Rook Page 13

  ‘The larger coffin was quite magnificent.’ Ada selects several more photos and, with a flourish, leans over the open suitcase to hand them to Jonny. ‘Horsham stone. See the apsidal head, and the way the stone is tooled? Brian said it must have been someone of great importance not only to be coffined, but to also be buried beside a king’s daughter.’

  ‘Any theories?’

  Ada kneels over the suitcase. She shakes her head. ‘Only some talk at the time it was Earl Godwin.’

  Ada’s gaze shifts from Jonny to the window above and behind his head, where poplar leaves stipple the sunlight. Her eyes are dreamy. ‘One of the London men stayed here with us for a few days, at Creek House.’ She glances at Nora and down at the photographs in her hand before passing them over. ‘Quite a gathering, as you can see.’

  Jonny hands Nora a photograph in which three men in suits bend over the pit of an open coffin. The stone lid has been prised open and leans against the church wall, broken. The coffin is empty. No skeleton, just rubble heaped together in the centre. A few sticks.

  In the next photograph two men stand near an opened coffin, one looking on, a splay-bristled garden broom in his hands, while the other stoops astride the pit and holds, between thumb and forefinger as if ready to cast it to one side, a length of bone. The camera’s flash has caught the gleam of his shoes. To one side, stands a third man, tall and angular, a mop of fair hair falling forward as he bends over a garden griddle filled with rubble.

  ‘The vandals had left so few bones – a frightful disappointment. The pelvis was there, I held it myself.’ Ada shivers. ‘All such a shambles, just bits and pieces.’

  Nora shivers, looking again at the photograph: not sticks lying in the tomb, but a bundle of bones.

  ‘So, even though it was not a new discovery, the smaller grave made the nationals for obvious reasons.’ Jonny runs a hand through his hair, nodding. ‘King Canute has mythic status, everyone’s heard of him, and the death of a child always draws sympathy.’

  Nora pulls in her feet, preparing to stand. She will have lunch and feed Rook.

  Though it’s late in the day, she might go for a run, and leave these two to it. Before she can get up, Jonny passes her a piece of paper, a charcoal drawing, the edges softened with age, the paper stained with damp. An illegible signature and a date, 1865, beside the sketch of a skeleton, marked out with pencil lines and numbers, measurements. The breadth of the ribcage is eight inches. Nora stretches her fingers wide. The ribcage is little more than the span of one of her large hands.

  Sweat slicks behind Nora’s knees, but she can’t stop herself from lifting the paper closer to examine the drawing, the mess of what looks like horse-hair surrounding the leer of a skull-face. The hand, all bones visible, looks unnaturally elongated. This can’t have been what they saw when the child’s coffin was first opened, not after eight centuries. Her stomach crawls. The paper falls to the floor.

  ‘For pity’s sake, Nora!’ Ada has snatched up the drawing. ‘This is well over a hundred years old!’

  Nothing changes: Nora has to do something wrong before her mother will acknowledge her existence. There is no air in the room. A wave of nausea passes through her, and she puts a hand over her mouth.

  Jonny’s brown eyes lift to hers and away again towards Ada, who is replacing the lid of a cardboard box, which she then puts back into the suitcase and covers over with other bits and pieces.

  Nora steps across the heaps of photographs and papers spread across the floor to open another window, but her muscles have turned to water. Dizzy, she makes for the bathroom instead when, from the bottom of the stairs, comes the clatter of the letter-box. She remembers Rook downstairs, cooped up in the kitchen. He’ll be hungry; she needs to get away.

  In the kitchen, a jug of water on the draining board holds a bouquet of crimson and purple anemones still wrapped in a cone of brown paper and tied with raffia the same crimson as the flowers. The simplicity of the wrapping accentuates the vivid colour of petals. Jonny has bought flowers. Nora wonders if they are for her, or for her mother.

  Rook hops and swaggers across the floor towards her. He pauses a little way from her feet and, with a twitch of his head to one side, eyes her up and down. With an extravagant shimmy of feathers, he shakes out his wings before stretching out his neck to dip his head in greeting, his long-feathered tail fanned as proudly as a peacock’s. He is now almost full grown and can feed himself from a bowl of offerings, but occasionally when, as now, he first sees Nora after an absence of a few hours his beak opens wide for food.

  ‘Shall I, or shan’t I, Rook?’ she says, moving her hand very slowly towards him to stroke his head. ‘Mum will not forgive me for stealing her thunder, but Jonny will find out one way or another. Might as well be me who tells him about Harold, don’t you think?’

  Rook’s feathers brush Nora’s skin. The man at the bird sanctuary told her rooks are highly intelligent, far more intelligent than most humans, he’d added with a wink. Nora liked the way he rolled up the sleeves of his denim shirt and washed his hands before touching Rook. You hardly ever seen a rook hit by a car, he’d said. ‘Pheasants and magpies, yes. Not rooks. If this bird can’t fly,’ he said, as he held Rook’s wing spread out over one forearm, ‘he must have something wrong with him.’

  The bird sanctuary man examined Rook’s wings for deformity. His forearms were tattooed with mermaids and fish, which made Nora imagine a seafaring past. He told her in detail how rooks make use of zebra crossings to crack nuts, dropping a nut on to the black and white stripes and then waiting on a wire or in a nearby tree until the lights change. When the traffic stops, the rook swoops down to pick up the nut, the shell having been cracked open by passing cars. Researchers at Cambridge University have also discovered a rook will make a tool out of wire. ‘Wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen it with my own eyes,’ the bird sanctuary man said. ‘They put some food in the bottom of a bottle and left the rook with a piece of straight wire. Bloody bird only picks up the bit of wire with its beak and bends the end into a hook, don’t he? Uses the neck of the bottle to bend the wire. Takes him a while, dropping the wire and picking it up again, but he does it in the end.’

  The bird sanctuary man could find nothing wrong with Rook that might affect flight. Nora, seeing Rook in his hands, one long wing stretched out, fingertipped as if in flight, had felt unaccountably sad. Rook, with his beaten pewter beak, his feathers iridescent as silk in the sunlight, doesn’t look remotely deformed or damaged.

  ‘I hope you know what you’ve taken on,’ the sanctuary man said, as Nora left. ‘Got that bird for life, you have.’

  ‘And that’s just fine,’ she says to Rook, ‘because you’re my beauty, aren’t you?’

  Rook fluffs himself up and places a foot over her big toe.

  21

  Rook has been ripping paper again. He greets Nora at the door with a strip of paper torn from a magazine and hops sideways under her feet as she walks down the hall. He may be a silent bird, but his hearing is not impaired and the sound of paper tearing seems to give him pleasure. He works with his beak at a page from a newspaper or magazine until the whole sheet is reduced to strips, when, given the chance, he’ll move on to the next one.

  In the sitting room, remnants of a newspaper are shredded all over the floor. Ada and Harry sit on the sofa, Ada’s body set at a tilt beside Harry’s bulk. She’s in full spate talking about rooks, telling Harry the story of old Arthur next door, back when he was new to the village and driven nearly insane during the breeding season by the endless rowdy calls and chatter of the rookery. The poplars grew close enough to scrape his eaves and block his gutters with leaves. The birds’ racket woke him at dawn, kept going until dusk.

  ‘Naughty Harry made tea then talked me into trying his favourite tipple. Have some.’ Ada nods absent-mindedly towards the tea-tray where two teacups sit nestled on top of the piled saucers, untouched.

  Ada sips from a sherry glass, though it’s not sh
erry she’s drinking. It’s Harry’s usual, sweet anis and brandy. Nora hopes he’s not mixed it too strong. The smallest of the nest of coffee tables has been placed within Ada’s easy reach and her feet, slim ankles crossed, rest on the leather pouffe. Harry must have rearranged the furniture for her convenience, as well as serving her drink. Ada does love to be fussed by a man.

  The tea pours dark and tarry and is completely cold. Nora nurses the cup. Ada continues to regale Harry, putting out a hand every now and again to touch his wrist. The surface of Nora’s tea swirls from the stir of the teaspoon, pallid compared to the rich amber glow of Harry’s drink. She thinks of the turquoise bottle of Bombay Sapphire in the bottom of her wardrobe, glass the colour of a jewel. Since that night, Nora doesn’t often drink alcohol, certainly never gin, the smell of it carrying her straight back to the slip of her foot catching on the too-long hem of her nightie, the jolt as her body smacked against the stairs. Drink affects the body in frightening ways. Tonight, her mother looks as if she has been dismantled and put back together, missing more than one essential component.

  Rook lurches his way up Nora’s arm to the back of the chair, where he balances and pulls very gently at a strand of hair. She puts up a hand to stop him, but he hasn’t hurt her, his beak hasn’t even touched her scalp so, gingerly, she lowers her hand. It comes again, the gentle tug on her hair right near the roots, the puttering movement of Rook’s beak. He’s grooming her with the same meticulous care he grooms his own plumage each morning.

  ‘Arthur’s house is as old as this one, and called Rook Cottage. One would suppose he might have guessed what he was in for!’ Ada exhales a puff of laughter. ‘But, he was a city man, unaccustomed to the country.’

  A local farmer shot a rook and strung it fifteen foot above the ground in one of Arthur’s trees, telling him it would keep the other rooks away. It didn’t. The dead rook swung upside-down from one leg, claws curled, one eye a grey slit.

  One dawn, Arthur could tolerate the racket no longer. Nora must have been no more than six or seven, and the story has many times since been told and retold, how her father, woken by the sound of shots and rage of the rooks, went to the window. Arthur, head hunched as rooks swooped and dive-bombed, tried to start up a chain-saw, one he’d borrowed, to trim his hedges, from Nora’s father. A shotgun lay abandoned on the grass. As Arthur set the saw’s teeth to the trunk of a poplar where six or seven nests clustered high in the bare branches, a rook dived close enough to lift a clump of hair from his scalp. Arthur dropped the saw and floundered backwards. He reached for the gun.

  ‘The rooks have been there hundreds of years, maybe even thousands. My Brian did have a mind for these things, you see, the history of a place. He’d quote Domesday at you and relish the chance. Well, quick as a flash, he ran out in his dressing gown and wrestled poor Arthur to the ground.’

  Nora’s version of the story is different. A window pane pressed against her nose, glass misting as she stood on tiptoes to squint down at Arthur’s garden; the whine of the chain-saw and the rooks’ cacophony; a gust and squall of wings. Her father in his paisley dressing gown lifted his palms to the rowdy air. He reasoned with Arthur. The rooks, because they knew her father, with or without his binoculars, kept their distance. And his voice would have been quiet. Her father never shouted. Arthur would have lowered the saw.

  Nora leaves the room without saying anything to Harry or Ada. She tips the tea into the kitchen sink, feeds Rook some raisins and banana and carries him upstairs with her. Tonight she needs his company. She lies on her narrow bed with him nestled on her stomach and picks up Elsa’s pamphlet. In the photographs from the fifties, the two stone coffins look empty; all that’s left of two lives is a handful of bones and some rubble. At the time, a doctor who examined the bones from the larger, newly discovered coffin, could identify only one femur, a fact which delighted Elsa because once Harold was knocked from his horse, according to one blow by blow description, one of his legs was hacked off and ‘hurled far away’. Elsa consulted a pathologist and two further medical advisors herself, and showed them the photographs. From their findings she began to put together her argument.

  The cover of Elsa’s pamphlet shows the scene from the tapestry which depicts Harold’s death, a scene littered with arrows, battle-axes and swords. Weapons stitched in wool. An English soldier with a moustache, thought to be Harold, falls to the ground as a Norman soldier on horseback leans forward and down. His sword strikes Harold’s left thigh just above the knee.

  One surgeon Elsa spoke to about the fifties photographs observed that the femur in the tomb is the left femur, and it has a fracture in the lower third, that is, above the knee. All three medical advisors she consulted agreed this bone fracture shows no evidence of having healed, meaning, if the damage to the bone occurred during life, rather than through any act of vandalism after burial, death must have followed within a week.

  Rook is very still, head sunk low into his feathers. The one eye Nora can see is closed, so he could be asleep, though it’s hard to tell. Rook has an uncanny ability to be half-asleep, one eye closed while the other eye remains open, alert and looking around. She should take him down to his basket in the kitchen for the night, but the lightness and warmth of his body resting between her hips is comforting.

  Her stomach is flat, hips and ribcage prominent, her body shape so different from Eve’s, which is rounded and ripe. When the baby moves, Eve’s face lights up. ‘Quick. Want to feel it?’ Not waiting for an answer, she will place Nora’s hand on the rise of her pregnant belly for her to feel the slide of something small but insistent moving beneath the skin.

  Next week, because Stavros is away on a small business management course, Eve has asked Nora to go with her to the hospital for her twenty-week scan.

  ‘We’ll be able to see the baby’s organs and skeleton,’ Eve said. ‘You can have 4-D images too, if you pay.’

  The fourth dimension is movement. Eve described a friend’s CD of her 4-D scan, the baby’s thumb moving in and out of its mouth.

  Rook twitches, head rising briefly, eyes open and alert, before sinking again. He often hears things she can’t, sound waves the human ear is not equipped to detect. Trying not to disturb him again, Nora reaches sideways for the matches on the bedside table and lights a smudge stick. The peacock tail-feather is just within reach. She closes her eyes. The feather wafts smoke aromatic as the hot scrubby land around Flick’s house in Spain. Nora wants to focus on being outside, to stay there on a Spanish hillside, but as Rook shifts on her belly, her mind turns inwards of its own accord, to her own body.

  In the waiting room of the clinic Nora was the only one without someone, the only one alone. She sat by the radiator and, although the air was stifling, hunched herself into her oversized fleece, her hands resting in her lap. Close to tears she lowered her chin into the fleece’s softness. She had the hard roll of money in her pocket. The schoolgirl opposite wore mocha-coloured tights with white fluffy knee socks over the top. She was with a woman whose eyes were red-rimmed. At the other end of the room sat two blowzy middle-aged women wearing too much gold and with too much blonde hair teased like candy floss from their scalps. One stared at the print of a stag standing atop a rock on Scottish moorland while the other patted her hand.

  Nora turned her head to the tropical fish tank where electric blue and red fish darted in cohorts through the plastic ruins of a castle. Outside, lorries and buses thundered down Sawyers Hill and the glass in the window-frame shivered. People who passed bent forwards to slog up the hill, oblivious to whatever knives or potions or suction implements were used behind the opaque curtains. Nora rubbed her eyes.

  The shift in gears of a lorry straining up the hill distracted her from the stagnant air in the room and Nora’s mind brought to her snatched phrases of the slow cello lyric of Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, which Isaac had dismissed with a slice of his hand as ‘a minor romantic work’.

  Kol Nidrei – ‘All Vows’ – a minor romantic
work? No, Isaac was wrong.

  She stared at the nylon which sheeted the window and listened, paid proper attention to the music in her mind until the vibration slid from her skull to her throat, to her fingers and ribcage, pushing down to her solar plexus, the inner core of her body where a tiny bunch of cells, like bubbles blown through a wand, clustered and multiplied while she sat in this silent room, waiting. She studied her cupped hands. She never was any good at waiting.

  After half an hour she stood, walked across the room past the girl’s knees in mocha tights and the blonde woman’s patting hand, down the corridor and out through the blue door with potted bay trees on either side. The door had no handle on the outside so she pulled it closed by putting her hand into the brass letterbox. She turned left. Pulled up the hood of her fleece and bent her body to haul herself along with the other walkers, up the steep hill and past the rows of windows blinded by net curtains. After a few minutes the rain started. She walked faster. The awareness of the strength of her body, the solid muscle and bone, gave her an exhilarating desire to increase her pace, to overtake the other walkers, push harder up the hill.

  She caught a train out of London and walked ten miles in the rain from Chichester to Creek House. Ada was shocked by her sudden appearance and by her weight loss. She thought Nora simply needed a good rest between performances and Nora at first had not the courage to tell her all concert performances were cancelled for the foreseeable future. She planned to choose the right time. She was not a child any more, she reasoned: she had made her own decision. She could return to performing, perhaps part-time at first, and Ada could look after the baby. She waited for the right time to talk to Ada, but it didn’t come. She’d been home a month before she fully accepted the probability her mother would not want to spend weeks at a time looking after a baby. Instead, Nora considered adoption. You could have a baby adopted at birth, she’d read. Her baby could be given to a couple who desperately wanted a child but were unable to have their own. She’d need only a few more months at home, before life could return to normal.