Gaudete (6 page)
Authors: Ted Hughes
Mrs Walsall draws a half pint, watchfully, for Garten. His chirpy rat-nervy manner makes her feel deep. He is being vivaciously familiar with the pensioner under the window. Old Smayle, who is the vicar’s nearest neighbour at the top of the village, lives with his granddaughter, Felicity. Garten courts Felicity. Nightly, stormily, unhappily.
Garten is fishing for the vicar. He is venturing jokey, overbalancing insinuations, as he sips. Felicity mentions the Reverend Lumb too often.
Old Smayle defends the vicar.
He admires him. The vicar, he declares,
Has realised that his religious career
Depends on women.
Because Christianity depends on women.
For all he knows, all those other religions, too, depend on
women.
What would he do for congregation these days
Without women.
Old Smayle has read it. The church began with women.
Through all those Roman persecutions it was kept going
by women.
The Roman Empire was converted by a woman.
And now the whole thing’s worn back down to its women.
It’s like a herd of deer, he says, why is it always led by a
hind?
Christianity’s something about women.
His narrowed eye-puffs pierce right to the crux of it.
Christianity is Christ in his mammy’s arms –
Either a babe at the tit
With all the terrible things that are going to happen to
him hovering round his head like a halo,
Or else a young fellow collapsed across her knees
With all the terrible things having happened.
Old Smayle’s eloquence pours from his travelling library.
His eyebrows arch, hoisting his whole baggy face.
His eyes are seriously amazed
At what such things evidently boil down to.
Something about mothers – maternal instincts.
Something about the womb – foredoomed, protective
instinct.
Instinct for loss and woe and lamentation.
So men have lost interest. Smayle knows.
Garten has forgotten his own stare.
He is fascinated and out of his depth and wondering
What Lumb is on to.
Evans, the blacksmith, has paid for a half.
He lifts the glass
In fingers that are the masters
Of all the heavy agricultural steel
In the district.
He can be quiet, with a nod.
Betty has come back, looking just as usual.
Garten is disturbed and confused.
He wants to include Evans somehow on his side, in this
groping.
He watches Betty’s high-tension boredom.
He keeps an eye on Mrs Walsall’s solemn listening.
He glances from one to the other.
He fancies something is darting between the two,
Escaping him among the crannies of these women.
Evans’ wife is vivid and tiny,
Startling, like a viper.
A magnet for local scandal fantasies, spoken and
unspoken.
Her incongruous Sunday-School cosy chatty manner
Does nothing to tame her deadly glance.
It has the effect of an outrageously lewd cosmetic.
She is Secretary of the local W. I.
What goes on at those W. I. meetings?
The words suddenly blurt out of Garten and he stares
after them wildly.
He plunges deeper.
He asks Evans if he’s ever read the book of minutes.
He is afraid of Evans. He brazens himself, feeling the
eyes of the two women.
He bets that’s a book of revelations
Real religious stuff.
Evans weighs Garten with a little easy smile,
A little glance, from little slow wolf eyes.
It would be more interesting, Evans dare say,
To know what’s going on, this minute,
Over in Garten’s bungalow.
The Reverend Lumb’s little van
Seems to have broken down at the gate.
Old Smayle’s merriment
Garten’s instantaneous exit
And the sun crossing one more degree
Bring the reaching of the landscape roots
A fraction closer
To the vicar’s body.
Ten years a widow
Is made up at noon.
In the garden hut
She sits back on top of orange-crate rabbit cages
While the Reverend Lumb lifts her into bliss.
The cages creak, the inquisitive rabbits
Try to get a view.
She reaches out to fasten the door’s yale
Without losing her advantage.
The flimsy cages start to collapse.
The widow and Lumb sag, clutching at other cages
Which come toppling,
Bursting open, spilling two ferrets,
Creamy serpents.
The widow clings in position, contorted.
Lumb cannot be distracted.
He pushes aside cages, and rabbits struggle out.
Her consternation gazes sidelong at them
From eyes that seem only lightly fixed to her body
Which cares nothing about rabbits
And which Lumb now overwhelms.
He is rapt. His communion
With Mrs Garten is especially deep and good.
She starts to cry out. He urges her cries.
Garten, finding the housedoor open and the house empty,
Hears the sounds.
He runs to the hut door, he kicks at it.
He forces in among the tumble of cages
Which the vicar is attempting to stack.
Mrs Garten is pulling a ferret from under cages.
It is attached to a crying baby rabbit.
She screams at Garten for help.
Lies on her bed, on her side, gazing into the crook of her
elbow.
She has sobbed herself stale.
But still hard sighs keep trying to bring relief.
She lies back and watches the clouds.
They are toppling across a snow wilderness.
Stunted fir-trees stoop under drifts.
A girl is struggling across a snow lake
Into the wind.
Closer, closer, the eye runs.
The girl turns, looking back.
The girl is Janet, her dead sister.
And she herself is a wolf, circling her dead sister
And wanting not to be recognised.
She does not want to frighten her poor sister
Who sees only the wolf
Which has followed her a long way
Waiting for her to weaken.
Her dead sister is crying and forcing herself on.
And now turns again, pleading something
But the wind blows the words away.
She watches, with a wolf’s interested eyes
Till her dead sister falls.
Now a wolf is killing her where she lies.
Her dead sister lies in the snow.
Her eyes and mouth, already freezing,
Are once again dead.
She starts to howl out over her dead sister who lies in the
snow.
A wolf crying and snarling jumps up on to her bed
suddenly
And she screams and jumps upright
In her empty room.
The clouds
Tumble their clumsy bursting baggage
Beyond the window frame
Over the glare, the gloom-dark tree-glitter
Of the day
Where the moments march unalterably.
Emerges from his updated, bleak, deserted roadhouse at quarter to one. A brief shower has gone over, loading the greenery. The bluebell-blue cloudmass now huddles to the horizon woods. But the sun soars freely, somewhere behind high parapets, and the black road steams like a vat. He is numb-edged with too much noon alcohol. Dark-edged. He aims himself at his car, parked solitary out on the desert of blue asphalt.
This bulging green landscape oppresses him.
The thick weight behind his eyes oppresses him.
He cannot stop thinking of that dead girl’s grey-pink parched-looking lips. The alcohol has dissolved his self-protection, a little. He pauses. His whole body craves pause, and time, like an exhaustion, while he thinks. He feels a great need to think. What was it he wanted to think about?
The air is warm. A nauseous sweet aniseed scent, an overrichness. Like an over-sweet melting sickness in the pit of his stomach. It is reeking from the creamy masses of the hawthorn blossom.
Jennifer’s insinuatingly amorous lamenting tones seem to have entered his blood, like a virus, with flushes of fever and shivers, and light, snatching terrors.
He stares at the piled hairy flowers, hedgerow beyond draped hedgerow. Hushed and claustrophobic. He imagines the still Sargasso of it, rising and falling, right across England. Funereal. Unearthly. Some bulky hard-cornered unpleasantness leans on him. He ignores it steadily. He searches for his car-keys, preoccupied, watching the mobs of young starlings struggling and squealing filthily in the clotted may-blossom, like giant blow-flies.
He drops his car-keys in a puddle.
Bending to pick them up
He bumps his bald brow on the car-door handle,
glancingly
But enough to jar off his spectacles
Which drop to the asphalt, where they lie, half-
submerged,
One lens webbed with cracks.
This awakening into his own world is nevertheless
satisfactory.
His body is still moving beyond him, its limits blurred.
Getting into the car energetically, with a new grasp of the
day’s course,
He clips the side of his skull, just above the ear,
On the brutal edge of the car-roof.
He sits dazzled with pain
And with rage at the petty error of it, as his eyes water.
He deliberates control –
Carefully cleaning the spectacles, and the cracked lens
especially with meticulous caution –
It flakes out under his thumb, the rim blinks up at him
empty.
He aligns the spectacles on his nose.
He must insist now, on control
Of every second as it chooses to come.
With firmly applied care, he steers out on to the road.
But he has drunk too much.
And the finality of that dead girl lies at the centre of the
day
Like an incomprehensible, frightful dream.
And her live sister is worse – all that loose, hot, tumbled
softness,
Like freshly-killed game, with the dew still on it,
Its eyes still seeming alive, still strange with wild dawn,
Helpless underbody still hot.
For minutes, driving in third gear, Westlake forgets
where he is.
While what she said about Lumb goes on and on in his
head
Like a taunt.
Because he has known it all the time,
And now he only has to look at it, and there it is.
His wife
And the Reverend Nicholas Lumb
Fit together, like a tongue in its mouth.
His numbness has freed his concentration.
Under this new, naked lamp-bulb
He probes for the deepest nerve of his damage.
He jerks into top gear –
Ending thinking.
His alcohol dullness has settled
To a hurtling lump, a projectile –
He turns in at the gate of his home
With the sensation of finding his trap at last tenanted.
And the lilac secretness of the drive’s curve brings him suddenly to the vicar’s van, tucked up against the back-porch, almost in under the wisteria drapery.
Westlake’s foot presses the lawn verge.
His fingers leave his car door
Just touching its frame but not closed.
He contemplates sabotage to the detestable blue van.
He sidles burglarishly down the side of his own house.
His heart is pounding turgidly, yet he feels light and
separate.
Like a man falling, feeling nothing of the glancing
impacts.
He rouses himself, a deliberate attempt
To realise afresh what he is about.
With his hand on precisely that brick of the corner of his
own house.
He looks at his watch
Where the second hand jogs busily in its ignorant circle.
He watches it, rejoicing absently at the comparative
slowness of time,
And his own freedom in it.
He observes, with a self-mesmerising stillness,
The peeled-back gorges of his rose-blooms, leaning poised
in space.
He marvels again that they are precisely where they are,
Neither an inch this way nor an inch that way,
But exactly there, with their strict, fierce edges.
He moves his head.
Through his unglassed eye, conveniently long-sighted,
He watches the young effortless horses,
Roistering flamily on the slope opposite.
Whole minutes pass.
His feet move. He peers into the grey sterility of his
lounge.
As if he had abandoned it all, years ago, in some
different life.
As if he had just returned, after half a lifetime on the
other side of the world.
The front door. The familiar dingy smell of the hall.
He stands at the bottom of the stair.
Weightless, in the balance of decision.
He feels light-headed and inadequate for this preposterous
business
Which nevertheless he proceeds to tackle.
Climbing the stair nimbly
Loading his double-barrelled twelve-bore as he goes
And pocketing other cartridges.
He pauses just short of the door. He remembers, absurdly, that fully-clothed men jump into the sea for much less. He explains to himself yet again, more distinctly, and with a pedantic solemnity of subordinate clauses, that what
he hears is indeed the crying of his wife at some bodily extreme, which can have only the one explanation. But as his brain mounts its annihilating court-case, which will need only the precise, annihilating words, his body has already moved convulsively, and the door bursts open.
At once he sees
That his expectations have been cheated.
His wife is lying fully clothed on the bed.
She is being hysterical in her familiar style,
Rolling from side to side
As if to escape some truth which threatens to scorch her
face.
And the Reverend Lumb
Is sitting at the foot of the bed, considerate as a baffled
doctor.
His calming hand detains her slim ankle.
In one flash Westlake understands
That his accurate intuition
Has been forestalled and befooled
By this goat-eyed vicar.
In spite of what it looks like
Something quite different is going on here,
Even under his very eyes,
And if he could only see clear
Through the vicar’s humbug soelmn visage
And his wife’s actress tragedy mask
It would be plain
That her writhing and cries are actually sexual spasm,
And that the Reverend Lumb, who seems to be gazing at
him
In such cool spiritual composure
And mild secular surprise
Is actually copulating with her
Probably through that hand on her ankle
In some devilish spiritual way.
This crazy idea strikes Westlake like a thunderbolt. And even if it is not so, even if he cannot actually detect them performing neck and neck there together in front of him, that is purely accidental, and as remote as any other coincidence, a coincidence inside-out. Anyway, he needs no proof.
Doctor Westlake levels his gun.
The vicar stands and knocks the muzzle aside.
Dr Westlake swings the gun and knocks the vicar’s
cheekbone
With the barrels. The cartridges explode
Tearing the side of the vicar’s head, a skin wound.
The two grapple and separate.
The doctor’s wife watches, silenced.
The vicar expostulates reasonably and the doctor knocks
him down with the gun.
He fumbles to reload the gun.
The vicar twists it from him and spears it through the
window.
The doctor runs from the room, down the stairs and out
into the garden,
Retrieves the gun, reloading it as he re-enters the house,
And listens.
The Reverend Lumb’s van is turning out at the front.
Westlake runs and from his doorstep fires twice.
One of the van’s rear windows goes black
As the van escapes along black rips of gravel.
The doctor spins his gun into the roses.
He pants seriously, feeling for his heart’s place and
staring after the van, squinting as if into the sun’s glare.
Huge hammers of blackness reshape him,
Huge hammers of alcohol,
Huge hammers of hellishness and incomprehension.
With a renewed effort of doggedness
He collects the gun, gets into his car, drives away out.