The Poets' Wives (7 page)

It’s an impulse that I think he will deny when I ask him if we can go and look at the menagerie and I suppose my request is a foolishness that will offend him but I am desperate to find something that will distract him and I am frightened, because already I have seen the signs, that he will slip away from me into despondency. And I think even his anger is better than the state where nothing can prompt him into feeling and all is governed by a heavy lethargy. But I am surprised when he makes no objection. And when we pay our admission money I worry that as Christ did he will think of throwing over everything he considers wicked and an abomination of life and all that is holy. He is sullen as we view the strange creatures that have been brought from distant countries and the excited chatter of the other spectators is an irritant to him and when he sees a great hulk of a bear chained to a wall he compares it loudly to the toys we viewed and then to those unfortunates who once were held in this damp and dismal place. People are looking at him and so I try to calm him and tell him it was a mistake for us to come here but as we are about to go he breaks free from the gentle link of my arm and wanders to a cage under the high walls where ravens blacken the ramparts.

I stand at his shoulder as he stares at it but says nothing. The creature unlike anything I have ever seen is all sinewy strength and its brindled tawny body is coloured like the tail of the comet. It prowls from one side of the miserable cage to the other and then it turns and looks at us, its eyes burning with a yellow fire that speaks of some hidden fury, some intense hatred. Every one of its movements frightens me, a fear that is made worse by my sense that the cage that holds it looks makeshift, so when William takes a step closer to the bars I try to pull him back but he agitatedly motions me away and I release my grasp. And it’s not like any of the other creatures, whether the monkeys who sought to ingratiate themselves for whatever scraps they might be given or the other dismal animals each as abject and lifeless as the other. I look at the creature in front of us and know it has not subjected itself to its fate, see in its restless prowling a hunger for what it doesn’t have. I say something of what I’m thinking but William doesn’t reply and he stands perfectly still in seeming absorption of everything. He goes a little closer again despite my caution and the creature turns its head slowly towards him as if deigning to look at him for the first time. And I am frightened as he stares at its amber-coloured eyes where seems to smoulder something which I have no words to name.

Then the spell is broken as a group of young men approach the cage, their oath-filled voices blending with the croaks from the sooty ravens nesting above. They crowd in around the bars and jeer at the beast and in the throng William is pushed to the side as one of them tries to draw his friends’ laughter by going closer and speaking to it as if it were some house cat. And when they cheer him on he grows bolder until he finds a little stick and pokes it through the bars while making a shrill whistle. It’s then that the tiger springs and roars such a sound as I think once more of the comet’s thunder and the youth jumps back so fast and shocked that he falls on his friends with such force that they scatter like skittles before they retreat. Then there is only William standing as close as he was before and just the bars separate him from the creature that stares at him with fire-filled eyes for a few seconds before it turns away and walks to the shadows at the back of the cage where it rests on the floor with its head turned to the wall and will no longer deign to look at us.

As we walk away one of the youths who are still dusting themselves off but who have assumed a new attempt at bravery shouts out after us, calling William a Daniel.

‘It shouldn’t be in a cage,’ he says in a quiet voice that I have to strain to hear and when I tell him that I’m glad that confinement separates it from us he replies, ‘More than anything I’ve ever seen it shouldn’t be in a cage.’ And when I tell him that only the cage prevented it from devouring us he says, ‘It is the way it is and nothing more.’

When he stops walking and glances back for a moment I think he’s considering returning and doing whatever must be done to set the creature free and I’m frightened by the intensity of his expression when what I crave is gentleness and calm. I tell him that I feel faint and in so doing make him turn his attention to me and we stop at a tavern and he goes inside and brings us something to drink and we sit and watch the ceaseless life of the river.

After a while he asks me if I would like to see the sea and when I tell him that I have often dreamed of it he says that I can have the chance if it’s what I wish because he has important news to share with me.

Perhaps I was slumbering here by the fire and so didn’t notice his arrival. When I look up he’s smiling at me and his face is calmer and more at peace than I have ever seen. His clothes still wear the sheen of light and I want to go to him but am frightened that my arms will embrace only what dreams and memories exist inside my head. So instead I ask him as I always do, ‘How much longer, William?’ and he answers, ‘Soon, Kate, very soon,’ and his words make me content. Then we sit in silence for a short while and although nothing is said it is as if all the days of our life pass again between us.

So now he’s giving me again his important news that he’s been offered work and patronage by William Hayley who is a great admirer of his art. We are to leave London that has become as a desert for us and full of anger and discord and rent a small cottage in Hayley’s home village of Felpham in Sussex and be under his generous auspices. William shrugs off his despondency and enters excitedly into the necessary preparations and I am glad to be leaving the city and hope that in our new home there will be less to agitate and distract him from his work.

‘It seemed like a good idea,’ he says as the light from the window breaks then flows through him. ‘Do you remember the journey to get there?’

I tell him yes and recall just before we left he said his fingers emitted sparks of fire with expectation of his future labour. I look at those same hands and once again wonder at their whiteness, the absence of any trace of ink that no amount of scrubbing could ever fully remove. Everything of his past struggle now seems stilled and washed away so he sits as if bathed in some waters purer than human eye can see.

Seven changes of coach to be made before we got there and each time the laborious loading of the heavy boxes containing all that we possessed in this world, arriving just before midnight, but still able under the bright moonlight to see our cottage looking as good as any home could be and a seeming haven of tranquillity and hope. And as we stand in front of it we hear what we have never heard before but which we tell ourselves must be the sound of the sea and the very smell of the city is replaced by something briny and fresh. Early on the first morning he wanders outside to the song of birds and in a field beside the house hears a boy call to the ploughman working the field, ‘Father, the gate is open,’ and he rushes in to me to tell me that it is a sign and we are excited as children and go about getting everything ready with great strength of purpose.

Then when our day’s work is over we walk across the field that separates us from the sea and while you hurry in anticipation I am hesitant, nervous about what it is we shall find, and with every step the noise grows louder until it drowns everything else. And there it is stretching as far as the eye can see and we suddenly clasp each other’s hand as if in need of protection from both the vastness and its unceasing motion that rolls towards us driven by some unseen force. The wind blows strongly and the waves rise up as if in anger then break their fury before being replaced by those that come behind. Will starts to make his way on to the shingle and his face is held towards the sea but when he signals me to follow I hesitate at first, frightened that we might be snatched from the shore and borne away to its hidden depths. But he turns and holds out his hand and I take it and we stumble a little as our feet sink into the deep shingle and the wind whips at our clothing and streams my hair. Closer and closer we go until we are at the very edge of where the waves shuck and steal the shingle and then he releases my hand and opens his arms wide and he signals me to do the same and so we stand wind-blown, offering the vastness our embrace. Then he lifts the shingle in his hands and holds it as if it is the world’s most valuable jewels and he stares at them so I do the same but cannot see what he sees and when I ask him he tells me we hold the whole world. And everything in him is filled with an extremity of wonder and excitement and for a moment I think he is going to wade into its depths but I rest my arm on his shoulder and tell him I grow cold and we must go back to the cottage. And with reluctance he turns away and we retrace our steps over the shingle but all the time he returns his gaze.

That night he rises from our bed and dresses and I watch him from our bedroom window go outside and I know he has gone under the waxing moon to look again at the sea and as I wait for him I grow frightened that he will be sucked into its darkest depths and swept to eternity in an instant. And I lie in a strange bed in a strange house with the sea’s low moan breaking about it and suddenly feel a terrible loneliness and not just because I am alone, but because I know there are worlds inside his head that I have no path to and whose very nature and colours seem always beyond my grasp. And that night I see most clearly what I have always known which is that I possess part of him but only part and although I know that he both loves and needs me, his ‘shadow of delight’, I am never to have all that is my full desire. I am a wife and a helpmate but want to know what he knows, see what he sees, and for a second I think of following him except my fears prove stronger and so instead I go only to the window and hope and pray for his safe return. And in time he appears out of the cornfield and his face is moon-washed and his hair is blown jagged and stiff like the stubble of the field. Behind him is the sea and he strides towards the house like some creature broken free from its secret caverns and when he holds me in the bed and kisses me his body trembles and his skin tastes of salt.

After the third day he won’t be put off any longer and I know there is no point resisting so in the early light and accompanied by the sweet song of the larks we walk the short distance to the sea and I am thankful that it’s calmer now, cradled in the morning light with the waves less angry and wind-tossed than they were the first time I saw it. The light sparks the shingle so it glitters like a swathe of precious stones and it is sharp on my bare feet and then we take off our clothes and stand naked at the edge of the vastness. I am frightened again but William goes first and walks into the waves, his arms stretched out by his side, and when he calls me to follow I step into the ripples that froth and foam about my feet. He calls me to be brave, that it is the sweetest baptism that we can ever know, and encouraged I wade after him to where he stands with the water breaking round his waist and I gasp at the coldness but to which he seems indifferent. The shingle under my feet shifts and presses itself between my toes and I am frightened of losing my balance but he takes my hand and we stand side by side and face the waves that buoy us up briefly while the water breaks white against our bodies. And then suddenly he isn’t there but ducked under the waves and vanished from my sight for a moment before he reappears, the sea sluicing and dripping off him, and he is washed in the morning light so that everything about him is gleaming and newly made and he tells me to do the same, to baptise myself in the purest light. But I am frightened and so he takes my hand again and I dip myself under the surface and it gets in my eyes and mouth and so I emerge spluttering and coughing and he takes me in his embrace, bears me up and pushes the wet plash of my hair from my eyes.

We stumble back up the shingle and dry as best we can and dress, then sit facing the sea that seems as if it’s stirring itself into quicker motion and whose waves gather size and power. William sits silently in the morning light and then his lips begin to move wordlessly and he holds his face skywards as if to receive a blessing and he turns to me and asks me if I can see it and when I ask him what, he says, ‘Each grain of sand, every stone on the land, each rock and each hill, how the sea itself all take on a human form,’ and he stands and looks about him entranced by what he sees and I desperately look about me because I too want to share this vision. ‘The whole earth is become as one man made up from shining particles of light,’ he says as if it forms before his eyes and might be touched by the very stretch of his hand. He tells me he ‘stands in the streams of Heaven’s bright beams’ and his rapture is engraved on his face. I look about me again and try to see this world but all that is visible to me is the wet gleam of the shingle and the sea that stretches to the sky. I close my eyes but nothing comes to my senses except the rising wind that blows against my face and the shingle that shifts no matter how still I try to stand. In sadness I turn away and start the slow climb to the house, pausing once and looking back to see him standing as if transfixed before what looks to me only like the great vastness of ocean.

In Felpham here beside ‘the sea of time and space’ he has many visions. He sees his dead father and brother and once a thousand angels upon the wind, then when walking along the sea’s edge the faces of ancient poets and prophets. The wind rustling through the cornfield seems to him the noise of souls. It is as if freed from the chains of London with all its fog of dirt and chartered streets he is able to see the gates of Heaven. And for the first few years he works steadily and is contented but eventually things begin to change for the worst. The cottage that we rent and which looks so homely soon reveals itself to us as damp and cold – it is there that my pains start and there are times also when we both get laid low with fevers. And gradually Will falls out with Hayley who binds him to the drudgery of his commissions and he comes to believe that he should be exercising his talents in pursuit of his own work. It is then that his thoughts turn to London once more.