The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [20]
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.
Hannah ignored her father’s words, looked past the tails of his coat, his hands floating from the sides of the lectern to pat his pages square, to where the Tennysons were sitting. Alfred Tennyson’s face was pensive, brooding - how else would it be? - but she couldn’t keep her eyes on him.To his right, his brother’s face seemed as set as a death mask, his eyes lightly closed, but down his cheeks ran tears. Eventually she saw him part his sore lips to inhale. Without opening his eyes he dried his cheeks with a handkerchief. As he then wavered to his feet with the rest, Hannah realised it was time to sing again.
Tennyson stood and sang as all of the afflicted opened their valves to God. The sermon had been decent, in his estimation, clearer and more clearly delivered than those of his own deceased father, more generously and compassionately addressed to his congregation. Afterwards, as the patients handed their hymnals to the attendants and began to leave, and Septimus hobbled away,Tennyson approached the doctor to offer his compliments. Hannah saw him do this and hurried to her father’s side.
Tennyson took Allen’s hand and shook it. ‘I thought that sermon fine,’ he said.
‘I’m pleased at that,’ Allen replied.
‘It was excellent,’ Hannah chipped in.
Allen turned with some surprise at this interjection from his unusually interested daughter, smiled indulgently and grasped her shoulder. Hannah stiffened at this contact and looked down, feeling painfully thwarted by only being able to appear as a child to them. But instantly she decided that to take the part of a pretty and devoted daughter was her most winning option, so again she surprised Allen by patting the back of his hand in response.
As this family interchange was happening,Tennyson was distracted by the approach of another man. He smiled,Tennyson saw as he neared, and his head lightly trembled. He took the doctor’s hand in both of his own and shook it. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘thank you again.’ After he had turned away, Allen explained to Tennyson who he was, how he suffered from the National Debt, and how these prayers were his only respite. Tennyson watched the man’s retreating back, his gait tightening the further away he was from this remarkably effective doctor.
Winter
Margaret stood in the dead of the world and looked down at the stopped fish under their dirty window of ice. In the black forks of the trees hard snow was pock-marked by later rain. Crows, folded tightly into themselves, clasped branches that plunged in the wind. Voices of other patients reached her there, the sound dulled by the covered winter surfaces like the clapping of gloved hands.
She liked the pinch of absence, the hollow air, reminiscent of the real absence. She wanted to stay out there, to hang on her branch in the world until the cold had burned down to her bones. She could leave her whitened bones scattered on the snow and depart like light.