The Essex Serpent(88)
They surveyed each other a while, unable to keep from smiling. Will had left off his collar, and with the country man’s disdain for the seasons wore no coat. His sleeves were rolled back as if he’d laboured all afternoon, and his shirt was unbuttoned at the throat. His hair had lightened since she’d seen it last, and grown longer: it was almost amber in the evening light. The scar on his cheek mimicked the edge of the sheep’s hoof, and his eyes seemed smudged as if he’d rubbed at them while reading an evening paper. He isn’t sleeping, thought Cora, with dreadful tenderness.
Under his gaze she knew she’d never looked less handsome: closeting herself indoors for much of the summer had given her face a greyish pallor, and her neglected hair grew coarsely at the crown. If she consented to look in the mirror it was to see quite dispassionately the fine lines fanning from the corner of her eyes, the single crease between her brows. All this she felt acutely, and with relief. Whatever mistaken moment at midsummer had caused their breach was impossible to countenance now: she was no man’s idea of a lover. The thought was so absurd she laughed with the relief of it; the sound pleased him, because it obliterated the weeks between and put him back in that warm room when first she’d held out her hand.
‘Come on, Mrs Seaborne: let’s go,’ he said: ‘I feel I’ve so much to tell you’; and far from feeling chastened or suppressed, Cora felt all her recent heaviness of spirit lift. They walked swiftly, matching step for step, leaving behind the village and the briny estuary breeze; they passed All Saints, and neither averted their eyes, because it did not occur to them there might be any misdemeanour in taking the evening air.
Both had saved such stores of anecdote and complaint, of tall tale and half-formed theory, that fully an hour passed without pause. Each made an inventory of the other, totting up with pleasure the well-remembered gesture or the phrases used too often, the tendency to withhold or exaggerate, the sudden veering-off into fresh pastures which the other followed at a run. They delighted in each other then as they had from the first, without thinking it indecent to smile so much and laugh so readily, while sinking in her blue silk cushions Stella raised a scrap of cotton to her mouth and withdrew it flecked with blood, and in Colchester Luke Garrett felt himself adrift. That each had felt betrayed by the other was not forgiven so much as forgotten: they’d sealed themselves up – they were inviolate.
‘And after all that, nothing but a dead fish!’ said Cora. ‘So much for the Essex Serpent – its wing and beak! Truly, I’ve never felt more foolish. I took myself off to the Reading Rooms (I half-thought I’d see you there) and did my homework, like any good schoolgirl, and saw the oarfish cast up in Bermuda thirty years ago, and read how they loiter near the surface when they’re dying – I must apologise to Mary Anning for disgracing both her sex and her profession.’
‘But such a fish,’ said Will, and described for her how the shining skin of its belly had split, and how its contents had writhed on the shingle.
When they spoke of Stella, Cora turned her face away: she’d shown Will her tears once before and had resolved not to do so again.
‘She asked to be shown the glass slide in the microscope,’ said Will, wondering again at his wife’s courage. ‘She looked at what came from her own body and there was death in it and she faced it better than I did. I think she’d known for months. She’d seen it all before.’
‘She’s the kind of woman who’s misunderstood: they think because she’s so pretty and wears her clothes so well, and because she gossips and chatters, that she’s nothing but a ballerina in a jewellery box turning round and round; but I knew from her first letter that she’d a sharpness to her – I don’t think she misses anything, not even now.’
‘Less now than ever, though something has changed.’ They’d entered the fringes of a wood; the track narrowed; jackdaws convened in the oaks, and brambles tugged at their clothes. Berries had been left to rot on the branch, since all through the months of the Trouble no-one had felt much like going out alone with their baskets. ‘Something has changed, and they told me it would, but I never expected this. She had faith of course, or I couldn’t have married her – you are horrified! But how could I ask a woman to spare me every Sunday and half the week between if she didn’t serve the same God? – yes: she had a faith, but not like this. It was’ – he cast about for the right phrase – ‘it was polite. Do you understand? This – it’s different – I find myself embarrassed by it. She sings. I wake in the night and I hear her singing from along the hall. I think she has the Essex Serpent muddled up with Bible stories, and doesn’t really believe it has gone.’
‘You sound more of a civil servant than a minister! Don’t you think those women who went to the tomb – I forget their names – might’ve been a little like that – blinded by glory, already half-dead, wanting this short time over as soon as possible – no: I’m not mocking you and God knows I’d never mock her – but if you insist on your faith you ought at least to concede it’s a strange business and very little to do with well-ironed cassocks and the order of service.’ She felt her temper rise slightly – she’d forgotten how readily they exasperated each other, and considered letting the conversation reach unstable ground; but it was too soon for all that. ‘But I do see,’ she said, growing conciliatory: ‘Of course I do: nothing’s more troubling than change in those we love. It’s a nightmare I have – I’ve told you about it often! – that one day I come home and there’s Martha and there’s Francis and they put their hands to their faces and lift them clear away like masks and underneath there’s loathing …’ She shuddered. ‘But she’s still your Stella, your star of the sea: love is not love which alters when it alteration finds! What will you do? What treatment can she have?’