Awakening Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Afterword

  Copyright

  AWAKENING

  Stevie Davies

  For dear Rosalie

  ἀστέρων πάντων ὀ κάλλιστος

  Friends firm. Enemies alarmed. Devil angry. Sinners saved. Christ exalted. Self not well.

  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 w
ere 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.

  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 lookout 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, Pa
pa 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.