Gaudete (5 page)
Authors: Ted Hughes
Is gleaming, the mopped floor drying
In the morning’s leisured vacancy.
The door standing open, to ventilate last-night’s beer-
smell,
Admits the conversation of the river and its stones.
The fleeing needle-cry of a dipper going downstream
Pierces the company of empty chairs.
Betty, the girl behind the bar,
Is making the last few preparations
For the first lunchtime regulars.
She is lean as a skinny boy and blonde as straw.
She takes a hot pie from the counter-oven
With pink bony hands
And goes back through the house.
The usual word to the pub-owner’s wife, Mrs Walsall,
Who is peeling potatoes in the kitchen.
She is just slipping home with this lunch for her old mum
Before the first customers.
She cycles out of the yard, Mrs Walsall watches the
window.
Betty does not pass the window.
Mrs Walsall opens the latch and leans out. Betty
Is cycling along the lane beside the river, away from the
village.
Mrs Walsall’s starved Syrian face
Has the religious pallor, the blue-socketed eyes
Of a mediaeval portrait.
Betty’s bicycle departure
Is in line with the perfunctory lips
Dried and leathered
By long night wakefulness, by blank morning hopelessness.
Mrs Walsall is in love
And has lost interest in everything else.
She wants to dedicate herself, like a sacrifice, to her great
love.
She does not know how.
She knows she is unacceptably ugly.
The child inside her is a growing
Fungus of jealousy
Displacing her from her body. A great hurt,
Like a coulter sewn into her stomach
That she cannot void or vomit.
As Betty rides into the silk-fringed hazel leaves, on the
chirping saddle,
Mrs Walsall lets the cold tapwater
Numb her hands, and escapes thinking.
She tries to let the water
Numb her body. She fixes her mind
Under the numbing water.
She stands at the sink, numbed.
Has informed Commander Estridge that his elder daughter is indeed dead. Estridge is sitting near the window, small and still, stunned by the event, and by the incomprehensible blunt fact that his daughter was pregnant.
Westlake’s delight in such facts, his opportunistic sense of theatre, his lust to uncover the worst and reveal it, could not let the chance pass.
Now Westlake
Has settled his professionally baleful stare,
His congenitally baleful stare,
On Jennifer, who is curled on the couch.
Her words flood and strew
In tangled sweetness and sharp fragments
Like a flower-vase just broken.
Old Estridge is trying vainly to reckon her words up,
As if they were some gibberish formula of huge numerals
Into which his whole family fortune is vanishing.
Explosions from different directions have left him little
more than mere outline.
He props his brow between finger and thumb
And rests his incomprehension on the sunlit pattern of the
carpet.
Westlake, deeply stirred, listens.
The perfumed upheaval of all this ringing emotion and
physical beauty
Is exciting him.
He follows what he can of her cascading explanations.
Her creamy satin blouse, stretching and flexing like a
skin,
Her dark-haired ankles,
Her sandals askew, her helpless uncontrol,
Her giddy mathematics
Which are constructing an abyss –
The corpse is absent.
It lies on Janet’s stripped bed upstairs, a shape under a
sheet
Like an article of furniture no longer required, stored
And waiting for removal.
Jennifer is telling
That her sister was in love with the minister Mr Lumb
Just as he had been in love with her
And they were going to disappear together to Australia
Because his religious work had become impossible for him
But then quite suddenly he no longer loved Janet.
Instead he loved herself, Jennifer, much, much more deeply
As he still does love her
And she loves him the same, there is nothing they can do
about it.
And so she undeceived her sister for her own good and
told her of this alteration
And so Janet has killed herself and that is the extent of it.
Westlake
Keeps losing Jennifer’s words
As he gazes fascinated
Into the turbulence of her body and features.
He jerks back into detachment
Noting again, between the inflamed eyelids,
Her irises clear and nimble-delicate as a baboon’s,
And the insanity there, the steel-cutting acetylene
Of religious mania.
And immersing himself in her voice, which flows so full of
thrilling touches
And which sobs so nakedly in its narration,
He is scorched by the hard fieriness,
A jagged, opposite lightning
Running along the edge of it
Like an insane laughter –
Something in his marrow shrivels with fear.
Is sunbathing in the orchard, between cloudshadows.
Snow-topped blue raininess masses low to the West,
bulging slant and forward.
She squints up, calculating whether the bursting bleached edges of that mattress are going to wipe out the sun.
The apple trees dazzle. The air shifts and stirs the black undershadows, caressing the fur of glow on her throat and forearm.
Inside, in the wide white kitchen,
Her husband chews cheese and bread dryly. Makes
himself tea.
She watches the honey bees, bumping at apple blossoms, groping and clambering into the hot interiors of the blood and milk clots.
In what continues of the sun
she knows she is happy. She is suspended, as in a warm solution, in the confidence of it. She lies back in her deck-chair, helpless in the languor of it, just as the chill-edged sun holds her, for these moments, unable to move.
Her transistor
Bedded in the tussocky moist grass, among milky maids
and new nettles,
Squirts out a sizzle of music
And transatlantic happy chat.
She even hums a little, as a melody draws clear,
Letting her round-fleshed, long arm
Dangle behind her head
Over the back of the chair.
She squirms her toes, feeling inside her shoes the faint clammy cold of the dew, which will hide all day in the dense grass.
She turns her freckled face shallowly
In the doubtful sun
And watches through her eyelashes a dewball jangling its
colours, like an enormous ear-jewel, among the blades.
Closing her eyes
Concentrating on the sun’s weight against her cheek,
She lets herself sink.
Her own rosy private darkness embraces her.
A softness, like a warm sea, undulating, lifts her,
Like a slower, stronger heart, lifting her,
A luxury
Signalling to the looseness of her hips and vertebrae,
Washing its heavy eerie pleasure
Through her and through her.
She wants it to go on. She lies there, with a slightly foolish smile on her face. She wants nothing to change. She does not want to think about anything, or to open her eyes.
The slow plan of the young corn, advancing
Its glistening pennons,
The satisfaction of the calf’s masseter
Moving in the sun, beneath half-closed eyes,
The grass feathering,
The muscled Atlas of the land
Resting in the noon, always strengthening, supporting,
assuring –
And she is like a plant.
The sun settles the quilt of comfort
Over her sleepy contentment with herself –
Which is like the darkness, secret and happy
Inside the down soft skull
Of a new suckling baby.
Through half-opened eyes, she watches a dark, giant bulk rocking behind nettles and cow-parsley. Her bull heaves to his feet. He leans forward, neck buffaloed, tightening his spine and stretching his thighs, belly deep in the flowering grass, black under leaf shadow. He sets his neck to a tree-
bole, then jerks up his head, driving it down and jerking it up again, with alarming ease and lightness, scratching his neck and shoulder, while the whole tree shudders. The blossoms snow down, settling along his shoulders and loins and buttocks, like a confetti.
Is cycling home.
The tatty newsboy’s bag over his shoulder
Is swagged with three warm rabbits
And his ferret in its purse.
As he rides he reads the river beside the road.
He hears a cock pheasant and pin-points it on his mental
map
Which is a topographical replica of the region, with each
bramble-stem in place.
A tree-creeper mousing the crannies in the bark of an elm
flags his glance.
Passing the old quarry, he does not fail to see the wet
car-tyre tracks turning inward
From a drying puddle.
Pausing, he queries the concealment of thorns.
He recognises the bicycle. And the van. Hidden. And
hidden.
Now his bicycle is also hidden.
He climbs, behind the quarry rim, through new bracken.
He peers from the crest, between stalks of bracken.
Below him, on a bed of squashed green bracken
The minister sprawls face downward, as if murdered,
Between slender white legs, which are spread like a dead
frog’s.
Beside his bald head, Betty’s face
Seems asleep under the high clouds.
Her clutching hands have pulled his cassock
Above his buttocks,
And still grip the folds, vigilant in their stillness.
The stillness is dreadful
In the bottom of the quarry.
Till her eyes open
And stare at Garten, who simultaneously
Becomes invisible
To a startlement
That dare not admit him.
Lumb’s housekeeper
Has brought into Lumb’s bedroom an armful of
blossoms –
Wet lilac and apple.
Her dumbness
Is a mystery.
Her self-effacement
Is the domestic nervous system
Of this almost empty house.
Her gaze, fixed and withdrawn,
Glaucous, hyperthyroid,
Glisteningly circumscribes
The vicar’s needs.
And the full pale mouth
Pursed in a compact nun stillness
Is a sufficiency of speech
Among the ivy shadows.
Her pale hair, glossed back like metal
From the bulge of brow
Concentrates in a tight knob, at her nape.
Her thin throat, her bony Adam’s apple
Projects above grandmotherly blacks.
With long, knobbly, bloodless, workaday fingers
She sets the blooms
Either side of the bed’s head, in jars.
Smooths from the coverlet petals.
Adjusts the prepared fire of twigs and logs.
Dusts over the long table which already shines.
Pausingly opens
The drawer in the table. She is fitting the key
To the carved bible-box on the table top.
She sits. She is reading a diary.
She lifts the lid of a smaller box, disclosing
A glass ball in a black velvet chamber.
This is the hidden treasure.
Her gaze deepens
To the bottom of the dark well in the ball,
Wary, as if the glass might explode.
It is filling with smoke.
And with trampling feet of cattle. It becomes
The swivelling eye of a bull.
Which is broken up by a stag’s legs scattering river
shallows.
A stag has backed under a rooty bank,
Chest-deep in the piling robe of river.
Hounds are clinging to it and clambering over it.
A sky-silhouette of grouped down-looking horsemen.
A huntsman wading deep. A swimming hound
Gripping the stag’s nose.
The stag’s swivelling eyeball.
And now the hunter’s knife
Diving into the stag’s nape, and a whelm of spray and
limbs
Becomes the billowing foam of a bride,
A girl’s face in a veil of ectoplasm
Floating down the church’s central aisle, on Lumb’s arm.
Their smiles are balanced carefully as they step
Into glare sunlight, as for the camera.
A lumpish form is dodging behind the bride
Who suddenly falls, face downwards, across the steps,
And lies frozen, in the hard sunlight.
A knife hilt is sticking from the nape of her neck.
Lumb’s face
Contorts, transforming
To a grotesque of swollen flesh
A glistening friar-fat
Gargoyle of screaming or laughter –
Rending itself slowly, smokily to shreds
Which dissolve in the watery ball’s
Simple shining darkness.
Maud puts everything back into the chest
Where Lumb’s magical implements lie folded in pelts of
ermine.
There lies the ebony hiked dagger,
Blade sleeved in the whole pelt of an ermine.
A knock on the door downstairs.
The chest is locked and the drawer closed.
Holding the dagger, Maud comes downstairs.
The breadman wants to know what she wants.
Nothing.
He has to take his slight surprise away with him.
He whistles
Covering his retreat
Into his van and through a swirling turn
Round the dovecot, that hubs the wheel of gravel,
And away.
The doves descend again, dazzling.