The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [28]
‘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