Awakening (5 page)

The painter of the miniature portrait in Anna's locket erased the pockmarks by painting Lore in black silhouette. There's something ghostly about the image: Anna looks at it rarely but likes to feel the warmed oval of metal against her throat.

Beatrice was jealous of Papa's adoration of Lore. She resented the closeness that grew up between Anna and their stepmother. When Papa took Beatrice off to London on church business, the two girls left behind explored their world together, making a collection of fossils and flints – scallops and ammonites and especially the egg-like flint fossils that country people call ‘shepherds' crowns' or ‘fairy loaves', pocketing them for luck and keeping them on their windowsills, to guard against evil spirits. Millions of years ago they were sea urchins, Lore said, creeping along the sea bottom – imagine that! And they died and their insides were eaten and the shells filled with silica jelly – and the sea became land and farmers ploughed them out of the chalk. It's abject nonsense to say that the world is only six thousand years old, Lore maintained: which simpleton believes that nowadays?

Picking up one of these little beauties from her bedside cabinet, Anna coddles it between her palms. She traces with her fingertip the stippling of the five-pointed star. They fell from heaven, say the old folk. No, they wandered the earth like us, she and Lore believed; they had their moment too.

Anna recorded all their expeditions. She removes the diary from her chest. A life without pen and paper would be unthinkable. Pen and paper immortalise your witness. How sad for the children of the labouring poor that, even if they're literate, they lack pencils or paper and must shape their letters with their fingers in sand trays, shake the sand and start again. Anna leafs through the diary to 1856, that golden year.

Lore & I to Stone Henge. We picnicked on a fallen bluestone & rambled round discussing the origins of the place. A temple, said I. To the Goddess, said Lore. We found nine chalk balls & part of a green glass jar, L believes the jar is Roman – some Ancient Romans came on an outing and ate their picnic here too, she said, & left their litter. It lay there for one thousand six hundred years or so whereupon those explorers of genius Anna & Lore Pentecost came along with their picnic and cleared up after them. Next week we plan to visit Old Sarum where Papa & I saw the skeleton unearthed.

Dined with the Montagus. Lore spoke not a word. If her inner voice doesn't prompt her, she keeps her mouth shut. Papa tried to coax her – thinks she's bashful. Mrs Kyffin knows better, she considers L uncouth, she heard us whistling in the wilderness – said nothing, her eyebrows said it all. Papa asked me if I thought L might be a trifle deaf & did it run in the family? Christian is also someone who cannot always hear what is said to him.

Lulworth Cove. First time I have
ever
seen the sea! A sheet of shiningness.

Today we bathed. Biting cold – delicious, delirious! Lore was flung by her father into the Baltic at the age of 5. She is practically fearless. Today she showed me how to float, holding her hand under the small of my back. The women's bathing huts are sequestered & we can swim without concern. I wrote Beatrice & Joss a long letter & L wrote to Papa. My darling Lore is to have a baby – it is an intimate matter, L says, something a woman keeps to herself until she is ready to share it. She will tell Papa when we return. I woke in the night & placed my hand on her belly.

Anna can only bear to read snatches. Her diary is a calf-bound book of Mama's in a brown paper jacket, stuffed with smaller leaves. Tiny, secret writing, cryptic as she can make it, writing backwards often: you can do this if you're left-handed. Think of the calf that made the binding, Lore would say; the creature many years ago butchered and eaten. Everything in this world makes me sad, she'd say, the next one will be better. It's a topic Anna sometimes muses on and can get no further than wondering at the slaughter the Almighty has unleashed on the Creation. She has qualms about questioning His ways but when it comes over her to do so, she's helpless to resist. Lore, who questioned everything and still believed, held it lawful to do so. The patriarch Jacob wrestled with an angel for three days, and threw him. If Jacob, why not Lore and Anna Pentecost?

You, Almighty Father, have
killed
my Mama and Mary and Lore and Papa, Anna challenges Him. I cannot accept that I shall never see their faces again in this world. Perhaps in another world but that scarcely comforts me. If You, God, had been
my
child, I could never have treated You in the way you treat us and just leave us to it.

She has wrestled the Almighty to the floor many times – just by thinking, by following a logical train of thought. How can it be helped? If her sister could see how far down the road to heresy Anna has wandered, she'd be appalled. There'd be retaliation. Mirrie and Baines Sala have crossed over: doubt has led to agnosticism. Humanism, Mirrie prefers to call it, emphasising her positive faith. She respects and honours the faith of others, though she cannot share it. Anna shrinks from taking that step: she could never be at home in a godless universe.

Opening her portable desk on her knee, Anna brings out her best pen; unscrews the cap on the inkwell and dips the nib. Her minute and costive script is meant to have a printed effect.

Watching the dragonfly on the pond I was amazed at the sapphire & emerald colours of his wings, his darting speed. They land on the water & I recall noticing as a child – face almost on a level – that they actually stand on a skin or film or membrane. Their feet dimple this membrane. A membrane of water? Dr Browne, who we had before Quarles, once allowed us to look at a water drop thro his microscope – what wonder! It comes over me how I'd love to travel the world – or just visit St Ives with the Salas – but if that cannot be done, a woman could curl up as Hamlet said in a nutshell & call herself queen of infinite space.

Laughter bursts from the parlour; there's a crash, a stampede – and everyone's streaming out into the garden. Anna looks down on the crowns of their heads as they bubble out of the door and float towards the summer house. Mr Crisp strolls in their wake and one sees he is in a sulk. Such a boor, snatching kisses from anything female with his little moist mouth – and you're hardly better, Gwilym Anwyl, she thinks as the fresh-faced minister of Fighelbourn chases the squealing Peck girls into the arbour. Beatrice steps out in their wake, to stand, arms folded, in a dream, her head in its intricate maze of plaits a swirling blur through the pane's irregularity.

How burdened Beatrice is. Go on, my love, join in, Anna silently urges her sister: don't stand apart feeling lost. Just play. They hide their love from themselves and one another in frequent squabbles. She remembers Papa's final delirium; he cursed them all roundly and called for his wife. Which wife did he mean? Anna quailed before the rush of filth from his tongue. Where had such gutter language come from? It was as if Pastor Pentecost had stored up the leavings of all the sinners tended through his long and virtuous life. Cramming it in some cellar of the mind, he'd shut the door on that heaving mass of ordure, until it rushed out on his dying day, to spatter the stricken hearers.

His daughters flinched, shawls tight across their bosoms, cleaving together. Dr Quarles administered a terrific dose of laudanum and after that no one could rouse Jacob Pentecost in the mortal world.

Papa taught that our whole life is a preparation for those sacred moments of deathbed trial and witness. A dying Christian's a telescope trained on the other world. Looking over the wall, he sends back a message. Mr Montagu, penning the obituary, drew a decent veil over that harrowing scene. The
illness
spoke, he privately reassured Jacob Pentecost's seared children, not our beloved; the illness was the last throw of our envious Adversary.

But did that not mean that Papa would go to Hell? The final breaths are ultimate moments of truth. But perhaps in the closing second of his life, faith flickered in Papa: and, if so, God, whose grace welcomes the least sign from repentant sinners, would take Jacob Pentecost to his breast. Imagine arriving in Heaven and finding … no Papa there waiting. Mama, saved but bereft – or, worse, indifferent. Or Mama absent: not, for inconceivable reasons, one of the chosen. I've never seen her, Anna thinks: my birth killed her. I must see her. Only one tenth of the elect is female, according to some Calvinists. How could Heaven be Heaven without those one had loved? It would be an affront to all that's divine and human. ‘Send me to Hell to comfort Papa and Mama,' Anna would plead. She has no wish to join the heartless angels who'd consented to be immunised to suffering and exempt from sympathy, just to save their skins.

God comes apart in one's hands like an old toy, when one searches into Him. The child stares aghast, holding the mess together.

The young folk are back indoors and playing hide-and-seek, to judge from the sounds. Half-dozing, Anna remembers that there's something in the wilderness she must find. Something spellbindingly lovely. Very secret. What was it? No idea.

Anna awakens to find Mr Anwyl in the room with his finger at his lips and his ear to the door. His sleeves are rolled up to the elbows; his collar's open. Will has beautiful arms and hands, slender and supple. He's always gesturing, so expressively. But his mouth is facile and perhaps the hands too. She thinks: Will's body would be all but hairless, epicene. Soft as a girl's. And perhaps Beattie will marry him after all, rather than Christian. Will's nakedness will lie in their father's sheets with Beatrice's pale body where Anna lies now, for she'll cede this chamber, with its spacious windows, green view and gracious morning light.

Feet thunder past the door towards the attic. Doors bang. Silence.

‘Annie
fach
,' he whispers. ‘May I come and sit with you for a little?'

The tiny see-through creatures on the surface of the pond change shape to slip in every direction in search of their minuscule diet. Anna with her sharp eyesight has watched them pour themselves round their prey. Which victim could see them coming or fear these creatures' motives when they slide so subtly where the spirit takes them, absorbing whatever comes near? And before you know what's happening, you're being digested in the acids of the predator's stomach. You're being transformed into his substance. Mr Anwyl can hardly be in a room without sliding close to you. How would he be then as a brother-in-law? Sarum House would sing and dance on its foundations. How long before it rocked and trembled? For Beatrice would be as exacting as Will would be capricious. But fun and games there'd be in abundance.

And, Anna thinks, he'd be a blithely wonderful father. She can see him now, on all fours, playing horses and riders with a row of white-petticoated, tempestuous toddlers.

Gwilym Anwyl stands to gain Sarum House. Lock, stock and barrel. In possessing Beatrice, he'd enter into all our property. Me he would not possess, Anna thinks, but I would diminish to a poor relation. She understands why Beatrice holds off and plays one suitor against another.

‘May I ask you something, Anna?'

She knows what's coming. He wants to pour out his heart. Wants to know about Christian and when this paragon is expected to visit and what was in the long letter he saw in Beatrice's hand last week. And oh, how much more eligible is the principled Christian Ritter than Mr Gwilym Anwyl. A
manly
Christian hero of the overseas cause. But who could advise Beatrice to accept Christian? He'd either kill her by taking her to foreign parts or arouse the anguish of long absences. And in all events, he'd flatten her.

‘Ask away. I may not give you an answer, of course. Now, sit you down here.' She pats the bed. ‘If we're going to whisper.'

‘I always feel I can talk to you and you'll give me honest answers – a pinch of mustard or pepper if I need it.' And, yes, he knows he needs seasoning, in every sense, he acknowledges: too often he catches an unflattering reflection of himself in Anna's eyes. ‘The thing is, I care about you very much. Do you mind my saying that, Anna?' His warm palm covers her hand; she withdraws it but his follows. ‘As a friend. A sister. I came late to God and to my calling, comparatively. Not like the great Mr Spurgeon.'

‘You're absolutely nothing like Mr Spurgeon, Will. I can't disagree with you there.'

‘Exactly,' he agrees, chagrined.

And I like you the better for it, Anna refrains from saying, rescuing her hand and hiding it beneath the covers. That moon-faced boy-preacher is a star in the Baptist firmament. Spurgeon is characterised by endless loquacity, towering over the massed thousands of hero-worshippers at Exeter Hall and the Surrey Gardens Musical Hall. She can't stand it, not least because on the one occasion she attended, she wasn't only tempted: she fell. Anna melted with the rest, wept, cried
Selah!
and worshipped God's creature in his lofty pulpit. Never before had she been in the presence of such a multitude; the roaring murmur of mortals seeking salvation or entertainment, one was unsure which. Anna abandoned herself to the torrent of this man's tongue. Mesmerised by his operatic voice, her body relaxed. She might have been asleep but when she came round, she felt … what was the word,
handled.

Wasn't it like worshipping a loin of pork? That's how he struck her then, so well fed that his very being has congealed to a mass of marbled fat. No sense to the spell he wove with his angel's voice.