The Essex Serpent(43)
Stella’s eyes brimmed. ‘How could we not have heard? Will – isn’t it your duty, to know, and to help?’
Cora saw his discomfort, and in the absence of an observer might have sought to worsen it, out of mischief and principle. But it wouldn’t do to diminish a man in the eyes of his wife, and she said: ‘I’m sorry to distress you! The book did its work – the cry was heard – they’ve been pulling down the slums, though they tell me what goes up in their place is hardly better. Martha has it in hand. She’s enlisted the help of our friend Spencer, who is embarrassingly rich, and who in turn is calling on Charles. I hear there’s even a Committee. Well – much good may it do them.’
‘I hope it will! I hope it will!’ said Stella. To Cora’s dismay she dabbed at her eyes, and said, ‘All of a sudden I’m tired – Cora, would you forgive me if I went up to bed? I can’t shake the flu, and you’ll think I’m very feeble, when really until this winter just gone I hardly had a day in bed, not even when I had my babies.’ She rose, and so did her guest; Cora kissed her, and felt how hot her wet cheek was.
‘But you’ve not finished your tea, and I know there was something Will had to show you, if you can stay a little longer? Will, play the host! Perhaps’ – she showed them her dimples – ‘you can talk over your sermon preparation, and Cora can give you her verdict?’ Cora laughed, and said that she was in no position to comment; Will laughed, and said that in any case he would not dream of subjecting her to it.
The door closed behind Stella – they heard her footstep on the stair – and it seemed to them both that there came a slight alteration in the air. It was not precisely that the room seemed at once smaller, and more warmly lit – though certainly it did, as the sun fell, and on the table the yellow blooms took on the look of flames burning in their bowl. It was a sensation of freedom, as though the curious liberty both felt as they’d crossed the common had returned. Will also was conscious of feeling mildly aggrieved: he did not for a moment think his guest had set out to make him look foolish, but that had been the effect. With little more than a look she’d made him feel chastised, and rightly so – when had his conscience dwindled down to the scope of the parish boundary? ‘Grace,’ he said, suddenly. ‘On Sunday I’ll talk about the quality of grace, which I suppose is a gift of a kind – of goodness and mercy undeserved, and unexpected.’
‘That’ll do, for your sermon,’ she said. ‘That’s quite enough. Let them go home early and walk in the forest, and find God there.’ This was so nearly his own preferred method of worship that his annoyance evaporated; he threw himself into an armchair, and gestured that she should do the same.
‘What was it you were going to show me?’ In Stella’s presence Cora had sat ladylike, neat, her ankles crossed beneath her skirts; now, she curled in the corner of a couch, leaning against the arm and resting her chin in a cupped hand.
‘Really,’ he said, ‘I wish she hadn’t mentioned it – it’s nothing – only a bit of stuff I found on the saltings last week, and put in my pocket, thinking you might like to see it. Come with me!’
It did not occur to him then that no-one but Stella ever entered his study – that it was neither clean nor tidy, and that anyone caring to look at the litter of books and notes on the desk and floor might’ve made a guess at the full character of his mind. Not even the children were allowed to enter, unless expressly invited, and then only in order to be chastised or taught; it would seem to him less exposing to relieve himself against Traitor’s Oak at noon than to allow anyone across the threshold. But none of this struck him as he opened the door, and stood back to let her pass, nor was he troubled by how immediately her attention turned to his desk, or that her letter was set beside his papers, thin at the folds from being opened and reopened. ‘Do sit,’ he said, gesturing to the leather armchair which had been his father’s; and she did, spreading out her skirts. He reached up to a bookshelf and withdrew a white paper packet, which he placed on the desk and opened very carefully, taking out a pale lump a little larger than a child’s fist. Embedded within were several black and pitted fragments, as if a rough plate had been smashed, and concealed for some reason inside a piece of clay. Will picked it up, and showed her, stooping beside her chair; looking down she saw where his hair grew whorled at the crown, and the few white threads which grew thick and gleaming as wire. ‘It’s nothing, I’m sure,’ he said, ‘but there it was, broken away from one of the banks down in the creeks; I go down so often, and never saw anything like it before, but then until you came I wouldn’t have thought to look! What do you think – ought we to contact the museum in Colchester, and offer to make a donation?’
Cora was not entirely sure: ammonites and toadstones she knew well enough, and the shocking white curl of a shark’s tooth biting through its lump of clay; she knew the puffed and spiny echinoid when she saw it, and the flared ribs of a trilobite, and was convinced that once at Lyme Regis she’d struck a seam in which was concealed the bone of a small vertebrate. But she’d learned the humility of scholars: that the more she knew, the more she did not know. Will flexed his hand – the lump rolled in his palm – a piece of clay broke off, and fell between his outspread fingers to the floor. ‘Well then,’ he said: ‘What is the expert’s verdict?’ He looked both eager and shy, as if certain there was nothing he could show her that might please her, but hoping all the same that he might. She drew her thumbnail across the black surface; it had grown warm from his hand, and was smooth. ‘I wonder,’ she said, grateful that the thought had occurred, ‘if it’s a kind of lobster – I’ll never remember the name! – hoploparia, that’s it. I can’t tell you the age of it, though several millions of years, I imagine.’ (And would he counter this with talk of an earth barely cool from creation?)