Awakening

Bless you, you don't

1. Title Page
   
2. Dedication
   
3. Prelude
   
4. Chapter 1
   
5. Chapter 2
   
6. Chapter 3
   
7. Chapter 4
   
8. Chapter 5
   
9. Chapter 6
   
10. Chapter 7
    
11. Chapter 8
    
12. Chapter 9
    
13. Chapter 10
    
14. Chapter 11
    
15. Chapter 12
    
16. Chapter 13
    
17. Chapter 14
    
18. Chapter 15
    
19. Chapter 16
    
20. Chapter 17
    
21. Chapter 18
    
22. Chapter 19
    
23. Chapter 20
    
24. Chapter 21
    
25. Chapter 22
    
26. Afterword
    
27. Copyright
    

AWAKENING

Stevie Davies

For dear Rosalie

ἀστέρων πάντων ὀ
κάλλιστος

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, letter (late 1850s)

Female hysteric
under hypnosis at Salpêtrière, 1876-80

I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with [sic]) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

Charles Darwin, letter to Joseph Hooker (1844)

Prelude

Anna sits back on her heels. The wilderness at the garden's end is her world, and the grassy mound's a world within this world. A tump in a field of tumps. Secret from Beatrice. A place where, if you look, you'll see things, both beautiful and terrible, that nobody else notices. Gorse and broom send up their heady scents and screen Anna from the house. From her pocket she extracts her finds from Old Sarum where the men were digging and they'd found, they informed Papa, a skeleton wearing leg-irons. A felon or a slave, or conversely a martyr or a heretic. His head had been cut off, and lay beside him. Anna did not see that. She saw the shackles, rusted and black. He may have died for Truth, said Papa. Or lies.

Once there was a cathedral at Sarum, Anna knew, but the monks weren't happy because the soldiers from the castle terrorised them. Also, it was draughty in the windy middle of Salisbury Plain and they liked their creature comforts, said Papa, being idol-worshipping Roman Catholics. So the cathedral moved to the banks of the Avon, where it stands now. Anna likes to think of a flying cathedral.

Anna's own finds are an amber bead and a leaf-shaped arrowhead. She levers up the turf of her mound and here's the earthenware pot she buried there. Opening it, Anna takes the amber bead and the leaf-shaped arrowhead, kisses them and places them in the pot with her other treasures, which she fingers one by one: the silver bell, the bone comb minus four teeth, the ox tooth, the green fragments of mosaic. You glean these bright fragments as you ramble, for the earth is planted with treasure like seeds: it works its way up to the chalky surface, the plough releases it or a badger's sett uncovers it. She pats the turf back into place over her hoard.

Everything settles down. Anna, cross-legged, observes the entanglement of life on her beautiful tump, the best in the world: insects flitting, plants quivering, ants clambering over grass blades. It's not still under the earth. Mama's in the earth, over the road in the churchyard, beneath another mound. There's life down there in the dead realm, a tumult of activity. Earthworms, beetles and moles enrich the soil, treasures light the blackness. And it's not still above the earth either. When you think all's quiet, there's violence. The blackbird died, Anna's blackbird with the yellow beak – the cat caught him, Anna's cat with the mint-green eyes. Maggots feasted on his gaping wound. Oh put that down, shrieked Beatrice; look what she's got hold of now – she's covered in filth; don't come near me; her brain is skewed; she's left-handed.

Chapter 1

1860

Body to body in the one bed: this is how they've always slept, lying like spoons, back to front. Or face to face, mouths lax, sleep-drool slipping from the corners; opening eyes upon the other's opened eyes.

‘The two of them … like twins, so devoted to one another,' the Pentecost family agreed.

The motherless sisters would strive silently, wielding different weapons. Beatrice, who remembered a time before Anna, would start it. From the first she'd cherished the dream of sending the usurper back where she came from, especially once she heard it whispered that the baby had killed Mrs Pentecost. She banged Mama's murderer's forehead against a window clasp, accidentally on purpose, and the telltale sign remains to this day, a curved scar between Anna's eyebrows. Beatrice, wincing, smooths it with her fingertips. Other attacks have left further marks. Early in her life Anna mastered a knack of turning blue and toppling backwards, eyes wide but the pupils sliding upwards, mouth squared in a silent scream, not breathing.

‘Speak to me, Annie!' Beatrice fell for it every time.

The innocent lamb was hushed and shushed, hauled high in the arms of love. The arms of their father the Baptist pastor were also in some sense the arms of Almighty God.

‘I'm sure it was an accident,' everyone agreed. ‘Dear Beatrice never tells lies. Do you, darling? Honest to a fault.'

And yet the closest tie Beatrice knows is to her younger sister. It's a bond of which she's all but unconscious when they're together but, sundered for more than a day, the root of their affection twinges; kinship all but biblical quickens. Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan. Don't leave me, Anna, never do, let us live and die together.

When Papa married for the second time, a half-brother Jocelyn killed a new mother; he was confided to the care of a wetnurse. As he grew, Joss attached himself to Nelly the maidservant. He'd trail her round like a puppy, a bunch of her woollen skirt in his fist. He'd be found kneeling at the sooty grate, his cherub face nearly as black as hers. Beatrice and Anna, recoiling from the soiled boy, had one another and saw no need to attach themselves to a dirty servant and a dirty servant's hanger-on, though Anna in course of time has grown close to the good-natured, unambitious Joss. Anna asks less of people.

Warily, the family recovered and Papa eventually married again.

The fire subsides in the grate; the last coals jostle; ashes flake down. Anna's pain shakes the walls of Sarum House at night and brings Beatrice's reprobate soul to heel.

She climbs into bed with Anna in the early hours: it's as homely and familiar as when they were youngsters dreaming one another's dreams, embroidering the dreams with Anna's stories in the morning. Anna wrote them down in tiny books fashioned from wallpaper scraps and flour bags. She sketched the characters they imagined, matchstick people running amok up and down the margins. But Anna did not write down the tales
correctly
: the matchstick folk would keep rebelling against their stories. They were never set to rights in a wholesome way at the end of their adventures, for the writer was nearly as unruly and anarchic as they were. They changed gender and acted inconsistently. In their lawless realm the wicked went unpunished, the good unrewarded. Beatrice was bitterly critical. She preferred order. Anna said it was not her fault. The daredevil people did what they liked and she couldn't control them.

Anna also kept a secret collection of papers sewn together and labelled in her minute writing ‘Tump Book'. What's a tump? Beatrice asked. It's a little world, Anna said, smirking. My little world. Where is it then? Somewhere else, was all Anna would say. Beatrice pried into the mirror-written tump book a few times, deciphering it in the looking-glass. Very silly stuff and rather nasty: insects eating each other; flowers throttling other flowers. None of the creatures or plants did or said anything quaint.

In the twinkling of an eye the feuding, loving lasses have become twenty-eight and twenty-six. Both parents are in the earth, the mother long ago, Papa only last year. I feel as if God were dead, Anna confided, her face ashen; I can't feel Him there any more. At all. Papa seemed immortal. We all came and went but he was a rock. There's no sense in any of it. Although his God was so harsh, Papa was mild and tender.

Beatrice endlessly corrects Anna: there is sense, of course there is, but we can't yet discern it.
Jocelyn does his best but cannot do for the young women what Papa did: stretch eagle wings over them and hold off Heaven and Hell. He was a roof against rain and against whatever else up there waits to fall on them, God Almighty's inscrutable justice louring down. Beatrice, the heir, must take his place; hold out both arms, act father and mother. And now Anna threatens to die.

Inside the parental bed, Beatrice slips into Papa's dip, warms her cold hands between her legs before nestling at her sister's back, folding her petals round Anna's ribby thinness.

‘Where does it hurt? Show me, darling.'

There are paroxysms of pain in Anna's belly; Beatrice's warm, calm fingers seek out the root of its billowing madness and soothe and bless it away. Perhaps in the past she has been tempted to welcome her sister's pain: it brought Anna to heel. Not now. Give me back my sister, on any terms. Slant rain drives against the pane. They snuggle close. As a child Anna would lisp, ‘I hate doctorth, don't you, Beatrith?'
Dr Quarles is an ass, up to now they've agreed on that, but he may have to be called in.

*

Eternal Wiltshire rain souses smocked labourers as they lead carthorses through the lane that bounds Beatrice Pentecost's two acres. They tip their hats, most of them. Some of the older men glare, the sullen remnant of the Swing riots thirty years back when rebels fired ricks, destroyed machines and their leaders went to the gallows or the colonies. The remnant bent to their lot, living in thatched cottages built of cob, rubbly chalk mixed with chaff, horsehair and water. When derelict, the cob houses vanish into the fields nearly as rapidly as they were built. The labourers and their multitudinous offspring have nothing to complain of, living to ripe ages on a diet of bread, bacon and skim milk, with apples and potatoes, and eggs perhaps on Sunday.

Chauntsey, with a population of two thousand, boasts seven Christian churches, as many as in Asia Minor at the turn of the century. Opposite the Baptist chapel stands the ancient parish church of St Osmund's, whose disdainful spire echoes the needle of Salisbury Cathedral on the skyline. There are Methodist and Congregationalist chapels – and the meeting house of the Plymouth Brethren. Though few in number, the Brethren make their presence felt: the elect pass by in black, as if in mourning for the crinolined persons mincing along the pavements. A mile out stands a Supralapsarian Chapel which teaches … whatever does it teach? Beatrice is unsure. There are traces of atheism too in Chauntsey and a handful of freethinking or frankly atheistical tradesmen cluster around an infidel analytical chemist and an unfrocked minister who has taken what Papa called ‘German Scissors' to the Scriptures.