The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [39]
Sylvia, the fair, in the bloom of fifteen,
Felt an innocent warmth as she lay on the green.
This Sylvia ‘saw the men eager, but was at a loss/ What they meant by their sighing and kissing so close’.
Hannah hadn’t quite seen the men, or him, eager, but this was all very compelling.
And clasping and twining,
And panting and wishing,
And sighing and kissing,
And sighing and kissing so close.
This was one of the most explicit clues she had had as to what she might expect actually to occur when passions converged.The phrases, the little skipping tune, made her heart race. And sighing and kissing so close.
Hannah sat down at the table and ignored Abigail’s protests as she tore a corner from the bread and butter the child was eating. She spoke over her. ‘You have butter on your face, Abi.You are not a slice of bread, you know.’
Abigail appealed to a higher authority. ‘Mama, she’s eating my food.’
‘Hannah, be kind to your sister. If you want bread and butter, there is . . .’
‘I wasn’t being unkind. I was sharing with her. Shouldn’t she be taught . . .’
‘Hannah, don’t be contrary.’
‘I’m not being contrary. I’m leaving.’
‘Contrariness itself.’
‘Not at all.’
The day was mild. Hannah let her shawl hang loosely from her shoulders as she walked to Annabella’s. She pinched her cheeks as she walked onto the lane, in case of an encounter with him. Annabella was in her garden, under the early blackthorn blossom, reading. ‘Good morning,’ Hannah called.
Annabella looked up, enhancing the scene, as she always did, with her beauty. ‘Greetings, fair nymph. Isn’t this tree heaven?’
‘Yes, it is.’ Hannah studied it with the appropriate dreamy appreciation. There were no leaves as yet, just slender black branches and the damp white blossoms ruffling in the breeze. The tree looked ardent, single-minded, standing there and declaring its flowers straight out of the wet, gnarled wood. ‘Very pretty,’ she said. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’
‘Has something happened?’
‘No. The ordinary torments of the familial life.’
‘I’ll just go and tell Mama.’
Hannah stood alone until Annabella returned.Alone. The quiet garden. Annabella’s life was so different to her own, just the one brother, her books and blossom and beauty. Sometimes Hannah, surrounded by her family and the mad, by all those hurrying or drifting people, felt as though she lived her life on a public thoroughfare.
As they walked, Hannah watched the effect of her friend’s beauty on the people they passed. Did Annabella realise how much she lived in the tunnel of it, always enclosed within the circle of its impact? It aligned men, stiffened their backs, knocked their hats up from their heads.A farmboy leading three cows right now lifted his hat straight up, smirking at her. If Hannah had had that advantage, she might have been more sure of gaining Tennyson. It was a power at least. Hannah had no power. There was nothing she could do. There was nothing any girl could do in choosing a husband for herself beyond panting and wishing and hoping, making herself visible, agreeable.
‘Snowdrops,’Annabella said, pointing at a little group of the trembling white things. ‘Shall we go into the church?’
‘Why not?’
This was becoming a habit on their walks. The first time it had felt like trespass, secret and wrong, to enter the church in their state of lazy reverie and admiration. By now it had an element of ritual. They passed the leaning gravestones in melancholy silence without stopping as they had in the past to calculate the ages of the people when they’d died and pity the children among them.There had been one seven-year-old girl who had moved Hannah to the point of tears. She greeted her mentally now as she passed on her way into the cold stone porch. Reverently,Annabella pulled open the heavy oak door and they stepped inside.The door closed solidly behind them, shutting them into a silence that magnified their footsteps and made them take shallower, careful breaths.An extinguished atmosphere, the sense of snuffed candles,of a room someone has just left.Annabella