The Quickening Maze (2 page)

‘They both might be,’ her father rejoined. ‘But a warm family welcome will do neither of them any harm.’

‘I’ll only wait with you a moment,’ Eliza Allen said. ‘I’ve things to do, only I saw you all standing out here in the sun. Oh, look, there’s Dora seeing us now.’

Hannah turned and saw her sister’s face in the window. She wouldn’t come out, Hannah knew. She didn’t like extraordinary people. She liked ordinary people and was preparing for her wedding, after which she could live almost entirely among them. She retreated out of sight like a fish from the surface of a pond, leaving the glass dark.

‘Abi, put that down,’ her mother instructed. ‘And don’t wipe your hands on your pinafore. Come here.’ Abigail joined them in a mildly shamed, dilatory way and allowed her mother to clean her palms with a handkerchief. ‘Where’s Fulton?’ Eliza asked her husband.

‘He’s occupied, I’m sure. We don’t have to be all arranged here like this. We’re not having our portrait painted.’

This was not how Hannah had arranged this meeting in her imagination. She would not have had the clutter of her family around her, not at first, and she would have happened by at the right moment, or at least could have easily dissembled her preceding vigilance. She could have been a solitary, attractive girl of seventeen, a wood nymph even, discovered in her wandering. She stared along the road as far as she could: it turned sharply to the right a little way ahead and the forest cut off the view down the hill.Through the trees she felt them approaching, an event approaching.Who knew how significant it might prove to be? She should try to expect less; there was little chance it would match her hopes. But it might. Certainly, something was about to happen. People were about to arrive.

And then it was happening. The carriage from Woodford was approaching, trunks strapped to its roof, the horses bowing their way up the hill, the driver dabbing at their broad backs with his whip. Quickly, hoping not to be seen, Hannah pinched colour into her cheeks. Mrs Allen picked up Abigail and held her on her hip. Matthew Allen smoothed his whiskers with both hands, tugged his waistcoat down, and enriched the swell of his cravat.

As the carriage slowed beside them, the driver touching the brim of his hat, Matthew Allen stepped forward and opened the door. ‘Misters Tennyson,’ he said in his deeper, professional voice.‘Welcome to High Beach.’

A cough and a thank you was heard from the shadowy interior where long limbs were moving.

Hannah stood a little closer to her mother as the two brothers emerged.

The two Tennysons were tall, clean-shaven and darkly similar. They greeted the three females with courteous bows. Hannah felt close to saying something, but didn’t. She heard her mother say, ‘Gentlemen, welcome.’ One Tennyson mumbled a reply as they both stood blinking, shifting on their feet after the confinement of the carriage. Both began lighting pipes.

The trunks were unfastened and brought down by Dr Allen and one of the Tennysons. Both the Tennysons were handsome, one perhaps more sensitive in appearance than the other - would that be the poet or the melancholic? Hannah waited for them to speak some more. She wanted desperately to know which of these two men her interest should fall upon.

 

John woke up without any feeling down one side. He reached a hand up to his face to feel for the rough crusting of frost and drag it off, but there was none. So either he wasn’t outside or the weather was mild. He felt that the air wasn’t moving over him, wasn’t alive. He was inside, in a shut room.

He kept his eyes closed, floating there in his own inner darkness, wanting to delay the knowledge of which room he was in, although in truth he knew. But it might not be there, it might be the right room, with Patty first up from the bed and busy with the children.

He opened his eyes by fractions and saw a dark grey room. The imagined biting rime on his sky side was the old numbness from sleeping out years ago, not a real touch of the world, and he wasn’t home. There was the window, glowing dimly with wet autumn light. It showed its view of two trees bent by the wavery glass.

Below he could hear other inmates moving and the brisk voice of Mrs Allen. She would collect him shortly to accompany her across the garden to the doctor’s house for breakfast, him having been a good lad.

He lifted the blanket, swung his softening white feet onto the clean wood floor, and stood up, and immediately wanted to lie back down again and not lie back down again and go and not go anywhere and not be there and be home.

 

John spread butter thickly on his bread and bit. Those considered constitutionally able had cutlets to eat and sawed at their meat, including Charles Seymour, the aristocrat who wasn’t mad at all. He’d condescended to join them this morning. The doctor had listed his pedigree to the new man as though presenting a prize mastiff. There had been polite talk, mostly about Cambridge, that lucky, unknown world, while John said nothing. Now the table was silent. George Laidlaw was talking to himself, almost inaudibly, his lips fluttering with his habitual fantastical calculations of the National Debt. Fulton Allen ate with a lad’s appetite, sweeping up juices with a chunk of bread on his fork. Margaret ate morsels silently. Hannah Allen kept glancing at the new man, Septimus Tennyson, whose head trembled and whose gaze seemed too sensitive to look at anything for long, but shrivelled back from what it hit like a snail’s wizening eyes. Tall and faded he looked. Why didn’t Hannah glance instead at John? He licked silky butter from his teeth and would much rather have been eating her, the prettyish, pale thing. He wondered how she tasted in the nest between her legs. He’d have liked to see her cheeks flush and hear her startled breath. The doctor smiled over his chewing at everyone. ‘Do we all have plenty to do today? George, you’ll be working in the vegetable garden, won’t you?’

John lay in the warmth of the bath, nursing the whiteness of his belly. He pressed his fingers into it, forming ridges of soft dough. Beneath, his penis had bobbed up out of the water and was capped with ticklish cold air. He lay back, the water slopping up beside his ears, and let his arms float. He lay so still he could feel his heartbeats shunting a little force around his body.

Knuckles beat against the door. ‘Five minutes, Mr Clare.’

 

Peter Wilkins was an old attendant. His heavy face was pouched and drooping. The lower lids of his watery eyes hung so low that they showed a quarter of an inch of their red lining like a worn-out coat with failing seams. He had had his fill of restrainings, bathings, arguings, and had now taken upon himself the duty of keeping the gate. He never mentioned that this was now what he understood his job to be in case he was contradicted and had his former duties imposed. Instead, each morning he walked purposefully, but not too quickly or obviously, to the gate under its trees and stood there.

His face was so detailed, so full of character, that John always found encountering him to be a small event, like eating something. John thanked Wilkins with a raised hat as he let him go out towards his work.

He walked with the quick skimming steps of a labourer up the hill to the admiral’s garden, getting a little heat and motion into his flesh. He began whistling a tune, ‘Tie a Yellow Handkercher’, one of those he’d transcribed years ago from gypsies and old boys, for a volume that no one would publish, that died on a desk in a cramped London office. Thus the real life of the people goes insulted and ignored. He sang out loud ‘Flash company been the ruin o’ me and the ruin o’ me quite’, then stopped: he was feeling it too strongly and it was more imprisonment to simplify himself like that in other people’s words, not when he had so many of his own. Also, he’d seen two charcoal burners on the road ahead, round-shouldered and dirty, their faces blackened and featureless. He angled his hat down and skulked under it as they passed, then wondered if that would have made them more or less likely to take him for one of the mad.

When they’d gone, he looked up again into the forest.Wet. Not much stirring. A flicker of wings. Mist between the crooked trees.

 

As he worked the admiral’s garden a robin joined him. It darted forward to needle the earth he’d turned, watching him, waiting, poised on its little thready legs. John saw the throb of a worm by his spade, plucked it up, and threw it at the bird. The robin flew away, flew back, and jabbed at the meal.

Watching this, being there, given time, the world revealed itself again in silence, coming to him. Gently it breathed around him its atmosphere: vulnerable, benign, full of secrets, his. A lost thing returning. How it waited for him in eternity and almost knew him. He’d known and sung it all his life. Perception of it now, amid all his truancy and suffering, made his eyes thicken with warm tears.

Too easily moved - he knew that. Nervous and excitable. He dried himself on his sleeve and went back to working, the easy rhythm and weight through his arms.A painless prescription.And it was light work, nothing compared to lime burning or threshing. He hacked down on a clod of this thick Essex clay and remembered the light flail his father had made him when he was a boy. Standing beside the old man’s effortless fast rhythm of circling whacks he’d tried to keep up, his arm burning, his shirt sweated through, his damp skin furred with itchy grain dust. Weak but willing, his father called him.

‘Good afternoon, John, or morning.’

It was the admiral, standing very dignified and straight. John had always suspected that he stood straighter and with greater dignity now in his retirement than he had on the seas. He looked spick and span, very comprehensively brushed, the remnants of his grey hair all shooting forwards from his crown, his long blue coat as spotless as a horse before a show. A man who’d known Nelson. ‘And how are we today?’

John stood up, his earthen five feet two feeling very shabby and insufficient opposite the admiral.‘Very good, sir. Fine day.’

‘Indeed.’The admiral released one hand from behind his back and gestured out at the woods. Like a dog, John looked at the hand, not at the direction indicated. He’d forgotten how twisted and swollen the admiral’s hands were, fingers like lengths of ginger root. John wondered that he didn’t wear gloves, but perhaps he couldn’t get them on. ‘Yes,’ the admiral said, ‘it’s the fine sort of autumn weather. I have an invitation in town,’ he announced. John bowed at the fact. ‘So I’m off to Woodford to entrust my poor person to the train.’ The admiral smiled.

John also smiled. ‘I wish you a safe journey,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ the admiral said slowly. He seemed not to like the concerned sincerity of this response. The thought of his bodily destruction at unnatural speed was not meant actually to be entertained. ‘Yes, indeed. So I shall bid you good day. Please convey my regards to the doctor and Mrs Allen. Oh, yes, there’s someone taking Beech Hill House, a friend of the doctor’s, I believe. Do you by any chance know who?’

‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

‘Ah well. Anon, then.’

The admiral let the gate clap behind him and headed down the hill, his thick hands bunched in the small of his back.

John whistled enviously after him ‘Flash company been the ruin o’ me and the ruin o’ me quite’. An evening in London with the old, wild lads - that was what he needed. He felt his flesh strain towards the thought of beer, wanting drunkenness, wanting the world softened and flowing around him. To be back in his green jacket, the country clown for his friends from
The London Magazine
with their bristling literary talk, their sharp, rehearsed epigrams scattered like cut stones through the thickness of talk. And later, swaggering, scenes around them changing like backcloths flown up and down in a tatty theatre until he found himself with a plump young something, her nest tickling his nose as he strained the root of his tongue, tasting up into her, then quenching himself inside her, that wonderful release, hugging her as he did so, rubbing the sweat-loosened paint from her cheek onto his own.

He could look up an address or two and find the old gang, balder, plumper, more fitfully employed now that the magazine had folded. But no point: it was gone, and he couldn’t have gone anyway, he reminded himself. He was an inmate, a prisoner. He was due back at Allen’s. At present, it was enough to have got through the day. But the thought of it all made him want to kick. And Nature had taken herself away from his dirty little fury and left him there.

He worked until dusk and walked back. Peter Wilkins opened the gate for him. ‘You’d better hurry,’ he told him, ‘or you’ll be late for evening prayers.’

 

Charles Seymour sat at his desk and wrote. His valet, with almost nowhere to resort to in this wretched place, lingered behind him, standing like a sentry against the wall.