Gaudete (8 page)
Authors: Ted Hughes
Naked at her dresser mirror
Is trying to see herself more slender and to look lighter.
And to make certain once again that her breasts
Are no fuller than they were.
Her cat rubs across her bare spine
As she sits on the bed.
She rolls back, hoisting the cat, loving the cat,
Pulls the sheet over her, snuggles to the cat, she dozes.
A bigger hot body nestles in beside her,
Overpowers her, muscular and hairy as a giant badger.
A goblin bald face laughs into hers,
Lifts her to shriek surprised laughter.
He is twisting and squeezing the laughter out of her,
They wrestle in a ball of limbs.
Her whole body is ticklish inside and out.
He laughs like an over-excited dog.
They scramble all over the room,
They crash the furniture, senseless to their bruises.
They roll like wrestlers from one corner to another.
Her shrieks get out of control and abandon her last efforts
of laughter.
Her laughs try to smother her shrieks.
Banging on the door.
Betty peers over the sheet. The cat, sprawled on the
pillow,
Stretches his claws and looks into her face through sleepy
slits.
Her mother peeps in through the open crack of the door.
Nothing is the matter.
Only one of her dreams again. Betty
Makes her face weary-woeful.
Stop sleeping with that cat.
From shrubbery to bungalow wall, next the window,
Dares full daylight and the watchfulness of many a village
bedroom view
He edges a creeping glimpse, through the window,
Of stockinged feet on a bed.
Is silent in the kitchen
Where a baby breathes in a carry-cot.
Full-length, at the open door of the bedroom,
A yard from the mingling breaths and the working
mattress,
He spies through the crack of the door.
He positions his camera close to the door’s edge.
He eases into the open and flashes
What he sees on the bed.
He is striding across the kitchen.
Here is the garden corner, now the hedge hides him.
He whirls in the road.
He pedals calmly past the front of the blacksmith’s
bungalow on his bicycle
Without a look back
At the blue van parked outside it.
Exultant, the fuse spluttering in him
Of what he has in the camera.
At eighteen, is in her second spring of full flower. Three years ago, a drab child, mongrel and spindly. Today, coming and going among the soft hot-house scents, she is the most exotic thing in the nursery. She is aware of it. She performs it a little, self-indulgently, with a flourish, as a leopard performs its frightening grace.
Her overlong upsweeping nose, her flat calf’s eye, her wide reckless mouth, were her father’s real ugliness. For the time being they compound her enigmatic triangular beauty.
Gypsy dark skin, intensifying into fierce wire hair. Lusty little moles on her upper lip, and on her cheek.
Slender
She is sliding boxes of bedding plants into the back of a
Range Rover.
Her dirty heels lift from her sandals.
A five-cornered cacophony, the sand-haired self-elected young Saxon squire, from the Manor at N., claiming Norman prerogative, directs her.
Flirts a little, to excuse his driving gloves.
He daunts her
With brandishings of a voice of colonial polish and cut,
Of military briskness, with brassy fittings,
Demonstrating to all its quelling echoes among the
grouped sullen conifers.
He watches the winking naked small of Felicity’s back
Under the grubby red pullover
As she leans forward, sliding the boxes. He observes the skinned patch along two inches of her spine. His thighs bristle. He ponders complacently just what time might drop into his lap in this neighbourhood, with a little shaking of the bough.
His new wife
Is disclosing her vowels likewise, under a wide pink brim,
To the ear of Mrs Davies
Whom she is meeting for the first time.
Mrs Davies
Humours her loonily.
Mrs Davies is the real thing, it appears.
An old sunburned vixen, with a soft belly,
An over-ripe windfall apple
From some lichenous, crumbling lineage
Growing eccentrically sluttish among her potting sheds,
her seed-frames, her greenhouses, and her compost.
An aged, tatty, unearthed lily bulb
Which secretes some staggering gilded chalice.
A questionable flowerpot troll-woman, her hands half-
earth.
Under her silver curls
Which are washed with a faint hydrangea blue
Her full, brown, moist night-time owl’s eyes and her full
moist lips intrigue her client
Who feels reproached
And styptic, and garish
To hear this unsettling creature
Promoting the home-grown qualities of her assistant.
Felicity has finished. She can go now.
The squire smartly offers her a lift, which Mrs Davies
decisively accepts for her,
Reminding the orchid in the hat
To consider the Women’s Institute most seriously,
Most, most seriously,
Now that she’s living so very near.
The Range Rover moves away toward face-lifted estates. Over the engine-din the hat and the squire debate, resonantly, a crisis of interior decorations.
Felicity, looking back, sees
The blue van turning into the nursery.
The driver and his ornament continue to perform, across the length of a tennis court, against international perspectives.
Felicity is biting her nails.
Already Mrs Davies and the Reverend Lumb
Are a bundle of struggling garments,
On the bags of Irish peat, behind the carnations.
Mrs Davies
Agonised ecstatic
As if he were tickling her unmercifully
And he laughing as if he had finally blindfold got her
After months of anticipation
In a dark-house party game.
And they bound, they are flung
With more life than they can contain
Like young dogs
Unable to squirm free from their torturing infinite
dogginess.
Walks in the graveyard.
She is carrying twigs of apple blossom.
The graveyard is empty.
The paths are like the plan of a squared city.
She comes into the main path.
A woman is walking ahead of her.
Maud follows the woman.
The woman walks to the far end of the path.
Maud does not see her go but now the woman is no longer
there.
Maud also walks to the far end of the path.
She watches a magpie on top of a sycamore.
An urgency, a sucking chak chak.
The magpie flies up and is blown away backwards
By the wind that jerks the grass and passes like a rumour
from tree to tree up the side of the graveyard.
The graveyard is empty.
Maud stands at the foot of the last grave.
A round shouldered stone.
She sticks the blossoming twigs into the perforations of
the green pot on the grave.
The black stone is bare, except for bird’s droppings
And a lonely engraved word:
Gaudete.
Maud kneels.
She rearranges some small sea-shells on the grave, which
grub-hunting birds have scattered.
She seems to be praying, She is weeping.
Sitting in her potting shed
Is sorting weeds, the fresh, the dried.
Skeletons of many plants dangle in the spider light.
Out of a dusty jar she bounces
A withered goblin midget face
Of fly agaric.
She sets it with other corpses, on newspaper.
Pleasure!
A snake is sliding in over the threshold.
An adder. Pretty! Pretty!
She greets it.
She is prepared – she settles its saucer of milk.
It lifts its head.
It seems to appreciate the caress of her endearments.
Now it sips.
Her singing is comprehensible
Only to the adder, which ignores everything now but the
milk
As she goes on sorting her shrivelled bodies.
At the Bridge Inn jerks from its drowse, starts barking.
Listens, searches the air, whines, barks.
Goes through from the bar into the house
Where Mr Walsall startles awake in his chair.
The dog is barking at him. It barks at the air.
Mr Walsall reassures the dog but it insists.
He watches the dog,
As it watches him, out of the corner of its eye, urging him
with more, still more urgent barking.
He gets up and calls for his wife.
He listens. He looks into the bar and calls.
He calls and the dog barks. He looks into the backyard.
Where is she? He asks the dog. He too is disturbed now.
He asks the dog what’s the matter. The dog goes on
barking,
Furiously, as if it were telling him plainly.
Its black hackles stand up, its bark opens a dangerous
deep note.
It alarms Mr Walsall. He calls for his wife.
His wife is biting a stick.
Animal gurgles mangle in her throat
While her eyes, her whole face, toil
In the wake of a suffering
That has carried her beyond them.
Her head thrashes from side to side among small ferns
and periwinkles.
Lumb labours powerfully at her body.
In her lopsided bedroom has finished packing her splitting suitcase. Her grandfather, old Mr Smayle, sunk in his pullover and face-folds, has anchored his wits in the television. He does not see her slip out, carrying the suitcase.
She goes up the cinder path of the back-garden, past the rows of greens, the spill of compost. Birds spurt everywhere. Fledgeling thrushes launch and fall struggling into undergrowth. Two crows circle low scolding the black shapes that flounder for balance among the lowest branches.
Clouds crumble, bright as broken igloos. Felicity bends through a worn gap in the thorn and holly hedge.
At a high creeper-fringed window of the rectory
Maud’s face
Dimmed, well back in the room’s darkness,
Watches, as if waiting for just this.
Felicity opens the boot of the Vicar’s old Bentley. She stows her suitcase. She closes the boot-lid, with deliberate care. She returns through the shrubbery and the hedge.
Maud is beside the car.
She opens the boot. She opens the suitcase.
She stares into the suitcase
As into the faked workings of a sum
To which she knows the correct answer.
She hurls the unclosed suitcase toward the shrubbery.
It spins, flinging off its clothes
And falls behind rhododendrons.
Maud embraces herself, as if she were freezing. Her eyes pierce through her shiver as through a focusing lens.
Is driving along.
He feels uneasy. He keeps glancing round.
At a high bend, over the river,
Stub-fingered hairy-backed hands come past his shoulders
And wrench the steering wheel from his grip.
The van vaults the bank.
He sees tree-shapes whirl, hearing underwood crash, then
shuts his eyes.
He clenches himself into a ball of resistance.
A toppling darkness, a somersaulting
Of bumps and jabs, as if he rolled down a long stair
A long unending way, and again further, then again
further.
Separate and still after some seconds
He realises he has come to a stop.
He stays coiled, afraid to test his jarred skeleton.
Probably the worst has already happened painlessly.
He opens his eyes.
Seeing only darkness, he stretches his eyelids wide.
He relaxes into stillness. He explores a freedom all round.
He feels wetness. He scrambles to his hands and knees,
Imagining his van is in the river, and now beginning to fill,
But realises he is free and out of the van.
He supposes he has been hurled clear. He supposes this is
river water.
He stares into the darkness, trying to split a glimpse
through his black blindness.
But what he thought was river is other noises.
As his head clears, harsh noises din at his head,
Like an abrupt waking,
He makes out shapes in the darkness, confusion of
movement.
He sees heavy rain glittering the night, he feels it.
He sees he crawls on his hands and knees
In the slurry of a cattleyard
Where bellowing cattle lurch in all directions,
Topheavy bulks blundering unpredictably, like
manoeuvring heavy machinery.
He covers himself from blows
Which are not just rain, which are not kicks and
tramplings of the hooves,
But deliberate, aimed blows.
Sticks are coming down on to his head, neck, shoulders
and arms.
Bewildering fierce human shouts jab him to consciousness.
He stands and tries to run but the thick sludge grips his
feet,
And he falls again, gets up again
Staggering slowly, losing both shoes in the quag.
Shapes of men are hunting him across the yard
Among the plunging beasts
With cudgels, with intent to kill him.
The cattle wallow and skid in the dark,
Their frightened bellowing magnifies them. From a raw,
high lamp
Broad sweeping strokes of rainy light come and go,
wheeling and thrusting.
He shields his head and tries to see his attackers’ faces
Among the colliding masses and tossing silhouettes.
Caught in the flashing diagonals
The faces seem to be all wide-stretched mouth, like
lampreys.
They roar at him, as at driven cattle in a slaughter-house.
Their bodies are deformed by oilskins
And their sticks come down out of darkness.
But now they draw off.
Lumb feels a reprieve, a lightening
Though the cattle continue to mill round and press closer
As if still multiplying out of the earth itself.
They are stripping their throats with terror-clamour
But they leave him his space.
He kneels up under the rain.
He shouts to the men.
He tells them who he is, he asks who they are
And what is happening.
What has he done and what do they want?
His voice struggles small in the grievous uproar of the
animals
Which now surge towards him as if helplessly tilted, with
sprawling legs,
And now as helplessly away from him
Like cattle on a foundering ship among overhanging and
crumbling cliffs of surge.
One man comes close, his oilskins flash in the downpour.
He hands Lumb a sodden paper, as if it were some
explanation.
Lumb scrutinises it but can make nothing out in the
broken rays,
As it disintegrates in his fingers, weak as a birth
membrane.
Now the murder-shouts are redoubled
And the malice redoubled. The sticks flash their arcs,
The cattle churn a vortex, leaning together
Shouldering, shining masses, bellowing outrage and fear.
It is like a dam bursting, masonry and water-mass
mingled.
Goring at each other, riding each other,
Heads low and heads high, uphooking and shaken horns,
Plungings as over fences, flinging up tails
And stretched out tongues.
Lumb is knocked spinning, recovers and is again knocked
spinning.
He runs with them, among them, as they circle.
He tries to find a hold on their wet, strenuous backs,
To lift himself above their colliding sides, and to be
carried.
Sticks lash at him, across the backs.
Suddenly everything runs looser.
The stampede is flowing to freedom.
He runs half-carried and squashed, and kicked.
Then legs are all round him.
Then he lies under hooves, only hearing the floundering
thunder,
As if he lay under a steadily collapsing building
No longer feeling anything,
From a far light-house of watchfulness, a far height of
separateness
Observing and timing its second after second
Still going on and still going on
Till it stops.
After some time of silence
He draws his limbs to him.
He lies buried in mud,
His face into mud, his mouth full of mud.
Everything has left him, except the rain, ponderous and
cold.
He tries again to remember, through the confusion of
fright,
But it is like trying to strike a match in such rain, and he
gives up.
It is downpour dawn
On a silvery plain of hoof-ploughed mud.
He stands for a while
Feeling the rain, like a close armour of lead, chilling and
hardening.
Not knowing what to do, or where to go now.
He stands spitting out mud, trying to clean his hands,
Letting the hard rain beat his upturned face, letting it
hurt his eyelids.
Now he walks up a slight incline
And finds Evans’s body.
Evans is crushed into the mud, as if a load of steel had
just been lifted off him.
Near him, Walsall the publican,
His limbs twisted into mud, like the empty arms and legs
Of a ploughed-in scarecrow.
So, one by one, the men of his parish,
Faces upward or downward, rag bodies.
And now he recalls the cattle stampede, an ugly glare of
shock with shapes in it.
Beyond that, his mind dissolves.
He looks at the bodies. No explanation occurs to him.
They are all there is to it.
But now he hears a sharp crying. He looks for it, as for a
clue.
Ahead, a hare-like small animal, humped on the mud,
Shivers crying,
With long hare-like screams, under the dawn.
It lets him approach.
It is the head of a woman
Who has been buried alive to the neck.
Lumb bends to the face,
He draws aside the rain-plastered hair.
It is Hagen’s wife, Pauline.
Her staring eyes seem not to register his presence.
He calls to her, he speaks to her softly, as to a patient in
a coma,
But she continues to scream
As if something hidden under the mud
Were biting into her.
Near her, sticking up out of the mud,
The red head of Mrs Dunworth
Moves and cries.
She cries through the draggled tails of her hair.
He wipes mud from her mud-spattered mouth but his
fingers are still too muddy.
He pushes aside her hair, letting the rain beat down her face,
He presses her brow back so that her face tilts to take the
rain
He calls to her sharply. She continues to scream
Ignoring him,
And though his hand presses back her face, her eyes still
watch across the plain of mud
As if the last horror
Were approaching beneath its surface.
Nearby
The small soaked head of Mrs Davies
A cry welling from her lips, hopeless,
As from the lips of a child that cries itself to sleep,
While her wide eyes, like pebbles, stare through her thin
fringe
As if her only life
Were disappearing slowly in the rain-fogged distance.
One by one he finds them.
The women of his parish are congregated here,
Buried alive
Around the rim of a crater
Under the drumming downpour.
And now he sees
In the bottom of the crater
Something moving.
Something squirming in a well of liquid mud,
Almost getting out
Then sliding back in, with horrible reptile slowness.
And now it lifts a head of mud, a face of mud is watching
him.
It is calling to him
Through a moving uncertain hole in the mud face.
It reaches towards him with mud hands
Seeming almost human.
He slides down into the crater,
Thinking this one creature that he can free.
He stretches his foot towards the drowning creature of
mud
In the sink at the centre.
Hands grip his ankle, he feels the weight.
The hands climb his leg.
He draws the mud being up, a human shape
That embraces him as he embraces it.
And now he looks up for some way out
Under the torn falling sky.
The rain striking across the mud face washes it.
It is a woman’s face,
A face as if sewn together from several faces.
A baboon beauty face,
A crudely stitched patchwork of faces,
But the eyes slide,
Alive and electrical, like liquid liquorice behind the
stitched lids,
Lumb moves to climb, to half-crawl
And feels her embrace tighten.
He holds her more securely
And with his free hand tries to dig a hook-hold in the clay
wall.
Her embrace tightens stronger
As if a powerful spring trap bit into his resistance.
He braces to free himself.
Her stitch-face grins into his face and his spine cracks.
Suddenly he is afraid.
He turns all his strength on to her, straining to burst her
grip.
With the heels of his hands he pushes at her face.
She only clamps tighter, as if she were drowning,
As if she were already unconscious, as if now her body
alone were fighting to save itself.
And his shouts of rage
Bring to the rim of the crater
Silhouetted against the dawn raincloud
Men in oilskins.
Lumb and the clinging woman are hauled out.
They are carried, still knotted together.
As they go, Lumb fights to keep his lung-space.
Her grip is cutting into his body like wires.
In a flurry of oilskins
He is held down on straw.
Already paralysed, he can no longer move even his face,
As if under stony anaesthetic.
He swoons into and out of unconsciousness,
Vaguely renewing his effort to see what is being done to
him.
Dancing lights and shapes interfere with his sight.
Men are kneeling over him.
A swell of pain, building from his throat and piling
downwards
Lifts him suddenly out of himself.
Somehow he has emerged and is standing over himself.
He sees himself being delivered of the woman from the
pit,
The baboon woman,
Flood-sudden, like the disembowelling of a cow
She gushes from between his legs, a hot splendour
In a glistening of oils,
In a radiance like phosphorous he sees her crawl and
tremble.