Rook (29 page)

Nora sits beside Eve on the ground. Because of her injured calf she’s been unable to run for days, and it’s making her restless, fidgety. She picks up a jam jar from the pile and begins to pick off the sticky remnants of the Robertson’s Lemon Marmalade label. Eve clears her throat.

‘He was a rat. I’m so glad you finished with him.’

‘I’d never have guessed.’

The focus of Jonny’s eyes had shifted, that was all, when she told him about the phone call. They were sitting in his car, about to drive into town for a meal. He made an attempt to take her hand, but she folded her arms. ‘Oh God, Nora, I didn’t mean you to find out in this way, but . . .’

‘
The time was never quite right to tell me the truth?
Listen to yourself, Jonny.’

Jonny, inevitably, started to talk. His wife Kimberley is older than him and has run a successful catering business for years. He’d left university to marry her and play a role in her business. He cracked his knuckles, pulled the sun visor down and slammed it back up again. Money is the problem. Kimberley is obsessed with it. She has kept hold of the business purse strings. He has to ask her for handouts when he’s strapped for cash. He tapped the car key on his thigh and his voice dropped as he dwelt on the lack of sex,
Almost from day one
.

He raked his fingers through his hair as he talked, and lifted his eyebrows in an upturned V of appeal when he turned to her and explained the Godwin Grave Project might be his chance to break away from Kimberley, to set himself free. She found herself wondering if he had practised the look in front of a mirror.

‘I discovered there wasn’t much to finish,’ Nora says to Eve. Selecting a tube of transparent cobalt paint and a short wide brush, she paints a blue line around the base of the jam jar. Her attraction to Jonny had been as fleeting as a schoolgirl crush.

Having decided to talk things over in the pub, they got out of the car, Jonny tugging at his cuffs to adjust the length of shirtsleeve showing beneath his jacket. Nora wondered how she hadn’t noticed, up until then, that he was vain.

From the church came the clang of the bells: Thursday evening bell-ringing practice. The hesitation and tumble of chimes drowned the music from the bar and distracted Nora from what Jonny was telling her. He’d soon moved off the subject of his money and wife to tell her about a commission from a prestigious series for the Godwin Graves Project, an hour slot.
Perfect
. He waved his arms around as he warmed to his theme. He’d submitted the proposal. Once they had permission for the exhumation, that’s all they were waiting for, any day now and everything would be
squared away
. But news had come in a phone call as they sat in the little garden at the front of the Anchor Bleu.

‘You were right it seems,’ she tells Eve. ‘About the bishop. Permission for exhumation was refused.’

Jonny had answered his phone, leaving Nora alone at the table as he paced up and down the lane. The church bells pealed. Nora’s thoughts drifted to Flick’s wedding at Bosham church, adjusting Flick’s tiara and shaking out the long ivory train as they stood in the porch together before walking down the aisle. They both missed their father that day. Flick had chosen a friend from university to give her away.

Bloody unbelievable. It’s outrageous
. Jonny was tight-lipped and frowning when he returned to the table.

‘Did they tell him why?’ Eve asks.

‘They mentioned lack of a credible academic framework and valid research aims.’

Nora had tried to ignore Jonny’s foot knocking to and fro against the leg of the wooden picnic table, but in the end she put a hand on his leg. Jonny stood abruptly and walked to the wall, hands rammed into his pockets. He scowled towards the church, just visible behind the yew.

‘A few floorboards, a few fucking fifties’ stone slabs, for God’s sake,’ he jabbed his finger in the direction of the bell tower. ‘A few inches of sodding mud.’

‘He said he could take a trowel and dig the body up himself in less than an hour.’

‘He wouldn’t, would he?’

‘Come off it, Eve. He’s arrogant but not stupid. No. He’s been told they can take the matter to court, if the parochial church council supports an appeal. He’s not giving up that easily.’

The cobalt blue paint transforms the jam jar. For the sky, Nora selects turquoise. With a candle alight inside, the colours will glow like stained glass, dance with light.

Isaac used to say a musician paints with sound. He’d recite the names of forty or more paint colours, proclaiming the words like a monologue in a different language, just a list of colours, to a lecture hall full of students. When he reached the end, he’d pause to neaten the pages of his notes on the table in front of him before looking up at the tiers of seats.
Sound is an infinte spectrum of colours
. The difference between an instrumentalist and a musican, he said, is the development of an acute inner hearing which allows the musican to distinguish the subtleties of different sounds. Far more than the bow’s basic sound production, nuance and hue and shade must be produced by the left hand through an immense variety of vibrato. To create colour, musicians use their imagination, search their own memory of experience for image and sensation. It is this, in part, from which Nora still shies away and which prevents the synchrony with music which once came to her instinctively.

She describes to Eve how the sight of the feathery charred wood of her burnt cello gave her a sense of opportunity. She’s hired a cello so that she can continue to play in the retirement homes over the summer, but has handed in her notice at the school. She’ll be paid until the end of the school holidays and then she’ll have to decide what to do.

‘I needed to stop,’ she says, ‘There was only one pupil I enjoyed teaching.’

And Rachel, her star pupil, would soon be moving on to other teachers. In York, when the judges of the festival competition read out their reports, it was immediately clear Rachel had won. They praised her dexterity and fervour, the rich and burnished string tones, the full-throated eloquence of the Largo opening of the Eccles Sonata she and Nora had chosen as her individual piece. In her summing-up, Lady Fisherton talked of the extraordinary emotional transparency, the rhythmic clarity and tonal vigour in Rachel’s playing. Backstage, Nora took the cello from Rachel, hugged her and gave her a gentle shove back on to the stage as wave after wave of applause surged from the depths of the auditorium.

‘Couldn’t you get a job in some Paris conservatoire? Is that a French word? Or Russian? Just give master classes to the most talented students? The hot ones?’

‘I don’t think I have what it takes.’

‘What you
have
is a gift going to waste.’

Nora is no longer sure of this. ‘Before, I felt guilty all the time, never switched off.’

The cello possessed her. When out with friends, she was never fully there, always distracted, her head occupied with the music, a phrase she couldn’t quite get right, or a particular technique she needed to improve. A large part of her only wanted to be practising, but if she turned down too many invitations to go out, she felt guilty about neglecting her friends. Her practising grew rigid, days strictly timetabled to fit in a certain number of hours: cello practice between seven and ten in the morning, two and four in the afternoon, nine until eleven at night.

‘My life got too unbalanced. Some of the instinct and intuition had gone. Trouble is you can always be better. When I wasn’t playing, it was as if every experience in my life had to be translated into something which could be put to use in my interpretation of music.’

‘Kind of living back to front, or inside-out?’

‘Yes, exactly like that,’ says Nora, surprised at the clarity of Eve’s understanding. ‘It’s all you think about, the desire to play better.’

‘Question is, can you live without it?’

Nora doesn’t know the answer.

‘Tell you what, though, if your leg doesn’t hurt too much would you be a dear and limp off to fetch me a bowl of cold water to put my poor aching feet in?’

‘Eve, how can your feet be aching? You’ve been sitting there all day doing these tea-light jars.’

‘There speaks someone who’s never been fat and pregnant.’

34

Ada keeps her back to the room. The ivories of Café Jetsam’s piano are badly stained, the colour of nicotine on a pub ceiling. She runs her tongue along her front teeth. Since the fire, Nora has grown high and mighty about not smoking in Creek House. Without touching the keys, Ada holds her hands over the piano in the playing position. The brass candle holders on either side of the music rack are blackened by tarnish. She is surprised Eve has not given them a quick clean and put in fresh candles for the opening of the café. But then Eve has been busy with preparing food and making the gay floral and pastel-striped bunting that is pinned in zigzags from the boathouse high ceiling beams. And she’s pregnant, so bound to be muddle-headed.

Ada doesn’t want to think of her own muddle-headedness the other morning at breakfast when she was talking about the finely tooled Horsham stone of the larger coffin and said to Nora,
Your father will know the answer to that
, meaning Robert. Only when Nora’s face softened with sentiment did Ada realise her mistake. Nora’s father, as far as she is concerned, is Brian. Was Brian.
Of course I mean Harry
. Ada had tried to gloss over her error.
Harry will know the answer
.

Behind her, chairs scrape and feet shuffle. She will not glance over her shoulder to see the chairs fill with people, the majority of whom she has known for years. Hell or high water, here they all remain. The tiny flags on the bunting are fluttering in a breeze. Nora and Stavros climbed up tall ladders to hang it yesterday. Prettier than the old-fashioned stuff one saw once upon a time at fairgrounds.

The café begins to smell of dog and ancient waxed jackets, clothes as stale as their wearers. Ted, tweedy in a jacket and flat cap he has worn since the fifties, is trying to catch her eye, but Ada dips her head to adjust the height of the piano stool and pretends not to have seen him.

The velvet on the seat of the stool is worn to a shine and holds the smell of greasepaint. The piano must have belonged to some theatre and been kept backstage for years.

Eve has given her a list of songs on a piece of paper propped on the music rack. ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ is top of the list. Ada has no recollection of ever memorising songs like this, but nevertheless she has them all by heart. ‘Roll out the Barrel’. Meaningless ditties, all of them. She adjusts the paper on the music rack. On one holder, a dribble of wax once molten, brought to life by the flame’s heat, trickling down the candle to cling to the underside of the holder and ready to drip, is now cold and hardened. Paper and wood: one scratch of a match and
Pfffff!
Letters and papers curled and blackened, floating on a current of air. Layers of polish and the chemicals which make up the shiny skin of varnished wood are more flammable than one might imagine. The whoosh of flame: a fierce heat.

The candle holder with its dribbles of wax is lopsided. Ada pushes it upright but the fitting is loose and when she takes her hand away it slips to a tilt again. If a candle were to be lit in that holder, hot wax would dribble all over the keyboard.

The Hoover hums a middle C, middle C
, Nora would sing out. Dance around Ada as she hoovered, getting under her feet until they went to the piano in the playroom to find middle C. Nora was always right. Ada told everyone she possessed perfect pitch, though she had no real idea of the meaning of the phrase.

Mixing egg whites for meringue, the Kenwood whined.
High E flat
, Nora piped up. The little finger of Ada’s right hand hovers over the ebony key, a stretch, more than an octave above middle C. With a fruit cake, the Kenwood would strain low, bass clef, D. Little finger, left hand.

Nothing ever got done. Nora heard a note in everything: the wind whipping round the corner of the house by the coal bunker; the fog horn at dusk – even the ring of the halyards on masts. Between them, she and Nora used to fill that old house with music. Brian would come in and find them both at the piano, Nora on Ada’s lap, the scent of Pear’s soap on her skin.