The young women at St. Mary’s had had little unchaperoned freedom. When there had been occasions to mingle with the men at St. Paul’s, Delia had always conducted herself with the magisterial superiority which the women were trained to wear for the classroom. The men at Cheltenham had all carried the burden of a physical debility rendering them unfit for military service and so any attraction was tempered by pity. Delia’s experience of the other sex was otherwise confined to the men of the village with whom she had grown up, but for whom her status as the headmaster’s daughter had imposed a barrier. Her instinct had been to raise this higher, finding as she did, that she rather enjoyed a reputation of social distinction.
Delia knew, while she relaxed in this young man’s company, that his attention was something she would have repelled in the past. She would have considered him beneath her. His grammar was not faultless. His accent was unsophisticated. She doubted he would have been educated beyond the age of thirteen. He was probably a little younger than she was. Nevertheless, he was interested in her and seemed keen to make himself as agreeable as possible. There was swagger and an assumed worldliness but it was touched with enough self-deprecation and humour not to render him ridiculous.
I am flirting with a stranger in a boardinghouse, Delia suddenly realised.
It brought her up short, contrasting as it did with why she had made the journey from Kent to Ipswich. Something must have registered in her manner because young Mr. Pollard stood up straight and apologized for taking her time.
‘You’ll want to rest after the train. The water in the ewer’s warm. Dinner’s at six but you can have something brought up if you wish. I hope you’ll be comfortable, miss.’
‘Thank you. You’ve been very kind. But could you just tell me? Do you know which room Mr. Cordingley has?’
‘Number Eleven. Top of the house. Up another flight and then to the back. Poor chap. Bit of a mess.’ He gave her a straight look which she could not interpret and left, closing the door behind him.
Left to herself, Delia unbuttoned her shoes and lay back on the bed. She was wearier than she had thought and, despite feeling she ought to see Geoffrey without delay, she found herself dozing while turning over and over in her mind what his failure to meet or even greet her implied and what she ought to do.
A perceptible drop in the light seeping through the window stirred her. She realised that she must have slept, that time had passed and she ought to stir herself. The water in the ewer was now only tepid but it served to revive her and, once she had tidied her hair and straightened her clothing, she sought out Room Eleven.
It was up a floor, as Mr. Pollard had said. What he had not indicated was that the internal decoration on this upper storey was much deteriorated. Even in the gloom of dusk, Delia could see that the paintwork was cracked and discoloured. There was evidence of damp where the wallpaper had lifted. The door to Room Eleven was not properly latched and, as she tapped on it lightly, it swung into the room. She pushed it tentatively. It was a long room, squeezed somehow out of the space under the eaves. Geoffrey was at the far end of it, his back to the window. He had not lit the gas and there was no light shining on him directly. The shadow which engulfed him gave her time to register his surroundings. They were meagre.
Afterward, she would be able to recall everything in considerable detail: the stained floorboards and the soiled rag-rug by the bed; the washstand and the chipped ewer and basin mockingly sporting voluptuous roses in baroque swirls; the narrow bed, sagging to the shape of a thin paliasse; the blotched wallpaper in a heavy pattern of greens and mustards above a brown dado and wainscoting; the low boudoir chair upholstered in a faded, indeterminate velvet, patterned on the seat with circles where the nap had worn to the shape of the springs pushing from beneath; the desk and the one decent piece of furniture—a single mahogany dining chair, matching the one she had sat on in the hall.
And here was Geoffrey, surrounded by this meanness.
Delia ventured into the room only far enough to enable her to close the door behind her. She stood, with her hands at her sides, her fingers still pressing against its panels.
‘Did they tell you I had arrived? You were expecting me today, weren’t you?’
He said nothing.
‘I wrote to you, you know. After I had your letter. I just thought I’d come, like you asked. I don’t really know why,’ (she was rambling) ‘except I knew you were free … and I thought if you wanted me to.… There was no reason for you to reply to my first letter. You could have just ignored it. But you didn’t.’ She knew that her voice was taking on a querulous, challenging note. She stopped.
Why did he not say anything? This was nothing like she had imagined. Where was the wash of reconciliation? Where was the adventure? He was free and she had escaped her own grim situation. There should have been a union but she could not even read his expression.
‘Geoffrey,’ she said. She wanted to be honest and continued, ‘No one seemed to know or care what had become of you. But I found out you had been in prison in Ipswich and so that’s why I wrote to you there. I was pleased that you wrote back to me and not to anyone else.
‘Please say something, Geoffrey.’
She moved toward him now, prepared to grab him, shake him into some acknowledgement of who she was and what she had done, even as she recognised her dreams for what they were: mere tissuepaper which would tear the moment it wrapped anything with hard edges or real substance.
She saw he was weeping soundlessly. His face was a grimace and tears were running down his sallow cheeks.
‘You could have been him,’ he said.
She did not have to ask whom he meant. But it mystified her. She had not seen Hubert for years and he had deliberately absented himself from their lives before the news of his death arrived. She had felt it as a relief rather than a shock. That he would not survive the war, which he had so madly surrendered himself to, had been—she had had the past few months to admit this to herself—inevitable. It was not a betrayal to admit such a thing; it was the truth. That was why she had found it all the more difficult to understand her parents’ reaction. That they would grieve was natural but this retreat into themselves, as if repelled by a culpability they found in the other, was savage in its destructiveness. Delia could not blame Hubert. But she felt the rub of resentment as she realised she would have to outmanoeuvre her brother’s spectre before she could even reach Geoffrey.
‘Oh, Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘He’s gone. He went a long time ago. You know that. He left us. But I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’
Her arms circled his thin frame, trapping his arms by his sides. He made no attempt to disengage them but stood immobile, apart from the shuddering which accompanied each laboured breath. After some minutes, he quietened and Delia relaxed her embrace.
She leaned back away from him, to look at him. His hair was cropped close to his head and it struck her that it had darkened to an indeterminate mid-brown. Shorn of that vanity, his facial bone structure made him look cadaverous rather than refined. His hands too, she saw, dangling at his side, had lost their expressive grace. She took one in her own hand; he let her as if his arm were a lifeless limb hanging off him. His fingers appalled her: the cuticles had been picked away from the sides of his nails, each of which had been gnawed back to the quick.
What could have happened to work this self-abuse? She looked at him, hoping to find some answer in his face. He met her gaze for a moment before inhaling deeply on another dry, rising sob. His head thrown back, like a drowning man’s, she saw there were teeth missing.
‘Oh, Geoffrey,’ she said and reached up to touch his face. He turned his head away but she pulled him to her and kissed him. His lips were flaccid but she pressed her mouth against them. A kiss, surely, would bring him to her.
He turned his head in the other direction and he broke free of the contact, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand
‘You’re not him. You cannot be him.’
‘Geoffrey!’
‘I only wanted his lips, only his.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was only ever him. I did not mean to encourage you but who else was there? You were a connection. A connection.’ His voice rose shrilly and he grabbed her by the arms as if to shake her. ‘Do you understand now? Sometimes, yes, sometimes I thought it would be enough. I thought if I couldn’t have him, I could have him through you. And then, who knows, if we ever got through this fucking war, he would see me waiting and…’ He shook his head, to dislodge the old deceit. ‘… but it was never, ever you … and now…’
She tried to break free of him. Every instinct was to recoil. But he shrugged himself together and held her all the more firmly. It hurt.
‘Look at me! Scorched, bloodied, broken. They wrecked me. Look at my mouth. Gum disease. A common scourge for common men, condemned to prison food for months on end. And they extract one’s teeth without any anaesthetic. Who’d look at me now? You wouldn’t. Would he? Would that beautiful, beautiful man ever look at me now? And if he did, what would I see in his face but pity for the miserable, miserable faggot I’ve become. I never want to see him again. That’s what I said. Never, never, never, never. I never wanted to see his expression change forever, from the portrait I cherished. That’s what I prayed.
‘And then I found out he’d been killed. I’d thrown away my faith in him, and my trust in his love and so he died. Everything died. Everything died!’
He was shouting at her now. A little ball of spittle had gathered in the corner of his mouth.
‘And then you come here. As if we could pretend!’
‘You asked me to!’
‘It was Jessop. Jessop told me to write. Jessop told me what to write.’ Geoffrey sagged under the confession, releasing Delia. He turned away from her, trembling.
‘Jessop?’
‘You don’t think he’s taken me in out of charity do you? He wants to sell me on. He imagines that someone will want to claim me and settle the debt.’
‘It was his idea? You let him? You could have said “no”. Instead you tricked me. Trapped me. That’s horrible.’
He looked at her. He saw her rising fury, her outrage that he could have had such little regard for her. He recognised the youthful pride and sense of self-worth which she still carried. He broke under the bitterness of it all.
‘You have no idea. None.’
‘No.’
It was true. She could not conceive what had brought him to this state. She only had an inchoate grasp of what he had tried to convey about his feelings for her brother. In addition, her imagination absolutely failed her when she tried to place him, once again, in his ancestral setting, in Dunchurch, behind the wheel of the motor, taking a turn along the lanes and passing the labourers who would touch their cap to him, crossing the lawns, or sauntering in Cambridge or Canterbury with the easy manners of a man with an open wallet, accustomed to deference. Instead, all she could now picture was the loathing and reviling, emanating from Lady Margery and infecting the whole village, which he would inspire. There was no future for him. He would have to fade into the backstreets of this or some other provincial town, haunting the grubby, upper-storeys of rundown boarding houses and live out the rest of his days in a grey twilight.
He was repugnant to her. She shuddered, rubbing her arms where he had touched her to dispel the physical memory of his contact. He was abhorrent, leprous.
‘No,’ she said again. It was a physical reflex which made her step away from him, as if from contagion, and flee.
She had only been ten minutes or so in her room, sitting on the edge of the bed, trembling with anger and revulsion, when Mrs. Pollard tapped on the door and offered her a light supper of bread and cold meat. She mastered herself sufficiently to accept it; she’d bring a tray up to her shortly.
Delia assumed as much self-possession as she could muster when Mrs. Pollard returned and busied herself lighting the gas and putting a match to the kindling on order to ‘get a bit of a blaze going so the coals will catch.’ Delia wanted to appear coldly dignified for it was surely impossible for Mrs. Pollard not to be in some sort of league with Jessop. They had connived to get her to travel to Ipswich. She had fallen in with their plans like some naïve chit, thoroughly duped by Geoffrey’s letter. She could do nothing now except stay the night and try to make sense of it all. Meanwhile, she did not want to give them the satisfaction of seeing her at all discomfited.
She had been ravenous. The bread and cold meats embellished with pickled onions had been surprisingly good. She had even enjoyed the apple, though soft and a little wizened from being stored through the winter, which she had eaten as she finished both bottles of milk stout that had sat on the tray. She had had nothing to drink for hours and the beer, coming after an empty stomach, had gone slightly to her head when Mr. Pollard tapped on her door.
‘Ma sent me to collect your tray, if you’re done. I see you’ve made short work of it!’ He laughed, ‘I like a girl with an appetite.’
‘Thank you. Yes.’ Delia did not know what to say. She smiled, feeling ridiculously buoyant as a result of the supper of bread and porter.
‘If you’ve been to see Mr. C, you’ll be feeling a bit surplus to requirements, I expect.’
‘I don’t know…’
Pollard was quick at reading the signals. He saw the tightening across her brows and immediately became solicitous.
‘And I expect it’s been a bit of a shock. Prison is not kind to a man. I’ll say that. We’ve had quite a few here over the years. Did he — does he mean a lot to you? Mr. C?’
Since Hubert’s death, no one had expressed the slightest interest in how she felt. There had been no sympathy. She had set such store on the outcome of this journey to Ipswich. She had expected to find Geoffrey and be able to escape her home. There would be a future worth contemplating. And it had come to nothing—worse than nothing. She had discovered that it had all been an abuse. She had been deliberately deceived. He scorned her, rejecting her because she was not her own dead brother. It was all horrible. It was mad. She burst into tears.
Pollard was at her side immediately. He took her in his arms and caressed her, stroking her hair gently, soothing her subtly into compliance until his lips, mumbling unintelligible comforts closed onto hers. He tasted the bitter beer on her breath and guessed she was unused to this, the strongest porter they kept in the house. He could imagine that already she would be feeling giddy from its effects and the pressure of his body against hers. She might fancy herself as a prim miss but he knew the type; they were ripe and eager if squeezed hard enough.
The noises she was making were muted but he made sure he kept them dampened, closing his mouth over hers, working her mouth with his lips as his hands dealt with her clothing. There’s not much, he thought, that Arthur Pollard doesn’t know concerning women’s undergarments.
‘Come on, come on,’ he urged as he manoeuvred his own body to use his weight and legs to separate hers.
Delia knew she was crossing a line. This was a transgression. But why shouldn’t she? She was not her dead brother. She was not Hubert. She was herself.
Pollard was experienced. He knew not to be greedy. He knew when he had a girl he could take his time with. A bit of booze always helped. If he pressed the right buttons, having undone the ones that got in his way, and touched her up nicely she’d be moaning for it before he stabbed her for his own hot pleasure. This one didn’t know what was coming. That was clear. But she was sliding happily enough into obedience. He’d got her tits out and she liked that. He knew by the way she rolled under him that she’d be ready for his finger down below. She bucked a bit as he got it inside her and found her little knob.
‘That’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘You like that don’t you? Now you know where to find it, you can have lots of fun.’
The bulk of her skirt and petticoat, riding up around her waist, was a nuisance and she was not helping him drag
her drawers down. It was always a risk with the ‘nice’ girls (that was a laugh!) when he had to break off from softening them up in order to get their drawers off ’em without ripping them. He’d learned the hard way that even when they’re as juicy as raw meat drawn down the grain with a sharp knife, the sound of cotton tearing can scare them frigid. He didn’t want to get violent with this one. He wanted to get inside her and pump away after she’d had her first wave of excitement. That way, they never forgot they’d wanted it, longed for it, begged for it. The nicest girls could never lie about that to themselves afterward. It was his best protection.
Delia’s head was swimming. The whole day had gone inside out; everything that had happened was circling around and around; nothing was right; Geoffrey, Hubert, Jessop, Mrs. Pollard, her son had all conspired but she couldn’t care, she couldn’t care. She was getting something she had half expected would come from Geoffrey; she was discovering something about her body and its waywardness and she was proving to herself that she was no expendable wraith in her brother’s image; she was blood and pain and raw desire because now, now and now this man was playing her until she had to scream out not for love or hope or even sorrow but with anger and rage and self-loathing and defiance and fury. It was a battle cry. Her war was beginning.
The first engagement finished suddenly. The violence on her body had stopped and he was lifting himself off her. She saw him hanging loose, a viscous fluid dribbling from the tip of it, as he bundled it into the front of his trousers. She moved to close her legs and straighten her clothing. She felt the colder air of the room on her exposed breasts now he was no longer pressing them. As she tried to lift herself, the room span and she felt she was going to be sick. She pulled herself over to the washstand and retched ineffectually into the basin.
‘That’s not very complimentary. After the good time, I’ve given you.’
She looked at him, remembering that this was Pollard, the son, who had come to collect her tray, who had uttered a few kind words, who had made her cry and then who had done all those things which, she supposed, everyone except the very prim or prudish or lonely do at some point in their lives because we are all, when it comes down to it, animals with an animal’s lusts otherwise why would we be made that way, why would she have opened to this man and let him get at her if she had not just been responding, instinctively, to the call of her body? She would have done it for Geoffrey. She had imagined doing it for Geoffrey except that what she had imagined had not been, not in any regard, at all like this which she had just experienced, endured, was regretting, was turning from, sickened. She had imagined talk and promises. She had imagined the lightest of kisses. And, if she had imagined this act, it would have been overlaid with softnesses and, if at all urgent or impassioned, at least courteous and deferential without the brusque withdrawal, the sudden finishing, and the furtive way he’d packed his dribbling thing back in his clothing while she, infected with the shameful slime it left in her, scrabbled to straighten out her own garments as if respectability could ever again be worn without hypocrisy.
That They Might Lovely Be Page 31