The Essex Serpent(73)
Still I bear it well enough for it was promised that though I walk through the rivers they will not overflow me! Though I walk through the fire, I shall not be burned!
AUGUST
1
Nothing inclined Charles Ambrose to Darwinism more than walking the narrow streets of Bethnal Green. He saw there not equals separated from him only by luck and circumstance, but creatures born ill-equipped to survive the evolutionary race. He looked on their pale thin faces – which often had a sour mistrustful cast, as if expecting at any moment to encounter a boot – and felt they inhabited their proper place. The notion that if only they’d had access to grammar and citrus fruit at an early age they might have one day sat beside him at the Garrick was preposterous: their predicament was nothing more than evidence of failure to adapt and survive. Why were so many of them so short? Why did they screech and bellow from windows and balconies? And why, at noon, were so many so drunk? Turning down an alley, twitching his fine linen coat closer, he felt much as he might if viewing them through iron bars. This is not to say that he felt no compassion: even animals in zoos should have their cages cleaned.
Four had gathered in Edward Burton’s rooms that August afternoon: Spencer, Martha, Charles and Luke. Their intention was to walk further into Bethnal Green, whose slums and rookeries were candidates for demolition and replacement with the good clean housing Parliament had promised. ‘It’s all very well passing Acts,’ Spencer had said, not knowing how precisely he mimicked Martha, ‘but how much higher will the infant death toll rise before policies are put in place? It’s actions we need, not Acts!’
Edward’s mother served lemon biscuits on a plate from which the Queen’s head looked grimly out, and fretted that her son was tired. He’d been silent in such company and responded only to Martha’s quiet asides – was the old wound hurting? Could he show Spencer the plans he’d been making for a new estate? ‘Very feasible,’ Spencer had said, though really he knew nothing about it. He smoothed his hands across the length of white paper on which Edward had drafted, with all his painstaking untutored skill, the blueprint of a tenement block set around a square of garden. ‘Can I take this – can I show my colleagues? Would you mind?’
Luke meanwhile had eaten his fifth biscuit, having admired Mrs Burton’s evident attention to cleanliness, and said, ‘Martha won’t be happy until she’s seen Thomas More’s Utopia encamped on Tower Hill.’ He’d licked sugar from his thumb, and looked merrily out at the ranks of peaked roofs past the window. Writing to Cora had been like lancing a boil: in due course there might be further discomfort, but for now he felt only relief. What he’d written had been the truth, at least while he still held the pen: he expected nothing back, had offered no bargain, thought himself owed nothing. Probably the euphoria would last no more than another day, but it was a heady thing while it lasted, and made him benevolent. Sometimes, imagining a sealed envelope making its way to his door on the back of a postman’s bike, he grew anxious: would she be amused – would she be moved – might she ignore it and go on blithely as before? Knowing her, he thought the last most likely: it was difficult to penetrate her good temper, or move her beyond a general display of affection to everyone she knew.
‘Off we go then, slumming it,’ said Charles rather gleefully, putting on his coat, remembering how years before he and a companion had one night been tourists of poverty, dressing in drag and loitering under streetlights, drumming up not a solitary client between them.
‘You might be sold a bad oyster,’ said Edward Burton, not yet well enough to take up his post over at Holborn Bars, ‘but keep your wits about you and you’ll all come home again.’
As they’d left it was not yet closing time in the factories and offices, and so the alleys were rather quiet, and it was possible to make out the sound of trains shunting on the tracks a few hundred yards distant. All around, high tenements blotted out the light, and laundry hanging low above them could never have been got clean. Though the summer was mild the few scraps of sunlight coming through seemed hotter there, so that before long Martha felt her clothes grow damp between her shoulder-blades, and the pavements, slicked with fallen scraps of food, gave off the sweetish scent of decay. What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. Rooms were sublet, and sub-let again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten, and strangers bickered over cups and plates and their few square feet of space. Less than a mile away, just beyond the City griffins, the landlords and their lawyers, their tailors and their bankers and their chefs, knew only what was totted in the columns of their ledgers.
Here and there Martha saw reasons to hope that passed the others by, and sometimes nodded, and smiled, because all those strangers’ faces were familiar. A woman in a scarlet jacket appeared from behind a lace curtain to water the geraniums on her windowsill, and tossed away a couple of spent blooms that landed in the gutter beside a broken Guinness bottle. Polish labourers had come to seek work, discovering that if Dick Whittington had been misled about London’s pavements, the weather was at least more temperate in the winter and the docks never slept. They were cheerful and noisy; they leaned in doorways in pairs with their caps tipped, passing a Polish newspaper back and forth; they smoked black-papered cigarettes that gave off a fragrant pall. A Jewish family went volubly by on their way to catch a bus, and the girls wore red shoes; a moment later an Indian woman passed on the other side and in each ear was a bit of gold.