The Essex Serpent(28)

‘Yesterday,’ said Martha. ‘You were admiring your nose. Good evening, Dr Garrett.’

This was said with so penetrating a chill Luke shivered, and might’ve attempted a wounding response if the landlord had not arrived, and with an admirable refusal to acknowledge the feather-strewn room and the chanting boy left a tray of beer upon the sideboard. This was followed by a platter of cheese and cold beef marbled with yellow fat, and a plaited white loaf, and a dish of pale butter sprinkled with salt, and lastly a cake studded with cherries and giving off the scent of brandy; and such was the impossibility of maintaining a bad temper in the presence of the feast that Luke gave Martha the sweetest smile he could manage, and tossed her a green apple.

Spencer, sitting beside Martha on the window-seat to watch the passers-by on the wet black pavements below, took up her magazine and said, ‘You were going to tell me about this – may I see – what’ve you been reading?’ He leafed through the booklet, which contained bewildering statistics on London’s over-population, and the catastrophic consequences of urban clearance.

Martha surveyed him with the temporary warmth of wine. Truth be told, he roused in her a kind of reflexive loathing which took an effort to suppress. Certainly he seemed kindly enough, and gentle; she’d seen him make attempts with Francis no other visitor had ever done (all those swift games of chess ending in Spencer’s defeat!), and she admired his efforts to keep the Imp in check. More – and most importantly – he treated Cora with a courteous friendship which never once transgressed into attempts to know her any better than he ought. But she saw his wealth and privilege coat him like furs. What little she knew of his circumstances (the possession of more property than he could find use for – the liberty to train in medicine as a kind of hobby while women contented themselves with bedpans and broth) ranked him among those she had all her life counted as the enemy.

Martha’s socialism was no less ingrained than any inherited faith still clung to past childhood fervour. Community halls and picket lines were her temples, and Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx stood at the altar; she had no hymn book but the fury of folk songs setting English suffering to English melody. In the kitchen of their Whitechapel rooms her father – hands reddened with brick dust, the whorls of his fingertips worn smooth – counted out his wages and set aside his Union fees, and in his careful handwriting joined the petitioning of Parliament for a ten-hour limit on the working day. Her mother – who’d once stitched stoles and copes with golden crosses, and pelicans pecking out their hearts – cut cloth for banners held high above the picket line, and eked out the household budget to take beef soup to the striking match-girls at Bryant and May. ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ her father had said, reverently reciting his apostle’s creed: ‘And all that is holy is profaned! Martha, don’t bow your head to the way things are and always were – whole empires are brought down by nothing but ivy and time.’ He washed his shirts in the small tin bath – the water came out red – he sang as he wrung the linen dry: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Englishman?’ When Martha walked from Limehouse to Covent Garden she saw not high windows and Doric columns, but the labourers toiling behind them. It seemed to her that the city’s bricks were red with the blood of its citizens, its mortar pale with the dust of their bones; that deep in its foundations women and children lay head-to-toe in buried ranks, bearing up the city on their backs.

Taking her place in Cora’s household had been an act of purest pragmatism: it permitted a degree of social acceptance and a reasonable wage; it placed her firmly outside the class she despised and equally firmly within it. But she had not bargained for Cora Seaborne – after all, who could?

Spencer’s long, melancholy face was flushed – she was conscious of his eagerness to please, and it roused her to mischief: ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ she said, testing his courage.

‘Shakespeare?’ he said.

Smiling, relenting, Martha said, ‘Karl Marx, I’m afraid, though he was a bard of sorts. Yes, there was something I wanted to tell you’ – for the sorry truth was that Spencer and those like him, however despised, were useful sources of influence and income. She spread open the pages and showed him a map on which the poorest of London’s housing was overlaid with plans for new developments. They would be sanitary, she said, and spacious: children would have green spaces to play in and tenants would be free from landlord caprice. But (she flicked contemptuously at the paper) to qualify for housing, tenants must demonstrate good character. ‘They’re expected to live better than you or I ever did to deserve a roof over their children’s heads: must never be drunk, or a nuisance to neighbours, or gamble, and God forbid too many children by too many fathers, and had too often. You, Spencer – with your estate and your pedigree – you can drink yourself wretched on claret and port and no-one begrudges you any of your homes; but spend what little you have on cheap beer and the dogs and you’ve not enough moral standing to sleep in a dry bed.’

Spencer could not rightly claim to have given the capital’s housing crisis any further thought than the headlines invited, and felt keenly the contempt for his wealth and status which lay behind her words. But in her indignation she seemed to him more to be desired than ever, and as if her rage were contagious he felt something like anger stir in his belly. He said, ‘And if you’re given one of these homes, and are later discovered out in the streets breaking a pint glass over your neighbour’s head?’