Rook Page 11

  Nora covers Rook’s basket with the black towel and opens a window. It’s another sultry night, almost midsummer. Eve and Stavros will have reached Stonehenge by now, in time to celebrate the summer solstice. She is glad not to be trapped beside Zach on hot plastic seats in the back of their cramped 2CV.

  The smudge sticks Eve made for her lie on the bedside table. About four inches long and made from dried herbs, they are bound together with a wispy, rough thread. Their aromatic smell has wound its way into Nora’s dreams, where the sun beats down, hotter and hotter until the heat becomes a stage light, blinding her. Weak with the white heat of panic, she can’t find her bow. The audience stirs restlessly as the sea, with nothing to keep them at bay. Her empty hands shake until she hears Isaac’s voice: The bow is where we create most of our expressivity, and then she’s awake in the hot darkness, sweating, rising out of bed to fling open more windows.

  Now feels like the right time. She reaches for the box of matches.

  The lit end of the bundle crackles and glows, the tip smokes and blackened fragments flake off, so she rests the stick in an upturned scallop shell on the window sill and picks up a pheasant tail-feather, already selected from her collection for this purpose. With her eyes closed, she breathes in the aromatic smoke.

  Bonfires, autumn bonfires in the garden with her father; dead leaves and newspapers in the incinerator; his shadow and hers, cast black by the orange leap of flames. Above them, scraps of burnt paper drift and waft, higher and higher, towards the treetops, where bare branches are silhouetted against the sky.

  She and Isaac stood between the high racks of music manuscripts in the hushed library of the Academy. In her hand, tightly rolled and hard as a stick, was the money. Her thumb flicked at the red rubber band which held the roll together until it slipped off and the notes began to separate, layer upon layer, peeling away from the centre of the roll like charred wood flakes, releasing a smell of smoke as notes drifted like leaves to her feet. Isaac had already begun to walk away. Scattered twenty-pound notes lay around her feet, their edges curled.

  The pheasant tail-feather skims through her fingers like silk. She smells a bonfire: her father is there. She is a child with a stick, poking leaves in the incinerator, her face hot in the flames.

  Nora and Flick didn’t know their father was gone until weeks after he’d left. In her memory his death is overshadowed by the shock of his leaving. They were used to him being often away on trips and returning with a browned face and arms to tell stories of the treasures he’d found, so Nora at first noticed nothing unusual in the more prolonged absence. She continued to compose letters to him, imagining him in the glare of a foreign sun, head bent as he dug and scraped the bone-hard earth with his triangular trowel. At weekends, home from boarding school, she folded the inky pages in half, taped the puffy, over-full envelopes to seal them and handed them to her mother to post.

  Then it was Whitsun, a fortnight at home. She moped down by the creek or practised particularly demanding phrases from the Martinu sonata over and over again until her mother slammed doors to indicate her protest at the repetition. She checked the post for letters from her father. Flick returned from university with a beribboned perm, fingerless gloves and outfits composed of lycra and ripped net. Sitting on Flick’s bed watching her unpack joss sticks and light one, Nora heard about the parties Flick had been to, the boys she’d slept with. Flick showed her the green foil packets of contraceptive pills she took, one every day.

  One sultry afternoon Ada caught Flick in the bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden messing around with one of the younger Tanner boys from the village. There was a fight. Ada dragged Flick from the door of the shelter; the boy cringed, his shoulder blades prominent as wings, pressed up to a tree trunk. He had a cow-lick of hair on his forehead. Flick, hands fisted, screeched at her mother until Ada stood straight, swung back one shoulder and slapped Flick hard on the cheek. And don’t think you can run to your father! Ada drew her lips tight against her teeth and sucked a breath, because he won’t be back. She lifted her hand high and slapped again, so hard Flick stumbled backwards, holding her jaw. The sound of the blow made Nora flinch. She clambered higher into the macrocarpa tree where she had been hiding to spy on Flick and the boy, up to where the branches were thinner but greener, and fallen, brown needles and pine cones clumped together in shaggy platforms screening the ground from sight.

  Nora rested her cheek on the bark, the resin so strong a smell it was a taste in her throat. Her mother called into the dusk, Time to come down now, Nora, and then, later, You’re far too big to be climbing trees and hiding, followed by the rattle of the glass in the window as the kitchen door slammed.

  At dusk, caws and chooks filled the air with jubilance as rooks and jackdaws gathered above the stand of trees. Darkness fell and the bird noise quieted to muttering and, finally, silence. Nora clambered down, limbs stiff, not belonging to her, only the scrape of the bark real against her palms.

  In the unlit house, corners and closed doors were unfamiliar. No one was about. Ada must have been out; she often was, on a Saturday night. Nora trailed through the house, feathery hunger combining with a fiercer hollowness, her fingers shaky as she felt her way in the dark along walls and ledges to the hallway, where her father’s raincoat hung, his trilby still jaunty on the hook above. The cool linings of his coat pockets parted as her fingertips delved deep, down to the seams: nothing. Not even the jab of one of his wooden toothpicks. Upstairs in his study, his spare reading spectacles were balanced over the crook of the Anglepoise lamp on his desk, a book open face down, spine bent back.

  One day not long afterwards, the house still electric with tension, Ada tripped over their father’s gardening shoes by the back door. Snatching one up, her back rigid, she flung the shoe on to the lawn. Hurling the other in the same direction she yelled, You bastard! stamping and swearing out into the empty garden. Bastard! Bastard! Next door, the paws of Arthur’s Great Dane clawed the fence as he leaped up in a barking frenzy.

  In the night, Nora retrieved the abandoned shoes from the lawn. They were caked with mud, the leather so moulded to the curve of his toe joints they might have been fashioned from clay. Nora stuffed balls of newspaper into the toes as she had seen her father do with wet shoes. She swaddled them in layers of newspaper and hid them in the junk at the bottom of her wardrobe, along with other things she didn’t want anyone to discover.

  A gust of wind rattles the glass in the window frame and Nora comes to. Her father is a presence in the room, close enough for her to see the dent in his hair at the side of his head where the arm of his glasses has pressed. Mesmerised by the smoke which un-scrolls from the smudge stick, she lies down, exhausted, to sleep.

  She must have slept deeply because it seems only moments later that birdsong – a blackbird or thrush, the repetitive purr of wood pigeons – wakes her. She goes quickly to the window. The garden is sponged with early-morning mist. It’s dawn. She hears a burst of chook, chock, chook: the jackdaws’ calls and answers, ecstatic, and below them, the deep croak of the rooks, slow as the creak of an ancient door. The ragged cloud, a jumble of black birds, passes overhead through the milky air, cavorting. Nora hurries downstairs to find her cello where she left it, propped in the hall.

  So as not to disturb Ada at this early hour, she goes down to the cellar. The concrete steps are narrow. To negotiate the twists of the stairwell, she holds the cello close, fingers flat on the wood, the flecks and ripples of varnish, the intimate flaws in the gleam of the cello’s surface, the strength of its body’s curve and filigree against her hip and breasts. The cello carries the scent of the eau de cologne she uses for cleaning the strings and, just detectable, the fibrous undertone of rosin.

  At the bottom of the stair way she pauses in the gloomy half-light. The cellar has three rooms. The smallest room with the ancient and rusty chest freezer she doesn’t consider. In the biggest room the oil-fed boiler roars in its cage and from the ceiling hang the clothe
s airers they hardly use these days. She steps into the third room. Long unused flower vases and Kilner jars are kept here, cobwebbed in rows on shelves. There is a stool used to reach the highest shelves, where she sits without thinking further and, with the urgency of long deprivation, begins to play the Martinu Cello Concerto no.1; the first movement – Allegro poco moderato.

  When she’s finished, her arms are shaking and she’s breathing hard. Heart racing, she leans her head against the cold of the cellar wall. Gradually, her pulse slows. She can hear breathing. Someone is sitting on the stairs. From where she sits purple crocs and muscular calves are all that is visible through the doorway: Harry.

  Hastily, she pushes the cello away from her body, pulling her knees together. She wipes her face with a hand. Unable to think what to say into the silence, she closes her eyes, hoping they can both pretend this has never happened. He might go away.

  ‘Nora.’ No sound of him moving, just the rolling boulder of his voice. ‘Is this where you always come,’ there’s a pause, ‘when you play like this?’

  Fuck off, she wants to say. Go away and leave me alone. None of this is any of your business. Her cheeks are wet. She scrubs at them with the hem of her T-shirt.

  ‘Because,’ a change of pitch in his voice, a rough edge, ‘this is something else and it’s like . . .’ She opens her eyes, sees the fuzz of hair on Harry’s calves. She has nothing to say. Harry exhales, a long sigh of breath, ‘. . . an excavation.’

  He moves – a sound of cloth. She can’t see his face, but the change in angle of the lower part of his knees tells her he must be standing. The blood rushes in her ears as if she’s drowning. Harry gives another sigh, which ends in a whistle of breath. ‘And that’s good.’

  His crocs scuff the concrete step. She waits to hear his breath again, expects at any moment to feel his presence beside her in the unlit space stacked with empty jars, but when she opens her eyes again, she’s alone.

  18

  Ada comes down the stairs carrying a pair of court shoes with heels.

  ‘Ready,’ she sings out, twirling to show off her outfit, a cream wool coat with a fur collar that swings from the shoulders, a cream hat with a wisp of veil across the crown.

  ‘Mum, it’s June, and we’re going out in the skiff, not to Goodwood! You can’t possibly wear those shoes.’

  ‘I’m past the age when anyone can tell me what I can and can’t wear. Do I criticise your shabby appearance day and night?’

  Eventually, Ada is persuaded out of the cream coat and hat, but she insists on the heels and dons a mink stole to replace the fur collar. She complains about a wakeful night which has left her chilled to the bone and, shaky in the heels, is not reliably in control of coordinating her slender limbs. The balancing act required to step between bobbing skiff and jetty will be too much. Since he overheard her playing in the cellar Nora has avoided Harry, but unfortunately today she will need his help.

  She finds him sitting on a fold-up garden chair in a patch of sun outside his caravan, legs akimbo in his dressing gown, headphones on and eyes closed. Conscious it’s Saturday, his day off, and she will be disturbing the solitude of his early-morning coffee, she turns to leave but he seems to sense her presence and slips off his headphones. From them, growls the rich bass of Leonard Cohen. If Harry sang, it occurs to Nora, his voice would sound similar.

  When she explains, Harry downs his coffee and tightens the tie of his towelling dressing gown around his waist.

  He cradles Ada like a bride, carrying her from the house down to the shoreline, where the skiff is pulled up on to clumps of eel grass, ready.

  ‘Light as a feather, no worries.’

  One arm draped across his shoulders, cheek close to the stubble of his jaw, Ada darts her eyes up to his and away again, lowering her lashes like a girl. While Harry and Nora slosh in the shallows to get the boat afloat, she sits serene in the bow of the skiff, eyes closed, hands flitting over her lap. Nora has wrapped her legs in a moth-eaten tartan rug because the sun this morning is weak and watery. It might be chilly out on the water.

  Ada tucks a wisp of silvered hair behind her ear and offers her cheek to the sky, displaying the dainty and intimate whorls of her ear as if for a lover’s kiss. Her lips move, almost imperceptibly, and she smiles, head inclined further. She appears to be drifting, elsewhere, a place altogether more glamorous than Salthill Creek under a pale English sky.

  Nora has handled the clinker-built skiff since childhood. She’d like to tell Harry, breathing noisily beside her, she can manage fine, thank you, now Ada is safely seated in the boat, but she’s worried her words will come out wrong and she doesn’t want to appear ungrateful. A sudden swell laps water over the tops of her wellingtons.

  ‘Right, in you go.’ Harry offers his hand, which Nora pretends not to see. She climbs easily over the side of the skiff and bends to reach the oars just as Harry gives the boat a final, unnecessary, shove. One of her feet lands on a heap of rope spilling out from under the central seat, and she staggers, arms windmilling as she struggles to regain her balance against the lurch of the boat. She lands with a bump on the seat across the stern and has to steady her breathing before reaching for the oars, manoeuvring them into the rowlocks without clouting the wooden sides or knocking her mother sideways. She’s done this time without number but as usual having her mother as an audience makes her clumsy as a cart horse. Ada clicks her tongue. Must come from your father. Nora waits for her to say the words. Those big bones.

  Harry stands on the shoreline, hands in his dressing-gown pockets, watching their progress. He hasn’t done much in the garden beyond lifting the turf and mowing the upper lawn. Besides the bits and pieces he does in other gardens in the village, Ada has kept him busy creosoting the fence and repointing brickwork. Nora decides to ask him to look at the Wolseley too. With any luck, more lawns to mow and hedges to cut over the summer will mean it’ll be autumn and nothing more done.

  Ada’s face remains beatific. When composed, stationary like this, her mother – with her haughty swan’s neck and fine cheekbones – looks poised and graceful as a ballerina. She doesn’t slump or shuffle or sit bent in half, nor is she slack-jawed like some of the elderly women in the retirement homes. Though, even there, barely suppressed anger lurks beneath the floral polyester.

  Nora winds up her hair, fastening it away from her face. Harry has hung a tin whistle around her neck, ready for when they want to come in. Running a hand over his stubble, he winked and told her it would all be fine, no problemo, getting Ada back on shore. He’s around all day, he’ll just wade out. Simple.

  Simple: the plop of water from the oars. No wind. Her mother is quiet, perhaps even content. She has brought her opera glasses for looking at the herons and egrets. Nora has also brought the more practical binoculars. Only a few sailing dinghies are out, keeping to the deeper channel. Nora soon settles to the rhythm of rowing, the dragging weight of water against squared blades, feathering the oars to skim the surface. Because she was older by eight years, Ada taught Flick to row first. For years, only Flick was allowed the oars when they went out together in the skiff. Nora’s impatience was volcanic, the pressure in her chest keeping her awake at night until she crept out and sat in the skiff pulled up on the shore, to practise rowing through the night air.

  Ada taught them both to swim too. To dive off the jetty when the tide was in; if it was out, to lie afloat in the shallows and feel their way, palms and fingertips grazing over bladder-wrack and eel grass clumps, probing for flinty pebbles softened with mud, testing their way out into deeper water.

  Ada is humming, swaying her torso to some inner melody and murmuring every now and again.

  ‘Mum, fancy cockles again tonight?’

  Her mother opens her eyes and gazes, unseeing, at Nora for a moment. ‘Cockles.’ She seems to come back to herself and claps her hands. ‘Delightful.’

  Water ripples against the sides of the skiff. Nora squints to try to make out who is driving the
tractor which is spraying on the far side of the creek. The strain of an engine at full throttle distracts her. From behind them a rubber inflatable smacks through the water, prow high and passing too close. The skiff tips and rocks. Ada’s hands fly out to grip the sides, her mink stole slipping from her shoulders. As the RIB passes, a boy crouched in the prow whoops as he clings to the bouncing craft, one arm circling in the air as if swirling a lasso. His eyes lock briefly with Nora’s before sliding away.

  The inflatable gouges a deep ‘V’ through the water as it travels up the creek. From behind, Nora notices another teenager in charge of the engine. She pretends not to notice the youth in the prow give an exaggerated lasso-wave of his arm, showing off for her benefit.

  Ada clutches the sides of the skiff as the boat rocks, tendons standing in her slender wrists. ‘Bloody brats!’ she hisses.

  Bloody parents, busy getting pissed-up in the sailing-club bar.

  A few seagulls wheel and cry overhead. Ada, breathing fast, darts a look here and there across the water as if looking for something in the middle distance.

  ‘Relax, Mum. It’s fine.’

  She’s always been fit and healthy, Ada, despite her delicate frame; this shaky breathlessness is new. Nora feels for the whistle Harry gave her and finds the metal is comfortingly warm.

  Up the creek towards the sluice gates, the RIB engine cuts to idle, the turmoil of its wake continuing to rock the skiff. The boys’ shouts and calls bait her; a shrill wolf-whistle echoes across the water. The engine revs again. On one of the moored sailing boats, a man washing down his deck stops, rag in hand, and turns to look upstream at the RIB. He drops the rag in a bucket to yell through cupped hands, ‘HEY!’, then stands watching. The boys’ laughter skims across the water as they swing the RIB into a wide curve over to the other side of the estuary, going back to wherever they came from.