Rook (20 page)

The shift in gears of a lorry straining up the hill distracted her from the stagnant air in the room and Nora’s mind brought to her snatched phrases of the slow cello lyric of Max Bruch’s
Kol Nidrei
, which Isaac had dismissed with a slice of his hand as ‘a minor romantic work’.

Kol Nidrei
– ‘All Vows’ – a minor romantic work? No, Isaac was wrong.

She stared at the nylon which sheeted the window and listened, paid proper attention to the music in her mind until the vibration slid from her skull to her throat, to her fingers and ribcage, pushing down to her solar plexus, the inner core of her body where a tiny bunch of cells, like bubbles blown through a wand, clustered and multiplied while she sat in this silent room, waiting. She studied her cupped hands. She never was any good at waiting.

After half an hour she stood, walked across the room past the girl’s knees in mocha tights and the blonde woman’s patting hand, down the corridor and out through the blue door with potted bay trees on either side. The door had no handle on the outside so she pulled it closed by putting her hand into the brass letterbox. She turned left. Pulled up the hood of her fleece and bent her body to haul herself along with the other walkers, up the steep hill and past the rows of windows blinded by net curtains. After a few minutes the rain started. She walked faster. The awareness of the strength of her body, the solid muscle and bone, gave her an exhilarating desire to increase her pace, to overtake the other walkers, push harder up the hill.

She caught a train out of London and walked ten miles in the rain from Chichester to Creek House. Ada was shocked by her sudden appearance and by her weight loss. She thought Nora simply needed a good rest between performances and Nora at first had not the courage to tell her all concert performances were cancelled for the foreseeable future. She planned to choose the right time. She was not a child any more, she reasoned: she had made her own decision. She could return to performing, perhaps part-time at first, and Ada could look after the baby. She waited for the right time to talk to Ada, but it didn’t come. She’d been home a month before she fully accepted the probability her mother would not want to spend weeks at a time looking after a baby. Instead, Nora considered adoption. You could have a baby adopted at birth, she’d read. Her baby could be given to a couple who desperately wanted a child but were unable to have their own. She’d need only a few more months at home, before life could return to normal.

It was April and the rooks were in pairs everywhere. Nora drew them in charcoal or with blunt pencil on creamy cartridge paper, page after page littering every surface in her childhood bedroom, and the floor. She was compelled to draw them, to capture their beauty. She drew them gathering to mate, to nest and to roost; she drew them in fields, their feathers gleaming like shot silk in the sun as they rooted for leather jackets; she drew them in the trees, in pairs on the leafless branches; in the air, soaring and banking, swooping across the lane with twigs and grass dangling from their beaks. The creak of their caws, the wet-sheet slap of their wings at take-off, these sounds were the familiar background of her thoughts, as was the cledge of mud underfoot by the creek.

At dusk, she took her father’s old binoculars to watch and listen as the birds swirled over the rookery. Their nests were repaired and ready for the spring. Watching the rooks gave her a reason to be out of the house, out in the flat fields under the high skies. Unable to sleep in her narrow girl’s bed, at dawn she took to walking along the creek path, an old raincoat of her father’s to keep off the mist. The hem of her nightie brushed the toes of her wellington boots. High in the poplars, where there had been a rookery for hundreds of years, bobbed the black heads of rooks. The nests themselves, chunky twigs anchored in the spindly heights of trees, had only the appearance of strength. Her father had told her rooks do not line their nests with the mud as other birds do. Consequently, without the mud to act as glue, their nests are vulnerable to every movement of the wind through high branches.

22

Elsa MacLeod pushes up her sleeves and picks up the rolling pin. ‘Well, of course, what we have are
two
fascinating local traditions associated with stone coffins in Bosham church, but it’s my opinion,’ she fixes Jonny with a severe look, ‘you may well be pursuing the tradition with the least historical significance. Excuse me, but I must get on.’ She sprinkles flour on the work surface and as she rolls out dough, Nora glimpses the half-smile on her face, hidden from Jonny’s view. Elsa’s enjoying playing him along.

Jonny sits astride the kitchen chair, his legs and feet folded into a squashed Z. Beneath his long limbs the chair looks child-sized. Nora hasn’t told him why she’s brought him here. He’s accepted Elsa’s Earl Grey tea with one of his wide smiles, paid polite compliments on her house and garden, but now the confinement is making him restless. With his forearms resting flat along the top of the chair-back, he moves his chest forwards and back as if performing vertical press-ups; he lifts and jabs an elbow sideways, rotating his shoulder joint, massaging it with one hand, his shirtsleeve tightening over the swell of muscle, the languor in his movements suggesting he luxuriates in the tension and release of muscle.

Jonny had phoned earlier that week, wanting to find out when he could come with his laptop to scan copies of Ada’s photographs, since she won’t allow them to be taken out of the house. Nora spoke about Elsa, explaining she was an amateur historian.

‘Your mother hasn’t mentioned the name.’

‘She wouldn’t. They don’t get on.’ More to the point, her mother will have said nothing to Jonny about Elsa’s local knowledge because his television programme is Ada’s chance to be the focus of attention.

Jonny flexes his shoulder joint again, elbow circling in the air, the muscles in his upper arm hardening. All the men she’s known have been musicians or academics, slender men like Isaac, whose energy sparked from mental or emotional strength, rather than physical. Sex with Jonny would be different.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah – we’re talking about the second, larger coffin, found in the fifties?’ Jonny’s eyebrows lift, an upside-down V over the bridge of his nose.

‘Of course.’

‘Vandalised, only fragments of bone remaining.’

‘You’ve read Geoffrey Marwood’s pamphlet.’

‘Also contemporary newspaper accounts . . .’

‘However,’ Elsa talks across him, ‘the body was mutilated before burial, not vandalised.’

Jonny seems not to have heard. He rubs vigorously at his hair with both hands, leaving it tousled.

‘The thing is, forgive me, Elsa, but we’re talking television here. A Saxon princess is pretty hard to beat. Everyone has heard of Canute, absolutely everyone. Who, apart from historians such as your knowledgeable self,’ he bows his dishevelled head of hair, ‘has heard of Earl Godwin? I, for one, had not, until recently.’

‘Have you, I wonder, read my own, more recent effort?’

Copies of both pamphlets lie on the kitchen table, with Marwood’s on top.

‘I do apologise. I’ve not come across yours.’

‘I interpret the significance of the facts presented by Marwood. For example, the larger tomb was “tooled Horsham stone, magnificently finished”, from which Marwood correctly deduces a person of some importance is buried there; a person of more importance, if we compare tomb decoration, than the daughter of a king. This piqued my interest. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
records the burials of all the important people associated with Bosham during the eleventh century.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The number of possible candidates for the larger tomb is actually very limited.’

‘I’ve always wondered,’ Nora says, ‘how they could tell the man had been powerfully built?’

‘From the thigh and pelvic bones, where muscle attaches to bone; the bone thickens as it grows, to support the muscle. A Saxon warrior led an extremely active life.’ Elsa’s rolling pin rests in her hands. She stares into space as if she sees her Saxon warrior mounted on his horse, straight-backed despite the weight of chain mail, his face obscured and flattened by the helmet’s nose-shield. The horse snorts; the bit clanks between its teeth.

Jonny is thumbing through Marwood’s pamphlet. ‘This guy has some useful stuff on Canute.’

Elsa returns from her reverie and listens to Jonny talk about the Saxon bell tower, the chancel arch and the rubble work. He waves his arms about as he talks. Nora wills him to stop, to look properly at Elsa’s pamphlet.

‘Of course,’ he finishes, closing Marwood’s pamphlet, ‘Canute was known to be a great builder.’

‘Cnut. He was a Viking. Can-newt is an attempt to Anglicise his name.’

‘Fair enough.’ Jonny straightens his back. ‘Elsa, I’ll be frank with you. This has to be a project with substance, not mere sentiment or sensation. To be awarded funding for this project, I need sound sources.’

‘I can save you some trouble,’ Elsa retorts, unfazed by the reprimand in his tone. ‘Whoever it is buried in that magnificent stone coffin church, it is
not
the first Earl Godwin. Your “sound sources” tell us he is buried at Winchester, where he died.’

‘
Godwin
,’ Jonny repeats. He chucks a sugar cube into his mouth and at last picks up Elsa’s pamphlet, though he does nothing more than riffle through the pages without giving the content any attention before replacing it on the table. He pats the cover with the flat of his hand, about to say something, before he glances down. He stops moving.

Is King Harold II buried in Bosham Church?

Apart from the knock of the wooden rolling pin on the worktop as Elsa rolls out a second batch of dough, the kitchen is quiet.

The sugar cube crunches in Jonny’s mouth. ‘Harold?’ His thigh begins to jiggle, up and down. Elsa nods.

Jonny swivels around, his eyes meeting Nora’s, eyebrows twitching upwards in query or excitement, she can’t tell, as he unfolds his body from the chair, and in two strides is across the kitchen, beside Elsa.

‘Am I right, Elsa,’ he points to the pamphlet’s title, as if Elsa might be unfamiliar with something spelled out with her own hand. ‘Your title refers to our King Harold, the Harold who grew up here?’ Here Jonny looks at Nora and grins. ‘And whom the Bayeux Tapestry shows praying at Bosham Church?’

‘Nora has filled you in.’

‘Arrow in the eye, 1066 Harold?’

‘Debatable,’ Elsa answers, and selects a pastry cutter. ‘The arrow, that is, not 1066.’ She holds up a cutter shaped like a shooting star, but rejects it.

‘Could—,’ Jonny strides to the kitchen door and back. ‘Would you mind filling me in?’ He fetches his notebook from his laptop bag, sits down only to stand up again and pace the floor. He asks questions and scribbles fast, leaning against the worktop. Elsa waves the rolling pin as she talks, her face flushed with animation. The high voltage of their joint excitement thrums through the room. Sponsorship from a TV company could provide the money Elsa needs for further research; Elsa’s theory could transform Jonny’s programme into one of enormous historical significance.

Elsa talks of ‘clues’ and ‘evidence’, the coincidence of certain dates and details recorded in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
, with an eleventh-century Latin poem entitled ‘The Song of the Battle of Hastings’ which describes what happened in 1066 between August and 25 December, when William the Conqueror was consecrated King of England. The poem, discovered in a library in Brussels in the 1800s, was written in 1067 and is the earliest record of events. Elsa refers to it with reverence in her voice as the ‘Carmen’. Jonny writes everything down in his notebook.

The Carmen provides a more accurate version of the way Harold died, a version which was hushed up in the years immediately after the Conquest. ‘The Norman Court would have considered it bad press. William’s close involvement in the precise way Harold was slaughtered on the battlefield would have undermined the God-given legitimacy of his accession, so the true details were suppressed, kept alive only where the influence of the ruling elite could not reach, at the lowest levels of society through songs and oral tradition.’

‘The arrow in the eye was a lie, just propaganda?’ Jonny whistles through his teeth. ‘William had mighty good spin doctors.’

‘So good, that by the time of the Domesday survey, in 1086, Harold’s name was blackened, his reign wiped from the historical record. The Carmen, however, describes four knights, one of whom was William, surrounding Harold to hack him to pieces. A lance through the heart, disembowelling, one leg hacked off and decapitation.’ Elsa sees Nora’s grimace. ‘On the battlefield, such mutilation was commonplace. The problem for William was that he took part.’