Gaudete (11 page)

Read Gaudete Online

Authors: Ted Hughes

Is looking right through the photograph to his unburied daughter and the stump-raw amputation of that morning’s event.

He is sharply aware of his age. The recurrent idea to kill Lumb keeps foundering in the proliferating concerns for what ought rightly to be done, in a civic and rational manner. Apart from taking council with Hagen.

And what is this other strange tale, this new religion? Something diabolical, concocted, filthy, very possible. A lecherous priest and a gaggle of spoofed women. Hysterical bored country wives. Credulous unfortunate females.

Evans is giving his simple statement. Evans, it seems, intends to walk into the church basement tonight and see what’s going on at the W. I. meeting. Anybody else will be welcome. But nobody must think they’re going to restrain him, when he meets Mr Lumb.

Looking at Evans’ dangerous, thick-set face, Estridge feels the draughty lack of his uniform. He feels the sheer-fall possibilities of being left out. But mostly he feels age, the wrinkle-crisp caul of the life-husk, an inert scratch-numb detachment. It would be so easy now to do nothing.
 

But then the sudden raving fantasy comes

Like a lump of insane music

Pulping Lumb’s skull with an axe

And Estridge’s heart bounds again and flutters.

Drive into the gravelled court behind Hagen’s house, circling the old well which is surmounted by a looted Silenus, decorated with fantails. Mrs Hagen, negotiating the grass-verge, drives out past them without a glance.

Hagen’s man is holding a tall bay mare by a snaffle. Hagen, leaning his chest against a steel gate, watches the slender sooty stallion descending from its horsebox, on powerful springs, restrained by an insect-thin manager.

The too-heavy clay of Hagen’s face is sagging as the day lengthens. His eyes are fixed in a spiritless nicotine-yellow dullness. Estridge, coming beside him, hands him the photograph without a word, casually as a cigarette.

Then stands watching the flashing ballet of the two horses, as they touch noses and flare tails, like great fish, like yachts.

Hagen, absorbing the photograph, massages his brow between thumb and forefinger, as if resting. The stallion whinnies, a squealing barrel-echoing snigger, as he feels his power swell, glitteringly, in the odours of the mare.

Hagen is contemplating the photograph, which seems very satisfactory, as if it were a just-completed jigsaw. He lifts his brow, to raise his head slightly, letting his whale’s eye, small and cold, rest on Estridge. He is thinking: so it is proved, and now they want me to do something about it.

Taking his old friend’s arm, he leads him toward the house, as if to impart something even worse. Their old wars go with them, cleaned and simplified, under the glare sunlight.

Evans, a grin stuck on his face, watches the stallion sprawling on the high mare, like a drunk on a table.

Estridge’s shout interrupts.

Leans his bicycle on a low wall, between Westlake’s car and Dunworth’s, and goes straight into the house. He pauses, surrounded, as by sudden guards, by all that polished modernity, the positioned furniture, in ultra colour, designed by Dunworth himself, like the demortalised organs of a body.

Through and beyond, framed against the panoramic feature window, he sees the two men sitting, a whisky bottle between them on a low table, and glasses in their hands.

Dunworth is discussing killing himself, which is what he seems to consider appropriate. Westlake does not say what he thinks. He makes provisional noises.
 

Their sentences

Falter and evaporate.

Bottomless silence drinks their ideas.

They are trying to imagine logicality.

Neither can quite feel the seriousness of their own words

                                                               or of the others.

They stare out, like yarded beasts, across the blue-

                                  layered monotony of the distance,

And sip.

They feel gently around in the illusory emptiness of these

                                                                         minutes,

Which are passing with such crowded rapidity.

They are quietly aghast

At the certainty that sooner or later they will have to move

Westlake is afraid that when he moves he will do

                something barbarous, disproportionate, insane.

Dunworth is afraid that if he is left alone he might well

              kill himself in a light-minded effort to be sincere.

Westlake hunches hooded in tortoised concentration,

                                  behind his dark-rimmed spectacles.

Dunworth’s face is exposed and woebegone, like a

                                        beggarwoman’s at a crossroads.

Garten introduces the photograph.

With one glance Dunworth has seen too much. Now he only wants to escape right away, fast enough and far enough for all this to disappear in slipstream and exhaust. He wants to lie down and sleep for fifty years in some utterly different landscape, and wake up in another age.

Westlake stares into the photograph as into a culture under a microscope.

Dunworth paces about the room. He can feel the whole day slipping like some horrible landslide, towards a brink. Everything is on the move, everything inside this house is on its way to the brink, the house itself, everything in the garden and those trees, it’s all on the slide. Even the clouds. The whole day. And himself in the middle of it, helpless.
 

His skin panics with hot and cold draughts

As Westlake stands up. 

Are assembling in the church basement.

Mrs Davies is in charge of refreshments. Mrs Evans follows her instructions. Dainty triangular sandwiches, prettily stacked. Tinned salmon, liver paste, cucumber, lettuce and tomato.
 

A hushed animation, sombre and uneasy.

Something is wrong and everybody is aware of it.

It is not only the gossip funeral for Janet Estridge.

Mrs Davies peels a blue razor blade from its wrapper.

The glans of a withered fungus

Receives its edge, and releases slices

Into each of three sandwiches.

Mrs Davies sets these apart.

Mrs Evans is pouring a milky liquid from a medicine

                                                  bottle into the tea-urn.

The loudspeakers cough and clear their throats at the

                                                      corners of the ceiling.

Betty has put a tape on the stereo.

Suddenly the women are engulfed

Under archaic music of pipes and drums,

An inane cycle of music, hoarse and metallic.

Mrs Davies is setting out cigarettes of her own blend.

Plates of sandwiches circulate and trays of cups of tea.

The birdlike agitation of women, fussy, tense, watchful,

                                                                             thins

As the music works behind their faces

And a preoccupation deepens.

A snaking coil of smoke materialises.

Already their eyes are glazed like young cattle.

They are waiting for the first shiver of power.

Something is obstructing it
.

A difficulty, the power will not flow.

The music is tangling with some obstacle.

Everybody is here, except Maud. And the Master.

Jennifer

Knows more and more clearly that she should not have

                                                                          come.

Mrs Evans shuts herself up in busyness.

Women in groups wait nervously for things to warm up.

Mrs Dunworth sits with the doctor’s wife and Mrs Hagen

A little apart,

Like three asked to stay behind after the doctor’s tests –

All are quiet with something like fear –

Nearly a definite prickle of fear.

Like passengers in an aircraft, just as it lifts off the

                                                                      runway,

Hearing a peculiar note in the engine.

Betty turns the music up purposefully. 

Is ready.

Black lace in her hair,

But under her black shawl

A long dress of white satin, a bridal dress, flashes as she

                                                                             moves.

Felicity is sitting with brilliant eyes, at the kitchen table.

The drink Maud served her

Has made her ears ring. Her lips feel numb.

Her fingertips feel enormous.

She is waiting to be conducted to the meeting

And sits watching Maud fixedly.

It occurs to her

That Maud’s regalia is some special craziness

Connected to her dumbness.

Lumb promises to follow within minutes.

Felicity appeals with a last look.

Words seem suddenly too big, they refuse to shape in her

                                                                              mouth.

She interprets his look as reassurance.

Actually his face is impenetrable.

Now as Felicity follows Maud out

She takes a deep breath, and for a moment has to pause

For the sudden smouldering fire under her midriff.

She sees the church.

It looks like an evil black shape painted on a wall.

Simultaneously she remembers that she left no note for

                                                             her grandfather.

She is heavily aware of her lips, lying together as if they

                                                                were swollen

And of the inner surface of her thighs brushing together,

                                                      as she follows Maud.

She feels Maud’s madness in that processional stately

                                                walk, flashing whiteness,

As they go among the graves.

Is cramming books into a trunk.

He crams in clothing.

Among the clothing

He nests, with hurried care,

His magical apparatus.

He lifts the stone woman from the mantel

And settles her snugly among underclothes.

He searches in the box, in the drawer –

Something is missing. His dagger is missing. His weapon

                                                                    of weapons.

He scrabbles, he unearths – vainly. He listens.

He knows

It is not in this room.

Enters the church basement, pausing impressively

Like a slightly tipsy actress.

Maud is impressive in her get-up – and frightening.

Felicity is frightened

Seeing so many confusedly familiar faces

Looking unfamiliar

As if police held her.

She meets Mrs Davies’ mystified savage look

But it is Mrs Davies’ welcoming smile,

Her surprise of affection.

It is Mrs Davies’ arm round her shoulder

Guiding her among the confusion of women, the harsh

               music, and all the movement of hands and faces

Which numb her every second more deeply.

Vaguely she looks round for Maud.

Maud is already poised motionless at the corner of the

                                                                        rectory.

She is watching Lumb.

He is lugging his trunk out though the back door.

After backing his car up, he tilts the trunk into the boot,

                     closes the boot, and returns into the house.

Maud is crossing the space of gravel.

Passing the open car-window her arm dips inside, and she

                                                                           goes on

Round the far corner of the house.

Half-way across the graveyard, she hesitates at a freshly-dug not yet occupied grave, and dropping the ignition keys between the covering planks, goes on toward the church.

Lumb is making a last furious search through his room, ransacking drawers and cupboards.

The assembly of husbands and their sympathisers,

              muffled by ceiling and walls and cigarette smoke,

Is a squabble of unlistened-to voices

Trying to become a meeting.

Mr Walsall continues to draw and push forward the

                                                               required drinks.

The photograph lies on the bar.

Garten sits near it, watching over his property, installed

                                             in the focus of excitement.

Evans keeps his print concealed, he has had enough of it.

Behind backs and elbows

Dunworth repeatedly tries to introduce a fuddled

                                                      reasonable attitude.

His mouth moves soundlessly in the din.

Westlake is saying nothing, he listens to everybody

Keeping his own thoughts untangled.

Holroyd in a big consoling voice wants to see proof

Because a photograph is not really proof.

He for one can’t believe it’s quite as lurid as everybody

                                                            wants to think.

And he’s not going to commit himself till he gets facts.

As for going up to the church, he can’t see what that will

                                                                  prove at all.

A shout of voices swamps him,

Complicating and simplifying the possibilities, faces are

                                                      jerking and heads.

Full pints stream over boots, glasses tilt empty and

                                                                       waiting,

As Walsall’s arms move steadily.

Nobody quite knows what to do.

They continue to drink more forcefully in search of

                                                     definition and action.

They all know what they want to happen

And they drink to make it more likely

So that the criss-cross push and pull of voices works

                                                steadily in one direction.

Evans keeps hauling the tangle into a tight hard knot and

                                                      humping it further.

When they hear his voice, everybody listens.

As he gets drunker, his memory becomes more naked and

                                                                   ungoverned.

He feels more and more his strength, feeling more and

                                    more the weakness of the others.

His little eyes become deadlier.

He gleams with impatience to do the direct, conclusive,

                                                                simple thing.

He has anaesthetised all thought of consequences.

Only old Smayle, behind backs in the corner,

Keeps his humour – as amazed, nevertheless,

As he is amused.

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