The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [31]
Alfred swirled the branches around him. His cape caught up behind him in the wind imparted the sensation almost of having wings. He pressed his steps down to the sides and his skates bore him over the ice with a fine sound of grinding stone. It broke up the thickness of his blood to move like this, to feel the sharp winterness of the day. Scribbling to himself, turning his patterns over his frozen pond, he could almost not think of Arthur, his dear, dead friend Arthur Hallam, who would not leave his thoughts.
As his revolve carried him round to the far side of the pond he was startled by a girl’s shape dark against the tarnished silver of the sky. He slowed towards her. She stood quite still, above him on the bank. ‘Good afternoon?’ he asked.
His dark eyes, wind-polished, shone in the clayish yellow of his face. ‘Good afternoon,’ Hannah said.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve come . . .’
‘You’re Allen’s daughter, aren’t you, the fair What-was-it? ’
‘. . . to pay you a visit. I’ve come to pay you a visit. In case . . .’
‘I see. Do you have a message?’
‘No. In case you are lonely.’
‘I see. You’ve come to pay me a visit.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And it is . . . ?’
‘Hannah.’
‘Hannah. Of course it is.’
Curious, he leaned forward precariously to get her face into focus. He saw her pale lips fluttering as she drew in a breath and backed ever so slightly away. ‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘Shall we go in?’
She nodded.
‘One moment.’ He skated away to an easier point of exit. She walked around to meet him and silently offered a hand to help him out, but he didn’t see it and hobbled up onto the grass unaided.Together they walked back to the house, Tennyson teetering over the girl, who wondered why he didn’t think to unstrap his skates and walk comfortably in his boots, but said nothing. She walked beside him proudly at his careful slow pace, as though in a procession, and was only slightly distracted by the sweet-sharp human odour that came from his clothes. At the door he finally did remove his skates, bending down so that she could see the top of his head.Thick hair, actually thick hairs - a wide diameter to each hair - flowed from the crown in strong waves. A leaf fragment had somehow lodged in there. She wanted to tease it out with her fingers, but of course could not, nor could she say anything.
Tennyson opened the door and ushered her in. She entered looking hungrily at everything for signs of the remarkable life that was lived there, but found an ordinary vestibule - wallpaper, a table, a mirror. There on the antlers of the coatstand, however, hung his coats and that wide black hat. He twirled the cape from his shoulders and added it. With proper care, with gentle fingers that seemed unafraid as he touched her shoulders, he took her coat from her and draped it beside his own. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
His gentlemanly etiquette appeared variable: he now led the way, striding ahead rather than walking behind her quietly directing, and she had to hurry after. She was rewarded, though, when she followed him into a room that was most certainly inhabited by a poet. As he bent to the fire, positioning fresh logs with his hands so that afterwards he had to wipe smuts and blown ash from them onto his trouser fronts, she looked around at a gracious, intellectual disorder. The piles of books and papers, the rumpled sofa and littered desk, the short-stemmed pipes that roosted on nests of ash and spent spills on ledges all around the room, showed this to be a working room, its objects gathered without thought of their effect. The room absolutely radiated from him, now stalking about its centre, thumping cushions. It flowed from him, and visiting it without him there would have been like listening into his thoughts or hearing about him from his friends. And on the desk, in that big open ledger that looked like a butcher’s book - could that be a new poem? Certainly the lines did not cross to the far side of the page. His handwriting. The charged page vibrated in her sight. A poem lived on it. If she could walk across and read those