Awakening (29 page)

At least two hundred pass by.

As the last singers move away, the Anwyls join the end of the procession. Will's singing. Anna looks back: inky darkness. There's nothing behind them except cold night. In the early hours of the morning, getting ready for bed, Will translates for her. She learns that the hymns that struck her so forcibly were written by a farmer's daughter of Dolwar Fach. Ann Griffiths died in childbirth at twenty-nine, half a century back. But to us Ann's still alive, Will says. And I hope she will be so to you. He and Anna kneel to pray.

Impossible to sleep. It's not that Anna was unmoved, there on the mountain path. She was. Nobody could have withstood – Miriam Sala herself would scarcely have withstood – the emotional power of that night walk. Mirrie would have acknowledged it as a human gesture of love and bonding. Its euphoria swept through Anna, a rising wave. The wave crested and overflowed; and again; and again. She was drenched in emotion. And that's the trouble. Throughout their stay in Wales, she has silently recoiled from displays of unmediated emotion. The charisma of the leader; the delirium of the led. This would never do at Chauntsey. The torrential crying of fifty children at Fishguard had to be heard to be believed. The prophetic David Morgan, after an hour of fiery preaching, would descend from the pulpit to harass the ungodly, eye to eye. An ancient woman vaulted a pew in her ecstasy, and a converted sailor at the
Tabernacl
, Aberystwyth, called on God to save his wife Betty whereupon she entered the church crying, ‘Lord have mercy on me, the biggest sinner in Trefechan!'

Hysteria.
What else can you call it? A word she abominates but Anna has been brought up in a strict household: the religion of the heart was, yes, paramount, but piety at home is sober and reflective.

‘You're not asleep, are you,
cariad
?
' Will whispers.

‘No. Can't you either?' Anna turns and snuggles into his arms. She can't see his eyes as his back's turned away from the dim beginnings of light piercing the threadbare curtains.

‘I was deep asleep; I was dreaming.'

‘What about, love?'

‘I'm not sure … anyway. It will have been about you. That's for sure.'

He doesn't want to tell me, she thinks. He remembers perfectly well. About Beatrice presumably. Beatrice is in our bed. She shares in everything we do. How strange this is, that they are accompanied wherever they go by Anna's sister, Will's first love, even into the Holy of Holies. That was the bargain, she reminds herself. I always knew that was how it would be. Will and I are each other's second best. But we do love one another. And sometimes I love him beyond reason, which is an infection I have perhaps caught from Beatrice.

Will sits on the edge of the bed in his nightshirt, elbows on his knees, fingertips massaging his temples and forehead. She kneels behind him, her head on his shoulder, arms loosely clasped around his body. His skin is nearly as soft as Lore's.

‘I wanted to ask you,' Will says. ‘Tell me the honest truth, now. You will, won't you?' He turns, takes Anna's hands, kisses her hair, his fingers meeting in the small of her back. ‘Promise.'

‘I do tell you the truth, love, always,' she lies. ‘I try to. If I know it.'

There's a whole world in her breast that Anna doesn't acknowledge and Will cannot glimpse. And the same is true of Will and, surely, everybody. Is he going to ask, at last, about earlier loves? Should she tell him about Lore? Are there things he needs to unburden?

‘How do you like this country, Annie? My
gwlad
,
my
bro
. Do you think you'd be happy here?'

‘Oh, I do like it,
cariad
.'

‘
But?'

‘Oh. I don't know.'

‘You'd soon learn the language,
bach
. You know you would; you're so clever. I've already taught you words for every part of your lovely self. Haven't I?'

Don't ask me, don't ask. For, no, she wouldn't like to stay here at all. It's so far from civilisation. Anna tries to say that she loves it here for Will's sake and because it's his home, of course she does. The people have been so kind and the landscape awes her. And now Will reveals that he has received an invitation to serve as minister of the chapel at Goginan.

‘We'd be poor. But would we mind that so very much? We'd have to make do and mend. It is not what you're used to. But if I have a call …'

‘But do you have a call, Will?'

A pause. Part of him surely hankers after the comparative prosperity he enjoyed in Wiltshire and perhaps after those he loves there.

Eventually Will says, ‘I must pray more and see what the Saviour has to say to me. What I felt was … it may be …
better
for us two, my Annie, in the long run, to build ourselves a home here. Do it from scratch. Just the two of us. And will you also pray, my darling?'

Into Anna's mind leaps the text,
If thine eye offend thee
,
pluck it out.
His eye does offend him and he's doing his resolute best to remedy this by breaking free of ties to his wife's sister and the relatively luxurious Pentecost way of life. If Anna looked into her husband's eye now, she'd spy a miniature of her sister in the darkness of his pupil. He's trying to blink it off. Honourably. Will is tacitly giving Anna the best possible chance. And a choice. Most husbands would not. You go where he goes. Your plain duty.

This is the moment when Anna ought to say, ‘We will do whatever you wish, husband.' She does not.

No secular books in English here and no library. Nobody to talk to. Questioning scepticism is anathema to these good people. She
cannot
read the Bible all day long.

Anna walks out alone along a high ridge, which drops away at either side to valleys scooped out in some past age by some inconceivable force.

The vastness of time and space reduces you. The world pitches and sways under the stress of your vertigo. The mountains are waves, the valleys their green troughs. She stumbles and peers down at where her boots are treading.

I am walking over a sea floor.

Shells have weathered out from the limestone: mussels and winkles, ammonites too. Anna remembers the meeting with Mr Gosse and how Miriam's friends talked of the war of species over millennia; their slippery mutations. Mirrie referred to Mr Darwin's theory not as conjecture or speculation but as matter of fact. Anna recalls a pillar of Purbeck marble in Salisbury Cathedral, which, if you look closely, teems with the fossils of tiny snails. They are suspended there like a coded message in the architecture of the glorious edifice: we are here to bear witness to the flaw at the centre of your design. Anna hunkers down to examine the path: one of the shells has weathered out so completely that she has only to tease it with a fingertip for it to drop like a hazelnut from its cup. It comes away cleanly and she closes her palm round it. The questions she has suppressed since marriage swarm upon her, a black host of excitable heresies, Anna's spiritual children.

*

Occasionally Luke opens his dark blue eyes but without gaining consciousness. The lids close. This was his mother's crib and cradled his grandfather before that. Two centuries ago it was hollowed from an oak trunk and one sees the whorls and indentations, the build-up of varnish and polish until its blackened veneer is a mirror. The rockers at the base are worn smooth.

An easy baby, that's what everyone says. A sound sleeper, a jolly smiler, a strong feeder. He rarely cries, although when he does, you know about it. Mrs Elias wears a faint but caustic smile when she hears Luke cry: you wait, my girl, her grin says – you'll rue the day you cast supercilious looks upon me and my boys. Luke's birth was brutal. Beatrice feared, then knew that she was dying; she tasted the bitterness of a double death, the baby being too large to move, or lying back to front, or upside down. The throes were abortive: she was a labouring grave. She began to tire and weaken. Requesting pen and paper, Beatrice scrawled a will. Everything to her sister. In your own right, darling. That and my love. I hope to see you in the next world. And forgive me my many faults. For Joss had made a settlement of Beatrice's property upon herself: it was hers to give.

Mrs Bunce however reassured her: all was likely to be well. She'd turn the baby with her hands. Done it a thousand times. She kneaded the mound like dough. Something in there began to give. A crumb of hope came. But then Dr Quarles appeared with Dr Palfrey of Salisbury and dismissed the midwife. Science had arrived.

Removing their jackets, the physicians rolled up their sleeves and washed their hands and forearms at the ewer. Though preoccupied with the business of dying, Beatrice in one corner of her mind was mortified at the threadbare towels Amy had laid out. At least they were clean. And Dr Palfrey was a practitioner of the latest sanitary doctrines learned in the Crimea.

Forceps and knife emerged from Dr Palfrey's black box. She thought of Mr Mussel the butcher and his cleaver. She started to pray. One moment you saw the two physicians; then their heads ducked down. They set to work on, no,
in
,
the furnace of scalding pain that was Beatrice's lower body. They reached up and dragged out what was there, bloody and silent.

The baby was big and blue. She reached for it, corpse though it was. They mustn't take it from her. Let me see his face.

Alive! You have a son! My son, my son. She wept. The baby pumped out screams. The father came in, looking pale, and held his swaddled son, praying for a blessing on child and mother.

Christian Luke Jacob Jocelyn Pentecost Ritter has an elongated head like a turnip, from the forceps. Bald. Cross-eyed. Snub-nosed. A scatter of pearly pimples on his forehead and cheeks. Beautiful to Beatrice beyond all language.

Luke opens his eyes and milk floods in for him. The breast is rock-hard, the cloth that protects her clothes saturated. Hurry, hurry, relieve me. Luke, in her lap, gazes into Beatrice's eyes as she undoes her shift. He battens on and the jaws work to drain her life into his. The tender ache as he drinks is something Beatrice never wants to lose. If only life could remain at this suspended moment. Never be weaned. Always be mine. She has fallen in love, for only the second time in her life. No comparison though. Her love for Will whirled her in a vortex of desire and illusion and incipient disappointment; this passion is all goodness. It commands the heart through a singing network of veins and nerves. A wholly innocent love. Chaste and sensual. Nobody had let Beatrice into the secret of the sheer physical delight of nursing a child. Once the baby learned to latch, pleasure radiated in a delicious melt and she fed the child for both their sakes.

She knows what Anna would say: ‘Don't tell anyone. If they discover the pleasure of it, they're sure to forbid it.'

Loveday makes no bones of her incredulity at Beatrice's contentment, never having detected motherly qualities in her friend. But she sympathises too and is transported back in memory to the birth of her firstborn – that time of dreams when nature tricks one into not knowing that the beloved will grow into a creature that insists on being intransigently herself.

‘To be honest, I had no notion of what to do with a baby when my Patience came along,' she admits. ‘I knew they had something out of a bottle and that they're always getting something the matter with them and then they get over it. Best thing to do is not to fuss, especially with girls. Girls are tough. Boys are more fragile.'

Patience glares. At her mother, at Beatrice, at her two brothers, at the baby in his crib.

‘Ugh', says Jack Elias when introduced to the newborn babe: ‘It's like a slug.
'
Patience calls her brother a naughty boy and begs to be allowed to hold the darling little baby. ‘Oh do look at his sweet little face.' Something in Patience's expression – a simpering irony – keeps Beatrice on her guard. Into her mind come the words of the Psalmist:
Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth the brats of Babylon against a stone
.

‘You must miss your dear sister so much,' says Loveday. ‘And she hasn't seen her little nephew.'

‘We hope they'll come home soon, if only for a visit.'

‘How I envy her,' sighs Loveday, who doesn't, at all, but likes to pretend that Wales is her earthly paradise. It's funny, thinks Beatrice, how the Welsh can't wait to escape their poverty and narrowness but no sooner are they over the border than they're nostalgic for their native land.

‘Don't bounce Luke up and down like that, please, Patience,' she says.

‘Oh, but he likes it. Don't you, Lu-Lu? Why don't I take him into the garden to look at the birds? Nice birdies, Luke!' Bounce. ‘Shall we see the nice birdies?' Bounce. The baby's mouth squares up to cry.

‘I'll have him back now.' Beatrice reads
brat of Babylon
in the minx's eyes. Patience is only pretending to be a human being. The razor intuition acquired with motherhood reveals this to her. ‘Now, this minute.'