Gaudete (4 page)

Albeit ephemeral music goes on

Like a materialised demon

Vandalising the ponderous ill-illumined Victorian house,

Beating at the faded ochre prints of imperial battles,

Re-animating

The arsenals of extinguished tribesmen

That trophy the walls.

It grips the cellars, feeling for the earth beneath

As if to lift the whole ungainly pile and shake off the

                                                                    chimneys.

It rushes up the servant’s stair

With a fiery icy elation

Like the ghost of an imbecile calculator

Into the long attic.

The attic is an aviary.

Bleak prison boughs, polished by bird’s feet, cage-wired

                                                                      windows.

Jays, magpies, crows, pigeons

Sitting in depressed jury.

Two macaws, seething their spite and lunacy.

Everywhere finches twitch and jitter.

Estridge’s elder daughter, Janet,

Is examining her body,

Her swollen stomach, delicate glossed as the flank of a

                                                                       minnow,

In a long pierglass

Foxed with age, propped back among attic lumber,

Streaked with bird’s droppings.

Her face, relaxed expressionless, as for a studio portrait,

Simply accepts the fate of being as it is.

She has made her decision

And is relieved not to be suffering any more.

No thought for the future falsifies these moments.

Her decision feels solid and good

Stronger than all the small appeals of tomorrow.

Like a final lying down into an immense weariness

It has relaxed her.

Now she can look at the birds,

Her father’s prisoners,

Her girlhood’s confidantes.

She sees just how squalid and miserable they are.

And they regard her too without any affection.

She rams out the frosted skylight with the back of a chair

And tells them to get back to their true friends

And true enemies.

She positions the chair.

She puts on her dressing gown, deliberately, feeling the

                                    critical watchfulness of the birds.

She climbs onto the chair, balancing.

Arranges the hanging noose about her neck, lightly and

                                                                    attentively

As if she adjusted the collar of a dress.

Then tightens the knot, under the chin.

She ignores the tears

Which have come out on to her cheeks in fear and dismay.

She steps into space.

The birds

Alerted

By the waft of a strange predator, are suddenly smaller,

                                                                        tensed.

The chair topples, deciding a pigeon

To clap up through the window gap.

An opportunistic jay

Scrambles up the air and vanishes.

A magpie goes out like a bolt.

More and more rapidly follows the skulking departure of

                                                                     the birds.

Only a crow, undecided, lingers.

While the music elbows nakedly in through the broken glass with the wet stirred freshness of the garden trees.

A middle distance farm has come close.

Three fields beyond the farm, two men are cutting up a

                                                     blown-over beech-tree.

Holroyd employs one man.

Sitting under the farm’s orchard wall, the minister’s blue

                                                                  Austin van,

Blossoms littering it.

Opening on to the closed yard, a barn-doorway, black.

Estridge is pleased with his telescope

Which brings him a hen flattened under a cock in the

                                                             barn doorway.

Then the birds scatter, long-legged.

Mrs Holroyd emerges, with dazzled eyes,

Carrying a basket, and adjusting her skirt,

And dusting herself down.

The Reverend Nicholas Lumb

Materialises out of the darkness behind her.

Mrs Holroyd, at twenty-seven, is a fresh-faced abundant

                                                                        woman

With an easy laugh.

Estridge treasures her among his collection of ideals –

She reminds him of the country love of his youth, who

                                                             never appeared.

Now he watches Lumb

Following her closely to the house-door.

Within the hallway, within the magnified circle,

Turning, she sets Lumb’s hands on her breasts and bites

                                                                       his neck.

His hands gather up her skirts

As his foot closes the door

And Estridge’s brain wrings

To a needling pang, as if a wire might snap.

His bulging eye

Hammers the blunt limits of objects and light.

Till a scream

Amplifies over his head’s pain –

A repeated approaching scream, then a silence.

His younger daughter has left her piano.

She is running between the shrubs towards him.

He puts on his spectacles.

He quickly tries to think what could be the worst

                                                                      possible.

He finds only helpless fear.

His daughter is screaming something at him

As if in perfect silence.

Is looking at the land.

This is the unalterably strange earth.

He is looking at the sky. He looks down at the soil,

                                                        between the grass.

He looks at the trees

Which clamber in a tangle up the slope towards him,

                from the river, out of the swell of land beyond.

He listens to all this, and listens into the emptiness beyond it

And the emptiness within it.

And the soft hollow air noises among it.

But he knows everything he looks at,

Even the substance of his fingers, and the near-wall of his

                                                                            skin,

He knows it is vibrant with peril, like a blurred speed-

                                                                  vibration.

He knows the blood in his veins

Is like heated petrol, as if it were stirring closer and

                                                      closer to explosion,

As if his whole body were a hot engine, growing hotter

Connected to the world, which is out of control,

And to the grass under his feet, the trees whose shadows

                                                               reach for him.
 

He breathes deeply and strongly to confirm his solidity,

To cool his outline and his solidity

To fill his strength

Against the power that beats up against him, beating at

                                                      the soles of his feet,

Beating through his thoughts

And the obscure convulsions and blunderings of a music

                                                that lurches through him

With brightenings and darkenings, and rendings and

                                                                  caressings,

With tiny crowded farness and near sudden hugeness

And hot twisting roughness, and vast cantileverings of

                                                               star-balance.

He looks out across the quilt and embroidery of the

                                                                   landscape,

The hazings of distance, and the watery horizons folded

                                                                   like fingers,

And tries to imagine simple freedom –

His possible freedoms, his other lives, hypothetical and

                                            foregone, his lost freedoms.

As each person carries the whole world, like a halo,

Albeit a dim and mostly provisional world, but with a

                          brightly focused centre, under the sun,

Considering their millions

All mutually exclusive, all conjunct and co-extensive,

He sees in among them,

In among all the tiny millions of worlds of this world

Millions of yet other, alternative worlds, uninhabited,

                                                  unnoticed, still empty,

Each open at every point to every other and yet distinct,

Each waiting for him to escape into it, to explore it and

                                                                   possess it,

Each with a bed at the centre. A name. A pair of shoes.

                                                                And a door.

And surrounded by still-empty, never-used limitless freedom.

He yields to his favourite meditation.

Forlorn, desperate meditation.

Between the root in immovable earth

And the coming and going leaf

Stands the tree

Of what he cannot alter.

As his heart surges after his reverie, with lofty cries and

                                                           lifting wingbeats

Suddenly he comes against the old trees

And feels the branches in his throat, and the leaves at his

                                                                           lips.

He sees the grass

And feels the wind pulse over his skin.

He feels the hill he stands on, hunched, swelling,

Piling through him, complete and permanent with stone,

Filling his skull, squeezing his thoughts out from his eyes

To fritter away across surfaces.

Till the one presence of world crushes him from himself,

         and sits on him like an iron crown on a stone pillar,

Studded with baleful stones,

As if he were a child king, hoisted on to a granite throne,

                           surrounded by eyes of sharpened metal.

For a half hour he stands, alert

Imprisoned in the globe’s stoniness

And the thin skin, the thin painting of mother-soil,

And the hair-fine umbilicus of life in the stalk of grass.

His life returns as a fly. It lands on his eyelid and trickles

                                            down to his mouth-corner.

He moves to free himself.

Some animal is pushing noisily below in the wood.

A squirrel flees up through a beech, like a lashing rocket,

             and rips into the outermost leaf-net with a crash.

Voices recede, snatch back their words and meanings,

Become bramble stem, leaf hollows, reticulation of twigs.

He is clearly aware of himself, on the hill in clear light, from the eye of a soaring, reconnoitring and downsliding far crow.

He prays

To be guided. He feels his prayer claw at the air, as at

                                                                           glass

Like a beetle in a bottle.

He tries to pray with the sun –

Feeling it break off, dry in his mouth

He tries to find in himself the muscle-root of prayer.

He takes a few brisk steps

To tear free of his fear, to shake his limbs

Out of their crawling horror, their fly-tiny helplessness.

He makes an effort

To feel his plans steady. He fixes, hard and firm, phrasing

                                                                    it clearly,

His decision to escape before night.

This very day. To carry his body, with all its belongings,

Right to the end of its decision. Surely that is simple

                                                                      enough.

What is wrong with this idea? He only has to do it.

Surely it is all he wants to do.

He is afraid

As if he were asleep and dreaming the first warnings of

                                                                  smoke-smell

In a burning room, where everything is already spluttering and banging into flames, cores of fury drumming flames,

The flames swarming up, leaping like rats,

A torrent of devils twisting upwards above the tops of

                                                                  everything,

As if everything –

The whole world and day where he stands, trying to

                                                                         awake,

Were a giant aircraft out of control, shaking itself to pieces, already losing height, spinning slowly down in space

Scattering burning chunks,

The air sprayed with blazing fuel, full of an inaudible

                               screaming, sprayed with fine blood –

He leans his forehead to an ash tree, clasping his hands

                                                               over his skull.

He presses his brow to the ridged bark.

He closes his eyes, searching.

He tries to make this ash-tree his prayer.

He searches upward and downward with his prayer,

 reaching upwards and downwards through the capillaries,

Groping to feel the sure return grasp

The sure embrace and return gaze of a listener –

He sinks his prayer into the strong tree and the tree

                                                     stands as his prayer.