That They Might Lovely Be

by David Matthews

  Modern warfare, as the civil war in Spain had shown, could contort conflict into horrors never before experienced. War would not just be fought in the skies. Its terror would be delivered through the skies. There were ‘planes designed now not for combat but for the carriage and unloading of bombs onto homes, schools, cathedrals. Trenches would not demarcate the theatre of war. There would be no boundaries. The skies and the oceans would be as violated as the hills and plains.

  Anstace knew that there were contingency plans drawn up to evacuate children from the major towns and cities but, when she saw even a backwater like Weston-super-Mare hunkering down behind spirals of barbed wire, she wondered if anywhere would be safe. Would it be worth wresting children from their mothers’ arms and parcelling them out to distant shires? Mustard gas could still drift into English gardens.

  Is this the inexorable progress of modern war? She wondered. To thrust the warriors’ experience onto his wife, mother, sister, child? Shall we all soon walk armed, as a matter of course?

  It was what the Quakers most dreaded: to have to live with the venom of aggression pumping through your body. Even when goaded by the most extreme personal provocation, they sought only to preserve their integrity as pacifists. Some had denied at their tribunals, in the last war, that they would resort to violence even when confronted by the violation of their womenfolk. Others had argued that there was a material difference between frustrating a genuine assault and donning a uniform to slay other men, similarly uniformed, who might be entirely innocent of any crime. Few had ever really imagined that their families would actually be exposed to rapacious attack but what if that were to change in a new war? What if Belgium’s experience in 1914 came to Kent, to Suffolk, to Sussex and Somerset? Would pure pacifism endure? Its most idealistic advocates, Anstace suspected, lacked empathy. They were incapable of really identifying with men and women facing the worst excesses of man’s barbarity. They liked to talk in fine metaphors, likening the pacifists’ implacable refusal to perpetuate violence to the relentless progress of glaciers, shaping the landscape for aeons to come. What they did not acknowledge was that flamboyant eruptions from volcanoes could alter land masses just as profoundly.

  For whom, for what would I kill? Anstace asked herself. She had never really understood Hubert’s stance; he had embraced personal sacrifice instead of championing an ideal. Geoffrey’s motivation, in the end, had been as much defiance against an authority which obliged him to fight as for any moral principle. The dear man had been broken by the juggernaut of militarism and patriotism, ridden by the judiciary. He had tried to retain his integrity but he remained tortured by his experiences.

  Was she here, in this unexceptional seaside town because she questioned that integrity? She had believed all these years that Geoffrey had fathered a child. That he had seduced Delia. Had he raped her? She could not accept that. But there had been some trespass and then something had occurred which rendered him effectively impotent. There had been no deceit. Throughout their marriage, he had always let her know that its sexual consummation was impossible. He remained in love with Hubert; she had understood that. She too still loved Hubert but love, for her, never excluded another. More than that: love, for her, was primarily a catalyst; it sought to liberate in others the capacity to love in all the myriad forms that this exalted emotion took.

  Is it a deficiency in me, she wondered, that means I do not crave to be loved?

  Wondering about love always brought her back to Bertie. She loved him and that love had become a protective impetus. She had rescued him and given him the best environment she could construct. No mother could have striven for her child’s well-being with greater dedication. She had never counted the cost until now. Now, however, she had to face up to the fact that who Bertie was had implications not just for him and his future but also for others. The Cordingley nieces believed he had cheated them of their rightful inheritance. Anstace could not leave Bertie exposed to their charge. He had to be explained. That is what it came down to.

  Conceived in whatever crucible, reared in his infancy under such dark influences, Bertie had, so far, stayed untainted. She had done that with the help of her relations. But the question of his identity could no longer be ignored if only because he needed defending from the malevolent forces now massing on the edge of his peaceful life.

  Anstace walked down Mafeking Avenue a few times before she found Holm View. This was a road which was no longer in its prime. None of the houses was numbered and it was only by chance that she noticed the bleached name-board propped against the front wall, no doubt having fallen from a more prominent position. Paint was peeling from the external woodwork. The small front garden looked tired and poorly tended. So this was where he had been born. She paused in front of the villa uncertain, now she had found it, as to how best to proceed. She walked on and then turned, crossed the road and walked back. She might have remained thwarted by indecision had a drably dressed woman not come from the other direction, crossed the road and climbed the steps to the front door, fumbling for the door key in her handbag. Anstace did not hesitate.

  ‘Please excuse me,’ Anstace called out, as she stepped off the pavement, ‘I had some friends who stayed here some time ago.’

  The woman turned slowly around, the key in her hand ready to unlock her door.

  ‘I don’t take guests, madam, not any longer, I’m afraid. You’ll maybe find rooms on the front but the season’s finished early this year.’

  ‘No it wasn’t a room for myself. I was just wondering if you had had this house for a long time—’

  ‘Since before the Great War (if we’re still to call it that).’

  ‘— there was a baby born. You might remember.’

  ‘Was there?’ She looked at Anstace more keenly. She paused, seemingly weighing up what she should do. She made up her mind. ‘You’ll not want to talk in the road. You’d best come in.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  Anstace followed her into the hall, waited while she unpinned her hat and hung her coat on the stand, removed her worn gloves and dropped them on a tarnished brass tray on the table.

  ‘Come into the back parlour. I don’t use the front room these days.’

  ‘I’m afraid I do not know your name.’

  ‘Have you forgotten it?’ The woman turned, gripping the back of an upright dining chair.

  ‘No.’ Anstace was disconcerted. ‘No, as I said, it was a friend of mine, twenty years ago, who stayed here.’

  ‘That’s as may be. This was a boardinghouse then. There were hundreds who came.’

  There was something warily defiant in the way that she spoke and Anstace wondered whether she had inadvertently drifted into the business which had so angered Miss Spode. It’s not as though I know why I am here, she thought. I don’t know where to begin. Twenty years is a long time ago. How could a landlady be expected to remember?

  Her visible weakening seemed to reassure the other woman.

  ‘You said there was a baby.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. There was. August 1919.’

  ‘There’ve been a number of babies. And I don’t know a lost mother yet who hasn’t come back pretending she’s acting on behalf of a friend.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘Sit yourself down. You might as well. I don’t care who knows it now. It’s not as if I have to keep up appearances any more. I’ve just the two permanent lodgers who’ll stay while the rent’s low. Sit down and tell me why you’ve come if not for yourself then for your friend.’ The voice softened and Anstace caught something of the local accent.

  She was not insensible to the lure to talk. But where to begin? Everything was so closely woven that, even if she found a loose thread, pulling it would be as likely to knot into confusion as unravel into understanding.

  ‘The family was very close to me. The baby—a boy— now a young man, of course,’ she laughed nervously, ‘is as dear to me…’

  Her companion seemed to apprecia
te her awkwardness.

  ‘And he was born here?’

  ‘August 1919.’

  ‘Let me see now.’

  She went over to a heavy sideboard and unlocked a cupboard. Pushed behind bits of tarnished silver and redundant crockery were several volumes. She lifted a marbled ledger out and placed it on the table. Starting toward the end, she turned the pages backward, scanning the chronicle of guests, pausing as one name or other, ghosts from the past, snagged her memory. She worked back to 1919.

  ‘And did the mother use her own name?’

  ‘She was here with her mother. Mrs. and Miss Simmonds.’

  ‘I have never forgotten.’

  Her old fingers found the place and rested there as if the long-dried ink could still convey that time, those faces, the drama.

  ‘Horace Minton’s sister. Her baby born because of The Fall. I’ve never known a mother so against her child and there’s been some I’ve known with far more cause to resent a baby.’

  ‘What do you mean, “The Fall”?’

  ‘A baby born during the Change of Life, to an older mother who thought she was passed childbearing. It can happen. Something shakes up her insides and, if she’s having relations, it can put her in the family way.’

  ‘Mrs. Simmonds had a baby!’ Anstace leaned forward, rapidly trying to construct afresh the family with whom her own life had become so interwoven.

  ‘They both did, dearie, but Mrs. Simmonds’ child was the one that lived. The night he was born, there was an accident. I never knew the truth of it. We found the baby at the top of the stairs and the girl at the bottom, unconscious, bleeding. It brought on her own contractions. Her baby was a boy too…’ Tears had sprung into the old eyes and there was a quaver in her voice. ‘… a perfect boy, but tiny. Born before its time, you see. It breathed but no more than for a few minutes. It could never have lived and it never had a name and never knew a mother’s love. The doctor said it was a miscarriage and there was no need to report it as a stillbirth, especially given the situation.’

  The truth pushed its way to the fore, throwing off the various garbs which had disguised it over the years.

  ‘Oh! I see. I see. Thank you.’ Anstace covered the old woman’s hand with her own so they both rested over the record of that momentous visit.

  She began to understand something of why Delia had been so reluctant to talk about Bertie’s birth. It was so closely associated with her own secret loss. She did not know why Mr. Simmonds or his wife had cared so little for their new baby. Perhaps Hubert’s shadow had fallen across the child and they resented this new child, bursting into their lives.

  He could have brought them so much joy if they had let him, thought Anstace.

  Instead, it was as if indulging this child was somehow heretical and to do so would have been a betrayal of old loyalties. She had heard of bastard children being punished for their mother’s looseness but Bertie was not Delia’s child; he was legitimate. Had she punished him for living when her own child died? Or what other sin, what guilt had they transferred to Bertie that he should become their scapegoat?

  She realised did not want to know. In fact, she did not want to know anything more. Mysteries would remain. What she had learned by visiting Holm View justified the Simmonds’ recent affidavits. More significantly, it confirmed that, though he could have been, Bertie was not Lady Margery Cordingley’s grandson. If she had truly believed him to be so, she had been deluded.

  As Anstace drove the eight miles from Weston-super-Mare back to Combe House she found herself no longer concentrating on the implications of Lady Margery’s will and the battles ahead. She was no longer worrying about how she should act. Now she had this confirmation of Berttie’s parentage, those decisions could wait for another day. Instead, she found her spirits buoyed up by one certain truth.

  ‘Bertie is not my husband’s son. Bertie is not Geoffrey’s child.’

  She held this sole fact aloft and spun it around and around until everything was spangled with the colours refracted through it. It was unaccountably lovely.

  Saturday, 21 May 1939

  The crossing to St. Malo had not been smooth and, although Anstace had not been badly affected, Bertie had been a green wraith of himself by the time they docked. He had chosen to slump in the back of the car she hired and nurse his queasiness as she drove them across the Breton peninsula. Anstace had been glad to be left with her own thoughts.

  She was relieved that she had finally resolved to let the solicitors wrangle over what was to be done; they could drain the estate of as much of its substance as they chose, as far as she was now concerned. It had taken her a considerable amount of time to untangle her own scruples from her obligations, as one of the two Trustees with responsibility for Bertie’s inheritance. Conversations with Kenneth and Peggy Southall had been a help. They saw things with the clarity which those who work with young children often have.

  ‘Why make things complicated, Anstace?’ Kenneth had said. ‘If you are unhappy about this inheritance because you have reached the conclusion that Lady Margery was wrong to name Bertie as her grandson, then step out of it. You can surrender your Trusteeship and you can advise Bertie appropriately.’

  ‘I’ve never been his legal guardian. His father’s that.’

  ‘No one could be more thoroughly in loco parentis than you!’ Peggy had asserted. ‘Morally, Mr. Simmonds abdicated responsibility for Bertie years ago. It’s not as if you’re suddenly thrusting the boy back into the bosom of his loving family!’

  ‘We’d have to bring out an injunction for cruelty if you did, wouldn’t we, Peg?’

  Anstace had been touched by their loyalty. They were right.

  ‘It’s lucky that we think we can raise an income through the gardening project. Dorothy Lean and the aunts in Canterbury have been ever so supportive. They’ve both let me rework their gardens as advertisements. The extra landscaping provides scope for Bertie’s labours.’

  ‘He’s become strapping, you know,’ said Peggy. ‘It’s nice to see a strong man without a hint of the brute about him.’

  ‘You’re married to one!’ Kenneth chipped in, knowing his cue.

  ‘I’m talking about physical strength, my dear, not the winsome, moral sort that you embody.’

  ‘Ah. Understood.’

  ‘Bertie will relinquish the inheritance and, if not comfortably comfortable, we would easily make ends meet. I shall seek to lease South Lodge for a reasonable sum and make sure that that sits out of any sale of the estate which might follow.’

  ‘Are you Dorothy Lean’s heir?’

  ‘Goodness, Peggy,’ remonstrated her husband, ‘sometimes you are indecently direct.’

  ‘Directness can never be indecent.’

  ‘It must be something else then but it’s still indecent.’

  ‘I don’t know, to be honest,’ replied Anstace. ‘I expect she’ll leave me something but that may be years away. She owes me nothing. She’s been so kind to me all these years.’

  ‘I remember when you sometimes came to stay in Birmingham with my parents.’

  ‘Oh, Kenneth, that seems a world away. I can’t have been more than ten or eleven because, once I started going to school in Canterbury, I really only alternated between my mother’s sisters.’

  ‘You always had that hexagonal napkin ring. Do you remember?’

  ‘I still do. It’s upstairs at this very moment. I never travel without it. When I was very small, I always thought that, if I had a special place laid at the table, I’d found a home.’

  ‘That’s terribly sad!’ Peggy stretched out her hands to Anstace. ‘What a poor little waif you must have been.’

  ‘I am not superstitious in any regard but my napkin ring is the closest I shall ever get to having a talisman. It was my mother’s and has her initials inscribed on one face. I can remember her giving it to me at the end of her life. At least, I can remember a memory.’

  Loud shouts, coming from outside, were a reminder
that Bertie was indulging in some horseplay with the schoolboys. Kenneth thought it likely that someone had fallen in the nettle bed.

  ‘They swing from the rope dangling from the ash tree and, if they won’t let you land, in the end someone will fall off. All clean fun.’

  ‘Boys,’ said Peggy as if to qualify the last statement.

  ‘I want to take Bertie on holiday. I thought to France. He’s never been abroad and the way things are looking, I don’t know when there’ll be another chance. After that, we shall settle down to business.’

  ‘It’ll complete his education. Like the Grand Tour.’

  ‘Hardly. But a sort of rite of passage.’

  ‘An almost coming-of-age. After all, he’ll be twenty-one next year.’

  And so plans had been made despite some grim warnings from friends and those who claimed ‘to be in the know’ about the precarious international situation.

  It’s only France, Anstace had reasoned. Not even the Germans could get across Europe and close the channel ports that quickly. She made a promise to herself that she’d find a newspaper at least every day or two.

  She did not know why she had brought Bertie to Brittany. It was either to exorcise or resurrect a ghost. Perhaps it was both. Either way, once she had made the decision, it had seemed inevitable that she should rent again the cottage she and Hubert had stayed in, twenty-one years before. It had been such a glorious spot, they would not be able to find anything better.

  It had been dark when they arrived at the cottage and Anstace had been exhausted. She was relieved that, despite spending the journey in a state of somnolence, all Bertie wanted to do was flop into bed. He carried their cases in from the car, found a bedroom and bade her good night.

  She had lit the stove and was brewing coffee for breakfast when Bertie burst into the kitchen in the morning. He had already been for a walk, taking the path from the farmhouse to the clifftop. A fresh, southwesterly wind was blowing and he was glowing and tousled, eager for Anstace to come out and join him on the clifftops.