by Ted Hughes
His alcohol dullness has settled
To a hurtling lump, a projectile –
He turns in at the gate of his home
With the sensation of finding his trap at last tenanted.
And the lilac secretness of the drive’s curve brings him suddenly to the vicar’s van, tucked up against the back-porch, almost in under the wisteria drapery.
Westlake’s foot presses the lawn verge.
His fingers leave his car door
Just touching its frame but not closed.
He contemplates sabotage to the detestable blue van.
He sidles burglarishly down the side of his own house.
His heart is pounding turgidly, yet he feels light and
separate.
Like a man falling, feeling nothing of the glancing
impacts.
He rouses himself, a deliberate attempt
To realise afresh what he is about.
With his hand on precisely that brick of the corner of his
own house.
He looks at his watch
Where the second hand jogs busily in its ignorant circle.
He watches it, rejoicing absently at the comparative
slowness of time,
And his own freedom in it.
He observes, with a self-mesmerising stillness,
The peeled-back gorges of his rose-blooms, leaning poised
in space.
He marvels again that they are precisely where they are,
Neither an inch this way nor an inch that way,
But exactly there, with their strict, fierce edges.
He moves his head.
Through his unglassed eye, conveniently long-sighted,
He watches the young effortless horses,
Roistering flamily on the slope opposite.
Whole minutes pass.
His feet move. He peers into the grey sterility of his
lounge.
As if he had abandoned it all, years ago, in some
different life.
As if he had just returned, after half a lifetime on the
other side of the world.
The front door. The familiar dingy smell of the hall.
He stands at the bottom of the stair.
Weightless, in the balance of decision.
He feels light-headed and inadequate for this preposterous
business
Which nevertheless he proceeds to tackle.
Climbing the stair nimbly
Loading his double-barrelled twelve-bore as he goes
And pocketing other cartridges.
He pauses just short of the door. He remembers, absurdly, that fully-clothed men jump into the sea for much less. He explains to himself yet again, more distinctly, and with a pedantic solemnity of subordinate clauses, that what he hears is indeed the crying of his wife at some bodily extreme, which can have only the one explanation. But as his brain mounts its annihilating court-case, which will need only the precise, annihilating words, his body has already moved convulsively, and the door bursts open.
At once he sees
That his expectations have been cheated.
His wife is lying fully clothed on the bed.
She is being hysterical in her familiar style,
Rolling from side to side
As if to escape some truth which threatens to scorch her
face.
And the Reverend Lumb
Is sitting at the foot of the bed, considerate as a baffled
doctor.
His calming hand detains her slim ankle.
In one flash Westlake understands
That his accurate intuition
Has been forestalled and befooled
By this goat-eyed vicar.
In spite of what it looks like
Something quite different is going on here,
Even under his very eyes,
And if he could only see clear
Through the vicar’s humbug soelmn visage
And his wife’s actress tragedy mask
It would be plain
That her writhing and cries are actually sexual spasm,
And that the Reverend Lumb, who seems to be gazing at
him
In such cool spiritual composure
And mild secular surprise
Is actually copulating with her
Probably through that hand on her ankle
In some devilish spiritual way.
This crazy idea strikes Westlake like a thunderbolt. And even if it is not so, even if he cannot actually detect them performing neck and neck there together in front of him, that is purely accidental, and as remote as any other coincidence, a coincidence inside-out. Anyway, he needs no proof.
Doctor Westlake levels his gun.
The vicar stands and knocks the muzzle aside.
Dr Westlake swings the gun and knocks the vicar’s
cheekbone
With the barrels. The cartridges explode
Tearing the side of the vicar’s head, a skin wound.
The two grapple and separate.
The doctor’s wife watches, silenced.
The vicar expostulates reasonably and the doctor knocks
him down with the gun.
He fumbles to reload the gun.
The vicar twists it from him and spears it through the
window.
The doctor runs from the room, down the stairs and out
into the garden,
Retrieves the gun, reloading it as he re-enters the house,
And listens.
The Reverend Lumb’s van is turning out at the front.
Westlake runs and from his doorstep fires twice.
One of the van’s rear windows goes black
As the van escapes along black rips of gravel.
The doctor spins his gun into the roses.
He pants seriously, feeling for his heart’s place and
staring after the van, squinting as if into the sun’s glare.
Huge hammers of blackness reshape him,
Huge hammers of alcohol,
Huge hammers of hellishness and incomprehension.
With a renewed effort of doggedness
He collects the gun, gets into his car, drives away out.
Lumb
Bowed at the river’s edge, knee in wet gravel,
Washes blood from his face and head, and dabs at the
wound
With his already bloodied handkerchief.
The wobbling blaze, the sun’s reflection,
Brands his retina.
The trees opposite, gargling black water in their drinking
roots,
Arch over blackly, shifting leaf-hands against the dazzle.
A whirl of radiant midges smokes upstream
Simultaneously smokes downstream
Unendingly.
The throat of strong water in the neck of the pool
Is jabbering a babel, to which he listens.
Voices shut him in.
He sees up through a spiralling stair of voices
Into the sun’s blaze cupola.
He recognises voices out of his past.
Peremptory trivial phrases,
Distinct and sudden, behind him and beside him.
One voice is coming clearer, insistent.
It calls his name repeatedly, searchingly.
It is his own voice.
As the other voices thicken over him
He manages, as from his deep listening, to answer: ‘I’m
here.’
The oily backwater, with the sparkle of floatage,
Turns, closely focussed.
He sees a fish rise
Off the point of the long broken finger of boulders
Which pokes out into the lake, from the island.
The lake is oil-still
As if it were pressed flat,
Ponderous-still, like mercury.
The warm weight of thundery air,
>
Immobile, and swollen with its load,
Hangs ready to split softly.
The tops of the blue pyramid mountains, in the afterlight
Tangle with ragged, stilled, pink-lit clouds
That hang above themselves in the lake’s stillness.
Felicity huddles in the boat,
Which rests in the stony shallows.
She is frightened by this enormous cloud and mountain
and water stillness.
And by this tiny scrubby island of heather
With its few staringly white birches.
She suggests they row back. It’s going to rain. It’s going
to be dark.
And this place is awful.
Her own voice frightens her in the vast listening hush.
The fish rises again, feeding quietly off the point.
Then out on the lake, a slap.
Like a shot.
And again, somewhere far out across the great stillness,
another.
The fish rings gently again, off the near point.
He’ll just try that fish.
He works out on to the finger, warily, from boulder to
boulder.
She watches his balancing form,
Black against the steely lake, under the electrical nearness
of the mountains.
Lightning flutters, orange and purple, in the high silence
Over the peaks, behind the clouds,
And beneath the floor of the lake.
Now he is getting out line.
She looks down at her book, there is just light to read.
Lumb secures his foothold, and lays out a long line and
waits.
The fish tilts up again, off to the left.
He waits.
It sips again, closer, patrolling its beat.
He lifts his line and puts his big evening fly down in its path
On the lake’s glass
Over the pit of hanging mountains and torn, stilled cloud
And quakings and tremors of violet.
Felicity has stopped reading
Though she continues to look at the page.
A little finger of fear has touched her.
Something nudges the half-grounded boat.
She looks up sharply.
Low ripples are coming ashore.
Twenty yards out in the small island bay, the head and
shoulders of a dark shape
Are watching her.
She smothers her fright, telling herself it is a seal.
But now it is moving.
It is coming towards her, still upright.
She sees it is a man.
His ripples crawl away on all sides.
As he emerges to the waist, she sees it is Lumb.
She sees he is naked.
She is astonished, she asks if he went for a swim.
At the same time
She sees Lumb still poised on the tip of the rock, sixty
yards away, motionless.
Again, at the same time, this obviously is Lumb.
Who grasps the stern
And grinning heaves himself naked and streaming into the
boat.
Yet it cannot be Lumb.
Suddenly she is terrified.
She screams and jumps anyhow out of the boat and screaming towards that figure on the point she splashes ashore.
As Lumb hears her first scream
Which jerks at the skin of his skull
A black thumb
Lifts out on the water, and presses the fly under.
He fastens into the fish automatically,
And turns.
He sees Felicity stumbling up on to the island,
And a lean leaping figure, moving like a monkey,
Bounding after her.
But it is a good fish
And it runs deep, and he cannot turn it.
Felicity’s screams, one after another, procession out
across the lake
And jangle against the mountains
As Lumb tries to wedge his rod-butt somehow in among
the rocks at his feet.
Till he abandons it with a curse.
He leaps balancing along the rocky spit
And slips and plunges heavily, in over the waist, gouging
his thigh, his hip, his ribs
And flounders back on hands and knees, scoring his hands
on the granite,
And gets up wet through and hurt.
Felicity and the other have disappeared among the turfy hummocks and hollows of the island, among the birches.
He follows her screams into a boggy gulley.
The naked stranger is already dragging her toward the
lake.
Lumb brings him down in the shallows and the two
wrestle in knee-deep water.
On the painful irregular rocks.
And now Lumb realises
That his antagonist is his own double
And that he is horribly strong.
As they roll together in the water
Felicity gets to her feet and lifts an oar out of the boat.
The two separate and Lumb scrambles to dry land.
His opponent comes close after him and kicks his feet
from under him.
Rolling on to his back and looking up, Lumb sees the
other standing over him.
His raised arms are poising aloft a rock the size of a baby.
Felicity swings the heavy oar horizontally across the
raised arms.
The rock drops on to the attacker’s own head and he too
falls.
But levers himself up, and sways again to his feet
Doubled over and holding his head, blood spilling between
his fingers.
Lumb pulls Felicity away.
They clamber up on to the turf among the birches.
Their feet and knees skid in wetness, and Lumb sees the
lake is boiling.
And realises the rain has come
A pressing warm weight on his head and shoulders.
The mountains have disappeared in a twilight mass of
foggy rain.
Their pyramids leap in and out of blue-blackness,
Trembling in violet glare, like shadow puppets, and
vanishing again.
And thunder trundles continually around the perimeter of
the deeply padded heaven
And through the cellars of the lake
With splittings of giant trees and echoing of bronze flues
and mazy corridors,
And repeated, closer bomb-bursts, which seem to shower
hot fragments.
Suddenly under a long electrocuted wriggler of dazzle
That shudders across the whole sky, for smouldering
seconds,
Their attacker glistening and joyous
Bounds over the turf bank and on to them.
Laughing like a maniac, he grabs Felicity’s arm.
With clownish yells and contortions, he starts dragging
her again toward the lake.
Again Lumb knocks him down and the two men wallow
pummelling,
Plastered with peat-mud, under the downpour.
Finally, gasping and immobilised, they lie face to face,
gripping each other’s hands,
One grinning and the other appalled.
Now with twistings and knee-splayings, they strain to
their feet, still locked, and stare at each other panting.
With a shout the other jerks Lumb off his feet and starts
hauling him toward the lake, like a sack.
Lumb twists to free his hands, freeing his left hand he
grips his own right wrist.
Felicity too hauls on his arm till he struggles upright.
She embraces his waist, together they pull ag
ainst the
other.
As they wrestle deadlocked, the other begins to gasp with
pain.
Lumb’s hand also is being crushed by the other.
He knows his fingers are helpless in that dreadful gripe
Which is bursting his fingertips.
He wrenches to break free as the other
Trying to break away toward the lake
Starts leaping and whirling with unnatural agility
Like a weasel trapped by a foot.
A cramp has locked their grip, hand in hand.
With a sudden screech, the other rips free
Holding aloft his stump from which the hand has
vanished,
And uttering long unearthly wails, one after another,
As he plunges into the water.
Lumb tugs to lever up the demonic fingers
Of the torn-off hand, which still grips his own hand.
The other is wallowing in the lake. He rises and falls
And disappears, and rises again, floundering, going out
deeper
Till he disappears at last under the rain-churned smoking
surface
In the darkening blue.
Lumb flings the freed hand out into the lake after him.
Felicity crouches under the bank of the turf.
She is shivering and sobbing, her face abandoned to her
sobbing
As in a great grief.
Lumb embraces her, squeezing her to his sodden body
Under the hammering of the rain, which is now icy,
In the almost darkness.
Westlake’s grey Daimler
Rips the road puddles.
It rends hanging holes of echo in the vapour-hung woods.
It slides through the village, slows at the rectory. Accelerates down burrow lanes, grass-heads lashing the side-mirrors, as he searches.
Through fir-tree fringes at last he glimpses the blue van, parked at the house of Dunworth, a young architect, Westlake’s golfing companion.
Westlake is phoning from a booth.
Dunworth, eight miles away in the city, called back into his office just as he was leaving for lunch, listens to the voice of his friend.
