The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [37]
‘John. John, you are John,’ the doctor panted. ‘And you were warned that you couldn’t stay away overnight. There will be consequences now.’
‘Let go of me! I’ll knock you down!’
‘Mary! Mary!’
Suddenly Margaret wasn’t just watching the pitiful play. The doctor was shouting and looking directly at her. She pointed slowly to her chest.
‘Yes, you.’
‘I’m Margaret.’
‘Yes, Margaret, sorry. Can you call Stockdale. He’ll be on the second floor.’
‘I was out fighting!’ John pleaded. ‘That’s all. It’s an honest man’s trade!’
‘You’d been warned,’ the doctor repeated. ‘It’ll be two days in the dark room.’
By the time Stockdale arrived the doctor was almost on the floor with John, trying to struggle out of his looped grasp like a drunken man trying to get out of his trousers. Stockdale intervened, securing John absolutely.
Margaret watched them drag the poor wounded man away to be shut in the dark.
Thrown onto the floor, the door slamming shut behind him, Jack Randall picked himself up and beat with his fists against its wood.
‘Have none of you the pluck to come up to the scratch?’ he roared. ‘Blackguards! I’ll take you all! Starting with that mincing bottle imp doctor!’
Matthew Allen spoke back calmly through the shuddering door. ‘John, you had been warned. It isn’t possible for you to sleep out in the woods.You know you must return in the evenings.’
‘Bastard! Shit-eating bastard! I’ll . . . I’ll . . .’ He varied his rhythm and thumped the door with three spaced punches.
‘John, you’ll do yourself more harm. Just look at yourself.’
‘Son of a whore!’ Darkness covered him. He grovelled at the crack of light under the door.
‘You knew the punishment, John. Two days.’
‘You cannot cage a man. You cannot. I’ll tear this door down!’
‘I’ll return later.’
‘A light! Just please give me some sort of light!’
Dr Allen walked away down the corridor. Back among the other patients he was aware of John still shouting like a dog yapping at the gate, but after a few hours it ceased.
Beyond any sound of the mad, Hannah walked with Annabella and Muffet, her dog. The snow had shrivelled, was crusted in hollows or on the lee side of trees only. The forest was wet and stretched away in soft tapestry colours.
Muffet didn’t like the cold. She trotted ahead, turning back with mute worried glances, eyebrows fidgeting.
‘Oh, I didn’t say,’ Hannah went on. ‘He was skating when I arrived.’
‘Skating?’
‘On his pond.’This detail had come back to Hannah in good time. She had finished the first avalanche of narration, telling it all at once, and in the silence just afterwards she was beginning to wonder if it sounded like anything at all.Annabella was reassuringly excited, though. She asked, ‘Was he good? Did he “cut a dash”?’
‘He was quite good, I think. I didn’t see for very long. He stopped when he saw me.’
‘That’s good.’
Muffet had trodden on something. She stopped, stretched back a trembling hind leg, kicked with it, then carried on away behind a tree.
‘So you spent all of the afternoon with him, talking?’
‘About poetry mostly.’
‘About poetry. That’s very promising.’
‘Yes. Do you think?’ Hannah remembered the long glutinous silences and was embarrassed to mention them in case they were a bad sign. But she did very much want her friend’s opinion and found a formula. ‘He was quite . . . morose.’
‘He’s bound to get lost in thought at times, given what he is.’
‘That’s what I decided.’
‘No, no. I do think this is promising. We need to plot something more. And I still haven’t seen him.’
‘We were together for hours,’ Hannah said, feeling the thrill of it again, but striding casually, in a worldly way.
Spring
She sat in the light of the window and looked almost too frail to bear its blast. He could see her fingerbones sharp and yellow through the cracked skin. The dent of her temple looked like the result of some violence. The skin of her face had drawn so tight that her lips were pulled against the hardness of her teeth. There were welts of shadow under her eyes and cheekbones.
He was telling