The Quickening Maze Part 1

The quickening maze.

by Adam Foulds.

Prologue: The World's End The World's End

He'd been sent out to pick firewood from the forest, sticks and timbers wrenched loose in the storm. Light met him as he stepped outside, the living day met him with its details, the scuffling blackbird that had its nest in their apple tree.

Walking towards the wood, the heath, beckoning away. Undulations of yellow gorse rasped softly in the breeze. It stretched off into unknown solitudes.

He was a village boy and he knew certain things. He thought that the edge of the world was a day's walk away, there where the cloud-breeding sky touched the earth at the horizon. He thought that when he got there he would find a deep pit and he would be able to look down into it and see the world's secrets. Same as he knew he could see heaven in water, a boy on his knees staring into the heavy, flexing surface of the gravel-pit ponds or at a shallow stream flas.h.i.+ng over stones.

He set off, down into the wide yellow fragrance. The wood he could collect on his return.

Soon he was further from the village than he had ever been, furthest from the tough, familiar nest of his cottage. He walked quite out of his knowledge, into a world where the birds and flowers did not know him, where his shadow had never been.

It confused him. He started to think that the sun was s.h.i.+ning in a new quarter of the sky. He felt no fear yet: the sun lit wonders in a new zone that held him in steady rapt amazement. He did wonder, though, why the old world had not come to an end, why the horizon was no closer.

He walked and walked and before he'd thought the morning pa.s.sed, the light was thickening. Moths flittered under the bushes. Frogs fidgeted along the rabbit tracks and mice twittered their little splintery cries. Overhead trembled the first damp stars.

It was the hour of waking spirits. Now he was afraid.

He hurried around with a panicking heart and found behind him a splay of paths. By chance he got on the right one. As the darkness grew, gathering first in the bushes and trees, then soaking out from them, he found himself approaching his own village. At least it looked like his own village, but somehow the distance he'd travelled made him uncertain. It looked the same. It definitely was the same, but somehow it didn't seem right, in place. Even the church, rising over the wood, the church he'd seen every day as soon as he could see at all, looked counterfeit. Frightened, racing, like a lost bird he flung his light body towards what he hoped was home.

His name. He heard his name being called. John! John! Jo-ohn! Village voices. He could put names to them all. He ran now, not answering, to his own cottage, feeling a tumult of relief as he approached. When he stepped through the open doorway his mother yelped at the sight and flew towards him. Her strong arms encircled him, her bosom crushed against his face.

'We thought you was dead. In the wood. They're out looking for you.We thought you was struck down by a falling . . . Oh, but you're home.'

Autumn

Abigail started neatly at a walk as her mother had just smartened her, plucking and smoothing her dress into place. She had run a fingertip down Abigail's nose as she bent down with a crackle of her own dress and repeated the message to carry. But outside the door and with the sun warm through the trees and the path firm under her tightly laced boots, Abigail couldn't help it: after a few paces she broke into a run.

She ran across the garden and over into the grounds of Fairmead House, then along its side and past the pond where Simon the idiot was throwing stones; even she knew he'd been told not to do that. He looked round sharply at the sound of her footsteps just after he'd launched one. It couldn't be stopped: their eyes met at the moment it plopped in and slow circles widened across the green water. It was only the child, though. He smiled naughtily at her, knowing she wouldn't tell. She ran round the corner past Mr Stockdale the attendant whom she did not like. He was large and strict and when he tried to play with her it was not meant, not meant properly, and his hands were heavy. But there was Margaret sitting on a stool, sewing. She liked Margaret, her thin, sharpchinned face like a wooden toy, and wide, clear, kind eyes. She was a peaceful lady, mostly, and now Abigail walked over and leaned against her knees to be for a moment inside that calm. Margaret didn't say anything, stroked once the back of Abigail's head as the child looked down at her sampler. There were three colours of thread: green for hills, brown for the cross and black for lines coming out of the cross. Abigail put out a finger and felt the b.u.mpy black st.i.tches. 'G.o.d's love,' Margaret whispered. 'Beams.' Briefly she wound the thread she was working with a couple of times around Abigail's finger. 'Wrap you up in it.'

Abigail smiled. 'Good day,' she said and set off running again, past some others strolling there, and then when she saw him, with greater speed towards her father.

Matthew Allen swung the axe down onto the upturned log. The blade sunk down into it, but it didn't split, so he raised the axe and log together and brought them down hard. The log flew apart into two even pieces that rocked on the gra.s.s. 'Nothing to it,' he remarked. He stooped and added the new pieces with their clean white pith to the barrow and stood another log on the stump.

Seeing Abigail bouncing towards him, he handed the lunatic the axe and grappled her up into his arms. 'Just go on like that until you've filled the barrow, please.'

Abigail could feel the warmth of his body through its compress of clothes. She wriggled at the sensation of his humid whiskers against her as he kissed her cheek.

'Mother says to come now because they'll be here pleasantly.'

Allen smiled.'Did she say "pleasantly" or "presently"?'

Abigail frowned. 'Presently,' she said.

'Then we'd better set off.'

Abigail leaned her head into his neck, into the smell of him in his cravat, and felt her feet swinging in the air with each of his steps, like riding a pony.

Patients greeted her father with a nod as he pa.s.sed or with some rearrangement of their posture. Simon the idiot, who definitely was not throwing stones into the pond, waved with his whole arm.

Outside the house Hannah stood waiting, holding her sharp elbows and thoughtfully drawing a line on the path in front of her with the toe of her boot. She looked up at them as they arrived and spoke as if to justify herself.

'I thought I ought to wait to greet them, given that there was no one else.'

Allen laughed. 'I'm sure even a poet is capable of pulling a door bell.' He watched his daughter ignore the comment, staring at the ground. Abigail was twisting in his arms now the ride was over, and he set her down. She ran off a few yards to pick up an interesting stick.The front door opened and Mrs Allen walked out to join them. 'Fine weather,' she commented.

'Are we not too many now?' Hannah asked. 'The brother may be a little overwhelmed.'

'They both might be,' her father rejoined. 'But a warm family welcome will do neither of them any harm.'

'I'll only wait with you a moment,' Eliza Allen said. 'I've things to do, only I saw you all standing out here in the sun. Oh, look, there's Dora seeing us now.'

Hannah turned and saw her sister's face in the window. She wouldn't come out, Hannah knew. She didn't like extraordinary people. She liked ordinary people and was preparing for her wedding, after which she could live almost entirely among them. She retreated out of sight like a fish from the surface of a pond, leaving the gla.s.s dark.

'Abi, put that down,' her mother instructed. 'And don't wipe your hands on your pinafore. Come here.' Abigail joined them in a mildly shamed, dilatory way and allowed her mother to clean her palms with a handkerchief. 'Where's Fulton?' Eliza asked her husband.

'He's occupied, I'm sure. We don't have to be all arranged here like this. We're not having our portrait painted.'

This was not how Hannah had arranged this meeting in her imagination. She would not have had the clutter of her family around her, not at first, and she would have happened by at the right moment, or at least could have easily dissembled her preceding vigilance. She could have been a solitary, attractive girl of seventeen, a wood nymph even, discovered in her wandering. She stared along the road as far as she could: it turned sharply to the right a little way ahead and the forest cut off the view down the hill.Through the trees she felt them approaching, an event approaching.Who knew how significant it might prove to be? She should try to expect less; there was little chance it would match her hopes. But it might. Certainly, something was about to happen. People were about to arrive.

And then it was happening. The carriage from Woodford was approaching, trunks strapped to its roof, the horses bowing their way up the hill, the driver dabbing at their broad backs with his whip. Quickly, hoping not to be seen, Hannah pinched colour into her cheeks. Mrs Allen picked up Abigail and held her on her hip. Matthew Allen smoothed his whiskers with both hands, tugged his waistcoat down, and enriched the swell of his cravat.

As the carriage slowed beside them, the driver touching the brim of his hat, Matthew Allen stepped forward and opened the door. 'Misters Tennyson,' he said in his deeper, professional voice.'Welcome to High Beach.'

A cough and a thank you was heard from the shadowy interior where long limbs were moving.

Hannah stood a little closer to her mother as the two brothers emerged.

The two Tennysons were tall, clean-shaven and darkly similar. They greeted the three females with courteous bows. Hannah felt close to saying something, but didn't. She heard her mother say, 'Gentlemen, welcome.' One Tennyson mumbled a reply as they both stood blinking, s.h.i.+fting on their feet after the confinement of the carriage. Both began lighting pipes.

The trunks were unfastened and brought down by Dr Allen and one of the Tennysons. Both the Tennysons were handsome, one perhaps more sensitive in appearance than the other - would that be the poet or the melancholic? Hannah waited for them to speak some more. She wanted desperately to know which of these two men her interest should fall upon.

John woke up without any feeling down one side. He reached a hand up to his face to feel for the rough crusting of frost and drag it off, but there was none. So either he wasn't outside or the weather was mild. He felt that the air wasn't moving over him, wasn't alive. He was inside, in a shut room.

He kept his eyes closed, floating there in his own inner darkness, wanting to delay the knowledge of which room he was in, although in truth he knew. But it might not be there, it might be the right room, with Patty first up from the bed and busy with the children.

He opened his eyes by fractions and saw a dark grey room. The imagined biting rime on his sky side was the old numbness from sleeping out years ago, not a real touch of the world, and he wasn't home. There was the window, glowing dimly with wet autumn light. It showed its view of two trees bent by the wavery gla.s.s.

Below he could hear other inmates moving and the brisk voice of Mrs Allen. She would collect him shortly to accompany her across the garden to the doctor's house for breakfast, him having been a good lad.

He lifted the blanket, swung his softening white feet onto the clean wood floor, and stood up, and immediately wanted to lie back down again and not lie back down again and go and not go anywhere and not be there and be home.

John spread b.u.t.ter thickly on his bread and bit. Those considered const.i.tutionally able had cutlets to eat and sawed at their meat, including Charles Seymour, the aristocrat who wasn't mad at all. He'd condescended to join them this morning. The doctor had listed his pedigree to the new man as though presenting a prize mastiff. There had been polite talk, mostly about Cambridge, that lucky, unknown world, while John said nothing. Now the table was silent. George Laidlaw was talking to himself, almost inaudibly, his lips fluttering with his habitual fantastical calculations of the National Debt. Fulton Allen ate with a lad's appet.i.te, sweeping up juices with a chunk of bread on his fork. Margaret ate morsels silently. Hannah Allen kept glancing at the new man, Septimus Tennyson, whose head trembled and whose gaze seemed too sensitive to look at anything for long, but shrivelled back from what it hit like a snail's wizening eyes. Tall and faded he looked. Why didn't Hannah glance instead at John? He licked silky b.u.t.ter from his teeth and would much rather have been eating her, the prettyish, pale thing. He wondered how she tasted in the nest between her legs. He'd have liked to see her cheeks flush and hear her startled breath. The doctor smiled over his chewing at everyone. 'Do we all have plenty to do today? George, you'll be working in the vegetable garden, won't you?'

John lay in the warmth of the bath, nursing the whiteness of his belly. He pressed his fingers into it, forming ridges of soft dough. Beneath, his p.e.n.i.s had bobbed up out of the water and was capped with ticklish cold air. He lay back, the water slopping up beside his ears, and let his arms float. He lay so still he could feel his heartbeats shunting a little force around his body.

Knuckles beat against the door. 'Five minutes, Mr Clare.'

Peter Wilkins was an old attendant. His heavy face was pouched and drooping. The lower lids of his watery eyes hung so low that they showed a quarter of an inch of their red lining like a worn-out coat with failing seams. He had had his fill of restrainings, bathings, arguings, and had now taken upon himself the duty of keeping the gate. He never mentioned that this was now what he understood his job to be in case he was contradicted and had his former duties imposed. Instead, each morning he walked purposefully, but not too quickly or obviously, to the gate under its trees and stood there.

His face was so detailed, so full of character, that John always found encountering him to be a small event, like eating something. John thanked Wilkins with a raised hat as he let him go out towards his work.

He walked with the quick skimming steps of a labourer up the hill to the admiral's garden, getting a little heat and motion into his flesh. He began whistling a tune, 'Tie a Yellow Handkercher', one of those he'd transcribed years ago from gypsies and old boys, for a volume that no one would publish, that died on a desk in a cramped London office. Thus the real life of the people goes insulted and ignored. He sang out loud 'Flash company been the ruin o' me and the ruin o' me quite', then stopped: he was feeling it too strongly and it was more imprisonment to simplify himself like that in other people's words, not when he had so many of his own. Also, he'd seen two charcoal burners on the road ahead, round-shouldered and dirty, their faces blackened and featureless. He angled his hat down and skulked under it as they pa.s.sed, then wondered if that would have made them more or less likely to take him for one of the mad.

When they'd gone, he looked up again into the forest.Wet. Not much stirring. A flicker of wings. Mist between the crooked trees.

As he worked the admiral's garden a robin joined him. It darted forward to needle the earth he'd turned, watching him, waiting, poised on its little thready legs. John saw the throb of a worm by his spade, plucked it up, and threw it at the bird. The robin flew away, flew back, and jabbed at the meal.

Watching this, being there, given time, the world revealed itself again in silence, coming to him. Gently it breathed around him its atmosphere: vulnerable, benign, full of secrets, his. A lost thing returning. How it waited for him in eternity and almost knew him. He'd known and sung it all his life. Perception of it now, amid all his truancy and suffering, made his eyes thicken with warm tears.

Too easily moved - he knew that. Nervous and excitable. He dried himself on his sleeve and went back to working, the easy rhythm and weight through his arms.A painless prescription.And it was light work, nothing compared to lime burning or thres.h.i.+ng. He hacked down on a clod of this thick Ess.e.x clay and remembered the light flail his father had made him when he was a boy. Standing beside the old man's effortless fast rhythm of circling whacks he'd tried to keep up, his arm burning, his s.h.i.+rt sweated through, his damp skin furred with itchy grain dust. Weak but willing, his father called him.

'Good afternoon, John, or morning.'

It was the admiral, standing very dignified and straight. John had always suspected that he stood straighter and with greater dignity now in his retirement than he had on the seas. He looked spick and span, very comprehensively brushed, the remnants of his grey hair all shooting forwards from his crown, his long blue coat as spotless as a horse before a show. A man who'd known Nelson. 'And how are we today?'

John stood up, his earthen five feet two feeling very shabby and insufficient opposite the admiral.'Very good, sir. Fine day.'

'Indeed.'The admiral released one hand from behind his back and gestured out at the woods. Like a dog, John looked at the hand, not at the direction indicated. He'd forgotten how twisted and swollen the admiral's hands were, fingers like lengths of ginger root. John wondered that he didn't wear gloves, but perhaps he couldn't get them on. 'Yes,' the admiral said, 'it's the fine sort of autumn weather. I have an invitation in town,' he announced. John bowed at the fact. 'So I'm off to Woodford to entrust my poor person to the train.' The admiral smiled.

John also smiled. 'I wish you a safe journey,' he said. 'Yes,' the admiral said slowly. He seemed not to like the concerned sincerity of this response. The thought of his bodily destruction at unnatural speed was not meant actually to be entertained. 'Yes, indeed. So I shall bid you good day. Please convey my regards to the doctor and Mrs Allen. Oh, yes, there's someone taking Beech Hill House, a friend of the doctor's, I believe. Do you by any chance know who?'

'I'm afraid not, sir.'

'Ah well. Anon, then.'

The admiral let the gate clap behind him and headed down the hill, his thick hands bunched in the small of his back.

John whistled enviously after him 'Flash company been the ruin o' me and the ruin o' me quite'. An evening in London with the old, wild lads - that was what he needed. He felt his flesh strain towards the thought of beer, wanting drunkenness, wanting the world softened and flowing around him. To be back in his green jacket, the country clown for his friends from The London Magazine The London Magazine with their bristling literary talk, their sharp, rehea.r.s.ed epigrams scattered like cut stones through the thickness of talk. And later, swaggering, scenes around them changing like backcloths flown up and down in a tatty theatre until he found himself with a plump young something, her nest tickling his nose as he strained the root of his tongue, tasting up into her, then quenching himself inside her, that wonderful release, hugging her as he did so, rubbing the sweat-loosened paint from her cheek onto his own. with their bristling literary talk, their sharp, rehea.r.s.ed epigrams scattered like cut stones through the thickness of talk. And later, swaggering, scenes around them changing like backcloths flown up and down in a tatty theatre until he found himself with a plump young something, her nest tickling his nose as he strained the root of his tongue, tasting up into her, then quenching himself inside her, that wonderful release, hugging her as he did so, rubbing the sweat-loosened paint from her cheek onto his own.

He could look up an address or two and find the old gang, balder, plumper, more fitfully employed now that the magazine had folded. But no point: it was gone, and he couldn't have gone anyway, he reminded himself. He was an inmate, a prisoner. He was due back at Allen's. At present, it was enough to have got through the day. But the thought of it all made him want to kick. And Nature had taken herself away from his dirty little fury and left him there.

He worked until dusk and walked back. Peter Wilkins opened the gate for him. 'You'd better hurry,' he told him, 'or you'll be late for evening prayers.'

Charles Seymour sat at his desk and wrote. His valet, with almost nowhere to resort to in this wretched place, lingered behind him, standing like a sentry against the wall.

. . . You counsel me to console myself with the thought of my freedom. I see how you struggle, my little darling, to smile encouragingly at me through your tears, but do not think I believe your heart is in it. Nevertheless, let me answer to that. First of all, to be stuck in an establishment such as this . . .

He dipped his pen, stared at the wall.. . . seems a very peculiar definition of freedom. I am imprisoned in a madhouse and in my right mind and imprisoned in my desire.

He stopped and looked down at this extravagance, but did not scratch it out.

I was brought to this h.e.l.lhole by my father to prevent us marrying and still I remain here. I know that you are referring to my freedom from obligation, viz. my freedom from you. I needn't tell you that to me that is no liberty at all. What is my freedom for, if I cannot have what I desire? It is a useless burden, if it can be said to exist at all . . .

Was He beyond the trees?

Of course He must be in them, through them, as they were His creation, but Margaret did not feel that. Having known Him in the actual live Spirit, she was no stickler for orthodoxy and knew what she knew. She felt Him infinitely behind the trees, behind matter, and the trees stood up as a guard, a brake. Their limbs reached into each other, preventing her, manufacturing darkness in the heart of the wood. No, not darkness - she must be proportionate, clear-minded to receive Him - but twilight. Their trivial falling leaves coloured the air.

She was a poor creature with sin's stink on her and must sit and wait on the far side of unbearable distance. That distance was larger than any in the mere world alone. It was absolute. But there was comfort there: the distance was a sign of His mastery and power. The wall that separated them connected them also, joined them by separation. In her inmost nearness that distance touched her and hurt her and was itself a revelation of Him. It was something she could hang on to.

Margaret stretched a fresh piece of muslin across the frame and fixed it there. Several samplers were already piled on the small table of her room. Soon she would give them away. They were weak signals of the Truth, but she was soothed by making them, by the image of the cross forming starkly in front of her and the purring of the thread drawn through the cloth. It was a task that sealed her spirit in contemplation until she couldn't hear the shouts of the mad or the weather, the branches grinding and clicking in the wind.

But how long would she have to wait? She might die. She might die and never know it again and be forgotten in darkness.

Margaret wondered if she should start to fast once more.

Alfred Tennyson screwed in his monocle, stooped and peered closely at the phrenological bust on top of Matthew Allen's writing desk. He read a few of the labels on the glossy surface of the head that named the mental organs corresponding with that area. Amativeness.Agreeableness. Ideality.The whole bland, stereotyped human head was speckled with these faculties.

'Ah, that, well,' Matthew Allen, who was talking rapidly, changed the course of his speech as he saw his guest examining this medical ornament. 'I'm increasingly of the opinion that these categories are by and large symbolical.There may be an overall right-ness of attribution, but I can't say that in my clinical work I've found watertight correspondences.The map is useful, however, for keeping in mind the panoply of things to be considered.'

'I had my b.u.mps read once,' Tennyson said. 'And was not dazzled by any brilliance of a.n.a.lysis.The fellow rather overestimated my quant.i.ty of animal spirits, perhaps because I'm large and was with friends after a lunch where let's say some wine was consumed.'

'Indeed. Indeed, there are vulgar pract.i.tioners out there, in their hundreds now, but really they aren't to be thought of. Vauxhall Gardens stuff.'

Matthew Allen looked round, wondering what to draw his guest's attention to next. He felt excitable at the literary young man's presence in his private study and was eager to impress upon him the range of his researches. He watched Tennyson relight his pipe, hollowing his clean-shaven cheeks as he plucked the flame upside down into the bowl of scorched tobacco.The head was ma.s.sive and handsome undeniably, with a dark burnish to the skin. Behind the dome of the forehead, strongly suggestive of intellectual power, very promising poems were being formed. He was very different in appearance to poor little Clare, but the forehead was reminiscent. The poet had been right about himself - he did seem deficient in animal spirits. The case was not nearly so morbid as his brother Septimus's, but Alfred Tennyson also moved slowly, as though through a viscous medium of thought, of doubt. Being so short-sighted might have exacerbated that, the world dim and untrustworthy around him.

As Matthew Allen stood diagnosing his guest, Tennyson now reached out and picked up a mineral sample. He brought it close to his monocle, saw its many metallic facets. It was a glittering tumble of right angles, little walls and roofs jutting out from each other like a town destroyed by an earthquake.

'Iron pyrites,' Allen explained. 'I've many other samples you'll see ranged around the room. My intention was, is still, to collect samples of every mineral to be found in the British Isles, but I have quite a few more to go. Chemistry was for a while a subject of mine. Here,' Allen paced quickly across the rug to a shelf, ran a finger across spines until he found five slender identical volumes. He pulled one out. 'My lectures on chemistry. I gave them in Scotland some years ago. Carlyle - do you know Carlyle? - Thomas Carlyle, he attended, as I recall. I knew him even back then in our Edinburgh days. Perhaps I could take you to Chelsea and introduce you.'

'I've had the pleasure of making his acquaintance, and Jane's, already.'

'Oh, very good. Well then, perhaps we should visit together. It really is very straightforward now with the train at Woodford.'