The Essex Serpent (32 page)

‘We’ll both go out on the same day like candles left by an open window,’ she said, smiling: ‘I remember! I remember! – but you see, I heard them calling me home and something was out here in the water and it whispered in the night and was hungry, and I thought: I will go down to the river and make peace with it for Aldwinter’s sake.’ At this she turned in Will’s arms to look out towards the river-mouth, where the clear sky showed the evening star brightly burning. ‘Did it come for me?’ she said, fretful: ‘Did it come?’

‘It’s gone,’ said Will. ‘Brave as a lion you sent it away – come home with us now, come home.’ How easy it was to lift her, to be helped to his feet by Joanna and Naomi – as if already she’d begun to dissipate up into the blue air!

‘Cora,’ said Stella, quietly calling, putting out her hand – ‘how warm you are and always have been – tell Francis to take my stones, my bits and pieces, leave them all behind. Give them to the river, turn the Blackwater blue.’

NOVEMBER

On turns the tilted world, and the starry hunter walks the Essex sky with his old dog at his heels. Autumn fends off the diligent winter: it’s a warm clear-eyed month, with a barbarous all-too-much beauty. On Aldwinter common the oaks shine copper in the sunblast; the hedgerows are scarlet with berries. The swallows have gone, but down on the saltings swans menace dogs and children in the creeks. Henry Banks burns his ruined boat down on the Blackwater shore. The damp wood spits, the black paint blisters. ‘Gracie,’ he says, ‘there you were, all along.’ Beside him Naomi stands very straight, warily watching the turning tide. She feels herself arrested in motion, pausing for a moment with one foot in water and one on the shore.
What now?
she thinks.
What now?
Deep in the flesh that joins thumb and forefinger there’s a black splinter from the boat’s hull: a talisman she touches, awe-struck by all her hands have done.

London capitulates too readily and hangs out her white flags: come mid-November there’s frost on the windows of the buses on the Strand. Charles Ambrose finds himself playing at fatherhood again: there’s Joanna, always at his desk, with an unerring taste for his least suitable books, and there’s James, who at breakfast found in the gutter a broken pair of glasses and had made a microscope by supper. He conceals his particular fondness for John, in whose appetite and placid good nature he recognises himself. He lies on his stomach playing cards; on Guy Fawkes’ Night he tears his coat, and doesn’t mind. In the evening he catches Katherine’s eye, and they shake their heads: the presence in their ordered tasteful house of these three is as strange as any number of river-borne beasts. Letters pass between London and Aldwinter with such frequency and speed they joke there’s a night train in the sidings waiting just for them. John believes it, and asks if he can bake a cake to keep the train driver going.

Charles receives a letter from Spencer. It lacks the vigour of his earlier efforts: certainly he remains ethically committed to better housing policy, but is concentrating for now on prudent investment of his so very burdensome fortune. Property, perhaps, he says (vaguely, though there was no need to elaborate), property’s the thing these days, and Charles is not for a moment deceived. Over in Bethnal Green there’s a new landlord, he’d wager, and one with a good heart and correspondingly poor business sense.

Edward Burton, not yet returned to work, looks up from his blueprints and sees Martha at the table. Cora Seaborne has given her a typewriter and it makes quite a racket, but he doesn’t mind. How can he? In the space of a month he’s moved from threatened homelessness to a degree of security and peace that bewilders him when he wakes in the morning. The entire tenement block has been bought up by a landlord who employed two clerks to make an audit of each home. They came with a camera and refused tea; they noted the damp window-frame, the buckled door, the creaking third stair. Within a week these were remedied, and the street took on the scent of whitewash and plaster, and over breakfast and supper, factory-workers and nurses, clerks and mothers and elderly men braced themselves for a punitive rise in rent that never came. Now neighbours gather in stairwells and scratch their heads, and it’s generally agreed the man’s nothing but a fool. There’s a degree of resentment in public – I stand in no need of charity, more than one tenant says, bullishly – but behind closed doors they’d bless his name, if they knew it.

Martha keeps in her pocket a folded note from Spencer, wishing her happiness. ‘For a long while I wondered what use I was, with only money to recommend me. I play at being a surgeon because it’s a respectable way to pass the time and it appealed to me once when I was a boy but my heart’s never been in it, and God knows I’m no Luke Garrett. It’s because of you I’ve found a purpose which allows me to look in the mirror and not be sickened by myself. I do wish you’d loved me, but I thank you for helping me find a way to love you, and try to right the wrongs you showed me.’ It’s so humble, and so kind, that she briefly wonders whether her path might better have run alongside his. But no: in the absence of Cora it’s Edward Burton she wants, with his near-silence and his clever hands, her comrade and her friend.

Her longing for Cora is strangely no greater in Bethnal Green than it was in Foulis Street, in Colchester, in the grey house on Aldwinter common. It is as fixed as the Pole Star, and she need not look for it. Nor does she resent their years of companionship: she understands the alterations of time, and how what was necessary once may be no longer needed. Besides (she looks up from her typewriter – sees Edward frowning over his plans – touches the magazine which has lately published her work) it’s a poor woman whose ambition is only to be loved. She has better things to be getting on with.

In Luke Garrett’s rooms on Pentonville Road a marriage of true minds has taken place. There are moments when each heartily wishes the other at the bottom of the Blackwater, but no more devoted couple can be found from one end of the Thames to the other.

Early in November Spencer leaves his home in Queen’s Gate (one which he increasingly considers an embarrassment) and takes up residence with his friend. Luke feels it his duty to protest at some length (he doesn’t need a nursemaid, thanks; he’s got no wish to see anyone, ever; he’s always found Spencer a more than usually annoying companion), but in truth he’s glad. What’s more, Spencer has unearthed an ancient maxim regarding the saving of a life, and points out with some regularity that since Luke prevented his dying, Spencer is both his possession and his responsibility. ‘I’m your slave, in effect,’ he says, and hangs a photo of his mother beside the portrait of Ignaz Semmelweis.

There’s no sign of any great improvement in the mutilated hand: the stitches have been removed, the scar’s no worse than to be expected, there’s no loss of feeling, but the two fingers crook resolutely inward and fumble over anything finer than a fork. Luke dutifully (if ill-temperedly) submits to a series of exercises with a rubber band, but more in hope than expectation. The spectre of Cora lies always before him. He cherishes two scenarios of equal unlikelihood: first, that he’ll suffer a necrosis that’ll leave him a stinking suppurating wretch, and that she’ll be moved to a lifetime’s remorse; second, that he’ll find a means to heal himself, and immediately undertake an operation of such daring he’ll achieve overnight fame, earn her helpless adoration, and sneeringly discard it in a public fashion. For all the promises he once made, he lacks Spencer’s capacity to love humbly and quietly with no hope of return, and his implacable loathing of Cora sustains him far more than Spencer’s insistence he eat a decent breakfast (‘You’re thin, and it’s doing you no favours …’). Spencer – wiser than anyone ever gave him credit for – understands what Luke does not: that a division fine and fragile as tissue-paper lies between love and loathing, and that Cora need only touch it to poke clean through to the other side.

But it’s not just sentiment and loyalty that sees Luke fetching pork chops for supper, and Spencer more or less forcing his friend out of doors to study or dine. There’s a practical aspect to their arrangement, which is this: Spencer has coaxed Luke back to the Royal Borough, where he has been both surgeon and patient, and proposed a solution. His own dexterity as surgeon was never anything on Luke’s, it’s true; but it’s good enough, and better than some. What Spencer lacks (he cheerfully admits) is the courage and insight of his friend, for whom every wound and disease represents no threat but a welcome opportunity to demonstrate his skill. That being the case, he says, could they not be between them a kind of chimera, with his own hands being substitute for Luke’s? ‘I promise not to actually think,’ he says. ‘You always said I wasn’t much good at that,’ and he flings open the door to the operating room, triumphant, hoping the sight of it will prove irresistible. And it does: the scent of carbolic, the gleam of scalpels in their steel trays, the laundered pile of cotton masks, act on Luke like an electric charge at the base of his spine. Not since having his hand stitched up has he set foot there, thinking it’d be much like giving a starving man a dish of food just out of reach. Instead, it enlivens him – the shadow of the gallows-oak which has seemed always at his feet recedes – the half-crouched body seems once again possessed of frightening reserves of potential energy. Then in comes Rollings, stroking his beard, catching Spencer’s eye: he says, diffidently, as if the thought had just occurred, ‘There’s a compound fracture of the tibia just come in – a bit of a mess, I’m afraid – and the man can’t afford to pay. Don’t suppose either of you chaps want a go?’

Sunday comes, and William Ransome’s in his pulpit. He sees a cracked pane in the west window and he makes a note; he sees the dark pew with its splintered arm and looks away. It’s a scanty congregation, what with no whispered terror to drive them to the mercy seat, but a cheerful one for all that:
Let us now with gladsome mind
, they sing, willing kindness on their neighbours. The horseshoes have been taken down from Traitor’s Oak, save one so high in the branches it’ll likely hang there until no-one can remember what purpose it might have served. Only once has he mentioned the serpent – the double illusion of it, the falsity of their fear – concealing it in a kindly homily regarding Eden’s garden. They leave in no doubt of having been foolish, but understandably so, and resolve to mind their tongues.

Down the narrow pulpit stair he comes (favouring his left knee, which lately has ached in the mornings), and it’s a cursory greeting he gives to those who wait at the door, who pause by the lych-gate: ‘Wednesday, in the afternoon, certainly I’ll come – no, not Psalm 46: perhaps you’re thinking of 23? – she sends love: she wishes she could’ve been there.’ But all’s forgiven. He’s indulged now as he never was before: they talk still of the London woman who not so long ago seemed always at his door; they know how he cradled his wife on the marsh. They see tarnish on him, and it makes him precious: he’s not steel, he’s silver. Besides, they know what waits behind the rectory door, and why he rushes home – the blue-eyed wife, who circuits the common every week or so, wrapped to the ears, taking air and hailing neighbours, then returning breathless to her curtained room. They leave gifts on the doorstep of rosehip syrup and walnuts in their shells; they leave cards and handkerchiefs so small, so fine, they’re no use at all.

Will takes off his collar, throws down his parson’s black coat: he does it impatiently these days, though almost as hurriedly puts them back on. Stella’s waiting, curled kittenish under a blanket, putting out her arms. ‘Tell me who you saw and what they said,’ she says, in one of her gossipy moods. She pats the bed, beckons him closer, and they’re children again, or nearly – laughing, dismissing all others, falling into half-remembered phrases that’d be nonsensical if anyone overheard. But no-one does: the house is empty, the children gone for a time, grown in their absence the stuff of legend. ‘Remember Jo,’ they say, ‘Remember John and James,’ taking pleasure in the pain of wanting them, since it’s a sweet grief that’ll be assuaged by a train ticket or a first-class stamp. Will – always stifled by small rooms and low ceilings, whose muscles ache from under-use – turns maid and mother, sometimes putting an apron on, surprising them both with a knack for roast meat and clean sheets. Dr Butler comes down from London and pronounces himself pleased: it’s a question now (he says) of management, better done here than anywhere, given appropriate precautions. He washes his hands in carbolic soap: mind you do the same, he says.

Stella remains as ever the happier of the two, feeling herself slowly unmoored, sails up for the coming wind. She aches for her children – sometimes she can’t tell if it’s love or disease that leaves her grasping the bed’s edge, white-knuckled, gasping – but (she says) every hair on their head is numbered; and if their father in heaven knows each sparrow’s fall, how much more will he see to it that John doesn’t run into the path of a London bus?

When she thinks of the Essex Serpent – and she does, though rarely – it’s with something like pity, forgetting that after all it was nothing but flesh and wood and fear.
Poor beast
, she thinks:
Never a match for me
. Sometimes she grows fretful, looking for her notebook with its blue bindings and blue ink, but it’s gone on the estuary tide, all its fibres and filaments dissolved in the dark Blackwater.

Daily, Will walks out between fields where winter wheat sends up vivid seedlings so fine, so soft, he might as well be walking between lengths of green velvet. By an effort he thinks might one day halt his heart, he sets Cora aside so long as he’s under any Aldwinter roof, and takes her out again in the bare forest, by the Colchester road, down on the Blackwater marsh. He brings her out, as if he’d kept her concealed in his coat, and considers her by daylight and in the pearly light of the autumn moon, turning her about – what is she to him, after all? He cannot settle his mind. He does not miss her, since she seems so insistently present, in the yellow lichen wrapping the bare beech branches, in the kestrel he once saw skimming the oaks, quivering its outspread tail. Coming to the green stair – faded now, the carpet muddied – he thinks of her impatient hand on her own skirt’s hem, and the taste of her, and he comes undone, of course he does; but that is not the whole or peak of it. How simple that would be, and how contemptible! But the truth is (and he remains truth’s disciple) that casting about for how best to name her he can land on nothing more exact, more honest, than to say: ‘She is my friend.’

For all that, he does not write – he hardly feels the need. She signals to him in the high mares’ tails overhead, in the turns of phrase she has borrowed and lent, in the curled scar on his cheek; and by similar means he imagines he also signals to her: that their conversations go on, silently, in the downspin of a sycamore key.