The Essex Serpent (28 page)

8

Dr Garrett found a branch fit to bear a stocky man. Hanging would doubtless be unpleasant: he’d have much preferred a high drop and broken neck to long slow pressure on his throat; but he understood it, and knew how his tongue would loll, and his bowels loosen, and how blood vessels would lay scarlet cobwebs over the whites of his eyes, and he’d never been afraid of anything he understood. He fumbled at the buckle of his belt, favouring his wounded hand (as if it mattered now what damage was done, or how he pulled at the stitches!), and as he looped the strap through the silver buckle to form a noose his thumb moved across the ridges which formed the symbol there. There it was, the coiled snake, the sign of his profession: the darting tongue picked out with the engraver’s tool, the winking eye. It was a mockery – he had no right to it – to think that once he’d walked proudly bearing the sign of gods, of goddesses! Worse, it called to mind Spencer – his long anxious face, his loyalty, his habit of seeming always to be dashing after him to prevent some disaster. How extraordinary it was that all the while he’d sat leaning on the gallows he’d chosen, numbering his reasons for living and setting each one aside, he’d never once thought of his friend. It was as if his presence was so constant, and so taken for granted, that he’d come to be barely noticed. Again he traced the symbol, resentful of its intrusion, and tried also to set Spencer aside. He was a grown man, after all, with pockets as deep as his heart was large – dull on first meeting, but generally liked: he’d miss Luke, but no more than if he’d gone to another country. But Luke knew this to be untrue. Since their days side by side at the college bench flaying open severed hands to see their bones and tendons Spencer had conferred on him a friendship more unerring than any brother could’ve shown. He’d patiently borne every slight and insult (of which there had been many); by wealth and good manners deflected the rage of tutors and debtors; had by his silent approval enabled every small step Luke made towards his goal. By slow degrees they’d established an intimacy more easy than that with any lover either had known: Luke remembered a time when Spencer, after too much wine, had lolled against his shoulder, and how he hadn’t moved for fear of waking him, though his arm grew stiff and sore. Luke pictured him – waking now in the George, perhaps, in his absurd striped pyjamas with a monogrammed pocket, his fair hair receding, probably thinking of Martha first, then of his friend in the adjoining room; how he’d dress too neatly and come quietly down for his egg, wondering when Luke might wake; how then he’d grow uneasy, and come knocking on the door – would he go to the police, or come searching himself? Would he find his friend hanging there, with the buckle of his belt shearing the flesh behind his ear – might he scrabble at the branch to bring him down?

No – it was impossible to think that he could do such harm – and it was also unfair: must he really struggle numbly on for the sake of George Spencer? How humiliating it was that neither the hope of professional glory nor the possession of Cora Seaborne might keep his neck from the noose, but nothing more than a friend. How humiliating – and another failure, even at the end! The calm he’d felt receded, and in its place was the old familiar rage: he thrashed wildly at the grass with the belt, sending up clods of mud, while behind him in the branches of the oak something moved because it had seen the sun.

Shortly after noon Spencer stood wringing his hands at the threshold of the George Hotel and saw a cab draw up. The driver opened the door and thrust out his hand for money, and then there was Luke, with his wounded hand cradled against his shoulder and his black hair all on end. Spencer’s righteous fury receded when he saw how the other man stared and stared with the whites showing all around his eyes, and a graze on his cheek as if he’d fallen.

‘My God – what have you
done
?’ he said, putting out his hand to draw him in; but Luke shook him off like a petulant child, and pushed past him into the lobby. The cab driver counted through the coins – ‘Where was he?’ said Spencer: ‘How far have you come?’ – but he didn’t answer, only shook his head and tapped the side of his head:
Mad as a hatter, that one.
Above them a door slammed fit to rattle the windows in their frames, and Spencer went upstairs in dread and hope.

His friend stood against the window, looking down onto the Colchester streets. The whole broad bulk of him was rigid; Spencer imagined he might topple over and break in pieces against the bare floor. ‘What’s happened?’ said Spencer, coming nearer: ‘Is everything all right?’

When the other man turned to look at him, Spencer went cold at the bitterness of his black gaze: ‘
All right?
’ said Luke, and his teeth ground against each other; he looked almost as if he might laugh. Then he shook his head, and grunted, and lunging at Spencer with his left hand struck him hard against the temple, splitting the skin above his eye. Spencer reeled against an ugly chest of drawers, and swore; his vision was speckled with stars, and behind them, Luke in his rage and misery said, ‘If it hadn’t been for you it would all be done with now, it would all be finished – God, stop looking at me,
I never wanted you here
–’ Then, as if he’d been held by a cord suddenly severed, he fell against the closed door, and huddled there, cradling his bandaged hand; he did nothing so good and simple as weep, but instead gave out a low and rhythmic groaning that was nearer the grief of animal than man.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Spencer, a little shyly: ‘It’s no good. I’m not going to go away, you know.’ Then carefully, prepared for another blow, he sat beside his friend, and keeping an English distance, patted his shoulder. After a pause he fell to rubbing it roughly, as if it had been the pelt of a dog coming out of disgrace, and said, ‘I’m not going to go away – have a good cry, I would, then we’ll have breakfast, and you’ll feel much better.’ Then, colouring violently, he bent and kissed his friend where his black curls parted, and standing said, ‘You get yourself all cleaned up. I’ll be waiting downstairs.’

9

‘You look well,’ said Martha, truthful but also a little afraid: Stella Ransome burned with too much life. ‘We’re not disturbing you? Frankie wanted to come and says he has gifts. And Cora sends jam, though I’m afraid it hasn’t set. Hers never does.’

Stella sat on her blue couch, wrapped in many blankets. She’d watched them come across the common: first the bobbing of torchlight through fog, then two figures circled by a glow: for a moment she’d thought she was being called home, but concluded that her summoning angels were unlikely to knock at the door. Besides, hadn’t that black-haired boy said he was coming with something to tell her? ‘I feel well,’ she said: ‘I feel my heart beating fast and strong and my mind opening out like a blue flower – I tarry only a short while here on the earth and want very much to live it vividly! Frankie’ – she was pleased to see the boy: ‘Sit there, by the window, where I can see you. Not too close: I’ve had a bit of a cough lately, though nothing too bad.’

‘I’ve got things for you,’ said Francis, and kneeling a discreet distance away laid out the bus ticket, the blue-banded stone, and a foil sweet-wrapper the colour of a robin’s egg.

‘Navy, cyan, teal,’ he said, touching each in turn. Then he put his hand in the other pocket and took out a white envelope. ‘And I’ve got to give you this, which is a letter for your husband from my mother.’

‘Cyan!’ said Stella, delighted, making a note of it: Cyan! Teal! Really there was no end to the boy’s charms. Her own children were returning to her tomorrow – would they also understand? She suspected not. ‘Put your treasures on the windowsill – there, where I’ve left a gap – and we’ll give William his letter – he’ll be pleased. He missed her while she was gone.’ She turned her eyes on Martha, who wondered what they saw, and what they did not.

‘Is he here?’ Martha said, curious: Cora had wandered home late in the cool evening, dazed as if with drink, though there’d been nothing telling on her breath; she’d said, ‘We had such a good long walk,’ and curling in a chair fallen immediately asleep.

‘In the garden feeding Magog if he can find her in the mist – Jo will be home tomorrow and will go straight out there and want to know what she had for breakfast and whether she still pines for Cracknell – go and find him, why don’t you, and take him the note?’ Stella lowered an eyelid very slightly at Francis, who understood that his new friend wished them to be alone, and felt himself grow warm with pleasure.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said when Martha had gone. He stood precisely where he’d been told to stand, and no nearer; very straight, and rigid with the importance of what he had to convey.

‘So I understand,’ said Stella.
Suffer the little children to come unto me!
Her own babies were coming, and here in the meantime was another, and she’d cradle him close if she could – sometimes she looked down at her arms and thought she saw love seeping out of every pore! ‘What is it? I won’t be here much longer, you see, so you have to tell me quick.’

‘I disobeyed my mother,’ said Francis, a little cautiously. He did not consider this to be a sin, but had observed that it was looked on dimly in most quarters.

‘Ah,’ said Stella. ‘I wouldn’t let it trouble you. Christ came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, after all.’

Francis didn’t know about that, but, relieved to see he was not to be told off, edged a little closer, rolling the brass button in his pocket between finger and thumb. ‘I got up this morning at half past five and I went down to the saltmarsh and that man Banks was there and there was lots of fog. I wanted to see if I could see it. The serpent. The Trouble. What they said is in the water. They told me they’d found it but I wasn’t sure because obviously I hadn’t seen it.’

‘Ah! The Essex Serpent – my old adversary, my foe!’ Stella’s eyes glittered, and the hectic colour on her cheek spread upward; she leaned forward and said confidingly, ‘I hear it, you know. It whispers. I write it all down.’ She flicked through her blue notebook and held it out, and Francis saw, written over and over in two neat columns, COMING READY OR NOT. ‘It’s all right,’ said Stella, wondering if she’d frightened the lad: ‘You and I understand each other, as I have always said we do. They have been deceived, Francis. I know the enemy. It can be placated. It’s been done before.’ She looked down at her palms, and read them – surely there were sores coming where the head-lines crossed the lines of memory? – she held them up, but Francis saw nothing.

‘Well,’ he said, pressing on, ‘there was such a lot of fog I couldn’t see very much, but then I heard a noise and there it was.’ He flung out his arm as if the Essex Serpent might creep out from behind the dining table. ‘Just there, big and dark and moving: I could’ve thrown a stone and hit it if I wanted! Well, I looked and looked and I tried to tell Banks but he wouldn’t come. And then the fog was gone for a bit and the sun came out and I saw what it was.’ He told her what he’d seen, and how he’d laughed, and how then the fog and the tide had swallowed it up. ‘Oh …’ she said, disbelieving, as he’d feared she would be, a little let down; then ‘Oh – !’ and she too fell to laughing, and could not stop. Francis watched, recalling how his father once had reached for his throat as if it could be coaxed into being calm. His father’s illness had interested him without troubling him, but as Stella’s eyes streamed with tears his own wetted in response – should he help her? He crossed the carpet, and gave her a glass of water; the fit passed, and she sipped gratefully, then clasping her hands in her lap said, ‘Well, then. Well, Francis. What are we going to do about it?’

‘We should show them,’ he said: ‘We should go down there and show them.’

‘Show them,’ she said, ‘yes: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen …’ She patted at the beads of sweat which settled in the cleft above her lip: ‘The people that walked in darkness will see a great light! We will deliver them out of their fear – give me my notebook, hand me my pen: I am a ready writer! Come’ – she patted the vacant seat beside her, and Francis knelt there, leaning on her arm, watching her leaf through pages blotted with blue ink – ‘I will show you what we’ll do, you and I.’ She began to sketch, her moment of weakness forgotten; her small body radiated vitality and purpose. ‘It is my time,’ she said: ‘The sands are sinking – I have heard it calling! – I am wet to my ankles in blue water …’

Francis wondered if he ought to be troubled, or should call for Martha: the woman’s white hands trembled – her words were tangled strings of bright beads – the black centres of her eyes had spread to the rims. But she put out her arm, and drew him to her, and Francis – who could not bear the shy attempts his mother made to pet him – leaned against her, and felt the heat rise from her shoulder and the incurve of her neck. ‘I can’t do it without you,’ she said, confidingly: ‘I can’t do it on my own, and who else understands, Frankie? Who else can help me?’

She told him what she had in mind. Any other child might have been frightened, or put their head on her shoulder and wept. But as she drew in her notebook, and showed him what part he should play, he was aware for the first time of being wanted, and not out of duty. A new sensation came, which he examined, and would think about later, when he was alone: he thought perhaps it was pride.

‘When shall we do it?’ he said. She tore the pages from the notebook (he admired how neatly she had set out what they were to do, and the care with which she’d planned it) and put them in his pocket.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said: ‘When I’ve seen my babies again. Will you help? Do you promise?’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘I do.’

Martha in the garden watched Will try and crown Magog with a home-coming wreath: the goat, growing stout on scraps, shook it repeatedly off, giving him a sour look they both understood to convey that Cracknell would’ve never dreamt of such an indignity. She blinked her slotted eyes and retreated to the misty garden’s end.

‘When are the children home?’ said Martha. ‘You must’ve missed them.’

‘I’ve prayed for them every day,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s been right since they’ve been gone.’ He looked very young, in a shirt with a tear on the shoulder and red berries from the discarded wreath caught in his hair. He’d left behind his pulpit voice and instead leaned on his country vowels; it had a curious effect, drawing the eye more than ever to the corded strength of his bare arms. ‘Tomorrow on the midday train.’ Martha studied him a while – dared she ask where he’d walked the night before with Cora? Had he too been a little off-kilter since then, a little restive? Perhaps it was only that his children were coming home, and meanwhile Stella burned in her blue room.

‘I’ll look forward to seeing them,’ she said: ‘Anyway, I was sent to give you this.’ She gave him the letter, which he looked at without interest; ‘Leave it there,’ he said: ‘I’d best go fetch Magog.’ He gave a curious bow – half-ironic, and half-comical – and walked into the white air.

Returning to the house to take Francis home, she stood amazed at the threshold. Frankie – who even as an infant could never bear to be held – was seated astride on Stella’s lap, his arms clasped about her neck; she’d drawn a blue cloth over them both, and under it they swayed very slightly back and forth.

What Martha later recalled most vividly of those last few fog-white days was this: William’s wife and Cora’s son, fit together like broken pieces soldered on the seam.