sometimes more brutally. The raw, nervous stimulation was the only escape he could achieve. He imagined other hands working his body. He imagined Hubert’s caress. Even in those listless dreams which skitted across his fitful sleeping, he never found himself arousing Hubert. The sexual play was wholly inverted.
Geoffrey understood what was happening to him. He understood that any restorative dimension which solitude could bring had been eclipsed by the ravages of his solitary existence. As gangrene spreads its rottenness to corrupt healthy flesh, anything finer, more noble in his nature was being destroyed. And the horror was that the agency for this pollution was within. Yes, he was in prison but he was also imprisoned with himself. The stench that arose from the slops bucket was the stench of his own waste. The odor which clung to his body was the smell of his own body when deprived of soap and eau de cologne to purge it. The pathways down which his mind chose to roam, when it lacked diversion, were fetid and rank. The ‘pleasure’ he wrung out of his genitals was no more than an addiction: sordid and fleeting, leaving him with a weary self-disgust. Solitude had exposed him to whom he was in essence.
It was this knowledge which broke him for he could never after conceal his revulsion of himself from himself. He knew that, whatever relief the future might bring (for presumably, one day, he would be released), it would be a superficial gloss over his wretched nature. Civilisation would never amount to more than this: a richly embroidered gown covering limbs riddled with disease, pocked and pustulating.
By the time he was released from solitary confinement to experience the normal exigencies of prison life, (the monotonous labour of sewing mailbags or making brooms and brushes, and the callous indifference of the warders exacerbated by the prohibition of any conversation with them) he lacked not only the energy to rise above the punishing, unvarying routine but also the will to do so. Living had been reduced to an existence. To believe that it could ever be more was a delusion. One endured it because the primitive, bestial instinct to stay alive was too deeply engrained in the human animal.
Geoffrey lived alongside the other prisoners. They had broken society’s rules, in one regard or another, just as he had. The fact that they had little in common with him, in terms of education or social standing or experience, was incidental. Prison created new patterns of interaction, new hierarchies, new behaviours. One conformed to these because it made things easier.
He found the monotony easier to bear than diversion. When he contracted pleurisy at the end of 1917 and was admitted to the hospital wing, the brisk, relative kindness of the nurses was a torment. It dragged him back from the bleak place where he had hidden himself. In and out of delirium, he was forced to confront the man he had, perhaps, once been, standing like a spectre at the end of his bed, dressed nattily, diamond tie-pin in place, louche, sardonic. He had to accept that he had never and would never amount to more than this shallow figure embodied.
It was while he was in the hospital wing, sufficiently on the mend to return to the main prison in a day or two, that Jessop addressed him. Anything other than a response to an instruction from a warder was forbidden but here, in the hospital, it was possible to subvert the rules. Geoffrey noticed Jessop sauntering about the ward on several occasions, sometimes passing the odd remark to the sick men. Geoffrey had been aware of this prison warder before. There had been one or two occasions, when the warder had been overseeing the prisoners’ labour, when they had made eye contact and then Jessop had manouevred himself over to Geoffrey, to whom he then delivered a brusque, inconsequential comment or unnecessary instruction. Geoffrey was aware of the innate instincts quickening; he recognised the type.
‘You want to buck yourself up, Cordingley. This war won’t go on forever. They’ll let you out then, so long as you’re a good fellow. They might’ve done before now except you’re one of these “absolutists” ain’t you? No point in giving you another chance in front of a magistrate. You still wouldn’t put on a uniform, would you? Not even after your little holiday in gaol. Funny that, because you’re top-drawer. I’ve been doing a bit of digging, you see. I like to find out about my prisoners. Those that attract my attention, at any rate.’ The innuendo was intentional.
‘Some of them you get in here are the dregs. Well, you don’t need me to tell you that. I can see you’re different. Class. You can always spot it. I like class.
‘One of these days, chum, you’re going to need a helping hand. When they let you out. Rehabilitation. Just finding your feet after prison. I’ve got a little establishment which is just the ticket. I could put you up whilst you get straight.
‘You remember.
‘One of these days, you’ll want me to look out for you. Meanwhile, chum, I’ll be waiting.
‘Once you’ve done your time, you and I can do each other a favour. I don’t waste my energy on riff-raff. You’ll see.
‘But a word to the wise. Man to man. You keep your hands on top of the bedclothes when the nurses are around. They don’t like fiddlers in here. Me—I’m open-minded. Besides, you and me, we’ve got the same interests.
‘Happy New Year to you, chum. Let’s hoping it’ll all be over this time next year and life can start all over.’
Geoffrey loathed himself for feeling so pathetically grateful for Jessop’s attention. Softened as he had been by the nurses’ consideration, he had found the warder’s interest, his veiled flirting, wretchedly sustaining.
Who could tell? When he was released, he might well need some halfway house to help set him back on his feet. He could not expect any support from his family and he had ceased to think of Anstace, Delia, Hubert or any of his friends who might still be alive, as having any significance to the life that would be his lot once he was free. He could no longer pretend to be the person they thought they had known. Jessop had seen him for what he was. There was a ghastly honesty in that.
Wednesday, 13 November 1918
The celebration of the armistice had so infected the village that Frederick Simmonds did not feel the slightest qualm when the telegraph boy handed him the envelope. The war was over. The daily anxiety which they had all lived with for years had lifted, just as early morning fog is dispersed by the warmth of the sun and a light breeze. The telegram would be some official notification of Hubert’s leave lest in their naiveté they expected their soldier-son home immediately on the signing of the armistice.
The boy was a Herne Hill lad and knew the school well enough to bring the telegram straight to his former schoolmaster, in his classroom, despite the forty or so children ranged before him. Mr. Simmonds signed for it and then laid the telegram on his desk and set about completing the labelling of his diagram of the parts of a buttercup, for the class to copy from the blackboard.
The children were not so relaxed. Too many of them had known the effects of a telegram during the past four years; they could smell the ominous odor of bad news. Delia too, working the term assisting her father before taking up her own class the following year, bristled with urgent curiosity. There was an unnatural intensity a
bout the silence in the classroom. The children were not working with concentration but were mesmerised by the envelope lying on their teacher’s desk.
It was Mrs. Simmonds who broke the spell. She had seen the boy ride off. She left her class of little ones, walked briskly down the corridor and straight into her husband’s classroom. His class leapt to their feet, alert, thrilled by the prospect of witnessing raw emotion being played out by these demi-gods of discipline. Mr. Simmonds was suddenly faced with the possibility of catastrophe. He made to pick up the envelope but his wife seized it before him and read its contents. At the back of the class, Delia felt trapped by the rigid school etiquette of the schoolroom; she could neither move nor speak. She watched her mother.
The children standing at the front saw Mrs. Simmonds’ mouth open. They saw her throat muscles contract as if she were about to vomit. A crimson flush broke out over her throat and cheeks. She did not speak to her husband but, as she turned to leave, she held his gaze for one awful moment before letting her tortured eyes rake across the children still standing to attention behind their desks. None failed to understand the significance of what had occurred. Delia let her mother leave before quietly following her.
No child was ever taught by Mrs. Simmonds again. She never returned to the school building. Mr. Simmonds turned back after a moment to the cross-section of a buttercup he was drawing on the blackboard and resumed his botany lesson. The parts of the flower became forever a litany to the dead.
‘… carpel
sepal
metacarpal
stamen
stigma
pistil…’
Frederick Simmonds did not seek out his wife for over four hours. He remained in his classroom, after the school had been dismissed, alone. It was easiest to find initial solace cocooned from anyone else. Hubert was dead; that was clear. Somehow he had contrived to lose his life a matter of hours before the armistice was signed. Perhaps he had been careless and shown himself above the parapet, deluded into thinking that no hun across the waste of no man’s land would want to snatch one last life when a peace was about to secure safety for all, failing to understand that a sniper might want to add one more to his score before the humiliation of defeat overtook his nation. Perhaps his death had been even more futile, the result of one of his own, stupidly celebrating by shooting off a spare magazine. They would probably never know. The official notification was terse; the formula so worn. It hardly mattered. Hubert was dead. Dead. No doubt there were hundreds of others, killed that Monday, whose families were discovering the irony of the armistice. No doubt there were thousands, wounded these past few weeks, who would soon be dead too. The peace was not a relief. The celebrations were all fatuous.
There was, for Frederick Simmonds, just this stark fact: his son’s twenty-five years of life had come to an end. With part of his mind, he began to grapple with this truth as he might compose a eulogy. Hubert’s energy, his wit, his intelligence, his good looks, that almost tangible vitality which as boy and man had made him so attractive, so popular … had stopped. The timing was horribly cruel. His death was rendered all the more pointless because he had died when the war had already been won. His death and victory collided.
But there was another part of him, more visceral than cerebral, which was surrendering to a more primeval grief. Here he was, fingering the parts of ranunculus acris, pistil and stamen, when his only son was dead, his blood shed. He knew with terrible, gnawing clarity that a man’s most potent ambition is to father sons and lunge at a vicarious immortality through the perpetuation of his own manhood. And he knew it too late. Hubert’s childhood and youth, those years when they had almost grown estranged, counted for nothing. Hubert as he had been, his nature, his character were already fading. What mattered to Simmonds now was his own futility; his blood, his line, the begetting finished, wasted. It was as if he had never fathered a son. He boiled with the frustration and injustice.
When they had brought Eric Baxter home, both legs blown away by a shell, Frederick Simmonds had visited him and found him surprisingly buoyant despite being in considerable discomfort. He had congratulated the young man on his fortitude and had not known how to take the crude reply, ‘Well they didn’t shoot away me bollocks, sir, and I can still get it up! Which is just as well because Gladys will want her dues and you know what a fast ‘un she always was.’
Eric Baxter knew the bald truth of it but the schoolmaster had not understood until this moment, here at his desk in an empty schoolroom. Until this moment he had been more likely to side with the pious journalists and tract-writers who raged in purple prose against the prevalent licentiousness and sexual immorality, fomented by men home on leave from active service. He could see now: there was nothing more compulsive than the sowing of seed in times of killing.
It was hunger which prompted Frederick Simmonds to leave the classroom. He found his way into the kitchen where someone, Delia or the girl, had left him some bread, cheese and a bottle of stout. He was grateful to them for giving him his own space and time. He ate with greedy relish and, once satisfied, sought out his wife.
It was too dark for him to see her clearly but, as he lay on the bed next to her, he could sense that she had been sleeping. She had had at least that respite. There was a fecund warmth to her body which he found answered the stirring within him. He leaned over and kissed her.
‘You’ve been eating,’ she said. It was an accusation.
‘You should eat something too, you know.’
‘I couldn’t. They brought me some gruel but I couldn’t have it near me. The smell was too much. I shall never eat again.’
He felt she was on the edge of hysterics. Her voice was stretched thin and taut. He was not surprised that grieving had driven her to fast. Nervous tension will always turn women against their bodies. He wanted to bring her to where he was and tried to turn her body toward him so he could pull her against his chest. She was heavy and limp, utterly unresponsive, but the softness of her flesh and the close smell of her made him persist. He had not had sexual relations with her for over two years but he could transpose onto her a vision of how she once had been when he had been in his prime, when he had taken her frequently, urgently, ardently. He kissed her again, heavily, across her parted lips. She caught the sour taste of cheese and the bitterness of the beer on his breath and tried to push him from her, moaning a little as if in fear.
‘We always knew there was this chance,’ he said, and the words shocked her at their implied acquiescence to Hubert’s death.
‘He was my babe,’ she cried. ‘I ache for him here.’ She clenched her fists against her abdomen.
He took her hands in one of his and pressed them with her into the softness of her belly. If the mother felt again the wrench of parturition, the father experienced a quickening in the loins.
He shifted the weight of his body, bringing his other arm out from behind her shoulders. In doing so, he slipped on to her and felt with a surge of excitement the fullness of her breasts beneath him. His hands were busy now freeing himself from the constraints of his own clothing, scrabbling at her petticoats. She began to fight against him now.
‘What! What! What!’ was all she said, as much question as exclamation before he put his hand across her mouth. He did not want her to speak. He did not want words. There was nothing to say. The significance was entirely in the act. She was not his wife. She had no name. If she had identity, it was shared with every other woman ravaged in the wake of killing, when men, intoxicated with it, split and stab, branding their conquest on every vulnerable body.
She screamed under the force of his dry penetration but it did not deflect his thrust. His flesh drove into her body again, again, again, again and his hand remained clamped over her mouth, so she could neither weep nor plead.
She ceased to struggle. There was no point.
He emptied himself into her and for one fleeting moment soared on the achievement of his ejaculation before falling, falling.
/>
Talk
‘If this is peace, I’m not sure that I don’t prefer the war. I’ve never seen such loose behaviour from young girls who ought to have known better. Nice girls from the Stephen Langton School acting like hoydens. They were running, running around the city walls, screaming at the tops of their voices, all stocking and underskirts.’
‘Is there anything you’d run around the city for, Ada?’
‘Of course not. Celebration does not have to be raucous.’
‘And what was your Mr. Perch doing at 11 o’clock on Monday morning?’
‘He’s not my Mr. Perch yet, Dolly.’
‘Of course he is but, nevertheless, I’d snap him up or tie him down, whichever you fancy, as soon as you can. It’s not as if there’s that many men to go around these days.’
‘I’ll have you know we’ll wed after the proper period of mourning. He’s lost two brothers in the last five months, don’t forget.’
‘Never has a weak chest been such a boon. He must be counting his blessings.’
‘It cut him to the very quick being rejected for active service but it was Canterbury’s gain. No one can say he has not done his duty by the city. He’ll be an alderman in a year or two, I have no doubt.’
‘How gratifying for you! But he’ll have to look to his laurels. There’ll be generals and brigadiers, majors and captains all returning from war. They won’t be content sitting at home taking their cue from the fellows who’ve been at home. I wouldn’t say that “Alderman” Perch is in the bag.’
‘It would be criminal if he didn’t get his just reward.’
That They Might Lovely Be Page 29