The Essex Serpent(106)

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?’