The Quickening Maze (6 page)

Handed his first rib, John was told, ‘Blood on your hands, my friend.You’re our accomplice now.’The meat was delicious, charred muscle to tear at and smooth soft fat.There was no harm in eating the deer, to John’s mind: they kept themselves; there were many in the forest.They flowed unnumbered through the shadows.

Afterwards there was more drink and music while bats, in their last flights of the year, flickered overhead. John proved his claim to know their music when he accepted a fiddle from them. He played Northamptonshire tunes and gypsy tunes. He played one that circled like a merry-go-round and lifted them all smiling on its refrain. He played a tune that reached out and up, branching into the trees. He played a tune that was flat and lonely as the fens, cold as winter mist. He played one for Mary. After he’d played, there was singing, John listened to the strong joined voices, adding his own notes of harmony, and his mind’s eye swept back to see them all in the middle of the darkened forest, in the circle of firelight, the bloody-muzzled dogs lying outstretched beside their hard-packed bellies. The people made a well of song; it surged up from eternity into that moment, a source. He lay back, really overwhelmed, and saw stars through the almost bare branches. He closed his eyes and lay there in the middle of the world, denied his wives, his home, but accompanied and peaceful.

Eventually the singing stopped and a little while after that he felt a blanket placed over him. He opened his eyes to see the rosy fire still breathing at the heart of white sticks. An owl cried its dry, hoarse cry and the bats still scattered their tiny beads of sound around him. He loved lying in its lap, the continuing forest, the way the roots ate the rot of leaves, and it circled on. To please himself, to decorate his path into sleep, he passed through his mind an inventory of its creatures. He saw the trees, beech, oak, hornbeam, lime, holly, hazel, and the berries, the different mushrooms, ferns, moss, lichens. He saw the rapid, low foxes, the tremulous deer, lone wild cats, tough, trundling badgers, the different mice, the bats, the day animals and night animals. He saw the snails, the frogs, the moths that looked like bark and the large, ghost-winged moths, the butterflies: orange tips, whites, fritillaries, the ragged-winged commas. He recounted the bees, the wasps. He thought of all the birds, the drumming woodpeckers and laughing green woodpeckers, the stripe of the nuthatch, the hook-faced sparrowhawks, the blackbirds and the tree creeper flinching up the trunks of trees. He saw the blue tits flicking between branches, the white flash of the jay’s rump as it flew away, the pigeons sitting calmly separate, together in a tree. He saw the fierce, sweet-voiced robin. He saw the sparrows.

And just before he fell asleep, he saw himself, his head whole, his body stripped down to a damp skeleton, placed gently, curled around, in a hole in the earth.

 

John woke with one side of his face tingling. He opened his eyes and found that it wasn’t the numbness, but a light rain pattering down onto him; with almost inaudible thumps it fell also into the soft ashes of the exhausted fire. Beyond that, wet trees gleamed.

He pulled the blanket up over his face and soon his breath made a warm, sleepy pocket under the coarse wool.

John woke again to people moving, dogs stretching. Judith, puffing with bellows into a new fire, smiled.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘To that place away up the road?’ she asked. He nodded. He had suspected that she would have guessed. ‘Don’t see why you have to be there myself,’ she said. ‘Anyone who plays the fiddle like that.’

‘Thank you.’ He stood, shook out and folded his blanket, then, not wanting to give her anything to do by handing it to her, placed it back on the ground where he’d slept.

‘We’ll be here the winter most likely, so if you want to come back . . .’

‘Thank you,’ he said again. ‘I will, if I can.’ He raised his voice to address anyone near. ‘Thank you. I have to go now.’

‘After a bit of food,’ Judith suggested.

‘Thanks, I’m full enough for a while.’

John hurried away or tried to. First he had to shake hands with all the children who’d run to make a ring around him.

The sun was still low and he reckoned it to be early, perhaps early enough to slip back in unnoticed. The charcoal burners weren’t at their hut. He passed a bird-catcher with two cages swinging from his pole, on his way to London where song was needed.The morning’s catch of finches flew against the narrow bars. The catcher tilted his hat. John did the same and when he’d passed him shook his head at the gross symbol, refusing the easy poem he was offered.

He was back at the gate before Peter Wilkins. With his own key, he let himself back in. He trudged up the path to Fairmead House and was almost in when Matthew Allen stepped out.

He saw John - he couldn’t not, they were barely three feet apart - and looked disappointed.

‘John, this is very bad,’ he began and John felt anger suddenly buckle inside him, with no possible release. He had done wrong and he knew it and had now to submit to being reprimanded like a child. He tried answering like a child.

‘I got lost.’

‘Did you?’

‘In the dark. I walked too far.’

Matthew Allen looked at him, sucked at his moustache. John looked back, then down. There was a moment of stalemate before Allen said, ‘It absolutely must not happen again. Can you assure me of that?’

‘I won’t walk that far, doctor. And I’ll pay more mind to where I am. I was composing was maybe part of the trouble.’

‘Ah, yes, John. After our conversation I collected a few poems from your room. To send to editors.’ Matthew Allen blinked a few times, perhaps not quite sure of the decency of this invasion.

John saw this,but didn’t mind;he welcomed the chance to even the advantage. ‘Oh, did you?’ he said casually to heat any embarrassment there might be in the doctor. ‘As I was saying,’ John went on, ‘I was composing yesterday. A poem to my wife, Mary. It’s fine I think. I can write it up for you fair to go with the others you took.’

Matthew Allen shook his head. ‘John, we’ve talked about this.You know that Mary is not your wife. She was your childhood sweetheart. A child, John, a girl of what nine or ten? Patty is your wife, and I know she finds this fixed idea of yours most distressing.’

‘No,’ John said. ‘No, I am well acquainted with the truth.’ He knew also that what was law and what was natural were not the same thing. ‘Mary is my wife. And so’s Patty. Just because a thing hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean it can’t. And anyway it has occurred, in the Bible.’

 

Hannah had offered to take Abigail for a walk. As they’d set out, she’d confused the child by turning her from the usual route, on this occasion, towards Beach Hill House.

Abigail preferred walking with her mother, who took more of an interest in what she picked up, pretty stones or feathers. Hannah’s attention was elsewhere, across and away somewhere, not down with Abigail, and she walked too quickly. Abigail caught her sleeve and leaned her whole weight back over her heels to slow her sister, but she was pulled forward into a trot.

‘I hope you’re planning to behave,’ Hannah said, ‘or I shall take you straight back.’

Hannah’s angrily swishing legs marched ahead. Abigail chased after, then her sister suddenly stopped.

‘Why have we stopped?’ she asked. ‘Stopped the wrong way?’

‘Shh, Abi. I’m thinking.’

‘But what are you thinking?’

‘Shh.’

Hannah stood and looked at the house where he was living, set behind its own large pond and lawn. Formerly of no significance, this place was now charged and thrilling as a beehive. She stood up on her tiptoes to see more.Taking a few paces up like a ballet dancer to bring a hidden corner of the garden into view, she saw him. It must have been him. Such a tall man, his back turned to her, standing still, in a thick cloud of his own manufacture, wearing that cape. She stood as still as she could, her heartbeats strong enough to unsteady her, absolutely at the edge of her life. Something had to happen soon. It had to.

Abigail, bored and frustrated, ran into her with both arms outsretched and shoved at her bottom.

‘Don’t,’ Hannah span round and hissed. She caught hold of Abigail’s hand and tugged the child towards her. Abigail saw her sister’s face, bright with a flush of anger, swooping towards her. Her lips were trembling. She looked very ugly like that. Abigail tried to free herself from Hannah’s grasp, but Hannah shook her arm hard, standing up and looking away again.

Uncertainly postured between cringing out of sight and standing up tall to see, Hannah tried to ascertain whether Alfred Tennyson had heard the commotion. As she did so she felt the warm wetness of Abigail’s small mouth close around her wrist and her little cat’s teeth bite in. She couldn’t help it, she cried out and definitely now Tennyson had heard. She bobbed up and saw his large shape turning. She ducked and ran, dragging a wailing Abigail after her. When they returned and had calmed down she could bribe the child with a chip of sugar not to tell.

 

Alfred Tennyson did not try to comfort or even make contact with his brother, Septimus, sitting beside him. When he had tried, the little hits of familial concern seemed to hurt him, and he’d shrink away, raising a hand and trying, horribly, to smile. Instead, Tennyson stretched his long legs in front of him in a casual manner he permitted himself while the patients were still arriving but would be corrected when the evening prayers began.

He looked vaguely towards Mrs Allen who played the organ, actually rather well. Her pale daughter, so thin and restless she flickered in his field of blurred vision, turned the pages. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound. It rose in regular crests of force as the treadle pump cycled air through the pipes and Tennyson saw the ridged sound abstractly, thought of the sea, of Mablethorpe, the heavy, low waves and hardened undulations of the sand after the tide had withdrawn.Words began.
Waves. Rocks. Lashed
. Or
felt. Waters that feel the scraping rocks, scourging rocks. Waters that feel the scourging rocks as they rush.That feel the sharp rocks as they rush.

Margaret watched the other poor souls take their seats to pray and again did not know what to think. She suspected that nothing there could be real, that when the doctor preached his watery sermons the Presence would swerve away, offended. She would. But then she lacked compassion, hating human weakness, so when they prayed was she the only one cut off, bogged down in sin, while the others prayed purely and were heard? God pitied them. And why pity her who was pitiless? She’d never liked the complications of joined prayer, all the human interference and distraction. She could only find her way alone. And in that solitude a part of her suspected she was lost, cut off, adrift.

They all started singing now, all upright. John Clare stood and added his voice to the compound of mad voices without much fervour. Seated beside the fire, he was distracted by its blustering heat.The attendants sang evenly, watchfully. One of the idiots sang very loudly but Simon beside him sang without noise, just opening and closing his lips while he rubbed at his left eye. Clara, the witch, never sang. She stared around and tried, when people looked back at her, to laugh to herself.

After they’d all stumbled down the short step of the two notes for ‘Amen’, Dr Allen patted them back into their seats with gently flapping hands and began this evening’s sermon.

This was the seventh of his addresses on the Beatitudes and he cleared his throat before pronouncing, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.’ He felt splendidly paternal and sincere when he gave his sermons, looking out over his flock of patients, their stricken eyes latched onto him. He sensed his wife seated behind him at the organ, saw three of his children seated before him. Fulton had his hair combed differently, somehow, perhaps in the opposite direction to usual, and this made him seem independently attentive, his own man, making his own decisions, and voluntarily there, voluntarily following his father into medicine. Dora, the quietest of his children, well matched with her betrothed, appeared to be trying to stop Abigail kicking her legs under the seat. Among the others, George Laidlaw’s gaze was particularly direct. He waited each day for the evening prayers; they brought him his only short hours of relief from the terrors of the National Debt for which his mind told him he was solely responsible.

Dr Allen enumerated several categories of peacemakers, among them those who bring an end to wars and discord. But there were other kinds of peacemakers, those who bring an end to the bitter strife of internal discord. Margaret knew that he meant himself and scorned his weakness for saying it. She almost pitied him the affliction of his vanity. Friends are such peacemakers, he went on, who bring peace through calm and the nourishing atmosphere of affection. It is not only those we know as peacemakers - curates, ambassadors, doctors - who bring these resolutions, then, but all of us, in our fellowship.

John knew what would bring him peace: his wives, Mary and Patty. Peace would have been lying beneath an oak with them on either side in a sweet, heavy smell of grass, the sun warm on them, thick curds of summer cloud moving slowly over. He turned from the sight of Matthew Allen rocking up onto his toes with each commonplace preacher’s phrase that pleased him, and stared into the fire. His thoughts began picking up uncomfortable speed as he looked and realised that those were particular logs being consumed, logs from particular trees burning with particular flames in that exact place at that specific hour and it would only ever occur once in the history of the world and that was now. Birds had landed on them, particular birds, and creatures had crawled across them, light had revolved around them, winds swayed them, unique clouds passed over them, and they would be ashes in the morning. There was so little time. He needed to be free with his wives in each living day, not consuming them here. Forked or foliate, the flames themselves were as singular as the trees, eternal and vanishing in quick snaps.