Mrs Holroyd emerges, with dazzled eyes,
Carrying a basket, and adjusting her skirt,
And dusting herself down.
The Reverend Nicholas Lumb
Materialises out of the darkness behind her.
Mrs Holroyd, at twenty-seven, is a fresh-faced abundant
woman
With an easy laugh.
Estridge treasures her among his collection of ideals –
She reminds him of the country love of his youth, who
never appeared.
Now he watches Lumb
Following her closely to the house-door.
Within the hallway, within the magnified circle,
Turning, she sets Lumb’s hands on her breasts and bites
his neck.
His hands gather up her skirts
As his foot closes the door
And Estridge’s brain wrings
To a needling pang, as if a wire might snap.
His bulging eye
Hammers the blunt limits of objects and light.
Till a scream
Amplifies over his head’s pain –
A repeated approaching scream, then a silence.
His younger daughter has left her piano.
She is running between the shrubs towards him.
He puts on his spectacles.
He quickly tries to think what could be the worst
possible.
He finds only helpless fear.
His daughter is screaming something at him
As if in perfect silence.
Lumb
Is looking at the land.
This is the unalterably strange earth.
He is looking at the sky. He looks down at the soil,
between the grass.
He looks at the trees
Which clamber in a tangle up the slope towards him,
from the river, out of the swell of land beyond.
He listens to all this, and listens into the emptiness beyond it
And the emptiness within it.
And the soft hollow air noises among it.
It feels very like safety. If the trees were trees only, wood only, were simple roots and boles and boughs and leaves, and that only, as the stones should be stones. If the stones were simple stones. This would be safe. All this would be safety.
But he knows everything he looks at,
Even the substance of his fingers, and the near-wall of his
skin,
He knows it is vibrant with peril, like a blurred speed-
vibration.
He knows the blood in his veins
Is like heated petrol, as if it were stirring closer and
closer to explosion,
As if his whole body were a hot engine, growing hotter
Connected to the world, which is out of control,
And to the grass under his feet, the trees whose shadows
reach for him.
He breathes deeply and strongly to confirm his solidity,
To cool his outline and his solidity
To fill his strength
Against the power that beats up against him, beating at
the soles of his feet,
Beating through his thoughts
And the obscure convulsions and blunderings of a music
that lurches through him
With brightenings and darkenings, and rendings and
caressings,
With tiny crowded farness and near sudden hugeness
And hot twisting roughness, and vast cantileverings of
star-balance.
He looks out across the quilt and embroidery of the
landscape,
The hazings of distance, and the watery horizons folded
like fingers,
And tries to imagine simple freedom –
His possible freedoms, his other lives, hypothetical and
foregone, his lost freedoms.
As each person carries the whole world, like a halo,
Albeit a dim and mostly provisional world, but with a
brightly focused centre, under the sun,
Considering their millions
All mutually exclusive, all conjunct and co-extensive,
He sees in among them,
In among all the tiny millions of worlds of this world
Millions of yet other, alternative worlds, uninhabited,
Each open at every point to every other and yet distinct,
Each waiting for him to escape into it, to explore it and
possess it,
Each with a bed at the centre. A name. A pair of shoes.
And a door.
And surrounded by still-empty, never-used limitless freedom.
He yields to his favourite meditation.
Forlorn, desperate meditation.
Between the root in immovable earth
And the coming and going leaf
Stands the tree
Of what he cannot alter.
As his heart surges after his reverie, with lofty cries and
lifting wingbeats
Suddenly he comes against the old trees
And feels the branches in his throat, and the leaves at his
lips.
He sees the grass
And feels the wind pulse over his skin.
He feels the hill he stands on, hunched, swelling,
Piling through him, complete and permanent with stone,
Filling his skull, squeezing his thoughts out from his eyes
To fritter away across surfaces.
Till the one presence of world crushes him from himself,
and sits on him like an iron crown on a stone pillar,
Studded with baleful stones,
As if he were a child king, hoisted on to a granite throne,
surrounded by eyes of sharpened metal.
For a half hour he stands, alert
Imprisoned in the globe’s stoniness
And the thin skin, the thin painting of mother-soil,
And the hair-fine umbilicus of life in the stalk of grass.
His life returns as a fly. It lands on his eyelid and trickles
down to his mouth-corner.
He moves to free himself.
Some animal is pushing noisily below in the wood.
A squirrel flees up through a beech, like a lashing rocket,
and rips into the outermost leaf-net with a crash.
Voices recede, snatch back their words and meanings,
Become bramble stem, leaf hollows, reticulation of twigs.
He is clearly aware of himself, on the hill in clear light, from the eye of a soaring, reconnoitring and downsliding far crow.
He prays
To be guided. He feels his prayer claw at the air, as at
glass
Like a beetle in a bottle.
He tries to pray with the sun –
Feeling it break off, dry in his mouth
He tries to find in himself the muscle-root of prayer.
He takes a few brisk steps
To tear free of his fear, to shake his limbs
Out of their crawling horror, their fly-tiny helplessness.
He makes an effort
To feel his plans steady. He fixes, hard and firm, phrasing
it clearly,
His decision to escape before night.
This very day. To carry his body, with all its belongings,
Right to the end of its decision. Surely that is simple
enough.
What is wrong with this idea? He only has to do it.
Surely it is all he wants to do.
He is afraid
As if he were asleep and dreaming the first warnings of
smoke-smell
In a burning room, where everything is already spluttering and banging into flames, cores of fury drumming flames,
The flames swarming up, leaping like rats,
&nb
sp; A torrent of devils twisting upwards above the tops of
everything,
As if everything –
The whole world and day where he stands, trying to
awake,
Were a giant aircraft out of control, shaking itself to pieces, already losing height, spinning slowly down in space
Scattering burning chunks,
The air sprayed with blazing fuel, full of an inaudible
screaming, sprayed with fine blood –
He leans his forehead to an ash tree, clasping his hands
over his skull.
He presses his brow to the ridged bark.
He closes his eyes, searching.
He tries to make this ash-tree his prayer.
He searches upward and downward with his prayer,
reaching upwards and downwards through the capillaries,
Groping to feel the sure return grasp
The sure embrace and return gaze of a listener –
He sinks his prayer into the strong tree and the tree
stands as his prayer.
The Bridge Inn bar
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.
Doctor Westlake
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.
Mrs Holroyd
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.