Awakening (36 page)

It all hinges on the authenticity of the medium. Antigone's no trickster. She is, to be frank, not intelligent enough.

‘
Did anyone come through?' Antigone asked, emerging from the trance.

Yes, Anna thought. The whistler came through. There you were, hands in your lap, eyes closed, whistling like an urchin. Without the least inhibition. Wherever could a woman as observant of proprieties as Mrs Kyffin have learned this unladylike art? It does take a lot of learning, Anna knows, for as children she and Joss would whistle to the birds imitations of their various songs. Joss could deceive the chaffinches with his flutings. Anna's songs were more miscellaneous – owl hoots, dove coos, thrush calls, a little of everything.

So what if it all comes somehow or other through or from me? Anna wonders.

Beatrice is overtaken walking back towards Chauntsey. Drawing level, they persuade her to enter the carriage, where she sits tight-lipped, veil lowered. On arrival she makes straight for her room. Later, Anna sees her slip over to the chapel where she remains for an hour and a half.

Sitting at her desk with a candle, Anna thinks it through. Perhaps, just as we all dream, our minds can somehow re-enact what they remember. Doubtless Mrs Kyffin well remembers Lore, having found the third Mrs Pentecost distasteful. Not that Antigone ever voiced her disapproval. She didn't have to.

So maybe all this was Antigone's unconscious performance. The other possibility, Anna thinks disquietly, is that it was somehow staged by me? And I threw Lore's voice like a ventriloquist?

Because I've never let Lore die. Not for a moment.

I've clung to her skirts and willed her back. Anna fingers the locket with Lore's miniature and a curl of her hair. She slips it off. The locket sits in the palm of her hand, warmed by her skin. Her thumbnail unclasps it. The hair has changed colour. Lore in life was fair, almost flaxen. The dingy hair is now a shabby red-brown. Anna shakes it into her palm, holding it to her eyes. As dead as horsehair, she thinks. No more than a relic, like the splinters of bone or skull venerated by the Papists. It's cheap as the trove of pilgrim artefacts dredged from the Avon – whistles and bells and a badge with a priest holding the devil in a boot.

Gazing at the tiny silhouette of Lore to try to tease out a living face, Anna sees with regret how out of date the sitter looks, with her topknot, her leg-o'-mutton sleeves – archaic even then. You do not see her face at all.

*

Beatrice is bent on drumming Lore Ritter out of Sarum House and Anna's heart for good and all.

‘This was not of God, Anna,' she repeats, her face stony. ‘The spirit was a demon sent from Hell. We should neither of us have gone. I have prayed and it has eased me. No blame attaches to Antigone but she's making a mistake and I shall tell her so. Whatever is she thinking of, opening herself to demonic possession? And yet it has done me good. I went to receive a message from Luke. And … yes … in a way I did. My son is gone, Anna. That's how it is. No, don't say anything. He will not come back. He has nothing to say to me. He has no tongue to say it. No lips, no hands, no heart, nothing. And I can weep and I can rave and I can pray but Luke is dead and I must leave him in the earth. Anna, you won't go again, will you?'

‘I think – if it is quackery and delusion – which it may be – but not on Mrs Kyffin's part – she's as innocent as a child –'

Beatrice gives her a straight look. ‘It
may
be?'

‘Beattie, I did really think it was Lore. At first.'

‘But, don't you see, the likeness proves that this was an unclean spirit. Horrible. Now do not allow yourself to be sucked in, Annie, don't. I've learned my lesson now. Let's be calm and try to forget it.'

Beatrice sees Anna shaking her head at talk of demons. But surely she's thought the same thing? The evil spirit somehow or other gained access to Anna's memories. The spirits detect hysteria and an unmade bed. An unmade bed? Beatrice has glanced into the Anwyls' bedroom several times to glimpse rumpled covers spilling off the bedstead. Is it possible that the living, when they allow themselves to be preyed upon by excessive grief and heretical questionings and sexual passion, even within marriage, can give space to spirits who then generate spectres? A kind of mating between the two parties, garbled and skewed. One's sacred inner world profaned and derided.

‘Are you going to speak about it to Will?' she asks Anna.

‘Oh yes. I tell him everything.'

*

In the night, Anna shivers under a mound of bedclothes, less with cold than with irrational fear. She hears Joss coming up to bed and velvet footsteps seem to tread in his wake. She's convinced there's someone with him. She catches the hint of a giggle, a rustling. Opening her door an inch, she peers into the corridor. Reassuringly, there's nothing but a powerful waft of tobacco and Joss's bedroom door just closing. Her brother is too solid and corporeal to attract spirits – whereas her own mind seems permeable; anyone may reach in who likes, ransacking the contents.

After a while Anna decides to knock on Joss's door and see whether he's awake. In his jolly, grumbling way he'll make space for her and plump a pillow so that they can sit and chat, as they used to do. Barefoot, Anna approaches his door and listens. A streak of candlelight seeps between door and jamb. She hears small shuffling sounds, a creak of floorboards.

He's awake. And again Anna has the peculiar sensation that he's not alone. Don't be silly. She taps lightly with her knuckles. Silence.

‘Joss, it's Anna. May I come in?'

There's the sound of someone slowly lumbering out of bed. Her brother appears in his nightshirt, peering round the door, yawning.

‘Oh, I'm so sorry, did I wake you?'

‘What is it, Annie? Are you not well?'

‘No, I just wanted to chat. Sorry to wake you. I thought I heard … something in here.'

He grins and holds the door wide. Looking past him, she sees Mr Elias's mangy old dog on the rumpled mass of bedclothes. She kisses her brother goodnight and apologises. What could she have told Joss anyhow that wouldn't have brought an amused smile to his lips? That's because the easy-going fellow has some sense. More sense than herself and Beatrice put together.

When Will joins Anna in bed, she clings to him, burrowing her head down into the space below his shoulder.

‘What is it,
cariad
?'

He listens carefully to the account of the séance and tries to give a verdict. But Will's mind is now fixed on the Awakening and he judges everything in relation to it. ‘Dearest, I don't disbelieve it. The Spirit cannot be limited. We've seen Revival in Wales – speaking with tongues, healing – this may, just
may
be the Spirit coming amongst us. But if it has upset you? Let me look at you. Light the candle. I want to see your face.'

In the candlelight he holds Anna's face between his hands, stroking it with his thumbs, reading the expression. ‘I think it has distressed you,' he concludes. ‘Rather badly. That may be the sign we need. Did the voice have a gospel ring?'

She can hardly say it did. As they lie close and warm in one another's arms, does the jealous spirit of Lore look down through the darkness?

No, she doesn't, Anna thinks. It's not Lore. She's at peace among the lemon trees. It's me. I'm throwing out illusions like a diorama.

Everything's in convulsion. Papa's Jesus is slowly perishing, his life's being drained. It's nearly run out. And in a hectic panic we start rushing to and fro with this extreme remedy and that. Spirit Guides, Awakenings. We deliver galvanic shocks to what remains of him and when we see the spasms and paroxysms we insist he's still alive and with us. Look! He moved! Mirrie saw all that – and has, sadly and reluctantly, let go and walked away, taking what she can salvage with her. Which may be the wiser way.

Chapter 20

It's a matter of what you settle for, Beatrice thinks to herself as she awakens. In earlier life there was always the longing for something beyond this mundane round, dreamy and gleaming. So I've been made to chew a bitter cud. On my knees, I'm inching forward like a beast of the field: the fate of Nebuchadnezzar. And I should thank God that I've lived to discover my place in this world and its rigid obligations. She remembers that the pig-sticker is coming this morning for Lucy. The creature, knowing nothing of what is intended, has a life less harrowing than ours. Beatrice opens the curtains on the charmless earth. It's grey out there, a little soiled: a light has been extinguished. The pulse beats low. But this is the lacklustre universe to which she must accommodate herself.

Who sweeps a room as for thy sake

Makes that and the action fine.

The hymn enters her head with the force of a command. That's what I must do, then. Nobody in the house is stirring. Beatrice lets herself out into the damp air. She takes a broom and begins to sweep, attempting to do this for her Maker's sake; to make, as the poet said, drudgery divine.

I am
not
a servant, she once told a visitor who mistook her for a skivvy. How dare he? I am Miss Pentecost.

No. For I am nobody in particular. I never was. The only comfort will be to acknowledge my low status on the scale of things. Amy is better than I am. I must be punished. The sweepings of Beatrice's broom disclose dust, ash, weeds and crumbling leaves, a feather, snail shells, seeds, one of the Elias children's lost jacks, which she slips into her pocket, to return to him. Sycamore seeds are falling all around, spinning on their wings. She picks one up and holds it to the light, looking through the veined transparency of its brown wing. Wind has floated the pea-sized seed a good fifty yards from the parent tree. She fingers the feather: grey, a gull's. The snail shell cracks between her fingers, its creature devoured. All these remains have been dropped here for me to clear, Beatrice thinks. Leavings and waste. Voidings. And this patch of paving is the boundary of my ministry. Here God has set me with this broom.

There are no tears to shed, only this tedious round of disciplined obedience.

God may grant you another child. The child may live. Once you have suffered this penance. It may take years. Not that you deserve such grace: no, but He does not torment his children beyond what they can bear. So the Bible promises. But that means I shall have another child to lose. How many will He take from me? Mrs Gartery in West Grimstead lost all but three of fifteen. And two of those three sailed to Tasmania.

In the barn a crossbar looks surprisingly like a gibbet. As she comes and goes during the day, between the chickens and geese and the kitchen, Beatrice spies it from the corner of her eye. The pig-sticker with his bulbous features arrives and does his work. Some of the blood that escaped the pail wastes itself in the soil, enriching it. The pig-sticker, aided by Amy, is dismembering Lucy.

Perhaps God will take Beatrice in her sleep. It will be an easy and acceptable journey. How grateful she'll be to see her son again on the other side and, gathering him to her breast, gather herself in too from this great scattering. Nevertheless (she warns herself) not my will but Thine be done. For what Beatrice has understood is that no prayer of ours can make a jot of difference to what Almighty God ordains. She cannot argue with Him as she can with her sister or even with Papa when he was alive. There's no gaining the upper hand. Occasionally she could plead with Papa sensibly enough to change his mind over a trifle and Anna could wheedle him out of this or that resolve. But no proposition or offered bargain moves the Maker to acquiescence. How could it? Everything has been decided; the book was written before time began. Everything was foreknown. All one can do is to pray for a submissive heart.

How can Christian, so highly educated, have come to dissent from the doctrine of Calvin? Even Mr Spurgeon has spoken on this subject in a lax way Papa could not have countenanced. It's a conundrum very hard to address: Christian preaches full and free salvation for all; nothing determined in advance. Impossible to argue him out of this – she has not the intellect, and besides it is not her place. Her husband would doubtless be quick to offer chapter and verse in Greek and Hebrew for his view. Nevertheless he would be wrong. It is a slippery slope. But what a curious paradox it is that Papa, so indulgent, preached an implacable God, whereas the authoritarian Christian's God is all-loving, all-forgiving.

‘Are you well, dearest?' Anna seems to ask this question from a distance. Her voice has had to travel furlongs to enter Beatrice's ears.

‘Yes, I'm quite well.'

‘You don't look it. Does she, Will?'

‘I'm sure you'll say if there's anything troubling you that we can help with – won't you, Beatrice?'

‘There's nothing. Nothing new. I'm giving Amy the afternoon off – and doing the baking myself.'

‘Why, dear?' Anna tries to take her sister's hand but Beatrice shrinks from her touch. ‘May I help you? We can do it together, as we used to do with our second Mama – do you remember? Mmm, the scent. And licking cake dough off our fingers. A hoard of currants in our pockets. She knew, of course.'