Ted Hughes — Fidelity

It was somewhere to live. I was Just hanging around, courting you. Afloat on the morning tide and tipsy feelings Of my twenty-fifth year. Gutted, restyled A la mode, the Alexandria House Became a soup-kitchen. Those were the days Before the avant-garde of coffee bars. The canteen clatter of the British Restaurant, One of the war’s utility leftovers, Was still the place to repair the nights with breakfasts. But Alexandria House was the place to be seen in. The girls that helped to run it lived above it With a retinue of loose-lifers, day-sleepers Exhausted with night-owling. Somehow I got a mattress up there, in a top room, Overlooking Petty Cury. A bare Mattress, on bare boards, in a bare room. All I had, my notebook and that mattress. Under the opening, bud-sticky chesnuts, On into June, my job chucked, I laboured Only at you, squandering all I’d saved. Free of University I dangled In its liberties. Every night I slept on that mattress, under one blanket, With a lovely girl, escaped freshly From her husband to the frontier exposure Of work in the soup-kitchen. What Knighthood possessed me there? I think of it As a kind of time that cannot pass, That I never used, so still possess. She and I slept in each other’s arms, Naked and as easy as lovers, a month of nights, Yet never once made love. A holy law Had invented itself, somehow, for me. But she too served it, like a priestess, Tender, kind and stark naked beside me. She traced out the fresh rips you had inscribed Across my back, seeming to join me In my obsession, in my concentration, To keep my preoccupation intact. She never once invited, never tempted. And I never stirred a finger beyond Sisterly comforting. I was like her sister. It never seemed unnatural. I was focused, So locked onto you, so brilliantly, Everything that was not you was blind-spot. I still puzzle over it — doubtful, now, Whether to envy myself, or pity. Her friend, Who had a bigger room, was wilder. We moved in with her. That lofty room Became a dormitory and HQ Alternative to St Botolph’s. Plump and pretty, With a shameless gap-tooth laugh, her friend Did all she could to get me inside her. And you will never know what a battle I fought to keep the meaning of my words Solid with the world we were making. I was afraid, if I lost that fight, Something might abandon us. Lifting Each of those naked girls, as they smiled at me In their early twenties, I laid them Under the threshold of our unlikely future As those who wanted protection for a new home Used to bury, under the new threshold, A sinless child.