Down at the quay Banks sat beside his struck sails dully counting out his losses – wife, boat, child, all slipped through his hands like so much salt water. Behind the sea-fog the estuary swelled in the coming tide, and he recalled the black-haired boy by the fire in the morning, and how he’d dragged him towards the shore. ‘Didn’t see a thing,’ he said into the dim air: ‘Didn’t see a damn thing’; but in his mind’s eye there it was – the strange news, the Essex Serpent: bloated, arrow-tailed, pawing at the shingle. Now and then the pale mist parted and there were the lights of smacks and barges winking in the dusk; then the curtain fell, and he was alone again. He whispered the boatsman’s plainsong for comfort – The starboard light is green at night – The starboard light is on your right … – but what use were flames behind coloured glass when down in the deep something was waiting, biding its time?
When he felt a small hand on his shoulder it came so gently he didn’t flinch or shirk it. The touch was not only familiar but possessive – no-one else could’ve touched him like that – it struck off memories that rose through the fuddle of drink and the thickening mist. ‘Come home then, littl’un?’ he said, tentatively, putting up his own hand in a searching pat: ‘Come back to your old man?’
Wrapped in Joanna’s cast-off coat Naomi looked down at her father’s head where hair grew thinner than she remembered, and felt a new and unexpected tenderness. For a moment he was no longer her father, so nearly an extension of her own self that he hardly crossed her mind. She understood for the first time that he too felt fear and disappointment – that there were things he hoped for, and suffered, and enjoyed. It moved her, and propelled her forward through the years: she took up her old position cross-legged beside him on the quayside and drew a fishing-net towards her. Expertly, she pulled it through her fingers, finding a tear, saying, ‘I’ll get on with this one if you like.’ It had always been a hated task – it left welts in the webbing between her fingers that grew sore with salt – but her hands found their old rhythm, and there was comfort in it. ‘Sorry I went away,’ she said, drawing together the torn threads, turning away to let him shed tears privately. ‘I was scared of things but it’s all right now. And besides’ – she reached over and did up the buttons on his coat – ‘I earned some money all on my own! We’ll go home and you can help me count it.’
Midway through the afternoon the sea-fog rallied and approached Aldwinter from the east. It crept across windowsills and pooled in ditches and hollows, and dampened the ringing of the All Saints bell. Cora, restlessly walking on the common, looked the sun dead in the eye and saw, specked on its surface, the dark sunspots of storms raging. Who will I tell now, if not him? she thought: Who else would believe me when I speak of impossible things?
‘I’m tired,’ Stella said in her blue room, ‘and now I lay me down to sleep.’ Curled in the corner, James and John looked up from a game of cards, and looked down again, incurious and content as animals returned to their hide. Joanna, who’d read several times a paragraph of Newton and felt none the wiser, saw how moisture gleamed on her mother’s forehead, and how her hair clung there, and was afraid. Stella, no less acute now than she’d ever been, beckoned her child over, and said: ‘I know you see it, Jojo: I know you see what they don’t. But I’m happy – sometimes even when you were all away and the house was silent I’d think: I am happier now than I’ve ever been. Do you believe me? I wouldn’t do without an hour of my suffering, because it has lifted me – it has shown me the path of life!’ She held out her skirt, and began to pick up all her treasures, one by one – the blue mussel shells, the fragments of glass, the bus tickets and the sprigs of lavender – and drop them into the fold of cloth. ‘I ought to tidy up,’ she said, looking about the room. ‘Bring it all to me, Jo – the bottles, there; all the stones and ribbons – I want to take them with me.’
In his study Will laid a sheet of clean paper beside Cora’s letter and could not pick up his pen. Keep guilt at bay, she’d said, as if it could be fended off, as if she had any idea! She’d untied herself from all that: she had no idea it was not simply a general sense of wrongdoing, but of personal and particular wounding; that he’d hammered in a little further the nails in foot and hand, that he might as well have taken a length of bramble and wound it tight round Stella’s brow. I am the chief of sinners, he thought; but wasn’t there pride in that, another sin heaped on the first? He thought of Cora, and summoned her easily up – the freckles high on her cheek, her steady grey gaze, her way of standing bolt upright, queenly in her tattered coat – and was blinded for a moment with fury (there – another sin: put it on the charge sheet, stick it on the slate!). From the moment of opening Ambrose’s letter when the year was young he’d known the wind was changing – he ought to’ve buttoned up his coat and pulled the windows shut, not turned to face the draught. But all the same it was Cora (he said her name aloud), Cora, who’d grown intimate in the first clasp of their hands – no, before then, while they grappled in the mud – who delighted and enraged, who was generous and selfish, who mocked him as no-one else ever did; Cora, who in his presence alone could weep! The fury receded, and he remembered the press of his mouth on her belly, and how warm she’d been, how soft, how like an animal at ease: it had not felt like sinning then, and hardly did now – it was grace, he thought, grace: a gift he’d never sought and did not deserve!
How long did you stay alone out there? she wrote, and it had been a long while: he’d gone down to the river-mouth, to Leviathan’s black bones, and looked out at the estuary, willing the serpent up from the deep to swallow him down like Jonah. By the rivers of Essex I sat down and wept, he thought, and upstairs the door to Stella’s room was gently closed, and footsteps moved across the landing. His heart made a painful circuit: there was Stella, his bright particular star, going out in a blaze; he was afraid she’d leave behind a black cavity into which he’d hopelessly fall. He wanted to go up to her, and lie beside her on their bed, and sleep as he always used to with her fitted to his back, but it was not possible: she wanted now always to be alone, writing in her blue book, her eyes fixed avidly elsewhere. On he sat in that dark room, unable to write – unable to pray – watching the red-rimmed sun, and wondering if somewhere Cora also watched.