Essex has her bride’s gown on: there’s cow parsley frothing by the road and daisies on the common, and the hawthorn’s dressed in white; wheat and barley fatten in the fields, and bindweed decks the hedges. Cora has walked four miles and is not yet tired. At the fifth mile she passes a farmer stripped to the waist and unbuttons her shirt: why should her skin be disgraceful, when his is not? But there’s someone on the path, and she puts the buttons back through their slots: no sense courting disaster.
She comes to a place where roses are grown for bowls and vases in dining rooms elsewhere; an acre or two of blooms laid out in coloured stripes, as if bolts of silk had been dyed and left to dry. It scents the air; she licks her lips, and there’s Turkish Delight on her tongue.
As so often these days, she’s thinking of Will. She cannot concede that she’s done wrong, or that she deserves to be in disgrace: she faintly despises him for being so readily thrown into a bad temper. Male pride, she thinks: the most tender, contemptible thing! But all the same her conscience is pricked – has she really ridden roughshod over him? She considers prostrating herself half-ironically in apology for the pleasure of watching him try not to laugh, but no: she has her own pride to consider.
What’s more, she misses the whole Ransome household – James had promised to show her the periscope he’s made out of a broken piece of mirror, and Stella’s gift for gossip is a fine substitute for London life. The thought of Stella casts a shadow on the path: has Will failed to see his wife’s new strangeness, how she wears only blue, and puts blue flowers in her hair? How she roots around the marshes for blue sea-glass and bluish stones, and sends to Colchester for roses with their stems dipped in ink so the petals come out cornflower coloured? How she’s grown thinner but more vital-seeming, her cheeks flushed, her motions hectic, her pansy eyes brighter than ever? I’ll speak to Luke, thinks Cora: Luke will know.
She arrives home with her arms full of dog-roses in creamy bloom and three new freckles on her cheek. She puts her arms round Martha’s waist, thinking how well they fit there in the groove above her broad hips, and says, ‘They’re on their way – everyone who’s ever loved me and everyone I’ve ever loved.’
2
Late in the gentle evening Stella Ransome walked over Aldwinter common with her husband on her right hand and her daughter on her left. Back at the rectory, in the care of Naomi Banks, her boys were eating toast and playing Snakes and Ladders. Cora had called that morning on her way home from walking, carrying armfuls of roses that left little scratches in the crook of her elbow, saying, ‘Come early, won’t you? I never could have a party and not be afraid no-one would show up, and that I’d be left to sit up all night with bottles around me, drowning all my sorrows.’
Earlier Stella had stood at her mirror smoothing her skirt’s white silk across her hip, and Will had said, ‘What, no blue today?’ and she’d looked down and laughed, because everything she saw was blue. The skirt’s folds shimmered with it; her own skin had a bluish cast; even Will’s eyes – which surely had once been the colour of the acorns the boys collected every autumn and lined along the windowsill – were blue. Sometimes she thought her eyes had filmed over with ink-stained tears.
‘I think I’m blue-blooded,’ she said, and lifted her arms, and thought how slender they were, and how pretty; and Will had said, ‘I never doubted it, my star of the sea,’ and kissed her twice.
On they walked, while house martins darted at insects over the grass, passing villagers off to set solstice fires in their gardens and on the margins of fields. Greetings chimed out across the village with the tolling of the All Saints bells: What a night for it! What a glorious night!
William slipped a finger inside his collar and loosened it: he did not want to see Cora – he wanted very much to see her; he’d thought all day of her roaming the marshes, her fingernails crusted with Essex clay – he never thought of her at all; she was the worst of women – she was his friend. Gratefully he looked down at Stella’s silvery head, ringed with sunlight, gleaming, and thought: not once in all these years has she caused me unease – not once! Her little hand turned in his, and it was hot, and at the nape of her neck where her white dress was cut low he saw a sheen of sweat. The flu, the Colchester doctor had said, putting away his stethoscope: it had left her weak. She should rest and eat and sleep. The summer had come. They were not to worry.
Stella saw the grey house with all its bright lamps lit and in each window a jug of dog roses. Behind them someone was moving back and forth, and there was the sound of a piano being played. Nothing pleased her more than a party on a warm night; to be the still centre of an eddying crowd, knowing she was admired, lighting on this person and that with her endless interest in grandsons, and ailments, and fortunes won and lost. But she felt desperately weary, as if she’d burned up her store of energy in the hundred yards they’d walked. She wanted to be home in the blue bower she’d made, counting over her treasures, lifting to the light the blue waxed paper that had wrapped a bar of gentian soap, taking in the scent, or running her finger in the curve of the robin’s egg her sons had brought her in May.
Flu, the doctor had said, speaking to Will; but Stella Ransome was no fool, and knew consumption when she saw it speckle the white folds of a handkerchief. Once in her youth she’d seen a girl die the White Death (as they’d called it then, as if to name the disease was to bring it into the room): she too had burned away, grown slender and distrait, greeting the end when it came contentedly, all her pains inside and out blunted by opium. A week before dying the girl had brought up gouts of blood that splashed her white bed-sheets.
Stella knew that she herself had not yet slipped so far into disease: when she did, she’d take Will aside, and ask to be sent to some high ward where she’d sit looking out on mountain ranges and all of their peaks would be blue. There’d been a reddish mist on the mirror once when she’d been caught by coughing one morning as she brushed out her hair – on the hundredth stroke it had come; but only once, and it had wiped away easily enough. (And why was it that blood when it came out was red, when clearly through the thin skin of her wrist every vein showed blue? It didn’t seem fair.)
But she could not go away – not yet, not when Joanna was still so sombre, not while Will so often slammed his study door, not while the village still shrank from the river and the villagers still came silently to church and left without being comforted. Star of the sea, Will had said – and wasn’t that also the name of the Virgin, who also only ever wore blue? She laughed, thinking: Pray for me, Mary Mother of God, and lend me one of your robes.
Then they were on the doorstep, and there was Cora in black silk, looking so stern and so serene that for a moment Will forgot his righteous indignation. Wrong-footed once again he took her hand and said, ‘Cora, you look tired – have you been walking too far?’
Tall in her costly black, a little nervous perhaps, it seemed to him that he’d never met her before – that she’d taken on a kind of remoteness that made him want to run after her, wherever it was she had gone. He watched her greet her guests with the grace he imagined cultivated in high-ceilinged establishments in Chelsea and Westminster: she seemed to know precisely what to say, and how to say it; who to greet with kisses and who preferred her handshake, which was so like a man’s. She conveyed Stella at once to a broad low seat on which a blue silk cushion was placed – ‘I saw this in Colchester just last week,’ she said, ‘and thought you should have it; take it with you when you go.’ She’d brushed her hair, and wore it loose like a girl, only pinned above the ears with silver combs; she wore pearl drops in her ears, and the lobes were red, as if they were sore from the weight of them.