Read Gaudete Online

Authors: Ted Hughes

Gaudete (9 page)

But already hands grip his head,

And the clamp of tightness, which has not shifted,

Is a calf-clamp on his body.

He can hear her whole body bellowing.

His own body is being twisted and he hears her scream

                                                                             out.

He feels bones give. He feels himself slide.

He fights in hot liquid.

He imagines he has been torn in two at the waist and this

                                         is his own blood everywhere.

He sees struggle of bodies.

Men are fighting to hold her down, they cannot.

He crawls,

He frees his hands and face of blood-clotted roping tissues.

He sees light.

He sees her face undeformed and perfect.

Blinded again with liquid, but free

He flounders – away, anywhere further away,

On his hands and knees.

And he is crawling out of the river

Glossed as an exhausted otter, and trailing

A mane of water.

He flops among wild garlic, and lies, shivering,

Vomiting water.

At last, pulling himself up by a sapling,

He sees his van, sitting out in a meadow,

Beside the river, under full sunlight.

Figures of men stand waiting round it.

Dazed and dazzled, with trembling legs he walks towards

                                                                           them.

But already there is nobody.

Only starlings, seething and glittering among the

                                                               buttercups.

With a sudden râle they go up, in a drumming silent

                                                                      escape.

His van sits empty, the doors wide open, as if parked for

                                                                      a picnic.

Has cycled eight miles to the city.

He goes into a chemist’s.

Spectacled, heron-crested, Tetley

Splays excitedly

Large glossy prints of badgers in den-mouths

With firefly eyes, among wood-anemones.

Garten is his informer

For the night life and underground activity

Of the woods

And all the secretive operations of birds

Which it is his infatuation

To photograph. Garten is his guide.

The urgency of the return favour

Which Garten now requires

Alarms Tetley, a little.

Can a roll of film be so consequential?

Curiosity blinks through him. His afternoon

Is readjusted.

Strips in his room. Resumes

Personal possession of his body

Like a boxer after his fight.

Maud hands him a towel, she pours coffee,

Stokes bigger the log fire, which is already too big.

Positions the high-backed chair, thronelike, in the middle

                                     of the room, fronting the flames.

Lays out fresh clothes on the low bed

Below the window

Which is also a door on to the furnace of the bright world

The chill bustle

Of the blossom-rocking afternoon

The gusty lights of purplish silver, brightenings, sudden

                                                                   darkenings

Teeming with wings and cries

Under toppling lumps of heaven.

She leaves him.

He half-lies in his chair and lets exhaustion take over.

His only effort now

Is pushing ahead and away the seconds, second after

                                                                         second,

Now this second, patiently, and now this,

Safe seconds

In which he need do nothing, and decide nothing,

And in which nothing whatsoever can happen.

Killing time in the city, contemplating the window of a gunshop, sees through the reflection into interior gloom.

Major Hagen is lifting to the light the underbelly detail of one of a pair of collector’s pieces. Which he covets. He brandishes the gun, its lightness, with a sudden fury of expertise. Flings it up
 

To cover a fictive woodcock

Escaping from Garten’s hair

Into the free sky above the Cathedral. 

Are locked

To an archaic stone carving, propped on his mantel,

                                                               above the fire.

The simply hacked-out face of a woman

Gazes back at Lumb

Between her raised, wide-splayed, artless knees

With a stricken expression.

Her square-cut, primitive fingers, beneath her buttocks

Are pulling herself wide open –

An entrance, an exit.

An arched target centre.

A mystery offering

Into which Lumb is lowering his drowse.

Ringdoves are ascending and descending

Between the rectory lawn and the rookery beeches.

And a thrush singing – slicing at everything

With its steely voice

Like a scalpel,

And thrush, lofty, calmer beyond thrush,

And ringdove mulling bluely beyond ringdove

Like treetops, blueing and blurring, stirring beyond

                                                                     treetops.

Heavens opening higher beyond heavens

As the afternoon widens.

Strolls in the Cathedral

Among rustling tourists and scrambled whispers.

The nervy crowd is blocked.

Some ecclesiastical dignitary,

Mummified senile, bowed nearly double,

Like a Bishop being brought from his tomb

For an important convention,

Supported by two spidery clerics,

Processions shufflingly towards the exit,

Ritualises a whole aisle, his advance

Like an invalid’s first inches, his features

A healing, pinkish-purple wound, just

Relieved of its dressings and now airing

In the stained light. Garten stands back. All

Visitors stand back

As from the luckless singled-out casualty

Being nursed towards the ambulance.

Garten sits on a bench, watching the children feed pigeons and the toddlers chase them.

The uninterrupted sun presses Garten’s face. He unbuttons his shirt, feeling marginally reckless. The winter tensions ease in his skin. How simple, to vanish. To desert the whole campaign. The station is two hundred yards. Emerge in Australia.
 

A cloud-shadow chills the precincts. He fastens his shirt up.

The prints are ready.

Garten collects them without explanation. Tetley stares after him as he goes, as alarmed by that caught flash as one of his own birds. 

Is welding the bar of a harrow.

Sizzling drops of glare fling out

Their wriggling smokes.

The shield-mask lifts away.

The red spot dulls. Evans sees

First Garten

Then the photograph.

He comes erect, waiting for the world to cool

Around the details.

He understands, without too much trouble –

As when he picked up the severed finger end

Under the metal cutter

That what has happened now has happened for good.

But he has escaped it already.

He has stepped that infinitesimal hair-breadth aside

From the point of impact.

He studies the photograph

Like a doubtful bill

Which already he does not intend to pay.

Evans drives. Garten, beside him, explains. Evans drives calm. Garten cannot believe that Evans is as amused as he looks. Garten’s voice goes on and on, like a bad conscience protecting itself, against the engine, against the pouring gardens.

Evans’ wife

Is ironing. She sees

Evans’ face in the doorway. Her heart

Leaps like a mouse, then hides.

The photograph

Appears, like a burn, on the shirt she is ironing.

Her husband cannot interpret

The foolish abandoned

Stupor of her look. She can hear him

Saying something.

Garten is surprised

By a cringe of pity.

Evans’ first blow crushes her lip, jolts her hair into a fine

                                                                       dark veil,

And fixes her in the corner by the fireplace

With angled limbs. She rearranges her slight, small body

Tentatively erect. His questions

Are travelling too fast, and they are not stopping

For her to answer. His second blow

Carries her into the fireplace

From which he snatches her back, as if concerned,

As if to safety.

Now his arm rises and falls, and she bows beneath it.

Garten watches like one whose turn comes next,

Marvelling

At what a body can take.

She is sobbing.

She will tell everything.

Evans stops, without releasing her

From the pressure of his eyes

Smooths down his upcrested hair.

She huddles, small-shouldered, over the bleeding

That drips into her hands.

She starts to tell, coaxed by questions

Which are converted blows.

Her story makes its blurred way, through sobs and

                                                                  tremblings.

Mr Lumb has a new religion.

He is starting Christianity all over again, right from the

                                                                         start.

He has persuaded all the women in the parish.

Only women can belong to it.

They are all in it and he makes love to them all, all the

                                                                            time.

Because a saviour

Is to be born in this village, and Mr Lumb is to be the

                                                             earthly father.

So all the women in the village

Must give him a child

Because nobody knows which one the saviour will be.

Evans and Garten forget everything, in a ravenous listening. Even after she has finished Evans continues to stare and question. It seems he might attack again. She tells and tells it again. She scrapes out the dregs of telling it.

It has nothing to do with loving the vicar.

She doesn’t love him.

Though poor Janet Estridge was infatuated with him and so is her sister and so is Pauline Hagen and Hilda Dunworth and Barbara Walsall and her and her and her and her, it’s true, all those are infatuated with him

But she doesn’t love him at all.

She doesn’t even like him. He frightens her.

She doesn’t know how she got into it, she only wishes she

                                                                 was out of it.

He must have hypnotised her, she is sure he did.

Evans turns from the revelation

Radiant with incredulity

Like a bar of furnaced iron. He meets Garten’s eyes.

Garten has no chance to move.

His brain moves, but his body is too late to catch up.

Then his long hair lashes upward,

His jawbone jars sideways,

The amazed loose face-flesh jerks at its roots.

His limbs scatter, like a bundle of loose rods.

He falls into a pit.

The pattern of the oilcloth returns slowly, magnified, and close to Garten’s eye. He feels its glossy cold on his cheek. He retains the snapshot picture of Evans’ fist in the air.

But Evans has disappeared. Mrs Evans is hurrying out, putting on her coat. She leaves the door wide.
 

Garten half-lies

Retching. He vomits

On to the oilcloth

Of the blacksmith’s kitchen. 

Is doing something with a white pigeon.

It balances on her folded fingers, as she carries it into the

                                               bare, bare-boarded room.

Maud’s face is closed

Like a new mother’s over her baby’s first suckling.

She kneels on the bare boards.

The pigeon flaps up, glide-flaps

Sinuously round the room, returns to the floor

Between her hands, wobblingly walks.

Its tilted head studies her, its pink eye. It blinks.

In the room above

Lumb’s head has sunk sideways.

He is not sleeping.

His eyes, fixed, seeing nothing, direct their non-gaze

By accident of his neck’s angle

Toward the carpet.

His lips loll idiot loose. His mask

Is loosened, as with ultimate exhaustion.

His fingers wince.

Maud, in her bare room below, has wrenched the pigeon’s

                                                                       head off.

Her blood-smeared fingers are fluffed with white down.

Now her hooking thumbs break the bird open, like a

                                                      tightly-taped parcel.

Its wing-panics spin downy feathers over the dusty

                                                                         boards.

She is muttering something.

Lumb’s mouth lumps with movement.

Sounds lump in his squeezed throat.

His lungs struggle, as under water.

His leg-muscles, his arms, jerk. His hands jerk.

Unconscious he tries to get up

As if a soul were trying to get out of a drowning body.

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