The Quickening Maze Read Free

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 passed, 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 threshing. He hacked down on a clod of this thick Essex 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 shirt 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