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Pearl: A Novel - Softcover

Hughes, Siân

 
9780593688588: Pearl: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593688589 ISBN 13: 9780593688588
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

LONG-LISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • Heartbreaking and redeeming, Pearl is the story of a young woman in a small English village who is struggling with the disappearance of her mother, what feels like a lifetime ago.

"A masterful novel, shot through with legend and song. It can be read on many levels: as a mystery, as a story of grief and healing, as a response to a poem. But most of all, it can be read as a story of love." —The Boston Globe • "A gorgeous, swirling, haunted and haunting potion of a book.... How utterly moving, to be under its beautiful, artful spell." —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers and This Other Eden

Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing.

Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood.

As time passes, Marianne finds it difficult to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Yet, in one of her mother’s dusty old books, she discovers a medieval poem called Pearl, and, trusting in the promise of its consolation, it seems as if her life begins to parallel the poem's course.

But questions remain. Marianne is ever more tormented by the unmarked gravestone in the abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, and as her childhood home begins to crumble, the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. Can Marianne ever come to understand her mother’s choices? And will her own future as a mother help her find her peace?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SIÂN HUGHES grew up in a small village in Cheshire, where the story of Pearl is set. Returning to live there after her mother’s death, she borrowed from the medieval poem Pearl to write a story set in an old house she cycled past every day as a child. Her first collection of poetry, The Missing (Salt, 2009), was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, short-listed for the Felix Dennis and Aldeburgh prizes, and won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry. Pearl is her first novel, and she lives in Malpas, UK.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1. The Wakes

Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me
Went down to the river to bathe.
Adam and Eve were drowned
Who do you think was saved?

At the end of every summer I take Susannah back to my home village for a sort of carnival called the Wakes. There’s a fancy dress parade and a few fairground rides. A whole ox is roasted on a spit in the playing field. When I was a child there was a thing called the Pram Race. The rules of the race were: a team of two men to push a pram to the next village and back, one running, one in the pram. They both had to drink a pint of beer at every pub along the way. Each two-man team dressed as mother and baby, one of them in a grotesque old nightie filled with balloon breasts, with smeared-on lipstick and hair in curlers, the other in a bib, bonnet and bath-towel nappy.

When they set off, the giant baby would be in the pram pushed by the man in curlers and lipstick, but to stand any chance of winning they needed to take it in turns, so by the first corner they would swap over, the baby leaping out of the pram, the mother leaping in, balloons popping, nappies unravelling, and the bearded baby would take his turn pushing the bearded mother.

There’s no pram race now. The roads are too dangerous, so the police stopped it.

The Wakes has been going on here for a long time. It started off as rush-bearing, and that still happens. Back when the churches had floors made of rushes, this was the time of year when they took the old floors out and brought in fresh ones. What we do now is, we dress our family graves in rushes. Halfway down Duckington Lane we pull into a gateway behind the old clay-pigeon shoot, to find some rushes in one of the pits.

We have to change into wellies. I pick up the secateurs from the boot and let the dog out of his travel crate. He straightaway picks up the scent of something and runs in frantic circles just inside the gate. Susannah says thanks, but she’ll wait in the car. Cutting rushes isn’t fun for her now she’s thirteen. I open the back door and ask her again. She sighs, says she might as well, now we’re here, puts her phone down and changes into her boots.

Someone’s already found all the good ones along the edge. There are hardly any left with nice black tops. Susannah is so light she can step easily over the marshy ground and pick the last few from near the middle. Back in the car I give her the job of plaiting them together with the ribbons. Blue and purple this year. We’ve brought lavender and mint from the front garden at home to weave in among them. As she twists them together the smell rubs off onto her hands and into the car.

We only need a small bundle. The grave we’re dressing is very small. It’s not even a grave, strictly. It’s a marker stone, and it’s not in the place where they buried the ashes. Susannah’s made a really nice job of our rushes. Her grandmother would be proud. She’s inherited her strong, tiny hands and feet, the red lights in her hair, her sweetly scratchy singing voice.

We get to the church in time for the Wakes service. It’s a sort of communal funeral that marks the start of the festival. Everyone who was buried in the parish in that year has their name read out. It’s just a list of names. It’s beautiful, really, like a poem, an incantation. All those old names from the stones outside, the same families who have lived there forever: Hewitt, Huxley, Leche, Proudlove, another one of their own, late of this parish. Every year I go and listen to it, even though the names that belong to my family have never been read out on that list.

After the service we take our little bundle of rushes round to the back of the church where the graveyard is full of families scrubbing down stones and filling vases and setting out picnic blankets. The thing about the Wakes is, everyone turns up. Some travel a long way. I haven’t lived here since I was Susannah’s age, and I always come.

I set out our picnic blanket next to the marker stone, unpack the sandwiches and boiled eggs and a twist of salt and pepper. I’ve made my mother’s black-treacle flapjack. I always do. I’m scanning the faces of the people around us, trying to work out who’s who by reading the names on the stones next to them, looking into the faces of their children for resemblances from primary school.

I don’t believe in the resurrection of the flesh. Not really. But if the dead did peel back the turf and climb out, shaking the earth from their hair, blinking at the sunlight, the scene would not be very different from Wakes weekend in Tilston churchyard. Just a bit more crowded. At the end of every August we’re revenants on assorted blankets, sitting on our family graves, the resurrected flesh and bones of our ancestors, wearing their handed-down bad teeth and weak ankles, passing round the sandwiches and cake.

I wonder if the risen dead are supposed to come back the same age as when they died. Good luck for my mother, if they do. Less so for my arthritic great-uncle.

I think of Great-Uncle Matthew, whose marker stone is nearly obliterated in lichen now, next along from the one we’re dressing, going up for his afternoon nap in the nursing home, gnarled hand tight on the banister, one step at a time. He’d have trouble getting out of a grave with his poor swollen knees. He always paused partway up the stairs to say, “Caesar se recipit in hiberna” (“Caesar retired to his winter quarters”), which he claimed was all he remembered from five years of grammar school. I thought it meant “I am going to have a nap” until I looked it up in the college library.

None of the others wants to come. My father, my brother. They never do. When I say to them, “Everyone goes back for the Wakes,” my father gives me his long, sad look. He has been telling me since I was eight years old that my mother is never coming back. He doesn’t have to bother with the words now: I know what that look means. But if she did, where else would she try to find us? And how else would she know me except by my sitting on the marker stone, looking more or less as she did thirty years ago? How else would I know her?

If she turned up in the graveyard and needed proof of who I am, I’d sing her a song. I’d sing her “Green Gravel.” Sometimes I sing it for her, anyway, if I am hanging out washing, or driving alone at night. I think of it as my song, though I am old enough to know now that it is far older than I am, far older than the baby my mother sang it for all those years ago.

Green gravel, green gravel,
Your grass is so green,
The fairest young maiden
That ever was seen.

I’ll wash you in new milk
And wrap you in silk,
And write down your name
In a gold pen and ink.

As a child, I had no idea it was a grave she was singing about, a green grave. I thought it was about gravel, the stuff on the drive that washed down the lane when there was a rainstorm. And who is being buried? New milk must be for a newborn infant, the fairest, purest creature, untouched by so much as a minute of life. All the time I thought she was singing it to me, she was singing to that other child, the one with the marker stone the size of a shoebox, a single date on it, birth and death in one.

I find myself starting conversations with her in my head, even now. When I had Susannah, I looked over my shoulder for her, I looked up from my daughter’s new face and realised I was looking for my mother’s eyes to meet mine, to agree with me she was the fairest young maiden that ever was seen. I waited for...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593688589
ISBN 13 
9780593688588
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
225
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