Gaudete (7 page)
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.