The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [26]
‘Father, you’re wanted back at the house.’
Matthew Allen lay and felt his weight entirely sustained, his head sunk in the pillow, his four limbs dead still, washed up there like driftwood. Bed was always a pleasure, an island he reached after the variable inevitable storms of a day spent with the mad, their frantic, tunnelling logic, their sorrow, their hopelessness and aggression and indecencies. No muscles had to work to keep him there. The lamps hissed quietly. Beside him on the pillow was the familiar peaceful landscape of Eliza’s face: soft, straight eyebrows, fine nostrils, the neat volute that ran down from them to the large, warm, mobile mouth. With her hair pinned, her nightcap on, her face at bedtime was presented with a kind of ceremonial or surgical simplicity that could strike him as funny. It was the cap particularly that made her look cute, childish or comically ecclesiastical. Her haughty, lordly, stern expression when asleep could also amuse him.
‘What are you peering at?’ she asked.
‘Only you. Can’t a man peer at his wife?’
‘Why? Do I look . . . is there something?’
‘No, no. You look very nice.’
‘Oh well, then. He’ll be gone tomorrow morning.’
‘Yes, he will.’
‘And he hasn’t been so terrible.’
‘Oh, yes, he has. I can’t wait to pack him off. Spiteful, resentful man.’
‘Really?’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’
‘So what is there to tell me?’
‘Nothing. There’s nothing to tell you, nothing that needs to be told.’
‘Well, I’m sorry he’s been horrid.’
‘Not that he can help it.’
‘Poor battered old cat,’ she said. She petted his head, lay softly against his side.
‘Mm. That’s nice.’
‘Yes,’ she said pouting.
Matthew reached a hand down and laid it on the warm width of her thigh. The flesh was so smooth under the sliding soft fabric. ‘Very soothing.’
Oswald Allen’s farewell was surprisingly gracious. He handed out sixpences to the children, even though only Abigail was young enough to be delighted. He thanked Eliza for the hospitality of her home and invited them all to visit in York.
Matthew and Eliza walked him to the station - again he insisted that they should not get a carriage for him - and during that walk the silences did lengthen uncomfortably. But Oswald could act as though absorbed in details of the scene, the motionless cold cattle, the ponds and their withered reeds, the passers-by.
Seated in his carriage, he raised a gloved hand to wave. The glove was buttoned at the side, his coat buttoned at the front, his collar firm beneath his chin. Matthew felt he had him strait-jacketed and safely stowed for transportation. In profile, Oswald opened a small volume, presumably devotional, and began to read.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Matthew to himself. ‘Off you go.’ The train hissed, clanked, and its four carriages rumbled away towards London. The platform filled with steam. Like a genie in a cloud, Oswald was gone.
‘I don’t expect we will see him again for some time.’
‘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.