You make some cryptic allusions to your uncle, Horace Minton. I do not understand them or what you were trying to imply. If there was some attempt here to strengthen your case, it failed. You have no case. You can simply rely on my silence, borne from a deep, deep disappointment and personal shame, and whatever connivance you can get from your mother.
It may be that your disgrace will be kept secret for a time but it seems to me inconceivable that it will remain hidden forever. And when the truth comes out, all of us will have to face the consequences of our actions. That is what you have done.
I remain your father,
Frederick Simmonds
Delia read and re-read this letter. The paper it was written on and the envelope in which it had been posted gave it a substance which helped her regard it almost with disinterest. What intrigued her was the fear which seemed to seep from between her father’s words. He wanted so much to retreat into his private fastness; it was clear that he felt dreadfully vulnerable. Instead of deflecting this with the unaccommodating tyranny which had always been his way, a whining note of self-pity had surfaced. It was bolstered by dishonesty. She had given him the opportunity to climb down from his remote retreat and confess to her all that he had done. Her own admissions were strewn all over the path he could take. ‘I too, Delia; I too’ could have been his refrain. But he had lied. He had denied knowing that her mother was pregnant and yet there had been communication with Uncle Horace Minton. He had claimed to be bemused by her allusions to her uncle’s role, and his experience in employing the services of Mrs. Hoskins and Dr. Spode in managing unwarranted pregnancies. How did he think his denials could ever withstand scrutiny against the testimony of these two players?
Delia could imagine her father hiding behind an unwavering refutation: ‘I do not understand you … I resent such insinuations…’ She had no doubt that he had the iron resilience to hold firm. In another age he would have made a triumphant martyr. The cause was immaterial; once he had decided on his perspective and the limit of his involvement, no rational argument, no amount of incontrovertible evidence would persuade him to renege on them.
Delia reflected on how little upset she was by her father’s letter and his abandonment of her.
No doubt, she thought, he and I are more similar than I had thought. Neither of us is prepared to risk trust. I cannot blame him for peddling his own deceptions when I deliberately let him assume Geoffrey fathered my child. There are truths which I shall never share with anyone and, in time, they may cease to have any substance. It is no doubt the same with him … but I cannot tell what it is which he so dreads being discovered.
Saturday, 2 August 1919
Delia took the omnibus beyond the villas and straggling cottages which littered the outskirts of Weston-super-Mare toward the dilapidated Napoleonic fort on Brean Down. As the detritus of an earlier war, tucked into the elbow of the Severn estuary, it had been a favourite place of refuge during her exile but could not be for much longer. Now, six months into her pregnancy, she was beginning to tire with the effort of walking along the undulating headland.
The fort had been little more than a look-out station. Built of brick, it was cut into the tip of the headland the better to be concealed by the contours of the ground. In the hundred years or so since its construction, the turf had encroached up the walls of the building, drawing it down into the earth. Delia liked to think that in a further hundred years it would be identifiable merely as a swelling under the grass and, a further hundred years into the future, it would be completely undetectable. She had heard that, already, farmers in northern France were beginning to reclaim the plains for agriculture. It was a comfort to believe that the relicts of war could, in time, be obliterated in this way.
The Down was an obvious destination for annual holiday-makers, spending their week in Weston-super-Mare, who wanted more than a stroll up and down the pier. However, it was unusual to see another solitary woman out walking; she was coming back from the headland. Delia paused and looked out to sea so that the other woman would be able to walk past her without any excuse even for a nodded greeting. She had become practised in repelling all interest from casual acquaintances or passers-by. Why shouldn’t she? She knew no one here nor did she wish to forge any connections. No one knew that it was to Weston-super-Mare that she and her mother had removed. Her father would discourage any well-meaning or prying enquiries from neighbours in Dunchurch.
‘Hullo, Delia.’
It was Anstace’s voice. It was Anstace. Delia swung about, incredulous.
‘How did you know I was here? What are you doing here?’ She realized with dismay that she was standing, arching backward, her feet planted firmly apart, to shift her centre of gravity. The wind blew her clothes against her swollen figure.
‘I had no idea.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I had no idea you were here … or anything. Are you all right?’
‘Oh, Anstace! What a question! Only you could ask such a question.’
‘I mean it.’
‘I know you mean it. That’s the point.’
Delia sat down on the grass and stared out across the estuary. Anstace sat too, leaving a little distance between them. Once they would have had so much to share. Now, listening to the mewing of gulls wheeling above them, was all they could do.
‘I have been staying with my cousin, Kenneth, just a few miles away. I left my bicycle at the road.’
‘Another cousin.’ Delia made it sound like a debility.
‘I wanted to see the sea and walk out along a headland. There is even a lighthouse.’
‘Are you telling me this is coincidence?’
‘It was not planned. You have never sent word to tell me where you were.’
‘And now you know why.’
‘You’re expecting a baby. Is that the reason?’
‘Do you need another?’
Anstace turned away. The town rose behind the miles of grey sand. In the distance, the iron pier marched out toward the breaking waves. Westward, the hills of Wales supported the horizon. To the south, the rest of Somerset and the distant Quantock Hills helped wrap the view. A lighthouse had been built on one of the two substantial islands, Flat Holm and Steep Holm, in the Bristol Channel. It was all a far cry from the wild, Breton coast and a limitless ocean.
Anstace rose to her feet.
‘Will you shake my hand? I’m no gossip, Delia. I shall never speak of this meeting. But I can’t drop you. I’m not made that way.’
She held out her hand to Delia who, after a moment, took it in both of hers.
‘You can pull me up. Come on, heave!’
Anstace smiled as her friend lurched to her feet but Delia remained serious.
‘I trust you, Anstace. And it would be nice to walk back with you. But I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to answer any questions or anything like that. You have to know that it’s never going to be the same. How can it?’
It was a slow walk. Descent, thought Delia not for the first time, is always tedious. Even the promise of a rest fails to redeem the laborious process of planting one’s feet more carefully, avoiding the loose stones or the muddy patches. But rough, country walking served to block one’s thoughts in a way that striding along a pavement or along the pier could not.
Anstace found herself imagining what the past few months must have been like for Delia. Her shock at falling pregnant, the act that caused it, the horror of telling … who? Her parents? Not her friends. And not, presumably, the child’s father. For Anstace was certain that Geoffrey, still recovering at Joachim Place, despite all that he was trying to lose in the caverns of his memory, would have told her or Dorothy Lean if Delia had let him know that she was having a baby. How might the future unfold for them all? What should she do? What could she do except be true to her promise to keep all she knew to herself?
At the end of the Down, Anstace collected her bicycle, which she had left under a hedge, and wheeled it back alon
g the road to Weston-super-Mare, toward the stop where Delia would board the omnibus. They tried some brittle conversation: mere observations on the weather, the landscape, trivial comments which gave the lie to any intimacy.
When the omnibus to Weston rattled into view, Anstace offered her hand again; Delia shook it once. There was no mistaking the contract of silence that it sealed.
Thursday, 7 August 1919
Delia took Anstace’s letter from her pocket and carefully tore it up. She bent down and pushed the pieces of paper through the gap between the planks of the pier. The fragments fluttered away in the light breeze. One or two seagulls swooped at the scraps before wheeling away uninterested. Delia watched the tiny squares of white bob about on the water, slopping against the pier’s girders.
Anstace had been true to her word. She had written nothing directly concerning their meeting on Brean Down but the letter, for Delia, was heavy with innuendo. ‘If ever you need a friend…’, ‘Once we were almost sisters, maybe… ’, ‘Do let me know when I can visit… ’, ‘I too have something significant I should like to discuss’ and other phrases, pulsing with allusion, punctuated the letter. Delia could not tolerate it.
It was around half-past six when she returned to Holm View after her long, afternoon stroll. As she approached the villa, she saw the curtains twitch in the upper room which was her mother’s bedroom. A little spasm of apprehension gripped her: why was she looked for?
Mrs. Hoskins was hovering by the hallstand as Delia let herself in.
‘Oh, Mrs. Simmonds,’ (Delia scarcely heeded the silly ruse now) ‘I’d have sent Mabel to look for you, feeling sure you’d be out on the pier or along the front, except it’s her afternoon off. Your mother’s waters broke shortly after you left and then the pains started coming thick and fast. Now there’s no need to worry’ — Delia was already on the stairs — ‘Dr. Spode has been here a good two hours and he seems in no doubt it will be a perfectly normal delivery.’
The hours that followed, racked Delia more than anything she had ever yet experienced. Her mother bucked and writhed with each convulsion, dignity and modesty abandoned to the agony of expelling the parasite from her body. Delia watched, appalled at the prospect that she too would be reduced to such throes. It frightened her. It also made her angry. What had she done, what had her mother done that meant this bloody tearing was a fit recompense? What was this creature, inhabiting the depths of her mother’s body, that it should wreak such violence?
Ominously, just as her mother fell still, she felt the lurch and kick of the thing she carried in her own womb.
Dr. Spode had sent for a midwife and she, with Mrs. Hoskins, busied about trying to clean her mother and make her more comfortable. Delia was given the baby, a blotched and slimey thing, wrapped in a crocheted blanket. She held it reluctantly. She stood at her mother’s bedside, looking down at the familiar face still distorted from pain, framed by her long hair, loose and bedraggled stretching like a web across the pillow.
Muriel Simmonds stared up at her and Delia suspected that her mother was lost for good. Delia had imagined that the silent, brooding despair, which had only intensified as the months of her pregnancy had progressed, would lift and flee as an immediate consequence of being delivered of this unwanted baby. She had not allowed herself to think beyond ‘delivery’ because the notion of her own escape was so inextricably linked to when she too would be relieved of the shame of pregnancy. Once her body was her own again, so she had half-reasoned, she would be able to reconstruct herself. She had thought it would be the same with her mother.
But there was no light of hope in her mother’s eyes. There was no fire or animation. She had been emptied. The baby’s snuffling whimperings turned to cries. Muriel Simmonds turned her face away from the noise, pressing one cheek into the pillow and clapping the palm of her hand against her other ear. Delia did not know what to do with the repellant body squirming in her arms. She saw Mrs. Hoskins catch the midwife’s eye and then the baby was taken from her.
‘Poor little mite’ll have to be fed however the mother’s feeling,’ said the midwife brusquely. ‘Come on, now, madam, raise yourself. You’ve done this before if not so recently.’
Delia forced herself to witness this last obscenity. She was shocked at her mother’s passivity as her full breast was exposed from her nightdress, the nipple tweaked and flipped and the child put to it. But she realised it was a passivity borne from utter degradation. Her mother allowed her arm to be positioned beneath the baby, a pillow punched into shape for support, and she lay there, slumped in abject surrender.
Muriel Simmonds spoke. Her voice was hoarse from the bellowing of childbirth but quite distinct.
‘I want him called ‘Hubert’. And ‘Frederick’ after his father. Make sure of that, Delia.’
‘But why, mother?’
‘So your father always remembers.’
‘Of course he’ll remember.’ She had no idea what her mother meant.
‘This one shall have everything that Hubert had except love. There is no more love. And anything without love is obscene.’
She let her head flop back against the bedhead, her mouth open, loose-lipped, a wound. As the baby suckled, Delia was twisted by visceral repulsion.
Friday, 8 August 1919
Delia had had a camp bed made up in her mother’s room but her own bulk made sleep difficult and, when it came, it was disturbed by nightmares.
She woke sweating and realised that the crying she had been enduring in her sleep was the lusty bleating of the baby lying beside her mother. Delia struggled to her feet and made her way to the bed. In the moonlight, she could see her mother was awake, wide-eyed, stoney-faced.
‘I shall give it nothing if it makes a noise.’
‘You must feed it, mother.’
‘Must I?’
‘Or it will wake up the whole house. Should I help?’
‘No. I’ll feed it for silence but then you’ll have to change it. I can’t get up to do that. You’ll have to manage.’
The baby was heavy from its feed when Delia carried him along the passage to the w.c. Mrs. Hoskins had left the gas turned low for the purpose. The task made her retch. She felt again a surge of repugnance and it was answered by the child she carried. It turned inside her, asserting its own separate existence: separate but not independent, like the live child kicking in its filth at her hands. She did not want it. She did not want any of it. Her mother was right. It was obscene. She put her hands on either side of her distended abdomen, feeling the movement within her and it terrified her.
Delia leaned on the balustrade on her way back to her mother’s bedroom. She experienced a sharp pain pulling at her entrails. She would have put out a hand to steady herself but she was carrying her brother. The second spasm twisted her round. She grabbed at the newel post and for a moment she felt herself suspended in midair her arms thrown wide. Then she could not tell if she were falling or climbing. There was just the spinning flight and the desperate hope that, at the end, she would be empty again.
She fell to oblivion.
Wednesday, 3 September 1919
Dr. Furnival brought his wife with him on his first visit to Mrs. Simmonds, following her return to Dunchurch, but Mrs. Furnival was incapable of drawing out the patient with any topic of conversation.
‘I have heard Weston-super-Mare—that is where you’ve been resting, is it not?—is quite charming. I have never stayed by the sea. I should like to. Would you recommend it?… Well, I suppose … Yes, foolish of me … in your condition. Miss Simmonds, how did you find Weston-super-Mare? Were you able to enjoy its amenities? You must have been quite at a loss for company.’
‘I walked. There is a pier and promenade and an attractive coastal path. Mother was seriously indisposed but I did try to walk each day.’
‘Even still, you look a bit peaky, Miss Simmonds, I must say. Marcus, I think you should attend to Miss Simmonds too. Prescribe a tonic or something.’
‘Thank you, Dr. Furnival. I am very well. Mother is my only concern. She has been so weak. And I had no idea babies slept so little.’
‘Some do but the demands these small people make are considerable.’
‘Do you have children, Mrs. Furnival?’ Delia sought to refocus the conversation as naturally as possible.
‘Sadly, not. I blame India but Marcus tells me that’s foolish. And I dare say he’s right as there was certainly no shortage of little brown babies in the villages and towns. I threw myself into what they call “good works” instead.’ Clare Furnival laughed brightly. ‘I’m looking forward to joining in with village life now we have settled in Dunchurch.’
Frederick Simmonds had been in his study but now joined them in the little drawing room, feeling that he ought to make an effort with this new medical man and his smart wife.
‘Oh, Mr. Simmonds,’ she continued, ‘I have just been talking about charity work. Perhaps there is a good cause, connected to the school which I can direct my energies toward? Are not schools always short of funds?’
‘Kind of you, I’m sure. A swimming pool is one plan I have had. To be built here so the children can learn to swim without having to traipse all the way to the lake at Mount Benjamin.’
‘What a splendid idea, Simmonds,’ said the doctor.
‘Goodness! Do small children and deep water mix?’ asked his wife.
‘A good enough reason, in my opinion, to ensure they all can swim,’ Simmonds replied shortly.
The pause which followed was sufficient, to Delia’s dismay, to allow Mrs. Furnival to revert to the topic of the baby.
‘You’re calling him “Hubert”, I understand. That’s a delightful name. There’s something romantic and medieval about it. But I gather it was your eldest son’s name too. I’m so sorry for your loss—’
‘Be quiet, Clare,’ said Dr. Furnival.
‘We shall call him “Bertie”,’ said Mr. Simmonds to cover the awkwardness. ‘I think “Bertie” more fitting.’
That They Might Lovely Be Page 36