Rook

by Jane Rusbridge

  Later, Nora lies awake. An owl hoots; another answers. Rook is downstairs, alone in the kitchen. Nora turns over on to her side.

  She will go and see Eve, tomorrow. She’s put it off far too long. I’m pregnant, I expect you guessed. She is a lousy friend. She should tell Eve how bad she feels and explain what has stopped her calling by, the way, when things she needs to forget get stirred about in her head, her mind shuts down, she can’t think straight, and her priorities get disordered so that she doesn’t recognise herself.

  She rolls on to her back, straightens out her legs, points her toes to stretch out her calf muscles. She should get up, go for a run, but her body is reluctant. She won’t sleep, though, because her thoughts will continue to leapfrog. It’s why she can’t play properly any more, this inability to either concentrate or relax, a constant spiccato, percussive, bouncing in her head, repeated and repeated. Her hands lie empty and useless on the bed. She rubs her face.

  To confront Ada and ask directly about her plans for the garden will only make her more secretive. Nora learned, years ago, the necessity of avoiding confrontation with her mother. She remembers her discomfort when a pre-teen growth spurt left her awkward with her body, taller than both Ada and Flick, who was by then nineteen. Reedy and pale, all elbows and knees, Nora looked nothing like her mother or sister. Only her white-blonde hair was substantial, waist-length, fanning out in waves. My Saxon princess, her father called her, and from the age of about four she’d fought with Ada to keep her hair long, running away and hiding from her mother and her hairdressing scissors. If caught and lifted on to the kitchen counter for a haircut, she’d bite at Ada’s wrists. How she’d hated her teenage body, its angles and bones, until, that is, she was sent to Marlene, the dressmaker’s.

  In Marlene’s mirrors, the indigo of the gown for which Nora was being fitted anchored her against the white puff and gauze backdrop of racked bridal gowns behind. She was about to take up the Senior Scholarship at the Academy, and Ada wanted a performance gown specially made. Once a week over the summer Nora went to be draped with silk and taffeta, measured and fitted, seams taken in and hems lowered. In the wall of mirrors, Nora stared at herself in a full-length gown. Lanky Legs, Flick called her.

  Marlene, the French seamstress, spoke through lips clamped around pins. A tiny tattoo of a butterfly fluttered at the pulse on her wrist as she prodded and turned Nora this way and that. The silky material brushed, cool, against Nora’s thigh and she longed to rip off the cloth-tackiness of an Elastoplast she had on one knee. Marlene leaned close to lift Nora’s hair in both hands as she heaped it high to fasten it in place with hair-pins. Exposed to the air, the hairs on Nora’s neck lifted.

  Pins in her teeth, Marlene gave Nora’s hips a pinch and muttered, ‘Good for clotheses.’ She stood back, studying Nora in the mirror. ‘The collar-bones,’ her voice was scratchy as sawdust, as if she needed to clear her throat, ‘so perfect.’

  The smell of cigarettes thickened Marlene’s breath and stale smoke coiled into her French pleat, the aroma carrying a complicated sense of dalliances in dimly lit bars. Of romantic, black and white films where the heroines wore scarlet lipstick and Hermes suits cinched at the waist. When Marlene moved away across the room, her pore-deep perfume, animal and earthy, remained behind, at the back of Nora’s throat.

  Marlene pinched and measured tucks and necklines, the fit and fall across the shoulders, the hips. Nora chewed on a finger as she watched the deft movements of Marlene’s painted nails until Marlene slapped at her hand. ‘Saperlipopette!’

  Marlene stubbed her cigarettes on a silver-plated bon-bon plate on the floor, pushed with her stockinged foot out of the way. By the end of an afternoon, ash and dog-ends overflowed on to the carpet. On those nights, when Nora lay in bed and thought ahead to the autumn and leaving home for London, Marlene’s smoke and perfume, exotic and alien, hovered close, embedded in the mass of Nora’s own hair spread on the pillow.

  The London in her mind’s eye was composed of vertical lines – a squeezed sky jammed between streets lined with shop windows – and thin, crowded spaces; people milling in the endless choice of tearooms, bars and restaurants. She’d fallen in love with the gracious and pale-stoned frontage of the Royal Academy; the graceful plane trees – straight and tall, not deformed by salt winds – casting a flutter of shadows over the broad pavement; the glitter of the looped crystal chandeliers in the Duke’s Hall with its high painted ceiling. London for Nora was also the incense and candle wax in the air of the chapel where she played her entrance piece to Isaac Brennen, who got up from a distant pew and came closer, standing in the aisle under the fall of light from a stained-glass window, hands in his trouser pockets. She drew the final bow across and held herself still to allow the last inner vibrations to fade from her body before she tossed her hair from her face and looked up. She had no doubt she had played exceptionally well.

  ‘Well, your music teachers seem to think very highly of you.’ His accent clipped the words. Looking down at his notes, he continued, his voice low and quick, to criticise the naivety of her playing, the lack of emotional control over her body language. Nora gripped her bow. She stared at the gleam of his black hair, the sharp cut of his goatee beard. When he glanced up from his notes, frowning, her breath caught. She would not cry.

  ‘This will cease,’ he announced without smiling. ‘Perhaps to start,’ Brennen waved a dismissive hand in the direction of her kicked-off shoes, ‘to start, you should play with the shoes on.’ He nodded curtly, tucked a battered leather music case under his arm and left her to his colleagues’ further questioning. He was shorter than she expected and walked with a slight limp. Her mind strained to follow the echo of his uneven footfall down the long aisle and she dropped her bow when the chapel door banged behind him.

  She turned to the others. The answers she gave them were automatic, easy.

  When the autumn came and she sat in the tiered ranks of the lecture hall, she refused to titter or gasp with the other students at the rapid fire of sexual innuendo of Isaac’s jokes. She didn’t whisper behind her hand about the outlandish coloured socks he wore and which showed only when he sat to demonstrate a technique on the cello. She didn’t comment on the flamboyance of his collection of hats. He sometimes twirled a metal-tipped stick when walking stiff-legged through the college courtyards. Rumour had it he fell from a horse as a child.

  Isaac was a magnetic performer, and he needed an audience. Nora dreamed of catching him unaware, but she also waited for and wanted the fiercer side of his onstage persona to explode through the repartee, the moment when he would begin to pace the lecture platform, eyes glittering. Something within her responded to the fury he showed towards those less passionate than himself about music.

  ‘Discipline, not emotion,’ he’d bark. ‘The discipline of the structure, its architectural strength, is what you must look for and understand.’ He glared down from the podium. ‘Learn control!’

  He talked about music with a forcefulness she wanted for herself, for at times the music overwhelmed her. As the term progressed, he glanced her way when she passed him in the canteen or library, or on the grand curve of the stairways, his look private in those public places. Her skin pricked. One day she came across him in the library. He stood with a manuscript in his hands, filling the narrow gap between two shelves where she needed to search. She’d hesitated, held her breath, walked quickly on by. She wasn’t brave enough. The leap of tempo in her blood told her he’d seen her pass.

  Sometimes, leaving the Academy library, she drifted past his study window and strained to hear him playing. She never did. It was said he practised only in the privacy of his home, or shut away in one of the many cloistered and anonymous practice rooms, rows of identical, soundproofed rooms below ground level, cramped and uniform spaces like cells in a honeycomb. Early in the mornings and every evening, when she pulled, then pushed, through the intimate suck and release of the door-seal, she imagined she’d find him there, in
the dark, seated at the piano, awaiting her arrival.

  In the end it was a far more prosaic beginning. After a seminar in her final year, a cluster of students were casually included in an invitation to a bar with three or four of the music tutors who often drank together at lunchtimes and early evenings. It was pouring with rain. When Nora arrived at the pub soaked through, Isaac was shaking out an umbrella in the doorway. In the Ladies, she stood in front of the splotched mirror and scrunched clumps of her wet hair to dry it a little, calling up the vision of herself in Marlene’s wall of mirrors. She was no longer a too-tall, too-thin girl. She tipped her head upside down to shake out the mass of her hair, lifting it from her neck and ears under the hand-drier. When she looked again at her reflection, her hair was wild, waves tensing to curls as they dried.

  In the crowded bar, between people holding drinks and bags and damp coats, Nora was shunted down an upholstered bench and seated beside Isaac. Up close, he seemed smaller. She had a sudden wish to be underground at the Academy, pushing through the double doors into the sealed silence of a practice room to find him there, alone.

  Someone, another tutor, was buying a round of drinks and she hesitated, unsure.

  ‘G and T, ice and lemon,’ Isaac said. He was so close she could see the wet of his bottom lip, glimpse the twist of his tongue when he spoke. ‘Times two?’

  She nodded.

  The group played drinking games, composers’ names and dates and biographical details shouted across the tables, Nora and Isaac hemmed in until the crowd thinned, much later. Long tendrils of her hair curled as they dried, and clung to the sleeve of his wool jacket. She didn’t move from her seat, even when desperate for the loo, but stayed, legs crossed tight, squashed up against his shoulder. She saw for the first time that his eyes, usually shadowed, were a brown close to gold, like syrup capturing the light. His oiled hair gleamed under the wall lamp, his face under the prominent brow cast by the spill of light into lines and hollows. An emptiness like hunger prowled through her. She couldn’t move away. When he leaned forward or stretched across the table, she smelled the end-of-the-day scent of his skin, and she knew what would happen, later in the evening, when he took her back to his room to find some sheet music she asked him about, when he took her on to his lap and his nose buried into the hollow of her neck, her hair, those darting, expert hands of his exploring, across and low and firm down her belly.

  She wore an Indian cotton skirt, wrapped and tied around her waist, falling open from her thighs as he pulled her up and back on to his lap, hard and close to his body, his beard pricking her neck, his fingers on her. The gin she’d drunk was oily and aromatic on her lips.

  11

  ‘I keep seeing someone. I think he may be dead.’ Nora brushes the hair back from her face. Her hands carry the smell of the ivy she and Eve have been pulling all morning from the roof and walls of the boathouse.

  Eve straightens, her arms filled with trailing ivy clumps. ‘I knew something was up.’

  Nora tugs on an ivy runner. The roots lift stringy and white from the soil, a metre or more creeping along the bottom of the boathouse wall to join a dense mass of ivy growing like a small tree attached to the bricks, with shaggy appendages embedded in the mortar.

  ‘Go on.’ Eve drops the ivy and dusts off her hands.

  ‘I meant to tell you before.’ Nora stops. Even though she’s rehearsed this conversation, she’s unsure how to continue. She might say too much. Never stop.

  Eve comes closer. ‘It’s good for you,’ her voice soothes, ‘to let go.’ She lays a hand across Nora’s ribs, just below her breasts, and closes her eyes. ‘Right here,’ she begins, but her voice trails off and she opens her eyes, frowning. The heel of her hand presses against Nora’s ribs. An expression Nora can’t fathom, of doubt or puzzlement, flutters across her face. ‘You know he’s dead?’

  ‘I had a dream. No. Well. Thing is, first I had this dream and then I saw him, here, in the village. I was sure it was him, at first sight, or half-sure, but then, when I consider the likelihood, after all, it’s been more than a year, that he would be . . .’ Nora shrugs.

  ‘An ex-lover? You shouldn’t give him too much attention.’

  Nora’s not sure what this means. She picks up the bow-saw to tackle the mass of ivy branches and roots, compacted hard as concrete.

  ‘Sometimes, when our present is a little too empty, our past moves in to fill the gaps. We have no room for our future to take root. This guy, he’s dead to you, or not?’

  Nora hesitates, not sure she can trust her voice. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was the sex good? Is it that you remember?’

  ‘Yes, it was good.’ She works the bow-saw to and fro.

  Isaac turned her on with a raised eyebrow, a sidelong glance; that spark remained between them, even when they’d been seeing each other several years, though the time they had alone together was only ever brief and snatched, so perhaps the urgency grew from a necessity for speed rather than intensity of desire. Nora can no longer tell. The teeth of the saw blade gnaw through the bark of the thick ivy. As she saws, she describes the man she’s seen, his halting stride so like Isaac’s, his dark, shaggy mane – but Isaac is now in his sixties, and when she last saw him, his hair was already edged with white over his ears, along the nape of his neck, a line of white arching up away from his forehead to his crown.

  As she picks away at the ivy, Nora dips in and out of the story of Isaac, working to keep the tone of a joke in her voice when she alludes to the many years of their ‘romance’. She rummages in her bag to show Eve the photo-booth picture, taken the first weekend they had away together. She was eighteen; Isaac was fifty.

  Eve doesn’t pull a face or roll her eyes at the age difference. ‘So now he’s what, mid sixties?’

  Nora nods. Isaac’s lapels are wide and his tie has a fat knot, his fashion sense arrested in an earlier decade. The photograph has faded to sepia, burnishing his skin. Showing the photo to Eve, Nora sees that even then Isaac looked a man past his prime.

  ‘It’s a bad photo. He wasn’t that dark-skinned.’

  Though, with his eyes shadowed by prominent eyebrows – each strand thick as sewing thread – and the sleek gleam of his hair, Isaac did possess a quality of darkness. His profile, the line of his forehead running straight and firm to the tip of his nose, was powerful. Only when he played the cello, or during sex, did the strong lines between his nose and the downward turn of his mouth, soften; only when his eyes were closed was the brush-line of his thick eyelashes noticeable.

  ‘Hmm.’ Eve hands the photo back. ‘You always carry that around?’

  ‘Along with all this other junk, old till receipts, general rubbish, see?’ Nora pulls a few crinkled bits of paper out from the ink-stained depths of her denim bag. ‘Am I seeing him because he is dead?’ The photograph slides easily back into the little pocket in Nora’s wallet. ‘I know that does happen. I mean, to people who’ve lost someone.’

  ‘No, not necessarily, but there’ll be a reason.’ Eve idly rubs her belly in a circular motion. She picks up the bundles of ivy once more, chucks them over the high sides of the almost-full skip and brushes off her hands. ‘How about I make you some smudge sticks? Some herbs to cleanse and move the soul will help.’

  Eve explains about smudge sticks, describes the woman who taught her how to roll the dried herbs, mentions white sage and mugwort.

  ‘Do you want him to be dead?’ she asks, abruptly.

  ‘For a long time – months – I wanted him to come and find me. I was sure he would. Crazy, isn’t it?’ Nora laughs to cover the crack in her voice.

  ‘But he didn’t.’ Once again, Eve’s tone is one of statement, not question, and her certainty stabs at Nora, deflating her attempt at flippancy.

  Eve puts her hand on Nora’s forearm. ‘This is how it works. Smoke from a smudge stick attaches itself to negative energy. As the smoke clears, the negative energy goes with it, to be released into another space where i
t will be regenerated into positive energy – with me?’

  Nora nods.

  ‘So, we might use a combination that embraces air, water, fire and earth – something like pine resin and sage. It’s not complicated. I’ll make you up a few sticks and you can do it yourself if you like. You might prefer that. All you need is a feather or fan to waft the smoke over you. Start at the top and work down.’

  As usual, she speaks with such authority that Nora’s doubts seem born of ignorance. ‘No time like the present,’ Eve says. ‘I’ll drop round tomorrow. Let’s do it!’

  She drags another solid chunk of stems and branches towards the skip. One side is flat, marked with the pattern of the bricks it has grown against for years. Eve pauses, bent over, hands on her thighs. ‘God, I feel like throwing up. It’s this smell.’ She sighs and pushes up her sleeves. ‘Any smell, to be honest. I can’t even clean my teeth.’

  Nora picks up the bow-saw once more. She has almost sawn through the ivy trunk; after that she’ll tackle the roots.

  12

  After the brightness of the summer garden, the hallway is dark. Ada pauses to light a cigarette, shakes out the match and savours the first inhalation. She takes a step forward, and stops. What has brought her into the house with some urgency she now cannot recall. Patting her head, she finds her reading glasses are not balanced there, so she perhaps was about to fetch them. She moves purposefully down the hallway but when she arrives at the telephone table she knows for certain her glasses are not the reason she came marching into the house.

  The telephone is reassuringly solid. Bakelite, provided by the GPO when she and Brian were first married and Creek House became their marital home. Ada chose ivory over the more common black. A very nice example of the Ivory 332L with drawer, a dealer once told her. Not long ago. A dapper little man with a peppery moustache; made her upper lip tickle to watch him speak.