The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [62]
Her boots clobbered on the floorboards as she ran. Her mother greeted her with, ‘Who is this trotting pony?’
‘It’s me,’ Abigail said and fell against her mother’s legs.
‘Well, do try and make less noise,’ she was told. ‘And stand on your own feet, child.’
Abigail felt her mother’s hand over her head, the fingers spread too tightly over her skull, and with ease Eliza pulled her upright.Abigail stood solitary, deprived of that merging contact. She stared up at her mother.
‘Child, I am occupied at present.’ A new patient was shortly to arrive whom she would have to receive, Matthew being away at the factory. And that was only her immediate concern. Eliza, while in her husband’s study finding the admissions book, had seen a page of his calculations. If she had understood them correctly, then the investment was deep. It had put a sea beneath them with the establishment riding on it. It was a good thing her husband was who he was. She had reminded herself of that, but found that she kept needing to.
Abigail stretched up a hand. Eliza grasped it, rocked it from side to side and released it. ‘Go and play,’ she said and walked away.
With a painful bulk of anger and sadness inside her, Abigail watched her mother withdraw. She stood there panting until her mother was gone, then ran away again on her terrible loud boots.
One of Alfred Tennyson’s significant deficiencies, Hannah had decided, was his lack of conversation.This was not unimportant. It had rendered matters practically impossible. Conversation was one of Hannah’s only resources. With conversation she could engage and entangle and forge the strong sympathy of, well, possible lovers, and she had certainly tried that with Tennyson, but he’d been dull, unresponsive, dumb as a beast. There was that one occasion on which he’d done that extraordinary thing with his face and he’d been amiable. The rest of the time all her brilliance had elicited only faint glimmerings. Her attention was a light shone into murky water that had revealed gloomy inward depths, but she’d seen nothing more, nothing provocative of hope. Besides, it wasn’t charitable to notice it, but he wasn’t clean and he did smell. Of course poets made themselves sound exciting and wonderful in their poems; the reality was bound to be different. It was unfair, really, that other sorts of people were not written about so much.
Now, Charles Seymour was someone who engaged readily in conversation. He was social and open, a gentleman, and probably lonely, with his broken heart slowly healing. He was evidently an intelligent man, but he was courteous and to a greater extent available to others. He was not always away inside himself making poems for the journals to read and dislike.
Hannah was seated in her room making out a list of possible subjects for conversation when Abigail ran in and found her. Her page read:
Hunting - the excitement. Does he? Queen Elizabeth hunting in this forest.
The young queen and Lord Melbourne. Virtue and experience. Has he met her?
The best society being of like-minded people, regardless of rank.
India.
The waning public taste for poetry.
She closed her journal as Abigail ran in and held out her hands to her. Abigail charged between them and bumped into her knees. ‘Ooh,’ Abigail said, doing one of her impressions of the patients, moaning and fidgeting and holding her hair.
‘Don’t do that,’ Hannah instructed, taking hold of her wrists. ‘Now, tell me, little sister, what do you like to talk about?’
‘Farms,’ Abigail replied.
‘Indeed? Farms?’
Abigail nodded. ‘Farms. Or presents.’
‘Come here,’ Hannah said, and fitted her hands into Abigail’s warm armpits and lifted her onto her knee.
It was worse, worse even than