The Essex Serpent
Page 23
A rota of nightwatchmen is set up. They sit by small fires on the marsh and make marks in a log book: 0200 hours, wind south-easterly, visibility good, tide low. No sighting but a faint grinding and groaning from 0246 to 0249. Banks is not permitted to join the watch, on account of how Naomi is missing and he’s likelier than ever to drink.
Aldwinter’s children don’t take kindly to being kept indoors. In one of the tithed cottages a boy goes quite deranged with boredom and bites his mother’s hand. ‘There,’ she says, showing Will the wound: ‘I knew something was up the moment a robin flew in. It’s the serpent in him coming out.’ She hisses at the rector, showing him her teeth.
Stella is home and writes in her blue book daily – I’d like to be baptised again in blue water on a clear blue night – and closes it up when Will comes in. She has good days and bad days. Her visitors attend her – had she heard about this woman and that thing and wasn’t it funny and didn’t she still look so beautiful and wherever did she find those beads so bright – and go away shaking their heads, and dousing their hands in antiseptic. ‘She’s not herself at all,’ they say: ‘She told me she hears the serpent sometimes when she sleeps! She told me it knows her by name!’ Then – ‘You don’t think she’s seen it, do you? You don’t think there’s something to see?’
Will finds himself treading a line. The line is narrow and on either side it’s a hell of a way to fall. On the one hand he won’t hear of it, this miserable superstition: was ever a whispered rumour given such wet flesh, so many bones? It is his duty to keep it at bay. He preaches brightly: ‘God is our refuge and strength: a very present help in trouble,’ but it’s clear the villagers doubt it. The congregation does not dwindle, only grows truculent and frequently refuses to sing. No-one mentions the splintered arm of the pew where it’s still possible to make out the remnants of a tail: they’re glad, on the whole, that it’s gone.
On the other hand he lies awake at night, with Stella too far away along the corridor, and wonders if it’s a judgment. God knows he alone could be indicted on several charges (he remembers standing alone on the marsh bent double with desire); he wonders if the Essex Serpent has his name written down in a ledger.
He hears nothing from Cora. He thinks of her. Sometimes he thinks she came in the night and put her eyes in his sockets so he’d see the world on her terms: he can’t look at a clod of mud in the garden without wanting to crumble it and see if there’s something curled up in there. He wants to tell her everything and because he can’t the fabric of the world feels thin and drab. ‘There’s a dragonfly in my study trapped behind a bookcase,’ he writes, ‘and I can’t think over the sound of its wings beating.’ Then he throws the paper away.
Cora reads her letters, and does not reply. She takes Martha and Francis to London: ‘It’s at its best this time of year,’ she says, and spends irresponsibly on a good hotel, on extravagant meals, on shoes she doesn’t like and will never wear. She drinks with Luke Garrett in Gordon’s by the Embankment, where the walls drip into the candles, and when pressed on the subject of her Good Reverend dismisses him with an imperious wave. But Garrett is no fool, and would prefer her old way of merrily mentioning Will each second sentence.
If Luke and Martha had expected either to fall in love or to despise each other in the time after midsummer they are greatly surprised. What comes instead is an ease which is like that of fellow soldiers who’ve survived a common battle. They never revisit that night, not even in memory: it was necessary, that is all. It is tacitly agreed that Spencer should be kept in the dark: Luke has such a fondness for him, and Martha such a use. He has gathered about him men of political weight and financial heft: he thinks it likely that Bethnal Green might benefit from new housing to which no moral obligations are attached, and which do more than meet the barest minimum of shelter.
Martha and Edward Burton share chips down at Limehouse and scheme while the ships from New Zealand unload frozen lamb on the docks. We’ll do this and that, they say, licking salt from their fingertips, companionable, without noticing that each has assumed the other’s presence on some future day. ‘It’s just I like looking up and seeing her there,’ he tells his mother, who has her doubts: Martha’s a good London girl but has airs and no longer drops her aitches.
What Edward does not notice, when he goes home that night holding one of Martha’s magazines, is that in the alley the man who cut him down in the shadow of St Paul’s is waiting patiently. Samuel Hall has bided his time since the day Edward came home from hospital; he wears a different coat, but in the pocket is that same short-bladed knife that slips so easily between the ribs. He can hardly remember the source of his hatred – a quarrel over a woman, was it? – it doesn’t matter anymore. It has become his sole purpose, fuelled by drink and aimlessness; he was cheated once out of revenge and passes the days impatiently until the task can be complete. That Edward Burton has become the pet of wealthy men and women who come so often and stay so long has only made him more implacable: they’ve all become the enemy. He watches Edward flick salt from his sleeve, and fit his key to the lock, calling up to his waiting mother. Not tonight then, he thinks, sheathing the knife: no, but soon enough.
Cracknell’s funeral is well-attended, since no-one’s as loved as the dead. Joanna sings ‘Amazing Grace’ and there’s not a dry eye in God’s house. Cora Seaborne sends a wreath judged rightly to’ve cost the earth.
Will has taken to walking and finds himself thinking that if only by the laws of statistics his feet might fit where Cora’s have been. While he walks he unspools his thoughts behind him, and they are divided. He cannot settle his mind where Cora is concerned: he’d been so content in his love for her – he’d thought it of a kind the apostles might admire, as if in that muddy patch of earth they’d made a heaven – and then something had altered. He can still feel how her flesh had given beneath his hand, and what came after, and he is ashamed, though not (he thinks) as ashamed as he ought to be.
And then there’s Stella, serene in her blue cotton dressing-gown: with the light behind her she’d shame a stained-glass saint. Sometimes she talks of sacrifice and lies quite still as if already on the altar, then she grows animated and writes at night in her blue book. What is he going to do with her? He thinks of the needle and scalpel in the surgeon’s hand and all his being shrinks from it. He rejoices in the reason conferred on mankind, but mistrusts the shifting sands of man’s ingenuity. This is what he is getting at: that we have always been in the habit of making mistakes. Think of the set-to when Galileo sent the earth spinning round the sun – think of the idea that a man deposited a crouching homunculus in his wife. It was all very well for science to puff out its chest and say, ‘This time we have it right,’ but must he gamble Stella on it?
Will bargains with God, as Gideon once did. ‘If it is not your will that she endures the treatment, prevent it by some very definite means, and let that be the sign,’ he prays. The logical absurdity does not escape him, but there it is: God might as well use logic as anything else. On Sunday he climbs into the pulpit and reminds the congregation of how Moses in the desert had raised up a wooden pole around which a great brass serpent coiled, and how it had given them hope.
Late in July the nightwatchmen abandon their post.
Luke Garrett
Pentonville Road
27th July
It’s late and you’ll think I’m drunk but my hand’s steady – I could sew up a man slit from throat to navel and never drop a stitch!
Cora, I love you – listen to me, I LOVE YOU – Oh I know, I have said it often and you smile and take it, because it is only the Imp, only your friend, nothing to trouble you, not even a stone dropped in your calm water, in your horrible calm, your TOLERANCE of me – which I think you might even mistake for love sometimes when I’ve amused you or shown you some clever thing I’ve done like a dog bringing a chewed thing to its mistress …
But I must make you understand – I must tell you how I carry you about in
me like a growth I should excise with my knife – it is weighty and black, it ACHES, it gives out something in my bloodstream, in all the sore endings of my nerves – but I could not cut it out and live!
I love you. I have loved you from the moment you came into that bright room in your dirty clothes and you took my hand and said no other doctor would do – I loved you when you asked if I could save him and I knew then you hoped I would not and I knew that I would not try … And I love your mourning dress which is a lie and I love you when I watch you try and love your son, and I love you when you put your arms round Martha, and I love you when you are ugly from weeping or weariness, and I love you when you put your diamonds on and play at being a beauty … do you think anyone else will ever know each Cora as I have known them and love each just as much?
And I have tried and tried to make something good of my love – I tried when Michael was dying like a wicked saint in that room with the curtains open, and I tried when at last he went back to where he came from. I have tried to love you in ways that won’t destroy me – I have not wanted to possess you – I have left you to this new friend of yours – and all the while I cannot sleep because when I do you are there and you are shameless, you demand things of me, I wake thinking I have all your tastes in my mouth – yet all this time have hardly done more than put my hand on your shoulder … you think me an imp but I have been an angel!
Don’t write. Don’t come. I don’t need it. It’s not why I’ve written. Do you think my love will starve without your crumbs? Do you think I am not capable of humility? THIS is humility – I will tell you that I love you and know that you cannot return it. I will debase myself.
It’s the most that I can give and cannot be enough.
LUKE
I am Stella stellar I am he said! Stella my star of the high blue seas!
And I’ve made my own missal my holy book with blue ink on the blue page and stitched up in threads blue as blue-blooded veins that are blue.
THEY HAVE TAKEN MY CHILDREN FROM ME!!!
My two blue-born babies my three that lived none of them now are found under my roof!
They want to give me things knives needles droplets and teaspoons of this and that no I said no I can’t be doing with any of that no let me live with my blue things all about me all my cobalt beads my lapis my black pearls that are blue my pot of blue ink my pot of blue paint my ribbons that are indigo my skirt that is royal my cornflowers growing both my pansy eyes
Still I bear it well enough for it was promised that though I walk through the rivers they will not overflow me! Though I walk through the fire, I shall not be burned!
AUGUST
1
Nothing inclined Charles Ambrose to Darwinism more than walking the narrow streets of Bethnal Green. He saw there not equals separated from him only by luck and circumstance, but creatures born ill-equipped to survive the evolutionary race. He looked on their pale thin faces – which often had a sour mistrustful cast, as if expecting at any moment to encounter a boot – and felt they inhabited their proper place. The notion that if only they’d had access to grammar and citrus fruit at an early age they might have one day sat beside him at the Garrick was preposterous: their predicament was nothing more than evidence of failure to adapt and survive. Why were so many of them so short? Why did they screech and bellow from windows and balconies? And why, at noon, were so many so drunk? Turning down an alley, twitching his fine linen coat closer, he felt much as he might if viewing them through iron bars. This is not to say that he felt no compassion: even animals in zoos should have their cages cleaned.
Four had gathered in Edward Burton’s rooms that August afternoon: Spencer, Martha, Charles and Luke. Their intention was to walk further into Bethnal Green, whose slums and rookeries were candidates for demolition and replacement with the good clean housing Parliament had promised. ‘It’s all very well passing Acts,’ Spencer had said, not knowing how precisely he mimicked Martha, ‘but how much higher will the infant death toll rise before policies are put in place? It’s actions we need, not Acts!’
Edward’s mother served lemon biscuits on a plate from which the Queen’s head looked grimly out, and fretted that her son was tired. He’d been silent in such company and responded only to Martha’s quiet asides – was the old wound hurting? Could he show Spencer the plans he’d been making for a new estate? ‘Very feasible,’ Spencer had said, though really he knew nothing about it. He smoothed his hands across the length of white paper on which Edward had drafted, with all his painstaking untutored skill, the blueprint of a tenement block set around a square of garden. ‘Can I take this – can I show my colleagues? Would you mind?’
Luke meanwhile had eaten his fifth biscuit, having admired Mrs Burton’s evident attention to cleanliness, and said, ‘Martha won’t be happy until she’s seen Thomas More’s Utopia encamped on Tower Hill.’ He’d licked sugar from his thumb, and looked merrily out at the ranks of peaked roofs past the window. Writing to Cora had been like lancing a boil: in due course there might be further discomfort, but for now he felt only relief. What he’d written had been the truth, at least while he still held the pen: he expected nothing back, had offered no bargain, thought himself owed nothing. Probably the euphoria would last no more than another day, but it was a heady thing while it lasted, and made him benevolent. Sometimes, imagining a sealed envelope making its way to his door on the back of a postman’s bike, he grew anxious: would she be amused – would she be moved – might she ignore it and go on blithely as before? Knowing her, he thought the last most likely: it was difficult to penetrate her good temper, or move her beyond a general display of affection to everyone she knew.
‘Off we go then, slumming it,’ said Charles rather gleefully, putting on his coat, remembering how years before he and a companion had one night been tourists of poverty, dressing in drag and loitering under streetlights, drumming up not a solitary client between them.
‘You might be sold a bad oyster,’ said Edward Burton, not yet well enough to take up his post over at Holborn Bars, ‘but keep your wits about you and you’ll all come home again.’
As they’d left it was not yet closing time in the factories and offices, and so the alleys were rather quiet, and it was possible to make out the sound of trains shunting on the tracks a few hundred yards distant. All around, high tenements blotted out the light, and laundry hanging low above them could never have been got clean. Though the summer was mild the few scraps of sunlight coming through seemed hotter there, so that before long Martha felt her clothes grow damp between her shoulder-blades, and the pavements, slicked with fallen scraps of food, gave off the sweetish scent of decay. What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. Rooms were sublet, and sub-let again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten, and strangers bickered over cups and plates and their few square feet of space. Less than a mile away, just beyond the City griffins, the landlords and their lawyers, their tailors and their bankers and their chefs, knew only what was totted in the columns of their ledgers.
Here and there Martha saw reasons to hope that passed the others by, and sometimes nodded, and smiled, because all those strangers’ faces were familiar. A woman in a scarlet jacket appeared from behind a lace curtain to water the geraniums on her windowsill, and tossed away a couple of spent blooms that landed in the gutter beside a broken Guinness bottle. Polish labourers had come to seek work, discovering that if Dick Whittington had been misled about London’s pavements, the weather was at least more temperate in the winter and the docks never slept. They were cheerful and noisy; they leaned in doorways in pairs with their caps tipped, passing a Polish newspaper back and forth; they smoked black-papered cigarettes that gave off a fragrant pall. A Jewish family went volubly by on their way to catch a bus, and the girls wore red shoes; a moment later an Indian woman passed on the other side and in each ear was a bit of gold.
‘Will it work? – it must work,’ she said, gesturing ahead to where Charles walked with Spencer, picking his distasteful way through a litter of rotten fruit from which a cloud of small flies puffed. ‘He must see this is unsustainable, if only out of common humanity!’
‘How can it not? Bit of a stupid man I’ve always thought, but not an unkind one – evening, love,’ he said, grinning at a woman in a curled wig who leaned invitingly out of her door and blew him a kiss as he passed.
‘It’s no use – Spencer has tried – I’m long past redemption.’ There ahead of them on the path his friend was gesticulating towards an especially narrow alley from which a sour smell came. ‘He’s doing all this mostly for your sake, you know. He’d give a fortune to a beggar if you asked him but otherwise would never notice they’re there –’