The Essex Serpent(74)
But even Martha had to concede it was frequently a miserable scene: a young mother sat on a doorstep enviously watching two children eat cheap white bread and margarine, and a group of men watched a bulldog in training for a fight hang by its jaws from a high rope. Someone had thrown aside a copy of Vanity Fair, and from the cover an actress in a yellow dress smiled placidly out; beside it in the gutter a clever-eyed rat flexed its little hands. Passing the men with their dog Martha couldn’t suppress her distaste: she glowered at them openly; a man with sleeves rolled high to show a blurred tattoo lunged at her, and laughed as she scuttled on. Luke, more familiar with the seamy city than he’d let on, a little amused by Spencer’s display of social conscience, allowed himself to grow chivalrous and walked more closely at her side.
‘Will it work? – it must work,’ she said, gesturing ahead to where Charles walked with Spencer, picking his distasteful way through a litter of rotten fruit from which a cloud of small flies puffed. ‘He must see this is unsustainable, if only out of common humanity!’
‘How can it not? Bit of a stupid man I’ve always thought, but not an unkind one – evening, love,’ he said, grinning at a woman in a curled wig who leaned invitingly out of her door and blew him a kiss as he passed.
‘It’s no use – Spencer has tried – I’m long past redemption.’ There ahead of them on the path his friend was gesticulating towards an especially narrow alley from which a sour smell came. ‘He’s doing all this mostly for your sake, you know. He’d give a fortune to a beggar if you asked him but otherwise would never notice they’re there –’
She considered denying this, but felt that what with one thing and another the Imp had earned her honesty. ‘It’s not so bad of me, is it? I’ve never promised him anything – and besides, I’m not what his family would’ve had in mind! – but I can’t do this alone. I’m a woman and a poor one – they might as well’ve cut out my tongue.’
They’d come to a kind of courtyard overlooked on all sides by tenement blocks. Luke watched his friend stand with arms folded surveying the insoluble problem of London, speaking in his quiet steady way to Ambrose, who only half-listened, distracted by a child in a fairy costume sitting on a doorstep and smoking a cigarette. ‘He has joined the Socialist League, and talks of commissioning a little something from William Morris. Martha – let him down easy, won’t you?’ The fairy child stubbed out her cigarette and began another; her wings shed a feather and shivered.
Martha, stirred with guilt, said crossly, ‘Can’t I just be friendly, and that be that? He’s not a puppet: he thinks well enough for himself, listen –’
‘All the new housing on the Thames Embankment,’ Spencer was saying, ‘that they were so proud of, and use as proof of progress: have you seen it? Little better than cages. They’re packed in there tighter than they ever were – some rooms have no windows and those that do are hardly bigger than a stamp – they wouldn’t house their hounds so badly.’ He couldn’t resist a glance at Martha, who came near and let her temper get the better of her.
‘Charles – look at you – you can’t wait to go home, to Katherine and your velvet slippers and your wine that costs more each sip than they must live on for week. You think them a different species – that they brought this on themselves because they’re immoral or stupid and that if you gave them something better they’d trash it in a week – well: perhaps they are a different animal from you, because while your kind grudge each penny of your tax, here if they had nothing they’d give you half of it – no, Luke: I won’t stop – d’you think because Cora taught me which fork to use for fish I’ve forgotten where I was born?’
‘Martha, my dear’ – Charles Ambrose had maintained fine manners against far worse, and besides, he knew well enough when he’d been found out – ‘we all know your point, and admire it. I’ve seen enough, and if you let me return to my natural habitat I’ll do what I can to carry out your every command.’ Seeing that his ironic bow would do nothing for her temper, he said, as if confiding state secrets: ‘The Bill has been passed, you know. The policies are in place. It’s only a question of next steps.’
Martha smiled as well as she could, because Spencer had withdrawn a little, as if suddenly uncertain of his attachment to a woman who’d bellow at her betters in the street, and because Luke had gone impish again, and had never looked more delighted. ‘Next steps! Oh – Charles: I am sorry. They tell me I should count to ten – wait, but can you hear that? What is it – what can I hear?’
They all turned, and heard from deep within a narrow alley the sound of an organ playing. An uneven melody gained speed as someone turned the handle, then became a rousing martial tune. The child ran to meet the music with her wings shivering behind her, and as the organ-player emerged others joined her as if seeping out of the bricks and mortar around them; some were barefoot, and others wore hobnailed boots that struck sparks as they ran; two fair-haired boys carried a kitten each; a girl in a white dress trailed behind, feigning indifference. Charles, keeping to the corners, saw a man of about his own age dressed in the remnants of a soldier’s tunic. Stitched on the breast was the green and crimson ribbon of the Afghan War Medal and his empty left sleeve was pinned at the elbow. With his right hand he turned the organ’s handle faster and faster, and began a jig of his own. The girl in the white dress spun, and laughed, and reached for Garrett’s hand; one boy held his kitten high and sang to it words of his own. Martha looked at Spencer, and saw he was appalled, and despised him for it: perhaps he imagined they ought to be decently miserable in their lot, and not snatch pleasure wherever they saw it. ‘Take partners,’ bellowed the soldier: ‘Try this one for size,’ and it wasn’t a military melody he played then, but with something in it of sailors on deck sighting land. Martha held out her hands to a passing lad who’d discarded his kitten on a doorstep and with great strength in his thin forearms flung her round, so that Spencer saw all her hair fan out, wheat-coloured against the grimy brickwork. ‘Heave me away, my bully bully boys,’ sang the girl in white, ‘I’m bound for South Australia,’ and as she passed Charles she dipped her head, as though accepting a compliment he hadn’t thought to give.