‘She’s right, you know,’ said Martha, sighing and shaking out her green dress. ‘She’ll break your foot – she’s heavy – won’t you have me instead?’
But Stella stood, and came forward: like a dancing-master she placed Cora’s hand upon her husband’s shoulder. ‘See how well-matched you are!’ She surveyed them a while, then returned, satisfied, to sit below the open window. ‘There, now,’ – she stroked the blue silk cushion in her lap – ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow it rains.’
Then William Ransome put his hand on Cora’s waist where her blouse was tucked, and Francis heard his mother sigh. She looked up – they stood quite still together – there was a quiet moment, and no-one spoke. Francis, watching, burst a piece of orange on his tongue: he saw how his mother smiled at Will, and how the smile was met with a steady, stern look – how then her head moved as though drawn back by the weight of her hair, and how his hand flexed at her waist, tugging at the fabric of her skirt.
I don’t understand any of this, thought Francis, seeing Martha withdraw, and stand beside Luke, and seeing how perfectly her face mirrored his: they looked almost a little afraid.
‘I can’t keep playing it over and over,’ said Joanna at the piano, rolling her eyes at Francis.
‘I don’t know the tune!’ said Will, ‘I never heard it before –’
‘Shall I try one like this?’ said Jo, and the piano slowed, grew rather languorous; Martha said, ‘No! No – not like that.’
‘Should I stop?’ said Joanna, raising her hands from the keys, watching her father. How odd they looked, simply standing there! They might have been John and James, uncertain if they’d committed some little household sin.
‘No: play on, play on!’ said Luke, turning the sharp points of his mischief on himself and wincing as he did it: he would’ve liked to slam the piano shut.
Then the rector said, ‘No: I can’t – I’ve forgotten the steps.’ Joanna played on – the clock ticked – still he did not move.
‘I don’t think,’ said Cora, ‘that I ever knew them.’ Her hand fell from his shoulder – she stepped back, and said, ‘Stella, I have disappointed you.’
‘Poor show altogether,’ said Charles Ambrose, looking with regret into his empty glass.
‘Best stop playing now, I think,’ said Will, turning to his daughter, giving her a look which was almost an apology. He made a deep bow before his dancing-partner, and said: ‘You’d’ve been better with anyone but me – I was never trained for this.’
‘Oh – please,’ said Cora, ‘the fault’s all mine. I’m good for nothing but books and walking. But Stella, you are shivering – are you cold?’ She turned away from Will, and stooped to take Stella’s small hands in hers.
‘I don’t feel it,’ said Stella, glittering, ‘but I suppose Jo ought not to stay so late.’
‘Yes!’ said Will, rather swiftly, as if grateful: ‘She certainly ought not, and we should see what havoc the boys have wrought while we were gone … Cora, will you forgive us if we go?’
‘Nearly midnight after all,’ said Charles, peering at his watch. ‘The clock will strike and make white mice and pumpkins out of us all – Katherine? Where is my Kate! Where is my wife?’
‘Here I am, as always,’ said Katherine Ambrose. She held out his coat, and watched as Cora grew brisk, polite, her manners beyond reproach. She pressed the blue silk cushion on Stella (‘Darling, you must: plainly they had you in mind when they made it …’), and kissed Joanna on the cheek (‘I could never play a note, you know – how clever you are!’). Still, Katherine was not quite fooled. There ought to have been nothing in a brief waltz on the bare boards – nothing in those polite familiar steps to take anyone by surprise. What then had caused that curious moment, with so sudden a change in the air she’d hardly have been surprised to hear a thunderclap? Well – she shrugged, and drew down her husband for a kiss – it was late, and after all Will Ransome was a clergyman and not a courtier.
Cora opened the door and the scent of the Blackwater came in. There was a curious bluish light in the sky, and she shivered, though the air was warm. From beneath the table Francis saw how his mother held out her hands to each guest as they crossed the threshold – ‘Thank you so much – thank you: promise you’ll come again!’ – and how vivid she seemed, how bright, as if however late the hour she’d never need her sleep.
William Ransome left with his wife on one arm and his daughter on the other, almost (Francis began to peel another orange) as though he’d buckled on a coat of armour. Cora – even brighter, more vivid – seemed somehow to sweep them all out onto the common. She closed the door, and clapped her hands together in satisfaction, but it seemed to her watchful son that a false note rang out as clearly as if Jo still sat at the ill-tuned piano. Why had William Ransome said nothing as he went out – why had his mother not offered him her hand – what caused Martha and the Imp to survey her silently now, as if she’d disappointed them? Well – he crawled out from beneath the table – what use was it to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no more fixed than the wind.
After Francis had been put to bed, reciting the Fibonacci series as another child might a fairy tale, Martha and Luke set about clearing the tables and unfurling the carpet, crushing buds of lavender strewn across the floor. Cora had briefly been very animated – hadn’t it been a good night, she’d said, wasn’t Jo a clever girl, although music probably was not her vocation – then said that she was tired, and needed her bed. Her friends had watched her run barefoot upstairs and grown companionable in their fear. ‘I don’t even think she knows,’ said Luke, drinking the last of Charles’s good red wine: ‘She’s like a child, I don’t think she can see it, what they’ve done – and all the while Stella there watching –’
‘Every day his name comes up, every day – what would he think of this, how he would laugh at that – but really what have they done, it was nothing, no-one else saw –’
‘And in her letters too – on every page! What can he give her? A country vicar afraid the world’s changing. And besides, he already has a silly wife, isn’t that enough, must he have Cora too –’
‘She’s collecting him’ – Martha plucked grapes from their stem and rolled them across the table – ‘that’s what it is. She’d put him in a glass jar if she could, and label his parts in Latin, and keep him on a shelf.’
‘I’d kill him if I could,’ said Luke, appalled at the truth of it, flexing finger and thumb as if he felt a scalpel there – ‘She’s going away from me …’
They surveyed each other, feeling all their antipathy ebb, and how the air was thick with the uselessness of their longing, and no way for it to be spent. In the dim room the surgeon’s eyes blackened; he watched Martha put her hands up to her hair – saw how her green dress pulled at the seam beneath her arm; he moved towards her, and she turned away to the foot of the stairs. ‘Come with me,’ she said, reaching for him: ‘Come up with me.’
The windows in her room were open and light was fading on the wall. She said, ‘There may be blood,’ and he said, ‘Better that way – better’; and it was Cora’s mouth he kissed, and Cora’s hand she placed where she wanted it most. Each was only second best: they wore each other like hand-me-down coats.