by Ted Hughes
Major Hagen irrupts quietly into this sphere.
Controlling the explosive china with watchmender’s touch,
he too drinks coffee.
He advances remotely, fumbling with keyhole words.
Suddenly he meets her small steady pupil
And sees her dry tangle of hair
And an outrage too dazzling to look at ignites the whole
tree of his nerves, a conflagration
Takes hold of everything –
His words seem to scald and corrupt his lips.
An insane voltage, a blue crackling entity
Is leaping around the kitchen
As if it had crashed in through the window.
Pauline Hagen feels her face go numb.
She stares at the black labrador
Which is enlarging, goggling, bristling
And snarling gape-mouthed.
Invisible hands
Are prising its jaws apart.
Hagen’s face-crust has crimsoned. He is yelling.
An avalanche is on the move.
It will have to come.
There is so much he must not fail.
Humiliation of Empire, a heraldic obligation
Must have its far-booming say.
Three parts incomprehensible.
A frenzy of obsolete guns
Is banging itself to tatters
And an Abbey of Banners yells like an exhausted
schoolmaster.
Arsenals of crazier energy open.
Depth charges
Of incredulity and righteousness
Search the taciturn walls and furniture.
Finally he just stands, gripping her shoulders,
Blasting her from all sides with voice.
She has shrivelled small, regaining her distance,
Trying to balance her coffee.
The labrador is spinning in a tight circle.
She sees the foam at its jaws.
And glances at Hagen – her half-anxiety
Outstripped by a quick smile, a flash of malice –
And the dog attacks him.
Its fangs hook in the weave of his jacket.
He flings it from him, barking its name, astonished.
It returns and clamps solidly on to the meat of his thigh.
He feels the shock of its hostility deeper than its fangs.
He kicks it away.
He bellows to overawe it.
It comes back
And leaps and leaps at his face.
Now Hagen
Swerves the full momentum of his rage on to the dog.
He lifts a chair.
This dog is going to account for everything.
Fangs splinter wood and wood shatters.
Only exhaustion will stop him.
Till at last he stands, trembling,
Like somebody pulled from an accident.
He drops the broken stump of his weapon.
He kneels
Beside the stilled heap of loyal pet
Hands huge with baffled gentleness
As if he had just failed to save it.
He lifts its slack head.
His horror is as dry
As volcanic rock.
His wife is watching him
As if it were all something behind the nearly unbreakable
screen glass of a television
With the sound turned off.
Lumb’s voice
Is stroking her deeply,
Touching at her heart and lungs and bowels glancingly.
She goes on sipping her coffee.
Again
The tall woodland rains echo,
A descending hush of roar.
And the Minister’s blue Austin van slides to a stop
Behind the white Ford.
Garten sinks to his knees
As if under the intensification of joy.
His lips
Surprisingly full red in the thin-skinned face
Filter crooked enlightenment.
The Reverend Lumb’s long figure
Has emerged. Brisk
Under the muscled, sooted boles and silvery torsos of the
uptwisting beeches
He appears tiny.
The long cassocked back
Is bending
At the Ford’s suddenly open door.
He is leaning right inside.
Garten
Rises above the napes of tender curled bracken
As if clearing an aim
And he sees
The Minister’s feet sprawling.
Lumb
Is fighting inside the car.
His hand
Claws for a grip on the car-top.
Suddenly he comes out backwards
As if tearing free
And the Ford roars out, its tyres rip dirt, it climbs
Away up through the tree tunnel of the opposite slope
In a burrowing fury.
Garten is erect, in open view, astounded – as if his rabbiting spade had spilled open a cache of ancient gold.
The Minister stands in the road
Mopping at his mouth. His white handkerchief
Brings away blood.
He and Garten inspect it thoughtfully
In the wood’s
Torn, healing stillness.
Mrs Westlake
Arriving home, has left the car-door wide, and run straight into the house, leaving that door wide too, right back to the wall, as if she meant to snatch up just the few essential things and leave this place forever –
She has already paused.
She stands
In the cool gleaming steel and copper stillness
Of her kitchen.
Stares at the bead on the cold water tap
Letting the scorchings sweep her throat and face.
She jerks back into control – hurries
From room to room, tense with purpose
Seeing nothing and arguing with everything.
All over her body the nerves of her skin smoulder.
The cream suit is an agony.
A lump of boiling electricity swells under her chest.
Wild cravings twist through her
To plunge to the floor
As if into a winter sea
And scour her whole body’s length with writhings.
Sweat prickles her brow, she exclaims at the mirrors.
Her interrogation of Lumb is rearranging itself inside her. A shifting of ponderous, underground machinery. A dragging and swaying of unmanageable stage-partitions.
For long minutes, vacant,
She watches through a window, hardly breathing,
Mesmerised
By a distant conifer.
She is moving again, as if it were a last search for something hopelessly lost. Mirrors turn her back. A hateful orange vase, a souvenir ashtray, present themselves briefly. She finds herself now in one room, now in another, with a sensation of dropping through papery floors, falling from world to world.
As if hours had passed
She is sitting at a walnut veneer table.
She tilts her watch. As if in a doctor’s waiting room. She has lit her last cigarette. Chill, comfortless, alien furniture. She is thinking: none of this has anything to do with me, and soon I shall be free.
She stares towards her husband’s medical reference library, to numb herself on its dull morocco. It is no escape. Those volumes are swollen with the details of Lumb’s body. Her brain swoons a little, trying to disengage. The glistening tissues, the sweating gasping life of division and multiplication, the shoving baby urgency of cells. All her pores want to weep. She is gripped by the weird pathos of biochemistry, the hot silken frailties, the giant, gristled power, the archaic sea-fruit inside her, which her girdle bites into, which begins to make her suit too tight.
She feels the finality of it all, and the nearness and greatness of death. Sea-burned, sandy cartilege, draughty stars, gull-cries from beyond
the world’s edge. She feels the moment of killing herself grow sweet and ripe, close and perfect.
The walls wait. The senseless picture frame.
Eyes half-closed
She sits stupidly, like something cancelled. Forcing the
seconds to pass.
Once, but more weakly and fleetingly than ever before, she imagines escaping to her sister in Reading. Her mother in Winchester. Rapidly she glances through the unbuttoning of coats, the worn-out exclamations, the glitter of curiosity, the celebration of tea and biscuits. Her drained, cold fingers remain spread on the walnut veneer, above their dim reflection. She stares into the fireplace.
She has already returned. She has already forgotten those
afternoon ceilings
The cactus windowsills
The hall-chime nothingness.
She is watching herself now, with richer satisfaction, in Lumb’s bedroom, tugging a knife through her throat. She plans her splayed, last, carefully ghastly position.
Her mind closes.
Her stare comes to rest in the ashtray.
She can hear her watch whispering,
Listening to it, as if trapped inside it.
She has closed her eyes.
She waits
Like a beaten dog
At her trembling cigarette.
The scherzo
Of Beethoven’s piano sonata Opus 110
Is devouring itself, dragonish,
Scattering scales,
Havocking polished, interior glooms,
Trembling dusty ivy, escaping towards the sky
Through the wedding of apple blossom at the open French
windows.
Jennifer is twenty two.
Under her loosened, jarred masses of chestnut
Her profile, long-nosed, lemuroid, lit,
Is pollen-delicate.
She is oppressed
By the fulness of her breasts, and the weight of flame in
her face.
She leans her trouble to the keyboard.
Observing her
Through the not-quite-closed corridor door
Her father listens, appalled.
The music flings in his face, it strikes at him
With derisive laughter and contemptuous shouts.
Her hands seem to be plunging and tossing inside his
chest.
His skull, glossy, veined, freckled, bulges
Over the small tight ferocious hawk’s face
Evolved in Naval Command. Commander Estridge
Is stricken with the knowledge that his dream of beautiful
daughters
Has become a reality.
Simply, naturally, and now inevitably, there by the open
window.
The dream was as beautiful as the daughters.
But the reality
Is beyond him. Unmanageable and frightening.
Like leopard cubs suddenly full-grown, come into their
adult power and burdened with it.
Primaeval frames, charged with primaeval hungers and
primaeval beauty.
Those uncontrollable eyes, and organs of horrific energy,
demanding satisfaction.
The music she plays bewilders the old man.
He cannot interpret those atmospherics
And soundings and cries.
It is shouting something impossible, incomprehensible,
monstrous.
The dutiful hands of his daughters
Which control his days
With routine breakfast egg and toast, with coffee,
With crisply ironed clothes, and warmed bed –
They are tearing him to pieces, elated
Under those sickly, sulphurous blooms
And the hellish upset of music.
In the dark hall, walled with stuffed wild life,
He listens. And he hears
Something final approaching.
Some truly gloomy horror is pushing.
Something that makes nothing of names, or affection, or
loyalty, or consideration.
An evil
Like his own creeping, death-dawn-emptiness fear.
And he knows his daughters are in it, are part of it
Like the flames in fire.
He understands that it is so
And that there is now no other situation to manage but
this
Which is beyond him
And that he can only wait for it, and that he is too old.
While the stuffed gulls around him vibrate,
And the stuffed falcons, the foxes, the stuffed great pike
With obedient eyes
And their panes vibrate.
The whole museum of dehydrated, memorial moults
Vibrates, helpless,
Under the girl’s powerful, white, pouncing fingers.
Dwarfish and too old
He steps wirily down into the garden, under sagging
conifers
Which are still loaded with cavernous night-chill.
He spiders along the flagged moss-slimed path
And sees the big poppies, planted long ago by his wife,
Coming into bloom, and one, full out, has already dropped
a crumpled blood-shard,
And he thinks yet again: Too late. And says aloud: I am
too late.
He is glad to be clear of his younger daughter
And of everything that pulses in her and swirls flaring
round her.
He climbs into the Belvedere at the end of the terrace
And closes the door
And sits. His bulging blood eyeball
Fixed in a lifetime of being imperious
Settles to the lens of the telescope.
He swings it on its pivot.
The village leaps towards him, opening its gardens and
doors.
But still the enraged
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.
In Estridge’s lens
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.
