Gaudete (10 page)
Authors: Ted Hughes
Stands at the door of Felicity’s cottage. The body and ripening hair of a dense honeysuckle bush the lintel. Over there, the rectory windows, among the Virginia creeper and behind high massed hollies, look ordinary.
Felicity’s face, in the gap of the door, offers nothing. She lets him come inside. Out of the observation of the village. In the cramped, coat-hung hallway, their whispers conflict.
Her grandfather, keeping his eyes on the television, shouts his enquiry. Garten bends a smile awkwardly on to his greeting, shouted back.
She wants him to go. She doesn’t want to talk any more.
It’s finished. No, it is not finished.
He is insistent. She is insistent.
The photograph
Is suddenly there. His weapon.
Behind her face, which registers no change,
Everything changes.
And Garten feels the freedom, for a moment, to take his bearings unforgettably on the stuffed fox-head, and the grandfather clock, touching quarter to four.
Then her glance frightens him.
Solemn
As a person
After the doctor’s terrible look, she
Puts on her coat.
Is standing naked.
She is sponging herself with the bunched rag of the
pigeon’s body.
She is painting her breasts,
Her throat and face, her thighs and belly,
With its blood.
Swaying her head, she continues to paint herself
Whispering more rapidly and sobbingly, more absorbed,
As if she were crazed,
As if she were doing something crazy
With the body of her own child.
Lumb’s head is pulsing pain.
He becomes aware, he tries to raise his hands to it
And to open his eyes,
And to get up.
He manages to glimpse flames.
He sees
A distant volcano.
It is not a volcano, but a hill.
He sees a church-shape, a silhouette Cathedral
On top of the hill.
He sees, with difficulty, a river of people
Flowing up the hill.
It is like a marching of ants.
It is a river of women
Flowing up the hill
To the Cathedral.
They are crushing in through the great West open doors
of the Cathedral.
Bodies cram the doorway, in pain,
In struggle,
Stricken and driven faces and reaching hands, seen with
difficulty.
In the fog of his vision
Which clears
To the dull tolling of a drum, a slow, convulsive pulsing
As if the whole stretch of sky were the drumskin.
Women black as flies
Like women mobbing for names
At some pithead disaster, mobbing to see bodies and
survivors, to hear the good news, the terrible.
They pile into the Cathedral, which is already packed,
Almost climbing over each other,
Pressing towards the high altar,
Raised faces, crying towards the altar, and arms lifted
towards it
Like swimmers from a wreck,
As if the Cathedral were sinking, with its encumbering
mass of despairing women‚
As if that altar were the only safety,
As if the only miracle for them all were there.
Their noise is a shrill million sea-bird thunder.
Walks in the graveyard with Garten.
Among decayed bouquets, unsheltered stones, neglected
grass.
No, she does not want to examine the photograph more
closely.
Near a comfortless sycamore
Garten studies it.
He is a little tipsy with the power of his new role.
A cuckoo, too near, moves its doleful cry from tree to
tree,
On and on and on.
He tells her, as if he were splitting logs cleanly,
What he has seen today.
And what he is going to do with this evidence.
She snatches at it, to tear it.
He protects it. He mocks,
He lets her taste his exhilarated bitterness.
He shows her the picture, guardedly,
As if spotlighting her eyes with a mirror,
As if searching there
For some mark of mortification.
Her frustrated hands
Claw repeatedly.
Garten’s cheek whitens, roughened, an opened grid,
Then gleams blood.
Felicity is running toward the gate.
Is rumbling, as if it moved slowly on its foundations.
It is humming the chord
Of all those cries‘ and the drum-pulse.
It is itself throbbing like an organ.
And the capacious cavern of it
The stalactite forest of walls and roof
Reverberates,
Magnifying their throats.
The tall altar candle-flames tremble
In the pulsing air.
Above them, above the altar,
Swathed in purple and gold,
Lumb
Looks down on to the tossing sea of faces,
The blighted and beseeching expressions,
The strangled eyes and grievous mouths,
Futile-seeming tendrils of fingers
That stretch their pleas towards him
Inaudibly
In the thunder of the one voice
Of all the voices
Beating like massed wings.
Throned beside him
An apparition, a radiance,
A tall blossoming bush of phosphorous
Maud has become beautiful.
He leans among the candle-blades towards her.
She raises her face to his.
The supplications intensify. The hammering voices
Make a walled deafness,
A peace like a cave under a waterfall
In which he kisses her mouth.
The drumming
Sharpens to a banging
And the cries
Harden like lament, like black disgorging smoke
reddening from the roots into oil-flame
Breaking in on the kiss,
And the candletongues
Lengthen leaping as if these new cries fed them,
And now thickening their flames with the flaming
Of her whiteness
And with the flames of his purple
As if these two were petroleum.
He embraces her. Their kiss deepens.
In a bush of flames they are burning.
The Cathedral
Oozes smoke from every orifice
Like a smouldering stack of rubbish.
Smoke bulges unrolling
From the shattered-out windows,
From the doorways.
Flames lance out, broaden and fork upwards
In rending sheets and tatters.
But the piling of women
Does not cease to spill into the interior,
Under the out-billowing smoke,
As if women were fuel
Enriching the conflagration, angering the flames
That claw for the sky,
Hooking upwards, clenching about the Cathedral
Like talons
Of a giant dragonish gripe.
As if the Cathedral
Were being crushed in the upreaching foot
Of an immense upside down griffon
Which is falling
Into a crater of black smoke
The griffon being aflame,
Beating deeper and deeper,
A star of struggling rays,
A glowing spot
Muffled away
By the banging –
Till only a hard banging remains.
Lumb
Lies unconscious on the carpet, face crawling with sweat
In front of the burned-out fire.
Maud
Striped with the dove’s blood, which has now dried,
Lies face upwards on the bare boards
Of the room beneath, still gripping
The blood-rag of the bird.
Her eyes flicker open.
She listens
To the banging on the door downstairs.
For a moment can make nothing of the blood-smeared brow, cheekbones and throat in the crack of the door opened three inches.
Maud studies the weak pretty face, which is trying to interpret her sheet-draped nakedness, as the door widens.
Felicity has to speak to Mr Lumb. Very urgent. Maud’s smile seems to understand, as she steps back and lets the tear-flurried face surge past her with its agitation.
So it is that Lumb, opening his eyes, finds Felicity staring down at him.
He springs up. He is cleansed and renewed.
His arms close round her, as if joyfully.
At once she is crying freely.
She feels his embrace is safety and assurance.
She tells him everything
About that picture and about Garten.
Already she can hardly believe any of it.
She prays it was faked.
She begs him to tell her it was faked.
He tells her it was faked.
His laugh frightens her, but she grasps it as more
reassurance.
She tells him she has put her suitcase in the back of his car, just as they said. She wants to leave now, this moment. Why can’t he just cancel that meeting tonight.
He kisses her, overpowering her with his kisses and easy
smiles.
He starts to unzip her dress.
She stops him with hard fingers.
She wants him to save it
Till they have escaped right away from all this and from
everybody.
Till they are alone together, absolutely together.
Why can’t they go now?
When he will not be stopped,
Explaining without explanation that he cannot cancel the
meeting
Because he simply cannot
She suddenly announces
That she is coming to the meeting, too,
So she can see for herself,
So she can be completely sure
That the rumour about those meetings is a lie.
That will prove everything to her.
And she needs it to be proved.
She is suddenly strong.
She realises she is strong.
She adds something else:
She is never going home again.
Lumb
Gazes blankly toward a reassessment
Impossibly beyond him. Two worlds,
Like two strange dogs circling each other.
The door opens, and Maud stands there. Lumb asks Maud to look after Felicity and prepare her for the meeting. And to instruct her. They will introduce her to the Institute.
Felicity
Looking at Maud, and looking again at Lumb
Reasons herself scramblingly
Out of the sudden terror
The light electrical gust
That grabs at her, to rush her
Away from this house,
Away from these two –
She takes firmer hold of her new initiative.
She goes out with Maud.
Though it is after five, is in his cattle yard with his man and the vet. They are sawing the horns off a young bull. Its hooves slam, its muscular half ton convulses, like a fist, racketing the locked steel bars of the crush, as the three men strain, two of them levering the head far over to one side, and Holroyd, his full weight leaning backward, sawing with a wire.
Seeing his wife climb into her car, and knowing where she is going, Holroyd shuts his mind from her, grimacing like a face in the dentist’s chair, as he concentrates on the rip of the wire, the angle of his double punching pull, and the ammonia smoke of the horn burn.
The bull roars long and horribly, like a tiger. The horn pulls loosely over and off, heavy. Nimbly the vet tweezers for the cut end of the vein, that showers him with a rigid thread of blood. He twirls the tissue to a knot. He sprays smoking purple antiseptic into the blood-streaming skull-crater, while Holroyd stands back, crimsoned and panting.
But now as they grip the bull’s nose-ring, and lunge into wrestling and levering the surviving horn upwards, Garten appears beside Holroyd.
Garten is an agricultural pest.
But he is coming closer, not answering Holroyd’s query.
He is holding out the photograph, like a peace-offering.
Holroyd has taken it, lifts it.
In spite of himself, his eyes are fascinated.
His mystification narrows.
He is wondering why Garten presents him with this
questionable picture.
The horn stands ready for the wire, which dangles in curls from Holroyd’s preoccupied hand. The two men, with locked joints, and full strength at full strain, have pinned the dangerous weight. The bull’s gruelling roar vibrates the concrete of the yard beneath their boots. Garten is saying something.
Holroyd’s dignity has stiffened. A big florid man, with handsome brown eyes and silver curls.
He glances at Garten, flushed and stormy and full of hatred. He responds to nothing Garten says, and hands him back the photograph as if it were of no interest.
He returns to his bull. The animal’s uplooking eye squirms like a live eye in a pan. It emits a yodelling weird roar, like a steel roof being ripped by a power saw, as the wire bites.