The Quickening Maze (11 page)

John attempted to say no, but a moment’s hesitation gave him away.

‘Ah, you are. We’ve a little meat. I’ll put the pan on. We’ll be bringing more later, sweet little hotchiwitchis. Time of year for them. But to keep your soul in your body till then.’

Ezekiel reached for a greasy black frying pan and knocked it down on the fire until it lay flat on the burning wood. John sat down on a log beside another man, smiling generally to show his friendliness. He held his white hands out towards the snapping flames. Ezekiel rose to his feet. Keeping his blanket around him, he ambled off to a varda and returned with a piece of venison now putrid and stinking. He pulled a knife from his pocket and shaved fine strips of the discoloured meat and tossed them into the pan where they hissed and curled.When they were cooked black, John was invited to pluck them out with his fingers and eat. They tasted only of the charring, were quite palatable and hot. John ate them and sucked his fingers.

‘Cold enough to wither you,’ Ezekiel said.

John wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘We should fight,’ he said, still bellicose from his encounter with Stockdale earlier. ‘Spar a bit,’ he went on. ‘Are there no prize-fighting men among you?’ He stood up and feinted a few blows with half-closed fists. ‘Come on, one of you. Let’s see a bit of pluck.’

The men laughed.‘One of our crew is in that sport,’ Ezekiel said. ‘Travels the fairs. Makes money with his iron head.’

‘No sense to knock out of it,’ added one of the others.

‘Jeremiah,’ another man explained. ‘Fights as the Gypsy Baron.’

‘I’ll see how quick your hands are, John Clare,’ said Ezekiel standing, hunching his shoulder up under his ears and raising two stiff fists far in front of his body.

‘Good lad,’ John said, curving right hooks through the mist of his breath.

 

‘That smells powerful,’ Hannah said, smiling through thin, smarted tears. ‘Do you smoke a particular type of tobacco?’

‘Important thing is,’Tennyson replied, lifting his pipe from his lower lip, ‘to dry it out for a while beforehand. Then you get a good full flavour.’

‘I see.’

With the tea things cleared away,Tennyson smoking, and the dim early evening light falling heavily into that untidy room, the conversation was now hard to keep alive. Hannah felt isolated on her chair. He produced smoke in incredible volume and it was the strongest Hannah had ever smelled. It scraped her throat while he sat calmly at its source, far away, silent, his gaze unfocused. She had lost him to the marine element of his private thought. And the silence was thickening, becoming harder and harder to break. In her imagining beforehand the conversation was supposed to have become music by this point, a duet, but their voices now were separate and sparse. She thought of a question that might startle him into a renewed appreciation of her. He would know at least how advanced, how daring she was.

‘May I ask you, what is your opinion of Lord Byron’s poetry?’

He did indeed raise both eyebrows at that, blowing long cones of smoke from his nostrils. He answered quite wonderfully with a revelation.

‘A very great deal. His poetry, well . . .’ Here he perhaps decided against a critical disquisition. She thought he might not think her up to it, but what he said instead pleased her just as well. ‘I remember when he died. I was a lad. I walked out into the woods full of distress at the news. It was the thought of all he hadn’t yet written, all bright inside him, being lost for ever, lowered into darkness for eternity. I was most gloomy and despondent. I scratched his name onto a rock, a sandstone rock. It must still be there, I should think.’

 

Ezekiel returned with two panting terriers and a sack over his shoulder. The dogs leaned against his ankles as he dumped the contents onto the ground. Three hedgehogs bounced heavily. Ezekiel picked one up with his coat sleeve pulled down over his hand.

‘Told you,’ he said.‘Best time of year for them. Good thick fat on him, get through the winter. Here, let them settle a moment.’

He put it down with the other two and waited, whispering, ‘Come on, old boys, don’t be feared’ to them while the prickly balls loosened, long reaching feet were planted on the ground, and shy, snuffling faces emerged. With a thick short stick he knocked the head of one. Then with a knife he cut around the back of its neck, pushed downwards through its spine, turned it and split along its belly. He pocketed his knife and pulled the head down, removing spine and guts together, and tossed aside the expressionless face and dangling violet tubes. The dogs chased the scrap. The body he gave to Judith to pack in stiff clay and went on to the next one. Judith made a smooth ball around the animal and placed it in the fire.

‘Good for clay round here. Good sticky yellow stuff.’

‘Northamptonshire gypsies,’ John said,‘bury the balls under the fire in a little pit.’

‘Do they now. They have their ways, I suppose, but they’re wasting time. Come out perfect like this.’

An hour later the baked spheres were rolled out of the fire with a stick, cracked open, and the cooked hedgehogs were lifted out naked and steaming. Their prickles remained stuck in the clay and pulled easily from the flesh. Judith made slices through their stippled backs and the fine-smelling meat was passed around.

John ate. It tasted as well as he’d remembered: a sweet, earthen, secret flavour. The meat was tender. Warm grease coated his lips.

‘Told you him had good pork on him,’ Ezekiel said, eating a slice from the side of his knife.

A bottle of whisky was passed around to accompany the food. John took a swig, letting its fire wash loosely down into his chest. ‘Old John Barleycorn,’ he said, saluting with the bottle. ‘Now there’s a fighting man. Seen him dust out many a strong fellow.’ The others laughed.

‘Let’s be having you, then,’ he said, standing, raising his fists.

‘Oho. Someone’s keen,’ Ezekiel answered. ‘Anybody want to take him on?’

‘Come on,’ John implored. There was anger inside him. He wanted to hit.‘Someone here must have some bottom.’ He dabbed the air in front of him with soft feints, quick combinations.

‘I’ll give you some exercise, my friend,’ one man answered, rising.

‘Good man, Tom. John, this is Thomas Lee.’

John shook hands with his opponent and backed away. The man was large, handsome, smiling loosely, with a dark fleece of hair. Might be he was slow. Around them the gypsies started to whistle and cheer. John’s blood raced now. He tilted his head, focusing. The stone-cold air scraped his lungs.Thomas Lee paced slow from side to side, shrugging with his fists around his hips. He stepped forward, threw out a blow. John ducked it, stepped in, landed a punch full force on the buttons of Thomas Lee’s coat. Thomas Lee grinned, pushing John back by his shoulders. Then he loosed a punch into him that whacked John’s sternum, making him step back further. The stout contact pleased John, who stepped forward again, bobbing behind his fists, watched, planted his feet, swayed from his hips, watched, and darted in again, swinging. His left fist caught the cold stubbled bone of Tom’s jaw. And then the fight began, both men neglecting their guards as they flurried forth punches. When John couldn’t avoid Tom’s, which mostly he couldn’t, he leaned forward fractionally, affectionately into the blows. That way, after a minute or two branches flailed upwards and the hard wet ground thumped along John’s back. He stood up laughing, to applause, his head ringing, the sweet taste of blood on his lips. Again he went at Tom. Again a well-landed fist tilted everything up and beneath him.

Ezekiel gripped his shoulder. ‘Come and have a swallow, little John.’

John panted, looked across. Tom was also walking back. ‘Very well. Very well, Robin.’

‘Hey?’

‘Little John. Robin of Sherwood.’

Ezekiel helped John up like an old dame, lifting him by his upper arm.

Back beside the fire, John looked around at the faces flaring with the flames, each so distinctive. How they emerged from the night’s darkness, gathered there in their makeshift camp. Tom patted him heavily on the shoulder and sat. They sang. A child raised John’s arm as champion. Again there was cheering and laughter. John swilled whisky, spat blood, swilled again and swallowed.

Later John stretched out under thick blankets, his mind marked with the blotchy images, leaching at their edges, and parroting, repetitious phrases -
have you the pluck? have you the pluck?
- of exhausted thought.

 

Tennyson sat and smoked on in the darkening room after the girl had left. The logs in the fireplace shifted with a rustling collapse. His large left hand lay on his knee; his right held the warm bowl of his pipe.

It had been an odd visitation. Certainly it had broken up his solitude and hadn’t been unwelcome. Perhaps she was lonely also, or bored. She’d been very eager to discuss poetry. Maybe she lacked for such conversation.Too much of that, though, and she’d turn bluestocking, fit only for a literary man and what sort of a life was that? Curious girl.Very pale skin.Whitely her narrow face had glowed in the gloom. He thought of her living out here in the woods, surrounded by the mad. An interesting subject. He pictured her again, this time in white, her hair a red rope down her back, glimmering through the woodland shade - not that ‘woodland shade’ would do at all. Barred from the world by the cagework of trees, by ancient trees, the sunset obscured by their limbs. The forest. The silent paths.The mad.Where minds decay and leaves rot. Fat weeds rotting at Lethe’s wharf.

The figment’s loneliness merged with his own; lyrical, it wandered in the room, wreathed in his smoke. He thought about her and words for her for a while, then picked up his notebook. He leafed through it a moment and found the first poem he’d written after his friend Arthur’s death, about his body returning from Trieste. He punched his thigh.There it was,complete and finished and shut.He wanted that feeling again,of bringing Arthur close in words, and of making something whole out of the drag and drift, the shapeless spill of his life. He wanted Arthur. The poem was, what, six years old now, seven? He felt the strength go out of him.

John stood in a gold cloud of his own breath. Dawn. A heavy low sun seemingly at head-height. He couldn’t see clearly. His left eye looked through a knife slit, his vision narrowed between a pinkish mist. One side of his body was numb. The cold air was flowing into his mouth, making his teeth tingle. He felt with his fingers: his lip was swollen up into a sneer that exposed his bite. And where was he? Some sort of encampment. He wondered how he’d got there. It had something to do, didn’t it, with his being a prize fighter. Had he fought a bout there? That looked like the ashes of a night’s fire under the new-fallen snow.There were caravans and horses. Gypsies must have put on the bout. He checked his knuckles for grazes and swelling. They looked good. The trees swung their billy clubs all the right the wind shoved have you the pluck Old Jack Randall will Jack Randall must have the pluck to come up to the scratch most famous fighter of them all must have dusted them out pretty quick! Old Jack Randall would have wouldn’t he what with the strength in his arms no question he stood up straight Jack Randall. He bounced up and down, threw out a few punches, though his head ached. He was ready to go again with whoever would challenge him. Jack Randall set off to walk back to . . . the other place, whatever it was - his place of lodging. He knew the way there through the woods.

With the new snow flattening sounds he felt almost deaf or dreaming. His boots crumped down into it. Two crows cranked past with their slow labouring stroke when a wind caught them and swept them round like a finger turning a clock hand. They rowed hard forwards and disappeared away to the side.

He punched the air again.That’ll teach them.That’ll teach them to try Old Jack Randall in the ring.

 

Back in his room, Jack Randall tried to tidy himself before slipping out again. He wetted and wiped his face. Without a mirror, he consulted his reflection in the window to see how damaged he was, pulling the curtain behind him to deepen the image. When he saw himself he laughed. His smile was wide, weird, undulating because of the flare of his lip. This made him smile more. His battered eye disappeared, closed behind a soft pink vulva of swelling that felt warm to the touch.At least he could neaten his hair and clothes. He scooped water onto his head and combed.

Margaret was standing in her favourite spot along the ground-floor corridor when she saw him walking towards her.This place was a small rounded recess with a high circular window so that her thoughts were accompanied by the sombre grading of the winter light through the day. The wounded man walked towards her, half-hiding his face, feeling his way with one hand skimming along the whitewashed wall. He was short, shabby, his face multicoloured and horrifying. Then, as in a play, she saw the doctor see him and call out, ‘John! John. Where are you going?’