Gaudete Read online

In her lopsided bedroom has finished packing her splitting suitcase. Her grandfather, old Mr Smayle, sunk in his pullover and face-folds, has anchored his wits in the television. He does not see her slip out, carrying the suitcase.

  She goes up the cinder path of the back-garden, past the rows of greens, the spill of compost. Birds spurt everywhere. Fledgeling thrushes launch and fall struggling into undergrowth. Two crows circle low scolding the black shapes that flounder for balance among the lowest branches.

  Clouds crumble, bright as broken igloos. Felicity bends through a worn gap in the thorn and holly hedge.

  At a high creeper-fringed window of the rectory

  Maud’s face

  Dimmed, well back in the room’s darkness,

  Watches, as if waiting for just this.

  Felicity opens the boot of the Vicar’s old Bentley. She stows her suitcase. She closes the boot-lid, with deliberate care. She returns through the shrubbery and the hedge.

  Maud is beside the car.

  She opens the boot. She opens the suitcase.

  She stares into the suitcase

  As into the faked workings of a sum

  To which she knows the correct answer.

  She hurls the unclosed suitcase toward the shrubbery.

  It spins, flinging off its clothes

  And falls behind rhododendrons.

  Maud embraces herself, as if she were freezing. Her eyes pierce through her shiver as through a focusing lens.

  Lumb

  Is driving along.

  He feels uneasy. He keeps glancing round.

  At a high bend, over the river,

  Stub-fingered hairy-backed hands come past his shoulders

  And wrench the steering wheel from his grip.

  The van vaults the bank.

  He sees tree-shapes whirl, hearing underwood crash, then

  shuts his eyes.

  He clenches himself into a ball of resistance.

  A toppling darkness, a somersaulting

  Of bumps and jabs, as if he rolled down a long stair

  A long unending way, and again further, then again

  further.

  Separate and still after some seconds

  He realises he has come to a stop.

  He stays coiled, afraid to test his jarred skeleton.

  Probably the worst has already happened painlessly.

  He opens his eyes.

  Seeing only darkness, he stretches his eyelids wide.

  He relaxes into stillness. He explores a freedom all round.

  He feels wetness. He scrambles to his hands and knees,

  Imagining his van is in the river, and now beginning to fill,

  But realises he is free and out of the van.

  He supposes he has been hurled clear. He supposes this is

  river water.

  He stares into the darkness, trying to split a glimpse

  through his black blindness.

  But what he thought was river is other noises.

  As his head clears, harsh noises din at his head,

  Like an abrupt waking,

  He makes out shapes in the darkness, confusion of

  movement.

  He sees heavy rain glittering the night, he feels it.

  He sees he crawls on his hands and knees

  In the slurry of a cattleyard

  Where bellowing cattle lurch in all directions,

  Topheavy bulks blundering unpredictably, like

  manoeuvring heavy machinery.

  He covers himself from blows

  Which are not just rain, which are not kicks and

  tramplings of the hooves,

  But deliberate, aimed blows.

  Sticks are coming down on to his head, neck, shoulders

  and arms.

  Bewildering fierce human shouts jab him to consciousness.

  He stands and tries to run but the thick sludge grips his

  feet,

  And he falls again, gets up again

  Staggering slowly, losing both shoes in the quag.

  Shapes of men are hunting him across the yard

  Among the plunging beasts

  With cudgels, with intent to kill him.

  The cattle wallow and skid in the dark,

  Their frightened bellowing magnifies them. From a raw,

  high lamp

  Broad sweeping strokes of rainy light come and go,

  wheeling and thrusting.

  He shields his head and tries to see his attackers’ faces

  Among the colliding masses and tossing silhouettes.

  Caught in the flashing diagonals

  The faces seem to be all wide-stretched mouth, like

  lampreys.

  They roar at him, as at driven cattle in a slaughter-house.

  Their bodies are deformed by oilskins

  And their sticks come down out of darkness.

  But now they draw off.

  Lumb feels a reprieve, a lightening

  Though the cattle continue to mill round and press closer

  As if still multiplying out of the earth itself.

  They are stripping their throats with terror-clamour

  But they leave him his space.

  He kneels up under the rain.

  He shouts to the men.

  He tells them who he is, he asks who they are

  And what is happening.

  What has he done and what do they want?

  His voice struggles small in the grievous uproar of the

  animals

  Which now surge towards him as if helplessly tilted, with

  sprawling legs,

  And now as helplessly away from him

  Like cattle on a foundering ship among overhanging and

  crumbling cliffs of surge.

  One man comes close, his oilskins flash in the downpour.

  He hands Lumb a sodden paper, as if it were some

  explanation.

  Lumb scrutinises it but can make nothing out in the

  broken rays,

  As it disintegrates in his fingers, weak as a birth

  membrane.

  Now the murder-shouts are redoubled

  And the malice redoubled. The sticks flash their arcs,

  The cattle churn a vortex, leaning together

  Shouldering, shining masses, bellowing outrage and fear.

  It is like a dam bursting, masonry and water-mass

  mingled.

  Goring at each other, riding each other,

  Heads low and heads high, uphooking and shaken horns,

  Plungings as over fences, flinging up tails

  And stretched out tongues.

  Lumb is knocked spinning, recovers and is again knocked

  spinning.

  He runs with them, among them, as they circle.

  He tries to find a hold on their wet, strenuous backs,

  To lift himself above their colliding sides, and to be

  carried.

  Sticks lash at him, across the backs.

  Suddenly everything runs looser.

  The stampede is flowing to freedom.

  He runs half-carried and squashed, and kicked.

  Then legs are all round him.

  Then he lies under hooves, only hearing the floundering

  thunder,

  As if he lay under a steadily collapsing building

  No longer feeling anything,

  From a far light-house of watchfulness, a far height of

  separateness

  Observing and timing its second after second

  Still going on and still going on

  Till it stops.

  After some time of silence

  He draws his limbs to him.

  He lies buried in mud,

  His face into mud, his mouth full of mud.

  Everything has left him, except the rain, ponderous and

  cold.

  He tries again to remember, through the confusion of

  fright,

 
But it is like trying to strike a match in such rain, and he

  gives up.

  It is downpour dawn

  On a silvery plain of hoof-ploughed mud.

  He stands for a while

  Feeling the rain, like a close armour of lead, chilling and

  hardening.

  Not knowing what to do, or where to go now.

  He stands spitting out mud, trying to clean his hands,

  Letting the hard rain beat his upturned face, letting it

  hurt his eyelids.

  Now he walks up a slight incline

  And finds Evans’s body.

  Evans is crushed into the mud, as if a load of steel had

  just been lifted off him.

  Near him, Walsall the publican,

  His limbs twisted into mud, like the empty arms and legs

  Of a ploughed-in scarecrow.

  So, one by one, the men of his parish,

  Faces upward or downward, rag bodies.

  And now he recalls the cattle stampede, an ugly glare of

  shock with shapes in it.

  Beyond that, his mind dissolves.

  He looks at the bodies. No explanation occurs to him.

  They are all there is to it.

  But now he hears a sharp crying. He looks for it, as for a

  clue.

  Ahead, a hare-like small animal, humped on the mud,

  Shivers crying,

  With long hare-like screams, under the dawn.

  It lets him approach.

  It is the head of a woman

  Who has been buried alive to the neck.

  Lumb bends to the face,

  He draws aside the rain-plastered hair.

  It is Hagen’s wife, Pauline.

  Her staring eyes seem not to register his presence.

  He calls to her, he speaks to her softly, as to a patient in

  a coma,

  But she continues to scream

  As if something hidden under the mud

  Were biting into her.

  Near her, sticking up out of the mud,

  The red head of Mrs Dunworth

  Moves and cries.

  She cries through the draggled tails of her hair.

  He wipes mud from her mud-spattered mouth but his

  fingers are still too muddy.

  He pushes aside her hair, letting the rain beat down her face,

  He presses her brow back so that her face tilts to take the

  rain

  He calls to her sharply. She continues to scream

  Ignoring him,

  And though his hand presses back her face, her eyes still

  watch across the plain of mud

  As if the last horror

  Were approaching beneath its surface.

  Nearby

  The small soaked head of Mrs Davies

  A cry welling from her lips, hopeless,

  As from the lips of a child that cries itself to sleep,

  While her wide eyes, like pebbles, stare through her thin

  fringe

  As if her only life

  Were disappearing slowly in the rain-fogged distance.

  One by one he finds them.

  The women of his parish are congregated here,

  Buried alive

  Around the rim of a crater

  Under the drumming downpour.

  And now he sees

  In the bottom of the crater

  Something moving.

  Something squirming in a well of liquid mud,

  Almost getting out

  Then sliding back in, with horrible reptile slowness.

  And now it lifts a head of mud, a face of mud is watching

  him.

  It is calling to him

  Through a moving uncertain hole in the mud face.

  It reaches towards him with mud hands

  Seeming almost human.

  He slides down into the crater,

  Thinking this one creature that he can free.

  He stretches his foot towards the drowning creature of

  mud

  In the sink at the centre.

  Hands grip his ankle, he feels the weight.

  The hands climb his leg.

  He draws the mud being up, a human shape

  That embraces him as he embraces it.

  And now he looks up for some way out

  Under the torn falling sky.

  The rain striking across the mud face washes it.

  It is a woman’s face,

  A face as if sewn together from several faces.

  A baboon beauty face,

  A crudely stitched patchwork of faces,

  But the eyes slide,

  Alive and electrical, like liquid liquorice behind the

  stitched lids,

  Lumb moves to climb, to half-crawl

  And feels her embrace tighten.

  He holds her more securely

  And with his free hand tries to dig a hook-hold in the clay

  wall.

  Her embrace tightens stronger

  As if a powerful spring trap bit into his resistance.

  He braces to free himself.

  Her stitch-face grins into his face and his spine cracks.

  Suddenly he is afraid.

  He turns all his strength on to her, straining to burst her

  grip.

  With the heels of his hands he pushes at her face.

  She only clamps tighter, as if she were drowning,

  As if she were already unconscious, as if now her body

  alone were fighting to save itself.

  And his shouts of rage

  Bring to the rim of the crater

  Silhouetted against the dawn raincloud

  Men in oilskins.

  Lumb and the clinging woman are hauled out.

  They are carried, still knotted together.

  As they go, Lumb fights to keep his lung-space.

  Her grip is cutting into his body like wires.

  In a flurry of oilskins

  He is held down on straw.

  Already paralysed, he can no longer move even his face,

  As if under stony anaesthetic.

  He swoons into and out of unconsciousness,

  Vaguely renewing his effort to see what is being done to

  him.

  Dancing lights and shapes interfere with his sight.

  Men are kneeling over him.

  A swell of pain, building from his throat and piling

  downwards

  Lifts him suddenly out of himself.

  Somehow he has emerged and is standing over himself.

  He sees himself being delivered of the woman from the

  pit,

  The baboon woman,

  Flood-sudden, like the disembowelling of a cow

  She gushes from between his legs, a hot splendour

  In a glistening of oils,

  In a radiance like phosphorous he sees her crawl and

  tremble.

  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 a
n 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.

  Garten

  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.

  Lumb

  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