Rook Page 5

  Ada puts a hand on Eric’s arm to call his attention, lifts it to his cheek, where the bristles are silvery-sharp as metal shavings. He has always responded to her touch. Tonight she asks him about the swans, to get him talking, to get his eyes to lift to hers.

  Rain, wind or shine, he tells her, every day on my bike.

  He takes three dog-eared paperbacks from his bag and heaps them on the bar before removing the top book and laying it on the beer towel, to reorder his pile. When he goes home, the books will still be there, left in whatever order he finally decides is best. They are his gift. Eric travels into Chichester every morning on the early morning bus with the schoolchildren, as he has done every morning for thirty years. He stares at his own feet – great plates of meat – as he shuffles down the aisle and hands out free second-hand books. The mystery is, all the young people love him.

  ‘Know them all.’ He nods, rearranging his books, lining up the battered spines. ‘Every one of this year’s.’

  The cygnets are half-grown now, almost adults in size if not in plumage. When Eric tells her this, Ada thinks again of Flick, living the high life in Spain; the granddaughters she hardly ever sees. Every day, Eric sees his swans, his babies.

  Making her way back to a seat near the fire, Ada would have tripped on the uneven edge of a flagstone, if Harry hadn’t come in at that moment and caught her arm at the elbow, steadying her. Solid as a rock, that man.

  Jason has let the fire die down and Ada’s feet, in her new kitten-heeled sandals, are cold. Not June yet. Ne’er cast a clout.

  Brian teased her. Said she misunderstood. Told her ‘May’ refers to hawthorn blossom, not the month. There is some debate, he said in that earnest way of his. A ‘clout’ is a slab of mud, earth turned over by a plough. He’d witter on about alternative meanings of words until she was utterly bemused.

  The saccharin in tonic water always leaves such a bad taste in one’s mouth.

  Whatever the month, an invitation from Flick to visit them all in Spain would not go amiss. Ada needs to get away from the chill which seeps up through the thin soles of her sandals.

  Harry brings her a fresh gin and tonic but the glass is too cold to touch. She rubs her palms together again and holds them towards the smouldering logs, hoping Harry might take her hands in his to stop her shivers.

  The ice cracks and settles downwards; bubbles fizz round the lemon slice. Mint. Robert. She gives a little shake of her head to free herself from that particular circle of thought. The air is too sharp for gin.

  Harry is drinking his usual. She’s not seen him drink it in the pub before.

  ‘I didn’t think Jason had the right ingredients.’ A little of his drink spills when she points.

  ‘All OK, Ada?’

  ‘I forget, what is it called?’

  ‘Sol y sombra.’

  ‘I had an idea it was Spanish, am I right?’

  Harry nods. ‘A drink they have with coffee sometimes to start the day. Sun and shade. They say the name comes from the seats at a bullring.’

  ‘Ghastly!’

  Once, when Ada visited Flick in Spain she’d eaten an entire meal seated beneath the stuffed head of a bull. A black one. Nostrils flared over her hair. She’d thought of nothing all evening but the stickiness of blood, the frightful stab and thrust of violence.

  Harry is talking about bullfights, about the most expensive seats having some sun and some shade. ‘As in life, a balance.’ He swirls the drink in his glass, mixing the clear anis and brandy together.

  ‘Absolutely.’ She has not quite followed his gist. Clearly he’s not still talking about the weather, but the mention of shade has carried Brian back into her thoughts again, Brian surrounded by his whispers from the past.

  No point crying over spilled milk.

  Nora came home at Christmas. A mother can tell these things and Nora spoke, when pressed, of a man with a Jewish-sounding name, an older man who spent a lot of time abroad, travelling. Ada kept her thoughts to herself. Nora went back to London as usual and Ada waited in vain for news until, out of the blue – Ada throws her hands up in exasperation, and notices she is perhaps speaking her thoughts aloud. ‘Out of the blue she comes home again. Spring, it would’ve been this time. She is far too thin and she drinks, shut away in her room, when she would never drink before because of the music, and she is a wreck. My first thought was an attack of nerves, but Nora? She’s a flibberty-gibbet, but much too strong for all that nonsense. Well equipped to look after number one, that girl.’

  Ada is about to go on, but something stops her. She has not mentioned her thoughts on this to anyone. A family matter is, after all, best kept behind closed doors. The gin has loosened her tongue. But – her thoughts move and settle like the melting cubes of ice – she surely has only got as far as telling Harry about the love affair. Harry, bless him, who gazes into his drink as if it will tell his fortune, does not engage in tittle-tattle. He, however, is not Family.

  Ada sips her gin and decides to sidestep the issue. ‘Nora has simply allowed guilt to destroy her life.’ She sighs. ‘My guess is, she discovered not only was he Jewish, he was also married.’

  Harry gives her a look she cannot for the life of her fathom. He says nothing, which gives her the feeling she may have spoken out of turn.

  ‘He was a powerful man.’ She stops. She has forgotten of whom she was speaking – someone important. She brushes white flakes of plaster from her sleeve. In places, the walls are stained brown from sea water which has washed in and out of the pub over the years, one landlord after another marking the height of the floodwater on the wall by the bar. Plaster peels in flakes which drift to the floor. A year or two back the water was very high. Jason added his mark to the wall, to record the level, the highest yet. Of course: Cnut. Cnut was a powerful man. His daughter, the little princess buried in the church. Brian was of the opinion, since there are no records anywhere of this daughter, Cnut may have had a love affair.

  ‘The child was probably illegitimate,’ she says to Harry.

  ‘Not a problem,’ says Harry. ‘There’s no stigma.’

  Time to leave, once she has finished her gin. She lifts the glass to her lips but the gin has gone. The pub is almost in darkness, only one lamp still alight; Jason is wiping down the bar. She turns her empty glass round and round on the cardboard mat. Where has every one disappeared to? She finds she has tears in her eyes. ‘Have you a hankie, Harry darling?’

  Harry goes to the bar and comes back with a pocket-sized pack of tissues. She wipes her eyes and turns to him. ‘Harry? My daughter tells me nothing!’

  They are walking past the church – not the quickest route back to Creek House but with the melancholy turn of her thoughts all evening, Ada has a feeling she may have insisted on coming this way. Brian has a theory about the little girl’s grave, a theory he keeps to himself. ‘First, I need to do more detective work,’ he says. She turns to ask him if it was one of his shades who pressed this story upon him and finds it is Harry’s arm on which she is leaning.

  Harry puts his other hand over hers. ‘Did you want to go in?’ Ada nods.

  The church is skeletal, beams like the ribs of some colossal beast arching high above. Each movement, even a breath, creates a disturbance, an echo which shifts the dust. How close she is, here, where the words on gravestones laid in the aisle have been blurred by the passing of feet, to the dead. Ada leans towards Harry. His body radiates heat, but he crouches down to look closely at the memorial slab.

  ‘Couldn’t even get that right, could they?’ Ada flicks a hand. ‘The grave is under the centre of the chancel arch, not here.’

  ‘They had their reasons,’ Harry says. ‘Don’t know what they were, that’s all.’

  She could tell Harry. With Harry, the story would be safe.

  June

  9

  The lane runs so straight because it was once a Roman road, or so they say. Nora’s feet take steady, regular steps; her sandals flash in and out from bel
ow the hem of her dress. Some stitching is unravelling and the thread tickles her calf. Between Nora’s shoulder blades, beneath the cello case, her dress sticks to her skin. She takes longer strides so that the walk won’t swallow so much time; she’s already late because of the staff meeting, and she should cook something for Ada before Miss Macleod’s lesson – the last of the day.

  From the creek comes the ching-ching-ching of halyards against masts and a sudden briny gust tells her the tide is on the turn, sea water pushing into Salthill Creek, frilling over silt and weed to float the leaning boats. She’s almost there. She lifts her head to the breeze, worrying about Rachel, her star pupil, whose playing today was accurate, as always, but lacked pungency, as if Rachel herself was not listening acutely enough to the music she was playing.

  Ahead, some youths are crouched in a huddle by the ditch. Nora hitches her cello case upwards, lifting the straps from her collar-bone. As she approaches, two of the youths straighten, jaws chewing, to give her a sullen stare over their shoulders. Jeans swag low across their buttocks and the tongues of their trainers are swollen. They’re not from the village, nor does she know them from any of the schools where she teaches. A sheet from the Neighbourhood Watch through the door yesterday warned of a recent spate of lawnmower thefts and garage break-ins, LOCK UP! USE YOUR CHAIN! scrawled in capitals across the bottom. She’d screwed up the note and chucked it in the bin.

  A third youth hooks and jabs at something in the ditch with what looks like a carving-knife. Nora shoves her hands into her pockets and strides towards the boy. In her head runs the forceful opening of the Appassionato, Saint-Saëns, over and over, her fingers pressing into her thigh the music’s insistent march of rhythm. The group breaks, crossing the lane and loping away, hands in pockets, faces hidden. They’re no more than schoolboys: pale and skinny-wristed. As if they’ve crawled out from under a stone, her mother would say.

  Bluebells lie trampled in the ditch, milky stems oozing; a screwed-up cigarette box beside a scrap of dusty black plastic. The breeze sways white saucers of cow parsley, causing her eyes to adjust. The curl of claws, a beak; a head twisted sideways, an odd angle, on the grassy slope of the ditch. Not black plastic, but a baby bird, dead. The wing stretches out, a fan of feathers and fluff. Nora glances up at the sky and down again. The bird’s beak, open a little, shows a glimpse of red inside. She has a fondness for baby birds. When she was a child, her father brought duck eggs home, along with an incubator and some story about the mother duck being savaged by a dog. Nora saw the ducklings hatch, watched them emerge bedraggled and exhausted. The baby birds responded to the girls as they would to a mother duck, following them around the garden, peeping in protest when they were left. Nora got up early to hold each duckling before school. She remembers the weightlessness of each golden ball of fluff in her hands, the cool of a webbed foot on her palm. She’d sit cross-legged while each duckling flapped and fidgeted on her lap before a sudden collapse into limp-bodied sleep.

  Sliding the cello off her back, Nora clambers into the ditch. She skids downwards on the long grass and swears. The slit of eye opens, beady and shining and blue: the poor thing is half-alive. If it’s badly injured in some way, she should just kill it quickly, but she can’t face doing that with her bare hands.

  She climbs out of the ditch. The boys have disappeared. With the cello knocking at her calf, she runs along the last stretch of lane and up the drive to the house. Blood hums through her eardrums. She knows what Ada will say, if asked. The runt of a pet rabbit’s litter born with spindly, bent hind-legs; the TV programme about a baby born with two heads: kindest thing would be to break its neck.

  In the hallway Nora leans her cello against the wall. The house is quiet. Ada must be napping so she has some time. Hoping the bird is merely stunned and she might be able to save it, she flits down the hallway, through the kitchen and out of the back door into the garden to the shed, where she regards the jumble of gardening tools and household remnants: a tea-chest, a budgerigar’s bath and a sixties bulky television set with no innards. Must have been one her father used for spare parts, years ago. Out here bent over his workbench, spectacles held together with Elastoplast, repairing things. Her father would not have abandoned the baby bird.

  Nora’s palms itch from the dust. She can’t see the incubator; perhaps it was borrowed and returned. She tips the straw-like remnants of a bird’s nest from a Startrite shoe-box. It will do for now. As an afterthought, she grabs the coal shovel, in case she has to kill the bird.

  She’s halfway down the drive when she hears laughter. The same three youths drift past the gate, two passing a can between them, downing something. The third, a black hood hiding all but the jut of his jaw, has a fag clenched in his mouth. The hoodie is several sizes too big, shoulder seams halfway down his arms, baggy sleeves mostly hiding his hands, but as he flicks his wrist in a repetitive gesture she glimpses a knife, definitely a knife this time, the blade shooting out from the handle each time he flicks. They head back towards the bird in the ditch.

  Nora has an idea, and sprints back to the house. Her father’s old bee-keeping veil hangs beside his raincoat. She grabs the veil, draws it over her head and reaches for the protective gloves on the hat shelf above the coats. Out on the lane again, clutching the shovel, she bears down on the three boys crouched by the ditch. The mesh of the veil is sticky with dust.

  The youths look round. One, gawping at her, belches and clutches his stomach.

  ‘Careful! It’s highly contagious.’ She makes her voice a gruff bark. ‘Bird flu!’

  Two of the boys step back, but the one with the black hood grinds his fag end under his trainer before slipping the hood from his forehead. The gleam above his upper lip is not a boil, but a lip piercing. His smile is slick with confidence.

  ‘Gonna get rid of it?’ He jerks his head towards the jumble of black feathers.

  Nora nods, pointing in the direction of a red van parked a little way up the lane: Harry’s van.

  ‘Sick!’ The boy kicks the kerb with the toe of his trainer before he struts off, the ragged hems of his jeans scuffing. His two mates scuttle along behind, one glancing back over his shoulder. Nora suppresses the laughter threatening to bubble up inside her. She’ll refashion the whole story later for her mother: young hooligans prowling and armed with knives, an injured bird; herself coming to the rescue, festooned in a veil.

  The bird opens one visible eye as she bends over it but, although the spread wing has been gathered in to the bird’s breast, it doesn’t stir. She puts the shovel down. Her father’s gloves are too stiff with age and disuse to handle something light and fragile as a bauble, she might crush the bird’s ribcage. As the finger of her glove brushes the feathers, the beak opens wider, tongue lifting like a latch, but the bird doesn’t peck or claw. She lifts the veil from her face and removes the gloves. Taking a breath, she flexes her fingers and, with a fingertip, strokes the back of the bird’s head. The feathers there are smooth, iridescent green and purple.

  She’d better get a move on, because Ada will want tea when she wakes from her nap. As her fingers close around spines like plastic drinking-straws amongst the feathers the bird jolts sideways, a heave of body and wing which catches Nora by surprise. She lurches back.

  Harry is wandering down the lane whistling, feet slopping in a pair of purple plastic crocs. His buckets hang, clanking, from his wooden ladder balanced over a shoulder, and his Hawaiian shirt, fastened with only one remaining button, gapes over his broad chest. He’s holding a brown paper bag.

  He stops and contemplates Nora’s legs as she stands in the ditch, the hem of her dress clutched up at her hips away from the sappy bluebells. She drops her dress and tugs the bee-veil from her head.

  ‘All OK?’ His voice is a rumble.

  ‘Yes.’ Nora nods, smiling. ‘Yes, yes, absolutely.’ He’s studying her face, waiting for her to say more. She must look mad standing like this in a ditch. ‘There’s a bird.’ She points.


  Harry puts his brown paper bag, the buckets and cloths, the ladder and his bundle of car keys in a heap on the tarmac and hunkers down.

  She waits for the deep slow sound of his voice. She has grown to like its vibration, the slur of words as if he can’t be bothered to separate sounds. In the few months since he parked his caravan up on Geoff Strickland’s old airstrip, he’s become a familiar sight around the village. His forehead is furrowed by a long scar which makes it difficult to guess his age but he seems older than her; perhaps forty. More scars, pencil-thin and silvery, web across the backs of his hands, now splayed on each thigh. He has no small talk, leaving sentences to float, incomplete, as he stares into the middle distance over a cup of tea. Now, however, he says nothing. He kneels by the bird, broad shoulders blocking her view. Curls clump at the nape of his neck, as if he’s been out in wind on water all day. A gust blows the floral cotton of her dress against her thighs.

  She jumps when Harry gets to his feet and steps up from the ditch, the bird’s body cradled in one large-knuckled hand, against the fuzz of his chest. His other hand rests over the folded wings. The hair on Harry’s forearm spreads over his watchstrap. Nora moves closer; the bird blinks at the fall of her shadow. Against her ribs, her heartbeat skitters as she and Harry gaze down at the bird with its elastic smile of a beak.

  ‘Will it survive, do you think?’

  Harry shrugs. ‘These birds, man, they are something else.’

  In the kitchen, Harry stands with the bird cupped in his hands, his fingers encircling the wings. Part of a black-banded leg and a foot slip out to dangle and thrust at air before withdrawing. When the foot slips out again, Nora reaches out with her forefinger; the bird’s toenails – delicate, translucent – graze her skin and pause, mid-air.