The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [57]
‘I have heard of you,’ Taylor assured Tennyson, who had risen to shake his hand. ‘You have been called cockney, I know, and compared to Keats.’
‘I’m not much of cockney, being from Lincolnshire, but they accuse me of similar sensuality and indolence, as they see it. They do me too much of an honour, did they but know it. It is an honour, of course, to shake the hand of a friend of Keats.’
‘I was honoured to know him.’
Alfred Tennyson was tall and dark with lengthy limbs, a wide-mouthed bronze face and large hands. Taylor, comparing him with his dead friend, saw a different languor, a kind of tired ease about his presence that was unlike Keats, but there was a similar something - the gravid silence, perhaps. But not Keats’s quickness, his darting anger.
‘You are with Murray, aren’t you? They are a very good house. I hope you will produce more.You must not let the magazines discourage you in any way.Theirs is a barbarous form of coffee-house entertainment. Yours is infinitely higher.’
Tennyson heard the voice of an older generation in that ‘coffee-house’. Encouragement from this older man who’d known real poets was welcome. ‘I thank you for those words. I don’t think that they will stop me. There’s really nothing else I’m fit for. Do you still publish poetry?’
‘No, I’m afraid I could not make it pay. The public’s taste has moved on to useful works and prose novels, as you know. But poetry will survive. Civilisation has never been without it.’ Taylor’s eye was caught by the flash of a brilliant silver teapot of fashionable design. Evidently what Eliza Allen had said was true: they were prospering. ‘It won’t pay, but it will survive. We want it, at least. Now, on the subject of payment, Dr Allen, would you favour me with a moment of your time.’
‘Certainly.’
‘It was a pleasure meeting you.’ He bowed to the company.
Tennyson watched him leave. A small man, not particularly smart, with a tired, kind face, but a friend of immortals, a survivor of poetry.
With her hope blasted and withered and unexpected tears not impossible, Hannah had intended not to like the Tennysons - she wouldn’t have been there at all if Father hadn’t insisted - but she hadn’t succeeded. The ladies were clever and distinct, sharply characterful and expressive, particularly the beautiful older sister Matilda, who might have put Annabella in the shade. Her fascination was only enhanced by the fact that she walked with a slow, semicircling limp. And when they spoke about their home, it sounded like the warm refuge she’d always imagined for herself, full of books and animals and invented games, with no patients and no business on the premises. Abigail had liked what she’d heard also, especially the idea of having a pet monkey and a big dog pulling Mother along in a carriage. She had immediately requested a monkey from Papa, who had laughingly refused as though the idea were ridiculous and he wouldn’t even think about it at all. There were enough of them to look after a monkey. It would be amusing. Hannah tried not to look at Tennyson. She had convicted him of indifference and then the susceptibility to Annabella that affected even the stupidest people, but she could not, of course, entirely extinguish her feelings for him. Disdain twisted painfully together with yearning. She looked at the tablecloth. She sipped her tea.
Matthew Allen returned to the party with Taylor’s money safely stowed in his desk. He liked handling money, liked possessing it, but the more potent and secret pleasure was risk. There was a pent force in having things at stake that seemed to charge one’s limbs with energy and made eventual triumph more intense than could be imagined. This dream had been the cause of his early imprisonments in the past, but look at him now with his buildings, his patients, his distinguished reputation, and orders already accumulating for machine-carved wood. He held the new teapot high above his cup and poured a long, musical arc. By the end of the afternoon he