Gaudete (11 page)
Authors: Ted Hughes
Is looking right through the photograph to his unburied daughter and the stump-raw amputation of that morning’s event.
He is sharply aware of his age. The recurrent idea to kill Lumb keeps foundering in the proliferating concerns for what ought rightly to be done, in a civic and rational manner. Apart from taking council with Hagen.
And what is this other strange tale, this new religion? Something diabolical, concocted, filthy, very possible. A lecherous priest and a gaggle of spoofed women. Hysterical bored country wives. Credulous unfortunate females.
Evans is giving his simple statement. Evans, it seems, intends to walk into the church basement tonight and see what’s going on at the W. I. meeting. Anybody else will be welcome. But nobody must think they’re going to restrain him, when he meets Mr Lumb.
Looking at Evans’ dangerous, thick-set face, Estridge feels the draughty lack of his uniform. He feels the sheer-fall possibilities of being left out. But mostly he feels age, the wrinkle-crisp caul of the life-husk, an inert scratch-numb detachment. It would be so easy now to do nothing.
But then the sudden raving fantasy comes
Like a lump of insane music
Pulping Lumb’s skull with an axe
And Estridge’s heart bounds again and flutters.
Drive into the gravelled court behind Hagen’s house, circling the old well which is surmounted by a looted Silenus, decorated with fantails. Mrs Hagen, negotiating the grass-verge, drives out past them without a glance.
Hagen’s man is holding a tall bay mare by a snaffle. Hagen, leaning his chest against a steel gate, watches the slender sooty stallion descending from its horsebox, on powerful springs, restrained by an insect-thin manager.
The too-heavy clay of Hagen’s face is sagging as the day lengthens. His eyes are fixed in a spiritless nicotine-yellow dullness. Estridge, coming beside him, hands him the photograph without a word, casually as a cigarette.
Then stands watching the flashing ballet of the two horses, as they touch noses and flare tails, like great fish, like yachts.
Hagen, absorbing the photograph, massages his brow between thumb and forefinger, as if resting. The stallion whinnies, a squealing barrel-echoing snigger, as he feels his power swell, glitteringly, in the odours of the mare.
Hagen is contemplating the photograph, which seems very satisfactory, as if it were a just-completed jigsaw. He lifts his brow, to raise his head slightly, letting his whale’s eye, small and cold, rest on Estridge. He is thinking: so it is proved, and now they want me to do something about it.
Taking his old friend’s arm, he leads him toward the house, as if to impart something even worse. Their old wars go with them, cleaned and simplified, under the glare sunlight.
Evans, a grin stuck on his face, watches the stallion sprawling on the high mare, like a drunk on a table.
Estridge’s shout interrupts.
Leans his bicycle on a low wall, between Westlake’s car and Dunworth’s, and goes straight into the house. He pauses, surrounded, as by sudden guards, by all that polished modernity, the positioned furniture, in ultra colour, designed by Dunworth himself, like the demortalised organs of a body.
Through and beyond, framed against the panoramic feature window, he sees the two men sitting, a whisky bottle between them on a low table, and glasses in their hands.
Dunworth is discussing killing himself, which is what he seems to consider appropriate. Westlake does not say what he thinks. He makes provisional noises.
Their sentences
Falter and evaporate.
Bottomless silence drinks their ideas.
They are trying to imagine logicality.
Neither can quite feel the seriousness of their own words
or of the others.
They stare out, like yarded beasts, across the blue-
layered monotony of the distance,
And sip.
They feel gently around in the illusory emptiness of these
minutes,
Which are passing with such crowded rapidity.
They are quietly aghast
At the certainty that sooner or later they will have to move
Westlake is afraid that when he moves he will do
something barbarous, disproportionate, insane.
Dunworth is afraid that if he is left alone he might well
kill himself in a light-minded effort to be sincere.
Westlake hunches hooded in tortoised concentration,
behind his dark-rimmed spectacles.
Dunworth’s face is exposed and woebegone, like a
beggarwoman’s at a crossroads.
Garten introduces the photograph.
With one glance Dunworth has seen too much. Now he only wants to escape right away, fast enough and far enough for all this to disappear in slipstream and exhaust. He wants to lie down and sleep for fifty years in some utterly different landscape, and wake up in another age.
Westlake stares into the photograph as into a culture under a microscope.
Dunworth paces about the room. He can feel the whole day slipping like some horrible landslide, towards a brink. Everything is on the move, everything inside this house is on its way to the brink, the house itself, everything in the garden and those trees, it’s all on the slide. Even the clouds. The whole day. And himself in the middle of it, helpless.
His skin panics with hot and cold draughts
As Westlake stands up.
Are assembling in the church basement.
Mrs Davies is in charge of refreshments. Mrs Evans follows her instructions. Dainty triangular sandwiches, prettily stacked. Tinned salmon, liver paste, cucumber, lettuce and tomato.
A hushed animation, sombre and uneasy.
Something is wrong and everybody is aware of it.
It is not only the gossip funeral for Janet Estridge.
Mrs Davies peels a blue razor blade from its wrapper.
The glans of a withered fungus
Receives its edge, and releases slices
Into each of three sandwiches.
Mrs Davies sets these apart.
Mrs Evans is pouring a milky liquid from a medicine
bottle into the tea-urn.
The loudspeakers cough and clear their throats at the
corners of the ceiling.
Betty has put a tape on the stereo.
Suddenly the women are engulfed
Under archaic music of pipes and drums,
An inane cycle of music, hoarse and metallic.
Mrs Davies is setting out cigarettes of her own blend.
Plates of sandwiches circulate and trays of cups of tea.
The birdlike agitation of women, fussy, tense, watchful,
thins
As the music works behind their faces
And a preoccupation deepens.
A snaking coil of smoke materialises.
Already their eyes are glazed like young cattle.
They are waiting for the first shiver of power.
Something is obstructing it
.
A difficulty, the power will not flow.
The music is tangling with some obstacle.
Everybody is here, except Maud. And the Master.
Jennifer
Knows more and more clearly that she should not have
come.
Mrs Evans shuts herself up in busyness.
Women in groups wait nervously for things to warm up.
Mrs Dunworth sits with the doctor’s wife and Mrs Hagen
A little apart,
Like three asked to stay behind after the doctor’s tests –
All are quiet with something like fear –
Nearly a definite prickle of fear.
Like passengers in an aircraft, just as it lifts off the
runway,
Hearing a peculiar note in the engine.
Betty turns the music up purposefully.
Is ready.
Black lace in her hair,
But under her black shawl
A long dress of white satin, a bridal dress, flashes as she
moves.
Felicity is sitting with brilliant eyes, at the kitchen table.
The drink Maud served her
Has made her ears ring. Her lips feel numb.
Her fingertips feel enormous.
She is waiting to be conducted to the meeting
And sits watching Maud fixedly.
It occurs to her
That Maud’s regalia is some special craziness
Connected to her dumbness.
Lumb promises to follow within minutes.
Felicity appeals with a last look.
Words seem suddenly too big, they refuse to shape in her
mouth.
She interprets his look as reassurance.
Actually his face is impenetrable.
Now as Felicity follows Maud out
She takes a deep breath, and for a moment has to pause
For the sudden smouldering fire under her midriff.
She sees the church.
It looks like an evil black shape painted on a wall.
Simultaneously she remembers that she left no note for
her grandfather.
She is heavily aware of her lips, lying together as if they
were swollen
And of the inner surface of her thighs brushing together,
as she follows Maud.
She feels Maud’s madness in that processional stately
walk, flashing whiteness,
As they go among the graves.
Is cramming books into a trunk.
He crams in clothing.
Among the clothing
He nests, with hurried care,
His magical apparatus.
He lifts the stone woman from the mantel
And settles her snugly among underclothes.
He searches in the box, in the drawer –
Something is missing. His dagger is missing. His weapon
of weapons.
He scrabbles, he unearths – vainly. He listens.
He knows
It is not in this room.
Enters the church basement, pausing impressively
Like a slightly tipsy actress.
Maud is impressive in her get-up – and frightening.
Felicity is frightened
Seeing so many confusedly familiar faces
Looking unfamiliar
As if police held her.
She meets Mrs Davies’ mystified savage look
But it is Mrs Davies’ welcoming smile,
Her surprise of affection.
It is Mrs Davies’ arm round her shoulder
Guiding her among the confusion of women, the harsh
music, and all the movement of hands and faces
Which numb her every second more deeply.
Vaguely she looks round for Maud.
Maud is already poised motionless at the corner of the
rectory.
She is watching Lumb.
He is lugging his trunk out though the back door.
After backing his car up, he tilts the trunk into the boot,
closes the boot, and returns into the house.
Maud is crossing the space of gravel.
Passing the open car-window her arm dips inside, and she
goes on
Round the far corner of the house.
Half-way across the graveyard, she hesitates at a freshly-dug not yet occupied grave, and dropping the ignition keys between the covering planks, goes on toward the church.
Lumb is making a last furious search through his room, ransacking drawers and cupboards.
The assembly of husbands and their sympathisers,
muffled by ceiling and walls and cigarette smoke,
Is a squabble of unlistened-to voices
Trying to become a meeting.
Mr Walsall continues to draw and push forward the
required drinks.
The photograph lies on the bar.
Garten sits near it, watching over his property, installed
in the focus of excitement.
Evans keeps his print concealed, he has had enough of it.
Behind backs and elbows
Dunworth repeatedly tries to introduce a fuddled
reasonable attitude.
His mouth moves soundlessly in the din.
Westlake is saying nothing, he listens to everybody
Keeping his own thoughts untangled.
Holroyd in a big consoling voice wants to see proof
Because a photograph is not really proof.
He for one can’t believe it’s quite as lurid as everybody
wants to think.
And he’s not going to commit himself till he gets facts.
As for going up to the church, he can’t see what that will
prove at all.
A shout of voices swamps him,
Complicating and simplifying the possibilities, faces are
jerking and heads.
Full pints stream over boots, glasses tilt empty and
waiting,
As Walsall’s arms move steadily.
Nobody quite knows what to do.
They continue to drink more forcefully in search of
definition and action.
They all know what they want to happen
And they drink to make it more likely
So that the criss-cross push and pull of voices works
steadily in one direction.
Evans keeps hauling the tangle into a tight hard knot and
humping it further.
When they hear his voice, everybody listens.
As he gets drunker, his memory becomes more naked and
ungoverned.
He feels more and more his strength, feeling more and
more the weakness of the others.
His little eyes become deadlier.
He gleams with impatience to do the direct, conclusive,
simple thing.
He has anaesthetised all thought of consequences.
Only old Smayle, behind backs in the corner,
Keeps his humour – as amazed, nevertheless,
As he is amused.