The Essex Serpent(55)
‘It was just so easy,’ said Joanna, rubbing her forehead, on which a white lump had begun to appear. She looked from the doctor to her father, and seeing how the two men stood rigid as far from each other as the room would allow said, ‘What’s wrong? Did I do something wrong?’
‘You didn’t,’ said Will; and although he did not take his eyes from those of the other man it was quite clear to Cora where his anger was directed, and she felt a kind of contraction in her throat. Falling back on fine manners, she stood between the two and said, ‘Luke, this is William Ransome, my friend.’
My friend, thought Luke: I never heard her say ‘my husband’ or ‘my son’ with so much pride.
‘Will, this is Dr Luke Garrett – won’t you shake hands? – we thought we’d help Joanna – she’s not been herself since what happened at the school.’
‘Help? How? What were you doing?’ Will ignored the offered hand, which was held out (he thought) with a sardonic grin. ‘She’s hurt – look: you’re lucky she didn’t knock herself out!’
‘Hypnosis!’ said Joanna, proudly. She had been an experiment! She would write about it later.
‘We can tell him later,’ said Stella, patting about for her jacket: all these raised voices! Her head hurt.
‘Nice to meet you, Reverend, I’m sure,’ said Luke, putting his hands in his pockets.
Will turned away from his friend. ‘Put your coat on, Stella, you’re shivering – why have they let you get cold? – yes, Jo, you can tell me all about it later – good afternoon, Dr Garrett: perhaps we’ll meet again.’ As if borne on a tide of politeness Will left the room with wife and daughter in his wake, not sparing a glance at Cora, who at that moment would’ve been as grateful for a glare as for a smile.
‘I was an experiment!’ they heard Joanna say at the door: ‘And now I’m hungry.’
‘Absolutely charming man,’ said Luke. So much for the fat parson in gaiters, he thought: he’d looked like a farmer with ideas above his station and had a fine head of hair, and in his presence Cora Seaborne – of all women! – had seemed a child dismayed to find herself disgraced. Martha rose from the sofa where she’d been silently watching and with a contemptuous look at the doctor came to stand beside her friend. ‘No good ever came of leaving London,’ she said: ‘What did I tell you?’ Cora briefly put her cheek to Martha’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m hungry too. And I want wine.’
5
Edward Burton sat on a narrow bed and opened the paper packet on his lap. In a high-backed chair beneath a print of St Paul’s, his visitor dredged her chips with vinegar, and the hot scent roused his appetite for the first time in weeks. She wore her hair in a fair braid wrapped around her crown: she looked, he thought, breaking batter from his bit of fish, like an angel, if an angel could be hungry, and didn’t mind grease on her chin and a smear of green peas on her sleeve.
Martha watched him steadily eating, and felt hardly less proud than Luke had done on closing up his wound. It was her third visit, and there was colour in his cheeks. They had been introduced by Maureen Fry, who beside a willingness to visit Burton in order to tug the stitches from his healing scar was a relation of Elizabeth Fry, and had fully inherited the family social conscience: it seemed to her the nurse’s duty lay well beyond the tying up of bandages, the mopping up of blood. She’d first encountered Martha at a meeting of women concerned with Union matters, and over strong tea discovered that Dr Luke Garrett (‘Of all people!’ Martha had said, shaking her head) was the link between them. When Martha first accompanied Sister Fry to the house where Edward and his mother lived in Bethnal Green, she’d discovered a home which was small, certainly, with sanitation troubles that left an ammoniac reek in the air, but was pleasant enough. Little light came in, only what filtered through lines of laundry running between the houses like the pennants of a coming army, but there were always flowers on the table in a rinsed-out jar of Robertson’s jam. Mrs Thomas earned her living by way of laundry, and contriving rag rugs out of scraps; these rugs decked their three small rooms and made them bright. It had never occurred to her that Edward might not recover entirely, and go back to the insurance company where he’d passed five years as a clerk, and so she faced a period of nursing him quite stoically.
That first visit had been an unsatisfactory one, with Edward Burton white and silent in the corner. Mrs Burton was battling delight at her son’s unlikely salvation with a troubling sensation that the man who’d come off the operating table was not the man who’d been laid out on it: ‘He’s so quiet,’ she’d said, wringing her hands, and borrowing Sister Fry’s handkerchief. ‘It’s like the old Ned bled out and I’ve got another one in his place and I have to get to know him before I can say he’s my son.’ Nonetheless, Martha had found herself fretting, in the following days, that Burton would not eat enough, or test the strength of his legs by walking the length of the road, and so she had returned a week later with packets of fish and chips, a net of oranges, and several of Francis’s abandoned copies of The Strand.
Edward steadily ate. To Martha – used to Cora’s endless conversation and her sudden fits of joy or gloom – his company was peaceful. He responded to everything she said with an inclined head, considering it slowly, often saying nothing in response. Sometimes there was a sharp pain in the place where his rib had been severed – it was like a cramping of the muscles as all the fibres tried to knit – and he’d gasp, and put a hand there in the hollow where the bone was gone, and wait for it to pass. Martha would say nothing then, only sit quietly with him, and when he raised his head say, ‘Tell me again how they built Blackfriars Bridge.’