Rook (31 page)

‘Coffee?’ Harry asks.

Nora turns towards him to answer and catches sight of the painting she’s seen before, stacked with other canvases on the floor against the wall. A bunch of palette knives stand in a bucket and a sheet has been thrown over the paintings, not quite covering them. All she can glimpse is a corner showing the tips of a woman’s hair.

‘Harold must have known Cnut’s daughter, mustn’t he?’ The painting has made her think of the Lady of Shallot and the drowning of the little Saxon princess. ‘They’d have been about the same age, growing up in the same village.Don’t you think?’

The Bosham church scene at the beginning of the Bayeux Tapestry shows the horseshoe shape of the chancel arch, below which Cnut’s young daughter already lay buried. Had lain for thirty or more years, by 1064.

When Harry doesn’t answer, she looks up from the half-covered painting. Forgetting she has not filled him in on her line of thought, she continues. ‘They prayed there, didn’t they, Harold and his men, just before they went to France?’

Harry is lifting the flapping lower edge of a rip in the T-shirt he has just pulled on, as if the rip can be sealed up again through his effort.

‘The custom before a journey.’

‘And then the wind took them in the wrong direction. Because they can’t have wanted to end up as hostages of Guy of Ponthieu.’

‘No.’

‘In the tapestry, Guy’s soldiers have swords and lances.’

‘Harold has only a dagger.’

‘He wasn’t prepared, so he wasn’t going to France to fight.’

‘Wreckers.’

‘That’s what Elsa says. She says they were famous for it on that stretch of French coastline.’

‘You both have your reasons for wanting the bones to be Harold’s.’ Harry’s face is serious.

‘Who?’ His statement takes her by surprise, coming as it does, sideways into the conversation. He must mean her and Jonny, grouping them together, as a couple.

‘Sometimes wanting something to be makes it seem so.’ Harry sits down on the end of the bed. ‘All I’m saying.’ Sometimes his sentences telescope into riddles.

‘It is an important part of English history,’ Nora says. ‘Jonny is right to pursue it.’

‘He wants his programme very much indeed.’

Nora doesn’t know if she wants the TV programme to be made or not. What she does want is the coffins to be opened again. Or, at the very least, she wants someone else, another archaeologist, someone who knows what they are doing, to take up the story where her father left off.

Harry leans to one side and tugs the sheet from the stack of paintings.‘They are for Café Jetsam.’

Nora is embarrassed; she must have been staring.

‘Is it Edyth?’ she asks, too quickly, when the painting of the woman’s hair is revealed. ‘The swans? Is that why she’s so white?’

Harry begins ripping pages from the telephone directory to wipe white paint from a palette knife. ‘It is and it isn’t.’ He doesn’t look up. ‘Can that be fixed?’ He nods in the direction of the scout blanket, still wiping paint from his palette knife.

Irritated by his evasiveness, she gets up. When she lifts one end of the blanket, she sees a broken headstock and stops in surprise.

‘In the attic – it was Daphne’s grandmother’s.’

Nora lifts the blanket away from the cello, which is in pieces, the soundboard loose and splintered, the fingerboard warped. The upper bout has cracked off and lies separated from the body of the cello.

‘What happened?’

‘I think all the pieces are there, except the strings.’ Harry shrugs. ‘Spanish, Daphne said. She has no use for it.’

Nora laughs, and runs her hand over the worn finish on the sound board. ‘I think she means Italian.’

‘It fell down the stairs when they were putting it in the attic.’

A glissando of excitement runs through Nora. The Italian restorer who fell in love with her Goffriller had talked to her at some length about how restorative wood is. She sits down on the bed and carefully lifts away the loose soundboard to look for a maker’s mark. ‘I know just who to ask about it.’

Harry nods, smiling to himself as he begins to clean another palette knife.

37

The door bell rings. Jonny stoops in the porch under the tendrils of honeysuckle, one arm balancing a sheaf of flowers, tangerine and red buds of gladioli. Nora’s mind is elsewhere, she wasn’t expecting him. In fact, she wants to put more distance between herself and her entanglement with Jonny.

‘Good news!’ He places the gladioli ceremoniously into her arms. ‘A date has been set for the consistory court. Things are moving again. No hard feelings? I thought we could celebrate the Godwin Graves Project.’

Rook appears at the kitchen doorway, his beak stained with cherry. Jonny steps in, muttering, ‘This place stinks of bird shit,’ and turns to close the front door. Before Nora can say anything, Rook launches himself down the hallway screeching, the crown of feathers rising on top of his head. Neck arched and wings outstretched, he rears and prances towards Jonny’s calves, beak thrust forward like a spear. He lets loose a pile of guano on Jonny’s smart London shoes and hops away again.

‘Bloody hell!’ Jonny swears and, pulling out a tissue, bends to his shoes.

Rook rears back once more. He hurls himself higher and higher into the air, claws raised, until he’s shrieking and swooping above Jonny’s bent head and shoulders. Battering the walls and ceiling of the hallway, he knocks the mirror frame crooked with his outstretched wings. He is an explosion of noise and movement – the flap of his wings, the scrape of his claws – he ricochets up and down the hall like a loose firework. Jonny cringes and backs away, his arms over his head to protect himself. ‘Christ! Get that fucking thing off me!’ He swings back a leg, lashing out to kick.

‘Careful!’ Nora grabs at Jonny, too late to prevent his foot connecting with Rook’s body. Kicked mid-air and knocked sideways, Rook tumbles downwards only briefly, screeching, before he rises up again, his wing-beat wild with fury.

‘Fuck. I’m out of here.’ Jonny fumbles at the door latch.

Rook has dropped to the floor and lies in the corner, a jumble of feathers, breast heaving and beak half-open. With his feathers puffed he appears three times his normal size. Nora approaches him tentatively, reaching out her hand.

‘Hey, gorgeous, what did you just do?’ she murmurs. ‘Did you just fly?’

A car pulls into the drive, a taxi. Nora hopes Flick has not decided to make an impromptu visit. She offers Rook her arm and he sidles on to it. In the kitchen he huffs his feathers and begins to preen.

‘Back soon, you clever boy,’ she says, as she closes the kitchen door.

Their heads bend together and they stand so close in the front porch, for a moment they are one person, Jonny-and-the-girl. Her hand lifts as she says something in a low, urgent voice; Jonny murmurs a reply. His shoulders shift towards her; the angle of his neck. At the click of the closing kitchen door, Jonny-and-the-girl turn as one to stare at Nora, their faces blank. The girl’s cheeks are tear-stained; Jonny’s hand drops from her elbow. He steps away from her and smiles at Nora.

‘Nora!’ He spreads his arms in an expansive gesture. ‘This is Emma, my PA. First time in this neck of the woods – she’s a London girl through and through.’

Emma brushes a hair from her face.

‘PA?’ Nora’s mind is glassy, opaque. The girl, it’s true, is clutching what could be a filofax – bulging and floral-covered – but she can’t be more than eighteen.

Jonny’s fixed smile confirms everything. ‘At last you two get to meet!’

Emma has bunched her fingers to her lips. The tips of her nails are brilliant white and thick. They must be false.

The three of them stand in the porch. A smell of mud and decomposition rises up from the creek.

‘Anchor Bleu?’ Jonny asks. The taxi is turning round in the drive.

Nora shakes her head at him.

‘Jonny, the train?’ Emma looks at her watch and stands down a step. ‘Got to go, sorry.’ She’s already shuffling sideways and giving a little wave. ‘Call me later?’

Emma says nothing to Nora, doesn’t even look at her. That’s how the realisation settles, fully, on Nora. She leans in the porch, her hand on the flint wall, the rounded pebbles fitting her palm as they fitted the palm of the stonemason who placed them there, more than a hundred years ago. Traditional lime mortar keeps a wall alive, her father explained to her, whereas a wall built with cement is dead. He’d shown her the differences in the laying of the stones, how you could tell whether the stonemason had been left- or right-handed, the different styles and colours and patterns of the stones in every flint wall in the village.

Emma’s high heels sink in the new gravel where it’s too deep, her progress towards the waiting taxi as slow as if she was making her way barefoot down a shingle bank. Not an outdoor girl. Emma is dressed for a carpeted office with a desk broad enough for impromptu sex. Nora will laugh, later, at this whole scenario.

‘Nice girl.’ Jonny ruffles his hair with both hands and they stand, side by side but not together, in the porch. He turns towards Nora. Tiredness drags over her. He will want to eat and drink; he will want to talk about the Godwin Graves Project; he will tell her more lies, or perhaps just not tell her the whole truth. It’s a relief not to want him any more. The bright sun highlights dry skin flakes between Jonny’s eyebrows, the downward pull of lines around his mouth, and she feels a wave of pity for the professional and personal muddle in which he’s embroiled – the possible failure of his dream to gain permission to make the TV documentary of the decade, perhaps the century; a wife he wants to escape, a teenage daughter and very possibly, if she can read him at all, another lover: this young girl, Emma. And Nora: the tricky ‘ex’ he needs on board for his Project.

Just ’tend
: Zach’s phrase. Nora rehearses a sentence. She might manage to stick to chit-chat, but already she can sense Jonny’s preoccupation as he looks back down the drive.

Harry ambles out of the shed and heads for the orchard with his spade on his shoulder.

No, she can’t spare any time or energy for Jonny. ‘Aren’t you going with her?’

For a moment it seems he will argue; he opens his mouth and hesitates, trying to work out whether or not she has put two and two together. If nothing else, Jonny has great ability to believe in himself. He smiles, gives her a peck on the cheek. ‘Sure?’

She nods.

He saunters down the drive, jacket slung over one shoulder. As he opens the door of the waiting taxi, he swivels on a heel, waves and blows a kiss.

Autumn

38

Ada has packed Cheddar and Ritz biscuits. She should have done this long ago because she would like him to talk to her again, more than anything, the way he used to when he dressed in the mornings, telling her about his day ahead as he wrenched his belt buckle tighter – he always bought his belts too long, took his Swiss Army knife to them to stab an extra hole in the leather.

In the dark, Ada trips on an uneven plank in the boardwalk. The picnic case knocks her ankle. She has teabags and boiling water in the thermos, slices of Eve’s fruit cake wrapped in foil. Though Brian had been a much bigger man when he was younger, in later years his appetite was only for his books.

She puts up her hands to cover her ears. They ache, from the lack of his voice or the whipping of the wind she can’t tell. The roar of her blood or the sea drags her into a tornado of thoughts and memories twisting inside her skull.
What was the point?
Nora had cried.
I didn’t tell you, because I knew you wouldn’t want anything to do with it
.