The Essex Serpent(6)

‘Let me go alone,’ said Cora, pulling on the borrowed gloves, so threadbare they were scarcely warmer than her own. ‘My thoughts are so tangled they’ll take a mile or more to unravel.’ She touched the black-edged handkerchief in Garrett’s pocket. ‘Come tomorrow, if you like, to the grave. I said I’d go alone, but perhaps that’s the point; perhaps we are always alone, no matter the company we keep.’

‘You ought to be followed about by a clerk making a record of your wisdom,’ said the Imp, satirically, letting her hand fall. He bowed extravagantly, and retreated into the cab, slamming the door against her laughter.

Marvelling at his ability to bring about such total reversions in her mood, Cora turned first not west towards home, but towards the Strand. She liked to find the place where the River Fleet had been diverted underground, east from Holborn; there was a particular grating where on a quiet day you could hear it running out towards the sea.

Reaching Fleet Street, she thought that if she strained hard enough into the grey air she might hear the river running through its long tomb, but there was only the noise of a city which no frost or fog could dissuade from work or pleasure. And besides, she’d once been told that it was scarcely more than a sewer by now, swollen not by rainwater leaching down from Hampstead Heath but by humanity massing on its banks. She stood a while longer, until her hands ached with the chill, and the punctured lobes of her ears began to throb. She sighed, and set out for home, discovering that the unease that once accompanied the image of the high white house on Foulis Street had been left behind, dropped somewhere beneath the black pews of the church.

Martha, who’d anxiously awaited Cora’s return (little more than an hour later, with freckles blazing through white powder and her black hat slipped), put a great store on appetite as evidence of a sound mind, and watched with pleasure as her friend ate fried eggs and toast. ‘I’ll be glad when it’s all over,’ she’d said. ‘All these cards, these handshakes. I am so bored of the etiquette of death!’

In his mother’s absence the child, mollified by the Underground, had gone wordlessly upstairs with a glass of water and slept with an apple core in his hand. Martha had stood at his door and seen how black his lashes were against his white cheek, and felt her heart soften towards him. A scrap of the wretched dog’s fur had found its way to his pillow; she imagined it seething with lice and fleas, and stooped over the boy to take it and leave him safely sleeping. But her wrist must’ve touched the pillowcase; he came fully alert in the time it took a breath to leave her; seeing the fur in her hand he gave a kind of wordless scream of rage, so that she dropped the greasy wad and ran from the room. Coming downstairs, she thought, How can I be afraid of him: he’s nothing but a fatherless boy! and was half-inclined to return and insist that he hand over the unsavoury little keepsake, and perhaps even submit to a kiss. Then a key was fitted noisily to the lock, and there had been Cora, demanding a fire, throwing down her gloves, holding out her arms for an embrace.

Late that night, the last to bed, Martha paused at Cora’s door: it had been her habit these past few years to content herself that all was well with her friend. Cora’s door stood half-open; a log in the fireplace spat as it burned. At the threshold Martha said, ‘Are you sleeping? Should I come in?’ and receiving no answer stepped onto the thick pale carpet. All along the mantelpiece were visiting cards and mourning-cards, black-edged, close-written; a bunch of violets tied with a black ribbon had fallen onto the hearth. Martha bent to pick them up, and they seemed almost to shrink away from her and hide again behind their heart-shaped leaves. She stood them in a little glass of water, set them where her friend would see them on first waking, and stooped to kiss her. Cora murmured, and shifted, but did not wake; and Martha recalled first coming to Foulis Street to take up her post, anticipating some haughty matron with a mind enfeebled by gossip and fashion, and how wrong-footed she’d been by the changeable being who’d come to the door. Infuriated and entranced, Martha found that no sooner had she grown accustomed to one Cora, another would emerge: one moment a girl who seemed a student over-pleased with her own intelligence, the next a friend of long years’ intimacy; a woman giving suppers of stylish extravagance, who’d swear once the last guest was gone, take down her hair, and sprawl laughing beside the fire.

Even her voice was a matter for confused admiration – that odd half-lilt, half-impediment, which would appear when she was tired, and certain consonants gave her trouble. That behind the intelligent charm (which, Martha wryly observed, could be turned on and off like the bathroom tap) there were visible wounds only made her dearer. Michael Seaborne treated Martha with the kind of indifference he might’ve reserved for the hat-stand in the hall: she was entirely inconsequential – he did not even meet her eye on the stairs. But watchful Martha let nothing pass her by – overheard each courteous insult, observed each concealed bruise – and only with a great effort prevented herself from plotting a murder for which she’d’ve cheerfully been hanged. Just less than a year after arriving at Foulis Street – in the small hours, during which no-one had slept – Cora had come to her room. Whatever had been done or said had caused her to tremble violently, though the night was warm; her thick untidy hair was wet. Without speaking Martha had raised the cloths that covered her, and taken Cora into her arms; she drew up her knees to enclose her entirely, and held her very tight, so that the other woman’s trembling entered her. Unlaced from the conventions of whalebone and cloth Cora’s body was large, strong; Martha felt the blades moving in her narrow back, the soft stomach which she cradled against her arm, the sturdy muscles of her thighs: it had been like clinging to an animal which would never again consent to lie so still. They’d woken in a loose embrace, wholly at ease, and parted on a caress.