The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [5]
‘Good afternoon, John, or morning.’
It was the admiral, standing very dignified and straight. John had always suspected that he stood straighter and with greater dignity now in his retirement than he had on the seas. He looked spick and span, very comprehensively brushed, the remnants of his grey hair all shooting forwards from his crown, his long blue coat as spotless as a horse before a show. A man who’d known Nelson. ‘And how are we today?’
John stood up, his earthen five feet two feeling very shabby and insufficient opposite the admiral.‘Very good, sir. Fine day.’
‘Indeed.’The admiral released one hand from behind his back and gestured out at the woods. Like a dog, John looked at the hand, not at the direction indicated. He’d forgotten how twisted and swollen the admiral’s hands were, fingers like lengths of ginger root. John wondered that he didn’t wear gloves, but perhaps he couldn’t get them on. ‘Yes,’ the admiral said, ‘it’s the fine sort of autumn weather. I have an invitation in town,’ he announced. John bowed at the fact. ‘So I’m off to Woodford to entrust my poor person to the train.’ The admiral smiled.
John also smiled. ‘I wish you a safe journey,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ the admiral said slowly. He seemed not to like the concerned sincerity of this response. The thought of his bodily destruction at unnatural speed was not meant actually to be entertained. ‘Yes, indeed. So I shall bid you good day. Please convey my regards to the doctor and Mrs Allen. Oh, yes, there’s someone taking Beech Hill House, a friend of the doctor’s, I believe. Do you by any chance know who?’
‘I’m afraid not, sir.’
‘Ah well. Anon, then.’
The admiral let the gate clap behind him and headed down the hill, his thick hands bunched in the small of his back.
John whistled enviously after him ‘Flash company been the ruin o’ me and the ruin o’ me quite’. An evening in London with the old, wild lads - that was what he needed. He felt his flesh strain towards the thought of beer, wanting drunkenness, wanting the world softened and flowing around him. To be back in his green jacket, the country clown for his friends from The London Magazine with their bristling literary talk, their sharp, rehearsed epigrams scattered like cut stones through the thickness of talk. And later, swaggering, scenes around them changing like backcloths flown up and down in a tatty theatre until he found himself with a plump young something, her nest tickling his nose as he strained the root of his tongue, tasting up into her, then quenching himself inside her, that wonderful release, hugging her as he did so, rubbing the sweat-loosened paint from her cheek onto his own.
He could look up an address or two and find the old gang, balder, plumper, more fitfully employed now that the magazine had folded. But no point: it was gone, and he couldn’t have gone anyway, he reminded himself. He was an inmate, a prisoner. He was due back at Allen’s. At present, it was enough to have got through the day. But the thought of it all made him want to kick. And Nature had taken herself away from his dirty little fury and left him there.
He worked until dusk and walked back. Peter Wilkins opened the gate for him. ‘You’d better hurry,’ he told him, ‘or you’ll be late for evening prayers.’
Charles Seymour sat at his desk and wrote. His valet, with almost nowhere to resort to in this wretched place, lingered behind him, standing like a sentry against the wall.
. . . You counsel me to console myself with the thought