When Charles Ambrose came in, blazing brightly in his new silk shirt, he held his hostess at arm’s length – ‘I thought you’d be decked in flowers, Cora: what a sad sight you are,’ but his gaze had been an admiring one.
‘You’re gorgeous enough for us all,’ she’d said, and kissed his plump cheek, and fingered Katherine’s long-fringed shawl (‘I am going to steal this later: see if I don’t’).
‘She’s getting fat,’ said Charles, not disapprovingly, watching her make her way past low tables set with silverware. Then Luke was brought over, and proudly presented (‘You know the Imp, of course!’), a yellow cowslip dying in his buttonhole and his black hair oiled.
‘Cora,’ he said, ‘I have something for you: I’ve had it for years, and you might as well have it as anyone.’ He handed her a packet wrapped in white, rather carelessly as if it hardly mattered whether it pleased her. When she opened it, Katherine Ambrose saw a small frame in which a miniature embroidered fan was set behind glass, and wondered what on earth the man was doing working with linen and coloured silk threads.
Martha, wearing green, looked a country girl born and bred, and more so when she produced a loaf shaped like a corn-sheaf and two gleaming capons dressed with sprigs of thyme. There were ducks’ eggs and a clove-studded ham; platters of tomatoes sliced and dotted with mint, and potatoes small as pearls. Joanna followed her to the kitchen and back, begging to be useful, permitted to cut curls of lemon to dress the salmon. All along the table early buds of lavender were crushed by heavy dishes and made the air sweet. Charles Ambrose had brought good red wine from London, and as he opened the third bottle he lined up the crystal glasses and with a wet finger on their rims played a melody. On a wool rug Martha and Joanna lay on their stomachs poring over papers, making plans, looking very serious and sucking cubes of ice, and coiled on a window-seat Francis drew his knees to his chin and recited the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence.
What Will wanted most of all was to take his friend aside, and pull up two chairs, and tell her everything he had stored up those past weeks – how he’d found in his papers a poem he’d written when he was a boy and how he’d burned it, and wished he hadn’t; how Jo had borrowed her mother’s diamond ring and tested its strength by scoring her name on the window; what Cracknell had said as he licked rosehip syrup from a spoon. But he could do none of those things: she was busy elsewhere, dredging strawberries with sugar and persuading Stella to eat, and saying rather shyly to Francis that if it was numbers that bothered him most these days she had several books he could read. Besides (Will tried to rouse himself to anger again) they were in the midst of a battle, with no quarter asked, none given.
Still, the anger wouldn’t come however hard he summoned: he pictured the crouching man stooping over his daughter, whispering, but after all it was only this Dr Garrett, this imp, who ought to be pitied, really, for his meagre height and the way one shoulder was surely more hunched than the other. Where were his good graces? What had Cora done with them?
He went over to the doctor, who’d taken the yellow flower from his buttonhole and was pulling at the petals, and heard himself say, ‘I was rude, that day when we met: I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that – will you forgive me?’, and looked astonished at the glass of wine he held, as if it was the liquid there that had spoken, and not him. The doctor flushed, and stammered, and said, ‘Don’t mention it,’ with something like hauteur, then the flush receded and he said, ‘it was just something I like to try out sometimes – we did it to Cora once – we didn’t see any harm.’
‘I can’t imagine anyone making Cora say anything she didn’t want to say,’ said Will, and for a moment the air chilled, with each thinking the other had no right at all to an opinion on what Cora was likely to do.
‘She says you are a genius,’ said Will: ‘Are you?’
‘I expect so,’ said Luke, and bared his teeth in a grin. ‘Your glass is empty – let me help – tell me: do you have any interest in medical science, or does your collar preclude it?’ And in the minutes that followed Will could do nothing but admire a man whose ambition burned so vividly: ‘Impossible to operate on the heart itself, of course: even if we could work out how to suspend the blood’s flow – to isolate it, if you like – the brain would be starved of oxygen and the patient would die on the table – Martha, get us some wine, would you? – there: are you squeamish? – let me show you …’ The Imp took out the notebook he always carried, and Will saw a drawing of a baby with the skin of its breast flayed from the bone while a cord linked the infant to its sleeping mother. ‘You look appalled – don’t be: it is the future! – if the mother’s circulation is connected to her child’s, so that her heart pumps for them both, and her breath supplies the oxygen, I could close up the hole in the heart so many babies are born with, but they won’t let me attempt it, you know. You look faint.’ And Will did look faint, but it was not the pipes and fluids of the body that troubled him, but the matter-of-factness of the surgeon, who spoke as if all God’s creatures were to be plucked and gutted like hens. ‘I forget you are a man of the cloth,’ said Luke, with a delivery that made the words an insult.
Under the table Francis peeled an orange brought down from Harrods in a paper bag. He saw Charles Ambrose sit beside Stella and give her a glass of cold water; he heard them speak of Cora, and how well she looked, and how lovely she’d made the room, as if she’d summoned the garden inside. Then Stella wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and said, ‘We should dance the summer in – can’t someone play?’
‘I can do a waltz,’ said Joanna. ‘Nothing else.’
‘One two three one two three,’ said Charles Ambrose, treading on his wife’s toes: ‘Shall we roll back the carpet?’
‘Come out of there,’ said Martha, seeing Francis in his hiding-place, tugging the carpet from under him, revealing the black boards beneath. At the piano Joanna, straight-backed, played a run that took in every key, wincing and saying, ‘It’s horrible! It’ll sound horrible – it’s been left to get old and damp!’ Then she played a melody that was too fast, and then too slow; every several note rang so dull as to not be heard, but no-one was troubled. Outside the moon was full and low (‘The Corn-Planting Moon,’ said Francis to himself), and the estuary lapped at its banks, and for all they knew something was even now crawling up onto the marsh, but they cared nothing for any of it. I think it could knock three times on the door and no-one would hear, he thought, and found himself listening for it on the threshold, and imagining the blaze of its hooded eye.
Luke Garrett, leafing through handwritten pages in a dim corner of the room, set his notebook down and went to stand beside Cora’s chair. He bowed like a courtier and said: ‘Come on – you are almost as bad as me – a fine pair we’d make.’ But Stella by the open window had other ideas: ‘Since I’m too tired to dance with my husband, will my friend take my place? Will!’ – imperious, laughing, she summoned him: ‘Show Cora you’re no ordinary parson, only ever at home with his books!’
Reluctantly, Will came forward (‘Stella! You give them false hope …’) and stood alone in the centre of the room. Without pulpit or Bible he looked all at a loss, and held out his hands a little shyly. ‘Cora,’ he said, ‘it’s not use denying her. I’ve tried.’
‘The Imp is right,’ said Cora, going to meet him, fastening a button at her cuff. ‘If I dance, it will be badly. I’ve got no music in me.’ She stood before Will, seeming somehow diminished, as if she’d gone some distance away: not since they’d left Foulis Street had she looked so unsure of her footing.