Gaudete (7 page)

Read Gaudete Online

Authors: Ted Hughes

Bowed at the river’s edge, knee in wet gravel,

Washes blood from his face and head, and dabs at the

                                                                         wound

With his already bloodied handkerchief.
 

The wobbling blaze, the sun’s reflection,

Brands his retina.

The trees opposite, gargling black water in their drinking

                                                                          roots,

Arch over blackly, shifting leaf-hands against the dazzle.

A whirl of radiant midges smokes upstream

Simultaneously smokes downstream

Unendingly.

The throat of strong water in the neck of the pool

Is jabbering a babel, to which he listens.

Voices shut him in.

He sees up through a spiralling stair of voices

Into the sun’s blaze cupola.

He recognises voices out of his past.

Peremptory trivial phrases,

Distinct and sudden, behind him and beside him.

One voice is coming clearer, insistent.

It calls his name repeatedly, searchingly.

It is his own voice.

As the other voices thicken over him

He manages, as from his deep listening, to answer: ‘I’m

                                                                           here.’

The oily backwater, with the sparkle of floatage,

Turns, closely focussed.

He sees a fish rise

Off the point of the long broken finger of boulders

Which pokes out into the lake, from the island.

The lake is oil-still

As if it were pressed flat,

Ponderous-still, like mercury.

The warm weight of thundery air,

Immobile, and swollen with its load,

Hangs ready to split softly.

The tops of the blue pyramid mountains, in the afterlight

Tangle with ragged, stilled, pink-lit clouds

That hang above themselves in the lake’s stillness.

Felicity huddles in the boat,

Which rests in the stony shallows.

She is frightened by this enormous cloud and mountain

                                                       and water stillness.

And by this tiny scrubby island of heather

With its few staringly white birches.

She suggests they row back. It’s going to rain. It’s going

                                                                    to be dark.

And this place is awful.

Her own voice frightens her in the vast listening hush.

The fish rises again, feeding quietly off the point.

Then out on the lake, a slap.

Like a shot.

And again, somewhere far out across the great stillness,

                                                                        another.

The fish rings gently again, off the near point.

He’ll just try that fish.

He works out on to the finger, warily, from boulder to

                                                                        boulder.

She watches his balancing form,

Black against the steely lake, under the electrical nearness

                                                        of the mountains.

Lightning flutters, orange and purple, in the high silence

Over the peaks, behind the clouds,

And beneath the floor of the lake.

Now he is getting out line.

She looks down at her book, there is just light to read.

Lumb secures his foothold, and lays out a long line and

                                                                          waits.

The fish tilts up again, off to the left.

He waits.

It sips again, closer, patrolling its beat.

He lifts his line and puts his big evening fly down in its path

On the lake’s glass

Over the pit of hanging mountains and torn, stilled cloud

And quakings and tremors of violet.

Felicity has stopped reading

Though she continues to look at the page.

A little finger of fear has touched her.

Something nudges the half-grounded boat.

She looks up sharply.

Low ripples are coming ashore.

Twenty yards out in the small island bay, the head and

                                              shoulders of a dark shape

Are watching her.

She smothers her fright, telling herself it is a seal.

But now it is moving.

It is coming towards her, still upright.

She sees it is a man.

His ripples crawl away on all sides.

As he emerges to the waist, she sees it is Lumb.

She sees he is naked.

She is astonished, she asks if he went for a swim.

At the same time

She sees Lumb still poised on the tip of the rock, sixty

                                                 yards away, motionless.

Again, at the same time, this obviously is Lumb.

Who grasps the stern

And grinning heaves himself naked and streaming into the

                                                                          boat.

Yet it cannot be Lumb.

Suddenly she is terrified.

She screams and jumps anyhow out of the boat and screaming towards that figure on the point she splashes ashore.

As Lumb hears her first scream

Which jerks at the skin of his skull

A black thumb

Lifts out on the water, and presses the fly under.

He fastens into the fish automatically,

And turns.

He sees Felicity stumbling up on to the island,

And a lean leaping figure, moving like a monkey,

Bounding after her.

But it is a good fish

And it runs deep, and he cannot turn it.

Felicity’s screams, one after another, procession out

                                                               across the lake

And jangle against the mountains

As Lumb tries to wedge his rod-butt somehow in among

                                                      the rocks at his feet.

Till he abandons it with a curse.

He leaps balancing along the rocky spit

And slips and plunges heavily, in over the waist, gouging

                                              his thigh, his hip, his ribs

And flounders back on hands and knees, scoring his hands

                                                               on the granite,

And gets up wet through and hurt.

Felicity and the other have disappeared among the turfy hummocks and hollows of the island, among the birches.

He follows her screams into a boggy gulley.

The naked stranger is already dragging her toward the

                                                                           lake.

Lumb brings him down in the shallows and the two

                                           wrestle in knee-deep water.

On the painful irregular rocks.

And now Lumb realises

That his antagonist is his own double

And that he is horribly strong.

As they roll together in the water

Felicity gets to her feet and lifts an oar out of the boat.

The two separate and Lumb scrambles to dry land.

His opponent comes close after him and kicks his feet

                                                            from under him.

Rolling on to his back and looking up, Lumb sees the

                                               other standing over him.

His raised arms are poising aloft a rock the size of a baby.

Felicity swings the heavy oar horizontally across the

                                                                 raised arms.

The rock drops on to the attacker’s own head and he too

                                                                            falls.

But levers himself up, and sways again to his feet

Doubled over and holding his head, blood spilling between

                                                                  his fingers.

Lumb pulls Felicity away.

They clamber up on to the turf among the birches.

Their feet and knees skid in wetness, and Lumb sees the

                                                              lake is boiling.

And realises the rain has come

A pressing warm weight on his head and shoulders.

The mountains have disappeared in a twilight mass of

                                                                 foggy rain.

Their pyramids leap in and out of blue-blackness,

Trembling in violet glare, like shadow puppets, and

                                                           vanishing again.

And thunder trundles continually around the perimeter of

                                            the deeply padded heaven

And through the cellars of the lake

With splittings of giant trees and echoing of bronze flues

                                                     and mazy corridors,

And repeated, closer bomb-bursts, which seem to shower

                                                                    hot fragments.

Suddenly under a long electrocuted wriggler of dazzle

That shudders across the whole sky, for smouldering

                                                                         seconds,

Their attacker glistening and joyous

Bounds over the turf bank and on to them.

Laughing like a maniac, he grabs Felicity’s arm.

With clownish yells and contortions, he starts dragging

                                             her again toward the lake.

Again Lumb knocks him down and the two men wallow

                                                                  pummelling,

Plastered with peat-mud, under the downpour.

Finally, gasping and immobilised, they lie face to face,

                                          gripping each other’s hands,

One grinning and the other appalled.

Now with twistings and knee-splayings, they strain to

      their feet, still locked, and stare at each other panting.

With a shout the other jerks Lumb off his feet and starts

                       hauling him toward the lake, like a sack.

Lumb twists to free his hands, freeing his left hand he

                                                grips his own right wrist.

Felicity too hauls on his arm till he struggles upright.

She embraces his waist, together they pull against the

                                                                         other.

As they wrestle deadlocked, the other begins to gasp with

                                                                            pain.

Lumb’s hand also is being crushed by the other.

He knows his fingers are helpless in that dreadful gripe

Which is bursting his fingertips.

He wrenches to break free as the other

Trying to break away toward the lake

Starts leaping and whirling with unnatural agility

Like a weasel trapped by a foot.

A cramp has locked their grip, hand in hand.

With a sudden screech, the other rips free

Holding aloft his stump from which the hand has

                                                                     vanished,

And uttering long unearthly wails, one after another,

As he plunges into the water.

Lumb tugs to lever up the demonic fingers

Of the torn-off hand, which still grips his own hand.

The other is wallowing in the lake. He rises and falls

And disappears, and rises again, floundering, going out

                                                                         deeper

Till he disappears at last under the rain-churned smoking

                                                                       surface

In the darkening blue.

Lumb flings the freed hand out into the lake after him.

Felicity crouches under the bank of the turf.

She is shivering and sobbing, her face abandoned to her

                                                                        sobbing

As in a great grief.

Lumb embraces her, squeezing her to his sodden body

Under the hammering of the rain, which is now icy,

In the almost darkness.

Rips the road puddles.

It rends hanging holes of echo in the vapour-hung woods.

It slides through the village, slows at the rectory. Accelerates down burrow lanes, grass-heads lashing the side-mirrors, as he searches.

Through fir-tree fringes at last he glimpses the blue van, parked at the house of Dunworth, a young architect, Westlake’s golfing companion.
 

Westlake is phoning from a booth.

Dunworth, eight miles away in the city, called back into his office just as he was leaving for lunch, listens to the voice of his friend.
 

Dunworth moves fast, surprising himself.

And now his white Jaguar sports is tilting at corners, flattening in dips and bobbing on crests, breasting the long straights on a rising note, over the eight miles, as he gnaws his lips and fights the road’s variety.
 

Westlake’s words have supplied the single answer to many

                                                                           clues.

The warp and weft of hints and suspicions,

Knotted, painfully, laboriously, over a long time, into a

                                                                         mesh

Have suddenly dragged taut, with the bulk of a body.

A few sprinkled words

Have transformed a bitter-cored ulcer

Into something delicious.

With one glance at the blue van, he walks into the house,

                                                calling his wife’s name.

He climbs the fondly designed cedar staircase to his

                                                                          studio

Without stealth. He returns casually

As if with some curio to show to a guest

Loading his target pistol, with which he is expert,

And without pausing strides into the lounge.

His red-haired wife

Is lying naked on the couch, almost hidden

By the naked body of Lumb

Who, half-twisting, and supported on one elbow, watches

                                                                     Dunworth

As if waiting for him.

Dunworth has paused.

His brisk executive plan evaporates confusedly.

The sight in front of him

Is so extraordinary and shocking

So much more merciless and explicit than even his most

                                                               daring fantasy

That for a moment

He forgets himself, and simply stares.

He gropes for his lost initiative,

But what he sees, like a surprising blow in a dark room,

Has scattered him.

He raises his pistol meanwhile.

He is breathing hard, to keep abreast of the situation.

He is trying to feel

Whether he is bluffing or is about to become

The puppet

Of some monstrous, real, irreversible act.

He waits for what he will do,

As a relaxed rider, crossing precipitous gulleys

Lets his horse find its way.

He levels the pistol at his wife’s face and holds it there,

                                                                   undecided.

Her red hair is strewn bright and waterish

Across the arm of the couch which pillows her head.

Her large eyes, mascara-smudged in her gleaming face,

                                                                    watch him

Moistly and brilliantly.

Her bold, crudely-cut mouth, relaxed in its strength,

Yields him nothing.

He searches her hot fixed look for some sign of reprieve,

Moving his aim from her brow, to her mouth, to her

                                                                        throat.

She swallows but resettles her head as if to watch him

                                                         more comfortably.

Her nakedness has outstripped his reaction, incredible,

Like the sudden appearance of an arrow, sticking deep in

                                                                      his body,

Seconds before the pain.

It cannot unhappen, and now the pain must come.

The white swell of her stomach, welded so closely

To that other strange body, which at first he hardly

                                                                        notices

But which prints in his brain as something loathsome and deadly, a huge python’s coils, of some alien nature and substance.

He feels a pressure inside his skull, like a long lever

                                                       tightening a winch.

He sees the pistol out there in front of him

As if it were a fixture he were hanging on to, outside a

                                                                       window,

Over a night-drop.

His gold hair seems to sweat.

His sunlamp bronze sweats.

His pale-eyed stare is brittle and impotently severe, like

                                                     the stare of a lizard.

His pistol sinks its aim

Over Lumb’s powerful gymnast’s shoulders.

The sweat-figured muscles

Of the half-twisted torso, and the long sinewy legs

Are an unexpected development.

Dunworth has difficulty

Adding this body to the familiar long-jowled monkish

                                                                         visage

That watches him unmoving, as if expecting

To see him do something typically stupid.

Those hooded heavy eyes weaken him

Like a load of ironweight.

Dunworth gazes back at his wife

Almost forgetting where he is or what he is doing.

He is helplessly in love.

He stands there, in his child’s helplessness,

As if he had searched everywhere and at last somehow he

                                                              had found her.

An irresponsible joy chatters to be heard, somewhere in

                          the back of his head, as he gazes at her,

Feeling all his nerves dazzle, with waitings of vertigo,

As if he were gazing into an open furnace.

At the same time he tightens on the butt and trigger of

                                      the pistol, readjusting his grip,

As if the terrible moment were approaching of itself.

In the remaining seconds

He studies her lips and tries to separate out the ugliness

                                                                        there,

Which he remembers finding regrettable.

He tries to isolate the monkey-crudity of her hairline,

Her spoiled chin, all the ordinariness

That once bored him so much,

But he feels only a glowing mass.

He stands there, paralysed by a bliss

And a most horrible torture –

Endless sweetness and endless anguish.

He turns the pistol towards his own face

And puts the muzzle in his mouth.

Lumb is stepping towards him.

Dunworth closes his eyes and tries to clench his strength

Which slips from him like water.

Lumb takes the pistol out of his hand.

Dunworth

Sits in a huddle on the floor.

His eyes, squeezed close, refuse the features of his trap,

Squeezing the ball of tight dazzling blackness behind his

                                                                          eyes.

His face is numb as rubber,

His body sunk in a depth of happening which holds it like

                                                                    concrete.

The Reverend Lumb has left.

Opening his eyes, Dunworth sees his wife’s stockinged

                                                             ankles and shoes

Passing close.

When he looks up she is fully dressed and tugging a comb

                                                          through her hair.

She ignores him and goes to her room.

He follows and tries the door but it is already locked.

He leans at the door, emptied, merely his shape,

Like a moth pinned to a board,

While the nectars of the white lilac

And the purple and dark magenta lilac

Press through the rooms. 

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