The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [77]
Evil: I may die here and I want Mary and I half-wish I had died in the storm on the sea.
Beeswax and lavender. It was the smell of the house that affected Hannah most strongly. The linens, the upholstery were fragrant with herbs and a dim, soothing aroma rose from the polished wood. In the vestibule, a potted hyacinth had cast its strong perfume, like a bright lamp’s light, into the air. The house may have been small, but it was wonderfully tight and tidy and quiet. The carpets were new, with a pattern that curled across deep red, and they stood up on the floorboards almost an inch tall.There was sunlight through the bay window where they sat and all the teacups steamed gold.
It was no surprise that Dora should excel as a wife, but the comfort Hannah felt was a surprise. She hadn’t thought she would like it so much. James was taking an evident pride in the respectable charms of his marital home, smiling to himself as things were admired. Dora was less at ease, vigilant of her siblings and tense for each part of the ceremony. She widened her eyes meaningfully when Fulton, having finished his piece of cake, sat back wiping his mouth with his napkin and inhaling deeply through his nose. Watching Dora try and chastise Fulton in silence made Hannah feel mischievous. She teased her older sister.
‘I hope this is your best set of china. I remember there were two at the wedding.’
‘Of course it is.’
Hannah felt a blush chase up her neck into her face. She was instantly ashamed. Dora’s snappish reply was perfectly in order. There was nothing here to be mocked. In fact, there was much that was considerable. Dora had always wanted quiet and decency and here it was. Dora had not asked about events at home because she did not want to know. The inventories being made, the sale of goods, were repugnant to her. She didn’t even ask about her father’s poor health because of what that invoked. She did not feel she had to know. She and James were a new generation, in a new home. There they would be safe from her parents’ extravagance and failures and would never meet another patient.
Fulton asked James polite questions about his work in the bank.
‘This is such a lovely window,’ Hannah said to Dora.
‘Yes,’ Dora answered. ‘It catches all of the afternoon sun.’
To love the life that was possible: that also was a freedom, perhaps the only freedom. A place like this was possible. Hannah could love such a life, the safety, the calm, her own children. Charles Seymour had sent her a letter after he’d fled. He thanked her for their conversation out picking blackberries. She had reminded him to be courageous. She had set him off with her words. He had misunderstood her completely and gone. She had read the letter once and burned it and cried alone.
She cut a triangle of cake with her fork and ate.
Abigail had grown. She knew she had because, running up the stairs, she was at eye level with the soaring diagonal of the dado rail. There were shelves in the larder she could now reach, resulting in Cook keeping currants at a safer altitude. She could see over tabletops and there she found her parents’ faces, tight, preoccupied, with flat, unseeing eyes.
She ran to her father’s side and put her hand on his knee. He looked down at her with those dull rabbit eyes and said, ‘Not now, child.’ Abigail tilted her head downwards, leaned back, and looked flirtatiously up past her eyebrows at him in the way that usually softened her parents, softened anyone, and brought them smiling towards her. No response. She swayed closer to take hold of his ear and squeeze it together, but he gave his head an angry horse’s shake. ‘Child, you will not deflect me.’
Abigail’s mother entered the room and Abigail’s father sank a little in his chair and coughed. Abigail could see - anyone could see - that he was making his malady look worse to get her mother’s sympathy. Indeed, Eliza stood behind him and ran a hand across the great width of coat stretched over his back. He coughed again as she did so.Abigail would have sympathised as well, but he didn’t seem to want