The Essex Serpent(107)
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.