The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Page B

interested daughter, smiled indulgently and grasped her shoulder. Hannah stiffened at this contact and looked down, feeling painfully thwarted by only being able to appear as a child to them. But instantly she decided that to take the part of a pretty and devoted daughter was her most winning option, so again she surprised Allen by patting the back of his hand in response.
    As this family interchange was happening,Tennyson was distracted by the approach of another man. He smiled,Tennyson saw as he neared, and his head lightly trembled. He took the doctor’s hand in both of his own and shook it. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘thank you again.’ After he had turned away, Allen explained to Tennyson who he was, how he suffered from the National Debt, and how these prayers were his only respite. Tennyson watched the man’s retreating back, his gait tightening the further away he was from this remarkably effective doctor.

Winter
    Margaret stood in the dead of the world and looked down at the stopped fish under their dirty window of ice. In the black forks of the trees hard snow was pock-marked by later rain. Crows, folded tightly into themselves, clasped branches that plunged in the wind. Voices of other patients reached her there, the sound dulled by the covered winter surfaces like the clapping of gloved hands.
    She liked the pinch of absence, the hollow air, reminiscent of the real absence. She wanted to stay out there, to hang on her branch in the world until the cold had burned down to her bones. She could leave her whitened bones scattered on the snow and depart like light. Whitened bones. A whited sepulchre. The phrase came to her. Was it aimed at her? Is that why she’d thought of it? Habitually, she tested every bit of scripture that came to her for immediate significance. The whited sepulchre was the Pharisee, according to Him, who appears beautiful, but inside is full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness . But isn’t that every human creature? And what if the uncleanness had been her husband’s, had been daubed on her, slapped on, smeared across her face? What use was always asking questions? As though thought was in any way helpful. Nothing could be argued into being. Whatever was, was. The only useful thing was to be unclouded by thoughts, to be in nothing. To be nothing. To be as empty as the cold. And to wait.
    Again she was denied this. She heard the crunch of footsteps behind her and waited for them to diminish away, but they grew louder. She turned. Footprints ran everywhere across the buried lawn like blue stitches.The sky was grey, darker than the ground: dreamlight: a steady stormlight. At the head of new lines of footprints were Clara the witch and Simon the idiot who dawdled after her, kicking up spurts of ice.
    Margaret stared at Clara, at the large lips that didn’t quite fit together, at the unpinned hair that draggled over her shoulders. Clara obviously thought of herself as sensual with a rolling walk, a flaunt in it, but she wasn’t. Her figure was ordinary, her face unexceptional, blander and healthier than her mind. ‘Good morning, Mary,’ she smiled. Calling Margaret Mary was a spiteful joke of hers. Margaret said nothing. ‘Not going to say anything, are you?’ Margaret stared.‘Devils eaten your words?’ Scratching his thighs through his pockets, the idiot asked, ‘What devils?’
    ‘I told you before.’
    Margaret looked at them for a moment more, then turned back to the pond.
    Their voices said more words, finally the hard separate ones of insult. But they were mistaken in thinking they could disturb Margaret’s concentration.
    An hour or so later she heard more footsteps coming towards her. This time hands landed on her shoulders. She was pivoted around to find herself looking into the doctor’s face. He said, ‘Margaret, you’re freezing. How long have you been out here?’ He chafed her hands between his. ‘You’re shivering.’ She was - that flashing and shuddering