The Quickening Maze (23 page)

‘You are unwell.’

Allen laughed.‘I fear you may be correct.’To himself, his voice sounded faint. Something had shifted inside his ears.

‘And tired.’

‘Oh, yes. And tired.’

‘Then rest. Lie down. Lie down on your sofa.’

‘Yes, yes, I will.’

Matthew accepted. Why not? Everyone pulling at him, requiring his decisions. Let them decide for a change. John stood over him as he subsided groaning down onto the cushions. John then took the blanket draped over the sofa’s back rest and spread it as a coverlet over the doctor. Matthew Allen watched the broken poet’s comfortable fat face as he tucked the blanket under his side so that he was snugly wrapped, and remembered that the poor man was a father like himself. He had tended fevered children with presumably that same look of abstract, practical care in his eyes. It made the doctor helpless for a moment, wanting to weep. John’s short, dirty hands completed their task and he stood upright again.

‘Thank you,’ he said. He lay, exhausted and incapable of his own life, lying beneath it without the energy to continue. ‘Thank you.’

‘So, about my freedom.’

 

John turned his face towards the sun, the light split into beams by the branches. One of them, the size of an infant’s vague kiss, played warmly on the corner of his eye and forehead. He squinted along it like a carpenter seeing if a plank was true. Soft with motes and pollen. A pair of circling transparent wings.

He walked over crackling dry twigs the storms had ripped out. Between oaks, occasional bluebells shivered together. Overhead, the weep of birds.The touch of the world. Glad of it. Yearning across it, for home. All the world was road until he was home.

At Buckhurst Hill church he emerged from the woods. The church with a face and aspect, there like a person, like a house. He walked through the stone gatehouse into its orderly garden of graves, the thickened silence where the dead lay.The yew with its dark, slow needles spread a decent gloom.

Inside the church he found the customary dry echoes, dark pews, figures frozen in the wildflowercoloured windows, and a woman sitting alone. He passed her as he walked up the aisle to cross himself before the altar. Mary! No, not Mary, another of the patients, that woman he had . . . saved from Stockdale. She was staring up at the cross and smiling with tears on her face. She did not glance at him. He had done that. He had saved her. A rising wind hummed against the glass and its frozen saints. He crept outside.

In the churchyard was a boy, resting apparently, dressed like a ploughboy in a smock. He looked about nine years old and neither smiled nor made a greeting. He looked as serious and tired as any working man and resembled, John realised, one of his own sons at that age: the same stout build, the same heavy, clean flesh of the face and eyelashes long against his cheek.

‘I haven’t a halfpenny,’ John said and the boy met his eye finally, but did not reply. The breeze lifted the long hair from his forehead and he narrowed his eyes and that gave the effect of an answer. ‘I would give you one otherwise.’

The boy looked at him, eventually raised a hand to thank John for the thought, then folded his arms.

John rambled back into the woods, the musky spring odour and wheeling light. He saw a tree lying on its side, barkless, stripped white, ghost-glimmering through the others. Strange for it to have been felled at this time of year, with the sap rising, making the trees strong and wilful and difficult. Perhaps it was diseased. And every shred of bark taken for the tanning trade. He pitied it, felt suddenly that he was it, lying there undefended, its grain tightening in the breeze. He hurried on.

They had moved. It took him some time to find them. When he did he was thirsty and tired. There were fewer of them, fewer horses, only two vardas. But the crone, Judith, was still there by the yog, staring into it, her face a mask painted with its light. She flinched at his approach; raising a shoulder, she made to get up. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Judith, it’s me.’

She squinted at him and relaxed with recognition. ‘You’ve come among us again, John Clare. Sit. Are you well?’

‘I am,’ he said. But he wasn’t. The day’s warmth faded out of him suddenly. Each day different. Each day perishing. His life at an end.

 

Cliffs of stained brick on either side as the train rambled out through the slums. Filth in the gutters, running children, worn laundry restless in the wind, wretched lives packed behind windows. The world was in poor repair. Dr Allen knew that there was much he could do, if given the chance, if only he were listened to, looked up to and asked. But he wasn’t. People would stop asking him anything when he was bankrupt, the asylum sold, rotting in gaol.

Beyond the city came the relief of countryside, standing cattle and wet lanes and carts and clouds. Usually, Matthew enjoyed travelling by train, travelling triumphantly at speed across a superseded world, the frightened labourers in the fields staring back at him, but he hadn’t that ease today as he travelled towards Oswald and humiliation.

If Oswald did grant him a loan, then surely all would be well. The machine was now, more or less, working as it should. It had been a delay only; his inspiration, his enterprise was sound. More than that, it was brilliant. He knew he was brilliant. And his brother knew it too.

He looked at the wooden fittings of the carriage’s interior. How were those contracts secured? Who was a wealthy man because of them? He should approach the rail companies himself. Just think of it: ticket offices, waiting rooms, lavatories - the railways teemed with places his wood carving could adorn. Oswald should be told that. Oswald was a fool. He too could be wealthy if only he could bring himself to admit his younger brother’s brilliance.

‘If you wouldn’t mind. Your leg.’

A lady in the carriage, reading trash, had found the fidgeting of Dr Allen’s leg irksome.

‘I do beg your pardon.’ He would have liked to treat her to a few days in the dark room, an ice bath, a clyster. Bloody hussy!

He would arrive at his brother’s shop unannounced, just as his brother had arrived at High Beach. This avoided being told by letter in advance that the journey was useless and accorded Matthew the advantage of a personal appeal.

By the time the train had stumbled into York, Matthew was tired, his mood had so quickly and so violently varied from the exultant to the enraged. And the sight of York made him feel sick, a town in which he had not distinguished himself, had made no reputation, had been imprisoned, and where people might remember him.

He smoothed his beard, his clothes, clasped his leather portfolio, and thrust himself out into its streets, walking quickly. As he lunged towards his target, he recited to himself the things that he should say, impressing himself once more with his commercial insight, his fragile but arguably quite real success.

Was that? No. He hurried past the man and turned into the street of his brother’s shop.Through the reflections on the glass, behind the ranked jars of pastilles, the bottles of Oswald’s useless tonics that compromised the prestige of Allen’s name, he glimpsed his brother’s bald head moving. He wiped his palms on his trousers, grasped the door knob, and woke the shop’s hysterical little bell with his entrance.

Oswald looked up, looked at him as Matthew struggled to smile, looked directly into his eyes and saw in his brotherly, intimate, presumptuous way Matthew’s purpose. He looked away and as he turned jars on the counter to align their labels precisely outwards said, ‘My renowned, respectable brother. But I have no fatted calf for your return . . .’

‘Oswald.’

‘I told you some time ago.’

‘Please, a moment.’

‘There is nothing I can do.’

‘No, no. It is good news really that I have . . .’

‘There is nothing . . .’

Matthew slapped the counter. He shocked himself with the noise and stared down at his bright shoes.

‘I have come a long way . . .’

‘There is nothing I can do.’

‘You’d send me to prison.’

‘I’m not sending you anywhere. There is nothing I can do.’

 

Matthew sat back in his chair, his book of imaginary numbers open before him. His eyes rested, unseeing, on the orrery by the window. He sank into a feeling of humiliation. It had an unclean warmth, like pissed-into bath water.The orrery slowly grew into his sight. When he noticed it, his thoughts swam away into philosophy.Those small globes on the end of the arms suspended in the vastness of space, in a total silence, and life, as far as man knew, on only one of those small globes, a mere dust adhering to its surface, and to what end? He achieved a deeply peaceful dejection, a sad smile on his face, thinking of man’s short squirming frenzy before entering the silence. He knew that chaos, that consequences would soon follow, so he took a careful pleasure in this time alone in his study, his neat figures drying on the ledger, the letter refolded, his last hope gone. So when the study door was flung open, Matthew Allen stood up immediately.

‘What is this I hear?’ Tennyson shouted. ‘What is this I hear?’

‘I don’t know,’ Matthew Allen answered. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me.’

‘I most certainly will.’Tennyson stood with his chin raised, head tilted, his hands in his hair, glaring down at the doctor. He was barely in control of himself, rage had so broken up his stillness, filled him with unfamiliar quickness and ferocity. He spoke with precision to keep it under control, holding on to his hair. ‘I have just spoken to my brother. He informed me, with some reluctance, as one with a horror of unnecessary suffering and disturbance, that some time ago you asked him for money, when all along it had been made perfectly clear to you that Septimus would not invest in your scheme.’

‘That is true. I did offer him the opportunity to involve some funds in our scheme in expectation of future . . .’

‘Because you were short of money. Because your imbecile machine is not making money. Meanwhile I am receiving letters from other members of my family anxiously enquiring after the dividends that should now be being paid.And from you there comes nothing, and more nothing.’

‘Please be calm.Allow me to show you my accounts.’ Now was the time for them, finally, after all the scrupulous work. Allen picked up the ledger and stepped towards the irate poet. Tennyson grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him back.

‘Enough talkee, talkee, as the niggers say. I don’t want to see your numbers. I want the first dividend to be paid. I have trusted you.You are into my family for eight thousand pounds and now you ask Septimus for a thousand more?’Tennyson was very strong. Allen, now hollowed by illness, hung from Tennyson’s hand as the big, dirty, wide-mouthed face bore down on him. He almost liked it, the cringe of fear in his genitals. He wanted to lean into the blast of his rage, to be purified by it, to be destroyed. ‘My father is dead,’ Tennyson was saying. ‘What we have invested is our inheritance and we appear to be losing it. For months you have flannelled and promised.’

‘Family money. That family that weighs you down. You might be grateful.’

‘What business is that of yours?’

‘You will get your money back and many times more. It just needs a little time.’

‘I thought you were out of the run of common men, not one of the herd. I trusted you. But evidently you are one of the herd, mutton-headed. Greasy and commercial and incapable.’

‘I’m not. Please let me go.’

‘Mercantile in spirit. Petty. A swindler.’ Tennyson shook the man with both hands. Allen clasped the ledger to his chest, his eyelids fluttering in the big man’s breath. ‘I’ll not let you ruin me, Matthew Allen. You will make good your debts to me, to all of us. Why, why have you done this?’

‘I haven’t. I won’t. I am your friend. Here, yes, here’s an idea: life insurance, on me, as an absolute guarantee.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of moneys returning to you.’

‘For which I’ll need you dead?’

 

Crusoe began to consider his position and the circumstances he was reduced to on the island. For clarity, he set good against evil like debtor and creditor, scribbling in his notebook, the pages crinkled by dried sea water.

Beeswax and lavender. It was the smell of the house that affected Hannah most strongly. The linens, the upholstery were fragrant with herbs and a dim, soothing aroma rose from the polished wood. In the vestibule, a potted hyacinth had cast its strong perfume, like a bright lamp’s light, into the air. The house may have been small, but it was wonderfully tight and tidy and quiet. The carpets were new, with a pattern that curled across deep red, and they stood up on the floorboards almost an inch tall.There was sunlight through the bay window where they sat and all the teacups steamed gold.

It was no surprise that Dora should excel as a wife, but the comfort Hannah felt was a surprise. She hadn’t thought she would like it so much. James was taking an evident pride in the respectable charms of his marital home, smiling to himself as things were admired. Dora was less at ease, vigilant of her siblings and tense for each part of the ceremony. She widened her eyes meaningfully when Fulton, having finished his piece of cake, sat back wiping his mouth with his napkin and inhaling deeply through his nose. Watching Dora try and chastise Fulton in silence made Hannah feel mischievous. She teased her older sister.