The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [19]
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thought of the sea, of Mablethorpe, the heavy, low waves and hardened undulations of the sand after the tide had withdrawn.Words began.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,