Rook (24 page)

‘Here,’ he said, throwing her an orange, which she caught. A mango, a peach – her mouth watered at the smell of them. Peaches: her mother’s favourite fruit. She used to freeze them, years ago, buying wooden cratefuls heaped with them at the market when peaches were cheap and in season. A scented sweetness filled the house as Ada peeled and cut the peaches into slices, which she covered with home-made syrup before freezing. Nora preferred the taste of defrosted peaches to fresh ones.

Nora cradled the collection of fruits. Each had a different weight, texture, colour, shape. She held them up one by one, testing the weight and substance, then began to juggle, the technique coming back to her. She’d learned as a teenager, taught by a boyfriend. Orange, peach and mango: different shapes and colours flying through the air, between her hands.

The liquidiser’s rattle was gritty and loud. Harry poured the smoothie, deep red, into two glasses, adding fresh black cherries on a cocktail umbrella. Nora was thirsty. She gulped down the delicious, icy concoction.

The two of them stood in the narrow space between work counters as Harry refilled her glass, and filled another glass for her to take out to Eve. His hand passed, quickly, down over his own face before brushing hers lightly, lifting her chin to inspect it, running his thumb across the edges of her mouth.

‘Juice,’ he said, and paused, before kissing her, not on her lips, but either side and below her mouth. The sudden shock of his body against hers made her start, pulling sharply away. She snatched up her drink and the glass for Eve, raised the glass in thanks, without meeting his eyes, and hurried back outside into the sunshine to join the others.

26

Nora is worried the cockle-shell heart will break. She puts down the drill. The rotten wood of the wind chimes she has already replaced with freshly collected sticks of driftwood and she’s added swan feathers to the assortment of pebbles. The cockle-shell heart would finish the whole thing off perfectly. Nora turns the shell over in her hands, opening and closing the two halves. Rook hops towards her feet and stops. He thinks she has food. He hops again, trying to get her attention, head twitching this way and that, tilted to one side, to examine her face from various angles. Only on the ground do rooks become awkward and jerky; in the air they soar and swoop and glide.

‘One day, Rook,’ she says to him, ‘you will be able to fly.’

The spines of the cockle shell are fierce; the fragility lies in the brittle hinge which joins the two halves. She places the shell on the fireplace beside her axe-head, where it’s more likely to remain whole.

Once she’s tied the final knot in the string, she holds the mobile up to check the hang is balanced. She will tie it to the same branch, the branch which already has string wrapped round it in various places from previous wind chimes. She’s used tarred string this time, so perhaps it will last longer. She knocks one of the pebbles with a finger and watches the mobile spin and bob.

‘I had a baby once.’

At her feet, Rook blinks, twitches his head to see her face.

Nora shuts her eyes against an image she doesn’t want to remember, her baby’s limbs swaddled close to his body. She had kissed his forehead to say goodbye. She sits down on the floor beside Rook.

‘I had a baby once,’ she tells him again.

The feathers on Rook’s head rise and he stretches his neck towards her.

‘I called him Noah.’

She called him Noah because, as a child, she loved the story of Noah and his ark, a round boat built against all odds. Her father told her the story of the ark illustrated the triumph of imagination over catastrophic events. She also called him Noah because the name sounded so close to her own. Names do have a certain magic, as Eve says. Noah, with his too-thin limbs, ribs which pressed through his skin. He was so tiny and fragile she couldn’t bear to be separated from him, to leave him alone in her room for longer than half an hour at a time. Her breasts were painful and heavy with milk, a constant reminder. She found excuses to go to him, tried not to disturb his miniature fingers, his curled toes and soft nails which peeled like skin. She trembled each time she unwrapped him to marvel at the translucency of his skin. She loved the dark hair stuck flat on his pomegranate-sized head; his old man’s neck. She lay with him in the crook of her elbow for hours as she studied his body, his eyelids and the wrinkles of his face. He was going to be safe and loved. Every night, she kept him close beside her on the pillow.

In Mothercare she’d seen mobiles for hanging over a baby’s cot; wind-up toys; a music box to attach to the bars. Though she hadn’t bought a cot for Noah, on the last night they had together she made him some wind chimes. She swaddled him well and carried him down the garden to hang the chimes on the apple tree where the forget-me-nots which reseeded every year spread a haze of starry blue.

In the hallway, the phone rings. Nora carries the repaired wind chimes downstairs, Rook sitting on her shoulder.

‘Who is he then, this man Mum’s always talking about?’ It’s Flick.

‘Hello, Flick. I’m well thanks, how are you?’ Nora transfers Rook from her shoulder to her hand. His feathers brush skin as he hops on to the floor to run, stiff-legged and tail up, in to the kitchen.

‘Too bloody hot! We’re thinking of coming over to England to escape.’

‘Great. Mum will be pleased.’ Nora leans against the wall, cool against her back. ‘All of you?’

‘There’s plenty of room for us all in that great mausoleum of a place. Mum wants to sell up, you know. Move into a bungalow near the shops. I think we should encourage her. This man hanging around, he after her money?’

A knot forms and tightens below Nora’s ribs. She slides down the wall until she’s sitting on the hall floor. ‘It’s
her
money.’

‘And it’s
our
inheritance. We don’t want her marrying some man who has flattered his way into her affections.’

‘She’s not dead yet, Flick. She may leave her money to the Cat and Rabbit Rescue Centre. She wants to move into a bungalow, or you want her to move into a bungalow? I don’t think—’

‘It’s not all about you, Nora, I have enough on my plate without . . .’ and so the conversation with Flick continues. Whenever Nora tries to say something, Flick snaps, ‘Please don’t interrupt. Let me finish a sentence.’

By the time the phone call has ended, Nora needs somewhere to lie down. The way she would before a concert, to steady her mind and body, to prepare for the intensity of concentration required in performance. An empty room in an expensive hotel, sealed off from the outside world by triple glazing. A jug of water on the bedside cabinet.

You must be spiritually prepared for each encounter with the Bach Suites
, Isaac said. Once he had made a student walk on to the stage seven times before allowing him to play.
You must carry with you the inner sensation that inhabits the music you are about to perform
.

She stands up, takes a breath and walks down the hallway, holding the wind chimes. Oh yes, Isaac had plenty of advice when it came to cello instruction, but absolutely no advice to offer when it came to having his baby. His only answer was money.

The kitchen is hot, airless. A note, from Ada, is stuck under the kettle, on the back of a telephone bill.
Why are there no cigarettes in the house?
it demands. Nora doesn’t know how she missed the note this morning.
Pay Harry
. Sweat trickles down her back. She pushes open a window and hears something, a grunt. Harry is down near the old apple tree, smashing a pickaxe into the flinty ground. A spade is propped against the gnarled trunk, his shirt hanging from it. Dropping Ada’s note she runs out, shouting his name. The sight of dug earth in that place brings a scorch of pain.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

He swings around, breathing hard. Sweat has dampened the hair on his chest into whorls. ‘Your mother . . .’ He rests the metal head of the pickaxe on the ground. ‘Wants a vegetable patch.’

‘A
vegetable
patch?’ Nora snatches up the spade. Harry’s shirt drops to the ground. ‘It will be far too much work for her. And here—’

Harry allows the pickaxe handle to fall sideways. He picks up a six-litre plastic milk bottle half-filled with water, and unscrews the lid, a tremor in his hand.

‘You’re dehydrated. You drink too much. And you shouldn’t encourage my mother to drink all the time either.’ Mid-sentence Nora realises Harry is the man Flick was talking about on the phone: Harry, after her mother’s money. ‘My mother is an elderly woman. It’s irresponsible.’

If she releases her grip on the spade handle, her own hands will be shaking.

Harry tips back his head to drink. Water spills from his mouth and trickles down his neck as he pours water from the plastic container down his throat.

‘She’d been drinking with you the night before the boat accident, hadn’t she? She could hardly put one foot in front of the other the next morning.’ The words come spewing out. Overwhelmed by the smell of dug earth, the sight of nodules of chalk and flint mixed in with the disturbed soil, she hears what she’s saying, accusation in her words, but the anger in her is unleashed. On the ground between them lies the pickaxe. She takes a step towards it.

Harry puts the water bottle down, picks up his shirt from the ground and begins to do up the buttons.

‘She could have drowned that day. She was so unsteady. People drink too much and accidents happen.’

Harry has stooped down for the pickaxe. ‘Your mother,’ he says, as he offers her the wooden handle, ‘makes up her own mind.’

She carried the pickaxe and spade back up the garden, put both away in the shed and found herself back in the kitchen. She shut the back door and leaned against it. On the draining board, spread like flotsam, lay her mobile, a jumble of string and sticks, pebbles and feathers.

August

27

The anchoring weight of the book is a comfort to Ada when she wakes to find herself cradled in the deckchair under the green shade of the macrocarpa at the bottom of the garden. She cannot remember how she came to be here, or for how long she has slept. Her tongue is dry and stuck to her throat. The hardback is one of Brian’s history tomes, pages like cardboard and most of the sentences just as stiff. Reading Brian’s books, she can hear the quiet persistence of his voice, the way he smothered with a blanket of academic language the fire of his enthusiasm, his eyes round like a child’s behind the thick glass of his spectacles. Mild as milk, was most people’s impression, yet how wrong about him, in the end, even she had been.

She is sleeping very badly. Up in the early hours and wide awake with no one to distract her, she drapes herself in doorways to revisit scenes and conversations, longing for past company in the empty rooms. The dents in the horsehair seat of the sofa, the threadbare tapestry of the carpet in front of the fireplace – these things remind her so vividly of the people who were once here, in Creek House, she sees them again, smoking or clattering cutlery together on a plate or sipping at a glass of sherry. Sometimes Nora is up early too, but she’ll have donned those ill-fitting shorts and be tying the laces on her plimsolls ready to go off out running.

From the house comes the slam of kitchen cupboard doors: Nora home from the supermarket, unloading carrier bags and filling cupboards. Ada closes her eyes and leans back under the tasselled deckchair canopy. In her thirst, she imagines peaches in one of Nora’s ghastly orange supermarket carriers, the bag bulging with juicy fruit, downy skin slipping from ripeness. Ada rests her cheek on her hand. How heavenly it would be to sit on the terrace sipping a Bellini as the day cools: the delicate taste of peach juice, its sticky remnants of sweetness on her lips.