‘We’ll make the best compost in England. Everywhere will be a garden.’
‘That would be lovely, wouldn’t it!’
‘And all the dead things would be part of it.’
Anstace did not know how their project would progress. She was not sure that Bertie would necessarily maintain interest. However, he clearly relished having a purpose which enabled him to be physically active and she began to wonder if his youthful strength and her plantsmanship might not work together in a more substantial way.
She could not expect her aunt to sacrifice her garden, which had been prinked and preened for decades, into a laboratory for Bertie’s large-scale activities. He needed more space. She wondered whether the time had come to claim his inheritance of Mount Benjamin, for there they would have scope to explore the commercial possibilities which she was starting to envisage.
For a number of years now the two firms of solicitors which Lady Margery had employed in the final months of her life, Kingsnorth & Kingsnorth and Duguid & Waterstone, had perpetuated a legal stalemate. This had been able to fester, without doing much harm, while the Trust only drew income from the Mount Benjamin estate and did not touch any of the capital. Now, however, Mrs. Childs had written to tell Anstace that the American to whom Mount Benjamin had been let for the past few years had definitely decided to return to The States; he would not seek to extend the lease. ‘And I’m not sorry, Mrs. Cordingley,’ she had written, ‘A house like this needs someone resident permanently or else a full staff to see to its upkeep. The place is getting run down and in need of repair. If you’ll forgive me stating my mind, it needs to be sold. Even if Master Bertie were to inherit, with everything sorted out, once and for all, it’s too big for one young man and he’s not been brought up to it, after all. He’s got no ties to the place. I only say this because it is getting me down seeing the House start to crumble around me. I’ve worked here for Mr. Henry and Lady Margery for over thirty years, as you know. Mount Benjamin has been my life and I can’t bear to see it all go for nothing. Times are changing. We all know that. There are big houses in every county which just can’t be kept up as once they were. Not in the old families at any rate.’
There was more in the same vein. Anstace had the greatest respect for Mrs. Childs and she could see the sense of her case. Of course Mount Benjamin, like all houses, needed to be lived in. Activity, like a life blood, needed to flow through its rooms, opening and closing doors and windows, changing the air; fires needed to be lit to keep chimneys clear and the damp at bay; a room—inhabited only by memories, resounding only to the ghostly footfall of residents long-departed, where cornices had become furred with cobwebs and where dust was settling on furniture even beneath the Holland covers, where fine wood was falling prey to worm—such a room becomes as useless to the living as a memorial crypt.
Without a tenant, there would be no income except for the very small sums paid by the tenant farmers. Even if another tenant for the house were to be found, it would not be long before essential repairs absorbed any profit which the tenancy generated. The limbo which had existed since Lady Margery Cordingley’s death could no longer continue.
Anstace knew the solicitors’ arguments; they were quite simple. Edward Tallis of Duguid & Waterstone maintained that, whether or not Lady Margery was convinced that Hubert Frederick Simmonds was her grandson was immaterial, she had clearly intended him to be her heir. That she was entitled to will Mount Benjamin to whomsoever she chose was incontestable: her late husband had clearly stated that, should she survive her only son, dying without legitimate issue, the estate was absolutely hers to do with as she chose. With probate proved in line with Duguid & Waterstone’s interpretation, that ought to have been the end of the matter.
However, Robert Kingsnorth lurked in the wings like a malevolent sprite. He had never abandoned his view that the phrase ‘whom I consider my grandson’, inserted in Lady Margery’s final will to describe Bertie, indicated that he could only inherit if he was indeed her grandson. He added weight to his case by emphasizing the point that Lady Margery had only changed her will after a grave illness when there was reason to believe that she was not in complete control of her mind and prone to irrationality. Her earlier will, far more in line with her late husband’s wishes, should stand and his nieces be allowed to inherit Mount Benjamin.
Anstace smiled grimly to herself as, not for the first time, she considered the legal men’s ability to wring an income out of dispute. Edward Tallis, of course, had been appointed—as she had—as Trustee of the estate until Bertie came of age. His firm derived a comfortable fee from every transaction this trusteeship necessitated. Mr. Kingsnorth was playing a longer game. He was watching the way the estate was managed with a predator’s interest while, no doubt, preparing an attack at the opportune moment. He would not want to squander legal fees or risk incurring costs until the critical moment. He had kept the nieces’ claim warm, over the years, with a series of vaguely aggressive letters which Tallis had waived airily away while pocketing a fee for the cost of replying.
To Anstace, the whole thing smacked of Jarndyce & Jarndyce except that, so far, a truce seemed to be in place with both solicitors agreeing (at least on paper) that an expensive wrangle before the courts was in no one’s interest. Nevertheless, Anstace could readily imagine a bitter and possibly protracted dispute erupting as Bertie approached his majority or if the Trust started drawing down significant funds and encroached upon the capital.
Anstace felt keenly her responsibility. If it had not been for her, Lady Margery might never have realised that Bertie was Geoffrey and Delia’s child. She remembered vividly her promise to Delia, made on the edge of Brean Down eighteen years before, to keep her own counsel about her friend’s pregnancy. She had never spoken of it, even when speculation about Bertie’s parentage had drifted to the surface of village gossip. She had never even alluded to it during her many visits to Muriel Simmonds or when talking to Delia about Bertie, during his childhood. She shuddered as she recollected Geoffrey’s agony when, on his deathbed, she told him who Bertie was. She should not have done so. It had distressed him horribly. But she believed it to be the truth. How could it be otherwise? She knew from the bitter insinuations which Lady Margery had hurled at her son that there had been some sexual scandal with which she had had to contend when he had been released from prison. Delia’s behaviour alone, following her visit to Geoffrey in Ipswich, had been enough for Dorothy Lean to suspect that she had been seduced.
Did the truth matter? Lady Margery, whatever her motivation, had enabled Bertie to escape the prison of living in the schoolhouse. Delia had resented him and her father had done his best to ignore him. Mrs. Simmonds had never recovered from her collapse following Hubert’s death. Bertie was an elective mute surely because he had learned that to talk, to assume any identity in that house, was to incur someone’s wrath. If she could have done anything differently, Anstace wished she and Geoffrey had had the conviction to adopt Bertie as an infant and save him from those years of neglect. She felt riddled with guilt at the way she had complied with the cruelty, allowing her conscience to be assuaged with meagre visits.
The rightness of Bertie inheriting his grandmother’s wealth, whatever the route by which he acquired it, might have satisfied Anstace if she had not received a letter from Edward Tallis informing her of the Kingsnorths’ latest manoeuvre.
‘Kingsnorth & Kingsnorth have obtained sworn affidavits from Frederick Simmonds and Delia Simmonds to the following effect. He swears that he is, to the best of his knowledge, the natural father of Hubert Frederick Simmonds, known as Bertie; and she swears that she is not his mother. I do not know what additional pressure Kingsnorth & Kingsnorth have exerted on Mr. and Miss Simmonds to bring about these affidavits, as they have both strenuously refused, in the past, to involve themselves in anything which is of no concern to them. They have repeatedly asserted that they were glad to surrender any involvement since the establishment of a Trust and the
appointment of Trustees, to care for the abovementioned Hubert Frederick Simmonds, was so obviously to his advantage…’
If she thought that stamping her foot in Tallis’ panelled office and screaming would have made any difference, Anstace would have done so. It would be pointless, however. The solicitor, she was convinced, would be twisting his podgy little fingers together in delight at this first significant volley fired by the enemy. ‘Let battle commence!’ he would cry while she, like every civilian caught up in the flak, could only vent impotent fury.
Sworn affidavits were serious matters. She could imagine Delia and her father finally agreeing to make them only if they had been persuaded that this would be the end of any persistent pestering by Robert Kingsnorth. But would they perjure themselves? Perhaps so; after all, she had always believed Bertie’s birth certificate had deceptively named his parents as Muriel and Frederick Simmonds. There was a difference, however, in a deception hatched to protect a young woman’s reputation and a blatant lie under oath. What was going on? What new, twisted developments were being hatched?
Anstace could not put these questions to one side. They even intruded into her dreams. She found herself walking across rotten boards, stretched between groaning rafters in a dilapidated mansion. The whole edifice was precarious and on the point of collapse. She should never have ventured inside it, yet alone climbed up into the roof-space. She imagined reaching out to pull Bertie, or sometimes it was Geoffrey, up to join her but he refused to take her hand or he began to jump up and down to make the building tremble and quake or she began to wobble, with increasing violence, until she was at that critical point when it was inevitable she would plummet down through the floors to the ground below.
It was thinking about Bertie’s birth certificate which gave her the idea. She decided she would drive down to Somerset as soon as possible. Kenneth and Peggy would put her up for one night at least, even in term-time. She might even take Bertie with her. But she would go alone to Weston-super-Mare and see what she could unearth.
Years ago, when the Trust had been first set up, she had prompted Edward Tallis to consult Dr. Furnival about Bertie’s medical condition. It had seemed the responsible thing: to check that there was nothing concerning his birth which might explain the delayed development of his speech. Although Furnival had not attended the birth, he did pass on the name of a Dr. Spode who, he said, had made it clear that nothing untoward had occurred.
Surely there was a real chance that Dr. Spode, though possibly now retired, might still be alive and residing in Weston. If not, a search for him might open up other avenues of enquiry. Anstace felt that the spectres which inhabited her dreams might be laid to rest if she knew more. Seeking answers, even to questions which she could not yet frame, was infinitely preferable to surrendering to ignorance.
Thursday, 4 May 1939
Loops of barbed-wire stretched across the neck of land that was Brean Down, barring the way for any ramblers. The old Napoleonic fort had been appropriated by the Ministry ‘for manoeuvres’. Surely, Anstace thought, it can’t really be happening all over again.
But Europe was crumbling, not only in the face of Germany’s energetic determination to obliterate the humiliation of Versailles but also under the aegis of despots in Spain and Italy. Even in England, tyranny seemed to have become fashionable in some quarters. What was it that drove some men to strut like demigods and others to swoon before them admiringly? There was a prevelant cult of the individual which offended Anstace’s Quaker instincts; it struck her as running contrary to a notion of progress which saw the cultivation of conscience and personal integrity as the primary goal.
If war came again, the strategists clearly thought that it could be far closer to home than the last one. Why else would there be these coastline defences? New observation posts and gun-emplacements, constructed from reinforced concrete, had usurped the obsolete nineteenth-century guardrooms of mellowed brick. The soft track she and Delia had once walked in the past was now a metalled road.
Anstace turned away before she made the young soldier on sentry-duty suspicious and drove on to Weston-super-Mare. She was glad, however, to have made that detour to the Down. It knitted the past into the present and enabled her to peer under the layers of incident which the last twenty years had laid down.
Weston-super-Mare had never achieved the status of a Leamington or Buxton-by-the-Sea. Building had radiated from the heart of the town, along the spine roads, and the gaps between had been filled with housing suited to residents of low or middle incomes. This seemed to set a tone and Weston-super-Mare’s visitors preferred to pick winkles from a cone of paper on the sea-wall than take tea beneath the palms in an elegant orangery before dwindling into a cultured retirement. The civic mood oscillated between raucous summer jollity and drab, out-of-season gloom.
Better a seasonal vitality, thought Anstace, than none at all. Why shouldn’t people come here, determined to have a good time, to laugh, to let their hair down? For the rest of the year … perhaps for the rest of their life there will be little opportunity to do so.
She recognised the privilege which had tucked around her own life but she knew too that she had acquired a temperament—had being orphaned done it?—which enabled her to absorb the challenges which had beset her. Loss had never shrivelled into debilitating grief. Solitude had never hardened into loneliness. Passion had never exploded.
Anstace stopped at a post office in the centre of the town to consult the local telephone directory. Her heart sank when she found just one ‘Spode’, a Miss A.E. in Avocet Close. Even if there were a connection here with Dr. Spode, the likelihood of it being strong enough to carry her investigation seemed remote. Nevertheless, she sought directions from the woman behind the counter, and determined not to be despondent.
She drove to the outskirts of the town. Avocet Close was one of several cul-de-sacs sporting modern bungalows. Anstace hoped that by calling around lunchtime she was more likely to find Miss Spode at home. She was correct.
The door was opened by an elderly, though sprightly woman whose age and old-fashioned dress were curiously at odds with the crisp permanent wave to her hair.
‘Miss Spode? I do apologise for disturbing you but I am looking for a Dr. Spode, who used to practise in Weston-super-Mare and I just wondered if you were any relation or perhaps could tell me where I might find him.’
Anstace smiled brightly, willing a positive response, but the other woman’s face hardened and she made to close the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ Anstace said. ‘Is there something wrong? I really didn’t mean—’
‘If you’re another reporter, I’ve nothing more to say. I knew nothing at the time and I know nothing now.’
‘I’m certainly not a reporter. My name is Anstace Cordingley. I’ve travelled up from Kent hoping to meet Dr. Spode.’
‘More fool you. You’d have done best to read the papers and then you’d know, like everyone else, that he’s fled. Left the country. South America they tell me though it might as well be Timbuctoo as far as I am concerned. Wherever it is, it makes no difference: he’s out of reach.’
‘I had no idea.’
Anstace was quite at sea. There were complications here which she could not fully fathom. She was about to make one more attempt to extract explanation from Miss Spode when she suddenly stepped out of the doorway and hissed at Anstace, jabbing her finger toward her.
‘You’ll be one of them, I expect. One of those women. How dare you come knocking on my door. I have never been anything but respectable. Never. It’s a shameful disgrace. Shameful. I never had anything to do with him. Your sort, for all you’re lah-di-dah, should be knocking on Maud Hoskins’ door not mine. Get off with you! Get off!’
Had she stayed, Anstace believed she would have been shooed down the path like a stray dog. Only once before had she ever experienced anything similar and it was this association which strengthened her resolve. It was not Geoffrey now but Bertie she was defending. S
he had not wavered then and she would not waver now.
Dr. Spode was clearly lost to her although there may well be information to be gleaned from the local press, if she cared to probe further. Before she took that step, however, Anstace decided to return to the post office and look for a Maud Hoskins in the telephone directory.
There was a Mrs. M. Hoskins listed but finding the name did not affect Anstace as much as the address attached to it: Holm View, Mafeking Avenue. It was the same address as that appearing on Bertie’s birth certificate, the place where Muriel Simmonds had been living at the time. Anstace felt as though she had fallen into an accelerating spiral, spinning into a vortex. It was impossible for her to do anything but seek out Maud Hoskins. And it would be impossible for her to avoid the consequences of a meeting, whatever they were.
She decided to leave her car on the seafront and find her way on foot. As she walked back into Weston, it became clear that Holm View would certainly not have sight of either of the islands in the Bristol Channel, unless it were a glimpse from a garret window. Was this trivial deception significant? What other delusions might she encounter?
She passed two young women, both smartly though not expensively dressed. They were, Anstace imagined, representative of the growing female workforce, no doubt taking a break from their offices for lunch. Their heads bobbed and nodded to their conversation, the epitome of easy friendship.
Are they oblivious to what could be in store for them? Anstace wondered. In another war, it may not just be men who are conscripted. These girls could be stepping up to the front line. They could be feeding magazines to the guns, shouldering rifles and finding their target, fixing bayonets and plunging them into a writhing enemy. There have been stories from Spain of women as involved in the armed struggle as men. If it could happen there, it could happen anywhere. It is foolish to believe that the ferocity of combat, long seen as the prerogative of the male, is essentially alien to women. Circumstances will shape each sex as necessary.
That They Might Lovely Be Page 39