Rook

by Jane Rusbridge

  ‘It was?’ Jonny pulls a notebook from the back pocket of his jeans and flips it open. ‘I’d better prove to you I’ve done some research, hadn’t I? OK, the bit about Canute sitting on a “chair” comes from the Saxon word for dyke which was char. In all probability a dyke or char was built across here somewhere.’ He waves over the inlet, the choppy brown water. ‘That right? And, according to my sources, there’s still a place actually called “Mud Wall”. Can you show me where?’

  She’s about to answer when his phone rings, a loud blare of music. Jonny checks the screen of his mobile, stands and steps away from the table, his back to her, phone pressed to his ear.

  Nora’s mind is racing. If her father was here he’d whisk Jonny away to his study immediately, reach down the appropriate files and documents from a high shelf and confide one or two of his theories. She rolls down one leg of her jeans but it’s still wet and there’s a chill in the wind, so she rolls it up again.

  Synchronicity Media, it says on the cover of Jonny’s notebook. She takes another sip of her wine, but she’s halfway through the glass and still Jonny stands with his back to her, listening to whoever has phoned him. He stares across to the other side of the water where a light flashes, the glint of sun on a closing car door in the drive of one of the big houses across the water at Bosham Hoe. She must go back soon to relieve Harry from rook-feeding duties. She wills Jonny to get off the phone. It occurs to her it might be a recorded message. Why else would someone talk for so long to him without any response?

  ‘No,’ he says eventually, without expression. ‘Not at the moment.’ He thumbs a few keys, maybe to send a text, before sliding the phone back into its leather pouch and tapping it down into his breast pocket. Slivers of sunlight bounce on ripples blown sideways by the breeze.

  Jonny slips on his sunglasses and rakes his hands through his hair. ‘Sorry. Where were we at?’

  Condensation has gathered on the bowl of Nora’s wine glass, making her fingers wet. She wants to make herself clear, to make sure Jonny has understood her point about the King Cnut story.

  ‘It’s one of my things.’ The words trip over each other; she forces herself to slow down. ‘Nearly everywhere you come across Cnut’s story these days, online, in newspapers, magazines, or people just talking, the story’s told as if he was trying to turn back the waves, when of course he wasn’t; just the opposite.’

  She tries to read Jonny’s face, unsure of his angle. He gives an easy smile. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Cnut wanted to prove he was not God. To show, powerful though he was, even he could not turn back the tide.’

  Jonny riffles through the pages of his notebook, pen at an angle behind his ear. ‘People hear what they want to hear, Nora, in my experience. The first version heard is the one they stick with. Bloody hard to turn them around.’

  ‘Then you need to go back to the first version of the story for your programme, back to the first half of the twelfth century.’

  ‘But you agree a battle with the sea is one the village can’t win.’

  ‘We are winning, though. We now have a water bailiff and thanks to him and his team, Bosham’s off the high flood risk register.’ She explains about the voluntary flood team appointed to oversee the maintenance of the surface water drainage system, how successful their work has been.

  Her glass is empty. They have not yet ordered food. A little light-headed, she returns to the subject of King Cnut. ‘His motive is crucial,’ she repeats. ‘Motive tells us so much more about character than actions. If we tell his story wrong, we misrepresent him.’

  Jonny downs the remains of his pint and studies her thoughtfully. ‘This project, Nora,’ he taps a page with his pen, ‘is very exciting. I’ve a list of contacts. All sorts of people round here to see. Consult. Persuade. And when I read about your father’s work on the grave of the Saxon princess, I knew you’d be top of the list.’

  They turn at the noise of water in turmoil. White feathers and water droplets snare the light as a swan heaves its weight out of the water. With the power and swell of a strongman’s shoulders, its wings spread and smack the water again and again while, in the white-water commotion, mallards flee, quacking and flapping over the surface. When finally the swan concertinas down, wings folding with a settling shake, it glides past them on the terrace, neck looped in elegance, one dark-rimmed eye turned towards Nora.

  The swans in the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry, Miss Macleod has told her, appear whenever Harold is pictured hunting or flying his falcons; she believes they refer to Edyth Swan-neck, Harold’s ‘hand-fast’ wife.

  The waitress brings olives. Several times she glances surreptitiously at Jonny, pen poised over her notepad as they choose their food. She tucks hair behind one ear before reading the order back to check it’s correct, standing with her feet in schoolgirl pumps turned on to their sides. Barely glancing in Nora’s direction, she gives Jonny a dimpled smile as she leaves.

  While he eats the glistening, black olives, rolling the stones around in his mouth before slipping them from between his lips to collect in the ashtray, Nora tells him about Edyth Swan-neck, with whom Harold lived for almost twenty years before he was crowned king and required to make a more strategic marriage. They had many children. Edyth had stepped aside to allow another woman to become Harold’s queen, though it was she who continued to follow him to battle, to cook and care for him in the camps. His new and pregnant queen was sent elsewhere, for safety.

  The words ‘hand-fast’ carry a sense of loyalty and permanence for Nora. ‘In the end,’ she says, ‘it was Edyth who identified Harold’s mutilated body on the battlefield at Hastings.’

  Jonny slides an olive stone from his mouth. ‘Hang on a minute, this Harold, the one with the swan-like mistress, he’s 1066 King Harold?’

  ‘Yes. His name was Harold Godwinson. The Godwins had a big estate near here, it’s where he grew up.’ Nora remembers something. ‘It might not be relevant to your programme, but my father had this idea about Harold’s mother, Gytha. He thought she might have had a love affair with King Cnut.’

  Jonny has stopped eating the olives. His lips are shiny with oil. ‘Canute and Harold are the same era?’

  ‘Yes.’ Nora is surprised at his ignorance. ‘Cnut was Harold’s parents’ generation. He came to England in 1014 when he was twenty, with his father, Svein Forkbeard.’

  ‘What a name!’ Jonny underlines something in his notebook.

  ‘Dad had so many theories. Cnut and Gytha were cousins but he thought they had at least one child together: Swegn, Gytha’s eldest son. He was by all accounts a bit wild, and different from the younger brothers. He himself even claimed Cnut was his father, not Earl Godwin. Dad thought the daughter buried in the church may have been a child they had together, illegitimate, hence the unmarked coffin.’

  Jonny’s head is bent as he writes this down. She can’t see his face. He lives in London, he has told her, and comes down by train or drives if he’s bringing equipment. He wears a silver ring on his right hand, but nothing on his left.

  She wonders who the young woman was, the one driving the 4×4 the first time she saw him on the beach.

  He looks up. ‘So, tell me more.’

  ‘Cnut granted Earl Godwin, Gytha’s husband, many favours, favours which in part accounted for the rise of the Godwins to such a position of power in England. Dad thought this was because he was Gytha’s lover.’

  ‘Guilty conscience?’ Jonny closes his notebook and props his pen back behind his ear. ‘Or perhaps he wanted to keep his mistress moving in the same circles as him. The plot thickens!’ He leans back on his chair legs and stares out over the water. ‘The illegitimate offspring of a passionate love affair, aged eight and the daughter of a king, falls into the millstream behind the church and is drowned. Can you imagine?’ He tips his chair forward, suddenly, leaning over the table close to her again. His eyes are so brown she can barely distinguish the black of the pupils. ‘Can you imagine what it was like?
To find it was actually true – this story bandied around Bosham for the last few hundred years?’

  Nora nods. She has imagined, many times.

  ‘What wouldn’t I give to have been one of those masons chipping away at the church floor. The old vicar says, “Hey guys, why don’t we check out this ’ere long-held village myth?” and, hey presto!’ Jonny drum-rolls the table with his forefingers, ‘in the very place, right under the centre of the chancel arch, they find a tomb, a child-sized tomb. You couldn’t make it up! And the poignancy – they lift the covering slab and find the remains of a child, buried for nine hundred years. What a discovery!’

  Jonny’s notebook lies open at a list of names, the handwriting copperplate and so miniscule it’s impossible to read. Some names are crossed out: others have ticks beside them. Nora wonders if Elsa Macleod’s name is on the list.

  ‘Imagine,’ Jonny says, ‘a child’s skeleton outlined in dust. Just imagine.’

  15

  Her bedroom door is closed, a chair wedged underneath the handle. One by one, with the flick of Nora’s wrist, photographs skim across the room. The waste-paper basket is full. The photographs are coloured and glossy, most of them expensive studio portraits. In them, she too is expensive, dressed formally in a variety of gowns, hair up or down, brushed or coiled, an earring to catch the light, the cello between her thighs, sometimes held away from her body. In them all, her arms and neck are exposed. She has posed for either the camera or the photographer; it amounts to the same thing: these photographs are a lie.

  At one photograph, she stops. The photographer was Italian, or she was in Italy; one of those high-ceilinged rooms with shutters on tall windows. No, he was not a photographer, and he didn’t flirt with her; he was a cello restorer, in love with her Goffriller. He’d scrawled his name and number on the back of the photograph when he gave it to her a few days later. The Goffriller is the centrepiece of the shot, her hand merely an artful extra on the cello’s neck, the pale skin of her bow arm contrasted against the curdled-red varnish of its body. ‘Godzilla’ her first boyfriend, Mark, had called her beautiful four-hundred-year-old instrument – an old lump of wood she wrapped her legs around. Mark complained at her habit of stroking the cello body, caressing its curves. If he and the cello were both in the room, he needed to be the one getting her attention. He felt the cello was male, aggressive and possessive, his sexual rival.

  In some ways he was right. She could never properly explain her fundamental connection with the Goffriller, an intimacy of mind and body and soul. Mark was too immature to contemplate how inert maple and strings might come alive under her fingers, in her arms, to understand the way the lithe and muscular action of the music erased her separateness from the instrument and its voice.

  She had given the cello away, her beautiful Goffriller, her soulmate, when she felt she no longer had the right to have care of such a precious instrument. Before she left London, she took it to one of her old teachers at the Academy and asked them to lend it out to the most promising pupil of the year.

  This photograph she can’t throw away. Not yet.

  For the heated aftermath of many concerts over the years, Isaac, already semi-retired from performing, often managed to be present; the two of them with the Goffriller in the back of a taxi, winding through city streets between concert hall and hotel room. Is it Paris, she remembers? Holding hands, their bodies swayed by the stops and starts of the taxi, the gear shifts and tight corner turns barely registering as they touched each other’s fingertips, dipped and slid fingers between fingers, where hidden skin is smoothest. All of Paris at night, car headlights, the blare and toot of horns, people yelling out farewells, everything melted into the background by the current which passed between them.

  She had thought what they shared was enough, and for years, it was. She rarely considered his wife or his grown-up children. She had never met them, so it was easy to feel no guilt. His family life was something with which she did not connect. She didn’t want what they had. She liked living alone, desired the hours of solitude for practice. Isaac understood – without the need for her to explain – the aftermath of exhilaration, the physical exhaustion, the mental tension after a performance. She was always starving, emptied out by the music, and Isaac would be there to steer her away from the press photographers and the crowds to a restaurant of his choice, a table reserved for them, tucked in a corner or alcove where she could sit and eat and observe, or relive her performance if she needed to, analyse, go over and over the weaker points, deciding which sections had to be worked on before the next performance. Afterwards, they would go to her hotel room.

  They gave each other something they both needed and took nothing, so she felt, from his family, but their relationship was dishonest. She had thought of their relationship as a secret, when it was a lie which ran a snagged thread through both their lives.

  Her striped dressing gown hangs on the back of the door. Her childhood bedroom at Creek House, a room in which she has been alone many times before but never thought she’d return to for good. What comes back to her is a day two years ago. Almost two years ago. Her period was due. She’d been in the practice rooms of a music conservatoire in Moscow all morning, dashing across the courtyard every half an hour to the toilets to see if she was bleeding. The air was freezing, painful on her skin. Something was wrong with the heating. Ice patterns branched and fanned across the inside of the toilet window; her breath huffed white. She was so very regular, even down to the time of day. Isaac used to joke that the rigorous strength of her bodily rhythms gave the particular sensitivity to musical rhythm and timing for which she was known. She had not quite dared to believe, each time she sat on the cold toilet seat, in the non-appearance of the blood. She considered the effect of the freezing temperatures, pre-concert nerves. If she was pregnant, her relationship with Isaac could grow into something more. It need only mean a few months’ break from the concert circuit and the more she thought about a break, the more she wanted a reason to provide the chance of escape. After scurrying across the frosted courtyard half a dozen times, she sat once again on the toilet, knickers at her ankles and knew her period was not coming. Isaac’s child! Delight skipped through her. As she rinsed her hands in the icy water, she examined her face in the washbasin mirror and was convinced either the sparkle in her eyes or the flush on her cheeks would announce to everyone her body’s cataclysmic changes.

  16

  ‘Go instead of me and make sure that woman doesn’t act First Lady,’ Ada said. Nora has left her mother in her element, entertaining Dr Robertson with the brocade curtains drawn against the low evening sun. Dr Robertson is in his nineties but always elegant, in a three-piece suit with a starched handkerchief in the pocket. He was a young doctor in the village when Ada was a child, and carried out his visiting rounds on horseback. He is the only person in the village who still calls her mother ‘Adie’.

  Daphne Johnson’s husband Jerry has been the chairman of the parish council for more than a decade and Daphne loves to hold parish council meetings at their house, everyone seated around her long, polished table. ‘Ideas above her station, that one, don’t you think, Robbie?’ Ada had added, lifting her chin.

  Rook, just fed, is in his basket, puttering with his beak at strands of willow on the handle. All Nora will have to do is find somewhere out of the way to put his basket and remember to sneak out of the meeting in time to give him his next feed.

  At the tumbling roar of an aeroplane, Nora stops to look up. A white line is visible between the smudges of cloud and as the aeroplane swoops down, she sees a shape forming, half of a love-heart. The engine noise changes, the aeroplane pumping out puffs of white as it labours upward, and the half becomes whole, a heart shape feathering across the blue. The plane banks, cuts away to one side, and the line of an arrow-shaft appears, piercing the heart.

  A love-struck heart in the sky is the kind of flamboyant gesture Stavros might make, typical of his impulsive displays of love.
Like the star he bought and named after Eve one birthday; the patchwork coat he sewed from fabric scraps, taking a year to stitch together, in secret, with a multitude of names and signs and symbols significant to them and their life together. Eve might be wrapped in her patchwork coat right now, standing on the deck of the boathouse with Zach on one hip, pointing to the love-heart in the sky.

  With a burst of crescendo the aeroplane drops once more, hurtling downwards, a flume of white streaming from its tail. Nora’s stomach tips, until she sees the pilot is simply redrawing the outline to emphasise the heart’s shape.

  One Valentine’s Day, early in their relationship, she sent Isaac the King of Hearts from a pack of playing cards. She didn’t entrust the card to the post, but pushed the pale pink envelope into the middle of a pile of internal mail in his pigeon-hole at the Academy. The remainder of the pack of cards, kept for a long time, was another of the mementoes thrown into a maximum-strength dustbin liner and put out with the rubbish when she left her London flat.

  Before she rings the Johnsons’ door bell, Nora, hot from running, scrubs at her forehead with Rook’s black towel, which carries his sandpapery smell.

  ‘A rook?’ Daphne lemon-sucks the word and twists the stud of one of her gold half-hoop earrings.

  ‘A young one. He can’t fly.’ Daphne’s probably worried about her hair. ‘He’s asleep now.’ Nora nods down at the towel-draped basket on her arm. ‘He won’t be a nuisance, I promise.’

  Tessa, the Johnsons’ overweight black Labrador, nudges past Jerry’s calves as he comes out of the kitchen with a wide tray loaded with cups and saucers, and clatters down the hallway barking wildly. The dog skids to a halt by Nora’s legs. Just in time, before Tessa leaps and slobbers, claws scraping, Nora swoops Rook’s basket high and out of reach. She gives the dog a hard shove with her knee, muttering, ‘Get!’ under her breath.