Immediately after prayers, the servant says, ‘Excuse me, miss, I’m going to leave.’
No, please don’t say so. Nothing holds Sukey in this bond. She can desert her mistress at any time. She, the inferior, is free and I, the mistress, am dependent. You can’t do this to me. I’ve been so good to you. However Beatrice says evenly, ‘Oh. Why is that, Sukey? Have you not been happy with us? Is there something not to your liking?’
With that, Sukey pulls off her cap. Her sandy-red hair falls in crinkled waves down her back, brazen in the soft evening light. Beatrice gasps; takes a step back.
‘It’s all so dismal, miss.’
‘In what way though, Sukey? What is dismal?’
‘Everything. Except Mr Joss. He’s a good sort. But obviously he can’t keep me company all the time. And otherwise there’s no one else here but me.’ Once unleashed, complaints become torrential. ‘Where I was before there was plenty of servants, see, and we could have a laugh and a joke together. And another thing is, I hate going to chapel. All the praying and canting and Methody stuff … it’s not what I’m used to and I don’t want it stuffed down my throat.’
Beatrice, astounded, hears her voice come out in a squeaking protest: ‘But we are not Methodists, Sukey, you know that. This is unhandsome.’
‘Which it may be and I’m sorry. And more’s the pity you aren’t Methodists, at least there’d be a bit of singing and jollity.’
‘So – you don’t wish to meet your God at chapel?’
Sukey, standing to her full five foot two, says with some dignity, ‘If I might say without offence, Miss, that’s my own business – this is what I been taught anyhow – and private. I’ll work out my notice, don’t worry.’
Beatrice lowers her head. ‘I think you should put your cap back on, Sukey. I’ve no idea why you took it off.’
‘I don’t know neither.’ Making no move to replace it, Sukey flashes Beatrice a smirk. ‘You can be more holy-like without me,’ she says. She picks up a scrubbing brush; gives it a little toss in the air and flounces off to scour the pantry before departing for the night. Does it scrupulously. All is spick and span when she departs. She bangs the door behind her.
And so the house begins to totter on its foundations. Beatrice crosses the road for the prayer meeting, her heart troubled. Not least that the girl said she was alone in the house; there was no one there. I work alongside her. I share everything she does. Am I then no one?
Chapter 4
June is wet. The butter won’t churn. In the fields the shorn sheep huddle shivering in the unseasonable weather. Bread is sixpence halfpenny. The Salas have gone. Christian’s departure from America is delayed. Will fails to visit. Joss is in a mortal sulk at Sukey’s departure; he’d grown fond of her, he mutters when reproached for his attachment to an unsaved female servant. He won’t know what to do without her jolly face to come home to. He lolls and lounges and takes too much wine: you smell it on his breath the following morning. Beatrice interviews unsuitable girls. Anna gradually sinks. Her bowels don’t move. Beatrice is prey to a need to force-feed her sister like a goose.
The invalid shrieks, shrinks back, as her sister advances with a plate of lambs’ tails fried in egg and breadcrumbs. ‘Don’t bring that muck anywhere near me; I can’t stand the smell.’ She twists round to bury her face in a cushion and her book dislodges, to lie splayed on the floor.
Beatrice fishes it up. Reading the word Species, she thinks the word specious. Anna snatches it back and buries it in the blankets.
‘Yes, you can,’ Beatrice says. ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Go away.’
‘I won’t go away until you’ve eaten three teaspoonsful. If you’re well enough to make such a fuss, you’re well enough to at least try to eat.’
‘Take it away.’
Beatrice acquiesces. Nothing for it but to call in Dr Quarles. Placing on the table the delicacy she’s taken trouble to cook, Beatrice stands at the kitchen window, draws several deep breaths and fits in a tense prayer for patience. She would be more merciful to her sister over the lambs’ tails if Mr Anwyl had only been over to visit. Or if a letter had come from Christian. Back she goes, with half the quantity of food on the plate.
‘Annie,’ she begins. ‘Dear Annie love – won’t you try for me? Because it does hurt so to see you starve yourself.’
‘I could try a little gin in hot water, Beattie. Or some of Baines’s port you’ve hidden somewhere.’
Beatrice hastens to prepare the gin, whisking the food away. Amy, the new servant, reheats it and Beatrice brings it back with the gin. The infidel port is no longer in the house: Miss Pentecost has given it to three deserving and abstemious villagers for medicinal use. ‘Three tiny spoonfuls first, darling.’ She waits.
Anna’s obstinacy sets rock-hard. ‘I’m not a child to be harangued. I’ll drink the gin. If you’d let me go to St Ives with my friends … ’
That childish whining tune again. Beatrice wonders, as her sister sips the gin and lemon, if Anna has made up her mind to follow their parents, brother and stepmothers to the mound in the churchyard and there abandon herself to final peace. To leave Beatrice alone in the world. Draughts gust between door and window; the sickly fire gutters. She hears Anna’s unridden horse, Spirit, whinny in its stall. It will have to be sold. The books must be disposed of.
Beatrice darts the spoon forward; as Anna’s mouth opens again, morsels enter her lips. She retches but swallows. Clamping her mouth, she turns her face away.
‘Now, just two more,’ says Beatrice.
Silence.
‘I won’t give up, Annie. I daren’t give up.’
Silence.
Anna puts out her hand. At last. Beatrice brings the plate closer. Her sister, laughing and crying, grabs the rim and slings it across the room like a quoit. The plate smashes against the fireplace. ‘Ha!’
Amy, taken on just this morning, is called in to clear the mess. ‘How did that happen. Miss?’ she asks.
Anna laughs again, unpleasantly. ‘Ask her.’ She stares at her sister without blinking. But Beatrice can see that her whole body quivers.
Hysteria, Beatrice thinks.
It’s hysterical to talk to oneself in private, as Anna does. To hide smirking grins behind a hand when there’s company. To keep books in your bed claiming they act as hot-water bottles. To hurl your lunch across the room like a child in a tantrum.
Beatrice comprehends the root of Anna’s hysteria, of course she does. Its origin is her womb, whose vagrancy expresses itself in her bowels. These are unstable, contradictory even. For weeks at a time Anna will have loose motions; then everything will silt up. Dr Quarles explains that faecal matter undischarged from the belly exudes poisons which mount to the brain. Beatrice knows that the bowels could never have polluted the system if Miriam Sala hadn’t introduced poison. Just as Indian sailors brought cholera to England, so Mrs Sala, that foreign body, has contaminated Anna, as Lore did before her.
Beatrice is the link between Anna and health; Anna and eternal life. But she allows her sister to win the current skirmish; backs off and marches straight over to Dr Quarles’s house.
He’s over in the twinkling of an eye. Quarles examines Anna thoroughly, lamenting that one cannot actually see into the intestines. Displaying none of the nervous agitation Beatrice would have predicted, the patient acts like an incredulous third party observing a South Sea islander from a distance.
The words ‘enema’ and ‘blister’ are spoken in private conference.
The moment Anna claps eyes on the soda-water bottle, she knows. She screams that it’s violation, she won’t, you mustn’t, get out of her room. Beatrice shushes her, laying out the red rubber sheet on the bed. Anna, with more energy than she’s shown for weeks, slips out of bed, grabs the rubber tube and flings it towards the fire. It lands on the rug; Beatrice rescues the apparatus, takes it to the wash bowl and rinses it thoroughly.
‘Come on, Annie, this is silly. Don’t be ch
ildish.’
As children they accepted without complaint the weekly enema to keep them regular. They understood the reasons for it. You could not go shopping or visiting or to Sunday School if you were likely to be caught short. The Pentecost children were treated with respect and felt little indignity in submitting to harmless turpentine and green soap dissolved in hot water. Jocelyn seemed actually to welcome and enjoy it. Beatrice did feel curious about that.
Anna won’t. She fights. They scuffle silently.
‘You’re killing me, Beatrice.’
Beatrice sits down at the end of the sofa, places one hand on her sister’s calf. She’ll have to bring in a neighbour to help. ‘Do you not believe in Dr Quarles?’
‘I believe he exists. I know he’s an ass.’
‘Well, sweetheart, never mind; I’ll leave you in peace for now.’
‘What do you mean by for now?’
Anna is on to you like a shot. Beatrice prevaricates. ‘I’ll look in on you later. Shall I bring you a cup of tea? Or some hot milk and water? No?’
When Mrs Bunce arrives, there’s another painful scene in Anna’s sick room.
‘There, there,’ says Mrs Bunce, and flips Anna over onto her stomach like a fish. She’s a large woman, nurse, midwife, layer-out. She wears a black hat and carries a black bag wherever she goes; the children call her a witch. There’s little Mrs Bunce hasn’t seen before. In goes the nozzle; Beatrice, taking a deep breath, presses it deep into Anna’s anus. It has to be done, so do it efficiently, she tells herself – for Anna’s sake. Her sister, who’s given up struggling, lies bathed in tears and cold sweat. When it’s all over, she will not look at Beatrice. She curls up in her bed, tears seeping into the pillow.
The bowel movement follows. Beatrice removes the chamber pot. As she washes her hands, she hears Quarles’s man at the door, delivering the blister. She hardly has the heart to administer it; her throat chokes with unshed tears. But it must be done. She swallows some gin and feels ashamed, not at the actions she must perform but at her own rancorous absence of pity. Beatrice’s goodness is tainted with something obscene – this endless assertion of predominance.
Gently, Beatrice draws back the blankets. Anna, compliant, has lost her fight; rolls onto her back, eyes shut. Beatrice raises her sister’s nightgown. One – two – three. The wax blister with the hot boiled leaves is rolled onto the delicate skin of her abdomen. Swiftly, Beatrice pulls down the nightgown and kneels at Anna’s bedside, holding her hand in both of hers. Tears leak from the corners of Anna’s eyes at the searing pain. She seems to pass out; is whispering something, over and over.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Beatrice says, weeping too, without restraint. ‘Please forgive me, Annie. I wish I could take the pain myself.’
Anna opens her eyes; nods. She understands that the treatment, by producing blisters on the outside of her body, will draw to the surface and drain the muck from the blisters whose presence Quarles suspects on her intestines. She lies trembling, bearing the biting pain that increases throughout the night.
At three she screams: ‘Lore! Oh, come back. Help me, Lore.’
She talks to the dead. She’s not Anna any more. She is abject pain; pain is all Anna is. Beatrice wonders whether to send out for laudanum. But wouldn’t that begin the blockage problem again? And so she’d have to hurt Anna for her own good, all over again. She’d rather chew a mouthful of stinging nettles than add a mite to her misery.
Chapter 5
How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter.
Mr Kyffin, exchanging pulpits with Mr Anwyl, announces the text for his sermon: The Song of Solomon. Beatrice has arranged the invitation as a way of showing Mr Kyffin’s persecutors at Florian Street the high regard in which Chauntsey holds its minister.
Their friend’s manner is exalted. Mr Kyffin dispenses with notes, having placed his trust (so he explains) in the Spirit to speak through him, to pierce the hearts of Christ’s stony-hearted people. For there will be an Awakening! A revival! It is coming! He gazes upwards. We see the signs throughout this lethargic, secular land. Who knows whence Revival will come: north, south, east or west? Perhaps from Wales? Or from Fighelbourn or Chauntsey?
There is a Boy, Mr Kyffin announces, a common boy of West Grimstead, chosen of the Lord, preaching at the Market Cross. Isaac Minety, the baker’s son. Who has heard the boy speak? Not yet perhaps? You shall!
There is Mr Spurgeon in his London pulpit. Perhaps he is the coming man.
Maybe the man will issue from America, on board the Petrel with Mr Jones of Bedwellty. It is not impossible that Mr Idris Jones may himself be the man. This we do not know! As yet. But the high wind is coming.
‘And do remember,’ says Mr Kyffin in a more ordinary tone, ‘when the glorious tempest of salvation shakes this nation, that it was your friend John who told you the news. But to my text! How beautiful are thy feet, prince’s daughter.’
The Song of Solomon is a book at which Bibles regularly fall open but on which little is ever said. A chaste veil is drawn. But why, enquires the pastor, should we fear to read Christ’s love song to his spouse the church? What should hold us back from contemplating the naked and the shod foot of the beloved? In all reverence.
Embarrassment seethes in the chapel. Shufflings, coughs.
Sensuous love, he says, is not a game.
No wonder poor Mrs Kyffin has cried off; no wonder Mr Prynne is up in arms, if this is Mr Kyffin’s new theme.
‘For what has John Milton, that great Puritan spirit, to say about nudity in Paradise Lost?’ Mr Kyffin enquires. ‘Does anyone here remember? What are clothes but those troublesome disguises which we wear? And what is excessive modesty but dishonest shame? Sensuous love is a sacred and mysterious language, spoken only in deep trust between bridegroom and bride in the sanctuary of their marriage bed.’
‘I shall show you the bed!’ he exclaims with a dramatic flourish. ‘Here is the bed! Here it is!’
Silence in the pews. Consternation. Faces red as radishes. Beatrice’s lower body within its drawers, shift, petticoats, corset, crinoline cage and skirts is aware of itself. Ladies sit rigid as conscious statues. They hold their breath. What next? Will there be a walkout? Will the respectable worshippers in the pews protest?
‘In my hand! The Word itself! The Book is, so to speak, the bed of consummation.’ John Kyffin holds his Bible aloft. ‘Here it is. Love itself. The wooing tenderness of my blessed Jesus for my erring human soul. Pillows for my delinquent head! Quilts of love to warm me, even me, the unchaste bride!’
There’s some relief and relaxation as the sermon moves to consideration of the pattern of shoe that might have been worn in the Holy Land by the prince’s daughter.
‘Let us say, sandals. The Lover looks down at the humblest portion of his beloved’s person and praises its beauty. Sandals are closed (in order to remain attached to the foot) but also open to the air, most necessary in the torrid temperatures of the Holy Land. And is this base function something of which we should be ashamed to speak? My children, we walk through the dust – and of this dust we’re fashioned – and to it we’ll return. Let’s consider also that this is where the sole meets the earth. Can we call to mind occasions when we have perceived the soul of man, woman or child in the feet?’
Mr Kyffin pauses.
Beatrice’s thoughts swing about wildly as the pause for reflection lengthens. A nervous laugh has to be thrust down.
‘Bring to mind,’ the preacher exhorts them, ‘the foot of love.’
It flashes through her: Jack Emanuel Elias at four months old in his crib under the apple tree. Anna in a blue summer dress snaring both his naked feet in her hands, kissing them till the baby shrieked with laughter. This is how it will be, Beatrice thought, when we are mothers.
But first we must have husbands. We must lose our virginity. Don’t think that; why are you thinking it; why is the pastor arousing such thoughts, in the chapel of all places? Beatrice seeks to blo
ck out Mr Kyffin’s words, his surely deranged words. She throws herself into prayer. But the thought of a wedding night, banished, creeps back.
The ram is brought by Farmer Hewison to tup the Pentecost ewes.
The dog mates with the howling bitch behind the sheds.
Coupled fox and vixen, caught in the tie, tear at the swollen root of their attachment, struggling for freedom.
Beatrice has nothing whatever to learn about the mechanics of mating, never having viewed it as unwholesome or shameful. But how the equivalent negotiation is transacted between human beings is unclear. Her body swirls disquietly. She can imagine a man gripping the tender instep of her foot in his hand, maternally: a strange and pleasurable thought. She can imagine a tempestuous bed brought to a hush, the sheets allowed to lie where they fell, lovers lying naked to one another in married trust. She cannot see the man’s face. One must trust this person with one’s life.
Afterwards the elders and deacons, as one body, flee Mr Kyffin, ignoring his outstretched hand. Mrs Mussell and her six daughters sidestep, nod and depart at the double, shoulders high, cheeks pink. Mrs Bunce the midwife chats amiably with Mr Kyffin, as does dear deaf Mr Turnbull who congratulates the preacher on an elevating sermon. Handsome Daniel Pittaway the gardener winks at Edwin Fribance the blacksmith, who preserves a grave countenance.
Mr Kyffin rides high on a windy afflatus. At supper in Sarum House, he refrains from enlightening the Pentecosts about the painful events at Florian Street. After the cheese platter, the afflatus wilts; he goes quiet and retires without taking a pipe with Jocelyn.
Beatrice recounts to her sister the gist of the sermon. ‘Poor Mr Kyffin, he seems to have gone off on his own strange road.’
‘Christianity is fissiparous,’ says Anna. ‘That’s how it works, I’m afraid.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’
‘Worms in a garden. To grow, they have to break. They divide to reproduce. Protestants divide and subdivide until there’s no union left, just thousands of sects all wriggling away to their own tune. Until in the end there are ten million churches of one person.’
Awakening Page 6