The Essex Serpent(8)
‘Garrett?’ he’d said: ‘Is that you? Are you all right? What are you doing here so late?’
Garrett hadn’t answered, but turned his head, and the sardonic grin with which his face was usually masked was gone. Instead he gave the other man a frank smile of such happy sweetness that Spencer thought he must have been mistaken for a friend; but Garrett gestured and said, ‘Look! Come and see what I made!’
Spencer’s first thought was that Garrett had taken up embroidery. This would not have been so strange: each year there was a contest among the graduate surgeons to see who could sew the finest stitches on a white silk square, and some claimed to have practised with cobweb. What had been holding Garrett’s attention was a beautiful object that resembled a Japanese fan in miniature with an intricately woven tassel at the handle. It measured no broader than his thumb, and was worked in such fine patterns of blue and scarlet on dense yellowish cream that he could barely see where the threads looped through the silk. Stooping to look closer, his vision sharpened and shifted, and he realised what it was; an exquisitely cut portion of the lining of a human stomach, sliced thin as paper, injected with ink to show the tracing of the blood vessels and set between glass slides. No artist could have matched the fine loop and twist of vein and artery, which had no pattern at all, but in which Spencer thought he saw the image of bare-branched trees in spring.
‘Oh!’ He caught Garrett’s eye, and they shared a look of delight that was a stitch neither ever severed.
‘You made this?’
‘I did! Once when I was young I saw a picture of something like this, made by Edward Jenner, I think – I told my father I’d make one of my own, though I doubt he believed me – and here we are and here it is. I broke into the morgue. You won’t tell?’
‘No – never!’ said Spencer, entranced.
‘I believe for most of us – for me, certainly – what’s below the skin is more worth looking at than what’s outside it. Turn me inside-out and I’d be quite a handsome man!’ Garrett placed the slide in a cardboard box, secured it with string, and placed it in his breast pocket, reverent as a priest. ‘I’m going to take it to a framer and have it set in ebony. Is ebony expensive? Pine, or oak – I live in hope of one day knowing someone who’ll think it as beautiful as I do. Shall we have a drink?’
Spencer had looked at the exercise books he’d carried from his rooms, then down at Luke’s face. It occurred to Spencer for the first time that he was certainly shy, and probably lonely. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If I’m going to fail the exam, I might as well not care about it.’
The other man had grinned. ‘I hope you’ve got some money, then, because I’ve not eaten since yesterday.’ Then he’d loped ahead down the corridor, laughing at himself, or at Spencer, or at an old joke he’d only just remembered.
It was apparent Garrett had not yet found a fit recipient for his handiwork, for there – years later – was the slide in its box, placed reverently upon the mantelpiece, the white cardboard darkened at the edge. Spencer rolled the cigarette between his fingers, and said: ‘Has she gone?’
Looking up, Garrett considered pretending he misunderstood, but knew himself bettered. ‘Cora? She went last week. The blinds are down at Foulis Street and the furniture’s covered in dust-sheets. I know, because I looked.’ He scowled. ‘She’d gone by the time I came by. That old witch Martha was there and wouldn’t pass on the address: said she needed rest and quiet and I’d hear from her in her own good time.’
‘Martha is one year older than you,’ said Spencer mildly. ‘And admit it, Garrett: peace and quiet are two qualities which are not often linked with you.’
‘I am her friend!’
‘Yes, but not a peaceful or a quiet one. Where has she gone?’
‘Colchester. Colchester! What is there at Colchester? A ruin and a river, and web-footed peasants, and mud.’
‘They’re finding fossils on the coast: I read about it. Smart women are wearing necklaces of sharks’ teeth set in silver. Cora will be happy as a schoolboy there, up to her knees in mud. You’ll see her soon.’
‘What good is soon? What good is Colchester? What good are fossils? It’s been hardly a month. She should still be mourning.’ (At this, neither met the other man’s eye.) ‘She should be with people who love her.’
‘She is with Martha, and no-one ever loved her more.’ Spencer did not mention Francis, who’d several times beaten him at chess: it did not somehow seem feasible to suggest the boy loved his mother. His watch ticked louder, and he saw in Garrett the slow burning of a furious temper. Thinking of the dinner that awaited him, and the wine, and the warm deep-carpeted house, he said – as if the thought had just occurred – ‘I meant to ask: how’s your paper coming along?’ Dangling the prospect of academic approval in front of Garrett generally had much the same effect as showing a dog a raw bone, and lately little else could turn his mind from Cora Seaborne.
‘Paper?’ The word came out like something unpleasant eaten. Then, a little mollified: ‘On the possibility of replacing an aortic valve? Yes, all right’ – almost without looking, he deftly retrieved half-a-dozen sheets of dense black script from midway through a stack of notebooks – ‘Deadline’s Sunday. Might as well crack on with it. Get out, would you?’ He turned away, folded himself over the desk, and began sharpening a pencil with a razorblade. He unfolded a large sheet of paper which showed a vastly enlarged transverse section of a human heart, with cryptic markings in black ink, and sections of script crossed out and reinstated with a series of exclamation marks. Something in the margins caught his eye; it excited or irritated him: he swore, and began scribbling.