Cracknell’s funeral is well-attended, since no-one’s as loved as the dead. Joanna sings ‘Amazing Grace’ and there’s not a dry eye in God’s house. Cora Seaborne sends a wreath judged rightly to’ve cost the earth.
Will has taken to walking and finds himself thinking that if only by the laws of statistics his feet might fit where Cora’s have been. While he walks he unspools his thoughts behind him, and they are divided. He cannot settle his mind where Cora is concerned: he’d been so content in his love for her – he’d thought it of a kind the apostles might admire, as if in that muddy patch of earth they’d made a heaven – and then something had altered. He can still feel how her flesh had given beneath his hand, and what came after, and he is ashamed, though not (he thinks) as ashamed as he ought to be.
And then there’s Stella, serene in her blue cotton dressing-gown: with the light behind her she’d shame a stained-glass saint. Sometimes she talks of sacrifice and lies quite still as if already on the altar, then she grows animated and writes at night in her blue book. What is he going to do with her? He thinks of the needle and scalpel in the surgeon’s hand and all his being shrinks from it. He rejoices in the reason conferred on mankind, but mistrusts the shifting sands of man’s ingenuity. This is what he is getting at: that we have always been in the habit of making mistakes. Think of the set-to when Galileo sent the earth spinning round the sun – think of the idea that a man deposited a crouching homunculus in his wife. It was all very well for science to puff out its chest and say, ‘This time we have it right,’ but must he gamble Stella on it?
Will bargains with God, as Gideon once did. ‘If it is not your will that she endures the treatment, prevent it by some very definite means, and let that be the sign,’ he prays. The logical absurdity does not escape him, but there it is: God might as well use logic as anything else. On Sunday he climbs into the pulpit and reminds the congregation of how Moses in the desert had raised up a wooden pole around which a great brass serpent coiled, and how it had given them hope.
Late in July the nightwatchmen abandon their post.
Luke Garrett
Pentonville Road
27th July
It’s late and you’ll think I’m drunk but my hand’s steady – I could sew up a man slit from throat to navel and never drop a stitch!
Cora, I love you – listen to me, I LOVE YOU – Oh I know, I have said it often and you smile and take it, because it is only the Imp, only your friend, nothing to trouble you, not even a stone dropped in your calm water, in your horrible calm, your TOLERANCE of me – which I think you might even mistake for love sometimes when I’ve amused you or shown you some clever thing I’ve done like a dog bringing a chewed thing to its mistress …
But I must make you understand – I must tell you how I carry you about in me like a growth I should excise with my knife – it is weighty and black, it ACHES, it gives out something in my bloodstream, in all the sore endings of my nerves – but I could not cut it out and live!
I love you. I have loved you from the moment you came into that bright room in your dirty clothes and you took my hand and said no other doctor would do – I loved you when you asked if I could save him and I knew then you hoped I would not and I knew that I would not try … And I love your mourning dress which is a lie and I love you when I watch you try and love your son, and I love you when you put your arms round Martha, and I love you when you are ugly from weeping or weariness, and I love you when you put your diamonds on and play at being a beauty … do you think anyone else will ever know each Cora as I have known them and love each just as much?
And I have tried and tried to make something good of my love – I tried when Michael was dying like a wicked saint in that room with the curtains open, and I tried when at last he went back to where he came from. I have tried to love you in ways that won’t destroy me – I have not wanted to possess you – I have left you to this new friend of yours – and all the while I cannot sleep because when I do you are there and you are shameless, you demand things of me, I wake thinking I have all your tastes in my mouth – yet all this time have hardly done more than put my hand on your shoulder … you think me an imp but I have been an angel!
Don’t write. Don’t come. I don’t need it. It’s not why I’ve written. Do you think my love will starve without your crumbs? Do you think I am not capable of humility? THIS is humility – I will tell you that I love you and know that you cannot return it. I will debase myself.
It’s the most that I can give and cannot be enough.
LUKE
I am Stella stellar I am he said! Stella my star of the high blue seas!
And I’ve made my own missal my holy book with blue ink on the blue page and stitched up in threads blue as blue-blooded veins that are blue.
THEY HAVE TAKEN MY CHILDREN FROM ME!!!
My two blue-born babies my three that lived none of them now are found under my roof!
They want to give me things knives needles droplets and teaspoons of this and that no I said no I can’t be doing with any of that no let me live with my blue things all about me all my cobalt beads my lapis my black pearls that are blue my pot of blue ink my pot of blue paint my ribbons that are indigo my skirt that is royal my cornflowers growing both my pansy eyes
Still I bear it well enough for it was promised that though I walk through the rivers they will not overflow me! Though I walk through the fire, I shall not be burned!
AUGUST
1
Nothing inclined Charles Ambrose to Darwinism more than walking the narrow streets of Bethnal Green. He saw there not equals separated from him only by luck and circumstance, but creatures born ill-equipped to survive the evolutionary race. He looked on their pale thin faces – which often had a sour mistrustful cast, as if expecting at any moment to encounter a boot – and felt they inhabited their proper place. The notion that if only they’d had access to grammar and citrus fruit at an early age they might have one day sat beside him at the Garrick was preposterous: their predicament was nothing more than evidence of failure to adapt and survive. Why were so many of them so short? Why did they screech and bellow from windows and balconies? And why, at noon, were so many so drunk? Turning down an alley, twitching his fine linen coat closer, he felt much as he might if viewing them through iron bars. This is not to say that he felt no compassion: even animals in zoos should have their cages cleaned.
Four had gathered in Edward Burton’s rooms that August afternoon: Spencer, Martha, Charles and Luke. Their intention was to walk further into Bethnal Green, whose slums and rookeries were candidates for demolition and replacement with the good clean housing Parliament had promised. ‘It’s all very well passing Acts,’ Spencer had said, not knowing how precisely he mimicked Martha, ‘but how much higher will the infant death toll rise before policies are put in place? It’s actions we need, not Acts!’