Rook (6 page)

The vibration behind Nora’s ribcage travels down into her body’s core, the music pinning her to the wooden pew. Judging by the rustling during breaks between performances, others, like Nora, only notice their discomfort once the music has stopped, and shift position too. The acoustics of the cathedral add clarity to the sound and she’s glad she saw the notice as she passed and slipped into the lunchtime recital on a whim.

The sousaphone player, with his eyes closed, is enfolded in the instrument’s gleaming coils. After a while, Nora realises she has been watching only him for several minutes, watching with a kind of voyeurism which now opens up within her a vast emptiness. To hold back the tears, she looks up at the arches of the vaulted ceiling high above but the stone emphasises the emptiness and chill of the cathedral. Her loss comes down sharp as a pain.

Her own sense of being carried by music, of vanishing into the layers of a chord shift, the fall of an arpeggio, has been dulled for a long time, replaced by the mechanics and techniques she teaches. She finds no joy in it.

In an interval between performances, Nora slips out of the cathedral to the lavatories in House of Fraser opposite, where she sits on the closed lid with her eyes shut. When she gets to the school summer break, she will put the cello in the attic and find something else to do with her life. Unable to go back and listen to the rest of the recital, she joins the queue in Costa’s. She ate breakfast very early, before running, and has eaten nothing since, so she chooses a slice of almond and raspberry Bakewell tart for energy and climbs the stairs to a seat by the window.

From upstairs, there’s a good view of the road below, where, straight away, she sees a broad-brimmed hat, a flash of red coat-lining in the sunshine. The spin of her blood. The man, now in the long shadow of the cathedral spire, crosses West Street. He has Isaac’s loping walk. The coat slung over his shoulder swings from a finger.

The sun through the glass is hot; Nora moves back a little, still watching as the man stops suddenly on the pavement edge. A woman with a shopping trolley bumps into him. Though he shakes his head and waves a hand in apology, he continues the conversation on his mobile. Head down, he swivels on a heel and slides the phone into his shirt pocket. When he glances up at the window of Costa’s, Nora jerks back into the shadows behind the curtain but not before she sees him tip his hat. He must have seen her watching. She studies her fingers wrapped around the unwieldy mug of latte; her strong cello-playing hands which Isaac had loved. He used to hold them on his lap, between his own, much smaller ones, and tell her,
with these hands, you were born for the cello
. Useless to think about that now.

They are shaking, her hands. She needs to concentrate on putting the mug down so as not to spill any coffee. On the white plate, the almond and raspberry Bakewell slice glistens. It’s moist and will taste delicious, but she is no longer hungry. She straightens her back. The muscles tear a tiny bit, she has learned, each time she runs, but the process of repair is what makes them grow stronger. To speed up repair, to make the muscle-strengthening process even more effective, serious runners have a list of foods they should eat. She is not yet that committed but, determined not to be ridiculous, she makes herself bite into the Bakewell slice.

Miss Macleod removes her cycle clips and rucksack in the hallway, having cycled to Creek House with her hired cello strapped into a bicycle trailer acquired from her nephew and intended for a surfboard. She is wearing black Nike boots with a white swoosh.

‘How’ve you been getting along with “Scarborough Fair” this week, Miss Macleod?’

‘Please call me Elsa, dear.’

Nora can’t quite manage this, even though Miss Macleod has been her pupil for more than a year, since she took up learning the cello for the first time in her seventies. She rides her bike in all weathers, even the eight miles in and out of Chichester, and it’s this lean stamina combined with the Miss-Jean-Brodie accent which reminds Nora of her school PE mistress. Today, Miss Macleod struggles through ‘Scarborough Fair’, her bowing heavy with determination. She lost the love of her life in the Korean War, so the story goes. Once the village beauty, her hair went white overnight. Nora can’t quite work out the maths but as it was about fifty years ago, she must have been extraordinarily young to have white hair.

‘Did you know?’ Miss Macleod taps the music stand with her bow and disturbs Nora’s reverie. She has pushed up her reading glasses to peer at the sheet music as if it is an interesting but highly debatable article in a journal. ‘These are the ingredients of a traditional herbal contraceptive douche: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.’

Miss Macleod has forgotten all about the bow in her hands and sits back, glasses now dangling from a string of coloured glass beads around her neck.

‘Could you try to remember to always hold the bow by the frog, do you think? The oil on your fingers . . .’

‘Extracts of these herbs were also used for abortion, administered by midwives, sometimes with fatal effects not only on the foetus, but also the mother. And yet here it is, repeated again and again, as a refrain, a song to a lover. Don’t you find that fascinating?’

Nora nods, it is fascinating. A few weeks ago she and Eve planted parsley, rosemary and thyme outside the boathouse in old cattle troughs from Ted’s farm.

‘Are you familiar with this ballad, my dear?’ Miss Macleod leans towards Nora with the air of someone just about to impart a secret. ‘There are, of course, many versions.’ Her fingers run up and down the bead string of her glasses, her eyes are dreamy. ‘The speaker demands impossible tasks of his former lover.’

The lesson is, as usual, about to veer wildly off course. Miss Macleod is passionate about history. She likes to talk and, although it means the lesson will almost always spill over the allocated half-hour, Nora likes to listen, to slip into the role of student. Today, however, she has resolved not to get distracted by Miss Macleod’s enthusiasm, but to keep a focus on the bow’s sweep and explain the necessity to think of the down and up strokes in terms of musical expression.

‘The piece is really coming on. Well done.’ Nora lifts her cello, prepared to demonstrate one or two points of technique, but Miss Macleod has her head on one side, waiting for a response. There’s no ignoring her expectancy. ‘Actually, do you know, I only remember the refrain.’

The refrain dominates the song, a spell of repetition.

‘You should look up the lyrics in their entirety, my dear. Most interesting, you’ll find.’

‘I will, I will. Now, shall we look at the opening bars one more time? Keep checking that you are not pressing down. Allow the cello to support the weight of the bow.’

Later, they stand in the hallway where Miss Macleod has spread A4 photographs of sections of the Bayeux Tapestry out on the table.

‘For years, the Tapestry was thought simply to be a piece of Norman propaganda,’ she tells Nora, ‘but we’re learning more and more about its complex and subversive nature. We’re now certain it was designed by an English artist, within a decade of the Battle of Hastings.’

The Battle of Hastings, the battle everyone who has ever been a schoolchild in England has heard about, and the detail they all remember is Harold killed by the arrow in his eye. Nora has begun to appreciate, from listening to Miss Macleod, how much the past is multilayered and shifting. She has learned the passage of time and the surfacing of untold stories will reveal new histories, changing what was previously thought to be ‘true’. The arrow in the eye was the equivalent of a cover-up story, the image a later alteration to the embroidery; Harold II met a death far more barbaric.

Academics began to unravel the secrets of the Tapestry decades ago. Nora imagines pale, long-nosed men donning gloves to pore over Anglo-Saxon documents, turning vellum pages headed with gilded letters and kept in high-ceilinged rooms shadowy as churches to prevent damage from the light, their discoveries written up, but buried in obscure journals. The rest of the world left in ignorance.

From the hall table Elsa picks up the photograph which shows Harold praying at Bosham church. She translates the Latin for Nora’s benefit: ‘
Where Harold, Duke of the English, and his soldiers ride to Bosham.
And look, here it says,
The church
—’

Miss Macleod will never leave Bosham. Here, she can stand where Harold stood. She can step from her cottage into the churchyard next door and reach out to touch the walls of a building pictured in a work of art which is a thousand years old.

‘
Here Harold sailed across the sea
.’ She points to a longboat with oars, bobbing on the wiggle of woollen waves. ‘What we really need to unravel, my dear, because it will help us solve at least part of the mystery, is Harold’s reason for this fated journey to France. There are several possiblilties.’

Little woollen figures wade out, bare-legged, into the sea at Bosham. Real people, alive ten centuries ago, stitched into the fabric, captured busy with their lives, rowing, riding, carrying hounds and hawks on to the longboats.

‘An artistic portrayal of events, of course,’ Elsa says. ‘One has to take this into account. It’s a matter of interpretation. But here, my dear, in the anti-Norman subtext, are so many hidden histories. Most people have no idea.’

For photograph after photograph, scene after scene, Elsa points and names characters, the events and stories which surround them until eventually Nora begins to lose track. Distracted by the fantastic creatures whose heads decorate the prows of the English longboats, she can’t interrupt to ask what they are without revealing she’s not been paying full attention.

‘Most exhilarating, my dear. I’ll let you know how I get on.’ Miss Macleod tightens the strap of her cycle helmet under her chin.

‘Good!’ Nora says, unsure whether she refers to cello practice, or a particular line of enquiry in her ongoing historical research.

Once Miss Macleod has left, Nora thinks again of the little woollen figures feasting in an upper room before tucking their tunics at their hips to paddle into the water as if they are on holiday. In contrast, later scenes are dominated by horses, disproportionately large and stitched in terracotta or forest-green, their riders weighed down with chain mail, helmets and battle-axes. In the margins of the battle scenes, fantastic-looking birds and beasts give way to semi-naked figures lying horizontally, some without heads. The dead stripped of their armour.

In the dust on the hall table are smudged outlines of the photographs Miss Macleod collected up and slipped into a plastic wallet as she left. Nora wipes a hand across the surface and blows the dust from her skin.

8

How she does enjoy a drink with Giovanni in the Anchor Bleu of an evening. Charming man, with those dark eyes and his marvellous Italian accent, though he leaves early, as always, says his wife will have cooked for him, there are the children to put to bed.

Brian had been putting the girls to bed, she told Giovanni, while she had a snifter on the terrace, and afterwards there was just something of a disagreement. They didn’t row. Brian was a quiet man. Giovanni nodded, but must have thought her quite doolally because she remembered, too late, that he and Brian had never met and everything was too far in the past for him to know who or what she was talking about.

Giovanni is young. Let him go back to his wife and his two little girls.

‘Like me, you, two daughters.’ What was she doing, holding up her fingers –
Two
– like a nincompoop? Giovanni’s understanding of English is perfectly adequate. Her mind is becoming soft.

Giovanni has never met Flick either. He thought there was only Nora. If Nora hadn’t come back from London he might have supposed Ada to be a spinster. The very thought! So she told Giovanni about her last visit to Spain to see Flick and her granddaughters, the olive trees with their silvery leaves and almond blossom in February. It’s possible she sounded a touch maudlin because Giovanni patted her shoulder when he got up to leave, told her she should fly out to Spain again, soon, for the sunshine. Heat the bones, he said. Warm the heart.

Why come and sell ice cream in the godforsaken damp of this country, this village? How Giovanni must miss the sunshine! Even with the fire lit this evening, it’s impossible to drive out the chill trapped within the ancient walls. Even in the height of summer, the windows are too minute to allow any heat from the sun to find its way through to the gloomy interior. And Jason continues to labour under the misconception that an open door suggests a welcome to passers-by.