The Essex Serpent(5)
Cora watched the evening’s performance with an interested detachment. There in the nave, obscuring the altar – in a coffin resting on what resembled a butcher’s trestle – was her husband’s body, which she did not recall having ever seen in its entirety, only in small and sometimes panicked glimpses of very white flesh laid thinly over beautiful bones.
It struck her that really she’d known nothing of him in his public life, which was carried out in (she imagined) identical rooms in the Commons, and in his Whitehall set, and in the club which she could not attend, having the misfortune to be female. Perhaps he dealt elsewhere with kindness – yes: perhaps that was it – perhaps she’d been a kind of clearing-house for cruelties deserved elsewhere. There was a kind of nobility in that, if you thought about it: she looked down at her hands as if expecting the notion to have raised stigmata.
Above her, on the high black balcony which seemed in the dim air to float several feet above the columns which bore it up, was Luke Garrett. Imp, she thought: look at him! and her heart seemed almost to move towards her friend, pressing against the bars of her ribs. His coat was no more fitting to the occasion than his surgeon’s apron might have been, and she was certain he’d been drinking long before he came, and that the girl by his side was a recent acquaintance whose affection was out of his budget; but despite the darkness and distance there came down to her, in one black glance, an incitement to laugh. Martha felt it too, and administered a pinch to her thigh, so that later, when glasses of wine were poured in Hampstead and Paddington and Westminster it was said: ‘Seaborne’s widow gasped with grief just as the priest declared though he were dead, yet shall he live; it was beautiful, you know, in a way.’
Beside her, Francis went on whispering, his mouth pressed to his thumb, his eyes tightly closed; it made him babyish again, and she put her hand over his. It fit within hers perfectly still, and very hot, and after a while she lifted her own and laid it again in her lap.
Afterwards, as black cassocks flapped like rooks between the pews, Cora stood on the steps and greeted the departing congregation, who were all kindness, all solicitude – she must consider herself to have friends in Town; she was welcome, with her handsome boy, at any supper she chose; she’d be remembered in their prayers. She passed to Martha so many visiting-cards, and so many small posies, and so much in the way of little books of remembrance and black-hemmed samplers, that a passer-by might have mistaken the day for a wedding, albeit a sombre one.
It was not yet evening, but frost thickened on the steps with a hard glitter in the lamplight, and fog enclosed the city in a pale tent. Cora shivered, and Martha came a little nearer, so that she could feel warmth rising from that compact body in its second-best coat. Francis stood some distance away, his left hand foraging in the pocket of his jacket, his right smoothing fitfully at his hair. He did not look distressed, precisely, or either woman would have drawn him between them, with the murmurs of comfort which would have come so easily if they’d been sought. Rather, he looked politely resigned to disruption in a cherished routine.
‘Christ have mercy on us!’ said Dr Garrett, as the last of the mourners departed, black-hatted, relieved it was over, turning to the night’s entertainment and the morning’s business. Then, with the swift transition to the serious which was so irresistible in him, he grasped Cora’s gloved hand. ‘Well done, Cora: you did well. Can I take you home? Let me take you. I’m hungry. Are you? I could eat a horse and its foal.’
‘You can’t afford a horse.’ Martha only ever spoke to the doctor with a show of annoyance; Imp had been her name for him, though no-one remembered it now. His presence in the house at Foulis Street – first a matter of duty, then one of devotion – was an annoyance to Martha, who felt her own devotion to be more than adequate. He’d dispensed with his companion, and had put into his breast pocket a handkerchief edged in black.
‘I’d like more than anything to go for a long walk,’ said Cora. Francis, as if detecting her sudden weariness and seeing in it an opportunity for gain, came quickly to stand at her feet and demand they travel home by Underground. As ever, it came not as a childish request that if granted, would give him pleasure, but as a bald statement of fact. Garrett, who’d not yet learned to negotiate the boy’s implacable will, said, ‘I’ve already had enough of Hades for one day,’ and gestured towards a passing cab.
Martha took the boy’s hand, and out of sheer surprise at her audacity he let it lie there in her glove. ‘I’ll take you, Frank: it’ll be warm, and I can’t feel my toes – but Cora, you surely cannot walk all the way – it is three miles at least?’
‘Three and a half,’ said the doctor, as if he himself had laid the paving stones. ‘Cora, let me walk with you.’ The cab driver made an impatient gesture, and received an obscene response. ‘You shouldn’t do it. You can’t go alone …’
‘Shouldn’t? Can’t?’ Cora took off her gloves, which were no more proof against the cold than a cobweb. She thrust them at Garrett. ‘Give me yours – I can’t think why they make these, or why women buy them – I can walk, and I will. I’m dressed for walking, see?’ She lifted her hem and displayed boots better suited to a schoolboy.
Francis had turned away from his mother, no longer interested in the turn the evening might take; he had a great deal to do, back in his Upper Room, and a few new items (pat, pat) which required his attention. He pulled his hand from Martha’s and set off towards the city. Martha, throwing a mistrustful look at Garrett and a rueful one at her friend, called out a farewell and slipped into the mist.