Free The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Page A

were they doing with their faces?’
    ‘They explained, didn’t they? Or were you still catching up?’ Matthew glanced at Oswald’s worried face and felt, oddly, a flush of affection for him. Oswald was always frightened, scared and strict. Even as a little boy he was serious and orderly; alarmed by their father’s ringing voice and fervour, he lived quietly within a set of reassuring rules of his own devising. Matthew pictured him as a child: combed head, woollen suit, the dark nervous gaze mutely requesting calm, peace, things done properly, and found the picture endearing.
    ‘They’re the Tennysons,’ he went on.‘A Lincolnshire family. And quite a family. My word, the things I’ve been hearing from Septimus. Opium. Spirits. A menagerie also. A monkey. Owls. Innumerable dogs. They’re nobility somewhere along the line, in part degenerate. The brother Alfred is a poet, starting to elbow his way into the world. Great things are predicted by some, mostly his friends from Cambridge. It’s a shame you won’t be staying for longer.There’s a literary evening I frequent in Bedford Square.’
    Oswald had not particularly listened, hearing only the little missiles of ‘nobility’, ‘Cambridge’, ‘Bedford Square’.
    ‘Yes, yes. Well, there we are.’
    ‘I’m sorry?’
    ‘I’m very pleased for you that you are acquainted with the minor nobility. You must be very proud.’
    ‘Oswald, really. Septimus is a patient.’
    ‘Of course. Of course.’ Oswald stopped, looked up into his brother’s face. ‘Another opportunity for your dreadful pride. Another chance for you to humiliate me.’
    ‘Oswald, what on earth are you talking about?’
    ‘Don’t play that game with me, Matthew.’ Oswald was shouting now, his face white and spiteful. ‘You may have established yourself in this respectable situation, the good doctor, but don’t forget that I know who you are. No doubt you have contracted sizeable debts to create all this. Just know that you won’t get a penny out of me.’
    Oswald was as boring as the mad, with one thought choking him, controlling him, blaring out of him. Matthew tried to remain dispassionate, tried to chuckle even, but it was difficult. His brother’s face was so familiar, so powerful, and his words once again loosened his past into this place, and Matthew was so tired of the mad.
    ‘Yes. Don’t forget that I know who you are. Literary evenings in Bedford Square! Matthew Allen. I’m sure your new friends would be intrigued by the history of your debts, your imprisonments.’
    That was too much. Matthew grabbed at his brother’s lapels. Oswald skidded back on the wet path, but Matthew held him upright, his fingertips bending painfully under the thick cloth. ‘Just you . . . just you . . .’ Matthew’s vision of the moment was strangely glazed. There, at the end of his arms, was his brother’s face, so familiar but thickened with age, he saw. He heard his own breathing, the soft crackling of twigs underfoot. He heard his son Fulton saying, ‘Father.’ Matthew dropped Oswald quickly back onto the flats of his feet. Fulton approached. As he did so, Oswald, as in victory, smiled.
    ‘Father, you’re wanted back at the house.’
     
    Matthew Allen lay and felt his weight entirely sustained, his head sunk in the pillow, his four limbs dead still, washed up there like driftwood. Bed was always a pleasure, an island he reached after the variable inevitable storms of a day spent with the mad, their frantic, tunnelling logic, their sorrow, their hopelessness and aggression and indecencies. No muscles had to work to keep him there. The lamps hissed quietly. Beside him on the pillow was the familiar peaceful landscape of Eliza’s face: soft, straight eyebrows, fine nostrils, the neat volute that ran down from them to the large, warm, mobile mouth. With her hair pinned, her nightcap on, her face at bedtime was presented with a kind of ceremonial or surgical simplicity that could strike