The Quickening Maze Part 17

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 p.i.s.sed-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 s.p.a.ce, 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs 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 circ.u.mstances 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.

Evil: I am without defence, or means to resist any violence of madman or sane man or beast.Good: I am a hardy fighter of great reputation and can answer for myself with my fists.Evil: Since my s.h.i.+pwreck I have been denied the love of my wives, the satisfaction of manly desire, the smiles of my children.Good: There is good provender. Food requires little foraging.Evil: I am all alone.Evil: I am not where I should be, not in my home.Evil: I am tormented by memories and phantasies and spells of insensibility.Evil: My verses languish unread and unheard by any man.Good: Nature is my mother and is here as elsewhere, although she wears a strange face so far from the scenes I love.Evil: I want my Mary.Evil: I may die here and I want Mary and I half-wish I had died in the storm on the sea.

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.

'I hope this is your best set of china. I remember there were two at the wedding.'

'Of course it is.'

Hannah felt a blush chase up her neck into her face. She was instantly ashamed. Dora's snappish reply was perfectly in order. There was nothing here to be mocked. In fact, there was much that was considerable. Dora had always wanted quiet and decency and here it was. Dora had not asked about events at home because she did not want to know. The inventories being made, the sale of goods, were repugnant to her. She didn't even ask about her father's poor health because of what that invoked. She did not feel she had to know. She and James were a new generation, in a new home. There they would be safe from her parents' extravagance and failures and would never meet another patient.

Fulton asked James polite questions about his work in the bank.

'This is such a lovely window,' Hannah said to Dora.

'Yes,' Dora answered. 'It catches all of the afternoon sun.'

To love the life that was possible: that also was a freedom, perhaps the only freedom. A place like this was possible. Hannah could love such a life, the safety, the calm, her own children. Charles Seymour had sent her a letter after he'd fled. He thanked her for their conversation out picking blackberries. She had reminded him to be courageous. She had set him off with her words. He had misunderstood her completely and gone. She had read the letter once and burned it and cried alone.

She cut a triangle of cake with her fork and ate.

Abigail had grown. She knew she had because, running up the stairs, she was at eye level with the soaring diagonal of the dado rail. There were shelves in the larder she could now reach, resulting in Cook keeping currants at a safer alt.i.tude. She could see over tabletops and there she found her parents' faces, tight, preoccupied, with flat, unseeing eyes.

She ran to her father's side and put her hand on his knee. He looked down at her with those dull rabbit eyes and said, 'Not now, child.' Abigail tilted her head downwards, leaned back, and looked flirtatiously up past her eyebrows at him in the way that usually softened her parents, softened anyone, and brought them smiling towards her. No response. She swayed closer to take hold of his ear and squeeze it together, but he gave his head an angry horse's shake. 'Child, you will not deflect me.'

Abigail's mother entered the room and Abigail's father sank a little in his chair and coughed. Abigail could see - anyone could see - that he was making his malady look worse to get her mother's sympathy. Indeed, Eliza stood behind him and ran a hand across the great width of coat stretched over his back. He coughed again as she did so.Abigail would have sympathised as well, but he didn't seem to want her. He wanted Mama. Eliza didn't look happy either and Abigail walked around and rested herself affectionately against her skirt. As a reward, her mother dropped a hand onto her shoulder. Abigail always tried to cheer people up, to make them happier, and she always would. She would live devotedly with her mother long after her father's illness, which, although exaggerated at this moment, was real and would soon kill him. Finally she would migrate to a marriage in which her husband was never as kind to her as he might have been, having no need to be.

'I'm not sure we can part with any more,' her mother said to her father.

Her father coughed with tightly closed lips, then said, 'They won't leave us a stick. All these years of work. Not a matchstick. These Tennysons will have it all.'

Fulton entered then and stared with naked disgust at the sad gazes that met his, said nothing and went out, slamming the door.

Swish of leaves, of strong drink. One of them idly compressing a squeezebox, not playing, but pus.h.i.+ng out a few quiet notes.The broth with hare's meat hung over the fire, bubbles lumping up to the surface. And opposite, a row of the girls deft with short knives cutting pegs to sell, quick as coring apples.

Judith was telling him of the two missing men.

'Said we's an atrocious tribe and that we ought to be made outlaws from every civilised kingdom. These are his words I'm telling you. And that we ought to be exterminated from the face of the earth. Exterminated.'

'And him a clergyman.'

'A Christian man.'

'Or pretends to be,' said John.

'That's it. Or pretends to be. It was common land a few months back and what grew and bred on it was common as G.o.d's air. Now it's the railway's and the boys are gaoled. And you could only tell it from signs they couldn't read, not having the art. Now it's chavvies without their fathers.'

'When will they be out?'

She shook her head as though they never would be, then said, 'A year or two. Less, maybe, I reckon.'

'And you're all going away.'

'Forest is a good place for us, good for food, but we've had too many night visits, been shaken in our vardas, and their dogs going mad. So now it's down to Kent for a fair. We want to, matter of fact. All our people gather.'

'To have fun at the fair.'

'Not me,' Judith answered. 'I'll talk is all I'll do, maybe tell the odd fortune. One time of day, I used to get up at four o'clock in the morning. I could run or jump or do anything you mention. But today I'm useless. That one, she'll have a livelier time of it.' She pointed with her pipe stem at one of the peg-making girls. 'She'll be seeing her lover boy there. See, the pa.s.sion's gone to her hands. Look at the mess she's making.'

If the girl could hear, she pretended otherwise, whispering behind her hand to the girl on her left.

'He'll be there, will he?' John asked immediately, unreasonably jealous.

'He will. They haven't see each other since they were not but nine years old, the pair of them, but they made promises and their words have been pa.s.sed along in the meantime, their messages to each other, from mouth to ear between the travelling people, and now his people will be in Kent same as us.'

'I see.' John took another swig. 'Got to go for a moment,' he said, and stood up.

Soft light flaking through the leaves. He unb.u.t.toned himself and let his stream go between the thick, down-diving roots of a hornbeam, his belly resting on his right foream. He thought about the girl, her love, the lovers' separate paths through the world that now would join, reuniting them, fusing at last. The excitement that must be in her breast, the pure pa.s.sion! In John as well, the loneliness, the wandering and desire for home, for Mary. How she'd stayed true and steadfast while all the world went wrong. He felt his toes wet and looked down to see his puddle rolling against his boots. What a fool's mistake: to p.i.s.s uphill! This is what came of living between walls and p.i.s.sing always into china. He dried his toecaps, digging furrows on the ground.

As he thrashed back through the branches, he called, 'Which way out is it? Tell me. Which way out of the forest?'

'Out? Where to?'

'North. To Northampton.'

'North is the Enfield road.'

'How would I find that then?'

'We can leave you signs if you like, before we go. Ties on branches to show you the way.'

'You will do it?'

'If you like.'

'I do. Our secret, though?'

'Our secret? We are secret. We don't talk.'

'And I'll find them?'

'You'll find 'em, no fear.'

'There's every chance, I suppose.'

'You suppose?'

'Well,' Thomas Rawnsley s.h.i.+fted in his chair, 'your husband has entered a marketplace which is new to everybody.'

'So, he can't know,' Fulton said and stared into his mother's worried eyes.

'No, he can't know precisely. None of us can. But that's not to say . . .'

'If it were your company, would you have proceeded in the same manner?'

'Fulton, don't interrogate out guest.'

'But would you?'

'I . . .' Rawnsley raised his hands, glanced across at the silent Hannah. 'Broadly, yes, I suppose I would.'

'So, why are you a success and . . .'

'Fulton!'

'Your father is a very ingenious man, of that I have no doubt.'

The doubts he did have sat in the air. Fulton stared at the carpet, thinking.

'But it wasn't especially to discuss Dr Allen that I came.'

'Oh, no?' Eliza enquired.

'No. I wanted, if I may, to speak to Hannah.'

'I see.'