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  Eve holds up a photograph, showing it round the circle of elderly people: a picture of the Queen’s coronation. ‘Peggy, do you know who these people are?’

  She calls each person by their name, always. It’s important, she says, because your own name holds a certain power. Peggy, dwarfed by the winged back of the armchair, grips the photo with both hands. ‘Yes.’ She smiles and nods.

  Nora is very thirsty. Everything about this particular retirement ‘hotel’ shrivels her insides. On the window sill, beside a flowerpot of dried soil, lie the husks of three dead moths, while through the picture window blares the bright blue of the May sky; the blossom on a flowering cherry just outside presses against the glass. Nora turns back to the room. By the time they’ve finished here it will be dark, and will also be three hours since she last ate, so she’ll be able to get out, escape for today’s run.

  ‘Do you know their names?’ Eve is still asking about the photo, but Peggy’s smile has vanished, her glance slipping sideways to the arm of the chair. ‘I don’t remember,’ she mumbles.

  Peggy did know, Nora can tell, she did remember the names, the occasion, and perhaps was even going to share a story of her own, but now she shrinks back between the enormous wings of the chair, the memory of whatever she was going to talk about having poured out of her like sand.

  ‘It was such long time ago, wasn’t it?’ Eve coaxes.

  Peggy places the picture face down in her lap, folds her hands together on top of it and stares at the floor. ‘Not really.’ Her voice is firm and tight. She is angry.

  ‘When was it, Peggy? Can you tell me?’

  A knot of tension tightens in Nora’s throat. Eve’s pushing too hard, she should let it go, but then Peggy looks up again, her face bright. ‘1953.’ She gives a little toss of her head. ‘That’s some time now.’

  ‘Yes, it is indeed. Can you pass that on for me now, Peggy?’

  Nora’s shoulders relax.

  Eve looks peachy and ripe; she’s put on a little weight. The air crackles with her joie de vivre. Those who were sleeping have opened their eyes and, one by one, each person in the room becomes aware of the others in the circle, passing photographs and red plastic carnations. Everything anyone says, anything at all, Eve conjures into some kind of conversation. She’s very good at this.

  ‘Shall we have some music now?’ she says, ‘from Nora?’

  Obediently, the circle of faces turns Nora’s way. She plays Saint-Saëns first, ‘The Swan’: lushly romantic. Some listen with their eyes closed. Music has the power to speak straight to whatever is our human soul. Nora remembers Isaac’s odd, dramatic turn of phrase. He’d make a fist and knock his heart. You must transmit the music’s inner emotional message with simplicity. Speak for the composer.

  When Nora has finished playing, a hubbub erupts. The session has run out of time. While Eve moves around the circle of people saying goodbye, Nora zips her cello into its case. She can think of nothing to say to anyone here so she leaves the room and waits for Eve in the hallway, where posters, faded and small, hang too high on the wall. The front door is bolted and locked with a security keypad for which Nora does not know the code. From beyond a swinging door behind the unmanned reception desk, someone shrieks, whether in laughter or fear it’s impossible to tell. To live in a place like this, Ada would require sedation.

  At Creek House, Harry’s red van is parked in the drive with the doors open, the ladder with a rag tied to the end poking out and his window-washing buckets and equipment lying on the gravel. Harry is bent over the bird bath with his shirtsleeves rolled up.

  Harry, as Ada says, is a man of few words. The sort who turns his hand to anything: household repairs and gardening; window-cleaning. Someone in the village saw him with a canvas and easel painting in the ruin of the warehouse down behind the boatyard, Nora has heard, but his chipped knuckles and broad palms like a cowman’s look all wrong for a painter.

  In the bird bath are a few centimetres of dirty rainwater. Nora’s body casts a shadow as she stands over Harry, but he doesn’t look up or say anything.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A moth.’

  Nora looks again, and sees the shiver of the water’s surface. The creature’s body presses a barely perceptible dip in the skin of surface tension as trembling ripples spread from the wings’ vibration. The wings are patterned in different shades of brown, fine lines and swirls like calligraphy inked with a nib.

  ‘It’s drowning.’ Harry pitches forwards, reaching with a finger.

  Nora grabs his forearm. ‘Don’t! They die if you touch them.’

  ‘Dead for sure otherwise,’ he says.

  She remembers something about fatal damage done if the dust on their wings is disturbed, but maybe it’s an old wives’ tale. She takes her hand from Harry’s arm; his finger has already dipped in and out of the water. Wings closed, only the dull underside visible, the moth stands on his fingertip with the absolute stillness of death. As the two of them stare down, Nora can hear Harry breathing. Finally, the moth lifts a front leg, stiff and tentative; another leg, another and another, one after the other, as it unglues its feet from his skin. Front legs stroke along one antenna and then the other, uncoiling the entire length, then, apparently exhausted by all this effort, the moth is completely still once more.

  They watch. The wings shift. Again, a rapid flutter followed by a pause. Finally, after a luxuriously slow fanning of the wings, spreading them wide, take-off is abrupt. The moth zooms skywards, veering to one side before righting its trajectory and heading straight into the blue.

  4

  The ball of Ada’s foot sinks as she leans forward to throw a chunk of bread into the water, mud squirting between her toes. The fresh ciabatta cradled in the crook of her arm is warm, doughy and alive. Saliva floods her mouth.

  The chunk of bread sinks, disappearing from sight entirely before it looms, pale and ghostly, from the depths to bob on the surface. Again she leans forwards, to repeat the pleasurable ooze of mud between her toes.

  The swans are a long way off, where the creek points a finger inland towards the Downs. They do not look her way. Ada flings the bread harder, her kimono rippling, the silk liquid against her skin. She lifts her arms high to allow the breeze to stroke the silk against her thighs and breasts and, when she does so, recalls the man who came to the house yesterday, a young man, who shook her hand and spoke her name as if he knew her. Tall, he was, and lanky, with a mop of hair and something of the eagerness of a puppy about him.

  Was it his height, or his hand pushing the hair back from his forehead which reminded her, took her straight back to a party sometime that summer, the cacophony of voices and music, the crowded rooms. A blast of male laughter – and they were introduced across a throng of people squeezed into a hallway. Ada leans forward, glancing a little to one side to feign coyness, and places her hand in his. Someone says again, meet Robert. He stoops to catch her name and smiles as he looks down at her, his hand enveloping hers with warmth.

  The way he looked at her. She had his attention, she could tell. His hands – Ada sees her hand stretched out over the water, grasping at air. It doesn’t matter. She lets her arm fall. She rips another hunk from the loaf and drops it in the water. He said he would be back.

  1954. That summer, she and Cicely had to air all the beds, beat the rugs and fling wide the windows. Creek House was full. They came down from London, the men in their snazzy suits, to look at the graves. Brought with them their canvas bags of equipment, tape measures, pencils and notebooks; took off their sports jackets, rolled up their shirtsleeves and drank Pimm’s in the garden in late afternoons, before the shadows yawned across the lawn. Her husband was too busy getting overheated with his measurements and sketches; Robert was the one who carried the tray of glasses for her, back out on to the terrace where the others were laughing and excitement zipped the air tight.

  Ada paused to dash some extra slugs of gin into the Pimm’s as she refilled the jug. Nothin
g like gin on a hot day!

  He came back in and closed the pantry door. The pantry shelf dug into the small of her back and his tongue tasted of mint. All afternoon Robert watched her as she crossed her legs, or leaned forward for him to light her cigarette.

  Robert’s body was so different, long and muscular, and his vigour took her by surprise. Under the macrocarpa, the smell of pine resin, the prick of needles on her spine and buttocks.

  Simply for ever afterwards, ripping up the roots of mint that spread along the cracks and edges of the crazy paving, she’d think of Robert, of his huge hands tenderly cupping her face. The memories of him come to her only in snatches: Robert’s head bent to the garden sieve, sifting the grit and rubble from the opened tombs, his hair falling forwards; his big, strong hands.

  The young man yesterday had come about the graves. He ran his hands through his hair and asked for Nora. Eyes brown as a spaniel’s, with the twitchy eyebrows one finds so appealing on a dog.

  The ball of bread which Ada has squashed and rolled and stretched drops into the water. The white globule sinks and rises again, floating on the surface.

  That time she met Robert in London.

  Afterwards, whenever Brian was away, she went up to London to meet Robert – and Brian was always away on digs in foreign climes, leaving her waiting here, rattling around Creek House at the end of the long straight lane, no roads branching off, the last house before the water, looking out over nothing but mud and sky. But always those first days come back to her, the afternoons of that first summer. In a striped deckchair, Robert rests his forearms on his thighs and taps out a cigarette, offers the box to her, his gaze drifting over her ankle.

  The number of years – and there were many – and the precise reason for their ending, she has forgotten. One time, near the end, when she announced her news, pulling off her gloves in Lyons’ Corner House amid the clink of china and teaspoons, the waistband of her skirt so tight it hampered her breathing, Robert was gazing elsewhere across the room and, only reluctantly, when she touched his arm, looked back to her. Why now? he demanded, Why now, Ada, when it’s far too late!

  And it was. Too late for her to have another child, too long after the first, and it did cross her mind, as she said last week to the young doctor – whose name escapes her, these days one never sees the same doctor twice – after he’d asked her to breathe into a mouthpiece, when he placed his chilly stethoscope between her breasts and stared away at the louvred blinds covering the window, it did cross her mind. She said, I was nearly forty, you understand.

  Someone had drowned the kitchen cat’s unwanted kittens in a bucket.

  The doctor’s eyes met hers, finally. ‘She knows, I assume?’

  The presumption of youth! Barely out of his teens.

  For a while she thought it entirely possible Robert would change his mind once the baby was born. Ada grabs at the loaf, tearing at what’s left of it, scattering first pinches then fistfuls out on to the water. Empty-handed, she puts a hand to her belly and shivers.

  ‘Mum?’

  It’s her daughter calling from the house, not Felicity, but the other one. ‘MUM?’

  Yelling like a fishwife.

  Yesterday, the young man down from London – spaniel eyes and city shoes – his height put her in mind of Robert, but his handshake was a frightful disappointment. Limp as an unstuffed cushion. Not like Robert’s, reaching for her across other party-goers in a crowded hallway, enveloping . . .

  Above Ada, Nora stands high on the edge where the lawn ends in a sudden drop to the shoreline. Sunlight flares through her dress, blurring the edges of her silhouette and leaving the core of her body indistinct.

  ‘Mum, why is Harry pulling up all the forget-me-nots?’

  Nora wears her characteristic hectic look, shoeless, hair blowing across her face, looking for all the world as though she’s about to run off again with the raggle-taggle gypsies-oh. Home she came for Christmas that year. Plain as a pikestaff what was going on, but not a word, oh no, not a word, and off she waltzed again, back to the high life in London. All over bar the shouting by the time she finally graced Creek House with her presence again.

  ‘Mum!’ Nora has her hands on her hips. ‘It’s past four o’clock. What are you doing down there?’ There’s criticism in her voice.

  Well, what does it look like? But the loaf of bread for the swans has long gone and Ada stands by the creek in her scarlet kimono, holding nothing.

  ‘What am I doing?’ She assumes nonchalance with a shrug. ‘I am thinking how headstrong and secretive you’ve always been.’

  Rewarded by the fall of Nora’s face, Ada slips her hands deep into the kimono’s silky folds and turns back to the creek.

  5

  The mud at low tide is alive with soft-lipped sucks and pops, the creek shrunk to a ribbon in the distance. Nora’s wellingtons slop around her calves as she steps from one hump of eel grass to another, arms spread to counterbalance any slip on the silt. Far off by the sluice gate twenty or thirty swans are clustered, startling white against the bladder-wrack and mud. Every limpid arch of neck and fan of wing displays an orchestrated grace, reminding Nora of her mother.

  ‘They’re over. Dead. And they smother the other plants,’ Ada said, when Nora asked again about the forget-me-nots. ‘Though I don’t know why it’s any of your concern,’ her mother added, ‘you’ll be up and off before the year’s out.’

  Ada was in the hall putting on her lipstick, about to leave for quiz night at the pub, her statement a question in disguise. Nora has no ready answer when her mother talks like this, as if with the turn of the calendar page to a new month the blank squares will be miraculously starred or ringed in biro, the name of a country written in capitals alongside Nora’s. Concert dates, gala performances, a master class.

  Ada patted her silver chignon and regarded herself in the hall mirror. ‘A little project for me,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘It is, after all, my garden.’ She closed the front door.

  Since her return to Bosham, people stop Nora in the lanes or on the creek path. Couldn’t stay away, then? They smile knowingly. How nice for your mother to have you back home. Ada, however, has never seemed to need the company of her daughters, sending Flick and Nora to board at a school only half an hour’s drive away. Although Flick was miserable, Nora loved it. She’d grab both suitcases and shoulder her way through the front entrance door the moment Ada dropped them by the wide steps at the start of each new term, while Flick stood outside and chewed her hair as she peered down the drive after their parents in the retreating car. For Nora, boarding school offered the chance to be fully engaged in musical activities whenever the opportunity arose; there were fewer distracting undercurrents than at home.

  Now, however, she and Ada have to manage living together. With this in mind, Nora has brought the rake and sieve, thinking to surprise her mother with cockles. The drier mounds of the cockle beds are further out across the gleaming mudflats, towards the sliver of creek. As children, because of living where they did – the lawn tipping towards the creek and ending a crumbling drop ten foot or so above the shoreline – Nora and Flick were taught early the pleasures of the mud; how to judge its character; not to be unsuspecting of the dangers. Ada showed them the differences in the mud’s texture which could reveal where it was safest to walk, near the shore where buried flints lay just below the slip of mud, or where the root mounds of eel grass clumped. She taught them how and where to lay down planks, when to fling themselves on hands and knees and crawl, even to lie flat, if they should find themselves sucked into the slime that in certain places lurked, black and slick, below the surface, its stench of decomposition rising on hot summer days. After an afternoon on the mudflats Flick and Nora came home covered with mud, which tightened their skin as it dried. Before hosing themselves, fully clothed, under the outside shower by the back porch, they emptied their pockets of the buried treasures they had found and lined up their finds on a tin tray. Bits of bone, fire-
cracked ‘pot-boilers’, Bronze Age artefacts, Iron Age hearths, a Roman helmet, Saxon pottery and a warrior’s medallions – or so they pretended, both of them seeing their father, imitating the gentle probe of his fingers, his eyeglass, as they examined each flint or bottle top with a magnifying glass. They printed names and dates and numbers on to re-used luggage labels and envelopes. Flick was best at this, her joined-up writing flowing in the lilac Quink she used to fill her new school fountain pen.

  One day, lying on her stomach – not because there was quicksand, but because in the glassy heat the suck of mud on sunburnt skin was seductive – the deep push of Nora’s exploratory fingertips found something hard. She scooped and dug with her hands, manipulating whatever it was through the cloy of mud. As soon as she held the flint up and scraped the surface, she saw she’d found something real. She knew. The flint was tapered towards one end, the surfaces sharpened; the broad end fitted neatly in her palm. On each side of the tapered end were two slight indentations, notches, perhaps where the flint tool had been bound to a wooden handle. It was an axe-head, she was sure. Her father, cracking open a chalk boulder to search for the nodule of flint embedded in the soft, porous rock, had told her about Neolithic farmers who cut down forests to clear land for their crops, and the tools they made for their task.

  Cradling the piece of flint in her fingers, she rinsed the mud off in the creek to reveal the colours of an English sky, grey shaded to white. Where the stone had been chipped away the blade was translucent and sharp-edged as glass, while around the notches at the tapered end the surface had been left uncut, chalky-soft and ingrained with dirt.

  Nora knew she had to have this piece of history for herself, to make the axe-head her talisman. Flick was further along the shoreline, towards Creek House, wading knee-deep, her dark head bent as she picked through the contents of her net. Nora rubbed her piece of flint dry on the back of her shorts where they were still clean, and slipped her find into a pocket.