The Essex Serpent(90)
Thinking of that shameful moment on the midsummer marsh after he’d left them all behind, Will coughed and said: ‘Joanna would’ve boxed my ears if news of Cracknell hadn’t come in time – look: all these conkers lying about, and no children taking them home.’ He bent to pick up a handful and passed one to her, snug in its green casing. With a fingertip in the split she prised it open, and found the nut in its white silk bed. ‘I was angry,’ he said: ‘That’s all. Now the Trouble has gone I hardly remember how it was – how folk kept indoors and we never heard the children playing, and how nothing I could say would convince them there was nothing to fear they didn’t summon up themselves.’
‘I felt it in the village as soon as I came,’ she said. ‘A change of air. I heard the school choir singing and not until I was home did I remember the day they’d laughed and laughed and something went badly wrong. To think when I first came there was rarely anyone on the common, and I thought I’d see people look at me mistrustfully – as if it were all my fault! As if it had anything to do with me!’
‘Sometimes I think it was,’ said Will, dropping his hands, kicking at the moss. He gave her one of his chastening looks and only half in jest.
She said, laughing: ‘The Trouble might not be my doing, but I hardly helped – I made other things muddled. What you said in your letter – that you’d come to the end of new things – I realised then how I go blundering about. I forced myself in. I might as well have broken a window! Imagine saying we should write to each other when you were barely half a mile away! And all because we talked once …’
‘There was also the question of the sheep,’ said Will.
‘There was that, of course.’ They looked at each other, relieved to have overstepped the crack opening in the path before them. But it widened and they tripped: Will said, ‘My windows were already broken – no: I left them on the latch – and why? Why was it, when I had everything a man asks, I saw you and ever since was glad of you –’
‘It’s not surprising to me.’ Cora prised the conker from its shell and rolled it between her palms. ‘Did you really think because you loved here you couldn’t love there? Poor Will – poor boy! – did you think you had so little of it? Look – should I boil it, bake it, or pickle it in vinegar?’ She made as if to throw it at him, but he’d turned away and moved a step or two above her.
‘It’s like talking to a child,’ he said, exasperated: ‘I know what you think of me – secretly, even secret from yourself – that I’m a God-addled half-wit fallen miles behind you, as if you’ve evolved past me!’ She surveyed him sombrely, and (he thought) with amusement very faintly at the corner of her mouth, and it made him press home his point more cruelly than he meant: ‘Look at you! Whichever Cora you are – the one in silk and diamonds or the one who wears clothes Cracknell would’ve thrown away; the one always laughing at us or the one vowing love to anyone who’ll listen – you wall yourself away because you know as well as I do you’ve almost run through your youth without ever having been loved as you should have been –’
‘Stop it,’ Cora said. All the intimacy she’d sought by letter was unbearable out there under the black forest canopy; she wanted to be back in their safe territory of ink and paper and not here, where her colour rose and she thought she could smell, above the sweetness of a distant fire, the scent of his body under his shirt. It was indecent – he was at his best sealed in an envelope – that he was so unavoidably a thing of blood and bones made it impossible to ignore the strong pulse beating in her neck – ‘Come down,’ she said: ‘Come back – don’t fight with me. Haven’t we had enough of that?’ A little ashamed, he stooped beside a chestnut tree, rooting among fallen leaves for conkers, handing them to her one by one.
‘I wish we were children!’ said Cora, closing her fingers over them, remembering how once they’d been treasures to be bartered and prized. She came closer – she sat beside him on the moss – ‘Why can we not be like children, and play together …’
‘Because you’re not innocent!’ said Will – there was a strange vertiginous feeling, as if what they were saying had flung them high up and they’d not yet fallen: ‘You are not innocent, and nor am I – you play at it – you fend me off –’ He tugged at her sleeve, a little rough – ‘d’you think because you wear a man’s coat I might forget what you are?’
‘And do you think I do it for you?’ she said. ‘I forget I’m a woman – I set it aside. God knows I’m no mother and was never much of a wife … d’you think I should torture myself with high-heeled shoes and paint out my freckles so you’re kept on your guard against me?’
‘No – I think you’re guarding against yourself; you told me once you’d like to be nothing but an intellect, disembodied, untroubled by your own flesh and blood –’
‘I would, I would! I despise it – my body only ever betrayed me: I don’t live in it, I live up here, in my mind and words …’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I know, yes: but here you are too, here,’ and moving aside the folds of her coat he tugged her shirt where it was tucked at the waist, in the place where once he’d touched her and been disgraced by it. But the disgrace this time kept its distance: it seemed to him that to keep apart from her now would be obscene; how could it be possible to seek out each fold and turn of her mind, and not grow familiar with the particular patina of her skin, the scent and taste of it? Not to touch her now would be to breach a natural law. Back she lay against the soft green stair in the thickening dusk and fixed her eyes on his, unsurprised, daring him: he raised her shirt and there in the split between the black cloth of her clothes he found her soft belly, very white, marked with the silver lines her son had made; he kissed it once, and could not stop, and she rolled against him in delight.