‘Talking of criminals, they’ll all be coming home too. The prisons will be releasing the C.O.’s before long. There’ll be some respectable non-conformists among them who’ve always been public-spirited.’
‘As if any of them would be elected to positions of influence now!’
‘You’ll be surprised, Ada. The cost has been so high, Frobisher says that there are many who think those who objected to the war on principle were right to do so. I don’t mean the shirkers. There’s the son of the member for East Finsbury, Philip Baker or Noel-Baker as he now is—he ran in the Olympics, if you remember. He was a C.O. but was put in charge of the ambulance service in Italy and has come home with gongs all over his chest. Frobisher says he could get a seat in the next election. And there’s more than a few like him. Not to mention the women of course, all voting for the first time. It’s all change, Ada. Don’t let Mr. Perch forget it!’
‘Suffrage and franchise! As if we’ve not been through enough.’
‘Geoffrey will no doubt return to Mount Benjamin. There’ll be a scene there that would play well in the West End, I wouldn’t wonder.’
‘He’ll never be welcomed. Aunt Margery would disinherit him if she had the power to do so.’
‘Stuff! She would not. You’re mad to think so. In whose favour? Mother’s? Ours? There’ve been plenty of rotten Cordingleys in the past, plenty of boring ones too, and the family has survived without cutting them off. Aunt Margery’s not going to break with tradition and deny her only son his birthright. Besides, until he’s thirty-five, you know as well as I do that everything’s pretty much tied up. She’ll find other ways to make him pay, that’s my view.’
‘It’s shameful.’
‘Maybe but he’s paid a stiff price. Frobisher says that it’s men like Geoffrey who suffer most from prison. He’ll have endured hell, he says.’
‘Hell is where he ought to be.’
‘Ada!’
‘Even that upstart friend of his, the son of the schoolmaster, lost his life. It took him the whole war to do it, mind you, but he knew his duty in the end. I hear that they’ve had to close the school for a period because his mother has gone completely to pieces. Quite, quite broken. I suppose she thought he’d got away with it. Well, I don’t see how Geoffrey can go back to Dunchurch with all that in the air. Even he won’t have that much effrontery.’
‘There’s no reason for him to associate with the villagers at all, Ada.’
‘But that’s exactly what he does, Dolly. Oh yes! He was far, far too familiar not just with this dead man but also his sister. Aunt Margery has told me for a fact that there was correspondence between them. The girl had the nerve to write to Geoffrey at Mount Benjamin. Of course Aunt Margery intercepted the letter. It was her duty once Geoffrey had been locked away to ensure that there was nothing else illegal afoot. She told the girl never to address anything to Geoffrey again and that it would be utterly pointless anyway as no letters would ever be forwarded. I don’t believe, actually, that Aunt Margery even knew where Geoffrey had been taken. The military had hold of him for weeks before he ended up in a regular prison. Well, the schoolmaster’s family are no doubt ruing the day they ever got entangled with Geoffrey. Look what it’s got them.’
‘I hardly think, Ada, that Geoffrey can be held responsible for all their woes.’
‘Do you not? He has shirked his position and, when there is no leadership, everything crumbles. He has failed his class and he has failed as a man.’
‘Do you know? I take it all back. With you at his side, I have every confidence in Perch becoming Alderman. None of his rivals would ever survive your venom.’
Chapter Eight
Thursday, 13 February 1919
Delia’s train approached Ipswich station. It had been a tiresome journey and the bold sense of daring which she had felt when she left Dunchurch that morning had all but dissipated. Now, as the afternoon slipped away, the leaden East Anglian sky felt oppressive, its gloomy weight intensified by the web of smoke, stretching from chimney to chimney which even the coastal winds could not dissipate.
She wondered again why, since his release, Geoffrey had not moved away from this place. All its associations, surely, would be with incarceration and she could see nothing, from the train, which suggested any great attractions to offset the negative. She could understand why he would not have wanted to return to Mount Benjamin, but why not London? Surely he was not entirely dependent upon his dreadful mother for funds. And anyway, didn’t young men borrow on their expectations? Geoffrey had ‘Great Expectations’. What could be better than a fine country house and estate in Kent, the Garden of England?
Delia set her chin as the train wheezed and spluttered to a stop. She had ‘Great Expectations’ on his behalf. What larks they’d have. Why shouldn’t they start afresh?
London, with its promise of frivolous anonymity, could well be where they’d settle. She could help Geoffrey pick himself up and find his feet again. He had survived both the Front and prison. He would recover himself. Though it seemed worlds away, that summer of 1914 had shown him to be socially confident. He could assume authority instinctively. Joie de vivre might be lying dormant but that did not mean it could not be woken. And an awakening was what Delia craved too. She had his letters as proof that he considered her a worthy companion.
The three months since the armistice, when they had learned of Hubert’s death, had been a purgatory. No: it had been worse than that; for purgatory implies some progress toward eventual salvation. There had been nothing about her home or her parents which had given her any hope that all might, one day, be well. Everything of comfort had been torn up and thrown to the winds. It would be an impossible, Sisyphean task to gather up and match the pieces. Better to leave all behind. The half-term break had enabled her to do so. On the pretext of visiting Anstace in Saffron Walden, she had managed her escape without raising any suspicion.
In fact, Delia thought she could have been openly, aggressively rebellious and still there would have been no reaction from her parents. Something more debilitating than grief had descended on them. They seemed to suffer not so much from the certainty that Hubert would be ever absent as from a brooding presence. They were being stifled by something squatting on them and they seemed powerless to disturb it. Muriel Simmonds, in particular, had slid into a morbid apathy except when she seemed to be directing a dumb fury toward her husband. Delia had to get away.
She had been pleased with her own resourcefulness in tracking Geoffrey down. The Quakers in Canterbury had been able to access information on where all prisoners of conscience had served their sentences. Eventually, at the end of January, she had received a reply to her letter addressed to Geoffrey in Ipswich Gaol.
After three years of silence, his letter was understandably reserved. Its prose was halting and contained none of the anger or eloquent passion of his letters from France. She had not cared. He told her he had been released a little earlier than other ‘conshies’ because his health was poor. He was staying in a boardinghouse in Ipswich as a temporary measure, but he wanted her to join him and then ‘there would be no need for letters’.
She had braced herself against the swirl of questions which threatened to disturb her desperate elation and just steadied herself with the logic that now that the war had done its damnable worst, what better course could she follow than ally herself to a man who had stood against it? She had spun girlish dreams from the thrill of walking arm in arm with Geoffrey on a summer’s afternoon, of receiving his potent letters from France, of being his confidante in the face of his mother’s unrelenting hostility. She had woven all this into something more substantial over the past three years. Her life, in common with the lives of so many others, had been in a sort of suspension while the war raged. It was ironic that when the world was being shaken to its molten foundations by the fury of unrelenting human combat, the lives of those on the periphery of the devastation lost all motion. They waited. They went about their dail
y business— Delia had even gone to college and trained as a teacher—but none of it ever became truly animated. Living was a sepia monochrome. Colour could only be found in the imagination.
And Delia had imagined Geoffrey being free for her. He would be released from prison and the experience would have liberated him from the last ties of convention which bound him to his class. He would be free from Lady Margery’s influence. He would be free to see her, Delia, as she was and, freely, he would choose her to be his mate.
If these were dreams, they were entirely compatible with the new spirit which was stirring. People ceased to talk of the armistice; instead they spoke of victory. There was a fresh sense of defiant entitlement. It was time now for the aggressors to pay and the victors to relish the fruits of victory. Delia unwrapped her dreams and shook out the folds. The colours were as bright as ever. There was no moth damage. This was cloth to be fashioned and worn. She would turn heads. She would be a modern woman. She would be a woman.
She dragged her suitcase down from the luggage rack and opened the carriage door. After the fug of the compartment, the station was raw and damp. Gradually the platform cleared and she found herself alone. The cold and a sudden hunger dragged at her spirits and she needed all her nerve to subdue a gnawing sense of folly at having undertaken such a long journey on such fragile arrangements. She waited twenty minutes before she crossed to the other platform, paced its length and returned to her original place. She did not dare retire to the waiting room lest Geoffrey missed her.
Surely he had received her letter telling him when she would arrive? What could be wrong? She could not have misunderstood his invitation to meet. It had been plain enough. Had he changed his mind? Did he regret asking her? Was she utterly deluded? She had credited him with feelings to match those she had for him. On what grounds? How presumptuous! How stupid! How lame! There was nothing she could do now except try to seek him out. But she had no idea how far away from the station he lived. And what if he had taken flight? Where could she stay for the night?
They had lit the gas by the time a short, smooth-cheeked man in a natty, dog-toothed tweed approached her.
‘Miss Simmonds? You won’t know me from Adam but in a manner of speaking I’ve had the pleasure of your acquaintance through a common friend. It’s Mr. Cordingley I’m meaning as you’ll surely guess. He sent me to meet you. Seemed to think it would be a piece of cake if I had your likeness, which in a manner of speaking I have.’
He removed a photograph from his breast pocket and showed it to her. It was a lovely photograph of Hubert, taken in heaven long ago. Though the card was breaking up on the corners and the image was greasy and thumbed it still shone from a time now dead to her. She could not speak but shook the man’s hand as he introduced himself.
‘Jessop’s the name. Friend of Geoff’s.’
She let herself be led out of the station and through the streets, glistening now with the early evening damp, to where she was told Geoffrey was lodging.
‘It’s just a step. Not the best part of town, I’d be the first to admit, but there we are. I expect you’re used to better. You’re quite the lady, I can see. Yes. Claude Jessop and pleased to meet you in person though it’s your brother’ — (and he patted the breast pocket into which he had stowed the photograph) — ‘I’ve had the pleasure of regarding during my—shall we say “association” — with Geoff, with Mr. Cordingley. They were very strict about personal effects, as you can guess, you were only allowed likenesses of family members strictly speaking but I fished this photograph out of Geoff’s parcel and let him have it toward the end. Turned a blind eye seeing as how particularly fond he was of your brother. And my commiserations by the way.
‘Now you’re probably trying to put two and two together and making five. I’ve been his warder and now I’m his landlord and, in a manner of speaking, something of a friend. I know, none better, the trials he’s been through. Unfair some say but we warders don’t have an opinion on the whys and wherefores. We’re not concerned with justice. It’s the law that we’re answerable to. You get a conviction; you go to prison; you do your time. That’s the way of it. Truth is, though, some cope better than others and Geoff—well, it’s knocked him up. I know what prison can do to a man and I can tell, within a week of a fellow being locked in solitary, how he’ll fare. You can tell if they’ve got the temperament. I’m seldom wrong…
‘I dare say you’ll find Geoff greatly changed. But you’re a sharp little thing. Plucky or you wouldn’t be here today. Care for him, do you? Not that it’s any of my business. You just tell me to mind my own business. But I’m glad to be able to hand Geoff over to his friends from his life before. They can take a bit of responsibility and settle the debts.’
Delia let Jessop continue his monologue. She tried not to let it touch her. There was no need for her to respond. There were a number of references to debt but it was not clear whether this was a moral debt, linked to the reason for his imprisonment in the first place, or a financial one. She began to understand that Jessop regarded her as bringing some sort of solution.
He explained that he lived with his widowed sister, who ran a boardinghouse in Rendlesham Road.
‘Lots of comings and going. Commercial travellers for the most part. But sadly fewer in number, as you can imagine, these days. Times have changed. Still, it means there’s often a room spare for a man newly released from the Gaol. Not any old ruffian, you understand. My widowed sister would only countenance the respectable. Those men who’ve done their time for what you might call a clean offence, an aberration. A clerk who’s had his hand in the till to make ends meet. A crime of passion when the gentleman in question was driven to it but, you can tell, is as softhearted as the best of them. We give them a place to kip until they’ve got themselves sorted out and can pay their way.
‘Many prisoners like a halfway house, you understand, just to help them get adjusted, in a manner of speaking. And there’s no need to go pretending with me and my widowed sister as we already know their secrets. And that’s a comfort for many.’
‘Geoff’, it appeared, had been glad of a room at Rendlesham Road. His release, so he had said to Jessop, was of no concern to anyone; there was no one who would be expecting to take him in; he would be happy to settle at Rendlesham Road indefinitely.
‘Well, we know that indefinite is out of the question. At least, not without some remuneration. But Geoff has clearly been used to a bob or two in the past. He’s a gentleman, born and bred. And so I said to my widowed sister, we can take him in and give him shelter while we help him find his family and those who’ll pay his debts. Then, lo and behold, along comes your letter and here you are. Plucky. I can tell. With an interest, I’ll be bound.’
They had been walking through a Victorian quarter of terraces and semi-detached villas. Acanthus leaves had been moulded into the stone surrounds of every bay window. Elaborate patterns of stained glass shone dully from every glazed front door but their solid light of respectability did not extend to the pavement where Delia walked awkwardly at Mr. Jessop’s side (he had taken her elbow to help her negotiate the puddles in the unmetalled road and had not released her); there was an incompatibility in the rhythm of their walking with his shorter steps impeding the swaying of her skirts to her own natural stride. He had taken her suitcase and this meant that he was bent toward her to balance the bulk of it. We must make an odd spectacle, she supposed, but in these anonymous streets anyone might roam with whatever companion they found.
They arrived at the boardinghouse. It was a detached house but the gap between its neighbours was only wide enough to create a narrow, dark passageway barely wide enough for goods and deliveries. Light from within illuminated the heavy glazing, etched with images of fruit and birds, which filled the panels on the front door and the leads above it. Dark greens and purples were punctuated by little diamonds of amber but the overall impression was not attractive. The glass seemed to suck in the light rather than radiate it with adde
d texture.
Delia was invited to sit in the lounge but she chose to wait instead in the hall, sitting on a squat balloon-backed chair. It was nearer the door.
She was not left long alone before the landlady joined her. Physically, Mrs. Pollard resembled her brother as closely as a woman might a man. Her manner, however, had none of his chirpy garrulousness.
‘There is a room reserved for you, Miss Simmonds, which I’m sure you’ll take given the hour and you not knowing Ipswich from Calcutta I assume. Jessop will tell Mr. C. you’re here but he won’t be down. He doesn’t frequent the lounge like my other gentlemen. Keeps to himself. So we’ll show you to your room and then see what’s what.’
She let her eye roll over Delia’s person in a way that she found both hostile and predatory.
It was a young man, who emerged from the rear of the house, who took her bag and escorted her to the room she had been allocated. He reminded her of one of the Baxter boys with his easy familiarity. She gathered that he was the son of the house though he lacked none of the stubby heaviness of his mother and uncle.
‘Fresh out of the navy, that’s me and pleased to be on dry land. I’m just looking about now. See what there is in the way of prospects. In the meantime, helping Ma run this place is better than nothing. And what about, you, miss? Have you come far?’
After the strain of the last hour, Delia was glad to talk. Once in her room, she sat on the upright chair by the washstand while he leaned easily against the doorjamb. His youth suggested that he could only have been called up toward the end of the war. He still carried himself like a boy, without that heavier set to the shoulders. There was nothing shy or deferential in his manner though. Like many who had returned to civilian life after serving, he had acquired the sureness, the brashness perhaps, which she would have associated, before the war, with an older man. In response, she recognized that she was responding to his attention with an easy, though unpractised, confidence.
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