Gaudete (9 page)
Authors: Ted Hughes
But already hands grip his head,
And the clamp of tightness, which has not shifted,
Is a calf-clamp on his body.
He can hear her whole body bellowing.
His own body is being twisted and he hears her scream
out.
He feels bones give. He feels himself slide.
He fights in hot liquid.
He imagines he has been torn in two at the waist and this
is his own blood everywhere.
He sees struggle of bodies.
Men are fighting to hold her down, they cannot.
He crawls,
He frees his hands and face of blood-clotted roping tissues.
He sees light.
He sees her face undeformed and perfect.
Blinded again with liquid, but free
He flounders – away, anywhere further away,
On his hands and knees.
And he is crawling out of the river
Glossed as an exhausted otter, and trailing
A mane of water.
He flops among wild garlic, and lies, shivering,
Vomiting water.
At last, pulling himself up by a sapling,
He sees his van, sitting out in a meadow,
Beside the river, under full sunlight.
Figures of men stand waiting round it.
Dazed and dazzled, with trembling legs he walks towards
them.
But already there is nobody.
Only starlings, seething and glittering among the
buttercups.
With a sudden râle they go up, in a drumming silent
escape.
His van sits empty, the doors wide open, as if parked for
a picnic.
Has cycled eight miles to the city.
He goes into a chemist’s.
Spectacled, heron-crested, Tetley
Splays excitedly
Large glossy prints of badgers in den-mouths
With firefly eyes, among wood-anemones.
Garten is his informer
For the night life and underground activity
Of the woods
And all the secretive operations of birds
Which it is his infatuation
To photograph. Garten is his guide.
The urgency of the return favour
Which Garten now requires
Alarms Tetley, a little.
Can a roll of film be so consequential?
Curiosity blinks through him. His afternoon
Is readjusted.
Strips in his room. Resumes
Personal possession of his body
Like a boxer after his fight.
Maud hands him a towel, she pours coffee,
Stokes bigger the log fire, which is already too big.
Positions the high-backed chair, thronelike, in the middle
of the room, fronting the flames.
Lays out fresh clothes on the low bed
Below the window
Which is also a door on to the furnace of the bright world
The chill bustle
Of the blossom-rocking afternoon
The gusty lights of purplish silver, brightenings, sudden
darkenings
Teeming with wings and cries
Under toppling lumps of heaven.
She leaves him.
He half-lies in his chair and lets exhaustion take over.
His only effort now
Is pushing ahead and away the seconds, second after
second,
Now this second, patiently, and now this,
Safe seconds
In which he need do nothing, and decide nothing,
And in which nothing whatsoever can happen.
Killing time in the city, contemplating the window of a gunshop, sees through the reflection into interior gloom.
Major Hagen is lifting to the light the underbelly detail of one of a pair of collector’s pieces. Which he covets. He brandishes the gun, its lightness, with a sudden fury of expertise. Flings it up
To cover a fictive woodcock
Escaping from Garten’s hair
Into the free sky above the Cathedral.
Are locked
To an archaic stone carving, propped on his mantel,
above the fire.
The simply hacked-out face of a woman
Gazes back at Lumb
Between her raised, wide-splayed, artless knees
With a stricken expression.
Her square-cut, primitive fingers, beneath her buttocks
Are pulling herself wide open –
An entrance, an exit.
An arched target centre.
A mystery offering
Into which Lumb is lowering his drowse.
Ringdoves are ascending and descending
Between the rectory lawn and the rookery beeches.
And a thrush singing – slicing at everything
With its steely voice
Like a scalpel,
And thrush, lofty, calmer beyond thrush,
And ringdove mulling bluely beyond ringdove
Like treetops, blueing and blurring, stirring beyond
treetops.
Heavens opening higher beyond heavens
As the afternoon widens.
Strolls in the Cathedral
Among rustling tourists and scrambled whispers.
The nervy crowd is blocked.
Some ecclesiastical dignitary,
Mummified senile, bowed nearly double,
Like a Bishop being brought from his tomb
For an important convention,
Supported by two spidery clerics,
Processions shufflingly towards the exit,
Ritualises a whole aisle, his advance
Like an invalid’s first inches, his features
A healing, pinkish-purple wound, just
Relieved of its dressings and now airing
In the stained light. Garten stands back. All
Visitors stand back
As from the luckless singled-out casualty
Being nursed towards the ambulance.
Garten sits on a bench, watching the children feed pigeons and the toddlers chase them.
The uninterrupted sun presses Garten’s face. He unbuttons his shirt, feeling marginally reckless. The winter tensions ease in his skin. How simple, to vanish. To desert the whole campaign. The station is two hundred yards. Emerge in Australia.
A cloud-shadow chills the precincts. He fastens his shirt up.
The prints are ready.
Garten collects them without explanation. Tetley stares after him as he goes, as alarmed by that caught flash as one of his own birds.
Is welding the bar of a harrow.
Sizzling drops of glare fling out
Their wriggling smokes.
The shield-mask lifts away.
The red spot dulls. Evans sees
First Garten
Then the photograph.
He comes erect, waiting for the world to cool
Around the details.
He understands, without too much trouble –
As when he picked up the severed finger end
Under the metal cutter
That what has happened now has happened for good.
But he has escaped it already.
He has stepped that infinitesimal hair-breadth aside
From the point of impact.
He studies the photograph
Like a doubtful bill
Which already he does not intend to pay.
Evans drives. Garten, beside him, explains. Evans drives calm. Garten cannot believe that Evans is as amused as he looks. Garten’s voice goes on and on, like a bad conscience protecting itself, against the engine, against the pouring gardens.
Evans’ wife
Is ironing. She sees
Evans’ face in the doorway. Her heart
Leaps like a mouse, then hides.
The photograph
Appears, like a burn, on the shirt she is ironing.
Her husband cannot interpret
The foolish abandoned
Stupor of her look. She can hear him
Saying something.
Garten is surprised
By a cringe of pity.
Evans’ first blow crushes her lip, jolts her hair into a fine
dark veil,
And fixes her in the corner by the fireplace
With angled limbs. She rearranges her slight, small body
Tentatively erect. His questions
Are travelling too fast, and they are not stopping
For her to answer. His second blow
Carries her into the fireplace
From which he snatches her back, as if concerned,
As if to safety.
Now his arm rises and falls, and she bows beneath it.
Garten watches like one whose turn comes next,
Marvelling
At what a body can take.
She is sobbing.
She will tell everything.
Evans stops, without releasing her
From the pressure of his eyes
Smooths down his upcrested hair.
She huddles, small-shouldered, over the bleeding
That drips into her hands.
She starts to tell, coaxed by questions
Which are converted blows.
Her story makes its blurred way, through sobs and
tremblings.
Mr Lumb has a new religion.
He is starting Christianity all over again, right from the
start.
He has persuaded all the women in the parish.
Only women can belong to it.
They are all in it and he makes love to them all, all the
time.
Because a saviour
Is to be born in this village, and Mr Lumb is to be the
earthly father.
So all the women in the village
Must give him a child
Because nobody knows which one the saviour will be.
Evans and Garten forget everything, in a ravenous listening. Even after she has finished Evans continues to stare and question. It seems he might attack again. She tells and tells it again. She scrapes out the dregs of telling it.
It has nothing to do with loving the vicar.
She doesn’t love him.
Though poor Janet Estridge was infatuated with him and so is her sister and so is Pauline Hagen and Hilda Dunworth and Barbara Walsall and her and her and her and her, it’s true, all those are infatuated with him
But she doesn’t love him at all.
She doesn’t even like him. He frightens her.
She doesn’t know how she got into it, she only wishes she
was out of it.
He must have hypnotised her, she is sure he did.
Evans turns from the revelation
Radiant with incredulity
Like a bar of furnaced iron. He meets Garten’s eyes.
Garten has no chance to move.
His brain moves, but his body is too late to catch up.
Then his long hair lashes upward,
His jawbone jars sideways,
The amazed loose face-flesh jerks at its roots.
His limbs scatter, like a bundle of loose rods.
He falls into a pit.
The pattern of the oilcloth returns slowly, magnified, and close to Garten’s eye. He feels its glossy cold on his cheek. He retains the snapshot picture of Evans’ fist in the air.
But Evans has disappeared. Mrs Evans is hurrying out, putting on her coat. She leaves the door wide.
Garten half-lies
Retching. He vomits
On to the oilcloth
Of the blacksmith’s kitchen.
Is doing something with a white pigeon.
It balances on her folded fingers, as she carries it into the
bare, bare-boarded room.
Maud’s face is closed
Like a new mother’s over her baby’s first suckling.
She kneels on the bare boards.
The pigeon flaps up, glide-flaps
Sinuously round the room, returns to the floor
Between her hands, wobblingly walks.
Its tilted head studies her, its pink eye. It blinks.
In the room above
Lumb’s head has sunk sideways.
He is not sleeping.
His eyes, fixed, seeing nothing, direct their non-gaze
By accident of his neck’s angle
Toward the carpet.
His lips loll idiot loose. His mask
Is loosened, as with ultimate exhaustion.
His fingers wince.
Maud, in her bare room below, has wrenched the pigeon’s
head off.
Her blood-smeared fingers are fluffed with white down.
Now her hooking thumbs break the bird open, like a
tightly-taped parcel.
Its wing-panics spin downy feathers over the dusty
boards.
She is muttering something.
Lumb’s mouth lumps with movement.
Sounds lump in his squeezed throat.
His lungs struggle, as under water.
His leg-muscles, his arms, jerk. His hands jerk.
Unconscious he tries to get up
As if a soul were trying to get out of a drowning body.