The Whitsun Weddings (2 page)

Walking around in the park

Should feel better than work:

The lake, the sunshine,

The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises

Beyond black-stockinged nurses –

Not a bad place to be.

Yet it doesn’t suit me,

Being one of the men

You meet of an afternoon:

Palsied old step-takers,

Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,

Waxed-fleshed out-patients

Still vague from accidents,

And characters in long coats

Deep in the litter-baskets –

All dodging the toad work

By being stupid or weak.

Think of being them!

Hearing the hours chime,

Watching the bread delivered,

The sun by clouds covered,

The children going home;

Think of being them,

Turning over their failures

By some bed of lobelias,

Nowhere to go but indoors,

No friends but empty chairs –

No, give me my in-tray,

My loaf-haired secretary,

My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:

What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four

At the end of another year?

Give me your arm, old toad;

Help me down Cemetery Road.

If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

   Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense

Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence

The river’s level drifting breadth began,

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept

   For miles inland,

A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.

Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and

Canals with floatings of industrial froth;

A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

And rose: and now and then a smell of grass

Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth

Until the next town, new and nondescript,

Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise

   The weddings made

Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys

The interest of what’s happening in the shade,

And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls

I took for porters larking with the mails,

And went on reading. Once we started, though,

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event

   Waving goodbye

To something that survived it. Struck, I leant

More promptly out next time, more curiously,

And saw it all again in different terms:

The fathers with broad belts under their suits

And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;

An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,

The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,

the lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.

   Yes, from cafés

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed

Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days

Were coming to an end. All down the line

Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;

The last confetti and advice were thrown,

And, as we moved, each face seemed to define

Just what it saw departing: children frowned

At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

     The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral;

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared

At a religious wounding. Free at last,

And loaded with the sum of all they saw,

We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.

Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast

Long shadows over major roads, and for

Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say

  
I
nearly
died
,

A dozen marriages got under way.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

– An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,

And someone running up to bowl – and none

Thought of the others they would never meet

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

I thought of London spread out in the sun,

Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat: 

There we were aimed. And as we raced across

    Bright knots of rail

Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss

Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail

Travelling coincidence; and what it held

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Oh, no one can deny

That Arnold is less selfish than I.

He married a woman to stop her getting away

Now she’s there all day,

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work

She takes as her perk

To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier

And the electric fire,

And when he finishes supper

Planning to have a read at the evening paper

It’s
Put
a
screw
in
this
wall
–

He has no time at all,

With the nippers to wheel round the houses

And the hall to paint in his old trousers

And that letter to her mother

Saying
Won’t
you
come
for
the
summer
.

To compare his life and mine

Makes me feel a swine:

Oh, no one can deny

That Arnold is less selfish than I.

But wait, not so fast:

Is there such a contrast?

He was out for his own ends

Not just pleasing his friends;

And if it was such a mistake

He still did it for his own sake,

Playing his own game.

So he and I are the same,

Only I’m a better hand

At knowing what I can stand

Without them sending a van –

Or I suppose I can.

On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,

Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:

No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass –

Mam,
get
us
one
of
them
to
keep
.

Living toys are something novel,

But it soon wears off somehow.

Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel –

Mam,
we’re
playing
funerals
now
.

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

Those long uneven lines

Standing as patiently

As if they were stretched outside

The Oval or Villa Park,

The crowns of hats, the sun

On moustached archaic faces

Grinning as if it were all

An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached

Established names on the sunblinds,

The farthings and sovereigns,

And dark-clothed children at play

Called after kings and queens,

The tin advertisements

For cocoa and twist, and the pubs

Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:

The place-names all hazed over

With flowering grasses, and fields

Shadowing Domesday lines

Under wheat’s restless silence;

The differently-dressed servants

With tiny rooms in huge houses,

The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word – the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

Lying together there goes back so far,

An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest

Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why

At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind.

The large cool store selling cheap clothes

Set out in simple sizes plainly

(Knitwear, Summer Casuals, Hose,

In browns and greys, maroon and navy)

Conjures the weekday world of those 

Who leave at dawn low terraced houses

Timed for factory, yard and site.

But past the heaps of shirts and trousers

Spread the stands of Modes For Night:

Machine-embroidered, thin as blouses, 

Lemon, sapphire, moss-green, rose

Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls and Shorties

Flounce in clusters. To suppose

They share that world, to think their sort is

Matched by something in it, shows

How separate and unearthly love is,

Or women are, or what they do,

Or in our young unreal wishes

Seem to be: synthetic, new,

And natureless in ecstasies.

When getting my nose in a book

Cured most things short of school,

It was worth ruining my eyes

To know I could still keep cool,

And deal out the old right hook

To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,

Evil was just my lark:

Me and my cloak and fangs

Had ripping times in the dark.

The women I clubbed with sex!

I broke them up like meringues.

Don’t read much now: the dude

Who lets the girl down before

The hero arrives, the chap

Who’s yellow and keeps the store,

Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:

Books are a load of crap.

Watching the shied core

Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,

Shows less and less of luck, and more and more

Of failure spreading back up the arm

Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,

The apple unbitten in the palm.

Closed like confessionals, they thread

Loud noons of cities, giving back

None of the glances they absorb.

Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,

They come to rest at any kerb:

All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,

Or women coming from the shops

Past smells of different dinners, see

A wild white face that overtops

Red stretcher-blankets momently

As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness

That lies just under all we do,

And for a second get it whole,

So permanent and blank and true.

The fastened doors recede.
Poor
soul
,

They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air

May go the sudden shut of loss

Round something nearly at an end,

And what cohered in it across

The years, the unique random blend

Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far

From the exchange of love to lie

Unreachable inside a room

The traffic parts to let go by

Brings closer what is left to come,

And dulls to distance all we are.