The Essex Serpent(34)

‘I suppose it might pay for a new window, but Essex is full of horrors, and we can’t compete with Hadstock and the Dane-skin door.’ Seeing her frown, he said: ‘The church door there is studded all over with iron bolts, and under the bolts are scraps of skin. They say an apostate Dane was caught and flayed, and his pelt used to keep the rain out.’ She shuddered, delighted, and wanting to give her more he discarded the last of his sternness and said, ‘Perhaps they gave him the Viking blood eagle punishment, and cleaved his ribs from his spine and spread them out like wings, and lifted out each lung – oh, you’re pale, and I’ve made Jojo sick!’

The girl gave her father a contemptuous look – you’ve let me down: really you have – and buttoning up her jacket went out to greet the bell-ringers on their morning duty.

‘How lucky you are – how blessed, you’d probably say!’ said Cora, impulsively, watching the girl dart between tombstones and stand beneath the lychgate waving. ‘You all seem to have the knack of happiness …’

‘Don’t you?’ He sat beside her on the pew, and touched the serpent there. ‘You’re always laughing; it’s contagious, like a yawn!’ We dreaded you, he thought: and look at you! ‘You’re not what we expected.’

‘Oh, lately, yes. Lately – I laugh when I shouldn’t. I know I don’t give what’s expected of me … these last few weeks I’ve thought over and over that there was never a greater difference between what I ought to be, and what I am.’ Absurd to talk so freely to almost a stranger, but after all they’d seen each other at their worst, and no conversation could mire them as deeply as that little lake by the Colchester road. ‘I am in a state of disgrace, I know it: I always have been, but it was never as visible.’ She made such a sudden transition to sadness that he saw, appalled, her grey eyes glaze and brighten, and touching his collar he said (in the grave voice that did so well for these occasions), ‘We’re taught – and I believe – that it’s when we’re most lost and feeling most lacking in grace that the source of comfort is nearest … forgive me, it’s not that I mean to impose, only not to say these things would be not to give you a glass of water if I saw you thirsty.’ This last phrase was so far out of his usual stock in trade that he looked down at his hands in astonishment, as if to check that it was his own body the words inhabited.

She smiled, and said, ‘I’m thirsty, I’m always thirsty – for everything, everything! But I gave all this up a long time ago.’ She gestured to the high roof with its white stones and the beams that crossed it, and the altar with its blue cloth. ‘Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don’t mean without morals or conscience – I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that …’ Frowning, she ran her thumb along the serpent’s spine and said, ‘I’ve never said this before, not to anyone, though I’ve meant to: but yes, I’ve sold my soul, though I’m afraid it didn’t fetch too high a price. I had faith, the sort I think you might be born with, but I’ve seen what it does and I traded it in. It’s a sort of blindness, or a choice to be mad – to turn your back on everything new and wonderful – not to see that there’s no fewer miracles in the microscope than in the gospels!’

‘You think – you really think – that it is one or the other: your faith or your reason?’

‘Not only my reason – there’s not enough of that to set against my soul! – but my liberty. And sometimes I’m afraid I’ll be punished for it, but I know punishment, I’ve learned how to stand it …’ He didn’t understand, and was afraid to ask – but then Joanna came in and stood in the nave while behind her the bell-ringers tugged at their ropes and the bells sounded faintly indoors.

‘You are not what we expected,’ he said again.

‘Nor are you,’ said Cora, looking at him as directly as she could in a curious bout of shyness. She thought his collar conferred no more authority than a blacksmith’s apron, but even a blacksmith is lord in his forge. ‘No, nor are you: I thought you’d be very fat and pompous, and Stella very thin and frail, and your children all horribly devout.’

He grinned – ‘Devout!’ he said: ‘What, traipsing into church in the mornings dripping piety and jostling to get at the bibles!’ At that moment Joanna genuflected enormously in front of the altar (a school-friend was a Catholic girl, and Joanna envied her rituals and rosary), and crossed herself three times. Her hair was bound like a halo above her ears; she wore white, and adopted such a prim expression her mouth had all but disappeared. She was so exactly the image of a parson’s horrid daughter that Cora and Will looked at each other in delight and could not help falling into another of their fits of laughter.

‘I can’t find my prayer book,’ said Joanna with dignity, not understanding what she’d done and deciding to be offended.

They were laughing still when the congregation arrived to take their minister by surprise. Will went to the porch to greet them as Cora tried once or twice to catch his eye, like a schoolboy wanting a conspirator, but could not: he’d pulled up the drawbridge. The serpent’s pew was in a dim corner where she would not be seen, and reluctant to leave the cool quiet church, she thought that she might stay a while.