Rook (14 page)

They gave each other something they both needed and took nothing, so she felt, from his family, but their relationship was dishonest. She had thought of their relationship as a secret, when it was a lie which ran a snagged thread through both their lives.

Her striped dressing gown hangs on the back of the door. Her childhood bedroom at Creek House, a room in which she has been alone many times before but never thought she’d return to for good. What comes back to her is a day two years ago. Almost two years ago. Her period was due. She’d been in the practice rooms of a music conservatoire in Moscow all morning, dashing across the courtyard every half an hour to the toilets to see if she was bleeding. The air was freezing, painful on her skin. Something was wrong with the heating. Ice patterns branched and fanned across the inside of the toilet window; her breath huffed white. She was so very regular, even down to the time of day. Isaac used to joke that the rigorous strength of her bodily rhythms gave the particular sensitivity to musical rhythm and timing for which she was known. She had not quite dared to believe, each time she sat on the cold toilet seat, in the non-appearance of the blood. She considered the effect of the freezing temperatures, pre-concert nerves. If she was pregnant, her relationship with Isaac could grow into something more. It need only mean a few months’ break from the concert circuit and the more she thought about a break, the more she wanted a reason to provide the chance of escape. After scurrying across the frosted courtyard half a dozen times, she sat once again on the toilet, knickers at her ankles and knew her period was not coming. Isaac’s child! Delight skipped through her. As she rinsed her hands in the icy water, she examined her face in the washbasin mirror and was convinced either the sparkle in her eyes or the flush on her cheeks would announce to everyone her body’s cataclysmic changes.

16

‘Go instead of me and make sure that woman doesn’t act First Lady,’ Ada said. Nora has left her mother in her element, entertaining Dr Robertson with the brocade curtains drawn against the low evening sun. Dr Robertson is in his nineties but always elegant, in a three-piece suit with a starched handkerchief in the pocket. He was a young doctor in the village when Ada was a child, and carried out his visiting rounds on horseback. He is the only person in the village who still calls her mother ‘Adie’.

Daphne Johnson’s husband Jerry has been the chairman of the parish council for more than a decade and Daphne loves to hold parish council meetings at their house, everyone seated around her long, polished table. ‘Ideas above her station, that one, don’t you think, Robbie?’ Ada had added, lifting her chin.

Rook, just fed, is in his basket, puttering with his beak at strands of willow on the handle. All Nora will have to do is find somewhere out of the way to put his basket and remember to sneak out of the meeting in time to give him his next feed.

At the tumbling roar of an aeroplane, Nora stops to look up. A white line is visible between the smudges of cloud and as the aeroplane swoops down, she sees a shape forming, half of a love-heart. The engine noise changes, the aeroplane pumping out puffs of white as it labours upward, and the half becomes whole, a heart shape feathering across the blue. The plane banks, cuts away to one side, and the line of an arrow-shaft appears, piercing the heart.

A love-struck heart in the sky is the kind of flamboyant gesture Stavros might make, typical of his impulsive displays of love. Like the star he bought and named after Eve one birthday; the patchwork coat he sewed from fabric scraps, taking a year to stitch together, in secret, with a multitude of names and signs and symbols significant to them and their life together. Eve might be wrapped in her patchwork coat right now, standing on the deck of the boathouse with Zach on one hip, pointing to the love-heart in the sky.

With a burst of crescendo the aeroplane drops once more, hurtling downwards, a flume of white streaming from its tail. Nora’s stomach tips, until she sees the pilot is simply redrawing the outline to emphasise the heart’s shape.

One Valentine’s Day, early in their relationship, she sent Isaac the King of Hearts from a pack of playing cards. She didn’t entrust the card to the post, but pushed the pale pink envelope into the middle of a pile of internal mail in his pigeon-hole at the Academy. The remainder of the pack of cards, kept for a long time, was another of the mementoes thrown into a maximum-strength dustbin liner and put out with the rubbish when she left her London flat.

Before she rings the Johnsons’ door bell, Nora, hot from running, scrubs at her forehead with Rook’s black towel, which carries his sandpapery smell.

‘A
rook
?’ Daphne lemon-sucks the word and twists the stud of one of her gold half-hoop earrings.

‘A young one. He can’t fly.’ Daphne’s probably worried about her hair. ‘He’s asleep now.’ Nora nods down at the towel-draped basket on her arm. ‘He won’t be a nuisance, I promise.’

Tessa, the Johnsons’ overweight black Labrador, nudges past Jerry’s calves as he comes out of the kitchen with a wide tray loaded with cups and saucers, and clatters down the hallway barking wildly. The dog skids to a halt by Nora’s legs. Just in time, before Tessa leaps and slobbers, claws scraping, Nora swoops Rook’s basket high and out of reach. She gives the dog a hard shove with her knee, muttering, ‘
Get!
’ under her breath.

‘Tessa! You
are
a naughty girl,’ coos Daphne, bending to ruffle the dog’s ears.

Nora takes her chance and slips down the hallway to catch Jerry as he makes his way with the tray into the dining room.

‘Shall I just pop this in your shed?’ She raises the covered basket into Jerry’s range of vision, hoping he is too preoccupied to wonder what it is.

‘Sure, sweetheart. Thanks. Go ahead. You know where ’tis.’ He shoulders the dining-room door open and calls back: ‘How’s your mother?’

Around the polished table are people she has known since childhood. Miss Macleod is there, head down, reading something. Ted, who, now his son has taken over the day-to-day running of Manor Farm, has time on his hands so sits on many committees and is governor of the village primary school. George gives her a nod, jowls wobbling like wattles. Patricia, Ted’s wife and locally famous for her bridge suppers, flutters her fingers in a wave. Steve, the vicar, gives her a wink, and points to the empty chair beside him. A single father of three small children, Steve is not what most people expect in a vicar. He doesn’t wear a dog-collar and today’s T-shirt has ‘You Are the Weakest Link’ in cracked, plastic-coated capitals across the front. Strung on a leather thong around his neck is a lump of sea-glass Nora would like to wear herself. She squeezes past the backs of the other chairs to slip in beside him and he passes her a copy of the minutes, his square hands rough and red around the knuckles as though he’s been too long scrubbing at sheets in very hot water.

The group is already deep in discussion about flooding. Steve hands Nora a photograph taken from Bosham Hoe looking across the inlet towards the village during one very high spring tide a few years back. The relentless churn of the water dominates the foreground of the photograph while, on the far side of the grey expanse, houses huddle around the church steeple, marooned. Waves foam against first-floor window sills, the only glimpse of colour the red flag which flies from the sailing-club flagpole. In the harbour, the boats themselves have sunk, masts leaning at odd angles. The village looks abandoned.

Nora had been abroad at the time, but she’d heard from Ada about the severity of the flooding. Residents had been shocked into coming up with more proactive ways to protect their homes, and appointed Will Holden as water bailiff. However, Nora’s heard a rumour that Will, who sits opposite with a ring file, a pile of photographs and three pens lined up on the table in front of him, is about to resign. She tries to catch his eye, but his head is bowed.

‘. . . and then the manhole covers burst off, my Lord!’ Patricia is saying, ‘Water pressure, the firemen said. In the Craft Café we thought the electricity was sure to blow.’

Nora is thirsty after running and the coffee Daphne pours from her cafetière into exquisite bone-china cups amounts to a mere thimbleful or two. Its strength makes her mouth and cheeks hot.

Jerry, the chairman, hands over to Will Holden, who opens his file. His report covers the precise order of events on the day of the spring tide. Long and detailed, it includes a list of possible causes, problems encountered and how they were dealt with, suggestions for precautions to be taken in the future. He clears his throat several times and reads directly from his notes without looking up.

His obvious tension makes others around the table fidgety. Nora remembers her confident conversation with Jonny about the flood team, before she’d heard of the rumours circulating about Will’s resignation. She wonders when Jonny will next be down from London. She’s heard nothing from him, not that she was expecting to, exactly. One of her male colleagues at school asked her out for dinner last week and when she turned him down she found herself wishing the invitation had come instead from Jonny. And then she bumped into Steve as she left the church one evening after lighting a votive candle, and he told her two men from the television had been to see him, asking to look at the Reverend’s notebooks from the 1865 excavation of the Saxon princess’s tomb.

Discussion has now shifted on to side issues: a request to replace the noticeboard in the church porch, which Steve will have to pass on to the parochial church council. Ted delivers a tirade about litter and fly-tipping. Nora reaches for a piece of Daphne’s homemade shortbread and bites into it, scattering sugary crumbs all over the sheen of the table’s veneer. Sometime later, glancing up from doodling in her notepad, she realises the drop in noise levels is because they are all looking at her.

‘Do you know how much damage they do, my dear, scavenging in my maize fields for seed?’ Ted’s gnarled hands tremble as he lifts, for a refill, the delicate coffee cup still balanced on its saucer. He smiles benignly down the table at Nora. Her knee knocks the table as she uncrosses her legs.

George swallows a mouthful of shortbread. ‘My father bought that strip of land down by the manor specifically because there was a rookery in the copse.’

‘He bought a rookery?’ Nora’s surprised and pleased, eager to talk about rooks.

George nods. ‘Held regular rook shoots in spring to thin out the branchers. Had rook pie more than once.’

‘Really?’ Patricia pulls a long face. ‘
Four-and-twenty black birds
,’ she warbles.

‘Damn difficult to shoot in the field, rooks.’ Ted addresses George, ignoring his wife. ‘Not like pigeons.’

Patricia looks at her lap. A flush creeps up her throat.

‘Terrible trouble on the peas last year.’ Ted nods sagely at George.

‘I’m surprised your mother gives the thing house room. They’re
evil
.’ Daphne shudders. ‘A bad omen too. I’d get rid of the thing.’

Ralph puts down his coffee cup. ‘Old Herbert Caper used to tell stories about the rooks in Hundredsteddle Copse, where they’ve been for centuries.’        

‘Doesn’t make them suitable pets,’ barks George. He snaps another shortbread biscuit in half. ‘Vermin,’ he says, with his mouth full.

‘No. My point was that in fact the rookeries are said to bring a household good fortune. Apparently one year they shot down too many at Hundredsteddle and the rooks didn’t return the following spring. That was the year four members of the family died. Flu epidemic, I believe.’

‘Pure folklore and ignorance.’

‘Actually, George—’

‘Ted, you’re whistling.’ Patricia points to her ear. Ted scowls and fumbles with his hearing aid.

‘Starvelings like yours would be killed by the parents. Nature always knows best.’ George leans back in his chair, arms folded across his belly as if that’s an end to it.

At the end of the meeting, Miss Macleod puts a hand on Nora’s arm. ‘A quick word, my dear?’ She slides a slim booklet from her canvas rucksack and holds it up for Nora to admire, her hand smoothing the cover. Pictured on the front is a reproduction of a section of the Bayeux Tapestry. ‘Professor Frank Barlow read my manuscript,’ she says. ‘We had several most interesting conversations.’

The cover shows stylised horses, soldiers in helmets and chain mail; axes, swords, shields and arrows, with the words HAROLD: REX: INTERFECTUS: EST sewn above the battle scene where a soldier with a moustache looks up at the letter O as he pulls at an arrow from the nose-shield of his helmet. This must be Harold. Underneath the picture, typed in large bold capitals, is the question: IS KING HAROLD II BURIED IN BOSHAM CHURCH?