Rook (10 page)

‘Come on inside now, Mum.’ Nora stoops to embrace her mother’s tiny frame, her cheek against the prominent line of collar-bone where Ada’s skin is thin and browned as an autumn leaf.

Later, Nora lies awake. An owl hoots; another answers. Rook is downstairs, alone in the kitchen. Nora turns over on to her side.

She will go and see Eve, tomorrow. She’s put it off far too long.
I’m pregnant, I expect you guessed
. She is a lousy friend. She should tell Eve how bad she feels and explain what has stopped her calling by, the way, when things she needs to forget get stirred about in her head, her mind shuts down, she can’t think straight, and her priorities get disordered so that she doesn’t recognise herself.

She rolls on to her back, straightens out her legs, points her toes to stretch out her calf muscles. She should get up, go for a run, but her body is reluctant. She won’t sleep, though, because her thoughts will continue to leapfrog. It’s why she can’t play properly any more, this inability to either concentrate or relax, a constant spiccato, percussive, bouncing in her head, repeated and repeated. Her hands lie empty and useless on the bed. She rubs her face.

To confront Ada and ask directly about her plans for the garden will only make her more secretive. Nora learned, years ago, the necessity of avoiding confrontation with her mother. She remembers her discomfort when a pre-teen growth spurt left her awkward with her body, taller than both Ada and Flick, who was by then nineteen. Reedy and pale, all elbows and knees, Nora looked nothing like her mother or sister. Only her white-blonde hair was substantial, waist-length, fanning out in waves.
My Saxon princess
, her father called her, and from the age of about four she’d fought with Ada to keep her hair long, running away and hiding from her mother and her hairdressing scissors. If caught and lifted on to the kitchen counter for a haircut, she’d bite at Ada’s wrists. How she’d hated her teenage body, its angles and bones, until, that is, she was sent to Marlene, the dressmaker’s.

In Marlene’s mirrors, the indigo of the gown for which Nora was being fitted anchored her against the white puff and gauze backdrop of racked bridal gowns behind. She was about to take up the Senior Scholarship at the Academy, and Ada wanted a performance gown specially made. Once a week over the summer Nora went to be draped with silk and taffeta, measured and fitted, seams taken in and hems lowered. In the wall of mirrors, Nora stared at herself in a full-length gown.
Lanky Legs
, Flick called her.

Marlene, the French seamstress, spoke through lips clamped around pins. A tiny tattoo of a butterfly fluttered at the pulse on her wrist as she prodded and turned Nora this way and that. The silky material brushed, cool, against Nora’s thigh and she longed to rip off the cloth-tackiness of an Elastoplast she had on one knee. Marlene leaned close to lift Nora’s hair in both hands as she heaped it high to fasten it in place with hair-pins. Exposed to the air, the hairs on Nora’s neck lifted.

Pins in her teeth, Marlene gave Nora’s hips a pinch and muttered, ‘Good for clotheses.’ She stood back, studying Nora in the mirror. ‘The collar-bones,’ her voice was scratchy as sawdust, as if she needed to clear her throat, ‘so perfect.’

The smell of cigarettes thickened Marlene’s breath and stale smoke coiled into her French pleat, the aroma carrying a complicated sense of dalliances in dimly lit bars. Of romantic, black and white films where the heroines wore scarlet lipstick and Hermes suits cinched at the waist. When Marlene moved away across the room, her pore-deep perfume, animal and earthy, remained behind, at the back of Nora’s throat.

Marlene pinched and measured tucks and necklines, the fit and fall across the shoulders, the hips. Nora chewed on a finger as she watched the deft movements of Marlene’s painted nails until Marlene slapped at her hand. ‘
Saperlipopette
!’

Marlene stubbed her cigarettes on a silver-plated bon-bon plate on the floor, pushed with her stockinged foot out of the way. By the end of an afternoon, ash and dog-ends overflowed on to the carpet. On those nights, when Nora lay in bed and thought ahead to the autumn and leaving home for London, Marlene’s smoke and perfume, exotic and alien, hovered close, embedded in the mass of Nora’s own hair spread on the pillow.

The London in her mind’s eye was composed of vertical lines – a squeezed sky jammed between streets lined with shop windows – and thin, crowded spaces; people milling in the endless choice of tearooms, bars and restaurants. She’d fallen in love with the gracious and pale-stoned frontage of the Royal Academy; the graceful plane trees – straight and tall, not deformed by salt winds – casting a flutter of shadows over the broad pavement; the glitter of the looped crystal chandeliers in the Duke’s Hall with its high painted ceiling. London for Nora was also the incense and candle wax in the air of the chapel where she played her entrance piece to Isaac Brennen, who got up from a distant pew and came closer, standing in the aisle under the fall of light from a stained-glass window, hands in his trouser pockets. She drew the final bow across and held herself still to allow the last inner vibrations to fade from her body before she tossed her hair from her face and looked up. She had no doubt she had played exceptionally well.

‘Well, your music teachers seem to think very highly of you.’ His accent clipped the words. Looking down at his notes, he continued, his voice low and quick, to criticise the naivety of her playing, the lack of emotional control over her body language. Nora gripped her bow. She stared at the gleam of his black hair, the sharp cut of his goatee beard. When he glanced up from his notes, frowning, her breath caught. She would not cry.

‘This will cease,’ he announced without smiling. ‘Perhaps to start,’ Brennen waved a dismissive hand in the direction of her kicked-off shoes, ‘to start, you should play with the shoes on.’ He nodded curtly, tucked a battered leather music case under his arm and left her to his colleagues’ further questioning. He was shorter than she expected and walked with a slight limp. Her mind strained to follow the echo of his uneven footfall down the long aisle and she dropped her bow when the chapel door banged behind him.

She turned to the others. The answers she gave them were automatic, easy.

When the autumn came and she sat in the tiered ranks of the lecture hall, she refused to titter or gasp with the other students at the rapid fire of sexual innuendo of Isaac’s jokes. She didn’t whisper behind her hand about the outlandish coloured socks he wore and which showed only when he sat to demonstrate a technique on the cello. She didn’t comment on the flamboyance of his collection of hats. He sometimes twirled a metal-tipped stick when walking stiff-legged through the college courtyards. Rumour had it he fell from a horse as a child.

Isaac was a magnetic performer, and he needed an audience. Nora dreamed of catching him unaware, but she also waited for and wanted the fiercer side of his onstage persona to explode through the repartee, the moment when he would begin to pace the lecture platform, eyes glittering. Something within her responded to the fury he showed towards those less passionate than himself about music.

‘Discipline, not emotion,’ he’d bark. ‘The discipline of the structure, its architectural strength, is what you must look for and understand.’ He glared down from the podium. ‘Learn control!’

He talked about music with a forcefulness she wanted for herself, for at times the music overwhelmed her. As the term progressed, he glanced her way when she passed him in the canteen or library, or on the grand curve of the stairways, his look private in those public places. Her skin pricked. One day she came across him in the library. He stood with a manuscript in his hands, filling the narrow gap between two shelves where she needed to search. She’d hesitated, held her breath, walked quickly on by. She wasn’t brave enough. The leap of tempo in her blood told her he’d seen her pass.

Sometimes, leaving the Academy library, she drifted past his study window and strained to hear him playing. She never did. It was said he practised only in the privacy of his home, or shut away in one of the many cloistered and anonymous practice rooms, rows of identical, soundproofed rooms below ground level, cramped and uniform spaces like cells in a honeycomb. Early in the mornings and every evening, when she pulled, then pushed, through the intimate suck and release of the door-seal, she imagined she’d find him there, in the dark, seated at the piano, awaiting her arrival.

In the end it was a far more prosaic beginning. After a seminar in her final year, a cluster of students were casually included in an invitation to a bar with three or four of the music tutors who often drank together at lunchtimes and early evenings. It was pouring with rain. When Nora arrived at the pub soaked through, Isaac was shaking out an umbrella in the doorway. In the Ladies, she stood in front of the splotched mirror and scrunched clumps of her wet hair to dry it a little, calling up the vision of herself in Marlene’s wall of mirrors. She was no longer a too-tall, too-thin girl. She tipped her head upside down to shake out the mass of her hair, lifting it from her neck and ears under the hand-drier. When she looked again at her reflection, her hair was wild, waves tensing to curls as they dried.

In the crowded bar, between people holding drinks and bags and damp coats, Nora was shunted down an upholstered bench and seated beside Isaac. Up close, he seemed smaller. She had a sudden wish to be underground at the Academy, pushing through the double doors into the sealed silence of a practice room to find him there, alone.

Someone, another tutor, was buying a round of drinks and she hesitated, unsure.

‘G and T, ice and lemon,’ Isaac said. He was so close she could see the wet of his bottom lip, glimpse the twist of his tongue when he spoke. ‘Times two?’

She nodded.

The group played drinking games, composers’ names and dates and biographical details shouted across the tables, Nora and Isaac hemmed in until the crowd thinned, much later. Long tendrils of her hair curled as they dried, and clung to the sleeve of his wool jacket. She didn’t move from her seat, even when desperate for the loo, but stayed, legs crossed tight, squashed up against his shoulder. She saw for the first time that his eyes, usually shadowed, were a brown close to gold, like syrup capturing the light. His oiled hair gleamed under the wall lamp, his face under the prominent brow cast by the spill of light into lines and hollows. An emptiness like hunger prowled through her. She couldn’t move away. When he leaned forward or stretched across the table, she smelled the end-of-the-day scent of his skin, and she knew what would happen, later in the evening, when he took her back to his room to find some sheet music she asked him about, when he took her on to his lap and his nose buried into the hollow of her neck, her hair, those darting, expert hands of his exploring, across and low and firm down her belly.

She wore an Indian cotton skirt, wrapped and tied around her waist, falling open from her thighs as he pulled her up and back on to his lap, hard and close to his body, his beard pricking her neck, his fingers on her. The gin she’d drunk was oily and aromatic on her lips.

11

‘I keep seeing someone. I think he may be dead.’ Nora brushes the hair back from her face. Her hands carry the smell of the ivy she and Eve have been pulling all morning from the roof and walls of the boathouse.

Eve straightens, her arms filled with trailing ivy clumps. ‘I knew something was up.’

Nora tugs on an ivy runner. The roots lift stringy and white from the soil, a metre or more creeping along the bottom of the boathouse wall to join a dense mass of ivy growing like a small tree attached to the bricks, with shaggy appendages embedded in the mortar.

‘Go on.’ Eve drops the ivy and dusts off her hands.

‘I meant to tell you before.’ Nora stops. Even though she’s rehearsed this conversation, she’s unsure how to continue. She might say too much. Never stop.

Eve comes closer. ‘It’s good for you,’ her voice soothes, ‘to let go.’ She lays a hand across Nora’s ribs, just below her breasts, and closes her eyes. ‘Right here,’ she begins, but her voice trails off and she opens her eyes, frowning. The heel of her hand presses against Nora’s ribs. An expression Nora can’t fathom, of doubt or puzzlement, flutters across her face. ‘You know he’s dead?’

‘I had a dream. No. Well. Thing is, first I had this dream and then I saw him, here, in the village. I was sure it was him, at first sight, or half-sure, but then, when I consider the likelihood, after all, it’s been more than a year, that he would be . . .’ Nora shrugs.