Rook Page 12

  Ada has worked herself up into a state. She gabbles incoherent snatches of sentences, her voice rising in a crescendo of anger, hands tugging at the stole around her neck, plucking at her coat buttons. Nora rests the oars in the rowlocks and stands ready to step over the middle cross-seat to her mother in the prow, but at the same moment Ada also stands abruptly. Her arms flail and the boat rocks.

  ‘Mum, it’s OK.’ Nora reaches out to hold her mother’s hands in her own. As she does so, the RIB’s engine roars out again, deep-throated, the inflatable rears up, engine now a high whine, and heads straight for them across the water. Both boys are crouched, pale faces pinched with concentration.

  Nora curses her stupidity. The man on the sailing boat hollers and waves his arms. Between the RIB bearing down on them and their skiff is a line of three, virtually submerged, wooden struts, all that remains of an ancient rotten jetty. The RIB is heading straight for the submerged struts. She’ll have to get the skiff out of the way because if the RIB strikes a strut at this speed, it will fly out of control.

  ‘DOWN!’ Her hands press down on her mother’s shoulders and they both tumble to the boat’s floor. Ada mews in protest. Nora scrabbles on to all fours, banging her elbow on the rowlock. Her mother lies on the tangle of rope, arms lifted to Nora for help.

  Nora’s diaphragm jars with a shock of sound as rubber thwacks on water. The inflatable is mid-air, flying towards them. Keeping low, she grabs an oar and reaches for the other to try to swerve the skiff in time, just a fraction, into shallower water, but now her mother struggles up, brushing her hands on her coat, tottering, one foot raised to the wooden cross-seat, her head dipped to resettle the mink stole across her shoulders. Nora drops both oars and lunges for Ada just as the hull of the RIB punches the side of the skiff, ramming it so that her mother slides sideways. The skiff jolts and tips. Nora fastens her arms around Ada’s body, toppling them both, a jumble of limbs, into the freezing hit of water that streams past in gulps of swelling bubbles.

  The cold halts her breath; water gargles and belches through her ears. Eyes strained open, all Nora can see as she stretches out her arms, fingers searching, are floating particles of silt until, at last she catches a glimpse of her mother’s face, her eyes violet-brown, wide open, coming closer under a looming shadow. Nora stretches out her fingers, touches the textured fabric of her coat-sleeve, and tugs her mother closer.

  July

  19

  Ada sways at the top of the stairs, ears buzzing with the silence of walls and doors closed on empty rooms. The telephone has stopped ringing. Her foot hovers over the stairs, which cut back beneath her, slanting suddenly more steeply, and a sensation of falling washes over her; for a moment it seems she will step into mid-air. Behind her eyes, colours spray like exploding dahlias. She feels for the banister, heart banging. Far below, the edges of the black and white floor tiles scissor across the hall floor. She would be dead before she hit them.

  One foot in front of the other, step by step, she moves back towards her bedroom and, with relief, sits down on the edge of the bed. In one hand she holds a fan of photographs but her mind is blank. She tries to retrace the events of the last few minutes, the telephone’s jangle, its shrill echo bouncing around the house as the noise persisted with no one except herself to answer it. Nora has waltzed off somewhere, as usual, without so much as a by-your-leave. Felicity may have been calling from Spain – that is, if anyone has thought to let her know of the boat accident. Always the same with Nora. Once she starts playing that infernal instrument all hours of the day and night, she can think of nothing else and sooner or later she ups sticks and is gone.

  The photographs in Ada’s hand have scalloped edges. The papery surfaces scuff against each other as she sifts through them, her knuckles, scraped when she fell against the sides of the boat, stiff as rusty hinges. Something has slipped her mind, something for which she was searching, before the ring of the telephone jarred her thoughts. She lies back on the bed and closes her eyes, listening to the reassuring rhythm of Harry splitting logs, down near the creek. Once the garden is tidy, the croquet lawn weeded and rolled, she will telephone Roger and invite him to call round, ask his advice, probe him for his opinion on how much the house is worth, though he is retired now and his son has taken on the family business.

  With a start, she remembers. How foolish to let it slip her mind! There is a reason she has pulled out the Louis Vuitton suitcase, a reason good enough to get her out of bed even though she is still a little shaky. Once again it happens, a sense of fading, her surroundings peeling away as her ears grow deaf with the pressure of water, sealing her off from the outside world. The sensation spreads. All she can hear is the sound of her own swallowing, the seep and trickle of something fluid, the edges of her mind softening like sponge as she begins to sink again.

  She knows enough to hold her breath, to grip the suitcase. For a moment, underwater murk fills her vision, floating silt as her blood slides slow and she slips further from the light. To prevent herself from falling she concentrates on holding on to the suitcase corners, which dig into her palms.

  The doctor says it is the shock, her mind fighting to forget the accident her body remembers. He says they will pass, but she doesn’t like these peculiar turns, thought she had grown out of them years ago, after she was sent away to school when her mother died because her father couldn’t cope with a little girl. When he abandoned her, there was Brian. Safe, steady Brian, and for a while it was better.

  She takes a slow, steadying breath and rubs the dents in her palms. The suitcase . . .

  For ease of access to past occasions – tennis and shooting parties, the weight of a silver fork in her hand, bone-handled knives – these days she keeps the Louis Vuitton case under the bed. Ada shuffles letters and postcards, theatre programmes, tickets. Round horn-rimmed spectacles, nubby sports jackets, cars with running boards, the salty smell of their leather seats: she misses these things. A man’s white handkerchief, a stiff shirt collar, starched and pressed. She sighs at one photograph. She is wearing furs, leaning forwards for a man to light her cigarette. The line of his jaw is familiar but his name has gone.

  What she needs is to feel a little more like her old self. She will send Harry for cigarettes. He will need money.

  Photographs are spread all over the floor. From them, Robert smiles up at her. No fool like an old fool, nevertheless . . . She picks Robert up, recalling the other tall young man with the rich brown voice, waving his arms about, talking nineteen-to-the-dozen as he strolled away down Creek Lane with Nora.

  He had come about the child’s tomb; this is why she has pulled out the suitcase. She knows now what she was looking for and exactly where it is hidden, in the red silky folds of the pouch pocket at the back of the suitcase.

  The piece of stone in the pocket of the suitcase is greyish white, small enough to cup in her hand, its texture roughened by tiny ovals of shell closely packed in lines, sharp as barnacles. Perhaps this is why she’s thought of it only now, this stone from under the sea. Nora has simply no idea, waltzing off without a by-your-leave. Ada closes her fingers around the piece of stone, the shells embedded there sharp as little teeth.

  From the depths of the ocean, she’ll explain, before dropping the stone casually into his hand, her fingertips grazing his palm, but well travelled since then. Well travelled indeed, through ten centuries, both ocean and time.

  He will crave it, as she did, will itch to snatch a piece of history, to possess. She knows this, because the need comes off him like heat. Ah well, nothing new on this earth.

  And when the moment is opportune, today, or is it tomorrow, she will produce her treasure. How on earth did you get hold of it? he’ll let slip, before realising the question is indiscreet.

  Ada looks down at the photograph in her hand in which Robert clutches the garden griddle heaped with rubble. The shine on his shoes is dulled with dust from the graves.

  ‘Tertiary limestone from Binstead on the
Isle of Wight; a shell bank there.’ The cadence of Robert’s voice is clear to her ears, as if he was in the room.

  ‘Let me take a snap,’ she’d said, because she wanted to capture Robert, to keep him with her. The irony is the camera was Brian’s. She and Robert stood together in the church, bathed in a downward slant of light from the high north window while Brian, somewhere behind them, unfolded his ruler to measure the larger grave of the two and conferred with the man whose job it was to make a drawing of the positioning and size of the coffins. That summer, for weeks, all Brian talked about was the excavation. How a coffined grave meant the burial of someone of great importance. She might just as well not have been there, for all the notice Brian took.

  ‘Quarr stone, first used in the late Anglo-Saxon period,’ Robert said. He was no ignoramus but he held the chunks and chips of rock and stone aloft like jewels, with a foolish look on his face.

  The puzzle for her was in the missing detail. None of the men would answer this, how the stone coffin had been hewn, and where. The sides were marked, chipped into shape with a tool like a chisel, Brian said. Ada wondered about the drowned girl’s body, where she had lain before burial, whether her warrior father carried her in his arms to the open tomb which awaited her, a chill bed with the covers drawn back. The way Harry carried her up from the creek, the warmth of his body a comfort; the taste of silt in her throat.

  Ada shifts on the mattress.

  A drowned child, buried under the chancel arch in the position reserved for those of high standing, yet the tomb was simple, without decoration. The result of an illegitimate liaison, Brian had said, by way of explanation, in that bored, dismissive way he had. Don’t let your imagination run away with itself, Ada. Don’t get carried away. The lack of decoration might have been due to haste, a need to bury the child quickly. Perhaps she died at this time of year, in the height of summer.

  Ada shivers, remembering the smothering weight of the wet cloth which dragged her body down. Harry strode up the slope to the house with her in his arms. Nora peeled off her clothes, wrapped her in a bath towel and rubbed her dry as if she was a child, while Harry fetched wood and laid up the fire in her bedroom. A fire lit upstairs, in June!

  The Saxon princess was laid in a coffin hewn from Quarr stone, which has another name – featherbed – and this is the name Ada prefers, the name she will give the young man from the television when he returns. As she knows he will.

  Strange name for a grown man, Jonny; a diminutive more suited to a child.

  No matter what opinion her daughter holds, Ada will not be taken for a fool. She will gain pleasure from mentioning Robert’s name when she next speaks with the young man, and advises him to add Robert Flatholm to his list: Dr Flatholm – airily – a geologist I knew quite well at the time.

  She has the facts at her fingertips. Featherbed stone was used in Bosham before the Norman conquest. Ada smiles to herself, gives a shrug of her shoulders, a demure shake of the head. The quarry was worked out by the fourteenth century.

  She can speak this language Robert spoke because she taught herself at the time, to be able to converse with him. Robert took pride in his area of expertise, pride in being able to date the different parts of the church through the stone used as building material.

  Ada hasn’t thought of the piece of featherbed stone in years but here it has been all this time, nestled in one of the silky inner pockets of the suitcase. Jonny’s questions about the little princess’s grave brought everything back. He’d love to have a look at Brian’s photographs, he’d said, and so she invited him to call again. Yet on the appointed day, he hadn’t so much as crossed the threshold of Creek House, thanks to Nora’s appearance.

  Robert’s blond head is bent to his diagrams. The renowned chancel arch, built in Quarr stone and stitched on to the Bayeux Tapestry, he coloured purple. How simple to slip a piece from the rubble in the griddle into the pocket of her new cashmere cardigan, to nod and tilt her cheek towards Robert when he pointed with his pencil to the purple and yellow blocks of shading, to nod a second time when he spoke in another language about nodules and limestone, her mind on other things – the blond hair at the base of his throat, the way his Adam’s apple moved, prominent as a boy’s – as her fingers closed around a piece of featherbed stone from the thousand-year-old tomb of a princess.

  Ada is not certain which of Brian’s books contains, folded between the pages, Robert’s diagram of Bosham church, a book with Robert’s signature and the date, April 1954, in the bottom right-hand corner. When she’s back on her feet she will go into Brian’s study and make sure she can lay her hands on it.

  Strictly speaking, opined that white-haired busybody on a bicycle – whose name Ada forgets – the 1954 excavation of the tomb was performed unlawfully; Brian and the others chose to disregard the fact. The Reverend, tubby little man with his white goatee beard and half-moon spectacles, the churchwardens, someone from the Ministry of Works – they all had their own petty rules and observances, the archaeologists, geologists and historians. The Reverend Jones – that’s his name – referred constantly to the copious notes of one of his predecessors. He had several notebooks detailing the original excavation of the child’s tomb in 1865, plus a dusty tome a previous incumbent had written on the traditions of Bosham.

  Since the mother of the little princess who drowned is unknown, Ada feels a sense of responsibility. Though several experts were gathered together to take measurements and notes, no women were invited to visit the opened grave. She was there merely as Brian’s wife, her name not mentioned in the newspaper reports of the time. She will be an invaluable asset to Jonny’s television programme. She must tell Nora to book an appointment for her at the hairdresser’s as a matter of urgency.

  Ada neatens a pile of photographs. Fifty years ago, near as damn it. Dust in the back of her throat from the sifted rubble. Her new cardigan was powder-blue cashmere, snug across the bust. Pearl buttons. She can feel them, the way each button rolled hard as an acid drop between her fingers as she fastened them.

  A mere trifle, in the grand scheme of things, to smuggle a tiny piece of another life, another time, Cnut’s time, a man whose sons were warriors who felt the pulse of daring.

  She will appear on Jonny’s programme to talk about the various types of stone: the Archaeologist’s Wife, widowed for almost two decades. The piece of Quarr stone will captivate him, Jonny, with his practised look. Doubtless some woman has made him her pet, told him he is adorable, some woman made foolish by those puppy-dog eyes, the treacle of his voice; an older woman, most likely, or a girl.

  She will call him Jonathan, the young man with an appetite, if she’s not mistaken, but – she recalls the disappointment of his handshake – likely to be lacking in staying power.

  20

  Creek house at first seems empty. Nora leans her cello against the wall in the hallway and slips off her shoes. She hears her mother’s laugh and muted voices from upstairs, followed by a thud and the sound of something moving across floorboards. Rook hasn’t come swaggering down the hallway to greet her, so he must be shut in the kitchen.

  In her bedroom, Ada kneels by a suitcase, one Nora doesn’t recognise, old fashioned and boxy, a pattern tooled in leather around the edges. Beside the suitcase, Jonny’s long form is stretched out on the floor, his head propped on one hand. From the stairs, only his back and the rolled-up shirtsleeve of the arm supporting his head is visible, but he must know she’s there because, without turning his attention from Ada, he lifts the other arm and beckons her into the room.

  Nora hesitates before stepping forward. Though she must be aware of her daughter in the doorway, Ada doesn’t look up. Her hair is loose, damp on her forehead. She’s flushed. This is the first day, since the accident, she has got up and dressed. Hefty at her neck is an ornate necklace of red glass stones. Although a window is open, the air is stale with cigarette smoke and liberally sprayed perfume.

  ‘Brian was thrilled at the opportunity, o
f course,’ Ada is saying. ‘Some regular repair work was being carried out, paving stones being renewed to the west of the chancel steps, I believe, which necessitated the lifting of slabs. They knew the child’s coffin existed, of course, that was found in the eighteen hundreds, but the memorial tablet is in completely the wrong place so they were not expecting to uncover it. The second, larger coffin was a complete surprise to all and sundry, despite the fact it had been vandalised on some previous occasion.’

  ‘How could they tell?’

  ‘The skull was missing. Other body parts were absent, if I remember rightly.’

  Ada talks on. Jonny pats the floor beside him and puts a finger to his lips. Nora sits cross-legged beside him. The room is hot so she unfolds her legs, stretching them out in front of her on the floor. Jonny glances down, the flick of his eyes tracing the length of her thighs, her calves and ankles. Glittering through her limbs, Nora’s blood responds. Ada’s chin lifts; she tosses her hair.

  ‘The vicar sent for Brian straight away. It was fortunate he was at home, he was so often away. They called in other experts too – someone from the Ministry of works, Dr Langhorne from the village, and a second archaeologist and a geologist came down from London. One or two of the churchwardens were there too, I believe.’

  Ada runs her fingertips over the photographs, fanned in her hand like a pack of cards. She tips her head, glancing at Jonny over the top of them, focused on him in such a way Nora is cut from her field of vision. Nora is left with a sense of not being entirely present. She decides to say something, to take more control of the situation. ‘So sorry not to be here when you arrived, Jonny. Mum, has Jonny had something to drink? It’s so hot today and he’s had a long journey from London.’

  ‘At the time the national press were terribly taken with the little princess and the story of her drowning in the millstream,’ Ada continues, as though Nora has not spoken. Clearly, her arrival is an unwelcome disruption.