Awakening (2 page)

Despite the busy activity of prayer meetings, Dorcas meetings and tea meetings, Beatrice senses that something has leaked away. Her childhood Jesus, who walked the potholed flint and chalk roads of Chauntsey barefoot, who jounced the children on his knee outside the school and carried his cross between the thatched houses of Butterfurlong Street, has withdrawn. Jesus was so real to the child that the hem of his garment had only just whisked away round the next corner. He might be that shepherd over there in Farmer Musselwhite's pastures, carrying a black lamb. The forge of Edwin Fribance, the blacksmith, was the site of his fiery glory. Now cabbage fields and pastures rolling to the grey horizon are spiritless matter, empty of his footprints.

Beatrice prays, down on her knees beside the bed where Anna lies in an early morning trance of light sleep under a dark hump of blankets, her hair caught up in a net. Long may my darling repose, enjoying dreams of health, Beatrice prays; bless her and pour out sunlight upon her. And may Sukey behave herself today and I be less tyrannical and vile-tempered when she irks me.

Only Joss can get Sukey to take her duties seriously, not that the large, flabby fellow ever issues orders or reproaches. His genial presence is enough to encourage Sukey to use elbow-grease on the brass; at a wink from him she'll kneel to the scrubbing of the front steps, backside in the air, sleeves rolled up. What is Joss's secret? Whatever it is, Beatrice doesn't share his knack. Many a time she has come upon Sukey sprawled with her feet up, toasting herself at the kitchen range. Oh well, says Joss. We all need a rest. Her brother has always seemed happier in the stable or kitchen than amongst clerical guests. Beatrice has put it to Joss that this indulgence cannot be good for Sukey. It teaches her to live beyond her sphere. Spiritual equal she may be: who could dare to deny it? But social equal, of course not. A modern generation of girls turns up its nose at the distinctions God has set between higher and lower orders. And Sukey who, at her hiring, expressed a vague wish for salvation, remains profane.

I'll pray for her, Beatrice thinks. And be silent about her shortcomings. The liberties Sukey takes with Joss or that Joss takes with her: which?

And yet one cannot imagine harm in Joss. The word
eunuch
comes to mind and Beatrice recoils from it, ashamed. Is he, however, quite manly? There's something flaccid in him. Effeminate even. The way he prinks his moustaches. Beside Christian Ritter Joss looks plain feeble. But who wouldn't?

Up and bustling, Beatrice chivvies Sukey, but as usual does the lion's share of heavy work herself. She tries to be patient with the lumbering girl, who's moaning that she didn't get a good night's sleep at all; the blooming owl woke her up and besides her throat hurts. It really does. She can't swallow. Beatrice mixes her a warm drink of honey and camomile and hopes she'll feel better soon.

‘And now shall we get on, Sukey?'

The Pentecosts organise hospitality on such a heroic scale that Sarum House might be a lodging house or mission station. Folk tramp in, folk traipse out, folk guzzle at their table, folk snore in the nine spare beds, turn and turn about, so that often there's no possibility of changing the sheets. Like it or lump it, Beatrice murmurs inwardly to ministers who arrive without warning, expecting hospitality. This is the house we were born in and will die in; Beatrice's inheritance.
My
house,
our
home,
your
hotel.

Pastor Elias and his man-of-all-work carry Anna downstairs: ‘Where shall we put her?'

She's not a sack of potatoes, for goodness' sake! Settled on the sofa at the look-out window, Anna draws shallow breaths. In her gaze, rain and wind drive a blizzard of blossom over the garden. The fire mopes and spits as rain finds its way down the chimney. She's clutching a pile of papers tied with ribbon.

‘Well, I'll be off then, ladies! Ta ta!'

‘Already?'

Off prances the pastor over the road to tinkle on his piano before evening service. Dandruff speckles his dusty old jacket: Beatrice itches to spank it with a brush. If his wife were any kind of housewife, she'd spruce him up by turning the jacket for him outside in. The Welsh have no pride. The Eliases' house is a pigsty. The small Eliases are never still and rarely disciplined. Tom's and Jack's mop-heads bob at the window as they caper to their father's polkas. Little tykes. Whatever is wrong with the world has infiltrated God-fearing households. The older Elias children backchat not only the mother but the paterfamilias, whose word should be law. Doors slam; they snarl, feral. Old values are everywhere under siege. Chauntsey's poor no longer feign gratitude for their comparative good health but murmur and perhaps curse behind the backs of their betters. They snatch the charity from one's hands as if it were a right.

The knot that secures one's own contradictions is being unloosed: Beatrice, feeling this within herself, tries to grip the threads tight.

The back of Anna's head is infinitely touching, hair caught in a topknot, curls straying at the nape. Her dark, thick and usually glossy hair is greasy, really needs washing – and Beatrice will do that for her later. Anna will feel better then, her scalp will relax. Anna's neck is so thin. Like a swan's, Papa would say fondly: just look at her, our baby Annie will be the beauty of the family. Jealousy seared through Beatrice's veins. But now poor Anna is wasted. Perhaps because of my ill-wishing? The wonder is that such a stem can support the head at all. She wants Anna's luscious, headstrong beauty back.

Even if it does outshine her own mere handsomeness. For Beatrice will always enjoy the rank of elder sister, head of household. The suitors flock for her, not for Anna.

Hands on Anna's shoulders, Beatrice looks along Anna's eyeline. Between the chestnut and the end of the tumbledown stable and paddock, the Pentecosts' pet lambs adorably pass the Sabbath of their springtime. Do the creatures recognise they're orphans? Do they take their human benefactors for their mothers? Have they an inkling that we fatten them for the kill? For even pets must be translated into mutton. That's just how it is.

Sarum House and its grounds are what remain of generations of Pentecosts. Father and three mamas: their own, then Jocelyn's mother, sensible, devout Mary, and finally, surviving only long enough to present the family with a defective infant, the bride Father brought from his visit to Lübeck. Lore Ritter, two years Beatrice's junior, was a shock. – Who is this pockmarked foreigner coming in my door claiming to be my new Mama?

Anna adored her. Beatrice tried and failed to ignore the fact that Lore made their father silly in his uxoriousness and melted her sister's heart. However did she do that? Beatrice disliked the tender way Papa and Lore climbed the stairs hand in hand at the end of the day. She recoiled from the likelihood that Sarum House would be taken over by a mob of children. And surely Papa would favour the males: without intending to, he would: only natural. Joss has somehow never quite counted. But Lore could well be breeding for twenty years. Instead she had time only to coach her stepdaughters in German – and Anna in the rudiments of Greek – and to sew ten lacy dresses and caps. Then she too was blown away like dandelion seed. Father and his three wives lie together in the turf of the chapel garden.

The only way Beatrice and Anna will be evicted from Sarum House is feet-first. As long as they possess these intimate spaces, these two acres, the great old trees and pasture, the Pentecost sisters will be secure. Papa, who left two houses and the farm with its tenant to Joss, willed the home and half his capital to his elder daughter. Safe, I am safe, she reminds herself.

The scullery's thick with steam; the window runs. Beatrice, a sweating scullion, heaves the wringer handle and grey water gushes from the sheets. She transfers the load to the mangle, extracting a pinch of jaded pleasure from completing the chore. No genteel woman has muscles like Beatrice's or hands roughened by labour: yet to her these signs are worthy of respect. An active and practical person, she's unashamed to work alongside the household's one servant. If only the servant worked half as hard as the mistress. But Beatrice was stung when Joss's friend Arthur Munby, visiting for the first time, took her for the maid-of-all-work and seemed confused when she drew herself up to her full height and introduced herself as Miss Pentecost.

Mr Munby is a gentleman and an enigma. What can Joss have in common with him? Just as bafflingly, how come Mr Munby condescends to know Joss? For he's an Anglican and a university man – and not a saved person. His wife Hannah only intensified the conundrum. Statuesque in her black London silks, mightily gloved and hatted and entirely silent, she sat to attention while the charming and loquacious Mr Munby held forth on the condition of the female working classes. Even in their gloves, Mrs Munby's hands were like shovels, Beatrice thought, still smarting. And her complexion! As if she'd been left out in wind and rain for a year. Mr Munby expatiated, with relish, on collier-lasses soot-black from head to foot; London dustwomen in their filth; crossing-sweepers and the flither-lasses of Filey who scale the cliffs to haul up baskets of bait – sitting on ledges way above the sea, shouting and whistling to the ships. A powerful woman in trousers in Wigan, he said, is considered less barbarous than a crinolined fine lady. Joss hung on his every word.

The rain dies down. Beatrice steps out to peg up sheets and, glancing back, sees with a qualm an invalid behind the pane. The heavy sheets billow like canvas sails. In the interior gloom, the sick woman, not yet twenty-seven, is a patch of shadow against the cushions.
Anyone
else she could bear to lose. But spare Anna. Beatrice offers the Almighty without a second thought Elias (not his wife though), Mrs Peck and all the Salisbury Pecks and Hatchers. Toss in the small Eliases. Beatrice can't abide children. They bring noise and care; they kill mothers. She's seen it too often to be intensely eager for marriage.

Don't think these things, don't. But how do you stop yourself thinking the thing before it's thought? It's a test. Mortals cannot win. Calvinism is in the Pentecost blood. Jehovah decided everything aeons ago: when He created the world, He knew me in advance. He sees through me; His lidless eye penetrates to my heart and kidneys. You're open to the Almighty like a coroner's corpse on a slab, putrescent with sin. To Him we are like the jelly tadpoles wriggling round in the pond, transparent.

And Anna said the other night in a lull between pains, ‘Have you ever thought, Beatrice, that if Almighty God were human, He'd be a criminal, we'd have to send Him to the penal colonies or … hang Him as a mass murderer? Look at the mess He's made.'

There's something that comes over Anna that makes one think the word
hysterical.
A word Beatrice prefers to
heretical
. If truth were known, they're both backsliding daughters. But only Anna seems to reckon this a virtue rather than a sin.

‘Annie, we did execute him,' was all Beatrice said. She spoke in a tone of rueful triumph. ‘We crucified our Saviour. You know we did. For loving us.'

‘I didn't.'

‘You did. The Jews killed him on behalf of the human race.'

‘Not with my consent. I wasn't there. Anyway I meant God the Father, not the Son.'

‘They are the same, dear. Think before you speak.'

‘Well, that's what I do. Perhaps it's better not to think?'

‘Or not to read all those unsettling books and journals.'

‘Mirrie brings them. I like to discuss them with her.'

‘When is Mrs Sala going off to the Continent?'

Anna's friends, Mr and Mrs Sala, are rich and cultured Unitarians from the north of England: to them Jesus Christ is not God, just a good man. Beatrice shudders at this atheistical rationalism. Something in Mrs Sala distresses one: a big-boned lady with a contralto voice, the light of a terrible, questioning sincerity in her pale eyes and no limit to her powers of speculation. She exerts an all but mesmeric influence over Anna. Indeed, it's not impossible that Mrs Sala practises the art of mesmerism. Her face plunges forward at you, staring with sympathetic intensity. Apparently there exists a phrenological cast of this formidable skull: Mrs Sala is said to have had her hair shaved off in order that its bumps could be measured.

Are all these bluestocking females such simpletons? Can they really imagine that the key to the human soul resides in the bumps of a skull?

First Lore, with her head-in-the-sky philosophical notions, and now Mrs Sala with her heresies have holed Anna like a colander full of doubts.

Hush now, hush: Father would have counselled that doubt is natural, a part of faith. And I was a better person, kinder, less caustic, Beatrice thinks, before I had to step into Papa's shoes. Tapering, buttoned, many-times-mended, Father's boots intimately remember him. His scent is trapped there, so their neighbour's labrador bitch told them, nose snuffling into leather innards. Beatrice is still giving away his belongings to the Baptist poor. Good folk with only one pair of boots apiece. Beatrice will not give to every pauper or pariah or Methodist or Irishman down on his luck. How would that further God's work? Following in Papa's footsteps, she dispenses charity, exhortations and pious tracts, reading aloud Mr Spurgeon's sermons to the sick, with a burning face because this is not easy for a woman to do. A husband would relieve her of such duties.