Rook (2 page)

West Sussex, early twenty-first century

In the half-light, a woman runs, her mouth snatching at air. Along Salthill Creek towards the sea, a rope of hair twisting between her shoulder blades, she ducks the salt-stunted branches. She has long limbs, strong lines to her cheek and jaw and, although she was born here on the Sussex coast, her colouring and build are more characteristic of the Scandinavian. She wears a simple sweat-wicking top, Lycra shorts, gloves, a canary-yellow cap pulled low to hide her eyes and the most expensive trainers she can afford.

At this hour, night has not yet become day. No one else moves in the fields and hedgerows, along lanes, down the ancient footpath or out upon the water. A mist ghosts the land.

Lack of breath woke her, the sensation of weight pressing, of Isaac’s body plastered to hers, slippery. The smell of his hair came back to her, an oil he used, foreign, perhaps, and a little old-fashioned; black hair, silky as a pelt. She lay poised on the dream’s edge, desire tipping her body like vertigo, but too soon her fidgety mind dragged her awake, alone in her childhood bed with a crinkled sheet beneath her.

Nora hates this time of year. Sap and dripping green; riotous birdsong and the sun’s sudden surprising warmth; the bounce of new growth as her fingers raked the grass for scattered pieces of her wind chime, smashed to smithereens by recent gales. Apple blossom petals stuck to her hands. The old tree fooling itself it can still bear fruit.

The mud of the creek path is slick underfoot. Every time one of Nora’s feet slips, muscle jolt and the flare of adrenalin disrupt her rhythm. Her weak knee twinges. She’s too slow. The toe that’s missing a nail rubs against the firmness of the new and very clean trainers. Before she left, the ibuprofen bottle, nearly empty, rattled as she tipped into her palm the extra two pills which now scrape like concrete in her throat. She can’t even do this right.

Nora runs harder, thoughts spattering.

‘Where would you be,’ Ada’s voice had crooned, her lips so close to Nora’s body she jerked away in shock, hand instinctively pressed to her ear, ‘if I’d done the same?’

The middle of the night, Nora was halfway through a virtual tour of a cottage in Norfolk and Ada should have been in bed, not there, leaning across the desk, her breath sweet as pear drops.

‘Remember?’ Ada pushed her face up close to the computer screen and for a moment seemed distracted, screwing up her eyes to peer at the image of a white sofa, a log-burner, alight. ‘
Cosy cottage for two
,’ she read, then clicked her tongue and drew herself up to her full height. ‘You came back from London so worn out from travelling Europe, so many concert appearances—’ Her hand swept the air aside.

Nora tried to rise from the chair, but her mother’s body was too close. She sat down again.

Ada’s face was blank. Her fingers slid over the lapels of her kimono.

‘Mum, you should be in bed.’

‘Mother’s Ruin,’ Ada shook her head. ‘And don’t we know it.’ Her voice dropped low. ‘Such a waste, and your hair in rats’ tails from the wind and rain, the dress sticking to you, sodden, skin and bone, your hip bones, my word, your ribs, one could have played the xylophone on your chest, like some little Orphan Annie you trailed through the village in the middle of the night, didn’t bother to consider a taxi, or the worry you might cause –’

‘STOP!’ She gripped her mother’s upper arms to move her away and Ada’s head fell back like a puppet’s. Horrified, Nora dropped her hands, pushed them down her sides. Bone showed in the set of Ada’s jaw. ‘Oh, I know what you did.’ Her head turned from side to side, ‘Don’t think I don’t.’ She waggled a finger.

Nora drags her forearm across her forehead: the air is damp, her face wet. She should have said something. She will have to, soon.

She runs on. A few bars of the Martinu Cello Concerto, No. 1, bustle through her mind and her body reacts involuntarily, squaring up for the hurly-burly of battle with the orchestra but, with a jerk of her head, like dodging a blow from a branch, the music is banished.

Rachel, her star pupil, leaned in the doorway of the school music room yesterday, dwarfed by the cello on her back. A few strands of hair had escaped her plait and glistened across the navy school jumper. Rachel’s talent is instinctual, fierce as a rage. ‘I haven’t had time to practise,’ she blurted. Her face reddened as if the words were a lie, both hands running over and over her plait, one following the other in an unfamiliar repetitive gesture. She needs to find a way to help Rachel have more confidence. If she was a good teacher, like Isaac, she would be able to instil in all her pupils a faith in their own resources; the belief that the impossible does not exist.

Nora keeps running. She has run every day for almost a year. Even in the semi-darkness, this landscape is familiar, a part of her; she grew up playing here, fingers and feet in the mud at the creek’s edge where the roots of misshapen trees are exposed more and more each year with the movement of tides and earth.

Perhaps Isaac has died. Perhaps the dream is his way of telling her he is no longer in the world.

The sea is close now, the air rich with the salty tang of rust. To the east of the creek path, the squat trees and hawthorns with their delicate twirls of new leaf-growth have given way to open grassland. Nora’s muscles stretch and tighten. She is as lithe and strong as she has ever been, her lungs greedy for the pump and squeeze of her heart. She tastes the salt from her sweat and concentrates on lifting her heels, tilting her hips forward, pushing her elbows further back to get more benefit from her arms. In the silence of early morning, the only sound is her breathing. This she can do. She tugs off her cap, a hat from childhood, too tight and hot.

When she was small, the desire to be bigger and stronger and faster sparked like fuse-wire in her chest. The frustrations of being a child and the arguments with Ada and Flick often prompted her to run away. She’d sneak out from Creek House at night and race along the flint-walled lane to Bosham church where, in those days, her fist could fit inside the keyhole carved deep into the planks of the ancient door. The key was lost or stolen, no one knew when or how. Nora would wait, anchored in the shelter of the outer porch, fist jammed in the keyhole, until the thud of her heart quietened enough for her to listen beyond the percussion of the millwheel to the millstream’s pianissimo ripple and the silted whisper of Salthill Creek.

The step down into the mussel-fragrant air of the church is worn; the door with its metal-studded planks impenetrable as a drawbridge. More than a hundred years ago, while working to lower the church floor, stonemasons uncovered a child’s coffin under the centre of the chancel arch. It was roughly hewn in stone, Saxon, and buried in the position saved for those of high standing where, according to long-held village tradition, King Cnut had buried his young daughter. Later, children in the village marked the place with a memorial slab, etched with the words:
IN MEMORY OF A DAUGHTER OF KING CANUTE
. Today she will go there to light a votive candle for Noah, wedge the taper into the holder with care, so as not to snap any of the hardened dribbles of wax. The flame will smoke a little. She will stand and watch the wisps curl upwards to vanish between the rafters.

Nora has run a long distance. Her heart jostles her ribcage with exhilaration. A race, she’s in the lead. She can run. She has run every day for a year.

My Saxon princess
, her father used to call her, his hand on her hair.

By the time she’s running up the drive to Creek House, several of Nora’s fingers are white and numb, the blood gone from them to pump instead deep inside, to her muscles, her inner organs. She fumbles with the front-door key. In the hallway, Ada is halfway up the stairs with a cup of coffee. It’s not yet seven o’clock.

‘Early for you.’ Nora shoves the front door closed with a foot.

Without turning, Ada flicks a limp hand in dismissal and continues to climb the stairs, her movements jerky and stiff as a puppet’s. She’s in another of her moods.

In the kitchen, Nora takes a long drink from the tap and notices that the pieces of the broken wind chimes, the shell fragments and salt-bleached sticks which she’d lain along the window sill ready to be untangled, have disappeared. Checking the clock, she does her stretches. She needs to shower and get dressed for teaching, but first she wants to find the broken bits and put them somewhere safe, so she moves around the kitchen, searching under newspapers and letter piles, coats and heaps of dry washing; she treads on the pedal of the compost bin and peers in at potato peelings and egg shells. Eventually, standing at the bottom of the stairs, she calls up. ‘Mum?’

Ada has vanished.

Nora bounds up the stairs to rap on her mother’s bedroom door. ‘Mum?’

The door swings open and Ada stands in the doorway, her hands pressed either side of her face. ‘Good gracious me, Nora! What on earth are you creating about now, and at this ungodly hour of the morning?’

3

‘Your mum said you won all sorts of prizes. A virtuoso, you were.’ Eve wrestles with the barn-like outer door of the boathouse, struggling to fasten the latch and padlock because woody tendrils of ivy have jammed the hinges. Towering above Eve, Nora reaches easily to lift a clump out of the way. She leans a shoulder against the battered wood and shoves.

‘All the exotic places you played. Like Russia. You never told me.’

‘It was a while ago now.’

‘She’s very proud of you, isn’t she?’

‘Mum? God no.’ Nora keeps her voice light. ‘Mum thinks I’m the bad penny.’

‘What do you mean?’

Nora looks down on the roots of Eve’s mass of shoe-string plaits, the anchoring strands of hair like the aerial roots of ivy. She gives the door another hefty shove and the metal latch slots into place.

‘I turned up again,’ she says.

Eve snaps the padlock shut.

This afternoon, Eve has picked the theme of Special Occasions for their visit. From her plastic crate-on-wheels, she pulls a portable CD player, plastic flowers, a champagne bucket and photographs, arranging everything on a side table.

Nora can’t get used to the silence and inertia, the circle of chairs with its jumble of occupants shut inside their own heads. Today the only sound comes from a woman slurping drink from a child’s spouty beaker.

Come and play some of the old favourites
, Eve had said,
They’ll love it. Music and singing, it lights them up, please come, if you’ve got time.
Of course Nora has time; these days she has too much time.

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.’