The Essex Serpent(79)

In the high white Ambrose house the children have grown very nearly as plump as Charles. Joanna knows the periodic table and the remarkable thing about the hypotenuse and can spot a post hoc logical fallacy at a hundred yards. If on a Monday she resolves to enter Parliament, by Wednesday nothing but the law will do. Charles keeps from her the unlikelihood of either: she’ll grow out of hope, as everyone eventually does. Now and then she remembers casting her childish spells with Naomi Banks, and guilt sends her reeling: where is her red-haired companion now? Do her curls wave in the estuary tides full five fathoms down? She still has a drawing Naomi made of their two hands clasped, and she asks Katherine if she can put it in a frame.

Katherine wakes one night, hears weeping, and finds the brothers in their sister’s arms. They want their mother; they miss the village; it’s agreed they’ll go down to Essex by the end of the week. Besides, says Joanna, there’s Magog to think of, still tethered in the garden, missing her master. They’re consoled with a trip to Harrods and sufficient cake to sink a sailor.

Cora remains in her London hotel, despising the carpets, the curtains. She has in her pocket a letter from Spencer advising her not to visit and it’s so polite the paper is cold in her hands. Martha sees her walk from room to room and can find nothing to say that won’t receive a harsh reply. Cora has little interest in her books and bones – she’s bored and bad-tempered and there’s a new crease between her eyebrows. Spencer’s rebuke has lodged in her and she’s sulking. Her idea of herself has never included selfishness or cruelty – she has always been done to, and never doing. It’s quite an adjustment. She has gone blundering about, wishing no harm and causing much.

Will’s letters are prized, read often, unanswered. How can she respond? She buys a postcard from a stand at the station and writes I WISH YOU WERE HERE, but what good did it ever do, to speak one’s mind? In his absence – without the possibility of walking with him on the common, of finding on the threshold an envelope (in a neat hand in which she always thinks she can spot the schoolboy) – the world grows dull and blunted; there’s no longer anything in it to delight or surprise. Then she’s struck by her own folly – to feel so dreary because she can’t talk to some Essex parson with whom she has nothing in common! – it’s absurd; her pride revolts against it. In the end, it comes more or less down to this: she does not write, because she wants to.

She tries – as she has so often tried before – to turn all her unused affection on Francis. How can it be that a mother and son should take so little pleasure from each other? She pulls every trick in the book: conversations on subjects that please him, attempts at jokes and games; she tries her hand at baking, and buys him novels she’s certain he’ll like. Sometimes she catches him out looking anxious, or thinks she does, and tries to console; they make frequent journeys on the Underground to destinations of his choosing. He submits with few words and less affection, and sometimes she thinks he is sorry for her, or (much worse!) finds her amusing.

Martha loses her temper. ‘Did you really think you could carry on like that – you never wanted friends or lovers – you wanted courtiers! What you have on your hands is a peasants’ revolt. Frankie,’ she says, ‘we’re going for a walk.’

Will stands in the All Saints pulpit and looks out at his flock and finds himself lost for words. They are by turns mistrustful and eager: at times it seems they’re ready to run pell-mell into the everlasting arms, at others they eye him askance as if the Trouble has all been his doing. Someone somewhere has transgressed, that is the general consensus; and if the parson can’t be trusted to root out the wrongdoer things have come to a pretty pass.

All the while he finds himself wavering like a compass needle between the South Pole and the North: his wife whom he loves and is the sanctioned source of all his joys; and Cora Seaborne, who is not, and what’s more brought him nothing but trouble. News of Luke’s catastrophe has reached him via Charles. Other clergy might’ve imagined this swift end to the surgeon’s career to have been as divinely intended as if it had been the almighty hand wielding the knife, since it delivers Stella from the threat of the scalpel. Will, of course, is not so backward in his thinking, but all the same it’s difficult not to feel they’ve been extended a period of grace: the brutal treatment once offered by Garrett – the diseased lung collapsed in its cavity – is now impossible, since no other surgeon in England would consent to it.

Without Cora, he finds his thoughts lack direction. What, after all, is the point of observing this, of encountering that, if he cannot tell her, and watch her laugh or frown in response? He finds himself restless, uneasy; often he grows exasperated with them both, for having permitted only a lapse in good manners (this is how he frames it to himself) to cut the knot between them. Perhaps she finds herself too enraptured by her wounded friend to recall the country parson with his ailing wife – brings him rich food he ought not to eat, learns to dress the cut, to tug silk stitches from the skin. He clothes her in white and seats her at the doctor’s feet, her head bent over his ruined hand, and is appalled to find himself envious. All the same (he thinks): soon enough a letter will pass either this way or that between town and country – it only remains to be seen who’ll be first to unfold a sheet of paper, to lick the nib of their pen.

Behind Stella Ransome’s ribs, tubercles are forming. If Cora could’ve seen them, they’d have put her in mind of the toadstones she collects on her mantelpiece. They send out scavenger cells; infection’s setting in. The blood vessels of her lungs are beginning to disintegrate and show themselves in scarlet flecks on her blue handkerchiefs.