Rook (17 page)

Ada’s face remains beatific. When composed, stationary like this, her mother – with her haughty swan’s neck and fine cheekbones – looks poised and graceful as a ballerina. She doesn’t slump or shuffle or sit bent in half, nor is she slack-jawed like some of the elderly women in the retirement homes. Though, even there, barely suppressed anger lurks beneath the floral polyester.

Nora winds up her hair, fastening it away from her face. Harry has hung a tin whistle around her neck, ready for when they want to come in. Running a hand over his stubble, he winked and told her it would all be fine,
no problemo
, getting Ada back on shore. He’s around all day, he’ll just wade out.
Simple
.

Simple: the plop of water from the oars. No wind. Her mother is quiet, perhaps even content. She has brought her opera glasses for looking at the herons and egrets. Nora has also brought the more practical binoculars. Only a few sailing dinghies are out, keeping to the deeper channel. Nora soon settles to the rhythm of rowing, the dragging weight of water against squared blades, feathering the oars to skim the surface. Because she was older by eight years, Ada taught Flick to row first. For years, only Flick was allowed the oars when they went out together in the skiff. Nora’s impatience was volcanic, the pressure in her chest keeping her awake at night until she crept out and sat in the skiff pulled up on the shore, to practise rowing through the night air.

Ada taught them both to swim too. To dive off the jetty when the tide was in; if it was out, to lie afloat in the shallows and feel their way, palms and fingertips grazing over bladder-wrack and eel grass clumps, probing for flinty pebbles softened with mud, testing their way out into deeper water.

Ada is humming, swaying her torso to some inner melody and murmuring every now and again.

‘Mum, fancy cockles again tonight?’

Her mother opens her eyes and gazes, unseeing, at Nora for a moment. ‘Cockles.’ She seems to come back to herself and claps her hands. ‘Delightful.’

Water ripples against the sides of the skiff. Nora squints to try to make out who is driving the tractor which is spraying on the far side of the creek. The strain of an engine at full throttle distracts her. From behind them a rubber inflatable smacks through the water, prow high and passing too close. The skiff tips and rocks. Ada’s hands fly out to grip the sides, her mink stole slipping from her shoulders. As the RIB passes, a boy crouched in the prow whoops as he clings to the bouncing craft, one arm circling in the air as if swirling a lasso. His eyes lock briefly with Nora’s before sliding away.

The inflatable gouges a deep ‘V’ through the water as it travels up the creek. From behind, Nora notices another teenager in charge of the engine. She pretends not to notice the youth in the prow give an exaggerated lasso-wave of his arm, showing off for her benefit.

Ada clutches the sides of the skiff as the boat rocks, tendons standing in her slender wrists. ‘Bloody brats!’ she hisses.

Bloody parents, busy getting pissed-up in the sailing-club bar.

A few seagulls wheel and cry overhead. Ada, breathing fast, darts a look here and there across the water as if looking for something in the middle distance.

‘Relax, Mum. It’s fine.’

She’s always been fit and healthy, Ada, despite her delicate frame; this shaky breathlessness is new. Nora feels for the whistle Harry gave her and finds the metal is comfortingly warm.

Up the creek towards the sluice gates, the RIB engine cuts to idle, the turmoil of its wake continuing to rock the skiff. The boys’ shouts and calls bait her; a shrill wolf-whistle echoes across the water. The engine revs again. On one of the moored sailing boats, a man washing down his deck stops, rag in hand, and turns to look upstream at the RIB. He drops the rag in a bucket to yell through cupped hands, ‘HEY!’, then stands watching. The boys’ laughter skims across the water as they swing the RIB into a wide curve over to the other side of the estuary, going back to wherever they came from.

Ada has worked herself up into a state. She gabbles incoherent snatches of sentences, her voice rising in a crescendo of anger, hands tugging at the stole around her neck, plucking at her coat buttons. Nora rests the oars in the rowlocks and stands ready to step over the middle cross-seat to her mother in the prow, but at the same moment Ada also stands abruptly. Her arms flail and the boat rocks.

‘Mum, it’s OK.’ Nora reaches out to hold her mother’s hands in her own. As she does so, the RIB’s engine roars out again, deep-throated, the inflatable rears up, engine now a high whine, and heads straight for them across the water. Both boys are crouched, pale faces pinched with concentration.

Nora curses her stupidity. The man on the sailing boat hollers and waves his arms. Between the RIB bearing down on them and their skiff is a line of three, virtually submerged, wooden struts, all that remains of an ancient rotten jetty. The RIB is heading straight for the submerged struts. She’ll have to get the skiff out of the way because if the RIB strikes a strut at this speed, it will fly out of control.

‘DOWN!’ Her hands press down on her mother’s shoulders and they both tumble to the boat’s floor. Ada mews in protest. Nora scrabbles on to all fours, banging her elbow on the rowlock. Her mother lies on the tangle of rope, arms lifted to Nora for help.

Nora’s diaphragm jars with a shock of sound as rubber thwacks on water. The inflatable is mid-air, flying towards them. Keeping low, she grabs an oar and reaches for the other to try to swerve the skiff in time, just a fraction, into shallower water, but now her mother struggles up, brushing her hands on her coat, tottering, one foot raised to the wooden cross-seat, her head dipped to resettle the mink stole across her shoulders. Nora drops both oars and lunges for Ada just as the hull of the RIB punches the side of the skiff, ramming it so that her mother slides sideways. The skiff jolts and tips. Nora fastens her arms around Ada’s body, toppling them both, a jumble of limbs, into the freezing hit of water that streams past in gulps of swelling bubbles.

The cold halts her breath; water gargles and belches through her ears. Eyes strained open, all Nora can see as she stretches out her arms, fingers searching, are floating particles of silt until, at last she catches a glimpse of her mother’s face, her eyes violet-brown, wide open, coming closer under a looming shadow. Nora stretches out her fingers, touches the textured fabric of her coat-sleeve, and tugs her mother closer.

July

19

Ada sways at the top of the stairs, ears buzzing with the silence of walls and doors closed on empty rooms. The telephone has stopped ringing. Her foot hovers over the stairs, which cut back beneath her, slanting suddenly more steeply, and a sensation of falling washes over her; for a moment it seems she will step into mid-air. Behind her eyes, colours spray like exploding dahlias. She feels for the banister, heart banging. Far below, the edges of the black and white floor tiles scissor across the hall floor. She would be dead before she hit them.

One foot in front of the other, step by step, she moves back towards her bedroom and, with relief, sits down on the edge of the bed. In one hand she holds a fan of photographs but her mind is blank. She tries to retrace the events of the last few minutes, the telephone’s jangle, its shrill echo bouncing around the house as the noise persisted with no one except herself to answer it. Nora has waltzed off somewhere, as usual, without so much as a by-your-leave. Felicity may have been calling from Spain – that is, if anyone has thought to let her know of the boat accident. Always the same with Nora. Once she starts playing that infernal instrument all hours of the day and night, she can think of nothing else and sooner or later she ups sticks and is gone.

The photographs in Ada’s hand have scalloped edges. The papery surfaces scuff against each other as she sifts through them, her knuckles, scraped when she fell against the sides of the boat, stiff as rusty hinges. Something has slipped her mind, something for which she was searching, before the ring of the telephone jarred her thoughts. She lies back on the bed and closes her eyes, listening to the reassuring rhythm of Harry splitting logs, down near the creek. Once the garden is tidy, the croquet lawn weeded and rolled, she will telephone Roger and invite him to call round, ask his advice, probe him for his opinion on how much the house is worth, though he is retired now and his son has taken on the family business.

With a start, she remembers. How foolish to let it slip her mind! There is a reason she has pulled out the Louis Vuitton suitcase, a reason good enough to get her out of bed even though she is still a little shaky. Once again it happens, a sense of fading, her surroundings peeling away as her ears grow deaf with the pressure of water, sealing her off from the outside world. The sensation spreads. All she can hear is the sound of her own swallowing, the seep and trickle of something fluid, the edges of her mind softening like sponge as she begins to sink again.

She knows enough to hold her breath, to grip the suitcase. For a moment, underwater murk fills her vision, floating silt as her blood slides slow and she slips further from the light. To prevent herself from falling she concentrates on holding on to the suitcase corners, which dig into her palms.

The doctor says it is the shock, her mind fighting to forget the accident her body remembers. He says they will pass, but she doesn’t like these peculiar turns, thought she had grown out of them years ago, after she was sent away to school when her mother died because her father couldn’t cope with a little girl. When he abandoned her, there was Brian. Safe, steady Brian, and for a while it was better.

She takes a slow, steadying breath and rubs the dents in her palms. The suitcase . . .

For ease of access to past occasions – tennis and shooting parties, the weight of a silver fork in her hand, bone-handled knives – these days she keeps the Louis Vuitton case under the bed. Ada shuffles letters and postcards, theatre programmes, tickets. Round horn-rimmed spectacles, nubby sports jackets, cars with running boards, the salty smell of their leather seats: she misses these things. A man’s white handkerchief, a stiff shirt collar, starched and pressed. She sighs at one photograph. She is wearing furs, leaning forwards for a man to light her cigarette. The line of his jaw is familiar but his name has gone.

What she needs is to feel a little more like her old self. She will send Harry for cigarettes. He will need money.

Photographs are spread all over the floor. From them, Robert smiles up at her. No fool like an old fool, nevertheless . . . She picks Robert up, recalling the other tall young man with the rich brown voice, waving his arms about, talking nineteen-to-the-dozen as he strolled away down Creek Lane with Nora.        

He had come about the child’s tomb; this is why she has pulled out the suitcase. She knows now what she was looking for and exactly where it is hidden, in the red silky folds of the pouch pocket at the back of the suitcase.

The piece of stone in the pocket of the suitcase is greyish white, small enough to cup in her hand, its texture roughened by tiny ovals of shell closely packed in lines, sharp as barnacles. Perhaps this is why she’s thought of it only now, this stone from under the sea. Nora has simply no idea, waltzing off without a by-your-leave. Ada closes her fingers around the piece of stone, the shells embedded there sharp as little teeth.

From the depths of the ocean
, she’ll explain, before dropping the stone casually into his hand, her fingertips grazing his palm,
but well travelled since then
. Well travelled indeed, through ten centuries, both ocean and time.

He will crave it, as she did, will itch to snatch a piece of history, to possess. She knows this, because the need comes off him like heat. Ah well, nothing new on this earth.

And when the moment is opportune, today, or is it tomorrow, she will produce her treasure.
How on earth did you get hold of it?
he’ll let slip, before realising the question is indiscreet.

Ada looks down at the photograph in her hand in which Robert clutches the garden griddle heaped with rubble. The shine on his shoes is dulled with dust from the graves.

‘Tertiary limestone from Binstead on the Isle of Wight; a shell bank there.’ The cadence of Robert’s voice is clear to her ears, as if he was in the room.

‘Let me take a snap,’ she’d said, because she wanted to capture Robert, to keep him with her. The irony is the camera was Brian’s. She and Robert stood together in the church, bathed in a downward slant of light from the high north window while Brian, somewhere behind them, unfolded his ruler to measure the larger grave of the two and conferred with the man whose job it was to make a drawing of the positioning and size of the coffins. That summer, for weeks, all Brian talked about was the excavation. How a coffined grave meant the burial of someone of great importance. She might just as well not have been there, for all the notice Brian took.