Rook (25 page)

Harry promised to make her peach Bellinis. Was that today? It could have been one of those nebulous promises certain men habitually make to women, but she doesn’t have Harry down as that sort, though he is hard to tie to fixed arrangements, dates and times. He hasn’t come to work on her vegetable patch today, or the day before. Where has he got to?

In the kitchen, Nora is banging tins. She’s emptied the wall cupboard of its contents and is placing newly bought tins right at the back, turning each so the label faces outwards. As usual, she’s humming some baleful cello piece or another. She’d do well to choose a gayer tune, something with more of a trill to lift the spirits but she does have a tendency to hum in this manner, screwing up her face, dropping her head, to reach the low notes. Something she’s done since childhood, chin squashed and folded into her neck. Not an attractive habit.

Ada drops Brian’s book on to the table with a thud. ‘Darling, shall I put on Radio 3? For a little music?’

Nora stops humming. She pauses for a moment in her busyness with the tins to look at Ada and shake her head, but then she continues, arranging each with more precision, a twitch of her wrist to straighten the Heinz Skinned Tomatoes. Ada tweaks open a shopping bag and peers inside.

‘Won’t bite, Mum. That bag’s for the fridge.’ Nora glances at her wristwatch. ‘I could do with a hand. I’ve got a lesson in less than half an hour.’

Ada’s insides pinch with irritation. She’ll be left to her own devices again just when she was looking forward to a prolonged conversation over supper. She closes the bag, smoothing it over corners and edges which poke through the thin plastic; nothing with the succulence of fruit. She sighs. These cartons of egg and milk she doesn’t want to touch.

‘Surely you don’t have to turn out again, when it looks like rain.’ Nora lines up tins of kidney beans. ‘You poor dear.’

Nora leans across the draining board towards the window. Outside, the sky is blue. She lifts a hand to her forehead in an exaggerated mime of a sailor searching the sky. ‘Not a cloud in sight, Mum.’ Their eyes meet. ‘I’ll only be half an hour or so. I’ll cook when I get back.’

‘Oh, no need to fuss.’ Ada’s fingers find the nub of her locket, warm from her skin and the sun. She slides it up and down the gold chain. ‘So much food, Nora! Do we live in daily expectation the government will again order rationing? Is a strike predicted?’

‘Flick’s coming next week with the girls, remember?’

Ada had forgotten it was next week. Time stretches and pings back, like one of those tiny rubber balls. ‘Of course. Only just now I was thinking we shall need to air the beds.’

‘Why Flick can’t make up her own bed when she comes to stay, heaven only knows, she’s no more of a visitor than I am. One of Dad’s books?’

Ada puts her hand on the book which lies on the kitchen table. This is the conversation she wanted to have, a conversation about Brian’s book. She sighs again. Nora glances over her shoulder.

‘You’ve been in the sun too much, Mum.’

‘Are you referring to the course of my entire lifetime?’

Nora half-smiles but turns away, her head back in the cupboards. Jars: marmalade and honey – the glass clinking. She is no longer humming but her arms fly between bag and shelf. Always has been hectic, that child.

Ada has been reading old Sussex words listed in one of the appendices of Brian’s book. Old Sussex words for mud:
cledgy; sleech; slommocky
. She mouths the
sl
and
bl
of them, shaping her tongue and lips around their texture.
Stabble
means to walk thick mud into the house. She likes the squelch and spread of the word, its peaks and smears. A memory surfaces: Nora at about four, squatting by a tin of gloss paint, her hair like thistledown. Nora plunged her arm into the paint tin right up to the elbow, an expression of total absorption – bliss – on her face. Now, Ada’s arrival in the kitchen has put an end to her daughter’s humming and, chill as sea mist, a mood rolls off Nora, seeping through the sunny kitchen. She wedges the twelve-pack of toilet tissue high up on the top shelf.

Ada clicks her tongue. ‘Oh that’s impossibly high! Can’t they go in the lavatory, the spare rolls, where they always used to be kept?’

‘What about here?’ Nora says, and pushes the pack into the cupboard under the sink. The door won’t close.

‘You don’t want me tumbling off a stool and doing myself an injury when you’re out at work, now do you?’ Ada smoothes the hair over her ears.

Nora takes a knife and stabs open the packet of toilet rolls. ‘Mum, will you tell me what’s going on with the garden?’

‘The garden?’

‘Harry said . . .’

‘An unkempt garden devalues the house.’

Nora stands with a toilet roll in each hand. ‘You’re having the house valued?’

She has an expression on her face Ada recognises; the expression she wore when she came home that spring, all skin and bone; a tight look. Not quite a frown.

‘You’re getting too thin again. It’s all that running.’

Never did get to the bottom of it, giving away that priceless instrument, coming home to shut herself in her room.

Nora bites her lip. Her face droops as if she will cry. ‘You are going to sell Creek House?’

‘Who knows?’

Nora says nothing. She turns away to squeeze the toilet rolls into the cupboard. They will be squashed out of shape.

‘Creek House is far too big for one person.’ She should make reparations. The urge is strong to put out her hand, to get Nora to refrain from her frantic motion, but at that moment the bird comes hop-stopping into the room like one of those clockwork birds one used to buy. At least this one makes no noise. He jumps with a flutter on to Nora’s shoulder and then down again to peck at a roll of toilet tissue.

Ada purses her lips. She runs her fingertip along the dry skin. Too much of her body is dry, these days. She puts the thought from her. Upstairs is the new coral lipstick she treated herself to, an expensive brand in a showy gold case. A smooth twist and the moist colour will emerge. She shouldn’t have, not really. Money doesn’t go far these days. Creek House would raise a tidy sum, without a doubt.

Nora has her head in the cupboard.

‘Roger is going to pop round to see what he thinks.’

The bird pulls a length of toilet tissue out across the floor and proceeds to shred the paper into strips.

‘Can’t you stop it doing that?’

Nora pulls her head out of the cupboard to reply, but both women turn towards the sound of whistling outside. The handle of the back door rattles. It’s Harry, rapping a belated
rata-tat-tat
even as he opens the door wide and steps into the room. He beams at them both. A powerfully built man, one who gives full attention to everything a woman has to say, and remembers.

Ada swivels her legs to one side and crosses her ankles, drapes her arm over the back of her chair and smiles back. ‘Harry!’

She is delighted to see him but Nora is fussing, twisting her hair up into a loose bun and fumbling for a pencil from the pen-pot which she will shove through her hair to hold it in place and proceed to pull out five minutes later, only to begin the process all over again.

‘Greetings!’ Harry looks wonderfully cheery today. He’s caught the sun and is ruddy with health. Even better, in one bear-like paw he grips two bottles of dry Prosecco, in the other, a bulging and slightly soggy paper bag. Nora appears to be barring his way.

Ada makes a show of stretching out her arm and turning her wrist to the light to check the time. ‘Aren’t you just on your way out, dear?’

‘Yes, Harry. Bad timing I’m afraid. I’m just off out teaching.’ Nora has picked up her cello and with it she obstructs Harry’s entrance. They look at each other and something passes unspoken between them. Harry’s expression drops from cheerful to crestfallen.

‘I’ve brought cherries for Rook,’ he says. ‘Peaches to make Bellinis for your mother.’

Seeing Nora’s jaw grow firm, Ada clears her throat and draws herself up. She rests her chin on her clasped hands. ‘Oh Nora, for heaven’s sake give the poor man some space and make way for him to come in.’ She arches one eyebrow for Harry’s benefit.

Nora bangs out through the back door with her cello and is gone.

28

‘It’s intolerable. A television programme will encourage the hordes to the village.’ Daphne Johnson’s voice has a strident edge, announcing her views to the entire post office rather than Nora and Steve, who are in the queue beside her. In front of them a group of children fight over which penny sweets to buy from the jars on the shelves behind the counter.

‘Litter everywhere, chewing gum on the pavements, queues in the shops.’ Daphne nudges Nora’s arm to get her attention. ‘I hear from Ada he’s called several times, the television man, especially to consult her, because of your late father’s work.’

Daphne makes Jonny sound like an alien.
The Television Man
. Nora nods and half-smiles, sucking sticky raspberry juice from her fingers so that she doesn’t have to reply. She has no desire to have the detail of Jonny’s project winkled from her by Daphne’s probing tongue; there are other things on her mind. She holds up the punnets of raspberries and checks the bottom of the containers, where red juice oozes from holes punched in the plastic.

The parish council has unanimously agreed to put forward a request to the bishop for permission to exhume what they are calling the ‘Godwin Grave’. If the Saxon princess story is shelved in favour of the discovery of Harold II’s burial place, Elsa Macleod will take centre stage in Ada’s place. Ada is furious with Nora. Daphne obviously doesn’t know any of this yet.

Steve’s eyes are red and swollen, his fair hair sticking up at the back as if he’s just rolled out of bed, late for everything. ‘My feeling is, Daphne, in this village we are lucky enough to have a church of great romantic beauty and steeped in history. There’s much to be said for sharing that richness with others.’ He glances at his wristwatch.

‘I can get these bits if you need to be elsewhere,’ Nora says, nodding at his basket of groceries. ‘I’m in no hurry, just on my way home.’

‘Thanks, Nora. I’m fine for time, just keeping track.’ Steve rubs his nose between his eyes. ‘Hay fever,’ he says, seeing her look. ‘Comes on when everyone else has stopped suffering.’

‘They’re harvesting the peas. Frightful black dust.’ Daphne wrinkles her nose in distaste, but doesn’t allow herself to get sidetracked. ‘I hear the television people want to dig up the body, take it away and film the entire process. Surely that won’t be allowed, Vicar?’

‘As yet, we don’t know. Respect for human sanctity and the consecrated church will be a prime concern, but we will remain open-minded about scholarly research.’

From the foreshore echo the chimes of Giovanni’s ice-cream van: Camptown Races, high-pitched and fast. Heads turn as one towards the doorway of the post office, where there’s nothing to be seen except sunlight on the purple velvet of the petunias in Eve’s courtyard garden across the road.

Daphne purses her lips. ‘It’s that Spaniard.’

The veiled racism makes Nora snappy. ‘Which
Spaniard
, Daphne?’

Ada glides past the doorway, holding Zach’s hand, pointing back down the road to something out of sight. Benjie trots by with his lead dragging along the tarmac. Nora piles her raspberries on top of the nearby stack of Coca-Cola cans. ‘Sorry!’ she says, and squeezes past Daphne.

Outside, Ada stands in the road, stroking Zach’s blond cap of hair with the same deliberation as she’d stroke a cat. Zach’s attention is focused on his melting ice cream, from which creamy rivulets run down to his elbow. Benjie sits beside them both, tongue lolling as he pants in the heat.

Nora squints in the sudden brightness of the sun after the darkness of the post office. ‘What’s going on, Mum?’

Ada watches her hand on the shine of Zach’s blond hair. ‘Since, once more, you were out, I called on Eve and now I’m looking after this beautiful boy. His mother is—’

Eve appears round the corner, a newspaper pinned beneath her arm and two more ice creams, one in each hand. She nods towards the front door of the cottage, above which Stavros has painted a sign saying ‘Bosham Castle’ to confuse the tourists who pause to comment on the quaintness of the terrace of cottages and to peer through the front window, straight through Eve and Stavros’s tiny living room and out of the window on the other side to the water. Eve pushes the door open with her foot and they all pile inside.