‘Sometimes I think it was,’ said Will, dropping his hands, kicking at the moss. He gave her one of his chastening looks and only half in jest.
She said, laughing: ‘The Trouble might not be my doing, but I hardly helped – I made other things muddled. What you said in your letter – that you’d come to the end of new things – I realised then how I go blundering about. I forced myself in. I might as well have broken a window! Imagine saying we should write to each other when you were barely half a mile away! And all because we talked once …’
‘There was also the question of the sheep,’ said Will.
‘There was that, of course.’ They looked at each other, relieved to have overstepped the crack opening in the path before them. But it widened and they tripped: Will said, ‘My windows were already broken – no: I left them on the latch – and why? Why was it, when I had everything a man asks, I saw you and ever since was glad of you –’
‘It’s not surprising to me.’ Cora prised the conker from its shell and rolled it between her palms. ‘Did you really think because you loved here you couldn’t love there? Poor Will – poor boy! – did you think you had so little of it? Look – should I boil it, bake it, or pickle it in vinegar?’ She made as if to throw it at him, but he’d turned away and moved a step or two above her.
‘It’s like talking to a child,’ he said, exasperated: ‘I know what you think of me – secretly, even secret from yourself – that I’m a God-addled half-wit fallen miles behind you, as if you’ve evolved past me!’ She surveyed him sombrely, and (he thought) with amusement very faintly at the corner of her mouth, and it made him press home his point more cruelly than he meant: ‘Look at you! Whichever Cora you are – the one in silk and diamonds or the one who wears clothes Cracknell would’ve thrown away; the one always laughing at us or the one vowing love to anyone who’ll listen – you wall yourself away because you know as well as I do you’ve almost run through your youth without ever having been loved as you should have been –’
‘Stop it,’ Cora said. All the intimacy she’d sought by letter was unbearable out there under the black forest canopy; she wanted to be back in their safe territory of ink and paper and not here, where her colour rose and she thought she could smell, above the sweetness of a distant fire, the scent of his body under his shirt. It was indecent – he was at his best sealed in an envelope – that he was so unavoidably a thing of blood and bones made it impossible to ignore the strong pulse beating in her neck – ‘Come down,’ she said: ‘Come back – don’t fight with me. Haven’t we had enough of that?’ A little ashamed, he stooped beside a chestnut tree, rooting among fallen leaves for conkers, handing them to her one by one.
‘I wish we were children!’ said Cora, closing her fingers over them, remembering how once they’d been treasures to be bartered and prized. She came closer – she sat beside him on the moss – ‘Why can we not be like children, and play together …’
‘Because you’re not innocent!’ said Will – there was a strange vertiginous feeling, as if what they were saying had flung them high up and they’d not yet fallen: ‘You are not innocent, and nor am I – you play at it – you fend me off –’ He tugged at her sleeve, a little rough – ‘d’you think because you wear a man’s coat I might forget what you are?’
‘And do you think I do it for you?’ she said. ‘I forget I’m a woman – I set it aside. God knows I’m no mother and was never much of a wife … d’you think I should torture myself with high-heeled shoes and paint out my freckles so you’re kept on your guard against me?’
‘No – I think you’re guarding against yourself; you told me once you’d like to be nothing but an intellect, disembodied, untroubled by your own flesh and blood –’
‘I would, I would! I despise it – my body only ever betrayed me: I don’t live in it, I live up here, in my mind and words …’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I know, yes: but here you are too, here,’ and moving aside the folds of her coat he tugged her shirt where it was tucked at the waist, in the place where once he’d touched her and been disgraced by it. But the disgrace this time kept its distance: it seemed to him that to keep apart from her now would be obscene; how could it be possible to seek out each fold and turn of her mind, and not grow familiar with the particular patina of her skin, the scent and taste of it? Not to touch her now would be to breach a natural law. Back she lay against the soft green stair in the thickening dusk and fixed her eyes on his, unsurprised, daring him: he raised her shirt and there in the split between the black cloth of her clothes he found her soft belly, very white, marked with the silver lines her son had made; he kissed it once, and could not stop, and she rolled against him in delight.
The sun slid down – the forest closed about them – the copper on the pillars of the trees turned to verdigris. The gilded temple was gone, and in its place there was the scent of leaf mould and long grass dying, and windfall apples splitting on the path. She met his gaze then, levelly as she always had, and felt herself go rushing to meet him like a river in spate; ‘Please,’ she said, pulling at her skirt: ‘Please,’ and he heard it like a command. He found her easily, and his hand slipped and moved in her, and her bright head drooped, and she was silent. He showed her his hand, and how she gleamed there; he put a forefinger to his mouth and hers, and they had an equal share.
6
Later that same night, hardly five miles distant, Luke Garrett walked alone beside barley fields harvested white. He’d taken it into his head to walk the River Colne, setting out in that mean time before dawn when even the lightest burden is intolerable and the prospect of sunrise laughably remote.
Though the moon had not yet set, the sky in the east was stained with light and the fields gave rise to mist. In places it thickened into scraps coming at him as he walked; they breathed wetly on his cheek then dissipated like sighs. Some time back he’d lost the Colne and neither knew nor cared where he might pitch up: if he could, he’d have walked clean out of his own skin. The Essex land to his London eye was uniform in its strangeness: all the fields were ploughed black, save here and there where barley stubble glowed pale under the setting moon, and the low hedges seethed with life. The ranks of oaks were sturdy watchmen surveying him as he passed: he was an imposter.
He came in time to an incline where grass grew thick, from which it was possible to see out across a modest rise-and-fall to a village drowsing in the hollow, and here he rested against an oak. By disease or bad luck it had shed its leaves early, and in among the branches mistletoe showed vivid green even in that murky light. He supposed another man might look up and think of mouths kissed under Christmas sprigs, but he knew it for a parasite, leaching all that was good from its host. Hanging in the bare branches the bundles looked, he thought, like nothing so much as tumours growing on a lung.