Awakening

by Stevie Davies

  The only way Beatrice and Anna will be evicted from Sarum House is feet-first. As long as they possess these intimate spaces, these two acres, the great old trees and pasture, the Pentecost sisters will be secure. Papa, who left two houses and the farm with its tenant to Joss, willed the home and half his capital to his elder daughter. Safe, I am safe, she reminds herself.

  The scullery’s thick with steam; the window runs. Beatrice, a sweating scullion, heaves the wringer handle and grey water gushes from the sheets. She transfers the load to the mangle, extracting a pinch of jaded pleasure from completing the chore. No genteel woman has muscles like Beatrice’s or hands roughened by labour: yet to her these signs are worthy of respect. An active and practical person, she’s unashamed to work alongside the household’s one servant. If only the servant worked half as hard as the mistress. But Beatrice was stung when Joss’s friend Arthur Munby, visiting for the first time, took her for the maid-of-all-work and seemed confused when she drew herself up to her full height and introduced herself as Miss Pentecost.

  Mr Munby is a gentleman and an enigma. What can Joss have in common with him? Just as bafflingly, how come Mr Munby condescends to know Joss? For he’s an Anglican and a university man – and not a saved person. His wife Hannah only intensified the conundrum. Statuesque in her black London silks, mightily gloved and hatted and entirely silent, she sat to attention while the charming and loquacious Mr Munby held forth on the condition of the female working classes. Even in their gloves, Mrs Munby’s hands were like shovels, Beatrice thought, still smarting. And her complexion! As if she’d been left out in wind and rain for a year. Mr Munby expatiated, with relish, on collier-lasses soot-black from head to foot; London dustwomen in their filth; crossing-sweepers and the flither-lasses of Filey who scale the cliffs to haul up baskets of bait – sitting on ledges way above the sea, shouting and whistling to the ships. A powerful woman in trousers in Wigan, he said, is considered less barbarous than a crinolined fine lady. Joss hung on his every word.

  The rain dies down. Beatrice steps out to peg up sheets and, glancing back, sees with a qualm an invalid behind the pane. The heavy sheets billow like canvas sails. In the interior gloom, the sick woman, not yet twenty-seven, is a patch of shadow against the cushions. Anyone else she could bear to lose. But spare Anna. Beatrice offers the Almighty without a second thought Elias (not his wife though), Mrs Peck and all the Salisbury Pecks and Hatchers. Toss in the small Eliases. Beatrice can’t abide children. They bring noise and care; they kill mothers. She’s seen it too often to be intensely eager for marriage.

  Don’t think these things, don’t. But how do you stop yourself thinking the thing before it’s thought? It’s a test. Mortals cannot win. Calvinism is in the Pentecost blood. Jehovah decided everything aeons ago: when He created the world, He knew me in advance. He sees through me; His lidless eye penetrates to my heart and kidneys. You’re open to the Almighty like a coroner’s corpse on a slab, putrescent with sin. To Him we are like the jelly tadpoles wriggling round in the pond, transparent.

  And Anna said the other night in a lull between pains, ‘Have you ever thought, Beatrice, that if Almighty God were human, He’d be a criminal, we’d have to send Him to the penal colonies or … hang Him as a mass murderer? Look at the mess He’s made.’

  There’s something that comes over Anna that makes one think the word hysterical. A word Beatrice prefers to heretical. If truth were known, they’re both backsliding daughters. But only Anna seems to reckon this a virtue rather than a sin.

  ‘Annie, we did execute him,’ was all Beatrice said. She spoke in a tone of rueful triumph. ‘We crucified our Saviour. You know we did. For loving us.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘You did. The Jews killed him on behalf of the human race.’

  ‘Not with my consent. I wasn’t there. Anyway I meant God the Father, not the Son.’

  ‘They are the same, dear. Think before you speak.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I do. Perhaps it’s better not to think?’

  ‘Or not to read all those unsettling books and journals.’

  ‘Mirrie brings them. I like to discuss them with her.’

  ‘When is Mrs Sala going off to the Continent?’

  Anna’s friends, Mr and Mrs Sala, are rich and cultured Unitarians from the north of England: to them Jesus Christ is not God, just a good man. Beatrice shudders at this atheistical rationalism. Something in Mrs Sala distresses one: a big-boned lady with a contralto voice, the light of a terrible, questioning sincerity in her pale eyes and no limit to her powers of speculation. She exerts an all but mesmeric influence over Anna. Indeed, it’s not impossible that Mrs Sala practises the art of mesmerism. Her face plunges forward at you, staring with sympathetic intensity. Apparently there exists a phrenological cast of this formidable skull: Mrs Sala is said to have had her hair shaved off in order that its bumps could be measured.

  Are all these bluestocking females such simpletons? Can they really imagine that the key to the human soul resides in the bumps of a skull?

  First Lore, with her head-in-the-sky philosophical notions, and now Mrs Sala with her heresies have holed Anna like a colander full of doubts.

  Hush now, hush: Father would have counselled that doubt is natural, a part of faith. And I was a better person, kinder, less caustic, Beatrice thinks, before I had to step into Papa’s shoes. Tapering, buttoned, many-times-mended, Father’s boots intimately remember him. His scent is trapped there, so their neighbour’s labrador bitch told them, nose snuffling into leather innards. Beatrice is still giving away his belongings to the Baptist poor. Good folk with only one pair of boots apiece. Beatrice will not give to every pauper or pariah or Methodist or Irishman down on his luck. How would that further God’s work? Following in Papa’s footsteps, she dispenses charity, exhortations and pious tracts, reading aloud Mr Spurgeon’s sermons to the sick, with a burning face because this is not easy for a woman to do. A husband would relieve her of such duties.

  I have no likeness of you, Annie, Beatrice thinks with a shiver. We should have your photograph made or perhaps a miniature. Never mind the cost. There should be something left of your face. Beatrice kneels at the sofa, head on Anna’s cushion; lavender fails to screen the unhealthy sourness on her sister’s breath.

  ‘Is Mr Elias still here?’

  ‘No and good riddance. Wouldn’t you think he could at least offer to pray with you or read to you, Annie?’

  ‘Well, quite honestly, I can do without Elias reading to me. He gabbles.’

  Anna’s affliction is a stronghold from which she assails the values on which their house is built. Affliction should temper the soul, subduing us to acceptance of our lot. But I’m no better, Beatrice thinks. Principled master of herself though she likes to appear, hardly a day passes without internal rebellion; discontent races like port wine through her veins.

  And part of it is that one gets a kind of nether view of the visiting clergy, in rather the way that Sukey is acquainted with the contents of the Pentecosts’ chamber pots. Subtle and gentlemanly Mr Montagu is distinguished by his surprising avarice, for despite his wife’s affluence, he’s a skinflint. Mr Elias is known for his facile piano-tinkling; Mr Kyffin for nervous tics and the ginger tobacco stains on his teeth; Mr Anwyl for his capers and caprices. And all by their appetites; their guzzling enjoyment of Sarum House’s hospitality.

  Up to the elbows, Beatrice’s hands are swallowed in the chilly insides of Tilly the Goose. Tilly’s mate Hector continues to search for his mate in the pond, swimming in baffled circles. Sukey mixes herbs for stuffing, humming a folk tune, something pretty and profane. Beatrice wants to whistle and refrains. The side door opens: Mrs Elias – bonnetless, hair a muss of greying waves tumbling from its bun, a wide smile.

  ‘You’ll come tonight, won’t you, dear, to the service?’

  ‘Of course, Loveday. If Anna feels she can manage without me.’

  ‘Oh Anna, dear heart, you can’t miss this! You
get so few treats, cariad.’ Loveday Elias, seating herself beside the invalid’s sofa, takes Anna’s hand. Can’t they push Anna across very gently in the wheeled chair? It’s just over the road, no distance.

  ‘Bowels,’ mouths Beatrice. She shakes her head behind her sister’s back. Anna’s bowels close up or they loosen, without rhyme or reason. They are quite honestly hysterical bowels.

  ‘Mr Elias warned me,’ Anna sings out. ‘Your countryman Mr Idris Jones of Bedwellty and his three ranting, canting sons! Oh no, please. I just couldn’t bear it.’

  Loveday takes no offence; never does. ‘Dyna ni. But you’ll miss something world-scale. Mr Elias prevailed upon Mr Jones to preach tonight. The chapel will be packed out, if last week at Mickel Green is anything to go by. Weeping they were in the aisles. Stamping and crying out like Methodists. And indeed Wesleyans attended. Souls were touched.’

  ‘I’d be weeping in the aisle if three youths with conkers on a string and round-button collars undertook to lecture me.’

  ‘Well, chwarae teg, Anna, the Jones boys are all over seventeen and baptised,’ Loveday says, smiling. She receives Anna’s asperities with comfortable serenity. ‘And – consider – they are getting older by the moment. I must admit that Mr Elias and I were sceptical. But, as I reminded him, how old was our Saviour when he lectured the elders in the Temple? Two years younger than Mr Spurgeon when he set out on his great work. And you know, we do need an Awakening! It’s been too long.’

  The Eliases often chat in Welsh together and with Mr Anwyl; there are so many Welshmen in Wiltshire that their homeland must be depopulated. Ministers in Wales don’t have two pennies to rub together, so it’s hardly surprising that sixty pounds a year in England is a magnet. Still, Beatrice is fond of Loveday; can’t help warming to her scatterbrained sincerity. Loveday can be quiet at the heart of a storm: a storm she has herself awoken in the form of five little sinners she and Mr Elias have called into the world and permitted to thunder barefoot over the tilting wooden floors while the piano plays a mazurka and unused mops rattle in pails and they all fall into bed at night innocent of soap and water.

  ‘Babes and sucklings have their place,’ observes Anna. ‘In cribs, on reins.’

  *

  And still you are smitten, Anna thinks, with the quivering expectation that Papa will appear up there in the high pulpit; he’s been hiding, round some twist in time and space. The mind tricks itself into thinking that if it waits long enough, the beloved will come home and set us all to rights. He’ll calm my tumults with a ‘Peace, be still.’ Oh, you are such a coward, Anna goads herself, forever on the run from reality. Your father will never come again. You’ll never see his face on this side of the grave, any more than you’ll see Lore’s. Accept it. The arrow speeds into the soft tissue of her belly; it lodges there and the venom it carries spreads. Pain radiates, she’ll faint, she perspires, she’s unwholesome: what if Anna soils herself in front of the congregation? Better to make Jocelyn take her home while there’s still time.

  The chapel reeks of rotten lilies or is that Anna’s own smell?

  The doors close behind her. Folk crowd the back of the chapel and gallery. Leaving the wheeled chair at the door, Joss supports his invalid sister to her place. Seated between Beatrice and Loveday and catching her breath, Anna is penetrated by birdsong from beyond the arched pane of plain glass. A yellowhammer surely, calling ‘A-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese!’ She’d like to be out there in the freedom of the open air. Joss with a small cough excuses himself and sidles off to sit amongst the servants. Anna hopes Beatrice will not notice and have her outing marred. She probably will. If there’s something negative to see, Beatrice’s eye will register it and darken. The dear fellow hasn’t even been baptised: never quite got round to it.

  Joss, who never came up to scratch, was an embarrassment to Papa but he always hoped for his son’s improvement. Joss tried his best and Papa, a just and charitable man for all his hellfire Calvinist theology, acknowledged the boy’s good heart while he lamented his flabby will. As for Anna, he indulged his younger daughter; denied her nothing and praised her even for ruffianly behaviour, which he called ‘spirit’. Down on the dappled grass Jacob Pentecost cast himself to snort like a pony, bucking while she rode him under the apple trees, whipping his horsy flanks with a switch of twigs. His silver hair was a mane she pulled or stroked. Paternal displeasure, which Anna rarely felt, was the end of the world to her.

  He was curiously innocent, she thinks. So interested in the antiquities at Sarum and Avebury, he never allowed questions of geological time to touch his faith. Never, that is, until the last couple of years. Every modern town, the suave Mr Montagu wryly remarked, should have a Village Darwin as its idiot, a Lesser Baboon, if one might so phrase it. He and Papa attended a lecture on the mutability of species by Mr Lee the analytical chemist. Mr Montagu was well pleased with his own contribution to the debate; he’d shot a whole quiverful of arrows into the soft belly of the undereducated fellow. They say one comes to look like one’s dog or one’s hobby horse: in the case of poor Mr Lee there’s a speaking simian likeness, Mr Montagu observed.

  Papa was quiet; he didn’t throw stones. In our day, he muttered, shaking his head, it seems most naturalists are infidels. And poor Papa did not make a good death. But that was his illness.

  Curious expectation murmurs round the chapel. The deacons, seated in a row facing the flock, swivel their heads as one. There’s a sudden stillness, a rustle; the preacher slips through the partially open door – and is not Mr Idris Jones of Bedwellty but Mr Clifford of Praed Street in London.

  Easy, all too easy, to fall headlong for a young man floating aloft in a shabby coat and the mercy of Christ Jesus in his eyes. So easy if you cared a fig about young men. Anna can’t seem to melt feelings of friendship into passionate attraction to any of the eligible young ministers who visit Sarum House. She remains cool, comradely. John Clifford, introduced by Mr Elias in glowing terms, is a shy-looking soul in his twenties, pale hair beginning to recede. He looks as if he never ate cake; his face is all angles and points. At the same time he’d be glad to see you eating cake. Anna glances sidelong at Beatrice: she’s taken up with the wrigglings of Tom and Jack Elias, who, managing to dodge their ma (and how willing Loveday is to be dodged), have nabbed a place at the outer end of the pew.

  Yes, a lovely man, to whom Beatrice will surely be susceptible, having collected in her time reverend followers as a cat laps cream, turning from one to another in a whirl of bewilderment, finding that none could offer the thing (what is it?) that she craves. As one does crave, Anna thinks. Above them all towers Christian Ritter for whom – ever since she was a girl – Papa intended poor Beatrice.

  What Anna herself desires, she cannot exactly fathom. An end to pain and physical weakness would be a start. Beyond that: some urgent scope denied to her. Action. Vocation. Rather than sitting here under the pastor’s spell, Anna imagines being the pastor, up on a public stage, offering milk and honey from her lips, and bitter herbs too. To be the mouth rather than the ears.

  Foot-binding. Mr Thoms brought home from the mission to China a pair of doll-sized slippers. He told of women mincing on crippled feet; they were considered more beautiful when deformed. Anna said, ‘Oh yes, Mr Thoms, we have that here but less blatantly.’ Beatrice kicked her under the table. Mr Thoms looked mildly puzzled. Silenced, Anna exploded inwardly: our tongues are bound, our brains are bound. Women are not fully awake; never have been. One is condemned for thinking – and thinking aloud – oh, heresy! This farce, this hypocrisy, this stupefaction! With every throb of rebellion, Anna finds transient relief from her spasms. The spirit of the Puritan Pentecosts scintillates in Anna’s veins, hot as the brandy Mr Sala brings to relax her pain, as he puts it, and for a while it does.

  Mirrie Sala, intellectual, freethinking, has somehow got away. Or rather she’s got away with it. How did she do that? I don’t believe I shall, Anna thinks. The worst thing about being ill is being u
nable to ride Spirit. Anna can hardly bear to meet her pony’s melting eyes.

  I’ll get better. I’ll ride again, she promises herself. I will write if I cannot speak.

  She hears the word slave and pays attention. Mr Elias, introducing Mr Clifford, explains that Mr Idris Jones of Bedwellty, accompanied by the fruit of his loins, has taken ship for America. Not in search of lucre but in order to invite Mr Henry Ward Beecher to return to England. Beecher the anti-slavery preacher, charismatic, brilliant, stands at the centre of the tempest at present shaking that unhappy nation. America is moving inexorably, it seems, towards civil war. Baptists have a long and honourable record in the anti-slavery movement. Anna remembers Mr Knibb, their father’s friend, describing the hell of slavery in Jamaica so that they all wept and, more to the point, opened their purses.

  Mr Elias explains that a fortnight ago Idris Jones visited Aberystwyth, where a great Awakening has spread from America. There he dreamed of its advance into England. A Revival. The name of Mr Beecher occurred to him. Accordingly Mr Jones left for Boston on The Petrel.

  ‘Shushie shushie, darling heart,’ whispers Loveday to Jack, leaning across Anna and putting a finger to her lips. He takes no notice. Beatrice, red in the face, grips the squirmer’s wrist and gives it a spiteful tug. Mouth squared up to bellow, Jack Elias takes her measure through his tears.

  ‘You little monster,’ Anna hears her sister whisper to the lad. ‘Sit still.’

  Jack’s resistance collapses. He slumps into a doleful heap of boyhood; his nose runs green mucus; one tear trickles down his cheek. Tom hugs him up against his side and tickles his armpit with the free hand.