The Essex Serpent(100)

‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Joanna, finding she’d grown tall enough to draw the girl’s head to her shoulder: ‘It’s gone, the Essex Serpent – it’s gone, there’s nothing there, there never was – just a poor old fish, a big one, and it died in the water – come back, Nomi’ – she kissed the girl’s hand, feeling on her mouth the ruin’s dust and the town’s grime – ‘don’t you want to see your dad?’ At this the last of Naomi’s pride departed, and she fell to crying, not violently like a child, but with the steady hopelessness of a woman. When Katherine Ambrose arrived, John on one hand and James on the other, she saw Joanna seated on a marble plinth in a pietà, a thin girl cradled in her lap, crooning what sounded very like a child’s idea of a spell.

‘I’m afraid,’ said Charles, looking at his watch, ‘we seem to’ve acquired another one.’





11


Stella in her blue bower heard her children coming and held out her arms: she knew the rap of John’s shoe on the doorstep, and James’s considered tread; she knew how Joanna would throw down her coat and come running long-legged, full-tilt. Then there was Will at her door, his smile that of a man bringing gifts, triumphant: ‘Darling, here they are – they’ve come back and tall as telegraph poles’ – then, quietly, to Joanna: ‘Go carefully: she’s weaker than she seems.’

Joanna had dreaded seeing her mother lolling on a sickbed, gaunt and grey, listlessly thumbing at a blanket, but here was Stella starlike, with eyes gleaming and a touch of rouge; she’d dressed for their arrival with turquoise beads looped three times round her neck and a shawl on which blue-winged butterflies flew. ‘Jojo,’ said Stella, straining towards them – she could not reach them soon enough. ‘My Joanna,’ she said, holding their names on her tongue: ‘James. John.’ How well she knew their particular scent – of John’s hair, which had always been a little like warm oats, and of James, who had something sharper about him, keen as his wits. Joanna felt beneath the shawl to brittle bones, and shuddered; her mother felt it, and a complicit look passed between them.

‘I like your necklace,’ said John, admiringly, then presenting half a bar of chocolate said, ‘I brought you a present.’ Stella knew this for a sacrifice, and kissed him, and turned to James, who had not ceased talking since he crossed the threshold, about the Cutty Sark and the Tube, and how he’d been down to see Bazalgette’s sewers. ‘One at a time,’ she said, ‘one at a time: I don’t want to miss anything.’

‘Don’t tire her,’ said Will, watching from the threshold, throat aching with pleasure and sadness: he could’ve stood there an hour seeing Stella hold them to her breast – he wanted to feel them in his own arms, warm and compact and wriggling; and all the while he wondered how he’d frame it for Cora, by letter or word: how it would please her, how her grey eyes would blur. God help me: I am severed, he thought, but no – it was not that he was there in part, and in part in the grey house across the common; he was wholly present in both. ‘Don’t tire her,’ he said, coming forward, finding himself drawn in by small hands: ‘A bit longer, then let her sleep.’

‘I have you all now,’ said Stella. ‘I have you all here now, sweethearts: be with me now before I go.’





HE calls me home to his banqueting house

His banner over me is LOVE

HE sent the serpent to Eden’s blueflowered garden and he sends it now and the penance must be paid for as by one man’s disobedience Aldwinter’s sinners are brought under judgment so by my obedience they will be delivered

God’s serpent servant in the blue Blackwater water has come to take our taxes

I shall pay their dues and it will go back whence it came

and I

shall enter

the gates of GLORY!





12


Down at the quay Banks sat beside his struck sails dully counting out his losses – wife, boat, child, all slipped through his hands like so much salt water. Behind the sea-fog the estuary swelled in the coming tide, and he recalled the black-haired boy by the fire in the morning, and how he’d dragged him towards the shore. ‘Didn’t see a thing,’ he said into the dim air: ‘Didn’t see a damn thing’; but in his mind’s eye there it was – the strange news, the Essex Serpent: bloated, arrow-tailed, pawing at the shingle. Now and then the pale mist parted and there were the lights of smacks and barges winking in the dusk; then the curtain fell, and he was alone again. He whispered the boatsman’s plainsong for comfort – The starboard light is green at night – The starboard light is on your right … – but what use were flames behind coloured glass when down in the deep something was waiting, biding its time?

When he felt a small hand on his shoulder it came so gently he didn’t flinch or shirk it. The touch was not only familiar but possessive – no-one else could’ve touched him like that – it struck off memories that rose through the fuddle of drink and the thickening mist. ‘Come home then, littl’un?’ he said, tentatively, putting up his own hand in a searching pat: ‘Come back to your old man?’

Wrapped in Joanna’s cast-off coat Naomi looked down at her father’s head where hair grew thinner than she remembered, and felt a new and unexpected tenderness. For a moment he was no longer her father, so nearly an extension of her own self that he hardly crossed her mind. She understood for the first time that he too felt fear and disappointment – that there were things he hoped for, and suffered, and enjoyed. It moved her, and propelled her forward through the years: she took up her old position cross-legged beside him on the quayside and drew a fishing-net towards her. Expertly, she pulled it through her fingers, finding a tear, saying, ‘I’ll get on with this one if you like.’ It had always been a hated task – it left welts in the webbing between her fingers that grew sore with salt – but her hands found their old rhythm, and there was comfort in it. ‘Sorry I went away,’ she said, drawing together the torn threads, turning away to let him shed tears privately. ‘I was scared of things but it’s all right now. And besides’ – she reached over and did up the buttons on his coat – ‘I earned some money all on my own! We’ll go home and you can help me count it.’