Conceit (28 page)

Your hair brushes my cheek and your tongue plunges between my lips, pulling me into the hot mouth of death, the labyrinthine end. My fornicating soul is sucked down with my body into a subterranean grave, your toothed and fatal vaginal embrace.

But a priest is stronger than a woman’s kiss. I hold out long enough for death to unjoint my soul from my skeleton. My face is anointed with Adam’s sweat and Christ’s blood, and my death becomes my resurrection. My soul takes flight and my earth-born body plummets to its fate.

18. A NOCTURNAL

Pegge was sitting beside her father’s bed, trying to get him to sip water from a cup. Con was eager to return to Barking, but still he lingered, his shroud hung ready on the bedpost. It had been a month since he had worn it for the artist, but he was past admiring his likeness on the coffin-lid.

When he finally died, the lament would sound at Paul’s, eclipsing all the other City bells. Women would wash his body, then wrap him in the shroud. The canons would nail him inside a wooden coffin and encase it in a larger one of lead, lowering him into the cold earth between the floor of St Paul’s and the ceiling of St Faith’s beneath. Even as the pavingstones were levelled, his legend would begin its sanctimonious ascent.

Con was welcome to wash his corpse for burial. It was his live body Pegge wished to care for. She was no longer shocked by its white boniness, nor by the mortal nooks and crannies that fell open to her eyes. No more aware of his incontinence than an infant, he sometimes called Pegge by her mother’s name. This evening, although she held his
head for him, the water was dribbling out of the cup and down his chin.

Walton came in, saying cheerfully, “He has no need for water now.”

She handed him the dripping cup. “Stay with him while I find a sponge.”

When she returned, Walton was leaning over her father, telling him that his immortal soul would soon be disrobed of its garment of mortality. Someone—did Walton mean himself?—would press an ear to the Dean’s lips and hear a muffled expiration, an easeful
sploosh
like a dipper going into a bucket, as his body melted into earth and his soul vapoured away in glad expectation of the Beatific Vision. At least that was how Walton pictured it to her father, looking as jubilant as if he would be vapouring off himself.

And her father was just as much a fool, coming back from wherever he had been and resting his hand on Walton’s wrist, muttering, “I were miserable if I might not die.”

Walton scribbled it into his little book. He stopped up the ink-pot just as Bess burst in with enough meat and drink to last her through the night, chasing both Pegge and Walton out.

Some hours before dawn, Pegge returned to her father’s chamber and shook Bess awake. “Let me sit with him now, since I cannot sleep.”

“Nothing goes in the man and nothing comes out.” Bess knocked the crumbs off her lap and lurched out the door, her clogs pounding up the narrow flight of stairs to bed.

The room was full of the cool mystery of spilt milk. The front of her father’s nightshirt was soaked from Bess trying to get some liquid into him. Pegge felt in her pocket for the sponge. She had been so annoyed at Walton, she had forgotten to give it to Bess. Dipping it in water, she held it to her father’s lips. He would not refuse, just as he would not move a finger to hasten his soul’s flight, for fear it might be thought self-murder. He was beyond thinking, sucking like an infant, a mindless rhythmical suck.

A thrill was pulsing in the vein at his neck, tempting the hangman’s noose or the butcher’s axe. His lips invited the suffocator’s palm, yet he was rock still, not moving a hair, a breath, an inch, towards the instrument God chose. His body was aligned towards the east and squared—hips even and flat, arms outstretched. His legs were splayed for the rapist’s plunge, his feet bared for the carpenter’s nails. He had been waiting all night, but his God had not come.

Something must be about to happen, some last words before she witnessed his soul escaping from his body. A formal leave-taking. Some wisdom passed from father to daughter. But what if he never spoke to her again?

“Father, why must you—” She blurted out all the wrongs he had done to her and how she felt and why she had hurt him back in turn. Still he held out for more, and at last she said, “I will be betrothed if you wish it, but I would rather marry for love, as you did.”

His eyelids opened and he looked clear through her.
Out of his death-mumble came a sudden clarity. “You were always my favourite.” Then his lips snapped back into a narrow line as if they had never moved.

Pegge did not believe what she had heard. He must have meant Con, getting bigger with child each day, or Jo who was studying for the priesthood, or Lucy who had died a virgin, or George who made him laugh, or Bridget or Betty who were more marriageable-but Pegge could not stop the sudden greedy joy that fountained up at being finally, justly, inexplicably, loved.

His body now had a mutinous stink about it and an absurd complacency was spreading across his face. His hands were joined in prayer, ready for the winding-sheet. He would not suck at the sponge Pegge held to his lips, and the thrill was pulsing ominously at his neck.

Pegge rolled up his damp nightshirt and stripped it off. His flesh was the black and white of church tiles, but he was not dead yet. When she ran her hand across the hard lump in his belly and up over his chest, his heart sprang alive, cramping and writhing. Something was dithering around in his rib cage like a boy’s stick propelling an iron hoop.

She washed his hands and dried between the fingers with a flannel. At one time, these hands had been as familiar with a woman’s body as hers now were with his. She squeezed water over his blackened toes, gauging the pain by the twitch of his eyelids. Holding up his legs one at a time, she washed them, before and behind, above and below. Then, pushing his knees towards his chest, she
soaped right up into the crack between his buttocks with the sponge.

“Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee,” she sang out. “As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be to taste whole joys.”

She could recite what she wished, for he could no longer object to his own erotic verse. She rinsed and dried the creases, then let his legs fall slack against the mattress. A passive prone receiving female, he was stuck in a marriage-bed waiting for a God who came and went in the small hours like an adulterous husband.

Why would he not tell her what she wished to know? His smug face sucked the pity right out of her. Later, she would hold herself accountable for each lost minute, but now she warmed an aromatic salve in her palm, rubbing it over his skin from west to east. The blood was rushing out of his arms and legs, which were whitening at an alarming rate, and accumulating in his groin, reddening his skin just where her fingers rested.

She thrust her scented hand between his thighs, right up to the shrunken old plums, and asked tormentingly, “What is love?”

A force that had nothing to do with wedlock, that she knew. Only her father had the answer, for Con had certainly not married for love, nor had Walton, nor anyone else Pegge knew. Bridget and Betty would take any man who would take them. Her father and mother had married for love, caused a scandal that had cost them everything, yet even exiled to a country cottage he had written exquisite love-poems to her. Her father alone knew love, but he
was about to bury that knowledge beneath the marble floor of Paul’s.

His pulse was slowing to an aboriginal rhythm and from his throat came the
tick tick tick
of stillborn words. She thought she heard
open
and
window
and went to open it, then remembered the thrill at his neck and spun around. The vein had stopped pulsing. As the sun rose in the east, the hairs at his brow became erect and moist, and paleness crept in a feathery wave from his forehead down his throat and chest, chasing the blood back into his heart.

He had awaited the exact moment that it was God’s pleasure to pluck him, ripe and willing.

And now he had been plucked.

She could see one eye half-open and the other gone white like a new-baby eye, and knew that the soul had gone straight out the window when her head was turned, that it had snuck past her, darted out like a rebellious schoolboy, and that there was nothing left in that old carcass now. Saw the lips gone slack and the hands freed from their noose of prayer. Saw the baby-eye bulge out as if escaping the socket. Pushed it back in with the ball of her thumb. Leaned over and closed the eyelids, this time for good.

She had turned away and missed the event, the instant his whole life had been hastening towards. She had missed discovering whether the soul was a jelly, or hot and sharp like the tip of a speeding arrow. Would it go straight to God, or into his coffin as worm-meat with his body? Perhaps it had not left through the window at all, but had hidden in the old black hat that Sadie always
barked at, for Pegge knew his soul would do any mischief to get itself to heaven.

She pressed her lips against her father’s but they were as cool as Sadie’s nose. He might have gone to eternal bliss, or limbo, or a much worse place, but he was certainly no longer in his bed. Only a corpse lay where her father had just been.

Sadie pushed the door open a crack and slunk in, reeking of civet. She scratched herself with her back leg and looked quizzically at Pegge, as if asking what mutiny had transpired while absent from her post. Wheezing guiltily, Sadie edged forward to tongue his hand until it shone with dog-spittle. Then, tasting the rot beginning, she forsook his arm and nosed the door back open, bolting down the stairs.

The pain intensified behind Pegge’s breastbone and a muscle in her leg began to spasm. She reached out a quivering thumb to touch her father’s cheek. It was then that the noises started, first a murky, gulping sound, then a prolonged and awful hiss. Pegge did not care to hear what her father now had to say. She had heard too many of his sermons, and a dead man’s verse would hardly scan or rhyme.

The sun filled the room and Con’s shoes were tapping up the stairs. Pegge heard her stop on the landing to talk to someone down below. In a minute, the door would be flung open and Pegge would be forced to share her father’s death. Wrapping his cloak around her shoulders, she stepped through the window, pushing it firmly shut behind her. She crept along the rooftop and climbed down
the ladder he had kept there in case of fire. It was a short drop from the last rung into the courtyard.

Sadie was sitting underneath the apple tree, waiting. Later, Pegge remembered one thing clearly: on her way down Carter lane with Sadie, she had passed a priest in a black frock going in the opposite direction.

19. METAPHYSICS

Pegge hurried along Fleet street and up Chancery lane to ask the bell-ringer at Lincoln’s Inn to ring the death knell for her father.

Delighted to outstrip Paul’s cathedral, he quoted exuberantly from the dead man. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” he lowered his voice for emphasis, “it tolls for Donne.” He pulled the exact number of strokes, no fewer, no more, putting out his palm smartly at the end.

Pegge emptied her pocket to pay him. She could not go back to the Deanery for fear her father’s spirit would return to its dwelling place. She shook out the folds of her skirts, ridding them of any grey hairs, nail parings, and scales of skin she might have carried from his deathbed so she would not tempt his soul to hunt her down. He once said that if he had lost an arm in the east, a leg in the west, some blood in the north, and some bones in the south, his soul would circumnavigate the globe and in an instant arm, leg, blood, and bones—eastern, western, northern,
and southern body-would be recompacted into one. She had no intention of standing between a soul and a lost body part, not if that soul was as zealous as her father’s.

Pegge drank from public conduits and stole food from market stalls, hardly knowing what she ate. That night, she curled up with Sadie in her father’s cloak in the narrow passage where Jane Shore had met her noble lover. From this trysting-spot, just below her own window, Pegge could look into the brightly lit Deanery and watch the inhabitants preparing for her father’s funeral.

On the following day the cathedral was so full nobody noticed Pegge standing in the choir loft for a better view. Men elbowed to the front to pay tribute with their verses, climaxed by a piece of surpassing length and folly that claimed the Dean had died a sacred martyr. She knew it was Izaak Walton’s by the inept rhymes, and by the author himself, trumpeting his verses loudly, then bowing almost to the floor at the applause.

After the eulogies, a file of men entered the Deanery to collect the rings and pictures left them by her father. Through the window, Pegge watched Con fold linens into baskets to take back to Barking, her mourning cut to show her belly proud with child. When the carriage was loaded, Con led Parrot out herself and tied the reins to the back. Mr Harvey helped his wife climb up and they set off. Only Bess remained inside the Deanery, packing the last of the family’s goods. She would probably spin out the task as long as she could, in case Pegge wandered back.

Pegge crisscrossed the City for hours, listening to lost rivers running far below the streets and to buried pipes bringing
fresh water from the north. They ran where Izaak Walton had showed her, silent and blue, like veins beneath the skin. Not all the water was hard and sweet. Some drained out of the hot baths where people cleansed themselves of sweat and grime, then filtered down through boneyards before springing out in rivulets a quarter-mile ahead. Waste water ran down streets into drains, spilling into sewers, and from thence into buried rivers which emptied themselves into the muddy Thames.

At Clerk’s Well, Pegge drank thirstily, then unlaced her boots and rinsed her feet. By now, the flagstones would be laid down over her father’s grave. She set off with Sadie towards the cathedral, around the Dean’s windy corner, past the blocks of marble waiting in the masons’ yard, through the Dean’s doorway, and down the nave into the depth of Paul’s. The fresh earth pressed into the seams on the choir floor told her where her father had been buried. Crawling into the niche where his effigy would be erected, she fell asleep, wrapped in her father’s cloak and holding Sadie in her arms.