The Essex Serpent Page 3

  Late that night, the last to bed, Martha paused at Cora’s door: it had been her habit these past few years to content herself that all was well with her friend. Cora’s door stood half-open; a log in the fireplace spat as it burned. At the threshold Martha said, ‘Are you sleeping? Should I come in?’ and receiving no answer stepped onto the thick pale carpet. All along the mantelpiece were visiting cards and mourning-cards, black-edged, close-written; a bunch of violets tied with a black ribbon had fallen onto the hearth. Martha bent to pick them up, and they seemed almost to shrink away from her and hide again behind their heart-shaped leaves. She stood them in a little glass of water, set them where her friend would see them on first waking, and stooped to kiss her. Cora murmured, and shifted, but did not wake; and Martha recalled first coming to Foulis Street to take up her post, anticipating some haughty matron with a mind enfeebled by gossip and fashion, and how wrong-footed she’d been by the changeable being who’d come to the door. Infuriated and entranced, Martha found that no sooner had she grown accustomed to one Cora, another would emerge: one moment a girl who seemed a student over-pleased with her own intelligence, the next a friend of long years’ intimacy; a woman giving suppers of stylish extravagance, who’d swear once the last guest was gone, take down her hair, and sprawl laughing beside the fire.

  Even her voice was a matter for confused admiration – that odd half-lilt, half-impediment, which would appear when she was tired, and certain consonants gave her trouble. That behind the intelligent charm (which, Martha wryly observed, could be turned on and off like the bathroom tap) there were visible wounds only made her dearer. Michael Seaborne treated Martha with the kind of indifference he might’ve reserved for the hat-stand in the hall: she was entirely inconsequential – he did not even meet her eye on the stairs. But watchful Martha let nothing pass her by – overheard each courteous insult, observed each concealed bruise – and only with a great effort prevented herself from plotting a murder for which she’d’ve cheerfully been hanged. Just less than a year after arriving at Foulis Street – in the small hours, during which no-one had slept – Cora had come to her room. Whatever had been done or said had caused her to tremble violently, though the night was warm; her thick untidy hair was wet. Without speaking Martha had raised the cloths that covered her, and taken Cora into her arms; she drew up her knees to enclose her entirely, and held her very tight, so that the other woman’s trembling entered her. Unlaced from the conventions of whalebone and cloth Cora’s body was large, strong; Martha felt the blades moving in her narrow back, the soft stomach which she cradled against her arm, the sturdy muscles of her thighs: it had been like clinging to an animal which would never again consent to lie so still. They’d woken in a loose embrace, wholly at ease, and parted on a caress.

  It heartened her now to see that Cora had not taken to her bed in mourning, but with her old habit of looking over what she called ‘her Studies’, as if she were a boy cramming for college. On the bed beside her was the old leather file which had been her mother’s, and which had lost the gilt from its monogram, and which smelt (so Martha insisted) of the animal it once had been. And there also were her notebooks, written in a small clear script, the margins covered, the pages interleaved with pressed stems of weeds and grasses, and a map of a section of coastline marked with red ink. A spill of papers lay all around her and she’d fallen asleep clutching her Dorset ammonite. But in her sleep she’d held on much too hard: it had crumbled to pieces, and left her with a muddy hand.

  FEBRUARY

  1

  ‘I mean: take jasmine, for instance.’ Dr Luke Garrett swept papers from his desk as if he might find beneath them white buds popping into bloom, and discovering instead a pouch of tobacco set about rolling a cigarette. ‘The scent is so sweet that it’s both pleasant and unpleasant; people recoil and go nearer, recoil and go nearer; they’re not sure whether to be disgusted or seduced. If only we could acknowledge pain and pleasure not as opposite poles but all of a piece, we might at last understand …’ He lost the thread of his thought, and cast about for it.

  Accustomed to these lectures, the man who stood beside the window sucked at his beer and mildly said, ‘Only last week you concluded that all states of pain are evil, and all states of pleasure are good. I remember your words exactly, because you said it so many times, and in fact wrote it down for me, in case I forgot. I might actually have it on me –’ He patted ironically at each pocket, then flushed, never having quite got the hang of affectionate mockery. George Spencer was all that Garrett was not: tall, wealthy, fair, shy, with feelings deeper than his thoughts were swift. Those who’d known both since their student days joked that Spencer was the Imp’s good conscience, severed from him somehow, always running to keep up.

  Garrett shoved himself deeper into his armchair. ‘Of course it seems completely contradictory and wholly unjustifiable, but then the best minds can hold two opposing thoughts at once.’ He frowned, an expression which caused his eyes almost to vanish below his black eyebrows and blacker fringe, and drained his glass. ‘Let me explain …’

  ‘I’d like that: but I’m supposed to be meeting friends for dinner.’

  ‘You don’t have any friends, Spencer. Even I don’t like you. Look: it’s useless denying that causing or experiencing pain is the most repulsive of human experiences. Before we knocked the patient out cold, surgeons would vomit in horror at what they were about to do; sane men and women would shorten their lives by twenty years rather than endure the knife – so would you – so would I! But all the same – it is impossible to say what pain actually is, or what is truly felt, or if what pains one pains another: it is more a matter of the imagination than of the body – so you see then how valuable hypnosis ought to be?’ He narrowed his eyes at Spencer and went on: ‘If you tell me you’re burned and in pain, how can I know whether the sensations you report bear any resemblance to what I’d feel if I suffered the same injury? All I can safely say is that we each experienced some physical response to an identical stimulus. True, we might both yelp, and splash about in cold water for a bit and so on, but how can I know that you are not actually experiencing a sensation that, if I were to experience it, might have me yelping to an entirely different tune?’ Wolfish, he bared his teeth and went on: ‘Does it matter? Would it alter the treatment a physician might give? If you begin to question the truth – or I suppose the value – of pain, how could you resist withholding or dispensing care according to some measure which you admit yourself is completely arbitrary?’

  Losing interest, Garrett stooped to collect the fallen papers from the floor, and set about sorting them into neat files. ‘Doesn’t matter in the least, to all practical purposes. The thought just occurred to me, that’s all. Things occur to me, and I like to talk about them, and I haven’t anyone else. I ought to get a dog.’ Spencer, noting his friend’s plunge into gloom, took out his cigarette, and ignoring the ticking of his watch sat in a bare-seated chair and surveyed the room. It was fanatically clean, and the parsimonious winter sun could not pick out a speck of dust, no matter how it tried. It contained two chairs and a table, with two upended packing cases making do elsewhere. A length of fabric nailed over the window was washed thin and pale, and the white stone fireplace gleamed. There was a strong scent of lemons and antiseptic, and over the fire were black-framed photographs of Ignaz Semmelweis and John Snow. Pinned above the little desk there was a drawing (signed LUKE GARRETT AGE THIRTEEN) of a serpent coiled about a staff and testing the air with its split tongue: the symbol of Asclepius, who was cut from the womb of his mother on her funeral pyre and grew up to be the god of healing. The only food and drink Spencer had ever seen up those three flights of whitewashed stairs were cheap beer and Jacob’s crackers. He looked down at his friend, conscious of the familiar battle between frustration and affection which he always roused.

  Spencer could recall with perfect clarity their first meeting in the lecture rooms of the Royal Borough, the teaching hospital where Garrett prov
ed himself to have leaped ahead of his tutors in theory and understanding, bearing their tutelage with ill grace save when studying cardiac anatomy and the circulatory system, when he’d become so boyish and enthused he was suspected of mockery and often tossed out of class. Spencer, who knew the only way to conceal and overcome the limits of his own intelligence was to study, and study hard, avoided Garrett. He suspected no good could come of being seen with him, and besides was a little afraid of the black glitter set behind his eyes. Encountering him one evening, long after the laboratory was emptied and its doors ought to have been locked, he thought at first he must be in deep distress. He was seated with a drooping head at one of the scored and Bunsen-burned benches, staring intently at something between his outspread hands.

  ‘Garrett?’ he’d said: ‘Is that you? Are you all right? What are you doing here so late?’

  Garrett hadn’t answered, but turned his head, and the sardonic grin with which his face was usually masked was gone. Instead he gave the other man a frank smile of such happy sweetness that Spencer thought he must have been mistaken for a friend; but Garrett gestured and said, ‘Look! Come and see what I made!’

  Spencer’s first thought was that Garrett had taken up embroidery. This would not have been so strange: each year there was a contest among the graduate surgeons to see who could sew the finest stitches on a white silk square, and some claimed to have practised with cobweb. What had been holding Garrett’s attention was a beautiful object that resembled a Japanese fan in miniature with an intricately woven tassel at the handle. It measured no broader than his thumb, and was worked in such fine patterns of blue and scarlet on dense yellowish cream that he could barely see where the threads looped through the silk. Stooping to look closer, his vision sharpened and shifted, and he realised what it was; an exquisitely cut portion of the lining of a human stomach, sliced thin as paper, injected with ink to show the tracing of the blood vessels and set between glass slides. No artist could have matched the fine loop and twist of vein and artery, which had no pattern at all, but in which Spencer thought he saw the image of bare-branched trees in spring.

  ‘Oh!’ He caught Garrett’s eye, and they shared a look of delight that was a stitch neither ever severed.

  ‘You made this?’

  ‘I did! Once when I was young I saw a picture of something like this, made by Edward Jenner, I think – I told my father I’d make one of my own, though I doubt he believed me – and here we are and here it is. I broke into the morgue. You won’t tell?’

  ‘No – never!’ said Spencer, entranced.

  ‘I believe for most of us – for me, certainly – what’s below the skin is more worth looking at than what’s outside it. Turn me inside-out and I’d be quite a handsome man!’ Garrett placed the slide in a cardboard box, secured it with string, and placed it in his breast pocket, reverent as a priest. ‘I’m going to take it to a framer and have it set in ebony. Is ebony expensive? Pine, or oak – I live in hope of one day knowing someone who’ll think it as beautiful as I do. Shall we have a drink?’

  Spencer had looked at the exercise books he’d carried from his rooms, then down at Luke’s face. It occurred to Spencer for the first time that he was certainly shy, and probably lonely. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If I’m going to fail the exam, I might as well not care about it.’

  The other man had grinned. ‘I hope you’ve got some money, then, because I’ve not eaten since yesterday.’ Then he’d loped ahead down the corridor, laughing at himself, or at Spencer, or at an old joke he’d only just remembered.

  It was apparent Garrett had not yet found a fit recipient for his handiwork, for there – years later – was the slide in its box, placed reverently upon the mantelpiece, the white cardboard darkened at the edge. Spencer rolled the cigarette between his fingers, and said: ‘Has she gone?’

  Looking up, Garrett considered pretending he misunderstood, but knew himself bettered. ‘Cora? She went last week. The blinds are down at Foulis Street and the furniture’s covered in dust-sheets. I know, because I looked.’ He scowled. ‘She’d gone by the time I came by. That old witch Martha was there and wouldn’t pass on the address: said she needed rest and quiet and I’d hear from her in her own good time.’

  ‘Martha is one year older than you,’ said Spencer mildly. ‘And admit it, Garrett: peace and quiet are two qualities which are not often linked with you.’

  ‘I am her friend!’

  ‘Yes, but not a peaceful or a quiet one. Where has she gone?’

  ‘Colchester. Colchester! What is there at Colchester? A ruin and a river, and web-footed peasants, and mud.’

  ‘They’re finding fossils on the coast: I read about it. Smart women are wearing necklaces of sharks’ teeth set in silver. Cora will be happy as a schoolboy there, up to her knees in mud. You’ll see her soon.’

  ‘What good is soon? What good is Colchester? What good are fossils? It’s been hardly a month. She should still be mourning.’ (At this, neither met the other man’s eye.) ‘She should be with people who love her.’

  ‘She is with Martha, and no-one ever loved her more.’ Spencer did not mention Francis, who’d several times beaten him at chess: it did not somehow seem feasible to suggest the boy loved his mother. His watch ticked louder, and he saw in Garrett the slow burning of a furious temper. Thinking of the dinner that awaited him, and the wine, and the warm deep-carpeted house, he said – as if the thought had just occurred – ‘I meant to ask: how’s your paper coming along?’ Dangling the prospect of academic approval in front of Garrett generally had much the same effect as showing a dog a raw bone, and lately little else could turn his mind from Cora Seaborne.

  ‘Paper?’ The word came out like something unpleasant eaten. Then, a little mollified: ‘On the possibility of replacing an aortic valve? Yes, all right’ – almost without looking, he deftly retrieved half-a-dozen sheets of dense black script from midway through a stack of notebooks – ‘Deadline’s Sunday. Might as well crack on with it. Get out, would you?’ He turned away, folded himself over the desk, and began sharpening a pencil with a razorblade. He unfolded a large sheet of paper which showed a vastly enlarged transverse section of a human heart, with cryptic markings in black ink, and sections of script crossed out and reinstated with a series of exclamation marks. Something in the margins caught his eye; it excited or irritated him: he swore, and began scribbling.

  Spencer withdrew a banknote from his pocket, set it silently on the floor, where his friend might mistake it for one he himself had dropped and forgotten, and closed the door behind him.

  2

  Having scoured its river for kingfishers and its castle for ravens, Cora Seaborne walked through Colchester with Martha on her arm, holding an umbrella above them both. There’d been no kingfisher (‘On a Nile cruise, probably – Martha, shall we follow them?’), but the castle keep had been thick with grave-faced rooks stalking about in their ragged trousers. ‘Quite a good ruin,’ said Cora, ‘But I’d have liked to’ve seen a gibbet, or a miscreant with pecked-out eyes.’

  Martha – who had little patience for the past and eyes fixed always at some brighter point several years distant – said, ‘There’s suffering, if you’re really determined to find it,’ and gestured towards a man whose legs ended above the knee and who had stationed himself opposite a cafe, the better to induce guilt in tourists with overfilled bellies. Martha had made no secret of her discomfort at being plucked from her city home: for all that her thick fair plait and strong arms gave her the appearance of a dairy-girl with a fondness for cream, she’d never before been much east of Bishopsgate, and thought the oaky Essex fields sinister and the pink-painted Essex houses the dwelling-places of half-wits. Her astonishment that coffee could be had in such a backwater had been matched only by her disgust at the astringent liquid she’d been served, and she spoke to anyone they met with the extravagant politeness reserved for a stupid child. All the same, in the fortnight since they’d departed London – Francis retrieved from
school, to the unspoken but evident relief of his teachers – Martha had almost come to love the little town for its effect on her friend, who removed from London’s gaze had abandoned her dutiful mourning and receded ten years to a merrier self. Sooner or later, she thought, she’d gently ask how long Cora intended to live in their two rooms on the High Street, doing nothing but walking herself weary and poring over books, but for now she was content to witness Cora’s happiness.

  Adjusting the umbrella, which had done nothing more than channel the weak rain more efficiently into the collars of their coats, Cora followed Martha’s pointing hand. The crippled man was doing a far better job than they of tricking the weather, and judging by the satisfaction with which he examined the contents of his upturned hat, had made a good day’s takings. He was sitting on what Cora first took to be a stone bench, but which on looking closer she saw was a piece of fallen masonry. It measured at least three feet broad and two deep, and the remains of a Latin phrase emerged to the left of the beggar’s limbs. Seeing the two women in their good coats observing him from across the road he immediately adopted an expression of craven misery; this he swiftly discarded as being too obvious and replaced with one of noble suffering, with the suggestion that though he found his occupation odious he could never be accused of shirking. Cora, who loved the theatre, tugged her arm from Martha’s and slipping behind a passing bus stood gravely at his feet, sheltered a little by a shallow porch.

  ‘Good afternoon.’ She reached for her purse. The man cast his eyes up at the sky, which at that moment split and displayed an astonishing blue interior. ‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘But it might yet be: I’ll give you that.’ The brief brightness illuminated the building behind him, which Cora saw had been torn apart as though by an explosion. A section to her left remained more or less as its architect intended – a several-storeyed building that might have been a great house or town hall – but a portion to the right had sheared away and sunk several feet into the ground. A bulwark of poles and planks kept it from tumbling across the pavement, but it was treacherous, and she thought she could hear above the slow traffic the creak and grinding of iron on stone. Martha appeared at her side and Cora instinctively took her hand, unsure whether to step backwards or hitch up her skirt and take a closer look. The same appetite that made her break stones in search of ammonites until the air reeked of cordite propelled her forward: she could see up to a room with its fireplace intact, and a scarlet scrap of carpet lolling over the edge of the broken floor like a tongue. Further up, an oak seedling had taken hold beside the staircase, and a pale fungus that resembled many fingerless hands had colonised the plaster ceiling.