The Quickening Maze (5 page)

‘Such effusions, as you call them, rural effusions, are no longer to the public’s taste.’

‘Perhaps you would allow me to assay for you? I’d be happy to write to a few literary connections of mine for magazine publication.’

‘I wouldn’t expect anything to come of it,’ said Clare, wary of the painful heat of hope that could flare inside him.

‘I’ll take it upon myself. It won’t be a trouble to you.’

‘I suppose there’s no harm . . .’

‘Excellent. Why not? Productions such as yours should not be confined to a dusty drawer in a hospital. I shall get you that key, if you’ll follow me.’

‘Thank you, doctor.’

 

John set off immediately with the key in his hand. Peter Wilkins smiled at John with his watery eyes and reached for his own key, but John lifted up his. Peter Wilkins straightened. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You’ve a key. Good to see, John, good to see.’

John was embarrassed at this congratulation, but warmed at it anyway. He tried to mask its effect, responding with a bluff, countryish,‘And the weather’s fair.’

‘You have a good walk, now,’ the old man said after him. ‘It lifts me up to see it.’

John raised a hand in farewell as he struck out along the path, past the familiar forms of the nearby trees, out to the strangers that grew hidden for miles around. Ferns, dying back with the season, stood frazzled between them. There was no song, just a few notes seeping from overhead as he passed and the quiet birds warned each other. A blackbird, frisking through the fallen leaves, bounced up away from his feet, settled on a low branch and twittered alarm, staring fiercely back at him.

John studied the bird’s daffodil-yellow beak, sharp as tweezers, its neat handsome black head, and absorbed the stare from its glinting round eye. Doing so he heard a human shout. He walked on, away from the noise, but was deceived by the forest’s maze of echoes and came right upon one of the patients barefoot on moss and leaves, his shoes discarded, sweating and gesticulating. When he saw John he started towards him, his face raw with rage, but two attendants were with him. One sprang up from a log on which they were playing with a pack of old, bent cards, and raised his arms. The lunatic pretended not to see him, but stopped where he was.

‘Move on there,’ the attendant told John. It was Stockdale. ‘Move on. No harm done. Had a bit of a morning, that one. Don’t fret yourself.’ The other attendant, whom John didn’t quite recognise, smiled through his pipe smoke.

John hurried on, removing his hat, wiping out the brim dampened by sudden fear, and setting it firmly back on his head.

After some yards, he lifted his gaze from the loosely matted leaves, the prickly star-shapes of beech-nut shells, and the roots that ribbed the path. He looked up again and saw the glaring, hooked darkness of holly bushes, the long whips and shabby leaves of brambles beneath them. He picked a blackberry and ate it: so tart it made his palate itch.

He walked on. He found a rotting trunk covered in fungus, rippling lines of livid yellow Jew’s ears eating away at the softened wood. Listening to what? He looked at them closely, their whorls, the wash of colour across them that went in waves or rings, pinkish towards the outer edge.

And there at one end of the log was scattered evidence that it was used as a thrush’s anvil. On the flattest part of the trunk a bird had brought snails and with them in its beak, whipping its neck back and forth, had smashed them open. Smithereens of spiral shell, some with a frail foam of mucus still on them, made a constellation that John swirled with his fingertip.

But he couldn’t touch Mary, he remembered - the sweetest of his two wives, the lost child who loved him, so near in his thoughts he could reach out and touch her. ‘Mary,’ he crooned to himself. Time’s walls were the strangest prison. He couldn’t touch them or bloody his head against them, but they surrounded him without a gap, and kept him from his loves, from home, lost in a wood miles away from them. He stood up. ‘Mary,’ he said. ‘O Mary. O Mary. O Mary sing thy songs to me.’ He dug in his pockets: his pipe, a pebble, a square of paper and bit of old pencil. He sat down again, removed his hat, flattened the paper over its crown and wrote,

After a spell there he had a new poem written on both sides of the paper, and then across for lack of room. He sat feeling whole for a moment, his mind serene and extensive, running through the poem, humming it. The wood surrounded him, its arms upraised, meeting the light. A fine rain had started to stutter onto branches and leaves.

Another poem, among thousands. It was comfortable to have them come singly, not streaming out in a fever. His flash company that had been the ruin of him quite. He remembered with a clench of his bowels his friends in the village avoiding him so as not to find themselves in a poem they couldn’t read and that brought the visiting strangers.
Is it true, as I have heard, that you rustics perform the conjugal act in your pig sties?
Still, it would please Dr Allen, he reflected. Another ornament to his thoroughly respectable establishment of lunatics.

John walked on, passing charcoal burners sitting inside their huts, ancient things of poles walled with cut turf, old as any dwelling probably. They had to spend days out there, making sure the fires didn’t catch, but slowly ate down to coal the wood piled under covers. The smoke that rose was sweet, much sweeter than at the lime kilns where John had worked off and on. He saw them look up and stare out of their darkness and risked a greeting doffing of his hat, but they didn’t move.

Then, half a mile away, in a clearing there were vardas, painted caravans, tethered horses, and children, and a smoking fire. A little terrier caught the scent of John and stood with its four feet planted, leaning towards him, as if in italics, to bark. An old woman seated near the fire, a blanket around her shoulders, looked up. John didn’t move or say anything.

‘Good day to you,’ she said.

‘Good day,’ John answered, and then to let her know he knew them, was a friend, said, ‘Cushti hatchintan.’

She raised her eyebrows at that. ‘It is. It is a good spot. You rokkers Romany then, do you?’

‘Somewhat, I do. I was often with the gypsies near my hatchintan, in Northamptonshire. We had many long nights. They taught me to fiddle their tunes and such. Abraham Smith, and Phoebe. You know them?’

‘We’re Smiths here, but I don’t know your crew. I haven’t been into that county, or had them here. This is a good spot,’ she raised an arm to gesture at it. ‘Plenty of land and no one pushing you off it. And the forest creatures, lots of hotchiwitchis to eat in winter. This is one commons that don’t seem to be getting ate up.’

John shook his head and answered as one weary elder to another. ‘It’s criminal what is nominated law now. Theft only, taking the common land from the people. I remember when they came to our village with their telescopes to measure and fence and parcel out. The gypsies then were driven out. The poor also.’

One of the children ran over to the old lady and whispered in her ear, watching John. The others stood apart like cats, eyes among the branches. The terrier that had warned of John’s coming now jogged over to join the children’s conspiracy.

The old woman spoke. ‘He thinks you might be a forest constable or a gamekeeper who might not be keen on us here.’

Wanting very much to stay in this comfortable loose nest of a place, with the free people, John declared himself. ‘I’m homeless myself, sleeping nearby. And often I’ve been arrested by gamekeepers.’ This was true: he’d often been mistaken for a poacher as he skulked and wrote his poems, a man with no reason to be in that place but being there.

‘What’s your name?’

‘John. John Clare.’

‘Well, I’m Judith Smith. I take you as an acceptable man, John Clare, pale and lorn, albeit well fed, whoever you are. I smell the wrong in men, crosswise intentions, and I don’t smell that in you, with your foolish open face. I’m known for my duckering, and my predictions have proved most accurate, most accurate.’

‘I know many ballads. I can sing, if you like.’

Judith Smith laughed and pulled a twig from the fire to light her pipe.‘Later, if you like when the others get back. Quick at making friends, ain’t I? The chavvies are fearful, but they’ll simmer down.’

John looked round at the children, four or five of them keeping their distance, as the one who’d whispered to her sprinted back to them.

‘Chavvies ought to be fearful,’ John said. ‘It might save them now and again.’

‘It’s possible. Will you sit, then? You can keep the yog going till we’ve something to cook. That’s why they’s worrying. Fellers have gone off to get something to eat, you see, and they don’t want it ruined.’

‘Quite right,’ John said.

So John sat beside her and poked the fire, turning its sticks to keep it burning while the chavvies gradually lost their fear and ran over to sprinkle dry leaves on, waiting for the ones that caught and lifted on wandering, pirouetting flights that drifted at times excitingly towards them.The old woman offered John a wooden pipe to smoke, its stem dented with yellow tooth marks, but he showed her his own. He drew whistling sour air through it to check it would draw, then filled it from a twist of tobacco she had. That wrapper of old newspaper was probably the only bit of printed matter in the place and John smiled to see it put to good use, its smudged words unread, its sharp voices sounding in nobody’s mind. He lit his pipe with a burning twig. They talked about the weather and the plants. Long silences between thoughts were filled with the sound of the fire and the ceaseless sound of wind through the branches, bird flights, scurryings.

Younger women emerged from the caravans - they must have been hiding there the whole time - and John made himself known to them. They seemed less certain of his presence than Judith Smith, offering the bare bones of greetings as they went about their business, rinsing pots, gathering more wood for the fire, smacking dirt from the chavvies’ clothes. John liked the brisk, free, tumbled life around him and watched it affectionately as the fire grew ruddier against the weakening light.

The men’s voices returned a few minutes before they did. By then the fire had been enlarged and pots arranged. As the voices approached, the children stopped burying each other in leaves and even pushed their hair back out of their faces. The dog, frantic, barked and ran in tight circles to bark again. It ran off to meet the men and returned ahead of the party with a few rangy lurchers and a blurring number of other terriers.

When John saw the men and the deer slung between two of them, covered in a blanket but still obvious, he knew what all the caginess had been about. He stood up immediately to introduce himself. ‘I’m John Clare, a traveller, and always a friend of the gypsies. I bring cordial greetings from Abraham and Phoebe Smith of Northamptonshire.’

‘He’s a good fellow,’ Judith attested.‘Knows the plants and cures as well as we do. He must’ve been long with those Smiths because he knows all our names for them.’

The foremost man made a decision as quick as Judith’s had been. He answered with the formality of a man speaking for his tribe. ‘S’long as you are no friend of the gamekeepers and don’t fall to talking with them you’re welcome among us, John Clare. My name is Ezekiel.’

So John was let stay and watched the men, who didn’t seem in any way encumbered by thoughts of transportation and a life of whippings at Botany Bay as they dismantled the deer.

He watched with great pleasure the skill of the men, their knives quick as fish. They said nothing, only the work made noises, knockings on joints, wet peelings, the twisting crunch of a part disconnected.

First, a trench was dug to receive and hide the blood and the deer was hung from a branch upside down above it. With sharpened knives they slit it quickly down the middle and found the first stomach. Very carefully one man cut either side of it, and knotted the slippery tubes to keep the gut acid from the meat. This made something like a straw-stuffed cushion, filled with undigested herbage.

Then the forelimbs were cut through to the precise white joints and removed. After loosening work with a knife, the skin was pulled from the deer. It peeled away cleanly with a moist sucking sound, leaving dark meat and bones beneath a sheeny blue underskin. As they did all this, the men had to kick at the dogs that were crowding round the trench to lap at blood.

The gullet was separated and the weasand was drawn from the windpipe.They cleared the chest of its entrails. The heart and lungs were snicked out and placed in a bowl, then the long rippled ropes of the intestines were hauled out and dropped into the trench.Working from the back, the chuck, saddle and loin portions were removed from the ribcage and spine in one piece, both sides together like a bloody book the size of a church Bible. They were then cut into pieces, some of which were sliced and spitted immediately over the fire. Other parts were taken away by the women.Then the neck was stripped of meat. The deer looked odd now with its whole furred head and antlers hanging down, its skeleton neck and body, and its breeches of flesh still on. Those too were now removed, divided, and packed. The ribs were sawn through, and all of them were split and set over the fire. The deer now was clean. Its skeleton faintly glowed in the dusk, its sorrowful head merged with the shadows. Another pit was dug and the skeleton was placed inside it, curled around like a foetus. The earth was replaced, leaves and twigs dragged over to hide the spot.

The dogs jostled round the other trench in a cloud of flies. John could hear the knocking of their empty jaws and short huffing breaths. With the smell of the venison rising in the smoke, John’s own hunger became acute and his guts let out a long crooning grumble like a pigeon’s note. Beer was poured and drunk and soon the air was splashy with talk and voices. John didn’t join in very much, but listened to the flow and switch of it, hearing Romany words he’d almost forgotten he knew.