Rook (4 page)

‘They’re over. Dead. And they smother the other plants,’ Ada said, when Nora asked again about the forget-me-nots. ‘Though I don’t know why it’s any of your concern,’ her mother added, ‘you’ll be up and off before the year’s out.’

Ada was in the hall putting on her lipstick, about to leave for quiz night at the pub, her statement a question in disguise. Nora has no ready answer when her mother talks like this, as if with the turn of the calendar page to a new month the blank squares will be miraculously starred or ringed in biro, the name of a country written in capitals alongside Nora’s. Concert dates, gala performances, a master class.

Ada patted her silver chignon and regarded herself in the hall mirror. ‘A little project for me,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘It is, after all,
my
garden.’ She closed the front door.

Since her return to Bosham, people stop Nora in the lanes or on the creek path.
Couldn’t stay away, then?
They smile knowingly.
How nice for your mother to have you back home.
Ada, however, has never seemed to need the company of her daughters, sending Flick and Nora to board at a school only half an hour’s drive away. Although Flick was miserable, Nora loved it. She’d grab both suitcases and shoulder her way through the front entrance door the moment Ada dropped them by the wide steps at the start of each new term, while Flick stood outside and chewed her hair as she peered down the drive after their parents in the retreating car. For Nora, boarding school offered the chance to be fully engaged in musical activities whenever the opportunity arose; there were fewer distracting undercurrents than at home.

Now, however, she and Ada have to manage living together. With this in mind, Nora has brought the rake and sieve, thinking to surprise her mother with cockles. The drier mounds of the cockle beds are further out across the gleaming mudflats, towards the sliver of creek. As children, because of living where they did – the lawn tipping towards the creek and ending a crumbling drop ten foot or so above the shoreline – Nora and Flick were taught early the pleasures of the mud; how to judge its character; not to be unsuspecting of the dangers. Ada showed them the differences in the mud’s texture which could reveal where it was safest to walk, near the shore where buried flints lay just below the slip of mud, or where the root mounds of eel grass clumped. She taught them how and where to lay down planks, when to fling themselves on hands and knees and crawl, even to lie flat, if they should find themselves sucked into the slime that in certain places lurked, black and slick, below the surface, its stench of decomposition rising on hot summer days. After an afternoon on the mudflats Flick and Nora came home covered with mud, which tightened their skin as it dried. Before hosing themselves, fully clothed, under the outside shower by the back porch, they emptied their pockets of the buried treasures they had found and lined up their finds on a tin tray. Bits of bone, fire-cracked ‘pot-boilers’, Bronze Age artefacts, Iron Age hearths, a Roman helmet, Saxon pottery and a warrior’s medallions – or so they pretended, both of them seeing their father, imitating the gentle probe of his fingers, his eyeglass, as they examined each flint or bottle top with a magnifying glass. They printed names and dates and numbers on to re-used luggage labels and envelopes. Flick was best at this, her joined-up writing flowing in the lilac Quink she used to fill her new school fountain pen.

One day, lying on her stomach – not because there was quicksand, but because in the glassy heat the suck of mud on sunburnt skin was seductive – the deep push of Nora’s exploratory fingertips found something hard. She scooped and dug with her hands, manipulating whatever it was through the cloy of mud. As soon as she held the flint up and scraped the surface, she saw she’d found something real. She knew. The flint was tapered towards one end, the surfaces sharpened; the broad end fitted neatly in her palm. On each side of the tapered end were two slight indentations, notches, perhaps where the flint tool had been bound to a wooden handle. It was an axe-head, she was sure. Her father, cracking open a chalk boulder to search for the nodule of flint embedded in the soft, porous rock, had told her about Neolithic farmers who cut down forests to clear land for their crops, and the tools they made for their task.

Cradling the piece of flint in her fingers, she rinsed the mud off in the creek to reveal the colours of an English sky, grey shaded to white. Where the stone had been chipped away the blade was translucent and sharp-edged as glass, while around the notches at the tapered end the surface had been left uncut, chalky-soft and ingrained with dirt.

Nora knew she had to have this piece of history for herself, to make the axe-head her talisman. Flick was further along the shoreline, towards Creek House, wading knee-deep, her dark head bent as she picked through the contents of her net. Nora rubbed her piece of flint dry on the back of her shorts where they were still clean, and slipped her find into a pocket.

Back at Creek House she hurried to the lavatory under the stairs to wrap her treasure in a page of her father’s
Daily Telegraph
left folded on the floor. She sneaked upstairs to hide her package in the mess of old tennis shoes, broken toys and salt-sticky flippers at the bottom of her wardrobe.

While having a clear-out the other day she found the axe-head, still wrapped in its bundle of newspaper and buried under heaps of clothes fallen from hangers long ago. There, too, was the bottle of gin: Bombay Sapphire. The bottle was heavy, almost full, and this fact took a while to sink in because she’d expected it to be empty. It seems she’d barely drunk any of the gin that night, after all, whatever story her fragmented memories appear to tell. She didn’t understand. She tipped the bottle end to end. Gin sloshed and gulped, swirling to fill the neck of the bottle and plopping back. She noticed the way the colour of the turquoise intensified where the molten glass had folded and set during the making of the bottle.

She had balanced the axe-head on the shelf above the stopped-up fireplace in her bedroom. Despite all the time since someone first patiently knapped the surface, the flint’s edge remains sharp as a blade.

Nora squats to pick up one unusually large shell. To her surprise, the two halves are still hinged together. The shell is deeply ridged and treacle-coloured spikes run along each raised rib, giving the shell the look of a medieval weapon. Webbed lines in shades of sand and stone remind Nora of growth lines on a tree trunk, but she has no idea how to read them to find out the age of the shell. She looks around between the clumps of bladder-wrack at the other, smaller cockle shells, lying open and empty after the oystercatchers have prised them apart and jabbed away the internal flesh.

The cavity of the shell, when she wipes off the mud with her thumb, is bone-white. No remnant of life. Since oystercatchers search out much smaller, thumbnail-sized shells, it’s most likely this shell has been washed empty by years of seawater currents and tides. The two halves closed together form a fat heart, with spines jabbing into her palm. It will be a perfect addition to her wind chimes, if she can work out a way to attach it without damage.

When her bucket is half-filled with cockles she puts it in the shade where the garden of Creek House drops down to the shore, and continues to walk along the creek path towards the sea. Birdsong is loud, the sky very blue, but today she will not give in to her desire to scurry back into the house and shut the door on the sounds and sights of early summer; instead, she will walk to the sea, right down to the dunes and back.

Years of musical training have taught Nora to tackle limitations of the human physique with imagination and discipline. For a cellist, the most basic weakness is the unequal length and strength of the fingers.
Begin with confidence that inherent weaknesses can be overcome
, Isaac told students in their first lesson. A weakness of mind, she thinks, might prove less easy to combat.

By the time she draws close to the sea, an east wind is stirring. Clouds gather, the sky pinned low over the stretch of salt marsh where the creek widens as it reaches East Head. Anchoring clumps of marram grass provide footholds for her to clamber up and over The Hinge, a narrow strip of dune which joins the sand dunes to the mainland. A few years ago The Hinge was completely destroyed by autumn gales turning the shifting sand dunes of East Head into an island, cut off from the mainland. Without the barrier of The Hinge there was much fear in the village that the sea would encroach further inland, putting homes under threat of regular flooding. In an attempt to stop this, The Hinge has been bolstered by a rock berm; gradually the narrow strip of dune is reforming. Last New Year, people dragged their Christmas trees to the beach and heaped them in a line to form a barrier which might help to encourage the build-up of sand.

In today’s wind, the sand is whisked up into scoops and ripples which glisten like sugar. The flying grains will be painful so Nora turns away from the dunes, along the top of the shingle bank towards the line of painted beach huts. The sound of an engine straining draws her attention to the car park below, where a black 4×4 is attempting to reverse, wheels churning the mud, while, behind the car, a man in a hat gesticulates, shouting instructions into the wind. His coat billows behind him, the lining flashing red. The wide brim of his hat – a gaucho, the hat Isaac favoured – hides the man’s face until he glances up to where Nora stands high above him on the shingle bank. Her heart pinches. His hair, blown wild by the wind, is longer than when she last saw him, but it is Isaac, she’s almost certain.

Her pace slows. He has turned away. Fighting the wind, he hauls open the passenger door and leans in to speak to the driver, a young woman. One hand holding down his hat, he throws out an arm, gesticulating at the mud, before launching himself into the seat. The hat dips with each jerk as the car jolts over the rutted field.

Nora is at a standstill. Below her, the 4×4 swings around in the car park, carving an arc of mud into the grass. The man in the passenger seat turns to pull the seatbelt across and as he does so he glances up at her again.

She was sure; now she is unsure. How can it be Isaac, because why would he be here? The man’s height was wrong – though she was too far away to see him properly so it’s hard to tell – but the hat, something about the windmill movements of his arm, his gesticulations at the mud. The flamboyance of the coat’s scarlet lining.

Windblown sand is sharp on Nora’s lips as she watches the black 4×4 move away, bouncing over the grassland towards the road which runs inland until, with a final puff of exhaust, it heads north on the tarmac.

He was with a younger woman.

Somewhere on the beach a child cries out, a high-pitched call of panic. A shadow passes overhead and Nora realises it was not a child calling, but a gull, the wind flinging its cry. She remains motionless for a few minutes, for once allowing the surge of music to rise in her mind, the melodic phrases of Granados’s Intermezzo from
Goyescas
. The bow control required steadies her so that she can walk on, heading east along the shingle bank with the wind at her back.

6

Beneath the floor of the boathouse is the creek. To see between the nail-pocked boards requires an adjustment of vision but since she first glimpsed the water’s ripple under her feet, Nora can’t rid herself of the disorienting sense of its continuous passing below. She makes a conscious effort to notice other things, such as the smell of wet emulsion and freshly sawn pine.

High up a ladder where a web of watery light wavers, Eve is spreading the last of a roller full of pale grey paint on the vaulted ceiling. Her three-year-old son, Zach, pushes a gingerbread man along a line of Smarties in the dip between two railway sleepers joined together to form a low table. He peers sideways at Nora through his blond fringe. She smiles at him but he turns away, chanting, naming colours in a sing-song voice. She tries not to mind. Children, like dogs, sense human unease; she cannot relax around Zach. One minute he’ll suck his thumb and lean his head on Eve’s breast, the next he’ll grit his teeth and kick out at her ankles with his miniature trainers. Zach has the face of an angel combined with a predilection for making guns with anything from Lego to a teaspoon. His moods travel across his face, an expression of concentration forecasting the smash of his plate on the flagstone floor of the Anchor Bleu, something he does whenever Eve takes him in there. He savours the noise, the drama of being at the centre of adult attention. Nora would much rather see Eve without Zach and, through some sixth sense of childhood he’s aware of this, she’s certain.