Read The Quickening Maze Online

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 (9 page)

BOOK: The Quickening Maze
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‘You’re forgetting the wedding.’
‘So I am.’The wedding. For which he needed money.
 
Nobody wanted to play. Abigail’s attentions slid off her father. She clambered up his legs, received a quick flinch of a smile, and was handed down again. Even her trick of folding his ear so that the top bendy part touched the bottom bendy part only resulted in a stubborn horse’s shake of the head and a reprimand for disturbing his papers, which she hadn’t done in her opinion. He apologised when she told him, even smiled at her, and pressed a firm, furry kiss to her forehead, but after that he sent her away.
Hannah wasn’t anywhere to be found and her mother was little better, talking tediously with Dora. Abigail pulled at her mother’s skirts and was firmly disengaged. Her mother then fetched her outdoor clothes, fitted her into them, deafening Abigail as she fastened her hat, and ushered her out to run around in the gardens.
Snow. Fresh snow that covered the gaps in the old snow and shone evenly everywhere. Abigail squinted at the hard bounce of bright light, breathed the sparkling, almost painful air. She ran a little way to stamp her footprints, looked back at them, continued onto the lawn, which gave way differently under her so that she stumbled, whitening her knees and mittens. She tasted the snow on her palms: a nothing taste, but full of an unnameable big thing, full of distance, full of the sky. Quickly it soaked through the wool and chilled her skin. She rubbed her hands on her coat and set off running again - she’d remembered the water pump by Fairmead House.
Yes, there were! There were icicles hanging from its nose.They were smooth at the top and tapered down, with bulges, like a pea pod, to a stopped drop round as a glass bead. She snapped one off and sucked it, holding it along her tongue until she could drink its melt.
The idiot Simon found her there. He looked padded and enormous in his coat, gloves and hat pulled down tight. Abigail showed him the icicles and he snapped one off as well. It darted out of his grasp and he had to pick it up from the snow to eat it. ‘Cold,’ he said.
‘Shall we make a snowman?’ Abigail asked.
Simon shook his head.
‘Oh, please. Oh, please.’
Simon shook his head again. ‘Do a cat,’ he said.
So together they rolled two balls that peeled up the snow from the ground, one big and one small. Simon set the small one on top of the larger. With soaked hands that itched and tingled and that she shook when they were too cold, Abigail helped to make the triangular ears to put on top. But then Simon wouldn’t let her do any more; he had to be in charge of everything. He tried to put the last three icicles in for whiskers, but that was uneven and anyway they stuck straight out and, after pauses, dropped off. Abigail didn’t think it looked much like a cat in the end, more like a snowman with silly ears.
 
When Matthew Allen had the idea he stood up out of his chair. Was it workable? Of course it was workable. Hadn’t he read of similar? All the elements of it were there, scattered through journals and treatises and out in the world, before his very eyes, hidden in plain sight. All of a sudden they had flown together in his mind, bolted together in this singular, hotly alloyed, all-solving thought. His body clenched with excitement, as though gripping the thought inside him so as not to lose it. Then he applauded the ramifications, the social aspect, the spiritual, the financial, the end to boredom, actually clapped his hands. Yes, indeed. He couldn’t possibly keep still, so skipped off for a walk.Without hat or coat he left his study and stepped out into the white morning.
The world was sharply displayed. Frost on the lawn, each and every blade of grass, each single one of them crusted with crystals. It creaked underfoot, fracturing. He pressed down, crushed and dissolved the ice with each step and left behind footprints - he looked back at them - of mineral green, of wet malachite. He rubbed his hands and laughed as he walked. There they were, the trees, beautiful friends, out there all this time, waiting to receive him. Ranks of lean footmen, they awaited his instructions. Their leafless twigs bounced responsively in the wind in front of a scratched, white sky. In one of them small birds, titmice, swapped their places, switching back and forth, then flew off together in a pretty wave of panic. His eye followed them and saw a hunched, short figure walking towards him from Fairmead House. He knew that gait, the weight carried low around the hips, the strides balanced and forthright, the shoulders held tensely up to carry the burdensome head. John Clare.
John approached the doctor who looked remarkably animated, without overcoat or hat, dancing on the spot to keep warm, blowing warmth over his hands and intermittently smiling. Perhaps he had the good news he’d been yearning for, despising himself for wanting it, but unable to prevent the painful increase of hope.
‘Good morning, doctor.’
‘Yes, indeed. It is, it is. Beautiful morning.’ He inhaled theatrically through quivering arched nostrils. The air entered his head and chest in delightful lengths of chilly clarity. He felt very tall and awake.
‘Do you have something for me?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I mean, has anything come for me from, you know . . . ?’
‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I actually do. A letter arrived for you yesterday, but I didn’t see you. Here it is.’ Allen reached into his jacket pocket. ‘I don’t know who it’s from.’
John took the letter. No sender’s address on the back. ‘Are you not cold?’ he asked when he looked up again. The doctor had his hands tucked into his armpits, was jiggling his legs.
‘Yes, I suppose I am. Shall we go inside, have some tea, perhaps?’
Inside, Dr Allen led the way to the kitchen, John trundling after in his wake. Allen shooed the cook and her girls out of the way and set about making tea himself, humming as he popped open the caddy, unhooked cups from the shelf. John sat down at the table, clasped his hands with the letter between them, and looked towards the girls huddled against one wall, talking from the corners of their mouths. He wanted to make some sign of his being one of them. By his posture he tried to demonstrate this, holding himself tightly in place, an awkwardly wrapped parcel of a man carried in and left there. But they wouldn’t meet his gaze. No, they could barely see him. This wasn’t how it used to be: the times he’d been embarrassed by the clumping of his hob-nailed boots on the polished floors of his noble patrons, an unlikely prodigy invited across the divide for conversation and inspection, then delivered to the servants’ quarters to be fed before he walked back to his cottage. Then, he’d felt the muscles of his face, stiff from smiling, relax as he chewed bread and bacon, allowed to forget himself as he listened to their conversation. But he wasn’t a country man any more, or even a poet.What they saw, if they saw him at all, was one of the doctor’s patients, a madman.
Ignoring them now, he opened the letter.
Most esteemed poet, Mr John Clare,
Like you I am a simple man, outwardly at least. I hope that you will forgive my great temerity in addressing you. Be assured I do not take up my pen without trepidation!
I am a labouring man of the county of Dorset. I make my living as a farmhand as you yourself did if I’m not much mistaken, but this is not the end of my story. For many years I have had a strong predilection for the heavenly art of poetry and have worshipped at the Muses’ temple. Some have been kind enough to say that my own efforts are not without merit, even genius . . .
Nothing. No help, no response from the literary world that had turned its back on him, cast him off to die in the wilderness. John skimmed down to the familiar request for assistance, and would he be good enough to cast his ‘terrible eye’ over the enclosed efforts? Might one of his friends, sympathetic to rural versing, be interested in publishing one of them?
‘Tea,’ Dr Allen said, handing John a cup.
John crumpled the letter into his pocket - later he’d watch it blacken and curl on a fire - while the doctor remained standing, drinking quickly.
‘Is there any news, perhaps?’ John asked. ‘Of those poems of mine that you’d sent to friends of yours?’
‘Oh. Ah, yes.Yes, I’m sorry. It had quite slipped my mind.’ John watched the doctor wrestle that persistent smile from his lips and knew that the answer would not be good. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it seems that you were correct in your supposition that your type of genius is no longer the fashion. That fashion should have anything to do with such matters, of course, can only be deprecated in the strongest terms, but there are phases, I suppose . . .’
The doctor’s high spirits now flowed into a disquisition on recent trends in literary taste while John, whose cup of tea was now an unwanted encumbrance, began composing loudly in his mind a reply to E. Higgins Esq. that would tell him precisely what he should know.
. . . under no circumstances entrust the least of hopes . . . changeable whims . . . estrange you from your fellows . . . took from me my peace of mind, my native country, my wives . . .
It was still dark when Margaret awoke. She lay still for a moment, eyes open and dry, holding the upper edge of the bed clothes, discerning before she moved the soft grey outlines of her room.
The world is a room full of heavy furniture. Eventually you are allowed to leave.
She felt her own Silent Watcher lying there inside her.That was what she called it, the thing that watched it all happen, that wanted her to live and sometimes let that be known, but could do nothing about it. It observed only, from deep behind her eyes. It had watched her husband’s wet eyes as they bore down on her and had watched that time he made her eat rotten meat, already blue and green and stinking, iridescent with decay. It had watched and remembered that, and watched when he locked her in the outhouse. And watched when she took to spending days in the parish church and liked the calm safety in there.
She raised herself out of bed and released a quiet flow into her chamber pot. She walked over to her basin of water and broke its frail covering of ice. She undid the strings at her neck and lifted off her night-gown. She stood then naked and unable to see herself in the gloom, her body a shadow that held her from the floor. She picked up cold water and dropped it over her head and neck. It fell on her like blades. She loved the winter, the purity of its punishment, and the purity of being awake before the rest, a single candle burning. Her husband had been always there, doubling her, filling the lucid emptiness, and he could never stand the cold, swearing and stamping, whacking the fire to a blaze with the poker, drinking, eating, laughing with his red mouth, and hot as a wasp’s tail at night, alone, stinging, stinging.
She patted herself dry. Her skin was smooth and numb. She put her nightdress on again. Holding the table edge, she lowered herself onto her knees to pray. The small wooden cross was a certain black form against the grey bloom of the wall. She fixed her eyes on it. She began.
 
Matthew Allen lifted his head and looked out at the morning. Beyond the blue lawn the trees were there. Their fine twigs, at this distance, made a russet mist. He looked back down at his page of calculations.
They added up to something, and that was with a very modest number of predicted orders. He smiled. He looked up again and saw a fox trotting silently across the lawn, its low body slung from its spine, its narrow head angled to the ground. How light it was in its movements, and quick, all travel and purpose.
 
John woke in a rage, knowing exactly where he was. He rolled out of bed, thumping his bare feet on the floorboards. He relieved himself into his chamber pot, clearing his throat and spitting also through the froth. He shunted it back under the bed with his toe against the warm china.
He rubbed his face in cold water from the jug, rubbed away at the dream still smeared across his thoughts. A girl with dark, unruly hair. She had secrets to tell him that he would understand. Her eyes glittered. His penis had stiffened as she brought her moist lips to his ear and whispered, words he could not now remember detonating softly inside his mind, urgent, full of meaning. Something to do with a place she could show him if he would just follow her. He’d wanted so much to know what she was saying that he’d woken up, tense, tumescent, straining to follow. He opened his eyes now so as not to see the intimate dark shine of her eyes and feel her hair minutely touching him. He wetted down his own hair, then quickly dressed. Fully clothed, he sat back down on his bed.What could he do now? Where could he go? Just out. That would be enough. He had a key after all. He could wait in his room until after breakfast, cadge some bread from the kitchen girls, and head out and away.
William Stockdale finished polishing his boots by stretching a rag over the toe, holding the rag at both ends, and working it back and forth with a rapid milking action. Then the other foot. He tightened the trouser straps that hooked under his shoes between heel and sole.
BOOK: The Quickening Maze
10.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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