Read Gaudete Online

Authors: Ted Hughes

Gaudete (5 page)

Is gleaming, the mopped floor drying

In the morning’s leisured vacancy.

The door standing open, to ventilate last-night’s beer-

                                                                         smell,

Admits the conversation of the river and its stones.

The fleeing needle-cry of a dipper going downstream

Pierces the company of empty chairs.

Betty, the girl behind the bar,

Is making the last few preparations

For the first lunchtime regulars.

She is lean as a skinny boy and blonde as straw.

She takes a hot pie from the counter-oven

With pink bony hands

And goes back through the house.

The usual word to the pub-owner’s wife, Mrs Walsall,

Who is peeling potatoes in the kitchen.

She is just slipping home with this lunch for her old mum

Before the first customers.

She cycles out of the yard, Mrs Walsall watches the

                                                                       window.

Betty does not pass the window.

Mrs Walsall opens the latch and leans out. Betty

Is cycling along the lane beside the river, away from the

                                                                         village.

Mrs Walsall’s starved Syrian face

Has the religious pallor, the blue-socketed eyes

Of a mediaeval portrait.

Betty’s bicycle departure

Is in line with the perfunctory lips

Dried and leathered

By long night wakefulness, by blank morning hopelessness.

Mrs Walsall is in love

And has lost interest in everything else.

She wants to dedicate herself, like a sacrifice, to her great

                                                                             love.

She does not know how.

She knows she is unacceptably ugly.

The child inside her is a growing

Fungus of jealousy

Displacing her from her body. A great hurt,

Like a coulter sewn into her stomach

That she cannot void or vomit.

As Betty rides into the silk-fringed hazel leaves, on the

                                                           chirping saddle,

Mrs Walsall lets the cold tapwater

Numb her hands, and escapes thinking.

She tries to let the water

Numb her body. She fixes her mind

Under the numbing water.

She stands at the sink, numbed. 

Has informed Commander Estridge that his elder daughter is indeed dead. Estridge is sitting near the window, small and still, stunned by the event, and by the incomprehensible blunt fact that his daughter was pregnant.

Westlake’s delight in such facts, his opportunistic sense of theatre, his lust to uncover the worst and reveal it, could not let the chance pass.
 

Now Westlake

Has settled his professionally baleful stare,

His congenitally baleful stare,

On Jennifer, who is curled on the couch.

Her words flood and strew

In tangled sweetness and sharp fragments

Like a flower-vase just broken.

Old Estridge is trying vainly to reckon her words up,

As if they were some gibberish formula of huge numerals

Into which his whole family fortune is vanishing.

Explosions from different directions have left him little

                                                more than mere outline.

He props his brow between finger and thumb

And rests his incomprehension on the sunlit pattern of the

                                                                       carpet.

Westlake, deeply stirred, listens.

The perfumed upheaval of all this ringing emotion and

                                                           physical beauty

Is exciting him.

He follows what he can of her cascading explanations.

Her creamy satin blouse, stretching and flexing like a

                                                                           skin,

Her dark-haired ankles,

Her sandals askew, her helpless uncontrol,

Her giddy mathematics

Which are constructing an abyss –

The corpse is absent.

It lies on Janet’s stripped bed upstairs, a shape under a

                                                                          sheet

Like an article of furniture no longer required, stored

And waiting for removal.

Jennifer is telling

That her sister was in love with the minister Mr Lumb

Just as he had been in love with her

And they were going to disappear together to Australia

Because his religious work had become impossible for him

But then quite suddenly he no longer loved Janet.

Instead he loved herself, Jennifer, much, much more deeply

As he still does love her

And she loves him the same, there is nothing they can do

                                                                      about it.

And so she undeceived her sister for her own good and

                                               told her of this alteration

And so Janet has killed herself and that is the extent of it.

Westlake

Keeps losing Jennifer’s words

As he gazes fascinated

Into the turbulence of her body and features.

He jerks back into detachment

Noting again, between the inflamed eyelids,

Her irises clear and nimble-delicate as a baboon’s,

And the insanity there, the steel-cutting acetylene

Of religious mania.

And immersing himself in her voice, which flows so full of

                                                            thrilling touches

And which sobs so nakedly in its narration,

He is scorched by the hard fieriness,

A jagged, opposite lightning

Running along the edge of it

Like an insane laughter –

Something in his marrow shrivels with fear.

Is sunbathing in the orchard, between cloudshadows.

Snow-topped blue raininess masses low to the West,

                                              bulging slant and forward.

She squints up, calculating whether the bursting bleached edges of that mattress are going to wipe out the sun.

The apple trees dazzle. The air shifts and stirs the black undershadows, caressing the fur of glow on her throat and forearm.

Inside, in the wide white kitchen,

Her husband chews cheese and bread dryly. Makes

                                                                   himself tea.

She watches the honey bees, bumping at apple blossoms, groping and clambering into the hot interiors of the blood and milk clots.

In what continues of the sun
she knows she is happy. She is suspended, as in a warm solution, in the confidence of it. She lies back in her deck-chair, helpless in the languor of it, just as the chill-edged sun holds her, for these moments, unable to move.
 

Her transistor

Bedded in the tussocky moist grass, among milky maids

                                                           and new nettles,

Squirts out a sizzle of music

And transatlantic happy chat.

She even hums a little, as a melody draws clear,

Letting her round-fleshed, long arm

Dangle behind her head

Over the back of the chair.

She squirms her toes, feeling inside her shoes the faint clammy cold of the dew, which will hide all day in the dense grass.

She turns her freckled face shallowly

In the doubtful sun

And watches through her eyelashes a dewball jangling its

colours, like an enormous ear-jewel, among the blades.

Closing her eyes

Concentrating on the sun’s weight against her cheek,

She lets herself sink.

Her own rosy private darkness embraces her.

A softness, like a warm sea, undulating, lifts her,

Like a slower, stronger heart, lifting her,

A luxury

Signalling to the looseness of her hips and vertebrae,

Washing its heavy eerie pleasure

Through her and through her.

She wants it to go on. She lies there, with a slightly foolish smile on her face. She wants nothing to change. She does not want to think about anything, or to open her eyes.
 

The slow plan of the young corn, advancing

Its glistening pennons,

The satisfaction of the calf’s masseter

Moving in the sun, beneath half-closed eyes,

The grass feathering,

The muscled Atlas of the land

Resting in the noon, always strengthening, supporting,

                                                                    assuring –
 

And she is like a plant.

The sun settles the quilt of comfort

Over her sleepy contentment with herself –

Which is like the darkness, secret and happy

Inside the down soft skull

Of a new suckling baby.

Through half-opened eyes, she watches a dark, giant bulk rocking behind nettles and cow-parsley. Her bull heaves to his feet. He leans forward, neck buffaloed, tightening his spine and stretching his thighs, belly deep in the flowering grass, black under leaf shadow. He sets his neck to a tree-
bole, then jerks up his head, driving it down and jerking it up again, with alarming ease and lightness, scratching his neck and shoulder, while the whole tree shudders. The blossoms snow down, settling along his shoulders and loins and buttocks, like a confetti. 

Is cycling home.

The tatty newsboy’s bag over his shoulder

Is swagged with three warm rabbits

And his ferret in its purse.

As he rides he reads the river beside the road.

He hears a cock pheasant and pin-points it on his mental

                                                                           map

Which is a topographical replica of the region, with each

                                                  bramble-stem in place.

A tree-creeper mousing the crannies in the bark of an elm

                                                            flags his glance.

Passing the old quarry, he does not fail to see the wet

                                       car-tyre tracks turning inward

From a drying puddle.

Pausing, he queries the concealment of thorns.

He recognises the bicycle. And the van. Hidden. And

                                                                       hidden.

Now his bicycle is also hidden.

He climbs, behind the quarry rim, through new bracken.

He peers from the crest, between stalks of bracken.

Below him, on a bed of squashed green bracken

The minister sprawls face downward, as if murdered,

Between slender white legs, which are spread like a dead

                                                                          frog’s.

Beside his bald head, Betty’s face

Seems asleep under the high clouds.

Her clutching hands have pulled his cassock

Above his buttocks,

And still grip the folds, vigilant in their stillness.

The stillness is dreadful

In the bottom of the quarry.

Till her eyes open

And stare at Garten, who simultaneously

Becomes invisible

To a startlement

That dare not admit him.

Lumb’s housekeeper

Has brought into Lumb’s bedroom an armful of

                                                                   blossoms –

Wet lilac and apple.

Her dumbness

Is a mystery.

Her self-effacement

Is the domestic nervous system

Of this almost empty house.

Her gaze, fixed and withdrawn,

Glaucous, hyperthyroid,

Glisteningly circumscribes

The vicar’s needs.

And the full pale mouth

Pursed in a compact nun stillness

Is a sufficiency of speech

Among the ivy shadows.

Her pale hair, glossed back like metal

From the bulge of brow

Concentrates in a tight knob, at her nape.

Her thin throat, her bony Adam’s apple

Projects above grandmotherly blacks.

With long, knobbly, bloodless, workaday fingers

She sets the blooms

Either side of the bed’s head, in jars.

Smooths from the coverlet petals.

Adjusts the prepared fire of twigs and logs.

Dusts over the long table which already shines.

Pausingly opens

The drawer in the table. She is fitting the key

To the carved bible-box on the table top.

She sits. She is reading a diary.

She lifts the lid of a smaller box, disclosing

A glass ball in a black velvet chamber.

This is the hidden treasure.

Her gaze deepens

To the bottom of the dark well in the ball,

Wary, as if the glass might explode.

It is filling with smoke.

And with trampling feet of cattle. It becomes

The swivelling eye of a bull.

Which is broken up by a stag’s legs scattering river

                                                                      shallows.

A stag has backed under a rooty bank,

Chest-deep in the piling robe of river.

Hounds are clinging to it and clambering over it.

A sky-silhouette of grouped down-looking horsemen.

A huntsman wading deep. A swimming hound

Gripping the stag’s nose.

The stag’s swivelling eyeball.

And now the hunter’s knife

Diving into the stag’s nape, and a whelm of spray and

                                                                          limbs

Becomes the billowing foam of a bride,

A girl’s face in a veil of ectoplasm

Floating down the church’s central aisle, on Lumb’s arm.

Their smiles are balanced carefully as they step

Into glare sunlight, as for the camera.

A lumpish form is dodging behind the bride

Who suddenly falls, face downwards, across the steps,

And lies frozen, in the hard sunlight.

A knife hilt is sticking from the nape of her neck.

Lumb’s face

Contorts, transforming

To a grotesque of swollen flesh

A glistening friar-fat

Gargoyle of screaming or laughter –

Rending itself slowly, smokily to shreds

Which dissolve in the watery ball’s

Simple shining darkness.

Maud puts everything back into the chest

Where Lumb’s magical implements lie folded in pelts of

                                                                        ermine.

There lies the ebony hiked dagger,

Blade sleeved in the whole pelt of an ermine.

A knock on the door downstairs.

The chest is locked and the drawer closed.

Holding the dagger, Maud comes downstairs.

The breadman wants to know what she wants.

Nothing.

He has to take his slight surprise away with him.

He whistles

Covering his retreat

Into his van and through a swirling turn

Round the dovecot, that hubs the wheel of gravel,

And away.

The doves descend again, dazzling.

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