Counting Backwards

by Helen Dunmore

  no one can weigh them,

  she says how beautiful

  each smile, each footfall

  each startled face

  in the heat of love –

  The Torn Ship

  In what torn ship soever I embark

  That ship shall be my emblem of Thy ark…

  JOHN DONNE,

  ‘A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s Last Going into Germany’

  I was up and watching

  that night the torn ship rode

  through the lock gates and so came on –

  In the guise of midnight

  it slowly glided

  owl-like in stubborn purpose

  broken by the hands of the storm.

  So it came on

  blackly on the black water,

  pulse by pulse it found harbour –

  Through the shut lock gates it melted

  to the ring and rocking

  of a hundred tall masts

  and then the swans woke from their nest

  and stood unfurling

  their steeple wings in warning

  as the shade and shadow passed

  of whatsoever torn ship it was.

  Remember this was no ark

  but something broken

  long before the dark took it down.

  Taken in Shadows

  Beautiful John Donne. Who wouldn’t want you? You lean slightly forward, arms folded over your body as if to protect it from all the women who might otherwise tear off your clothes.

  And yet, now that I look closely – and I do look very, very closely, John – there’s a teasing touch of something I can only call …readiness…in the way you’re sitting for your portrait. Take your eyes. They are clear hazel, brooding on something that is beyond me and a little to my right. What has caught your gaze? How many generations of women – and men too, I’m sure, men too – must have longed to make you turn to them. But your gaze has never shifted. Not once, in over four centuries.

  Your mouth is red. The shadow of your moustache – so dandyish, so eloquently shaved into points! – serves to emphasise the perfect cut of your upper lip. Your lower lip is full, sensuous. Red lips, hazel eyes, arched, dark eyebrows. Your jaw is a line of perfection. The shadow of your broad-brimmed hat can’t hide the modelling of your temples. Your long fingers rest on your sleeve’s rich satin. You gleam in light from a source which is forever invisible, outside the frame. And then there’s the fall of your collar, the exquisiteness of lace thrown over darkness.

  You’re in your glory. From where you sit inside your portrait, it’s the present day. The present moment, even, and you’re caught in it. Your right ankle itches, but you suppress the urge to scratch. Your heart throbs with its own quick life. Soon the sitting will be over, but you don‘t mind the time you spend here. The artist is anonymous to me, but not to you. You know him well. This portrait is important to you and you’ll keep it with you all your life.

  The moment I look away, you smile, stand up and stretch like a cat. The artist, of course, has taken careful note of your pose before it dissolves.

  ‘Until next time,’ he says, wiping a brush.

  ‘Until next time,’ you agree.

  You’ve given me the slip again, John. You’re back in your own world. It’s 1595, a date which I know well. I’ve studied your period, and I dress you in my rags of knowledge. I can analyse your social status in the light of your lace collar. You are history, John. You wouldn’t like that, I know. The fact that I can speak and you cannot would seem quite wrong to you, given the relative values of what we have to say.

  You know 1595 from the inside, by the touch of satin, the warmth of a spring day, the gamey smell of your own body, the bite of a flea at the nape of your neck. For you, the door is about to open into a stream of May sunshine that will make you blink. For me, it has closed forever.

  The Elizabethan age has eight more years to run. The old Queen has kept the show on the road so much longer and more brilliantly than anyone had a right to expect. She has united the country. Those who are not united are dead, imprisoned, exiled, silenced or lying very low indeed.

  You’re in your glory, but also in those shadows that wrap themselves around you like a cloak. Your mother has gone into exile, and your brother died in Newgate two years ago, because he harboured a priest. Your fellow Catholics are food for the scaffold. That is what hanging, drawing and quartering is all about. It does so much more than kill: it turns a protesting soul into bloodslimed joints of meat, laid on the block for the public appetite.

  You don’t yet know for sure that England will not return to the faith, not soon, not ever, but I should say that you’ve already made an educated guess. You have, as we know, a great deal of imagination. You will do nothing which will allow your body to be seized, racked, beaten, imprisoned, to die in its own shit and blood and vomit on the clammy ground. You will not be carted to Tyburn to be pelted with the crowd’s insults, spittle and rotten fruit before you are lynched. Nor are you willing to endure the long, dismal martyrdom of being jobless, without influence, friends or position, bled dry by penal taxes. You are already preparing to leave the home of your soul, and find another if you can.

  I look at your long, slender fingers. Perhaps you played upon the lute, as well as upon the emotions of a hundred women. Beautiful, beautiful John Donne. How were you to know that there’d be generations snuffling greedily over your portrait? You couldn’t guess, any more than Sylvia Plath guessed what would happen to her image after the lens clicked, her radiant smile faded and she got up from where she’d been sitting on a bank of daffodils with her infant son in her arms. How could you estimate the wolfish hunger of a public not yet born?

  You and Sylvia are the kind we really love. You make us feel that we can climb right inside your lives. The only frustrating thing is that you keep looking at things we cannot see. You will never meet our eyes.

  Listen, John, I can tell you what’s going to happen to you after you take off that lace collar. You’re going to screw up on a royal scale. You’ll fall in love with the wrong girl, miscalculate about her father coming round to your secret marriage (he won’t, not for years). You’ll find yourself in a cottage full of children, most of whom have coughs or colds or sweating sickness or some other early seventeenth-century malady, for much of the time. Life will become an everlasting winter, smelling of herbs, baby shit, sour milk and dirty clothes.

  John Donne

  Anne Donne

  Undone

  I wonder what your wife thought when she read that little epigram? Some of your children will die, or be born dead. With any luck you won’t feel it as we would these days. Poor little rabbits, you’ll be sorry enough for them while they’re alive, screaming their heads off, wanting all the things that nobody’s able to give them, such as antibiotics, central heating and a trip to Disneyland.

  I expect your wife will have to sell that lace collar to pay for one of her confinements. You’ll lose your job. Everyone who owes you a grudge will take the chance to kick you now that you’re down. You’ll be out of favour for years. For all the effort you’ve put into avoiding martyrdom, you’ll achieve your own not very glorious exile in a borrowed cottage in Mitcham.

  But none of that has happened yet.

  ‘Come and look,’ says the artist, and you saunter round to his side of the easel. Next week he will begin to paint your hands. It has already been decided that you will wear no rings. You don’t need to trumpet your status or your prospects, and besides, the artist prefers not to mar the effect of your long, eloquent fingers.

  You stare thoughtfully at your unfinished portrait. It will wreak havoc for generations, that painted face. Cohorts of fifteen-year-old girls will fall for you and feel for you, as you struggle in the swamp of domesticity. ‘His wife had a baby a year, isn’t that gross? She must of been pregnant, like, all the time.’

  But your true lovers are more sensitive. We know the inside story. You were undone indeed
, you and Anne. A piece of her soul went awry when she married you, and a piece of your soul left your body to meet it. You were never intact again. You tried to write with the noise of your little ones ringing in your ears. You went upstairs, you went downstairs, you went up to town and down to the country, you went to my lady’s chamber but there they still were, babbling, squabbling, screaming and squawking, catching quinsies and spotted fevers and scarlet fevers and marsh fevers.

  You had no money and each child cost so much. Months of sickness and weariness for Anne, heavy clambering of the stairs, dull aches that heralded the rack of labour. The children’s voices floated, skirling. Tom fought with John, Constance bossed little Mary.

  Mary died. Baby Nicholas died. The stillborn unnamed baby died. They floated off, little eager vagrant souls who had found flesh, but not for quite long enough. They were turned out of their bodies like tenants who hadn’t paid the rent. They left fragments of themselves: their blind, eager sucking, the drum of their feet inside the womb. Mary’s first words drifted around your house like feathers.

  I was one of those fifteen-year-olds, of course, and head-overheels in love with you. You were so unhappy. With what brave grace you wrote of your ‘hospital at Mitcham’ where the children grew and the poems shrank. You were kept busy writing begging letters. You had to have patrons, even though so many had turned their backs. No one wants to be contaminated by social failure. You’d stepped out so boldly and now you had to fight for a foothold somewhere, anywhere.

  I would have done anything for you, when I was fifteen. I even made friends with your wife. Yes, in that hasty, obsequious way of a very determined girl when she pits herself against a grown woman and a mother. I could babysit for Anne perhaps. Surely she would like to have a nice sit down? I shepherded little Constance and John and Tom and Mary into the other room, sang sweetly to them, gave them their dinner and washed their bare, rosy feet. A curl of green snot crawled in and out of Mary’s nostril as she breathed. I found a rag and wiped it away tenderly.

  There was silence from the bedroom. Anne must be sleeping, I thought, and no wonder. Her pregnancy looked like a growth on her skinny body. Her skin was blue-white. She wore a married woman’s cap and the hair that escaped from it was thin and lustreless.

  I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

  Did til we loved?

  Let Anne sleep for a while, poor thing. I didn’t want the children to wake her, so I hoisted Mary onto my knee and began to tell a story. She twisted round in my lap and pressed my lips together with her fingers. The others pinched and poked and whinged. I couldn’t even come up with a nursery rhyme. It was time to wake Anne up again.

  I tiptoed to the door of her bedroom. Your bedroom too, but I prefer not to think about that. I heard something I didn’t expect: laughter. A slash of dread went through me. You’d got in there somehow. You were laughing with her, privately. But no. I peeped through the gap in the door and there she was, quite alone, sitting up in bed and reading. A few seconds later she laughed again, and looked up with vague shining eyes as if she expected someone. She didn’t see me, of course.

  I’ve put a stop to all that sort of thing. I’m not fifteen any more. The past is the past and it’s better, much better for everyone, if it doesn’t come alive. I don’t want to see your beautiful face grow old. I don’t want to see your wife’s plain, worn features light up when she thinks I might be you, ready to share her laughter. I went too far that time, but I’ve pulled myself back and I’m in command again. You are history, John. You’ve written all your poems. Your tongue is still. I refuse to be coerced into seeing things your way.

  You’re back inside the portrait frame, beautiful and contained. Your red lips. Your high cheekbones and the pure almond cut of your eyelids. It’s no surprise that you liked this portrait so much. What a blend of sexual magnetism and intellectual glamour. But I’ve just noticed something else that I’ve never seen before. There’s a glint of humour in your eyes, as if you’re wondering how many more centuries of devastation you’ll be capable of before your painted magic fades. There are just the two of us, John. Why won’t you look at me? Why won’t you tell me what you see?

  Prince Felipe Prospero

  (1657-1661)

  He wears a silver bell

  so that in the shadow

  of palace corridors

  he can always be followed,

  he wears a ball of amber

  to ward off infection,

  he wears an amulet

  against malediction,

  so blessed and protected

  with hair like thistledown

  and a gaze the painter

  ‘found in heaven’.

  He wears the slightest of frowns

  but keeps to his station

  as we do, watching him.

  Picture Messages

  of trees: olive and lemon,

  of eggs and bacon

  of my father at The Tin Drum

  on his last weekend

  smiling,

  with coffee in front of him.

  We went to Latinos

  to eat gambas a la plancha

  while you chatted to Mariella,

  we went home and you sat

  in the red armchair.

  Your hand took mine:

  it was that half hour before departing.

  You took my bag to the door

  and had your hand on the lift button

  as usual pretending surprise

  that anyone could shun

  the judder of that contraption

  with its random halts between floors,

  I said I would see you soon

  after a last embrace,

  and you kept your hand raised

  until I was swallowed

  in the dark of the turning staircase.

  Lethe

  Is it Lethe or is it dock water?

  Either has the power.

  The neighbourhood killer

  is somewhere quietly washing up

  dipping and dipping his fork

  in the dirty water.

  The police vans sit crooning

  on the crux of the Downs.

  How quickly the young girls walk

  from work and from the shops.

  The frost that was bone cold

  has eased into rain, the dock water

  takes everything and turns it brown.

  The Queue’s Essentially

  The queue’s essentially

  docile surges get us

  very slowly somewhere.

  Like campfire, life springs up –

  that pair ahead of me

  (newly landed on Easyjet, he

  shunts the wheeled, packed

  tartan suitcase

  inch by inch

  through jumpy fractures of brake-light

  on wet pavement) –

  that pair ahead of me

  who graze on their vegetable pasty

  and pass it in Polish

  from his hand to hers –

  so intimate, rained-upon –

  learning so quickly it will be a mistake

  to take that taxi

  all the way to Kilburn –

  The Captainess of Laundry

  I am the captainess of laundry

  and I sing to its brave tune,

  to the crack and the whip and the flap of the sheets

  and the rack going up, going down, going down

  and the rack going up and going down,

  I am the captainess of laundry

  and I salt my speech with a song

  of the bleach and the blue and the colours holding true

  and the glaze of the starch on my skin, my skin,

  and the glaze of starch on my skin,

  I am the captainess of laundry

  and I swing my basket through the town

  with the sheets and the shirts and the white petticoats

  and a snowy-breasted cover tied around, tied around
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  and a snowy-breasted cover tied around.

  The Day’s Umbrellas

  On the same posts each evening

  the harbour cormorants

  hang out their wings to dry

  like the day’s umbrellas

  as the late ferry passes.

  In sour-sweet ramparts of ivy

  the blackbirds call

  drowsily, piercingly.

  Above them the gulls

  are casing the terraces.

  Thickly, the pigeons

  groom their own voices

  as parents in the half-light

  tiptoe away from babies

  over their heads in sleep.

  The Deciphering

  How busy we are with the dead in their infancy,

  who are still damp with the sweat of their passing,

  whose hair falls back to reveal a scar.

  We think of wiping their skin, attending them

  in the old way, but are timid, ignorant.

  We walk from the high table where they are laid

  leaving their flesh royally mounded

  just as they have left it

  for the undertakers to cherish.

  We consider the last kiss,

  the taste and the grain of it.

  The lift doors squeeze open, then shut.

  All day we think that we have lost our car keys.

  There is a feeling in the back of the mind