Read The Quickening Maze Online

Authors: Adam Foulds

Tags: #Tennyson; Alfred Tennyson, #Mental Health, #Mentally Ill, #England, #Historical Fiction, #London (England), #London (England) - Social Conditions - 19th Century, #Clare; John - Mental Health, #Psychiatric hospitals, #Psychiatric Hospitals - England - London - History - 19th Century, #General, #Mentally Ill - Commitment and Detention - England - London - History - 19th Century, #london, #Historical, #Commitment and Detention, #Poets; English - 19th Century - Mental Health, #Fiction, #Poets; English, #19th Century, #History

The Quickening Maze (18 page)

BOOK: The Quickening Maze
4.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
‘Allow me to introduce you. John Taylor, these are the Tennysons.’
‘A number of them,’ one mumbled.
‘Alfred Tennyson you may have heard of. Alfred, this is John Taylor, erstwhile publisher of Keats, Hazlitt, Lamb, our own unfortunate Mr Clare, and, I suppose I must confess, one of my own works on the classification of the insane.’
‘I have heard of you,’ Taylor assured Tennyson, who had risen to shake his hand. ‘You have been called cockney, I know, and compared to Keats.’
‘I’m not much of cockney, being from Lincolnshire, but they accuse me of similar sensuality and indolence, as they see it. They do me too much of an honour, did they but know it. It is an honour, of course, to shake the hand of a friend of Keats.’
‘I was honoured to know him.’
Alfred Tennyson was tall and dark with lengthy limbs, a wide-mouthed bronze face and large hands. Taylor, comparing him with his dead friend, saw a different languor, a kind of tired ease about his presence that was unlike Keats, but there was a similar something - the gravid silence, perhaps. But not Keats’s quickness, his darting anger.
‘You are with Murray, aren’t you? They are a very good house. I hope you will produce more.You must not let the magazines discourage you in any way.Theirs is a barbarous form of coffee-house entertainment. Yours is infinitely higher.’
Tennyson heard the voice of an older generation in that ‘coffee-house’. Encouragement from this older man who’d known real poets was welcome. ‘I thank you for those words. I don’t think that they will stop me. There’s really nothing else I’m fit for. Do you still publish poetry?’
‘No, I’m afraid I could not make it pay. The public’s taste has moved on to useful works and prose novels, as you know. But poetry will survive. Civilisation has never been without it.’ Taylor’s eye was caught by the flash of a brilliant silver teapot of fashionable design. Evidently what Eliza Allen had said was true: they were prospering. ‘It won’t pay, but it will survive. We want it, at least. Now, on the subject of payment, Dr Allen, would you favour me with a moment of your time.’
‘Certainly.’
‘It was a pleasure meeting you.’ He bowed to the company.
Tennyson watched him leave. A small man, not particularly smart, with a tired, kind face, but a friend of immortals, a survivor of poetry.
With her hope blasted and withered and unexpected tears not impossible, Hannah had intended not to like the Tennysons - she wouldn’t have been there at all if Father hadn’t insisted - but she hadn’t succeeded. The ladies were clever and distinct, sharply characterful and expressive, particularly the beautiful older sister Matilda, who might have put Annabella in the shade. Her fascination was only enhanced by the fact that she walked with a slow, semicircling limp. And when they spoke about their home, it sounded like the warm refuge she’d always imagined for herself, full of books and animals and invented games, with no patients and no business on the premises. Abigail had liked what she’d heard also, especially the idea of having a pet monkey and a big dog pulling Mother along in a carriage. She had immediately requested a monkey from Papa, who had laughingly refused as though the idea were ridiculous and he wouldn’t even think about it at all. There were enough of them to look after a monkey. It would be amusing. Hannah tried not to look at Tennyson. She had convicted him of indifference and then the susceptibility to Annabella that affected even the stupidest people, but she could not, of course, entirely extinguish her feelings for him. Disdain twisted painfully together with yearning. She looked at the tablecloth. She sipped her tea.
Matthew Allen returned to the party with Taylor’s money safely stowed in his desk. He liked handling money, liked possessing it, but the more potent and secret pleasure was risk. There was a pent force in having things at stake that seemed to charge one’s limbs with energy and made eventual triumph more intense than could be imagined. This dream had been the cause of his early imprisonments in the past, but look at him now with his buildings, his patients, his distinguished reputation, and orders already accumulating for machine-carved wood. He held the new teapot high above his cup and poured a long, musical arc. By the end of the afternoon he had all the other Tennysons investing, except Septimus, whose nerves were to be spared the strain of capital adventure.
 
John felt the warmth of a hand on his shoulder. He knew its touch, its weight. ‘Patty!’ he said, turning.
‘I thought you was all alone,’ she said. ‘It’s dark in your room, ain’t it?’
‘It is dark. I am alone. Just that tiny window. Stars and clouds, never a bird or living thing. In hell. I’m alone in hell, Patty. At night, in darkness, doors get opened. Things happen.’
‘Hush, now. Don’t you want to know of your children? ’
Patty sat down beside him on the hard, sour cot and pulled his head onto her shoulder, a strong and comforting woman. Her heavy cool fingers held his brow. She pulled him into the smell of her. He snaked an arm around the soft curve of her belly and grasped the cloth on the far side of her waist.
‘The children are well,’ he said. ‘I know they are. They’re free. John carpentering for the railways. Charles a clerk to that lawyer. Anna Maria to marry. I want to come home.’
‘Why do you want to come home? The people aren’t free there either.’
‘They’re not shut up. They’re not locked away.’
She shook her head. ‘The land is fenced. Can’t walk across nothing.We’re kept in narrow tracks.The common land is owned.The poor are driven away, the gypsies also.’
‘The rich man is a tyrant and we are all prisoners. No one cares for the poor. They can burn ricks and riot. Nothing. Transportation. A whole continent is made a prison for them.’
‘You’re safer here.’
‘No, I’m not. At night . . .’
‘Shh. There’s someone here to see you.’
Mary approached the bed.
‘You! But how did you get in? Through the walls?’
‘What are walls?’
John laughed. ‘In your innocence you don’t know.’ While Patty held him, Mary approached, the beautiful child, barely taller than him seated, and kissed him, a flake of gold that fell spinning into his mind.
‘Sit beside me,’ he said. ‘Sit beside me. Now, here we are.’
Between the two women, John sat, his two hands joined with theirs rested in his lap, linked.
‘We’re together,’ he said.
The flow between them, kindling smiles from each other, their gazes touching, until John felt a warm drop on his right hand. Blood, branching immediately into the tiny channels of his skin. He looked up, saw the small wound beneath Mary’s left eye.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Why did you do this to me?’ she asked. ‘I was ever gentle.’
‘I was a child,’ he protested.‘I never meant.You were so pretty in the orchard. I wanted to touch you. I felt so far away. That’s why I threw the hazelnut.’
‘Look. My face is healed.’ The cut closed as he watched. Her skin resumed its placid surface like water.
‘It’s beautiful.’
Mary smiled back at him for a long moment. She held his gaze. She radiated love.
‘Do you miss your sister?’ she asked.
John felt his face crumpling. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And nobody ever asks.’ Along his side he hurt, frost-bitten, scoured by the winter wind, exposed.
‘They don’t know of her. Barely she glimmered in this world. You didn’t know her.’
‘She was a baby, my twin. Where did she go?’
Patty explained. ‘Into a rich man’s coffin. She died before baptism. She had to be snuck into holy ground.’
‘So she’s safe. But she would have been here. We would have loved one another.’
‘You say that,’ Patty said, ‘but you were a solitary child, dreamy and distant.’
‘Cause she wasn’t there!’
‘Here she is,’ Mary said, and placed into his hands a sleeping baby. Closed purple eyes, curled fingers, a blunt, breathing nose, a soft swirl of hair. The warm weight of her head lay in his left palm.
‘This is her,’ he said. ‘This is my sister.’
He looked up at Mary and Patty, disbelieving, overcome. When he looked down again, he held in his hands a bird’s nest. He didn’t recognise the type although he knew them all from his egg collecting. It was light, springy, tightly woven. Nor did he recognise the eggs. There were four of them.
‘There we all are,’ Patty said. ‘Better now.’
The eggs were white as bone china. They glowed, tender and natural, lightly resting against each other.
‘There we are,’ he said. He lifted the nest and the eggs rolled with the irregular, delayed movement they had when there were chicks inside. ‘There we are.’
 
‘It’s this part here that’s the trouble.’
‘This frame.’
He nodded in his infuriatingly slow way and said no more, so that Matthew Allen had to ask, ‘And what is it that’s wrong with it?’
‘Being made of wood, even within the iron frame, it’s soft, too soft. It don’t hold it tight, and then because it’s loose . . .’
Matthew looked again at the product. The carving was scribbled, all jittery scratches and ragged gashes. The clean, deep design was lost. He looked down at it and in his rage felt the power that would have bitten down and carved it perfectly, the will that barged and bullocked inside him.
‘And they’re all like this.’
Again that slow blink.
‘Well?’
‘It’s this part here. They’s all going to come out the same. Course I could finish them by hand, tidy them up.’
‘No, no, no. Obviously that is not how we’re going to go on. The whole point, the whole scheme, is mechanical wood carving.’
The terror of risk was that while it charged Matthew Allen, had him skimming into the future with a harsh exhilaration that felt like delight, while it filled him at every moment with the sense of his own possibility and power, if it failed, if it failed all that rushing energy simply crashed like a carriage into a ditch and there was nothing, there was humiliation, debt, imprisonment, and all that he had defied would be all that there was.That was the risk. He threw the board across the room with sudden force so that his employee jerked back and, like a nervous old woman, placed a hand over his fluttering heart.
‘Damn it to hell!’ He calmed himself, running his hands down his beard. ‘Then this part of the machine must be remade in steel.That is all there is to it. Orders will be delayed. But there’s no alternative. Very well. Very well. I’ll get to it instanter.’
‘What shall I do? I can finish a few by hand.’
‘No, no. What did I say? No, you go home to your wife.’
The man smiled slyly. ‘I don’t have a wife.’
‘Then you can change your clothes and go out looking for one.’
‘Oh, I’ve had interested parties.Will I still get paid?’
‘Yes,’ Allen hissed. ‘Now go. Things are suspended here for two weeks at least, I imagine. I shall let you know.’
As he walked back to High Beach from Woodford, Matthew Allen composed in his head a letter to his customers of such persuasive excuse and finely phrased affirmations of the historical import of the enterprise, along with the irrefutable truth that revolutions are not made in single days, that he had restored his mood by the time Thomas Rawnsley appeared beside him on his horse. He greeted the younger man as one manufacturer to another. He even alluded to the day’s difficulties and was cheerfully condoled by Rawnsley, who knew all about such technical vicissitudes. Rawnsley, when asked, revealed that he was in fact riding towards the doctor’s residence to pay an impromptu call. He wished to offer a gift of apples from his garden. Would he find the doctor’s wife and daughter at home?
 
From her window, Hannah could see Charles Seymour prowling outside the grounds, swishing his stick from side to side. Boredom, a sane frustration, a continuous mild anger: Hannah thought he looked like a friend, someone whose life was as empty and miserable as her own. Clearly he needed company. She went downstairs to meet him. It didn’t matter now; she could meet whom she liked, and she was very bored.
When she did so, he raised a hand to lift his hat and found that he wasn’t wearing one. He smiled and mimed instead. Hannah gazed for a moment down at his shoes and smiled also.
‘Good day to you,’ he said.
‘Good day.’
She looked up at him again. He had a froth of fair hair and a smooth, beardless face that was colouring in the wind.
‘Chilly today,’ he said.
‘Indeed. The weather is from the north. My father says this aggravates the patients.’
‘But your shawl looks warm.’
‘It is.’
His imagining of her physical state was pleasing. It was gentlemanly, aristocratic, to assume this curatorial intimacy with people. Of course, he was an aristocrat. To be his wife would be to be raised up in society and made secure. Absurd thought, and she wasn’t thinking it for herself. And he was passionate. Hannah knew that he was there sane, against his will at his family’s insistence, to liberate him from an unwise love. So they had both been denied their loves.
‘I’m feeling dull today,’ he said, swishing his stick again, in a tone that suggested he might tell her anything, that he was honest and unconcealed.‘I must admit it. First of all, I’ve finished the book I was reading. It wasn’t terribly interesting in the first place.’
‘My father has a library. I’m sure he’d give you use of it. And I have quite a few books.’
‘Well, that’s kind of you.Your father stocks a library for all of us, but it tends rather to the devotional.’ He tapped his stick against his boots as though taking guard to play cricket. ‘To be brutally honest, I’m not a great consumer of literature. I think some distraction is all I’m looking for.’
‘We could go for a walk.’ He looked up at her and immediately she added, to dissipate the effect,‘At some time.’
BOOK: The Quickening Maze
4.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Time to Move On by Grace Thompson
The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
Trial by Fury (9780061754715) by Jance, Judith A.
Fading by Blair, E. K.
Mark of the Seer by Kay, Jenna
Night Walker by Donald Hamilton