Gaudete

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.