by Ted Hughes
Garten
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.
Maud
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Her gaze, fixed and withdrawn,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.
Behind the bar
Mrs Walsall draws a half pint, watchfully, for Garten. His chirpy rat-nervy manner makes her feel deep. He is being vivaciously familiar with the pensioner under the window. Old Smayle, who is the vicar’s nearest neighbour at the top of the village, lives with his granddaughter, Felicity. Garten courts Felicity. Nightly, stormily, unhappily.
Garten is fishing for the vicar. He is venturing jokey, overbalancing insinuations, as he sips. Felicity mentions the Reverend Lumb too often.
Old Smayle defends the vicar.
He admires him. The vicar, he declares,
Has realised that his religious career
Depends on women.
Because Christianity depends on women.
For all he knows, all those other religions, too, depend on
women.
What would he do for congregation these days
Without women.
Old Smayle has read it. The church began with women.
Through all those Roman persecutions it was kept going
by women.
The Roman Empire was converted by a woman.
And now the whole thing’s worn back down to its women.
It’s like a herd of deer, he says, why is it always led by a
hind?
Christianity’s something about women.
His narrowed eye-puffs pierce right to the crux of it.
Christianity is Christ in his mammy’s arms –
Either a babe at the tit
With all the terrible things that are going to happen to
him hovering round his head like a halo,
Or else a young fellow collapsed across her knees
With all the terrible things having happened.
Old Smayle’s eloquence pours from his travelling library.
His eyebrows arch, hoisting his whole baggy face.
His eyes are seriously amazed
At what such things evidently boil down to.
Something about mothers – maternal instincts.
Something about the womb – foredoomed, protective
instinct.
Instinct for loss and woe and lamentation.
So men have lost interest. Smayle knows.
Garten has forgotten his own stare.
He is fascinated and out of his depth and wondering
What Lumb is on to.
Evans, the blacksmith, has paid for a half.
He lifts the glass
In fingers that are the masters
Of all the heavy agricultural steel
In the district.
He can be quiet, with a nod.
Betty has come back, looking just as usual.
Garten is disturbed and confused.
He wants to include Evans somehow on his side, in this
groping.
He watches Betty’s high-tension boredom.
He keeps an eye on Mrs Walsall’s solemn listening.
He glances from one to the other.
He fancies something is darting between the two,
Escaping him among the crannies of these women.
Evans’ wife is vivid and tiny,
Startling, like a viper.
A magnet for local scandal fantasies, spoken and
unspoken.
Her incongruous Sunday-School cosy chatty manner
Does nothing to tame her deadly glance.
It has the effect of an outrageously lewd cosmetic.
She is Secretary of the local W. I.
What goes on at those W. I. meetings?
The words suddenly blurt out of Garten and he stares
after them wildly.
He plunges deeper.
He asks Evans if he’s ever read the book of minutes.
He is afraid of Evans. He brazens himself, feeling the
eyes of the two women.
He bets that’s a book of revelations
Real religious stuff.
Evans weighs Garten with a little easy smile,
A little glance, from little slow wolf eyes.
It would be more interesting, Evans dare say,
To know what’s going on, this minute,
Over in Garten’s bungalow.
The Reverend Lumb’s little van
Seems to have broken down at the gate.
Old Smayle’s merriment
Garten’s instantaneous exit
And the sun crossing one more degree
Bring the reaching of the landscape roots
A fraction closer
To the vicar’s body.
Mrs Garten
Ten years a widow
Is made up at noon.
In the garden hut
She sits back on top of orange-crate rabbit cages
While the Reverend Lumb lifts her into bliss.
The cages creak, the inquisitive rabbits
Try to get a view.
She reaches out to fasten the door’s yale
Without losing her advantage.
The flimsy cages start to collapse.
The widow and Lumb sag, clutching at other cages
Which come toppling,
Bursting open, spilling two ferrets,
Creamy serpents.
The widow clings in position, contorted.
Lumb cannot be distracted.
He pushes aside cages, and rabbits struggle out.
Her consternation gazes sidelong at them
From eyes that seem only lightly fixed to her body
Which cares nothing about rabbits
And which Lumb now overwhelms.
He is rapt. His communion
With Mrs Garten is especially deep and good.
She starts to cry out. He urges her cries.
Garten, finding the housedoor open and the house empty,
Hears the sounds.
He runs to the hut door, he kicks at it.
He forces in among the tumble of cages
Which the vicar is attempting to stack.
Mrs Garten is pulling a ferret from under cages.
It is attached to a crying baby rabbit.
She screams at Garten for help.
Estridge’s younger daughter Jennifer
Lies on her bed, on her side, gazing into the crook of her
elbow.
She has sobbed herself stale.
But still hard sighs keep trying to bring relief.
She lies back and watches the clouds.
They are toppling across a snow wilderness.
Stunted fir-trees stoop under drifts.
A girl is struggling across a snow lake
Into the wind.
Closer, closer, the eye runs.
The girl turns, looking back.
The girl is Janet, her dead sister.
And she herself is a wolf, circling her dead sister
And wanting not to be recognised.
She does not want to frighten her poor sister
Who sees only the wolf
Which has followed her a long way
Waiting for her to weaken.
Her dead sister is crying and forcing herself on.
And now turns again, pleading something
But the wind blows the words away.
She watches, with a wolf’s interested eyes
Till her dead sister falls.
Now a wolf is killing her where she lies.
Her dead sister lies in the snow.
Her eyes and mouth, already freezing,
Are once again dead.
She starts to howl out over her dead sister who lies in the
snow.
A wolf crying and snarling jumps up on to her bed
suddenly
And she screams and jumps upright
In her empty room.
The clouds
Tumble their clumsy bursting baggage
Beyond the window frame
Over the glare, the gloom-dark tree-glitter
Of the day
Where the moments march unalterably.
Dr Westlake
Emerges from his updated, bleak, deserted roadhouse at quarter to one. A brief shower has gone over, loading the greenery. The bluebell-blue cloudmass now huddles to the horizon woods. But the sun soars freely, somewhere behind high parapets, and the black road steams like a vat. He is numb-edged with too much noon alcohol. Dark-edged. He aims himself at his car, parked solitary out on the desert of blue asphalt.
This bulging green landscape oppresses him.
The thick weight behind his eyes oppresses him.
He cannot stop thinking of that dead girl’s grey-pink parched-looking lips. The alcohol has dissolved his self-protection, a little. He pauses. His whole body craves pause, and time, like an exhaustion, while he thinks. He feels a great need to think. What was it he wanted to think about?
The air is warm. A nauseous sweet aniseed scent, an overrichness. Like an over-sweet melting sickness in the pit of his stomach. It is reeking from the creamy masses of the hawthorn blossom.
Jennifer’s insinuatingly amorous lamenting tones seem to have entered his blood, like a virus, with flushes of fever and shivers, and light, snatching terrors.
He stares at the piled hairy flowers, hedgerow beyond draped hedgerow. Hushed and claustrophobic. He imagines the still Sargasso of it, rising and falling, right across England. Funereal. Unearthly. Some bulky hard-cornered unpleasantness leans on him. He ignores it steadily. He searches for his car-keys, preoccupied, watching the mobs of young starlings struggling and squealing filthily in the clotted may-blossom, like giant blow-flies.
He drops his car-keys in a puddle.
Bending to pick them up
He bumps his bald brow on the car-door handle,
glancingly
But enough to jar off his spectacles
Which drop to the asphalt, where they lie, half-
submerged,
One lens webbed with cracks.
This awakening into his own world is nevertheless
satisfactory.
His body is still moving beyond him, its limits blurred.
Getting into the car energetically, with a new grasp of the
day’s course,
He clips the side of his skull, just above the ear,
On the brutal edge of the car-roof.
He sits dazzled with pain
And with rage at the petty error of it, as his eyes water.
He deliberates control –
Carefully cleaning the spectacles, and the cracked lens
especially with meticulous caution –
It flakes out under his thumb, the rim blinks up at him
empty.
He aligns the spectacles on his nose.
He must insist now, on control
Of every second as it chooses to come.
With firmly applied care, he steers out on to the road.
But he has drunk too much.
And the finality of that dead girl lies at the centre of the
day
Like an incomprehensible, frightful dream.
And her live sister is worse – all that loose, hot, tumbled
softness,
Like freshly-killed game, with the dew still on it,
Its eyes still seeming alive, still strange with wild dawn,
Helpless underbody still hot.
For minutes, driving in third gear, Westlake forgets
where he is.
While what she said about Lumb goes on and on in his
head
Like a taunt.
Because he has known it all the time,
And now he only has to look at it, and there it is.
His wife
And the Reverend Nicholas Lumb
Fit together, like a tongue in its mouth.
His numbness has freed his concentration.
Under this new, naked lamp-bulb
He probes for the deepest nerve of his damage.
He jerks into top gear –
Ending thinking.