The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [45]
‘No, no. I wouldn’t want to compete with our friend Rawnsley here,’ Allen smiled. ‘No, think.’ He paused, then announced, ‘Mechanical wood carving.’
‘Like this?’
‘I just said not like this. No, for furniture. Domestic. Ecclesiastical fittings.’
‘It could well be a success,’ Rawnsley commented, who already knew of the scheme. ‘The market for mass production - not inconsiderable.’
‘I see,’ Fulton said.
‘You don’t seem quite as enthused as I expected you to be,’ Allen told his son. ‘It will make you rich. Think of all the new churches in all the cities. And think of all the people unable to afford fine furniture hand-carving, but who can have the same, of the same quality, carved to guildsmen’s standards, because they are simply perfectly exact and precise mechanical copies of hand-carved originals, for a fraction of the price. That beauty and dignity, that elevating spiritual environment, made available to great numbers of people.’
‘I see.’
‘You see, you see,’ Allen grinned and swiped a hand down his beard. ‘A little investment and it will take place. Il aura lieu.’
‘More difficult than producing these things, but plausible, ’ Rawnsley said, dipping his hand into an open box of tiny cogs, ‘entirely possible.’
Matthew Allen also dipped his hand and scooped up a few cogs in his palm. They were warm still from the machining and felt nutritious, like nuts. He liked Rawnsley, liked the prosperous sheen to his hat, his fine-checked trousers tightly strapped under his boots. ‘Perhaps you would care to be one of my lucky investors?’ he asked.
Stands in the wilderness of the world, stands alone, his face from his own house, a book in his hand, surrounded by strangers, trembling, unable, the sun heating him, his will breaking inside him, until he bursts out, ‘What can I do?’
As though it were possible, he searches again the strangers’ faces to find Mary or Patty or one of his own children or anyone, but there is no warm return from them. They are alien, moulded flesh only, and they frighten him.
A jarring of magpies overhead. He turns. He breathes. He is in a garden. He knows where he is. So why can’t he stop it, why can’t he kill it in himself, the sense that at any moment he might see her, that she might come for him, a door in the world swing open and there she is? That she might end this for him? John, you have a visitor. John, you have a visitor. The phrase repeats inside his head, endlessly, boringly, because he craves it, that she might come and end this for him.
Something tugs at the corner of his vision. He looks: a rising, a thing of the summer season. He walks over quickly to see. Like the plume of steam from a kettle’s spout, ants are rising from the sandy hole of their nest. He crouches, his belly softly crushed behind his knees, and peers at the glittering black bodies swarming up to the surface, raising their heavy transparent wings, flying up. He looks up at those already airborne. They hold mostly together, a cloud of them funnelling and warping in the wind. They fly beyond limits. He gets up and follows them as far as he can.
They disperse along the line, flaking off into clear air. Some land on the trees. He stands by one, in the cool wood-scent of its shade, and watches a single ant walk along a leaf. A breeze flips its platform, but it adheres. Many leaves shine against the light, the sweet, living green. He quotes himself under his breath.‘Leaves from Eternity are simple things.’
Ants fly over, carry beyond him. He can’t follow them further. Like a lock gate opening in a canal, the water slumping in, his heavy rage returns. He presses himself to the tree, looks down and sees the roots reaching down into the earth.The admiral’s hands. He has