Jack Maggs by Peter Carey

and his wife’s younger sister, Elizabeth. Having come from no proper family himself, or none that he could remember without great bitterness, he had for all his short, determined life carried with him a mighty passion to create that safe warm world he had been denied.
    So it was that he was now the husband of a rosy-cheeked and broad-hipped wife who in no way resembled that pinched and worried woman who had brought him so resentfully into the world. He was the father of a babe just three months old, a boy, whom he doted on as his father had never doted on him. And if he had no more than a florin in his pocket, he was also still the master of a substantial house, a place of books and laughter, of colourful rugs, of mirrors, these last being desired for their light: he would not have his son grow up in dreariness, or darkness. He had a long dining table that could welcome his wife’s aunts and uncles, and there was a splendid alcove in the parlour big enough to accommodate a twelve-foot-high fir tree at Christmas. It was towards this pleasant house in Lamb’s Conduit Street that he now walked briskly, but not quite directly. He could not arrive there yet. He was too agitated by this conversation which had set his heart beating wildly in his chest. Instead he set off down to Lincoln’s Inn Fields—the long way home—to calm himself.
    His secret had been seen.
    This secret pressed at him all day long, and as he set out through the dark streets towards the place where the secret had its nest, it was with the most perplexing mixture of feelings. He walked briskly—some would say fiercely—with his shoulders back, a fast sort of duck-toed march as if he were intent on Moscow, as if he could escape his secret, which was that he was in love with his wife’s sister.
    This had never been his intention, and had begun through no other enthusiasm than their mutual concern for his wife, who had been confined to bed in the last months of her term. This confinement, coinciding with their moving into Lamb’s Conduit Street, brought Tobias and Lizzie intimately together, necessitating the shouldering of small domestic offices which a husband and wife might more properly have performed together. The final act of their tragedy had been completed by no other agency than a heavy counterpane which they had folded together, halving, quartering, until they were, by reason of their honest household labour, brought into temptation.
    No one who knew Tobias, not even the old actor who thought he saw the “thunder,” had any understanding of his unholy thirst for love. He had not known it himself. He did not know the curse or gift his ma and pa had given him: he would not be loved enough, not ever.
    He never really knew this truth about himself, not even when the fame he craved was finally, briefly, granted him and he travelled from city to city like a one-man carnival act, feeding off the applause of his readers. Even when it was thrown in his face, so to speak, he did not see it.
    In 1837 he had even less idea of his own character. She was eighteen years old, he defiled her . Toby, Toby . He had been at church an hour before he did so. Now he would have abandoned all hope of Paradise for her.
    Afterwards, they knelt side by side and made solemn vows to God, which vows they soon broke, once, then twice, and again, in the little garden, in the rain, in his study at three in the morning. She was a child and he was a fool, worse than a fool. He was worse than the father whom he would never forgive, and only minutes after having escaped the wine-stained Henry Hawthorne, he was thinking of her again. He gave his florin to a beggar in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

11
    JACK MAGGS WAS famously fast upon his feet, but now he was half-crippled by his dead man’s shoes. God damn, but they cut him. They squeezed his toes in their vice. They cut his heel with their hooks. He took them off, but then suffered another wound on account of this: so he had no choice