Awakening (9 page)

There is Mr Spurgeon in his London pulpit. Perhaps he is the coming man.

Maybe the man will issue from America, on board the
Petrel
with Mr Jones of Bedwellty. It is not impossible that Mr Idris Jones may himself be the man. This we do not know! As yet. But the high wind is coming.

‘And do remember,' says Mr Kyffin in a more ordinary tone, ‘when the glorious tempest of salvation shakes this nation, that it was your friend John who told you the news. But to my text!
How beautiful are thy feet, prince's daughter
.'

The Song of Solomon is a book at which Bibles regularly fall open but on which little is ever said. A chaste veil is drawn. But why, enquires the pastor, should we fear to read Christ's love song to his spouse the church? What should hold us back from contemplating the naked and the shod foot of the beloved? In all reverence.

Embarrassment seethes in the chapel. Shufflings, coughs.

Sensuous love, he says, is not a game.

No wonder poor Mrs Kyffin has cried off; no wonder Mr Prynne is up in arms, if this is Mr Kyffin's new theme.

‘For what has John Milton, that great Puritan spirit, to say about nudity in
Paradise Lost
?' Mr Kyffin enquires. ‘Does anyone here remember? What are clothes but
those troublesome disguises which we wea
r
?
And what is excessive modesty but
dishonest sham
e
?
Sensuous love is a sacred and mysterious
language
, spoken only in deep trust between bridegroom and bride in the sanctuary of their marriage bed.'

‘I shall show you the bed!' he exclaims with a dramatic flourish. ‘Here is the bed! Here it is!'

Silence in the pews. Consternation. Faces red as radishes. Beatrice's lower body within its drawers, shift, petticoats, corset, crinoline cage and skirts is aware of itself. Ladies sit rigid as conscious statues. They hold their breath. What next? Will there be a walkout? Will the respectable worshippers in the pews protest?

‘In my hand! The Word itself! The Book is, so to speak, the bed of consummation.' John Kyffin holds his Bible aloft. ‘Here it is. Love itself. The wooing tenderness of my blessed Jesus for my erring human soul. Pillows for my delinquent head! Quilts of love to warm me, even me, the unchaste bride!'

There's some relief and relaxation as the sermon moves to consideration of the pattern of shoe that might have been worn in the Holy Land by the prince's daughter.

‘Let us say, sandals. The Lover looks down at the humblest portion of his beloved's person and praises its beauty. Sandals are closed (in order to remain attached to the foot) but also open to the air, most necessary in the torrid temperatures of the Holy Land. And is this base function something of which we should be ashamed to speak? My children, we walk through the dust – and of this dust we're fashioned – and to it we'll return. Let's consider also that this is where the
sole
meets the earth. Can we call to mind occasions when we have perceived the
soul
of man, woman or child
in the feet
?'

Mr Kyffin pauses.

Beatrice's thoughts swing about wildly as the pause for reflection lengthens. A nervous laugh has to be thrust down.

‘Bring to mind,' the preacher exhorts them, ‘the foot of love.'

It flashes through her: Jack Emanuel Elias at four months old in his crib under the apple tree. Anna in a blue summer dress snaring both his naked feet in her hands, kissing them till the baby shrieked with laughter. This is how it will be, Beatrice thought, when we are mothers.

But first we must have husbands. We must lose our virginity. Don't think that; why are you thinking it; why is the pastor arousing such thoughts, in the chapel of all places? Beatrice seeks to block out Mr Kyffin's words, his surely deranged words. She throws herself into prayer. But the thought of a wedding night, banished, creeps back.

The ram is brought by Farmer Hewison to tup the Pentecost ewes.

The dog mates with the howling bitch behind the sheds.

Coupled fox and vixen, caught in the tie, tear at the swollen root of their attachment, struggling for freedom.

Beatrice has nothing whatever to learn about the mechanics of mating, never having viewed it as unwholesome or shameful. But how the equivalent negotiation is transacted between human beings is unclear. Her body swirls disquietly. She can imagine a man gripping the tender instep of her foot in his hand, maternally: a strange and pleasurable thought. She can imagine a tempestuous bed brought to a hush, the sheets allowed to lie where they fell, lovers lying naked to one another in married trust. She cannot see the man's face. One must trust this person with one's life.

Afterwards the elders and deacons, as one body, flee Mr Kyffin, ignoring his outstretched hand. Mrs Mussell and her six daughters sidestep, nod and depart at the double, shoulders high, cheeks pink. Mrs Bunce the midwife chats amiably with Mr Kyffin, as does dear deaf Mr Turnbull who congratulates the preacher on an elevating sermon. Handsome Daniel Pittaway the gardener winks at Edwin Fribance the blacksmith, who preserves a grave countenance.

Mr Kyffin rides high on a windy afflatus. At supper in Sarum House, he refrains from enlightening the Pentecosts about the painful events at Florian Street. After the cheese platter, the afflatus wilts; he goes quiet and retires without taking a pipe with Jocelyn.

Beatrice recounts to her sister the gist of the sermon. ‘Poor Mr Kyffin, he seems to have gone off on his own strange road.'

‘Christianity is fissiparous,' says Anna. ‘That's how it works, I'm afraid.'

‘Whatever do you mean?'

‘Worms in a garden. To grow, they have to break. They divide to reproduce. Protestants divide and subdivide until there's no union left, just thousands of sects all wriggling away to their own tune. Until in the end there are ten million churches of one person.'

‘Honestly, Anna. What will you say next? Do you ever know what you are going to say before you say it?'

‘No. Not always. Do you always?'

‘Yes, Anna, on the whole yes, I think I do.'

‘Poor you, Beattie, you are deprived of the spice of novelty.'

Beatrice, not for the first time, flinches from her sister's thinking-aloud; pretends to laugh it off. Anna is an odd mind out and really can't help it. Since you cannot gain complete control of her, you need to veil her anomalies from other people's sight. Sitting back, Beatrice contemplates her sister's melancholy but beautiful eyes, looking into the distance; she admires the lustrous darkness of Anna's hair, just washed, all brought forward over one shoulder. Her face is gaunt but Anna has rallied significantly since the medical treatment, indicating to Beatrice that Dr Quarles knew what he was talking about.

There's a pile of books sticking out from under the bed. Aha, you forgot to hide them! ‘Fissiparous': Anna could not have dreamed that up on her own: Miriam Sala is somewhere behind that. ‘Christianity is fissiparous! Worms in a garden!' Is that a sample of Anna's reflections when she's lying prostrate in her room all those tedious hours?

‘But perhaps an Awakening would bring all the churches back together again, Annie. That, I am sure, is the idea. General Baptists would reunite with Strict and Particular Baptists, Congregationalists, all the different Wesleyans, Unitarians, Brethren, even the Anglicans, High and Low and High-low. All of us would be one. So perhaps there is something in it and we should pray earnestly about it? This may be
the
moment.'

While Anna dozes on the couch after tea, Beatrice runs lightly upstairs and removes the offensive books. Without examining the titles or investigating their soiled contents, she conceals them in the cupboard under the stairs until evening. In the wilderness at the end of the garden, Beatrice lights the pyre. She tears out pages quire by quire. The fire licks, then rages. Kindling's all they're good for. Flakes of charred paper float up into the air but on a windless evening they don't travel far. The fire burns low and Beatrice stirs the ashes with a stick until every trace is extinguished. And she'll be watchful and do it again and again, should the need arise. Her heart is choking her throat with its drumming.

*

Turdus philomelos
,
Anna records in her diary,
the speckled song thrush
has had her nest smashed. Five eggs, powder blue, 9 days old & near to hatching, stolen. This whole nesting arrangement was a mistake on her part. She should build nearer heaven for we down here are raptors. Never trust us. We do not trust one another or ourselves – & how wise we are in this regard. But our thrush too is an engine of death: an empty litter of snail shells marks her presence. She beats them against the post to extract the meat. & this she must do until the Almighty calls a halt to the slaughter.

Anna will get up today. She's sick of sickness. Meeting her own sallow face in the mirror, she's shaken. ‘Emaciated; not long for this world'
are the words she reads in the sympathetic faces of visitors: they conceal what Lore would have called their
Schadenfreude
. Hens peck the runty chicken to death, after which deed they run about squawking with five minutes' relief. The healthy feed on the ill: that's a fact. It ensures that the mad and bad survive. And then, generation by generation, they select and breed for madness. Outwit the mob or be devoured. Outwit Beatrice. But Anna was sad through and through to see her observations confirmed by Mr Darwin in one of the snatched books. The zoologists sorrow over the bloodbath of nature and are reluctant to acknowledge it. It has made Mr Darwin ill. But tell it he must. Tell it and be vilified. Speak and be mobbed by the beaks of the
cognoscenti
.

Mrs Bunce brought trout from the Avon for the invalid. The creatures lay on a slab, a mortuary company, their yellow eyes glazed. The fish cried out with Job:
Why did you create me
,
O my Maker
,
to be the food of vermin?
Their creaturely life spoke to Anna and harrowed her. All life is kin to all life. This would sound insane. ‘But Anna, the creatures were given to us for our use.' And the smell. Even in her romping days, Anna Pentecost was never more than a light eater, a slight child. Too much to do, trees to climb, cartwheels waiting to be turned in the morning garden. ‘You're a fairy,' said Papa. ‘You eat the dew on the leaf. But I'm an elf, my lamb, a porridge-elf, so let me feed you this teaspoon of magic porridge made of oats soaked in rainbows.' Yes, she opened her beak then and accepted the delicacy.
And throve.

Anna accepts a portion of fish, poached in milk, her sister hanging over her, staring at the fork as it travels to and from her mouth. Afterwards, seized with a violent headache, Anna suppresses the pain and agrees with Beatrice that Dr Quarles' remedy has done her good after all. Yes, she was wrong to object to the quacks and to make such a fuss about being
violated.
Anna smiles at Beatrice none too pleasantly, a sardonic rictus which Beatrice apparently chooses to accept as the real thing.

Anna manages to creep downstairs under her own steam and settles herself on the sofa. She considers her plan. It's to take up her bed and walk. But not too soon, so as to avoid a trip to London with Beatrice, who'll be meeting Christian Ritter at Regent's Park College. He's to lecture on slavery in America and about new horizons for the world ministry. The great Mr Spurgeon will attend.

Yesterday a long letter arrived from Christian, which Beatrice has not shared with Anna. Beatrice's colour is high and she spends a disproportionate amount of time trying on her best dresses and selecting hats for London.

‘Oh I wish you could come with me, Annie. I dislike leaving you.'

‘I'll be perfectly comfortable. And getting stronger every day, you can see that. Mrs Elias and Mrs Montagu will keep me company.'

‘I don't like going without you, I don't
like
it.'

A little-girl look crosses the elder sister's face. What self-respecting woman wouldn't comprehend Beatrice's apprehen-sion? Solitary in a railway coach, you're prey for any rogue who chooses to insult you. Together the Pentecosts are a match for anyone.

‘You'll be well cared for,' Anna reassures her. For what if Beatrice becomes so nervous that she cancels her trip? ‘I'll write every day. Joss will take you to the station.'

‘Yes, but it's you I worry about.'

‘Well, don't.'

‘I've been unkind to you, Annie. Dearest, I'm just – so sorry.'

Anna stares. Her sister is rarely known to apologise; can only with difficulty concede that she may have been mistaken. A caress, a vase of anemones, a cake baked with cinnamon constitute her usual language of contrition. And, look, the penitent is already beginning to regret it. Beatrice has to be forgiven on her own terms.

What she mustn't know, for fear of reprisals, is that, no, Anna will never forgive her sister on any terms, ever. You're a one-woman Inquisition, thinks Anna. If there's an hysteric in the house, we know what her name is.