No need to ask Anna twice. But she lingers and says, ‘Dear, we shall come through all this. We shall. I won’t do the least thing to worry you. I promise. Please don’t look like that.’
‘I’m not looking like anything.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, but let’s not badger her, Annie,’ Will advises.
‘Am I badgering you, love? I’ll stop. But what can I do to console you?’ Anna’s eyes swim with tears. ‘Anything at all. Whatever it is, I’ll do it, just ask me.’
Him, Beatrice thinks. Give me him. Give him back. My old love, my one love, who I now see is filled with the Holy Spirit, the Comforter.
‘You deny me, Anna,’ she cries. ‘You deny me!’
‘What do I deny you? Because I won’t promise not to think my thoughts? I can’t not think and still be me.’
‘Then don’t act on them,’ says Beatrice.
‘I will try.’
Anna puts her arms round her sister and kisses her cheek, imploring some return of emotion – but Beatrice can find none to give. The last milk has dried in her glands. A faint tingling: then the star goes out. This is all as God wills. And remember, she tells herself, Will is your sister’s husband. You have no right to him. She scrubs the kitchen table. Everywhere seems to have been let to slide. Beatrice will not blame Amy for the state of Sarum House; it’s her own lackadaisical self who bears responsibility for the housekeeping. Every corner betrays signs of neglect. Blade marks score the beech table, into whose wounds blood and fat have run over decades. Very hard to scour out, however you attack them; such deep and polluted scars.
She knew the man who killed her, the dear old sow understood at once. Such intelligent beasts they are, swine; they recognise individual human faces. They look you in the eye and return your scrutiny. Pigs understand you perhaps through their noses. To me Lucy would come lolloping with that funny barking sound and snuffle at me and lie down at my feet to have her fat belly tickled. But at the sight of the pig-sticker she screamed like a baby. He is skilful, mind, very. He dispatched her as fast as it could be done and there she swung, upended, hooked. She’d ceased to be Lucy. Hams and flitch, blood for pudding. Her lifeblood poured into the bucket: plenty of salt to stop it congealing. The scream died fast in her throat. Singeing, scalding, scraping. The pig-sticker went at it, snorting. A reek arose, until her skin looked like a field of mushrooms. The guts flopped out cleanly, secured in the white transparent sheath of the bowel: no stench. Everyone present tasted the jellylike texture of the meat, succulent, still warm. And now Lucy is part of me, part of us all. Strange eucharistic sacrifice. And this is the world in which our Maker has set us, for our sins. Lucy was without sin. She suffered for Eve’s mortal transgression, like the whole Creation.
Beatrice stands back to survey her work on the table, which is still unclean. How could she have let it get like this? It will have to do. He says it is spick and span. It isn’t really. But they’re ready to bake. Fetching an apron for Will, Beatrice ties it for him; he obediently washes his hands to the elbows. Dirt kills, she reminds him: Miss Nightingale has warned us. She scrubbed the filth out of the Crimea. But foetid airs arise from the earth and poison us. We breathe them in; they kill our babies. And our house is lowlying: so near to the river, the earth saturated. All this unhealthiness is Eve’s gift to us.
They knead together, knuckles in the dough, flour whitening her companion’s hair. He has a confession, Will says: this isn’t the first time he’s played the baker. He used to bake bread before, at home with his foster-mother. The dark bara lawr, laverbread, eaten with bacon and cockles. One day he’ll prepare for Beatrice and Anna such a breakfast. But also they’d occasionally bake the good white bread. The scent as you took it out! Always it was a miracle of transformation. The way the loaf rose under the cloth. The way it goldens in the oven. The way the smell gets into your clothes and hair and beard, and haunts you on the stairs and strays into every corner of the house. The following day, even then, there’s the ghost of the scent, reminding us perhaps of our duty to enjoy the God-made world.
‘What is your view, Will,’ she asks him, ‘of the spirits? Am I wrong?’
‘Hard for me to judge, dear – because of course I was not present. All I know is that anything is possible to God, anything at all. I will pray about it. Or shall we do so together? Shall we kneel? Here and now, what better time?’
Here on the rust-red tiles, dusted with flour, they fall to their knees, hand in hand – and Amy, entering with a clattering pail and a grumbling word on her lips, stops in her tracks, retreats and closes the door softly.
*
Can one listen in to other folk’s conversations, even from a separate room? Or overhear when nobody’s actually speaking? Her floor is their ceiling and shields the two of them from her gaze. But Anna is convinced that no sooner did she retreat than the two of them turned to one another. They were made for each other: simple as that. She imagines Will saying to his sister-in-law, ‘God is infinitely merciful, Beatrice. Don’t be tempted to imagine that His heart is hard. Or that He turns away from your grief. He has lost a son of his own, don’t forget that. He knows, bach, he knows. How could He fail to know?’ No need of salt in the bread: their tears savour the dough. Tears for a havoc larger than Luke. The chaos that made Will marry his beloved’s sister.
Meanwhile in the chamber below the soles of Anna’s feet, her sister and husband reach out to clasp one another close. Perhaps not in body. But in their hearts they embrace. She cannot blame them. There in the kitchen with the flames from the range casting a red glow, they set aside the dough in the pantry for the yeast to raise. They turn to one another. Anna looks down at the floorboards and witnesses it as it happens, as if from above.
Who giveth this woman?
‘I give her,’ Anna thinks. ‘Fully and freely. Against all law and custom. I give him too – because my love for him, like his for me, though real, turns out to be a kind of adultery.’
Anna takes the pen in her hand: Will’s wedding present to her. The weight of its tortoiseshell body sits snugly on the join between her thumb and forefinger. Tendrils of inlaid flowers wander from the mosaic capstone along the shaft. Loading the pen, Anna touches it to the blotting paper, where a blossom of ink forms. Once it’s bled out, she suspends it above the paper.
The glass water-jug on the desk casts a pale shadow on the page. The surface of the water trembles; light travelling through it traces a faint spangling ellipse, which sways from side to side. She sees the smudge of her lip-print on the rim, the trace of a living moment. The glass blower has trapped a bubble of air – his breath perhaps – in the vessel, creating an imperfection, the vestige of another moment, years ago. Something microscopic afloat in the water – perhaps a flake of human skin – casts the shadow of a speck. In the sunlight, the grain of the cherry wood desk has a depth of brown that is remarkable: what would a word for this colour be? The years have stained the wood with a dark luminosity of varnish and polish. Its grain is eventful, waylaying the eye with knots and whorls where once branches forked in the living tree.
In a world without spirit, Anna thinks, all you’re left with is matter. Is that so very bad? All objects have a story. The world’s a reliquary and here we are sifting about in the remains, turning up a shard here, a fragment there.
She fingers one of the fossilised sea urchins she and Lore loved to collect. You might find a cache of fifty in a shallow grave the plough unearths. Millennia ago a creature crawled in the mud of a warm sea. Its soft insides were consumed by other lives. Into the empty shell oozed a jelly that hardened to a flint cast. Ice and wind and water eroded it out of layers of chalk. Someone picked it up, someone human or nearly human, thousands of years before Anna came along; someone in mourning perhaps, who saw this blind stone eyeball as a sacred object and buried it with the tribe’s dead. Thousands of years later a second wandering collector, Anna Pentecost, pocketed it and took it home and kept it for luck and inspirati
on.
A scent of baking bread arises from downstairs: delicious. There’s laughter from the kitchen; Beatrice is laughing. Will’s miracle, bless him. What to write? Miriam has made a profession of the pen, behind the mask of a male pseudonym: Calder North. The public lie has betrayed the private woman. So what should Anna call herself? Is she capable of writing anything that hangs together? I’m all odds and ends, she thinks. I know nothing systematically. My thoughts are all questions.
The metal box contains a trove of these thoughts that are only questions, going right back to childhood. Opening the lid, she’s confronted with a sea of papers – wallpaper scraps, packing-case paper, flour bags full of jottings, leaves from notebooks, blanks torn from books for her scribbles. Paper in those days was expensive: it had to be conserved. Anna’s tiny script was meant to have a printed effect and yet to be secret.
She holds to the mirror a tiny volume sewn together with minute stitches, labeled ‘The Tump Book by Anna Pentecost’. Inside there are minute illustrations: an earthworm with its segments carefully drawn, a stag beetle and a parade of ants.
My bank or hillock or Tump or mound is a great Mystyry … In my Tump are special tregures and on my Tump are special things going on.
Grasses and dandelions, poppies and vetches are jostling one another, along with ants and earwigs, worms and bees and a dead blackbird mauled by a cat that wasn’t hungry.
And it is My Mamas Tump I have left her the tregures
Anna begins to sort the scraps from the flour bag. The first thing to do is to decipher and transcribe all the scraps. And then begin to write her book, a work not of fiction but of observation. And I need to read, Anna realises. I need to buy books. I need a study. And I need time. I have a vocation. And I need to investigate the Tump. The name on the cover will be, quite plainly, Anna Pentecost.
*
Meeting Mrs Quarles in the street, Beatrice blurts in response to her polite enquiry, ‘My sister tells me she is writing a book.’
‘Oh dear!’
Mrs Quarles is onto it like a cat with a grasshopper. Her face brims with the riling sympathy that feasts on a neighbour’s mortification. She remarks that dear Anna was always a highly sensitive young person. The brain can become inflamed in such cases. The doctor’s wife has observed what she calls ‘unusual ladies’ going in and out of Sarum House. ‘There was one lady who seemed to be carrying a whole pheasant on her head. Doubtless a city fashion.’
Mrs Quarles drops the subject and goes on to lament Dr Quarles’s toothache and his refusal to visit the dentist. Dear oh dear: great men can often be fretful patients. How did the Bard put it: ‘For there was never yet philosopher who could endure the tooth ache patiently.’ A profound truth there. Shakespeare never lets you down. ‘Do you read much Shakespeare, Beatrice?’ she enquires. ‘The Bard is a tonic. I could never manage without my Shakespeare.’
‘Very little. Dr Quarles’s tooth should come out,’ Beatrice observes trenchantly. ‘Without delay.’
The lady with the pheasant hat was a female bookseller from London. She and Anna sequestered themselves with a catalogue from which Anna selected works she ‘needed’ to read. ‘It’s my own money, Beatrice.’ Two boxes duly arrived, which Anna carried up to the spare bedroom she has requisitioned for a ‘study’. Locking the door, Anna pocketed both keys. No by-your-leave. But Anna’s manner was and remains calm and gentle, even humorous. When Beatrice pointed out that the room was frequently required for a visiting minister, Anna apologized – ‘I’m so sorry, love, if it puts you out’. But she said there were plenty of rooms for that; the ministers could double up – and anyone extra could be accommodated by the Eliases. Anna is affable, no trouble to anyone. Never quite here with us really, Beatrice thinks. Anna wears her inkstains like a badge of office. She wanders round the wilderness muttering to herself.
It’s no longer Beatrice’s place to assess her sister’s reading: that duty falls to Will. All one can say is that there have been no further visits to or from Antigone Kyffin and Anna has assured her sister that she views the whole performance with irony. ‘It’s sheer legerdemain,’ she says, evidently trying out a new word and feeling pleased with it. ‘Only (and this is the interesting part) the poor deluded conjurer has no idea she’s playing tricks. So it is not intelligent. Interesting though. As a phenomenon.’ She would like to attend more of the séances to observe – but not if Beatrice objects.
And every day Anna seems, in a subtle way, to cede her husband to her sister. There’s to be an ecumenical meeting in Salisbury, to prepare for the Awakening. Will naturally assumes that Anna will accompany him.
‘Oh no, Will, I’m so sorry, I can’t go.’ She says this sorrowfully, not as wishing to give offence but with an air of perplexity. ‘Take Beatrice. You’ll go, won’t you, darling?’
‘It will be a great pleasure to me if Beatrice accompanies us, Annie. But your presence will be looked for, dear. As my wife.’
‘Surely not, Will? Beatrice will even enjoy it.’ And so I would, Beatrice thinks; just sitting with Will is a comfort, even if he never looks at me or speaks to me. But he does look, he does speak, his whole person is aware of me. That will always be so. She knows that, in Anna’s warped mind, every hour she’s kept from her desk and books is an hour lost.
‘Your absence will be commented on, dear. I’m constantly being asked where you are these days.’ Will speaks lightly but there’s a level of grave concern Beatrice never saw before his marriage.
‘People will always talk though, won’t they, cariad?’ Anna responds, not in a cantankerous spirit but touching Will’s arm, with a confident smile. ‘Let them. You’ll go for both of us, won’t you, Beattie?’
‘No, Annie. I’m afraid not. Not if you don’t.’ Beatrice won’t make it easy for Anna to shirk her responsibilities. She can’t make her out. It was so much easier in the days of her hysterical illnesses. Is this calm just another kind of insanity? Anna has crossed some line but Beatrice cannot make out how this happened. She’s acting – yes, that’s it – like a man. As if she had the right to dictate her way of life. And everyone else should recognise it. Yet she looks hale and happy. She’s put on weight and eats like a horse.
‘Bless you, you don’t realise, cariad,’ Anna says to Will.
‘Realise what?’
‘Oh, sweetheart, there’s just so much work to get through.’
Will takes a deep breath; puts his hand through his hair. Softly Beatrice lays her hand on his back for just a moment.
‘But what is it you’re doing?’ he asks. ‘And why? You won’t let anyone in. Why keep it secret?’
When you knock, Anna peers round the door. She doesn’t invite you into the room she has usurped. She’s behaving as if she were the head of household. It’s risible. Risible too that she takes herself for a great authoress. What has she ever written worth keeping?
‘Books are my vocation,’ Anna says.
‘I am a minister of the church, Anna. That is a vocation. And you – are my wife – and a Christian.’ Will speaks with studied patience as if explaining to a child. There’s also a note of pleading in his voice. Beatrice, who keeps quiet, sees how the pulse at his throat throbs.
‘Well. But, dear heart,’ replies Anna in the most rational way, ‘not in any narrow sense.’
Will says nothing. He turns to the window, looks out through the slanting rain. Beatrice stands perfectly still. When he turns back to them, Will suggests that they all three pray together: ‘Peace upon our house,’ he begins. ‘And fellowship one with the other.’
Anna, closing her eyes, seems to surrender to the prayer; she bows her head. She’s just waiting to get back to her scribbling, Beatrice knows. And Will can never winkle her out. She appeals to Joss to talk their sister round.
‘Poor Annie has temporarily mislaid her sense of humour,’ is all Joss will say. He’s expecting a visit from Mr Munby and cannot spare much attention, having let fall that he has something important to discu
ss with his friend. ‘Annie will come round, won’t she? Not to worry, Beattie, she’ll soon recover. Just let her be. Always the best way.’
For once, Beatrice takes her brother’s advice. And in any case she intuits that nature will soon clip Anna’s wings. Routinely Beatrice trims the wings of the hens to stop them escaping, clipping the flight feathers of one wing so the bird’s out of balance. Hens can’t fly but could easily leap the fence. As long as you start above the shafts of the feathers where the blood vessels are, there’s no pain. And every time the bird moults, you repeat the process. It’s time. Beatrice will do this soon. She has deliberately ignored, could hardly bear to acknowledge, her sister’s state. In point of fact all she has to do is ask, ‘When do you expect your confinement, dear?’ And Anna will fall to earth, her Icarus dreams of fame aborted.
In the night Beatrice is awoken by the sound of the Anwyls’ door opening and closing. The door of Anna’s so-called study also opens and closes. There are sounds of a whispered altercation. Anna has gone in there to sleep – is that it? – and refused her husband entrance? There’s a long pause, then the sound of slow footsteps down the stairs. Beatrice waits for the click of the latch. Peering from her window, she sees her brother-in-law in the garden, walking slowly up and down, fingers at his temples.
There’s no answer when Beatrice knocks. ‘Anna! What on earth are you doing?’
Nothing.
‘Come to the door, dear.’
Nothing.
If Anna won’t go to Will, Beatrice must. She’ll bring him into the kitchen; brew him tea; talk the whole thing through and work out what steps to take to rid their home of turmoil. Vocation, she thinks, vocation! The voice that’s calling Anna to wall herself up like an anchoress in her cell must be either demented or demonic. She thinks of the voice of Lore speaking through poor Antigone. Whatever’s going on in that room, in that wayward head of Anna’s? Beatrice shivers: she doesn’t really want to know. Wrapping her shawl around her, she follows Will out. The fragrance of night-scented stocks hits her with the shock of an archaic memory. She looks up to see if her sister is standing at a window. No – and the candles are all out. Anna can’t be asleep?
Awakening Page 27