Awakening (37 page)

‘No need. I can manage. Do you really want to help me?'

‘I do. Of course I do. Anything.'

‘The spirits. Annie, turn your mind away, don't dabble – if not for your sake, then for mine. The practice is anathema, it will damage our souls. I shall say the same to Mrs Kyffin. You agree, don't you, Will? You see the danger?'

His nods have a particle of ‘no' in them; his shakes of the head leave latitude for ‘yes'.

Anna replies, ‘I do see the danger. It might not be the same danger you see, dear heart – I've been thinking –'

‘Don't
think
,
' Beatrice comes back. ‘You think too much. Curiosity is so dangerous. Life is so short. At any moment one of us might be taken and then it would be too late.'

‘For what, dearest? I can't promise not to think. You look so strange.'

Yes, I would look strange. But why are you surprised? I am the walking dead. You live in the world of fancy still, as if your wishes had some chance of altering your destiny. I'm a soul God in His infinite wisdom has singled out to flay alive. And yet I feel no pain. And perhaps that comes of faith. The power to continue without a skin.

‘Too much thinking,' Beatrice says. ‘Altogether too much. You can't think against your Creator, Annie. He made the moon and stars. He made you. There's no point in thinking.'

She stops dead. Luke comes stealing into her mind. She recalls the pulsing of his skull, where the fontanelles hadn't fully closed – and Will said one afternoon while Luke was taking a nap, ‘What is that called? – the open part of the skull? – we see it pulse – he's still close to Jesus, not sealed off.' How grateful she has been for her brother-in-law's consolation, taking his words as gold, hoarding them in her memory. Beatrice's heart pauses between one beat and the next.

‘Doesn't she look strange, Will? Should she sit down?'

The next throb comes after all. Beatrice's heart will persist a while yet. For a moment it was as if the door to the other world opened a smidgeon. To let her out. Oh, may it be soon. The knife handles are made of discoloured bone. They offer themselves in a bunch, the blades buried in a wooden block.

‘She does look pale and weary. Won't you rest now?' Will Anwyl, the only one capable of touching her heart, comes up close and his voice is too beautiful for words; it will unstring her. Beatrice daren't look into his dangerous eyes. ‘Why don't Annie and I roll our sleeves up and bake the bread?'

‘You, bake bread?' The faint gleam of a smile lightens her face but it seems to jeopardise her defence. Will is, after all, a slippery character. ‘What do you know about baking bread?'

‘Well, I know something, perhaps not much as things stand. But Annie will teach me. I'll be her apprentice. Or yours – perhaps you'd like us to do it together, just you and me? Then Annie can carry on with her writing
.
I know she's itching to.'

No need to ask Anna twice. But she lingers and says, ‘Dear, we shall come through all this. We shall. I won't do the least thing to worry you. I promise. Please don't look like that.'

‘I'm not looking like anything.'

‘Exactly.'

‘Well, but let's not badger her, Annie,' Will advises.

‘Am I badgering you, love? I'll stop. But what can I do to console you?' Anna's eyes swim with tears. ‘Anything at all. Whatever it is, I'll do it, just ask me.'

Him, Beatrice thinks. Give me him. Give him back. My old love, my one love, who I now see is filled with the Holy Spirit, the Comforter.

‘You deny me, Anna,' she cries. ‘You
deny
me!'

‘What do I deny you? Because I won't promise not to think my thoughts? I can't not think and still be me.'

‘Then don't act on them,' says Beatrice.

‘I will try.'

Anna puts her arms round her sister and kisses her cheek, imploring some return of emotion – but Beatrice can find none to give. The last milk has dried in her glands. A faint tingling: then the star goes out. This is all as God wills. And remember, she tells herself, Will is your sister's husband. You have no right to him. She scrubs the kitchen table. Everywhere seems to have been let to slide. Beatrice will not blame Amy for the state of Sarum House; it's her own lackadaisical self who bears responsibility for the housekeeping. Every corner betrays signs of neglect. Blade marks score the beech table, into whose wounds blood and fat have run over decades. Very hard to scour out, however you attack them; such deep and polluted scars.

S
he
knew the man who killed her, the dear old sow understood at once. Such intelligent beasts they are, swine; they recognise individual human faces. They look you in the eye and return your scrutiny. Pigs understand you perhaps through their noses. To me Lucy would come lolloping with that funny barking sound and snuffle at me and lie down at my feet to have her fat belly tickled. But at the sight of the pig-sticker she screamed like a baby. He is skilful, mind, very. He dispatched her as fast as it could be done and there she swung, upended, hooked. She'd ceased to be Lucy. Hams and flitch, blood for pudding. Her lifeblood poured into the bucket: plenty of salt to stop it congealing. The scream died fast in her throat. Singeing, scalding, scraping. The pig-sticker went at it, snorting. A reek arose, until her skin looked like a field of mushrooms. The guts flopped out cleanly, secured in the white transparent sheath of the bowel: no stench. Everyone present tasted the jellylike texture of the meat, succulent, still warm. And now Lucy is part of me, part of us all. Strange eucharistic sacrifice. And this is the world in which our Maker has set us, for our sins. Lucy was without sin. She suffered for Eve's mortal transgression, like the whole Creation.

Beatrice stands back to survey her work on the table, which is still unclean. How could she have let it get like this? It will have to do.
He
says it is spick and span. It isn't really. But they're ready to bake. Fetching an apron for Will, Beatrice ties it for him; he obediently washes his hands to the elbows. Dirt kills, she reminds him: Miss Nightingale has warned us. She scrubbed the filth out of the Crimea. But foetid airs arise from the earth and poison us. We breathe them in; they kill our babies. And our house is low-lying: so near to the river, the earth saturated. All this unhealthiness is Eve's gift to us.

They knead together, knuckles in the dough, flour whitening her companion's hair. He has a confession, Will says: this isn't the first time he's played the baker. He used to bake bread before, at home with his foster-mother. The dark
bara lawr
, laverbread, eaten with bacon and cockles. One day he'll prepare for Beatrice and Anna such a breakfast. But also they'd occasionally bake the good white bread. The scent as you took it out! Always it was a miracle of transformation. The way the loaf rose under the cloth. The way it goldens in the oven. The way the smell gets into your clothes and hair and beard, and haunts you on the stairs and strays into every corner of the house. The following day, even then, there's the ghost of the scent, reminding us perhaps of our duty to enjoy the God-made world.

‘What is your view, Will,' she asks him, ‘of the spirits? Am I wrong?'

‘Hard for me to judge, dear – because of course I was not present. All I know is that anything is possible to God, anything at all. I will pray about it. Or shall we do so together? Shall we kneel? Here and now, what better time?'

Here on the rust-red tiles, dusted with flour, they fall to their knees, hand in hand – and Amy, entering with a clattering pail and a grumbling word on her lips, stops in her tracks, retreats and closes the door softly.

*

Can one listen in to other folk's conversations, even from a separate room? Or overhear when nobody's actually speaking? Her floor is their ceiling and shields the two of them from her gaze. But Anna is convinced that no sooner did she retreat than the two of them turned to one another. They were made for each other: simple as that. She imagines Will saying to his sister-in-law, ‘God is infinitely merciful, Beatrice. Don't be tempted to imagine that His heart is hard. Or that He turns away from your grief. He has lost a son of his own, don't forget that. He knows,
bach,
he knows. How could He fail to know?' No need of salt in the bread: their tears savour the dough. Tears for a havoc larger than Luke. The chaos that made Will marry his beloved's sister.

Meanwhile in the chamber below the soles of Anna's feet, her sister and husband reach out to clasp one another close. Perhaps not in body. But in their hearts they embrace. She cannot blame them. There in the kitchen with the flames from the range casting a red glow, they set aside the dough in the pantry for the yeast to raise. They turn to one another. Anna looks down at the floorboards and witnesses it as it happens, as if from above.

Who giveth this woman?

‘I give her,' Anna thinks. ‘Fully and freely. Against all law and custom. I give him too – because my love for him, like his for me, though real, turns out to be a kind of adultery.'

Anna takes the pen in her hand: Will's wedding present to her. The weight of its tortoiseshell body sits snugly on the join between her thumb and forefinger. Tendrils of inlaid flowers wander from the mosaic capstone along the shaft. Loading the pen, Anna touches it to the blotting paper, where a blossom of ink forms. Once it's bled out, she suspends it above the paper.

The glass water-jug on the desk casts a pale shadow on the page. The surface of the water trembles; light travelling through it traces a faint spangling ellipse, which sways from side to side. She sees the smudge of her lip-print on the rim, the trace of a living moment. The glass blower has trapped a bubble of air – his breath perhaps – in the vessel, creating an imperfection, the vestige of another moment, years ago. Something microscopic afloat in the water – perhaps a flake of human skin – casts the shadow of a speck. In the sunlight, the grain of the cherry wood desk has a depth of brown that is remarkable: what would a word for this colour be? The years have stained the wood with a dark luminosity of varnish and polish. Its grain is eventful, waylaying the eye with knots and whorls where once branches forked in the living tree.

In a world without spirit, Anna thinks, all you're left with is matter. Is that so very bad? All objects have a story. The world's a reliquary and here we are sifting about in the remains, turning up a shard here, a fragment there.

She fingers one of the fossilised sea urchins she and Lore loved to collect. You might find a cache of fifty in a shallow grave the plough unearths. Millennia ago a creature crawled in the mud of a warm sea. Its soft insides were consumed by other lives. Into the empty shell oozed a jelly that hardened to a flint cast. Ice and wind and water eroded it out of layers of chalk. Someone picked it up, someone human or nearly human, thousands of years before Anna came along; someone in mourning perhaps, who saw this blind stone eyeball as a sacred object and buried it with the tribe's dead. Thousands of years later a second wandering collector, Anna Pentecost, pocketed it and took it home and kept it for luck and inspiration.

A scent of baking bread arises from downstairs: delicious. There's laughter from the kitchen; Beatrice is laughing. Will's miracle, bless him. What to write? Miriam has made a profession of the pen, behind the mask of a male pseudonym: Calder North. The public lie has betrayed the private woman. So what should Anna call herself? Is she capable of writing anything that hangs together? I'm all odds and ends, she thinks. I know nothing systematically. My thoughts are all questions.

The metal box contains a trove of these thoughts that are only questions, going right back to childhood. Opening the lid, she's confronted with a sea of papers – wallpaper scraps, packing-case paper, flour bags full of jottings, leaves from notebooks, blanks torn from books for her scribbles. Paper in those days was expensive: it had to be conserved. Anna's tiny script was meant to have a printed effect and yet to be secret.

She holds to the mirror a tiny volume sewn together with minute stitches, labeled ‘The Tump Book by Anna Pentecost'. Inside there are minute illustrations: an earthworm with its segments carefully drawn, a stag beetle and a parade of ants.

My bank or hillock or Tump or mound is a great Mystyry … In my Tump are special tregures and on my Tump are special things going on.

Grasses and dandelions, poppies and vetches are jostling one another, along with ants and earwigs, worms and bees and a dead blackbird mauled by a cat that wasn't hungry.

And it is My Mamas Tump I have left her the tregures

Anna begins to sort the scraps from the flour bag. The first thing to do is to decipher and transcribe all the scraps. And then begin to write her book, a work not of fiction but of observation. And I need to read, Anna realises. I need to buy books. I need a study. And I need time. I have a vocation. And I need to investigate the Tump. The name on the cover will be, quite plainly, Anna Pentecost.

*

Meeting Mrs Quarles in the street, Beatrice blurts in response to her polite enquiry, ‘My sister tells me she is writing a book.'