The Essex Serpent(81)

On a bench in a small square park he ate chips with vinegar. Children dressed in party clothes stood waiting on the kerb, and behind them, Standard sellers bawled the evening news. ‘But how?’ he said. ‘It makes me stupid sometimes – all I read and hear. I have anger in me and I don’t know what to do with it.’

‘It is how they’d have us,’ said Martha. ‘It’s not the function of the wage-slave to think. The girls at Bryant and May, the boys down in the quarries: d’you think they’ve time to think, to plot, to revolutionise? That’s the great crime: that no-one need be put in chains when their own minds are shackles enough. Once I thought we were no better than horses tied to the plough, but it’s so much worse – we’re only moving parts in their machinery – just the bolts on the wheel, the axle turning round and round!’

‘What then? I must work. I cannot escape the machine.’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Not yet: but change is slow. Even the world turns by inches.’

Weary Edward leaned against the bench. Croesus touched the chestnut trees, the oaks and London limes; his friend was by his side. ‘Martha,’ he said: just that, and it was enough for now.

‘You’re pale,’ she said. ‘Ned. Let me take you home.’ She kissed him, and on her mouth there was a grain of salt.





Edward Burton

4 Templar Street

Martha – won’t you marry me? Don’t we do all right together, you and I?

EDWARD





By hand

Dear Ned –

I cannot marry you – I cannot marry at all.

I cannot promise to love, honour and obey. I obey only as my reason commands me to obey – I honour only those whose actions demand that I must honour them!

And I cannot love you as a wife’s obliged to love a husband. I see the day coming when Cora Seaborne’s done with me but I can never be done with her.

What now – do you think politics stops at the doorstep? Do you think it only a matter of soapboxes and picket lines, and not also a matter of our private lives?

Don’t ask me to enter an institution that puts me in bonds and leaves you free. There are other ways to live – there are bonds beside those sanctioned by the state! Let’s live as we think – freely and unafraid – let’s be bound by nothing but affection and by holding our purpose in common.

If you cannot have a wife, will you take a companion – will you have a comrade?

Your friend –





MARTHA





Edward Burton

4 Templar Street

Dear Martha –

I will.

EDWARD





3


Little Harriet, yellow-dressed youngest of the laughing girls, woke before dawn and vomited into her pillow. In the corner her mother stirred, and rising to comfort her child breathed in the morning air, choked, and vomited also. Coming from the Blackwater on a warm west wind a vile smell had entered the room through a broken windowpane. Creeping past World’s End and finding nothing there, it had passed over and come to the borders of Aldwinter, where few lights shone. Leaving the child in her mother’s arms, it came to the Banks cottage, and borne on the breeze stirred the red sails of the barges in the quay. Weighted by drink Banks slept too deeply to be roused, but something troubled him in the dark, and three times he said his lost daughter’s name. On it went, past the White Hare, and on the doorstep a stray dog whined for a master long gone; past the school, where Mr Caffyn – already up, marking grammar notebooks, deploring abuse of the comma – gave a cry of disgust, and ran to fetch a glass of water. Rooks had begun to gather in Traitor’s Oak on the common, sensing in the reeking air a feast. At Cora’s grey house it crept above the door, beneath the lintel; it seeped into the fabric of the sheets on her bed and could not find her. It skirted the All Saints tower, and reached the window of the rectory: William Ransome, sleepless in his study, thought perhaps a mouse lay rotting beneath the boards. Pressing his shirt’s cuff to his mouth he went on his knees below the desk, beside the empty chair he kept beside his own, and found nothing. Stella, in a blue satin garment through which the bones of her shoulder-blades flared like hard little wings, appeared at the threshold. ‘What on earth?’ she said, caught between laughing and choking: ‘What on earth?’ She held a bunch of lavender to her nose.

‘A dead thing somewhere,’ said Will, putting his own jacket around her, afraid she’d begin one of the coughing fits which shook her small body as if it were held in the jaws of a predator: ‘Something on the common? A sheep?’

‘Not Magog, I hope,’ said Stella: ‘We’d never be forgiven’; but no – the last of Cracknell’s family could be seen at the garden’s end, untroubled, chewing an early breakfast. ‘Will, should we light a fire – oh! Oh, it’s foul, foul – you’ll go out on the common and see the earth split open and sinners looking up with all their bones broken and their lips cracked with thirst!’ Her eyes glittered as if the prospect pleased her, and it troubled Will more than the vile air, which he almost thought he could taste, there on the tip of his tongue: something foetid, with a horrid sweetness behind it. Ought he to go out there – perhaps he should – certainly he must: who else was there to seek out the cause of all that had lately befallen the village? He lit a fire, and shortly the reek was displaced by wood-smoke; Stella tossed in her lavender, and there was a brief and piercing scent of recent summer. ‘Go on,’ she said, straightening the papers on his desk (so many letters! Did he never put them away?), giving him his coat. ‘Ten minutes more and we’ll hear the bell and you’ll be wanted somewhere by someone.’