The Quickening Maze (14 page)

‘You must be pure. You must empty yourself.’ Stockdale dropped the cloth onto the ground and with his free hand shoved at her forehead. Mary flew back onto the grass. She smiled up at the sky and its finely dragged high cloud. Suffering had been sent her. She felt his gratuitous boot sink into her stomach. Her work had truly begun.

 

Annabella was good with Abigail, soft-eyed, patient, able to play. The child stood entranced, trying to keep her wriggling fingers still as the beautiful older girl wrapped around them the thread of a cat’s cradle. Dora sat nearer the light of the lamp, embroidering borders on the linens of her future married life. Hannah had taken the finest needle from Dora’s sewing box. Carefully she pushed it into the skin of her fingertip and across, then out of the other side, making a white ridge where it passed through. It wasn’t painful, slightly tight, but not painful. She enjoyed lightly terrorising Abigail by showing her the sliver of metal passing through her flesh.

‘Look, Abi.’ She wagged her finger over Abigail’s eyes, then grabbed her own wrist and sucked in air as though in pain.

‘Ow!’ Abigail said.

‘Don’t be so childish,’ Dora said.

Hannah pulled the needle out again, placed it back in the box.

‘I saw Mr Tennyson the other day,’ she announced, not at all childish.

‘Indeed?’ Annabella raised her eyebrows.

‘Yes, I did. We had a most pleasant conversation.’

‘Did you? Hannah, why haven’t you told me about this? No, you need to pinch it there and there.’

‘Can’t,’ Abigail complained. ‘You do it.’

‘But it’s on my fingers.’

‘You ought to be careful with your pleasant conversations, ’ Dora warned. ‘You don’t want to be taken lightly.’

‘Why would I be taken in any way? We met in the lane. We spoke.’

‘Hmm.’ Dora examined her stitches.

‘Has he heard you play the piano?’ Annabella asked.

‘Yes. That would be bound to induce a proposal,’ Dora said.

‘No, he hasn’t. How could we arrange that? Take no notice of Dora. She is merely disappointed that her proposal has already come and it was from James.’

‘I would be very happy with such a proposal,’ Annabella said appeasingly.

‘Neither opinion terribly interests me,’ Dora said, smoothing the edges of a napkin.

‘Here.’ Annabella hooked her fingers through the thread, pinched and lifted from Abigail’s fingers a neat crossed frame.

‘Knock, knock,’ said a voice. A loose bunch of wild-flowers appeared beside the door frame, then, smiling beside them, the face of James. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘There are lots of you.’

‘Don’t be frightened,’ Hannah said. ‘Come in.’

‘Don’t be impertinent,’ Dora chastised.‘I’ll put those in water.’ She got up, took the flowers from him, received with demurely downcast eyes his kiss on her cheek, and left.

‘So,’ he said when she was gone.

‘Do sit down,’ Hannah said.

He nodded and sat with a breathy smile in Annabella’s direction, squinting as though her beauty were sunlight full on his face. He bent forward and patted Abigail on the shoulder; she looked at him and turned away.

‘Those are your linens,’ Hannah said.

‘Are they?’ he asked and bent forward to touch them.

The sight made Hannah shudder. It was precisely what had to be avoided: the life with linens, the dreary, comfortable, tepid life. She said suddenly, almost to punish him,‘And will you be happy, married to Dora?’

‘I . . . I . . . well, what a question. Of course I will. Mutual regard, a marriage founded on warm mutual regard . . .’

‘I thought so,’ Hannah cut him off. ‘I’m sure that you will.’

Dora returned with the flowers in a jug. ‘There,’ she said. ‘James, you look very warm. Are you ailing?’

Hannah snorted.

‘Is Hannah being impolite?’

‘Impolite is a very strong word.’

‘I thought so. Hannah, why are you not capable of being just ordinarily civil?’

‘I am civil. You weren’t even here.’

‘Evidently. If I had been, perhaps you would have behaved in a less . . .’

‘Less? Less what?’

Abigail cringed close against Annabella’s skirt, holding the fabric with one hand.

‘Or perhaps if you hadn’t been here . . .’

‘Oh, that’s fine. That’s really fine. I shan’t be here.’ Hannah stood up and fled the room. Annabella, in the pained silence, fitted the cat’s cradle again around Abigail’s fingers, then got up and followed.

 

‘Look at that,’ Matthew Allen said to his son. ‘Marvellous.’ He bent forward with his hands on his knees, peering.

‘It’s a Maudsley,’ Thomas Rawnsley told him.

‘Oh, I know, I know. I’ve studied all the designs. It’s simply that I haven’t really seen a table engine working before.’

The hypnosis of its movement, silent, balanced, rhythmical.The viscous thrusting of its arms, well oiled. And the turning of the triangular centrifugal governor at the top, back and forth, like a girl hearing her name and turning towards him, saying Yes? Yes? Yes?

‘This type of engine,’ Rawnsley said, ‘would probably suit your purposes as well as mine. I use charcoal, which is of course abundant here with the forest.’

‘That I have already decided,’ Allen told him,‘having studied all available specifications. But I haven’t yet told my son what my purposes are.’

‘It’s true, he hasn’t,’ Fulton confirmed, wincing as the man working the drill filled the air with its screaming. ‘So what is it?’ he asked his father.

‘Look around you. All the materials are here.’

Fulton did look around at the piles of squared wood, some of it still with the natural roughness of bark on its back or along its edge, most of it squared out of nature and geometrically regular. He looked at the tools, the sweet-smelling dust, the display cabinet of variously sized wooden cogs, the boxes filled with the same. ‘We’re going to make machine parts also?’

‘No, no. I wouldn’t want to compete with our friend Rawnsley here,’ Allen smiled. ‘No, think.’ He paused, then announced, ‘Mechanical wood carving.’

‘Like this?’

‘I just said not like this. No, for furniture. Domestic. Ecclesiastical fittings.’

‘It could well be a success,’ Rawnsley commented, who already knew of the scheme. ‘The market for mass production - not inconsiderable.’

‘I see,’ Fulton said.

‘You don’t seem quite as enthused as I expected you to be,’ Allen told his son. ‘It will make you rich. Think of all the new churches in all the cities. And think of all the people unable to afford fine furniture hand-carving, but who can have the same, of the same quality, carved to guildsmen’s standards, because they are simply perfectly exact and precise mechanical copies of hand-carved originals, for a fraction of the price. That beauty and dignity, that elevating spiritual environment, made available to great numbers of people.’

‘I see.’

‘You see, you see,’ Allen grinned and swiped a hand down his beard. ‘A little investment and it will take place. Il aura lieu.’

‘More difficult than producing these things, but plausible, ’ Rawnsley said, dipping his hand into an open box of tiny cogs, ‘entirely possible.’

Matthew Allen also dipped his hand and scooped up a few cogs in his palm. They were warm still from the machining and felt nutritious, like nuts. He liked Rawnsley, liked the prosperous sheen to his hat, his fine-checked trousers tightly strapped under his boots. ‘Perhaps you would care to be one of my lucky investors?’ he asked.

 

Stands in the wilderness of the world, stands alone, his face from his own house, a book in his hand, surrounded by strangers, trembling, unable, the sun heating him, his will breaking inside him, until he bursts out, ‘What can I do?’

As though it were possible, he searches again the strangers’ faces to find Mary or Patty or one of his own children or anyone, but there is no warm return from them. They are alien, moulded flesh only, and they frighten him.

A jarring of magpies overhead. He turns. He breathes. He is in a garden. He knows where he is. So why can’t he stop it, why can’t he kill it in himself, the sense that at any moment he might see her, that she might come for him, a door in the world swing open and there she is? That she might end this for him?
John, you have a visitor. John, you have a visitor.
The phrase repeats inside his head, endlessly, boringly, because he craves it, that she might come and end this for him.

Something tugs at the corner of his vision. He looks: a rising, a thing of the summer season. He walks over quickly to see. Like the plume of steam from a kettle’s spout, ants are rising from the sandy hole of their nest. He crouches, his belly softly crushed behind his knees, and peers at the glittering black bodies swarming up to the surface, raising their heavy transparent wings, flying up. He looks up at those already airborne. They hold mostly together, a cloud of them funnelling and warping in the wind. They fly beyond limits. He gets up and follows them as far as he can.

They disperse along the line, flaking off into clear air. Some land on the trees. He stands by one, in the cool wood-scent of its shade, and watches a single ant walk along a leaf. A breeze flips its platform, but it adheres. Many leaves shine against the light, the sweet, living green. He quotes himself under his breath.‘Leaves from Eternity are simple things.’

Ants fly over, carry beyond him. He can’t follow them further. Like a lock gate opening in a canal, the water slumping in, his heavy rage returns. He presses himself to the tree, looks down and sees the roots reaching down into the earth.The admiral’s hands. He has them himself for a second, thick, rooty fingers, twisted, numb. He shakes his hands and they’re gone. They reappear at his feet, and clutch down.The painful numbness rises, his legs solidifying, a hard rind surrounding them, creeping upwards. He raises his arms. They crack and split and reach into the light. The bark covers his lips, covers his eyes. Going blind, he vomits leaves and growth. He yearns upwards into the air, dwindling, splitting, growing finer, to live points, to nerves. The wind moves agonisingly through him. He can’t speak.

Stands in the wilderness of the world.

Dr Allen found the company he was in highly congenial. Thomas Rawnsley had brought him along to an informal gathering of the area’s industrialists, brisk and cheerful, ambitious and duplicitous men. They ate beef and the spiced foam of roasted apples. They drank beer. A light rain petalled against the windows. Pipes were smoked. Rawnsley turned out to be quite a different man with drink inside him. His stiff exterior was broken up and he emerged boyish and excitable, red-faced, clumsy and loud-voiced. He showed off his new acquaintance to the small crowd and implored him to hold forth on his scheme, which Matthew Allen did readily. He drew assent from them when he spoke of their great good fortune in having the forest at their disposal, with the charcoal burners to render it down to useful fuel and their own imaginations to turn the timber into anything at all. Tanning and ship building were old occupations. The new was up to them. Seated at their centre, Matthew Allen felt he easily outclassed them all, gifted as he was in so many respects, so educated and already a published author on chemistry and insanity. He was reflected back to himself in their smiles, their interested gazes. For a moment he heard his father’s voice in his own, holding forth among the Sandemanians.When he had finished his description of the Pyroglyph there was even applause. Rawnsley picked up the jug and sloshed more beer into his glass.

 

Alfred Tennyson walked to loosen his blood. He had spent the day sunk in a low mood. The word ‘sunk’ was the right one, the mood soft, dark, silted, sluggish; it smelt of riverbed, of himself. He’d managed no new lines. Poems lay around half-formed and helpless, insects droned in the garden, a fly butted its hard little face against the window panes. He’d sat and smoked thickly enough to make his stupid head light with it, his heart flutter, his limbs feel shaky and hollow. Distantly he heard the rhythmic clubbing of woodmen at work among the trees.

The doctor might be a comfort. That man always had energy, afflatus, interest.

He passed among the tired lunatics and up the path to the doctor’s house. He pulled on the bell and turned and watched a madman flinch and talk at nothing until the door was opened. A servant had opened it, but immediately the doctor hurried towards him, hand outstretched. He took Tennyson’s larger hand in his own and shook it warmly, patting him on the shoulder as he drew him inside. ‘How splendid of you to stop by,’ he said. ‘Come in, come in.’ Tennyson handed the servant his hat and cape. The doctor led him in.

Mrs Allen met him in the vestibule. From a doorway, the youngest child veered out and clung to her mother’s skirts. ‘How lovely to see you again,’ Eliza said. ‘Do come through to the drawing room.’

From that farther room music started. Hannah had heard his arrival and rushed to the piano, her cheeks freshly pinched, to be accidentally discovered playing a Clementi sonata. She stumbled on a phrase as they entered the room, her face starting to burn. Abigail ran to her side, arriving with a soft thump against the stool, and began to plink at the highest notes. Not daring to lift her head - she was still being accidentally discovered - Hannah pushed Abigail away with her forearm. The child tripped; her upflung arms were caught by her mother. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Hannah stood up.