The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [66]
‘Let me go back to my room.’
‘How mad are you?’ Stockdale asked, finally tucking himself away. ‘What do you know?’
‘I know when I smell sulphur. I know when people have forgotten shame.’
‘So mad, then.’
‘I know when crimes are committed. I, Lord Byron, have spoken against slavery and abuse.’
‘You didn’t see anything and you won’t remember anything.’ Stockdale drew back his right hand and threw his fist into John’s face. He saw the attendant’s knuckles suddenly huge, big as the palings of a fence with creases of shadow between them as his eye was struck, a vivid visual arrest he was still pondering when the second shadowy blow swum like a pike towards him and knocked him out cold.
Alone together in Hannah’s room, their conversation veered between the worldly, ladylike and implicit, and the girlish, rapid and amazed. Hannah had decided for the first time not to tell Annabella everything, it being perhaps better for her not to meet Charles Seymour. His was the name Hannah did not say. Her silences and elisions were full of him. Rawnsley she would perhaps talk about. They could disparage him together.
Annabella used Hannah’s brushes on her own thick, dark hair. They made a scuffing, electrical sound. Annabella looked very maidenly or mermaidly with her untied hair draped over her shoulders, although her facial expression, vacant with concentration, looked to Hannah like a small girl’s or an animal’s.
Hannah found that she could talk about Alfred Tennyson. The poet’s name, when she said it, was cool and solid in her mouth. Very recently it had dragged after it a sensation of panicking flight.
‘Oh, yes. I saw him the other day,’ Annabella said. Tilting her head and brushing her hair into a gathering hand, she stared up at the ceiling.
‘Did you?’ This did make Hannah start, that she did not know about this.
‘Yes, I did.Wrapped in his cloak, out in the cold fog,’ she said in her recitation voice.‘Amid the spectral trees.’
There was that tone of light scorn, of satire, and it displeased Hannah. She could dislike Tennyson, but not easily find him comical yet. And it suggested that Alfred Tennyson would not have been considered good enough for Annabella. She was a nymph or dryad to him. She was a nymph or dryad to everyone. She would wait and make a choice.
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘I said “Good day” and he answered “Good day”.’ She had imitated his Lincolnshire accent unsuccessfully and tried again. ‘ “Good day,” and raised his hat off all that tangled hair and walked on.’
Hannah was suddenly, surprisingly, angered by this. She didn’t like the thought of these people out there moving independently, meeting and having conversations she would never hear, not thinking of her. It killed her, made a ghost of her. And even if she had given up on Tennyson, she did not like Annabella’s contemptuous tone. It was too typical of the person that she knew lurked behind that beauty.
‘Perhaps he had no desire to talk to you because he was thinking more interesting thoughts.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Simply because you are so beautiful, Anna, doesn’t mean the whole world has to fall down and worship you.’
‘What?’Annabella asked again dumbly, her face innocent and stricken. She blushed in that ridiculously pretty way she had - two thumbprints of rouge above her dimples - not the painful red stain Hannah could feel spreading up from her neck.
‘I know that you can have anyone you want to have. You know you’re beautiful.You don’t have to try and pretend: oh, no, I’m just a plain simple comfortable girl.’
‘Why are you saying this?’
‘Because.’
Hannah didn’t know quite why. She was much angrier than she could have anticipated. Annabella’s beauty was not fair; it pulled the world towards her, drew in her future without effort, and Hannah was sick of pretending it wasn’t there. It was as though she were conniving in her own betrayal, knowing that Annabella would safely, lightly, contemptuously surpass her at any moment she chose.