‘It’s a glory! Do hurry, Anstace.’
She felt old when he was like this. She was nursing a dull headache which had spread up from her shoulders and she felt sapped of all vigour. She imagined herself as something hard and brown and dry, like a bulb at the end of spring shorn of its leaves and denied the chance to regenerate for the following season. His energy was thrown down like a gauntlet at her feet but all she felt like doing was turning away, withdrawing into herself or fiddling around with a pan and broom, sweeping dust into neat piles.
There’s nothing more that I can do. It’s not just that I lack energy. I cannot find the courage to dance, run or race. He would fly with me if I let him but, if I looked down, I’d be terrified and fall.
Bertie could not even sit at the table. He cupped his bowl of coffee in his hands and stood, gazing through the lumpy glass in the windowpanes to where a honeysuckle ducked and bobbed along the top of the stone wall. Even the plants seemed excited. Anstace played with her bread, teasing it apart, dunking morsels in her coffee. She could not think of anything to say in response to his rapture except to correct his idiom.
‘Look at the wind in the leaves. And you can smell the sea on the breeze. It’s glory.’
‘It’s glorious.’
‘Yes. Yes.’
I must let him go, she thought. It has taken this trip to Brittany to make me realise that I must let him go.
‘Come now. Come now, Anstace.’
‘I must write some letters.’
‘Letters! Who is there to write to?’
‘I should write to Kenneth Southall at the very least.’
‘Write to him when you’ve something to say.’ He rushed out of the parlour, returning with her scarf and jacket. ‘Come now, Anstace. Now.’
She was ready to weep.
‘Oh Bertie, why are you never still?’
‘I’m still when it is time to be still. You have seen me at Meeting. I’m as still as marble. But this is a heavenly morning. The whole world is a-blow and we must blow with it. It’s wrong to stay indoors.’
From the farmhouse, the path to the cliffs runs between tall hedgerows thick with hawthorn, bent to the prevailing wind. On either side stretches a heath of low-growing gorse and heather: a cadmium yellow patched with crimson and mauves. There is nothing to suggest that, in less than a mile, the land drops into the Atlantic. Skylarks trill high above, barely visible specks against the sharp blue. And then, with a turn in the lane, it is just sea and sky and the sound of waves breaking on the rocks. It is an eternal song as old as the continents.
They walk along the clifftop, following the path worn into the turf which the langoustiers take as they go from cove to cove to check on their pots. It is impossible not to be drawn to the edge, to stop and peer down at the movement of the water. Besides the turbulence at the foot of the cliff, there are great patches of calm, black water, marbled with veins of foam held by the crosscurrent in a sort of stasis. In other parts, the foam gathers like the froth on a yeasty dough: a heavy, creamy, curdling bed. And here, where a wave breaks and retreats over deep water, the spume descends into the depths of the green sea in a vortex.
The waves approach the coast, rolling into a mass, holding their colour and form (smooth like molten soda glass) as they strain to achieve the perpendicular and, for one held moment, are poised in the ascendant before falling, toppling forward, disintegrating. And again and again. This is the drift of the sea: to seek a shoreline so that waves might take shape, a wonderful aerial shape, and break into a consummate boiling whiteness before re-forming, tirelessly in perpetuam.
It is like a prayer. Anstace was fascinated.
Bertie was far ahead of her now but she followed him onto the crest of a narrow headland from where she could see the broad sands laid out between where they stood and a second promontory, projecting half a mile or so into the Atlantic. A path, cut into the side of the cliff, would allow them to make a safe descent to sea level. He took this route and she followed. In the lea of the point, the sea was much calmer, rocking against the rocks like a liquid in a basin, with none of the excitement on the other side. Buoys bobbed on the surface, marking the lobster pots.
Bertie waited for Anstace to catch up and helped her scramble down to the flat. The sands were deserted. He ran out to the water’s edge where the tamed waves trickled in, frilled, before sinking into the glistening sands. Each wave seemed to advance less boldly, drawing Bertie gently away from the shore toward the sea.
‘Don’t get your feet wet!’ called Anstace, but she was glad the breeze threw her words to the gulls and she did not call again. This was no time, this was no place for prosaic injunctions. She stood still, watching the glistening on the wet sands, marveling at the way the shimmering seemed to chime with the gust of wind coming off the sea. She waited.
‘This is like standing on the edge of the world,’ he said when he returned to her. ‘Over there on the horizon, it’s like the edge of the world and I think that, if I was on a piece of wood or in a bottle, I’d drift away to the edge of the world because every wave is pulling me into the sea.’
‘It’s the tide, Bertie. The tide must be going out.’
‘Can you feel it pulling?’
She made herself chuckle.
‘I can see where it’s left the sand wet. You can see how far it came in earlier today. And look,’ she pointed behind her, ‘can you see how far the last storm reached? It’s left the seaweed right up there on that bank. You can always tell where the highest tide came to.’
‘Yes.’
I sound like a parent, she thought. Why have I picked up this voice? He’s not really listening to me and why should he? He does not want to turn his back and look at the debris on the sands when, in the other direction, there is a horizon to draw the eye and play the imagination. She frowned, resentful of her mood. But he merely smiled and, turning, walked back to the sea-edge.
She stayed, looking west, beyond the old lighthouse, but there was nothing further out to sea, nothing at all. After a while, she whooped to attract his attention, then waved to him before trudging across the sand to the head of the bay where she could pick up the road back to the hamlet.
Whitsunday, 28 May 1939
In the morning, the parlour was a cheerful place to sit and write letters, with the light piercing the salt-grimed windowpanes. Dust motes floated in the light as if rubbed from the petals of the yellow roses, which had been placed in an old bowl on the table. As the sun moved around in the course of the day, however, a gloom settled on the room. The view of the garden from the window was now all in shadow. Instead of the perfume from the flowers, Anstace could only smell the petals’ mustiness, a tired potpourri. The heavy furniture had grown dull, no longer reflecting the morning light. Dust would be gathering like a fungus on the top of the dresser. Cobwebs would stretch across the beams.
Anstace sat on one of the stiff dining chairs. Her forearms rested on the table before her like the arms of the Sphinx, rigid, square. She stared at the knots on the oak board, her head bowed. She was conscious of the muted sounds of Madame Guezennec preparing their evening meal in the kitchen; a little further away were the farm noises: the weary clucking of a disconsolate hen, the hollow ring of metal on metal, someone calling but never hearing a reply. Bertie would be out there somewhere, radiating bonhomie with little more than a syllable of French to help him. In her listlessness during the past week, he had taken to adventuring on his own.
She craved oblivion. A simple, irreversible and complete cessation of all feeling would amount to ecstasy. If she could will herself to step out of this realm and fall to that still point, she would do it. But she could not even find the energy to lift her arms from the table.
I shall go mad, she thought, if I am not mad already. I must be mad to have brought Bertie here … And then she spoke aloud, ‘… not to lay Hubert’s ghost but to raise it.’
Articulating this truth jolted her with an involuntary, physical spasm. She raised her arms
and buried her face in her hands. Bertie would return from rambling around the lanes, perspiring, loose-limbed, relaxed in his youth and she would look up to greet him. What would he see but the stretched visage of a mummified woman with a lewd eye? For that was it. She looked at Bertie and saw Hubert. And when she saw Hubert, she remembered everything.
It was not to be tolerated. She could think of only one thing to do. She found Madame Guezennec to explain that she had a sick headache, desolée she would not want any supper, and, if he could be made to understand, le jeun monsieur must not disturb her. Then she hauled herself up the stairs to her room.
The grate was filled with a paper fan. No fires had been laid since spring had taken hold. It did not matter; what she intended would only take one brief, flaring moment. She had brought all Hubert’s letters with her. It had been an insame thing to do unless, somewhere in her subconscious, she had known that this is what had to happen. Her fingers seemed half-paralysed; they lacked any strength. But those letters which she could not tear, she crumpled into a ball.
But there were no matches. There was nothing to reduce the past to ashes. Her love lay there in the grate moving slightly as the scrunched paper uncurled: a slow exhalation.
Anstace could do no more. She dragged herself onto the high bed, pulling the bolster from beneath the pillows and lying with it in her arms for comfort. She was cold but had not the energy to do anything other than twitch the counterpane up and pull it around her. She lay on her back, staring wide-eyed at the pattern on the ceiling where the lathes beneath the thin plaster were visible, where the skeleton of the house showed through.
Her only solace was to know that until this day she had not understood why she had dragged the boy from his mute innocence, why she had placed him before Lady Margery, why she had relocated him in Winscot with her own people, why she had led him into the gardens. Now she knew it was to this end: that he should take her hand and run with her across the Baie des Trepasses, as Hubert had; that he, in Hubert’s stead, should embrace her, take her, transport her that she might have life abundantly; that love would be given to her.
It was terrible.
It overwhelmed her.
When she woke, it was from a dead sleep. At first, she was only aware of her sticky eyelids, her dry, closed throat. There was an unfamiliar susurration of blood in her ears. Nothing, no sounds nor smells from the living world penetrated her dawning consciousness. Her fingers moved over the ridges in the woof of the shroud she had wrapped around herself. She felt the bulk of the inanimate bolster pressing against her side and the thought screamed into her head that she had woken in the vault at Dunchurch against her husband’s corpse.
‘Geoffrey!’ she mouthed, but the name only reverberated in her head; she could generate no sound. How was it then that this other voice answered her?
‘It’s me. Bertie. I’ve been waiting for you to wake. You’ve been dreaming.’
She struggled to turn so that she could see him. Her body ached terribly with the pain that follows numbness. It was an effort just to turn her head; any finer movement — to curl her tongue around speech—was impossible. She felt as if her body had lain unused for a millennium.
‘You have been dreaming but now you’re awake.’
He spoke very quietly: a voice from soft shadows. She could see him now, leaning over the bolster between them.
‘You have been dreaming but now you are awake.’
She tried to articulate a response but only succeeded in emitting a dry, rasping sigh. How could she confess when no words came?
‘Do not say anything, Anstace. There is absolutely no need. I can tell. You have woken up and everything before was dreaming. This is where you begin. This is the point … this is the point.’
Where were his words coming from? Surely, she had not given him this eloquence. How could she have crossed from that other side, haunted by what she knew of herself, to here where, unaccountably, her most dominant emotion, growing with every breath she drew, was a hope inspired by him.
‘You have been talking,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to be frightened. You said you were frightened of me because I am a man.’
‘Did I?’ she croaked. ‘Did I? Oh, Bertie … Bertie, you don’t understand.’
‘I do. I understand. I can tell. I am a man. I can love you too. You have loved me. I can love you. It will make it better. We can love each other. Don’t shake your head. Why shouldn’t we? Our lives are each other’s.’
She felt the springs of the bed adjust and the mattress give as he shifted his weight. It stirred her. This was an awakening. There was no more dreaming.
Quite simply, he had spoken the truth. The reciprocity of feeling was fact. He had found the words, his words. Who was she to wish them unspoken?
Nothing would ever be the same. It was an end but also a beginning: an alpha and omega. She had but one course open to her. She must acknowledge that she loved him with a fresh devotion as dynamic as any ardour springing from his pristine virility.
This love, she understood, had nothing of surrender in it. She had not ‘fallen’ into love. She was on the ascendant, rising like a phoenix from her own chaos, cauterised and pure. For nearly twenty years she had walked through her days with her face averted from the future. When Hubert’s head had opened with such cruel irony on Armistice Day, purpose and meaning and pattern had stopped because hope had died. All that had been left for her was an approximation of what would never be. First there had been Geoffrey to redeem and then there had been Bertie to rescue. She had deluded herself into thinking kindness and compassion and integrity were love. All she had done was apply a balm to the past so that, at least, scar-tissue might heal the present.
‘Now you are awake,’ he said.
She sat up and turned to him, cupping his face between her hands.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Awake.’
‘Then come with me.’
He wanted to show her where he had been that afternoon. He led her down the stairs, creaking in the gloom and out of the farmhouse. Night wrapped them. Only the gentlest of breezes stirred the tops of the trees but it was enough to make Anstace, fresh from her fevered sleep, shiver. Bertie made her run to warm herself. He half-skipped, half-bounded, running backward holding out his hands to her, over-brimming with rapture. He took her across the meadows through flowers, dove-grey daisies and slate-grey scabious, muted by the moonlight. Ahead of them, beyond the next field, she could make out the bulk of the village, dominated by the delicate tracery of the church spire and the little, squat dome of its adjoining stair-turret. The breeze took her anxieties, lifted them and scattered them across the Atlantic.
As they passed through the dormant streets, Bertie slowed down. She sensed a sobering in his manner. He led her by the hand into the cobbled square where there was a huge calvarie: a dozen or so life-size statues clustered around Christ on the cross, flanked by two diminutive thieves. The whole arrangement stood on a great, stone dais, some five feet high, decorated on all sides by Biblical characters in carved relief.
Anstace had only seen these Breton calvaries from a distance. She was quite unprepared for the iconic power of this sacred edifice. It was thrown into silhouette by the white moon. Wisps of cloud drifted behind the beams of the cross. Through some trick of the dappled light, the impassive features of the saints seemed to soften. There was a stirring. The Druids would have set a monolith on this site centuries before the monks from Rome marked that same stone with a cross, and a thousand years before the Breton stonemasons challenged their fraternity to create these impressive testaments to their faith. It was impossible to stand there and not feel the ghostly presence of countless pilgrims, passing that way, fluttering about the dais like moths to a lamp.
Bertie led her to one side of the calvary to a flight of narrow steps.
‘We shouldn’t,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I want to stand with you on holy ground. And then we shall make our promises. Come, Ans
tace.’
He was already on the dais, standing among the apostles. They were all turned to the figure on the cross but he was turned to her, holding out his hand for hers, to bring her up to join him. She felt as if she were stepping onto the summit of a mountain. The hamlet, their farmhouse and Brittany, Dunchurch, the schoolhouse, the South Lodge, Mount Benjamin and Kent, Europe in its turmoil, were all beneath her, all insignificant compared to this boy-man before her whose face, shining in the moonlight, was wet with tears, whose lips were trembling with an elusive smile, whose warm, broad hands were taking hers, who now spoke softly to her with the saints as witness.
‘I, Hubert Frederick Simmonds give you, Anstace Cordingley, love forever as no one ever has, with friendship and glory and adoration because you are my heart’s dancing. And I promise faithfulness and kindness and truthfulness forever and ever. Amen.’
Anstace could not speak at first. She gazed at him, marvelling. That such a thing should come to pass. That he had the confidence, the strength. That he loved her. That she could love him.
‘I, Anstace give you … Bertie … Hubert … everything because I love you with all my heart. The world is nothing compared to you. I live my life for you. You are my “forever and ever”. Amen. Allelujah. Allelujah.’
‘Allelujah.’
‘My darling.’
At the foot of the Cross, the configuration shifted. The clouds danced across the heavens, rippling the moonlight as it illuminated the figures upon the calvarie. Anstace’s silhouette was merged with that of the Virgin, gazing up at her Saviour. Bertie too was no longer a distinct entity. In the shifting light, he lost his substance; his moving among the figures animated them. The clouds parted and the moonlight quickened the face of the Man who lifted the weight of all human suffering. The upturned faces of those standing there were transfigured. Every embodiment of human love was distilled into an expression of ineffable adoration.
Talk
‘The commanding officer is a most charming man, Dr. Furnival tells me. I hope that we might meet him socially on occasion.’
That They Might Lovely Be Page 41