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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 (3 page)

BOOK: The Quickening Maze
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He stopped and looked down at this extravagance, but did not scratch it out.
I was brought to this hellhole by my father to prevent us marrying and still I remain here. I know that you are referring to my freedom from obligation, viz. my freedom from you. I needn’t tell you that to me that is no liberty at all. What is my freedom for, if I cannot have what I desire? It is a useless burden, if it can be said to exist at all . . .
Was He beyond the trees?
Of course He must be in them, through them, as they were His creation, but Margaret did not feel that. Having known Him in the actual live Spirit, she was no stickler for orthodoxy and knew what she knew. She felt Him infinitely behind the trees, behind matter, and the trees stood up as a guard, a brake. Their limbs reached into each other, preventing her, manufacturing darkness in the heart of the wood. No, not darkness - she must be proportionate, clear-minded to receive Him - but twilight. Their trivial falling leaves coloured the air.
She was a poor creature with sin’s stink on her and must sit and wait on the far side of unbearable distance. That distance was larger than any in the mere world alone. It was absolute. But there was comfort there: the distance was a sign of His mastery and power. The wall that separated them connected them also, joined them by separation. In her inmost nearness that distance touched her and hurt her and was itself a revelation of Him. It was something she could hang on to.
Margaret stretched a fresh piece of muslin across the frame and fixed it there. Several samplers were already piled on the small table of her room. Soon she would give them away. They were weak signals of the Truth, but she was soothed by making them, by the image of the cross forming starkly in front of her and the purring of the thread drawn through the cloth. It was a task that sealed her spirit in contemplation until she couldn’t hear the shouts of the mad or the weather, the branches grinding and clicking in the wind.
But how long would she have to wait? She might die. She might die and never know it again and be forgotten in darkness.
Margaret wondered if she should start to fast once more.
 
Alfred Tennyson screwed in his monocle, stooped and peered closely at the phrenological bust on top of Matthew Allen’s writing desk. He read a few of the labels on the glossy surface of the head that named the mental organs corresponding with that area. Amativeness.Agreeableness. Ideality.The whole bland, stereotyped human head was speckled with these faculties.
‘Ah, that, well,’ Matthew Allen, who was talking rapidly, changed the course of his speech as he saw his guest examining this medical ornament. ‘I’m increasingly of the opinion that these categories are by and large symbolical.There may be an overall right-ness of attribution, but I can’t say that in my clinical work I’ve found watertight correspondences.The map is useful, however, for keeping in mind the panoply of things to be considered.’
‘I had my bumps read once,’ Tennyson said. ‘And was not dazzled by any brilliance of analysis.The fellow rather overestimated my quantity of animal spirits, perhaps because I’m large and was with friends after a lunch where let’s say some wine was consumed.’
‘Indeed. Indeed, there are vulgar practitioners out there, in their hundreds now, but really they aren’t to be thought of. Vauxhall Gardens stuff.’
Matthew Allen looked round, wondering what to draw his guest’s attention to next. He felt excitable at the literary young man’s presence in his private study and was eager to impress upon him the range of his researches. He watched Tennyson relight his pipe, hollowing his clean-shaven cheeks as he plucked the flame upside down into the bowl of scorched tobacco.The head was massive and handsome undeniably, with a dark burnish to the skin. Behind the dome of the forehead, strongly suggestive of intellectual power, very promising poems were being formed. He was very different in appearance to poor little Clare, but the forehead was reminiscent. The poet had been right about himself - he did seem deficient in animal spirits. The case was not nearly so morbid as his brother Septimus’s, but Alfred Tennyson also moved slowly, as though through a viscous medium of thought, of doubt. Being so short-sighted might have exacerbated that, the world dim and untrustworthy around him.
As Matthew Allen stood diagnosing his guest, Tennyson now reached out and picked up a mineral sample. He brought it close to his monocle, saw its many metallic facets. It was a glittering tumble of right angles, little walls and roofs jutting out from each other like a town destroyed by an earthquake.
‘Iron pyrites,’ Allen explained. ‘I’ve many other samples you’ll see ranged around the room. My intention was, is still, to collect samples of every mineral to be found in the British Isles, but I have quite a few more to go. Chemistry was for a while a subject of mine. Here,’ Allen paced quickly across the rug to a shelf, ran a finger across spines until he found five slender identical volumes. He pulled one out. ‘My lectures on chemistry. I gave them in Scotland some years ago. Carlyle - do you know Carlyle? - Thomas Carlyle, he attended, as I recall. I knew him even back then in our Edinburgh days. Perhaps I could take you to Chelsea and introduce you.’
‘I’ve had the pleasure of making his acquaintance, and Jane’s, already.’
‘Oh, very good. Well then, perhaps we should visit together. It really is very straightforward now with the train at Woodford.’
Tennyson opened the volume that Allen handed to him. He read a line or two about the flow of the caloric from heated objects. He knew something of the theories from his own reading in the library at Somersby, shut away from the clamour of family and pets, with nothing to do but continue his education with as much self-discipline as he could muster. But he wouldn’t have dared pronounce on the subject. Evidently the doctor was a man of scope and capacity. And they had friends in common.
‘Caloric flow,’ he murmured as he surfaced from the book.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ the doctor enthused.‘My contention in this work, as elsewhere, is that there is behind the phenomenon of the caloric, behind all phenomena, a principal cause I nominate The Grand Agent.’
‘The Grand Agent.’
‘Yes. A common cause, a unitary force. There is a union through all things. Heat and light are manifestations, as are living organisms and their animal spirits.’
‘Energy. Thoughts.’
‘Yes, thoughts as well. Their energy - the flow of them.’
‘I see. A Spinozism, of sorts.’ And Tennyson did see: a white fabric, candescent, pure, flowing through itself, surging, charged, unlimited. And in the world the flourishing of forms, their convulsions: upward thrive of trees, sea waves, the mathematical toys of sea shells, the flight of dragonflies. It all changed constantly. ‘All the metamorphoses of living beings,’ Tennyson said, gesturing at the window with his pipe.
‘Precisely,’Allen said, beaming.‘The forest is a perfect example.’
The forest died into itself, growing, shapes fading, eaten, lengthening anew. Yes, yes. And thought, the unbreaking wave, constantly changing—colours, shapes, sinuously pouring towards the world, pulsing with language.
‘And unliving things, inorganic things have their energy also.’
‘My philosophical speculations tend to the same view,’ Tennyson went on.
‘Oh, that’s interesting. As a poet, you feel . . .’
‘As a boy,’Tennyson began, catching the enthusiasm, feeling released now beyond the polite chatter of acquaintances into the deep, the frictionless element of real thought. ‘As a boy I could put myself into a trance by repeating my name over and over until my sense of identity was quite dissolved. What I was then was a being somehow merging, or sustained, with a greater thing, truly vast. It was abstract, warm, featureless and frightful.’
‘The Grand Agent?’
‘Perhaps, perhaps. Well, certainly actually. I mean to say, if we’re right about this at all, then what else would it be?’
Dr Allen did not say ‘a mental phenomenon’. For a moment they simply smiled at each other. How remarkable and exhilarating to have found their deepest speculations reflected in the other, about the universe, about existence.
‘It would be nice,’ Allen said, ‘if we were able to talk some more. Are you now intending to stay?’
‘Oh, yes. I agreed to take the house yesterday.’
‘Oh, marvellous. Splendid. Well, no doubt you’ll be a great addition to Epping society, such as it is. And of course you’ll be near Septimus and that will be a great benefit to him.’
Tennyson inclined his head at the mention of his suffering brother. The blush of enthusiasm left him, dwindling down painfully to a small heat of embarrassment. That often came after too intense a disclosure of self with somebody; now it was made the more intense by the thought of Septimus. The wide line of his mouth hardened. Allen saw and sought to reassure him.
‘I’ve no doubt that Septimus has very fine prospects of recovery. Melancholy, you know, the English malady, what you will, is really quite tractable, I’ve found. Brightness of company, exercise, a familial atmosphere, an unbosoming of anxieties . . .’
‘Unbosoming?’
‘Yes, the disclosure of personal fears and unhappinesses. Often I find encouraging patients through a conversational, what shall we call it, memoir is terribly useful.’
Tennyson huffed out a big mouthful of uninhaled smoke. ‘So you’ll be hearing all about my family.’
‘Probably. But I make no certain inferences from the testimony of unhappy individuals. That really isn’t the point. At any rate, families, well . . .’ He smiled. ‘Nowhere more productive of mental difficulty. I attach no shame to coming from one. It is not a matter in which we generally have a choice.’
‘You’ll see. You’ll be mired in it. The black blood of the Tennysons.’
‘So there is a predisposition - to melancholy, or other disturbances? Very often . . .’
‘There are quieter barnyards. Somehow we don’t take life easily.’
‘Ah.’ Matthew Allen tilted his head and stood still, waiting to allow Tennyson to go on with what he was saying.
‘I accompanied my brother, you see, because I thought I might be entering your establishment myself. And now I’ve decided to stay in this area, this different atmosphere.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes.Away.Although these woods are rather gloomy.’
‘Oh, time of year. They blossom, you know, they put out green leaves.’
Tennyson, who had already filled the room with thickly drifting smoke, again relit his pipe.
‘There is no shame in encountering these difficulties. In some sense, quite the reverse. They argue a great mental power that is prone to exhaust itself, in creation, in your case, I would imagine. You know of other cases, I imagine, among poets.’
‘Of course. So. The price to be paid.’
‘But it needn’t be exorbitant.’ Allen smiled.‘I’m very pleased you’ve come to visit me here and have had a glimpse of my interests. I ought to spend more time on them. I suspect I’ve made the breakthroughs I will make in therapy for the insane. After that is the long work of practice, which tires after a while.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Oh, I’m committed to it, of course. But I feel the need for a new something, to research and create again. And of course, money is never not a concern, with a family, property.’
‘Oh, yes? I’ve no doubt you have the brain to find something.’
‘And to return to what we were saying earlier, I think it is unhelpful to specialise too strictly. One must have a broad range of intellectual activities if one is seeking unifying ideas. Bacon’s the man.’
‘Indeed? I have a Cambridge friend who is editing him. Perhaps I could arrange for you to meet.’
‘Well, that would be wonderful. Thank you,’ Allen said and rather fervently shook the young poet’s hand. ‘Actually, perhaps you will walk with me. I have a patient I must see.’
 
Seated by the window with their books piled ready, to pass the time Annabella sketched a bust of Hannah. They were waiting for Mademoiselle Leclair, their French tutor, who hardly seemed a mademoiselle. She was a dumpy spinster from somewhere in Picardy with a pale extensive face that ran mostly downhill from a long, white nose.The girls were too old for this tuition, but continued on improving themselves as they prepared for marriage. Mademoiselle Leclair knew that the classes were a genteel diversion and her manner was kind and encouraging, always patient with the girls’
bêtises
. Hannah often felt ashamed when she noticed her thick shoulders or the sour warmth of her breath as she read.
Not that Hannah Allen was entirely pleased with her own appearance. On the whole, she passed: she was slender, fair-haired; her bosom was decent. Smaller than her sister Dora’s, it was also lighter, less motherly. Her pallor, however, was just the far side of attractive. Of course, it was from her Scottish ancestry and that gave it welcome, even enviable associations of Byron and Scott, but the whiteness of her face made her lips look a little bloody. Also her teeth, which were really a perfectly normal colour, looked yellowish in contrast. Her eyelashes were blond. Her eyebrows looked like summer wheat.
Hannah felt a tingling at Annabella’s scrutiny, the flicker of her gaze over her as she drew. She watched Annabella’s dark eyes lift from the page and meet her own, then realised their gazes hadn’t quite met: Annabella stared impersonally at some portion of Hannah’s face. Annabella was herself unequivocally beautiful, really exquisite, and to a degree that made Hannah puzzle over precisely what it comprised, what made someone beautiful. Beauty was so fugitive and variable in so many people and among her father’s patients she’d seen many an example of it extinguished, distorted or reversed, but there in Annabella it sat and stayed all day. She was always beautiful. Her complexion was lovely, with just the right susceptibility to blushes. Her eyes were large and dark. her lips were full, particularly the lower one, and they were always like that without any arrangement or pouting on Annabella’s part. If Hannah had been a man, she was sure that she would have wanted to kiss her. It was her neck that decisively elevated her up out of the realm of normal good looks. It was long, slender, and curved gracefully up from her shoulders. Fine curls of her dark hair, escaping from its pins, rested on her nape. The sight of them made Hannah feel tender towards Annabella, as though she were a child, but also sensual. If she’d been anything other than negligent of her appearance, almost oblivious to it, she would have been unbearable. As it was, her great power of beauty was only ever noticeable in her effect on other people, never in her. She was Hannah’s true and best friend, and had been since they were little girls, since the Allens had moved to Epping. Annabella lived in a calm, small house in the forest not far from Hannah’s own. Her father was a magistrate, a respectable man to whom Matthew Allen had paid his respects on arriving. Discovering the pretty, demure child of Hannah’s age, he’d encouraged them together and since then they’d gone on growing upwards, twining together. Hannah had already confided in Annabella the news of Mr Alfred Tennyson’s arrival.
BOOK: The Quickening Maze
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