Rook (27 page)

‘MUM!’ Last night, Nora had yelled at Ada to get her attention.

Ada swung round, her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘It’s locked!’ The words spat out.

‘Use the key.’

‘How dare you?’

‘It’s night time. Most people . . .’

‘I am not—’ Ada stamped her bare foot. Nora darted forward as she swung the mallet again ‘—most people!’

Her mother’s grip on the mallet was surprisingly strong. They glared at each other, both clasping the wooden handle. Sweat prickled Nora’s forehead. With a blink, Ada’s expression softened. Her hands fluttered and dropped. She frowned, lifting her hands to examine the palms as if they were dirty or unfamiliar and chafed them together. She was trembling. Nora let go of the mallet. Just in time she moved close to support her mother’s weight and save her from crumpling to the floor amongst the shards of glass.

‘Darling,’ her mother leaned into her, ‘Might I lie down for a moment?’ Her voice passed over Nora’s skin like a feather.

Eve has plugged in her CD player. ‘Is everyone here? Where’s Norman today? Is he still in his bath? And how are you, Clara?’

The woman next to Nora begins to hum, drumming her fingers on the chair arms. Every now and then she tugs her polyester dress down to cover her age-splotched knees. Her legs are naked. ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush,’ she belts out, full vibrato, and chuckles to herself.

‘A song for every occasion, haven’t you, Iris?’ Eve says.

Iris gives Nora a bold stare, then sits back in her chair and beams around the room. Nora looks away. Her cello rests between her thighs. When Harry kissed her, the bulk and weight of his body pressed against hers. She straightens her arms, pushing the cello upright and away from her body. She’ll make a decision soon about whether or not to go back up to London. A few weeks from now the pavements outside the Academy will turn yellow and brown with a filigree of fallen leaves from the plane trees. If she does go back to London, she’ll be able to see more of Jonny.

She brushes some dust from the polished wood. Her cello’s formal curves and curlicues are artificial and out of place in this room; it doesn’t belong here and nor does she.

Eve passes around photographs of wedding couples in church doorways, pictures of balloons and cakes. It’s a session on anniversaries. Eve plays a recording of Happy Birthday and sings along at full volume, conducting with exaggerated arm and body movements. When Iris interrupts, warbling, ‘To tell you the truth I’ll be lonely,’ with a doleful expression, Eve moves swiftly on.

When the time comes for Nora to play, Phyllis has seated herself on a chair to one side of the circle. Nora pulls the cello to her. During the Bach Prelude in G major Phyllis cranes forward in her chair, fighting the severe hunch of her back to get a better view of the cello, to look higher so as to be able to watch Nora’s fingers. She taps with her stick on the carpet, keeping time, and her body – with the eager, forward stretch of her neck, the yearning of her jaw line – uncurls a little. Her head jerks upwards. Looking directly into Phyllis’s faded eyes, Nora remembers her own face forced upwards by Isaac’s hand on the back of her head, the shock of his roughness. She was playing Beethoven to a lecture hall of students. ‘This, for the public!’ he bellowed, ‘Not for yourself!’ He believed the cello to be an instrument with the power to influence, to transmit ideas and hypnotic images, spiritual states of being, to affect the human mind in ways as yet unknown. Nora lifts her head, keeps it raised as bars of semiquavers run beneath her fingers.

When Nora stops playing, the matinée idol with the crinkly hair swivels his gaze around the room. He hasn’t said a word for the entire hour, but he has leaned forward and watched everything with a serene smile on his face. Now, he sinks back down and stares at his hands. He twiddles his thumbs, first one way and then the other. Phyllis is straining forward in her seat, but when she sees Eve has begun to pack her CD player into the plastic crate along with all her other bits and pieces, her face falls, her body slumping as the hunch returns to her spine.

30

Nora wakes to the smell of burning. In the instant of recognising the taste in the back of her throat, she’s up, crashing into her father’s study, her mind seeing the bookshelves on fire – but there’s only darkness. The curtainless window shows a cusp of moon, a starry sky. Déjà vu washes over her. Somewhere in the night, her mother will be up and smoking, that’s all. The house is still.

Without switching on the light, Nora walks one step at a time like a child, down the stairs. In the kitchen, the fridge hums. No movement from Rook’s basket, but the smell of smoke is more pungent. She checks the oven and finds it cold. The acrid taste in her throat is stronger and she has a sense, now, of something stirring in the house.

From behind the closed door of the dining room comes a low-level noise like paper being screwed into balls. No one goes in there any more. Do they? With an unreasonable surge of premonition, she stops with her hand on the glass door knob. A flicker of light and movement gutters along the bottom of the door.

When she turns the handle, the door falls open to a room wild with the heat and roar of flames. She slams the door shut again, leaning back, pulling on the handle to hold the door closed against any suck of air which might force it open. A glimpse was all she’d had. So many licking flames: flames climbing the sides of the chimney breast; flames racing along the curtain pelmet; flames transforming the old raffia wastepaper basket into a spiky bush of orange.

Water. Bucket.

No, too late, too many flames, their darting image imprinted on her retina as her mind registers the shock and reaches for half-forgotten warnings about water and electricity.

If the curtains catch, the fire will take hold, become all-consuming. She must find a rug or floor mat before that happens. She must try to beat back the flames. Her eyes prick in the smoke leaking out under the door and around the hinges. Fire drill: teachers with shrill whistles hustling them out of the dorms. Do not stop to save valuables.

Do not stop. Her mind crawls.

A movement at the edges of her vision: Ada wafts down the hallway, silent as a ghost. Pausing, she draws on a cigarette held in an ebony holder, the silver of her hair doubled in the hall mirror behind her head.

The sight of her mother galvanises Nora into action. From the dining room comes the crack of wood. No time. She grasps Ada by the shoulders and turns her around, feeling the fragile jumble of bones beneath her hands as she guides her mother’s feather-light body towards the front door.

‘Out!’

The front door slams behind them, knocker banging. Outside it’s cool, silent and still. Under the vast starry sky, shut outside Creek House in her nightdress, Nora feels exposed. In a macabre mimic of dance, the pulsing light from the dining-room windows strobes orange across the damp lawn and into the shadows of the shrubbery. Ada’s cigarette holder gleams.

There’s a shout, and Harry appears, jogging across the grass in his dressing gown, his arms wide, reaching for her. Nora leans into him, the thud of his heart. Momentarily, she is reeled in. Then she opens her eyes. His stubble scrapes her cheek as she wriggles away and reaches out for Ada.

‘Look after Mum. Keep hold of her.’ Nora pushes her mother towards Harry and dashes back to the door. Phone the fire brigade. The phone is in the hallway. Flames writhe against the glass of the dining-room window. Nora shields her face from the heat’s intensity and daren’t, after all, go back inside. She turns on her heel to race in the opposite direction, hitching up her nightdress to skin over the wall into Arthur’s garden and tear up the path to his house. Her fists bang on his door. In her mind, the flames prowl and leap.

She should have gone back inside. She should have grabbed the cello, in its hard case in the hallway.

Humphrey the Great Dane gallops to and fro inside, bellowing, until the noise of his barking and clattering run brings Arthur to the door. Humphrey’s weight nearly knocks Nora to the floor, his paws on her shoulders. In Arthur’s hallway she hears her own voice rise in pitch as she gabbles an address into the telephone. ‘Be quick; be quick.’

A cluster of neighbours huddle together outside the house, awed faces like pewter in the cold of the fire engine’s blue light. Nora can’t quite recognise any of them. She shakes, though she is not cold. The grass is wet under her bare feet. The fire hose, monstrous and black, snakes up the front steps, in through the door, down the hallway and into the dining room, where firemen, shadowy and huge in their helmets and uniforms, stamp and call to each other. The orange glow has died down. Someone has put Harry’s heavy waxed jacket over her shoulders and rubs her back, but the hand is too small to be Harry’s. He, she realises, has disappeared. His jacket holds the strong smell of tarry rope.

‘It’s mostly smoke damage. Don’t worry. It looks much worse than it is,’ a woman’s voice says.

Nora’s mind is blank. She has forgotten something vital, and the absence nudges at her mind. She can’t think what it is until she sees Harry come running round the side of the house from the back with Rook’s basket. She flies across the lawn and whips off the black towel. In a stretch of wing and claw, Rook flaps up on to the side of the basket and launches himself at her. The surprise of his movement knocks her backwards and she finds herself sitting on the grass with Rook treading her lap with his claws, wings outstretched.

The ambulance arrives and Nora watches, as if from a great distance, as Harry helps the paramedics persuade Ada to be gently led into it. They come for Nora, who refuses to get up from where she sits on the damp grass. Rook screeches and thrusts himself at the paramedics. The woman shields her face with her forearm and steps back behind her male partner, even though Rook can’t lift himself higher than a few inches from the ground.

‘Bloody hell!’ the male paramedic mutters.

In their reaction Nora sees how much Rook has grown without her noticing. No longer the loose bundle of feathers he once was, he’s a big, powerful bird with a vicious-looking beak and claws, and coordination of movement.

‘C’mon, Miss. Just to check your breathing,’ the male paramedic coaxes, recovering himself.

Harry squats and reaches out with his square hands, but Rook flaps and flutters, beak open, at his fingers.

‘Don’t!’ Nora scrambles up. ‘He doesn’t like hands coming at him. Let me.’

Nora is silent in the back of the ambulance, thinking of the paramedics and Rook’s shriek of fury. It’s the loudest noise she has ever heard him make. She managed to settle him in his basket in the kitchen, with Harry promising to stay and keep him company until she gets back. The house is safe. She closes her eyes, overcome with weariness, bracing her body as the ambulance turns a corner. Her hands are linked in her lap, where Rook has taken to sitting every evening. Until now, because of his silence, she hasn’t worried too much about whether or not he has imprinted on her, but if he’s found his voice, he may now try to leave. She wonders whether he might soon discover he can fly up into the sky and join the circling cloud of rooks winding down over a copse at dusk, his heart beating fast as he soars and dips, the air around him filled with the caw and call of hundreds like him.

31

The morning after the fire Nora wakes late, to the smell of wet plaster and ash. She’s alone in the house apart from Rook, yet from downstairs comes a noise she can’t quite place, a creak or an echo. She strains to listen. The sound is like a swollen door opening. She sits up, suddenly alert: it can only be Rook. Rook cawing from the hallway, his caw cracked and wavering, his throat dry from disuse.