‘I was an experiment!’ they heard Joanna say at the door: ‘And now I’m hungry.’
‘Absolutely charming man,’ said Luke. So much for the fat parson in gaiters, he thought: he’d looked like a farmer with ideas above his station and had a fine head of hair, and in his presence Cora Seaborne – of all women! – had seemed a child dismayed to find herself disgraced. Martha rose from the sofa where she’d been silently watching and with a contemptuous look at the doctor came to stand beside her friend. ‘No good ever came of leaving London,’ she said: ‘What did I tell you?’ Cora briefly put her cheek to Martha’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m hungry too. And I want wine.’
5
Edward Burton sat on a narrow bed and opened the paper packet on his lap. In a high-backed chair beneath a print of St Paul’s, his visitor dredged her chips with vinegar, and the hot scent roused his appetite for the first time in weeks. She wore her hair in a fair braid wrapped around her crown: she looked, he thought, breaking batter from his bit of fish, like an angel, if an angel could be hungry, and didn’t mind grease on her chin and a smear of green peas on her sleeve.
Martha watched him steadily eating, and felt hardly less proud than Luke had done on closing up his wound. It was her third visit, and there was colour in his cheeks. They had been introduced by Maureen Fry, who beside a willingness to visit Burton in order to tug the stitches from his healing scar was a relation of Elizabeth Fry, and had fully inherited the family social conscience: it seemed to her the nurse’s duty lay well beyond the tying up of bandages, the mopping up of blood. She’d first encountered Martha at a meeting of women concerned with Union matters, and over strong tea discovered that Dr Luke Garrett (‘Of all people!’ Martha had said, shaking her head) was the link between them. When Martha first accompanied Sister Fry to the house where Edward and his mother lived in Bethnal Green, she’d discovered a home which was small, certainly, with sanitation troubles that left an ammoniac reek in the air, but was pleasant enough. Little light came in, only what filtered through lines of laundry running between the houses like the pennants of a coming army, but there were always flowers on the table in a rinsed-out jar of Robertson’s jam. Mrs Thomas earned her living by way of laundry, and contriving rag rugs out of scraps; these rugs decked their three small rooms and made them bright. It had never occurred to her that Edward might not recover entirely, and go back to the insurance company where he’d passed five years as a clerk, and so she faced a period of nursing him quite stoically.
That first visit had been an unsatisfactory one, with Edward Burton white and silent in the corner. Mrs Burton was battling delight at her son’s unlikely salvation with a troubling sensation that the man who’d come off the operating table was not the man who’d been laid out on it: ‘He’s so quiet,’ she’d said, wringing her hands, and borrowing Sister Fry’s handkerchief. ‘It’s like the old Ned bled out and I’ve got another one in his place and I have to get to know him before I can say he’s my son.’ Nonetheless, Martha had found herself fretting, in the following days, that Burton would not eat enough, or test the strength of his legs by walking the length of the road, and so she had returned a week later with packets of fish and chips, a net of oranges, and several of Francis’s abandoned copies of The Strand.
Edward steadily ate. To Martha – used to Cora’s endless conversation and her sudden fits of joy or gloom – his company was peaceful. He responded to everything she said with an inclined head, considering it slowly, often saying nothing in response. Sometimes there was a sharp pain in the place where his rib had been severed – it was like a cramping of the muscles as all the fibres tried to knit – and he’d gasp, and put a hand there in the hollow where the bone was gone, and wait for it to pass. Martha would say nothing then, only sit quietly with him, and when he raised his head say, ‘Tell me again how they built Blackfriars Bridge.’
That afternoon, as rain gathered in the gutters in the Tower Hamlets streets and poured from the eaves, Edward said, ‘He came to see me again, the Scottish man. He prayed with me and left some money.’ This was John Galt, whose tent mission in Bethnal Green brought the gospel to the city alongside temperance and improved personal hygiene. Martha knew of him – had seen his photographs recording the city at its worst – and deplored his tender Christian conscience. ‘He prayed, did he?’ She shook her head and said, ‘Never trust a do-gooder,’ disliking as always the connection between righteousness and weather-proof walls.
‘It’s not only that he does good,’ said Edward, thoughtfully. He surveyed a chip before putting it in his mouth. ‘I think he is good.’
‘Don’t you see that this is the trouble – that it’s not a question of goodness – it’s a question of duty! You think it’s kindness to bring you money and ask if the walls are damp and leave you in God’s hands, wherever they are, but it’s our right to live decently, it shouldn’t be a gift from our betters – oh!’ She laughed. ‘See how easily that came out! Our betters! What, because they never put money on the dogs or drank themselves stupid!’
‘What are you going to do about it, then?’ He said it with good humour so deeply buried that only Martha could’ve seen it there. She finished her meal, and wiping the oil from her mouth with the back of her hand said, ‘Plans are afoot, Edward Burton, mark my words. I’ve written to a man who can help – always comes down to money, doesn’t it, in the end? Money and influence, and God knows I’ve no money and not much influence but I’ll use what I’ve got.’ She thought briefly of Spencer, and his way of looking at her slightly askance, and felt a little ashamed.
‘Wish I could have a hand in it,’ said Edward, and with a gesture that took in his thin legs – thinner now than ever, since he could not run ten paces without losing his breath – he looked briefly hopeless. He’d taken his place in the city without considering it, until this woman with her hair like a rope and her brisk way of talking had stood on one of his mother’s rugs and raged at what she’d seen in the streets. Now it would be impossible to walk from one end of Bethnal Green to the other without thinking how that dark labyrinth of mean housing had a consciousness all of its own, operating on everyone who lived in it. At night, when his mother slept, he took out rolls of white paper and made drawings of high, wide buildings that let in the light, with good water running through them.
Martha withdrew her umbrella from under the chair and unfurled it, sighing at the rain running thickly down the window-pane. ‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I can do. But something’s going to change. Can’t you feel it?’
He was not certain he could, but then she kissed him on the cheek, and shook his hand, as if she could not decide which greeting suited them best. At the door she paused, because he called out after her: ‘It was my fault, you know.’
‘Your fault? What is – what’ve you done?’ It was so unlike him to speak unprompted that she was afraid to move and startle him out of it.
‘This,’ he said, and lightly touched his breast. ‘I know who did it, and why. I deserved it, you know. Or if not this – something.’
She returned to her chair, not speaking, turning away to pluck at a thread loose on her sleeve. He knew it was done to spare him, and there was a movement in his damaged heart.
‘I was such an ordinary person,’ he said. ‘It was such an ordinary life. I had a bit of savings. I was going to get a place of my own, though I didn’t mind living here: we’ve always got on all right. I didn’t mind my job, only sometimes got bored and made plans of buildings that’ll never be built. Now they tell me I’m a miracle, or whatever does for miracles these days.’