by Ted Hughes
Dunworth moves fast, surprising himself.
And now his white Jaguar sports is tilting at corners, flattening in dips and bobbing on crests, breasting the long straights on a rising note, over the eight miles, as he gnaws his lips and fights the road’s variety.
Westlake’s words have supplied the single answer to many
clues.
The warp and weft of hints and suspicions,
Knotted, painfully, laboriously, over a long time, into a
mesh
Have suddenly dragged taut, with the bulk of a body.
A few sprinkled words
Have transformed a bitter-cored ulcer
Into something delicious.
With one glance at the blue van, he walks into the house,
calling his wife’s name.
He climbs the fondly designed cedar staircase to his
studio
Without stealth. He returns casually
As if with some curio to show to a guest
Loading his target pistol, with which he is expert,
And without pausing strides into the lounge.
His red-haired wife
Is lying naked on the couch, almost hidden
By the naked body of Lumb
Who, half-twisting, and supported on one elbow, watches
Dunworth
As if waiting for him.
Dunworth has paused.
His brisk executive plan evaporates confusedly.
The sight in front of him
Is so extraordinary and shocking
So much more merciless and explicit than even his most
daring fantasy
That for a moment
He forgets himself, and simply stares.
He gropes for his lost initiative,
But what he sees, like a surprising blow in a dark room,
Has scattered him.
He raises his pistol meanwhile.
He is breathing hard, to keep abreast of the situation.
He is trying to feel
Whether he is bluffing or is about to become
The puppet
Of some monstrous, real, irreversible act.
He waits for what he will do,
As a relaxed rider, crossing precipitous gulleys
Lets his horse find its way.
He levels the pistol at his wife’s face and holds it there,
undecided.
Her red hair is strewn bright and waterish
Across the arm of the couch which pillows her head.
Her large eyes, mascara-smudged in her gleaming face,
watch him
Moistly and brilliantly.
Her bold, crudely-cut mouth, relaxed in its strength,
Yields him nothing.
He searches her hot fixed look for some sign of reprieve,
Moving his aim from her brow, to her mouth, to her
throat.
She swallows but resettles her head as if to watch him
more comfortably.
Her nakedness has outstripped his reaction, incredible,
Like the sudden appearance of an arrow, sticking deep in
his body,
Seconds before the pain.
It cannot unhappen, and now the pain must come.
The white swell of her stomach, welded so closely
To that other strange body, which at first he hardly
notices
But which prints in his brain as something loathsome and deadly, a huge python’s coils, of some alien nature and substance.
He feels a pressure inside his skull, like a long lever
tightening a winch.
He sees the pistol out there in front of him
As if it were a fixture he were hanging on to, outside a
window,
Over a night-drop.
His gold hair seems to sweat.
His sunlamp bronze sweats.
His pale-eyed stare is brittle and impotently severe, like
the stare of a lizard.
His pistol sinks its aim
Over Lumb’s powerful gymnast’s shoulders.
The sweat-figured muscles
Of the half-twisted torso, and the long sinewy legs
Are an unexpected development.
Dunworth has difficulty
Adding this body to the familiar long-jowled monkish
visage
That watches him unmoving, as if expecting
To see him do something typically stupid.
Those hooded heavy eyes weaken him
Like a load of ironweight.
Dunworth gazes back at his wife
Almost forgetting where he is or what he is doing.
He is helplessly in love.
He stands there, in his child’s helplessness,
As if he had searched everywhere and at last somehow he
had found her.
An irresponsible joy chatters to be heard, somewhere in
the back of his head, as he gazes at her,
Feeling all his nerves dazzle, with waitings of vertigo,
As if he were gazing into an open furnace.
At the same time he tightens on the butt and trigger of
the pistol, readjusting his grip,
As if the terrible moment were approaching of itself.
In the remaining seconds
He studies her lips and tries to separate out the ugliness
there,
Which he remembers finding regrettable.
He tries to isolate the monkey-crudity of her hairline,
Her spoiled chin, all the ordinariness
That once bored him so much,
But he feels only a glowing mass.
He stands there, paralysed by a bliss
And a most horrible torture –
Endless sweetness and endless anguish.
He turns the pistol towards his own face
And puts the muzzle in his mouth.
Lumb is stepping towards him.
Dunworth closes his eyes and tries to clench his strength
Which slips from him like water.
Lumb takes the pistol out of his hand.
Dunworth
Sits in a huddle on the floor.
His eyes, squeezed close, refuse the features of his trap,
Squeezing the ball of tight dazzling blackness behind his
eyes.
His face is numb as rubber,
His body sunk in a depth of happening which holds it like
concrete.
The Reverend Lumb has left.
Opening his eyes, Dunworth sees his wife’s stockinged
ankles and shoes
Passing close.
When he looks up she is fully dressed and tugging a comb
through her hair.
She ignores him and goes to her room.
He follows and tries the door but it is already locked.
He leans at the door, emptied, merely his shape,
Like a moth pinned to a board,
While the nectars of the white lilac
And the purple and dark magenta lilac
Press through the rooms.
Betty
Naked at her dresser mirror
Is trying to see herself more slender and to look lighter.
And to make certain once again that her breasts
Are no fuller than they were.
Her cat rubs across her bare spine
As she sits on the bed.
She rolls back, hoisting the cat, loving the cat,
Pulls the sheet over her, snuggles to the cat, she dozes.
A bigger hot body nestles in beside her,
Overpowers her, muscular and hairy as a giant badger.
A goblin bald face laughs into hers,
Lifts her to shriek surprised laughter.
He is twisting and squeezing the laughter out of her,
They wrestle in a ball of limbs.
Her whole body is ticklish insid
e and out.
He laughs like an over-excited dog.
They scramble all over the room,
They crash the furniture, senseless to their bruises.
They roll like wrestlers from one corner to another.
Her shrieks get out of control and abandon her last efforts
of laughter.
Her laughs try to smother her shrieks.
Banging on the door.
Betty peers over the sheet. The cat, sprawled on the
pillow,
Stretches his claws and looks into her face through sleepy
slits.
Her mother peeps in through the open crack of the door.
Nothing is the matter.
Only one of her dreams again. Betty
Makes her face weary-woeful.
Stop sleeping with that cat.
Garten
From shrubbery to bungalow wall, next the window,
Dares full daylight and the watchfulness of many a village
bedroom view
He edges a creeping glimpse, through the window,
Of stockinged feet on a bed.
Is silent in the kitchen
Where a baby breathes in a carry-cot.
Full-length, at the open door of the bedroom,
A yard from the mingling breaths and the working
mattress,
He spies through the crack of the door.
He positions his camera close to the door’s edge.
He eases into the open and flashes
What he sees on the bed.
He is striding across the kitchen.
Here is the garden corner, now the hedge hides him.
He whirls in the road.
He pedals calmly past the front of the blacksmith’s
bungalow on his bicycle
Without a look back
At the blue van parked outside it.
Exultant, the fuse spluttering in him
Of what he has in the camera.
Felicity
At eighteen, is in her second spring of full flower. Three years ago, a drab child, mongrel and spindly. Today, coming and going among the soft hot-house scents, she is the most exotic thing in the nursery. She is aware of it. She performs it a little, self-indulgently, with a flourish, as a leopard performs its frightening grace.
Her overlong upsweeping nose, her flat calf’s eye, her wide reckless mouth, were her father’s real ugliness. For the time being they compound her enigmatic triangular beauty.
Gypsy dark skin, intensifying into fierce wire hair. Lusty little moles on her upper lip, and on her cheek.
Slender
She is sliding boxes of bedding plants into the back of a
Range Rover.
Her dirty heels lift from her sandals.
A five-cornered cacophony, the sand-haired self-elected young Saxon squire, from the Manor at N., claiming Norman prerogative, directs her.
Flirts a little, to excuse his driving gloves.
He daunts her
With brandishings of a voice of colonial polish and cut,
Of military briskness, with brassy fittings,
Demonstrating to all its quelling echoes among the
grouped sullen conifers.
He watches the winking naked small of Felicity’s back
Under the grubby red pullover
As she leans forward, sliding the boxes. He observes the skinned patch along two inches of her spine. His thighs bristle. He ponders complacently just what time might drop into his lap in this neighbourhood, with a little shaking of the bough.
His new wife
Is disclosing her vowels likewise, under a wide pink brim,
To the ear of Mrs Davies
Whom she is meeting for the first time.
Mrs Davies
Humours her loonily.
Mrs Davies is the real thing, it appears.
An old sunburned vixen, with a soft belly,
An over-ripe windfall apple
From some lichenous, crumbling lineage
Growing eccentrically sluttish among her potting sheds,
her seed-frames, her greenhouses, and her compost.
An aged, tatty, unearthed lily bulb
Which secretes some staggering gilded chalice.
A questionable flowerpot troll-woman, her hands half-
earth.
Under her silver curls
Which are washed with a faint hydrangea blue
Her full, brown, moist night-time owl’s eyes and her full
moist lips intrigue her client
Who feels reproached
And styptic, and garish
To hear this unsettling creature
Promoting the home-grown qualities of her assistant.
Felicity has finished. She can go now.
The squire smartly offers her a lift, which Mrs Davies
decisively accepts for her,
Reminding the orchid in the hat
To consider the Women’s Institute most seriously,
Most, most seriously,
Now that she’s living so very near.
The Range Rover moves away toward face-lifted estates. Over the engine-din the hat and the squire debate, resonantly, a crisis of interior decorations.
Felicity, looking back, sees
The blue van turning into the nursery.
The driver and his ornament continue to perform, across the length of a tennis court, against international perspectives.
Felicity is biting her nails.
Already Mrs Davies and the Reverend Lumb
Are a bundle of struggling garments,
On the bags of Irish peat, behind the carnations.
Mrs Davies
Agonised ecstatic
As if he were tickling her unmercifully
And he laughing as if he had finally blindfold got her
After months of anticipation
In a dark-house party game.
And they bound, they are flung
With more life than they can contain
Like young dogs
Unable to squirm free from their torturing infinite
dogginess.
Maud
Walks in the graveyard.
She is carrying twigs of apple blossom.
The graveyard is empty.
The paths are like the plan of a squared city.
She comes into the main path.
A woman is walking ahead of her.
Maud follows the woman.
The woman walks to the far end of the path.
Maud does not see her go but now the woman is no longer
there.
Maud also walks to the far end of the path.
She watches a magpie on top of a sycamore.
An urgency, a sucking chak chak.
The magpie flies up and is blown away backwards
By the wind that jerks the grass and passes like a rumour
from tree to tree up the side of the graveyard.
The graveyard is empty.
Maud stands at the foot of the last grave.
A round shouldered stone.
She sticks the blossoming twigs into the perforations of
the green pot on the grave.
The black stone is bare, except for bird’s droppings
And a lonely engraved word:
Gaudete.
Maud kneels.
She rearranges some small sea-shells on the grave, which
grub-hunting birds have scattered.
She seems to be praying, She is weeping.
Mrs Davies
Sitting in her potting shed
Is sorting weeds, the fresh, the dried.
Skeletons of many plants dangle in the spider light.
Out of a dusty jar she bounces
A withered goblin midget face
Of fly agaric.
She sets it with other corpses, on newspaper.
Pleasure!
A snake is sliding in over the
threshold.
An adder. Pretty! Pretty!
She greets it.
She is prepared – she settles its saucer of milk.
It lifts its head.
It seems to appreciate the caress of her endearments.
Now it sips.
Her singing is comprehensible
Only to the adder, which ignores everything now but the
milk
As she goes on sorting her shrivelled bodies.
The Alsatian
At the Bridge Inn jerks from its drowse, starts barking.
Listens, searches the air, whines, barks.
Goes through from the bar into the house
Where Mr Walsall startles awake in his chair.
The dog is barking at him. It barks at the air.
Mr Walsall reassures the dog but it insists.
He watches the dog,
As it watches him, out of the corner of its eye, urging him
with more, still more urgent barking.
He gets up and calls for his wife.
He listens. He looks into the bar and calls.
He calls and the dog barks. He looks into the backyard.
Where is she? He asks the dog. He too is disturbed now.
He asks the dog what’s the matter. The dog goes on
barking,
Furiously, as if it were telling him plainly.
Its black hackles stand up, its bark opens a dangerous
deep note.
It alarms Mr Walsall. He calls for his wife.
His wife is biting a stick.
Animal gurgles mangle in her throat
While her eyes, her whole face, toil
In the wake of a suffering
That has carried her beyond them.
Her head thrashes from side to side among small ferns
and periwinkles.
Lumb labours powerfully at her body.
Felicity
