The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [74]
‘Thank you,’ he said. He lay, exhausted and incapable of his own life, lying beneath it without the energy to continue. ‘Thank you.’
‘So, about my freedom.’
John turned his face towards the sun, the light split into beams by the branches. One of them, the size of an infant’s vague kiss, played warmly on the corner of his eye and forehead. He squinted along it like a carpenter seeing if a plank was true. Soft with motes and pollen. A pair of circling transparent wings.
He walked over crackling dry twigs the storms had ripped out. Between oaks, occasional bluebells shivered together. Overhead, the weep of birds.The touch of the world. Glad of it. Yearning across it, for home. All the world was road until he was home.
At Buckhurst Hill church he emerged from the woods. The church with a face and aspect, there like a person, like a house. He walked through the stone gatehouse into its orderly garden of graves, the thickened silence where the dead lay.The yew with its dark, slow needles spread a decent gloom.
Inside the church he found the customary dry echoes, dark pews, figures frozen in the wildflowercoloured windows, and a woman sitting alone. He passed her as he walked up the aisle to cross himself before the altar. Mary! No, not Mary, another of the patients, that woman he had . . . saved from Stockdale. She was staring up at the cross and smiling with tears on her face. She did not glance at him. He had done that. He had saved her. A rising wind hummed against the glass and its frozen saints. He crept outside.
In the churchyard was a boy, resting apparently, dressed like a ploughboy in a smock. He looked about nine years old and neither smiled nor made a greeting. He looked as serious and tired as any working man and resembled, John realised, one of his own sons at that age: the same stout build, the same heavy, clean flesh of the face and eyelashes long against his cheek.
‘I haven’t a halfpenny,’ John said and the boy met his eye finally, but did not reply. The breeze lifted the long hair from his forehead and he narrowed his eyes and that gave the effect of an answer. ‘I would give you one otherwise.’
The boy looked at him, eventually raised a hand to thank John for the thought, then folded his arms.
John rambled back into the woods, the musky spring odour and wheeling light. He saw a tree lying on its side, barkless, stripped white, ghost-glimmering through the others. Strange for it to have been felled at this time of year, with the sap rising, making the trees strong and wilful and difficult. Perhaps it was diseased. And every shred of bark taken for the tanning trade. He pitied it, felt suddenly that he was it, lying there undefended, its grain tightening in the breeze. He hurried on.
They had moved. It took him some time to find them. When he did he was thirsty and tired. There were fewer of them, fewer horses, only two vardas. But the crone, Judith, was still there by the yog, staring into it, her face a mask painted with its light. She flinched at his approach; raising a shoulder, she made to get up. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Judith, it’s me.’
She squinted at him and relaxed with recognition. ‘You’ve come among us again, John Clare. Sit. Are you well?’
‘I am,’ he said. But he wasn’t. The day’s warmth faded out of him suddenly. Each day different. Each day perishing. His life at an end.
Cliffs of stained brick on either side as the train rambled out through the slums. Filth in the gutters, running children, worn laundry restless in the wind, wretched lives packed behind windows. The world was in poor repair. Dr Allen knew that there was much he could do, if given the chance, if only he were listened to, looked up to and asked. But he wasn’t. People would stop asking him anything when he was bankrupt, the asylum sold, rotting in gaol.
Beyond the city came the relief of countryside, standing cattle and wet lanes and