The Essex Serpent(42)
‘Neither hide nor hair of it!’ said Cora, ruefully: ‘Even Cracknell looks cheerful when I mention it. I believe you informed the wretched thing I was coming, and sent it to Suffolk with a flea in its ear.’
‘Oh no,’ said Will: ‘I assure you, rumours abound! Cracknell may put a brave face on for a lady but he never leaves his window without a candle. He’s keeping poor Magog indoors, and her milk’s dried up.’ She smiled; he said: ‘What’s more, either the folk of St Osyth are careless with cattle or something’s taken two calves from their mothers and they’ve not been seen since.’ Likelier to be theft, he thought, but let her have her daydream.
‘Well, that’s encouraging, at least. No hope, I suppose’ – she spoke gravely – ‘that another man has drowned?’
‘None, Mrs Seaborne – Cora? – though it pains me to disappoint. Now then: where was it you were going?’
They’d come, by silent consensus, to the rectory gate. Behind them on the common lengthened the shadow of Traitor’s Oak; before them the chequered path was bordered by blue hyacinths. They gave out a strong scent, and Cora reeled with it, felt it indecent – it caused a response in her so like unsought desire that her pulse quickened.
‘Where was I going?’ She looked down at her feet, as if they’d carried her without consent. ‘I suppose that I was going home.’
‘Must you? Won’t you come in? The children are out, and Stella will be glad to see you.’ And she was: the door opened without their knocking, as if they’d been awaited, and there was Stella, all her colours vivid in the dim hall – her silver hair loose, her eyes bright.
‘Mrs Seaborne – how funny: we talked about you at breakfast – didn’t we? – we hoped you’d come soon! William Ransome, don’t leave your guest on the doorstep: bring her in, make her comfortable – have you eaten? Won’t you have tea?’
‘I can always eat,’ said Cora, ‘always!’ She saw how Will stooped to kiss his wife; how lightly his fingers slipped through the fine fair curls above her ear, and marvelled at their tenderness (I’ll fill your wounds with gold, Michael had said, and pulled one by one the hairs from the nape of her neck, leaving a bald place there the size of a penny).
A little later, in a sunny room, they dawdled over plates of cake, and admired the daffodils blooming on the table. ‘And tell me: how is Katherine? How is Charles?’ Stella’s appetite for the lives of others made her an easy companion, since she wanted only to be spun stories and never much minded embellishment. ‘They’re both appalled that you’re here. Charles says he’s going to send a case of French wine and that you’ll last a month at most.’
‘Charles is much too busy to think of wine – even French wine. You see: he has turned philanthropist!’
Will raised an eyebrow, and drained his tea. The notion seemed unlikely: Charles was good-hearted, but in the fashion of a man devoted to his own happiness, and – always supposing it cost him no great effort – that of those he liked. That he’d exert himself for the benefit of what he was in the deplorable habit of calling ‘the great unwashed’ was surprising indeed. ‘Charles Ambrose?’ he said. ‘No-one was ever fonder of anyone than I am of him, but he troubles himself more over the cut of his shirts than the state of the nation!’
‘It’s true!’ said Cora, laughing. (She’d have liked to defend the man, but knew were he to overhear, slumbering in his velvet seat at the Garrick, he’d surely have nodded, and laughed, and agreed.) ‘It’s Martha’s doing.’ She turned to Stella. ‘Martha is a socialist. Well: sometimes I think we all must be, when it comes down to it, if we have a grain of sense – but for Martha it’s as much a way of life as Matins and Evensong to the good Reverend here. London housing is the loudest bee in her bonnet (which, honestly, contains entire hives): workers damned to slum conditions unless they prove themselves deserving of a roof, and meanwhile landlords fatten themselves on rent, and vice, and Parliament sits on cushions stuffed with their coins. She grew up in Whitechapel, and her father was a working man and a good one, and they all lived well enough; but she never forgot what was just beyond the doorstep. How was it the newspapers put it, a year or two ago – “Outcast London”! You remember – you saw it?’
It was clear they had not, and Cora – who’d clean forgotten she was not in Bayswater or Knightsbridge, and that what occupies London gossip for months might not filter far from the waters of the Thames – could not help giving each a censorious look. ‘Perhaps I know it well only because of Martha, who really, I think, could recite it by now. It was printed and reprinted so often a few years back that you almost expected to find it wrapping your fish and chips.’
‘And what was it – what did it say?’ said Stella. Outcast London! The phrase appealed to her ready pity.
‘A pamphlet produced by a group of clergymen I believe – The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, and once read not soon forgotten. I thought that I’d seen everything the city had to offer from best to worst, but never anything like that. In one cellar a mother and father living with their children and their pigs – a baby dead and cut open for the coroner right there on the table, since there wasn’t any room in the mortuary! And women working seventeen hours a day stitching buttons and buttonholes … unable to pause long enough to eat, and never earning enough to keep warm, so that they might as well have been sewing their own shrouds. I remember Martha would not buy new clothes for years, saying she’d not be clothed in her sisters’ suffering!’