The Essex Serpent(91)
The sun slid down – the forest closed about them – the copper on the pillars of the trees turned to verdigris. The gilded temple was gone, and in its place there was the scent of leaf mould and long grass dying, and windfall apples splitting on the path. She met his gaze then, levelly as she always had, and felt herself go rushing to meet him like a river in spate; ‘Please,’ she said, pulling at her skirt: ‘Please,’ and he heard it like a command. He found her easily, and his hand slipped and moved in her, and her bright head drooped, and she was silent. He showed her his hand, and how she gleamed there; he put a forefinger to his mouth and hers, and they had an equal share.
6
Later that same night, hardly five miles distant, Luke Garrett walked alone beside barley fields harvested white. He’d taken it into his head to walk the River Colne, setting out in that mean time before dawn when even the lightest burden is intolerable and the prospect of sunrise laughably remote.
Though the moon had not yet set, the sky in the east was stained with light and the fields gave rise to mist. In places it thickened into scraps coming at him as he walked; they breathed wetly on his cheek then dissipated like sighs. Some time back he’d lost the Colne and neither knew nor cared where he might pitch up: if he could, he’d have walked clean out of his own skin. The Essex land to his London eye was uniform in its strangeness: all the fields were ploughed black, save here and there where barley stubble glowed pale under the setting moon, and the low hedges seethed with life. The ranks of oaks were sturdy watchmen surveying him as he passed: he was an imposter.
He came in time to an incline where grass grew thick, from which it was possible to see out across a modest rise-and-fall to a village drowsing in the hollow, and here he rested against an oak. By disease or bad luck it had shed its leaves early, and in among the branches mistletoe showed vivid green even in that murky light. He supposed another man might look up and think of mouths kissed under Christmas sprigs, but he knew it for a parasite, leaching all that was good from its host. Hanging in the bare branches the bundles looked, he thought, like nothing so much as tumours growing on a lung.
Having come to a halt he encountered many separate pains: his feet, unused to walking much beyond an urban mile or so, were rubbed raw against his boots; his knee was swelling where he’d stumbled, swearing, over a stile. Worst, he’d let his injured hand hang loosely by his side, so that blood collecting there throbbed against the healing cut. Where knife and scalpel had scored the palm, the flesh looked rather like a thin mouth stitched shut. ‘There was a crooked man,’ he said, ‘who walked a crooked mile.’
But he could hardly resent the pains, since they distracted from the frantic misery that had dogged him since his arrival from London with a good-for-nothing hand and in his pocket Cora’s letter. ‘How could you?’ she’d said, and he’d felt her anger, and understood it: how could he? Own nothing which is not beautiful or useful, she’d once said, and he was neither. A squat, glowering creature as near to being beast as man, and now (he pushed the thumb of his left hand into the damaged palm of his right, and reeled with the shock of it) useless to boot.
Since the day the knife had gone in, he’d woken each night drenched in sweat that collected in the hollow of his collar-bones and left his pillow damp. Useless, he’d say, beating a clenched fist against his temples until his head ached, useless – useless: all that gave him purpose had been taken in a matter of hours.
Sometimes he woke forgetting, and for fleeting seconds the world was spread out before him invitingly: there were his notebooks and his models of the heart with its chambers and pipes; there the letter Edward Burton wrote in the early days as he healed, and beside it an envelope into which Cora had put a piece of stone and an explanatory note in her schoolboy hand. Then he’d remember, and see it was all false as stage props, and the black curtain would fall. It was not melancholy he felt – he might have welcomed that, imagining it possible to enjoy a fading sadness that found companionship on memorial benches. Instead he veered between bitter fury and a curious deadening that dwindled his whole range of feeling to little but a shrug.
Under the oak in the coming dawn he grew calm. If I am useless, he thought, can I not discard myself? He had no duty to go on living – no obligation to walk a yard further. There was no God to censure or console: he answered to no intelligence but his own.
Over in the east a coral light struck the low cloud while Luke laid out reasons for living and found each insufficient. Once his ambition had driven him on through poverty and disgrace; now it belonged to a lost age. His mind was now muddied and slow, and besides: what use was it, matched to a mutilated hand? Once he might have let love for Cora sustain him, but he’d lost that too: her outrage hadn’t extinguished it, not quite, only turned it into something secret and furtive, of which he was ashamed. Would she grieve him? He supposed she would, and imagined her putting on one of those black dresses that made her skin so pale, and imagined William Ransome looking up from his books to see her there on the threshold, her lips parted a little, a tear gleaming on her cheek – oh certainly she’d grieve: she did it so well, after all.
He pictured his mother’s grief: well, she’d never yet had his photo on the mantelpiece – perhaps she’d enjoy finding a silver frame going cheap in the market, and tuck behind the glass a black curl of his baby hair. There was Martha, of course – the thought of her raised something like a smile: what they’d done on midsummer night had delighted them both, but it had also been only a poor substitute. What a mess, he thought: what a mess we make. If love were an archer someone had put out its eyes, and it went stumbling about, blindly letting loose its arrows, never meeting its mark.