Rook (22 page)

‘And you are certain you haven’t left said bag somewhere, madam?’ Through the glass, chewing the end of the biro, he glances over her upper body, waist to neck. Back again: neck to waist. Nora hitches up her jeans, her gardening/painting/odd-job jeans, filthy and baggy. She’d left the house in a hurry.

‘On the bus, perhaps?’ he adds.

His eyes are pale, the sort which always have a sty coming. Nora runs her tongue over her teeth and decides not to mention finding the old cash box on the window sill beside the French doors, instead of where it is kept, on the telephone directory shelf in the study. The fact that gun pellets are kept in the cash box would perk him up, but rules about keeping guns are likely to be stricter now than years ago, when Ada first took control of their father’s gun cabinet.

‘I didn’t catch the bus yesterday,’ she tells the police officer. Despite her efforts, the lie brings a heat to her face. Pressed into his pad are cross-hatching and spirals in biro. She hasn’t got time for this. She pushes herself back from the desk. ‘Never mind, I’ll leave it, thanks.’

The boy’s face remains bland, but as she leaves through the double swing door, he peels the page from his pad and rips it in half and in half again, focused on the wad of torn paper in his hand as he tries to tear it again, as if it is a trial, a test of his own brute force.

Between the undulating dunes the boardwalk snakes away into the distance, towards the vanishing point. The sun is setting, a line of liquid red smelted along the horizon beneath a bank of black clouds. Today, so far, has not been good. Nora tried to hurry Eve out through the hospital corridors. ‘Look at those storm clouds. We need to get to the car.’ Eve’s baby floated out of harm’s way in the amniotic sac. She had two photographs to prove it. Every five minutes, she stopped to take the photos out of her bag to look at them, to point out details and show Nora.

The storm broke as they left the hospital. Rain bounced off the pavement and the road gave off a steamy smell of tar. Eve pushed the photographs down the front of her dress, her hand over the place to keep them there. In the Little London Tearooms, instead of drinking her lemon and ginger tea, she talked non-stop, cupping a hand to demonstrate the curve of the baby’s forehead, exclaiming about the baby’s profile, imitating the lips pushing forward, pursed ready to suck. The tiny hand, fingers curled, was suspended over a pot belly, thumb pointed towards the baby’s eager mouth, legs skinny as a frog’s tucked up to the baby’s bottom.

‘Small, aren’t they? But they’re always kicking, believe me.’

‘Your tea must be cold.’

‘Why am I even drinking tea in this heat?’ Eve rolled her eyes and pinched at the front of her cotton dress. ‘I tell you what I really fancy – some chalk.’ Eyes dreamy and unfocused, she stretched her arms above her head, showing damp patches underneath her breasts.

Eve didn’t want to be told the baby’s sex.
I know my baby already
, she confided to the sonographer, who put her pen back into the breast pocket of her white coat and said nothing in reply. Eve tapped her turquoise nostril piercing and winked at Nora. Since she’s been pregnant sometimes she behaves like a mad woman.

The chicken-wire surface of the boardwalk creates an odd resistance against the soles of Nora’s running shoes.
One must constantly fight natural weaknesses with discipline combined with the imagination and flexibility as befits the artist
.

She is no longer an artist. She lifts her heels higher, pushes her elbows back. She will beat this.

In her missing wallet was the only photograph of Isaac she had allowed herself to keep. She last saw him at a supermarket till, just before she walked out of the abortion clinic. She’d wanted to tell him she was getting rid of their baby the next day. She’d hoped he would change his mind. She caught the tube to Hampstead, walked to Waitrose in Finchley Road, where he often shopped on a Friday evening. His back was towards her as he held open a hessian bag. A woman with white hair cut in a precise bob put groceries into the bag. Isaac’s jacket hung loose across his narrow shoulders. He stooped over the bag, a tired man in his sixties.

She runs on, alone. The dunes at East Head are wild and unmapped, a landscape in constant motion, shadow and light shifting over heights and depths sculpted by sand, sea and wind. When she was a child, the family had many picnics here, her parents spreading the tartan rug in a hollow. Flick, eight years older, would play the big sister and take her hand to lead her off to hide in the dunes. They were allowed to take their sandwiches with them on their explorations. Time stretched with the retreating tide, the sea far off. When she crouched in a dip in between the dunes, the distant, outside-world roar of the wind and waves disappeared, leaving only the sound of her breathing, the bristly whipping of marram grass. She’d hold her breath to listen for the scuff of sand grains as they fell.

Today, sand lifts from the dune tops like spume from sea-swell and builds in drifts against the beach-hut doors. Her back teeth grind on grit. She sees her father, as she almost always does when he first comes to mind, in a trench, a hat shading his head and neck. The ‘V’ point of the trowel; his fingertips brushing off dirt, the neat half-moons of his nails. The landscape which surrounds him is brown and barren, a desert, somewhere she has never been except in imagination.

She knows very little about how her father died but after years of imagining, this desert place is familiar. Sometimes she dreams about the tunnel, hot and airless, dust in her mouth and nose and eyes. Her mind can conjure up all this, the tunnel’s dryness suffocating, but she can’t see her father’s face. He reads a story to her, his mouth moving; his Adam’s apple slides. His reading glasses with the broken frame are propped crooked on the bridge of his nose. Out in the garage, an eyeglass in one eye, a cocktail stick rolling between his teeth as he lined up cogs and wheels from the clocks he enjoyed mending.

Nora would like to ask her father if what drew him to archaeology was his preoccupation with time, and whether it is from him she inherited her own strong and natural sense of rhythm, her body’s instinctive feel for time. She’d like to talk to him about the way the passing of time changes what we once believed to be truth or fact into something previously unknown. She minds that she never had these adult conversations with him, but knew him only in the way a child conceives of a parent.

Sometimes Nora tries to gather the details of the accident from what little she knows to create a narrative, but in her mind the story caves in on itself. The earth cracking, a rumble as the tunnel begins to collapse: these elements repeat again and again. She wonders if Ada does the same. She has always been vague. All she has ever said is that they were all killed, the four of them in the underground vault or tunnel or tomb, so there can be no one who really knows what happened or what it was like. No way of knowing, she told Flick and Nora at the time, nothing to know, except they are all dead.
His life is insured. We’ll be all right
.

Nora hopes her mother had someone to talk to. There was no funeral, because no bodies were found. Without him, their family began to separate into parts, like the cogs and wheels from her father’s broken clocks. A memorial service was held, about which the girls were not told until years later. Flick was at university and Nora stopped coming home from boarding school at weekends. She was never good at phoning or writing. Seeing how much Ada enjoys Flick’s weekly phone calls from Spain, she feels guilty about that now.

Ada saw plenty of different men, it seemed, after her father’s death, but no one moved in. Her mother has lived without a man for more than twenty years. Like Elsa Macleod.

She should have come out running sooner. Day by day, week by week, her body is becoming stronger. Her feet pound the coarse grass of the Greensward, a steady rhythm.

24

Particles of rosin float like dust from the bow into the air. Nora’s pupil is blonde. A strand of her hair is trapped on the frog and, as she bows, it bounces in the sunlight. She is about eight, Nora thinks, her mind immediately sailing off to Bosham, the millstream and the little stone church by the water. Later, she and Jonny are going to visit the vicar and talk about the Godwin Graves Project.

She has chewed on her pencil, the end splitting into soggy splinters. She can taste the lead. Cross with herself for not concentrating, Nora shoves the pencil into her hair and puts a hand to the child’s wrist to stop her playing. She draws her own cello between her legs, slips off her shoes, leans into the neck. A sinewy hum vibrates through her ribcage as she draws the bow across the strings in a long, firm stroke, but she resists the instrument’s lure.

‘OK. Your left hand is a dancer. Make it strong and flexible. Curve your fingers as if you’re holding a tennis ball.’ Nora raises her left hand to demonstrate. ‘Now, play with the tips.’

The girl flips her blonde plait over her shoulder and bends, breathing noisily, as if she has a cold, to her left hand, which rests, fingers flat, knuckles collapsed. Her expression is fixed, obedient.

‘I don’t mean all the time. Just give it a try. OK. Good. Five minutes a day?’

Nora takes the child’s cello by the neck. Does she really care so little about her pupils that she can’t remember their names?

‘Now, remember The Squid? Show me, can you?’

At the vicarage, nobody answers the front door bell.

Jonny examines the cast-iron surround, runs his finger over the ceramic button with ‘PUSH’ inscribed in cursive script. ‘Does this thing work?’ He presses the button a second time, holding it down. A clang echoes through the house.

The village is suspended in mid-afternoon heat. From the wheat fields beyond the vicarage comes the rumble of a combine harvester. Nora wonders if she can persuade Jonny to make time for a swim, to run into the sea with her and sluice off the tiny thunder-bugs she has been brushing from her arms and neck all day, but in weather like this she knows the queue for the car park at West Wittering will stretch for miles, and he has squeezed in this trip to Bosham before an early evening meeting in London.

She wanders back up the front path to stand under a weeping willow while Jonny paces around the side of the house. He peers in the windows, face pressed to the glass. When he joins her under the tree, he slips his mobile phone in and out of its black leather case several times to check the time.

They’re here to talk to Steve about the Godwin Graves Project. Jonny phoned Creek House a few evenings ago to say he’d heard from someone at University College London about the DNA comparison. He spoke fast, in breathy-half sentences and the mobile reception was poor, with chatter and the scrape of chairs in the background, so his words were indistinct. Nora found the detail hard to follow.

‘He needs a piece of bone weighing one gram, but he has the techniques, he can do it.’

‘Who is he?’

‘A pioneer in his field, which is the integration of modern and DNA data with archaeological information, so perfect for our needs. He says it is entirely possible to extract DNA, even from such ancient material, and to compare Y-chromosomes with those from living descendants, as well as from Earl Godwin. You’ll have to read his email. It’s all there. Bloody exciting.’

‘What about the fact they’ve already been exposed to the air, the bones? And been handled without gloves?’

‘It’s his area of expertise, human genetic variation – ancestry, population evolution, that kind of thing. Old school mate of mine put me on to him. He can deal with all that side. He’s pretty confident we’ll discover the truth.’

Jonny made it sound very simple. Mouth swab kits would be supplied for collecting DNA samples, which could be sent and returned by post, and analysed within six to eight weeks. Nora explained about the complications associated with getting permission to exhume the grave, but Jonny didn’t seem worried.

‘We need to jump through a few hoops – so what? It shouldn’t be too much of a problem to get Steve on our side. Churches always need money, don’t they?’

Nora had been the go-between. To find a time convenient to both Jonny and Steve had been the first problem, necessitating a number of phone calls back and forth, but she’s flattered Jonny is keen for her to come along.

Jonny slips out his phone yet again just as Steve arrives at last, arms stretched with bags of shopping and his daughter Frannie in tow.