‘Tessa! You are a naughty girl,’ coos Daphne, bending to ruffle the dog’s ears.
Nora takes her chance and slips down the hallway to catch Jerry as he makes his way with the tray into the dining room.
‘Shall I just pop this in your shed?’ She raises the covered basket into Jerry’s range of vision, hoping he is too preoccupied to wonder what it is.
‘Sure, sweetheart. Thanks. Go ahead. You know where ’tis.’ He shoulders the dining-room door open and calls back: ‘How’s your mother?’
Around the polished table are people she has known since childhood. Miss Macleod is there, head down, reading something. Ted, who, now his son has taken over the day-to-day running of Manor Farm, has time on his hands so sits on many committees and is governor of the village primary school. George gives her a nod, jowls wobbling like wattles. Patricia, Ted’s wife and locally famous for her bridge suppers, flutters her fingers in a wave. Steve, the vicar, gives her a wink, and points to the empty chair beside him. A single father of three small children, Steve is not what most people expect in a vicar. He doesn’t wear a dog-collar and today’s T-shirt has ‘You Are the Weakest Link’ in cracked, plastic-coated capitals across the front. Strung on a leather thong around his neck is a lump of sea-glass Nora would like to wear herself. She squeezes past the backs of the other chairs to slip in beside him and he passes her a copy of the minutes, his square hands rough and red around the knuckles as though he’s been too long scrubbing at sheets in very hot water.
The group is already deep in discussion about flooding. Steve hands Nora a photograph taken from Bosham Hoe looking across the inlet towards the village during one very high spring tide a few years back. The relentless churn of the water dominates the foreground of the photograph while, on the far side of the grey expanse, houses huddle around the church steeple, marooned. Waves foam against first-floor window sills, the only glimpse of colour the red flag which flies from the sailing-club flagpole. In the harbour, the boats themselves have sunk, masts leaning at odd angles. The village looks abandoned.
Nora had been abroad at the time, but she’d heard from Ada about the severity of the flooding. Residents had been shocked into coming up with more proactive ways to protect their homes, and appointed Will Holden as water bailiff. However, Nora’s heard a rumour that Will, who sits opposite with a ring file, a pile of photographs and three pens lined up on the table in front of him, is about to resign. She tries to catch his eye, but his head is bowed.
‘. . . and then the manhole covers burst off, my Lord!’ Patricia is saying, ‘Water pressure, the firemen said. In the Craft Café we thought the electricity was sure to blow.’
Nora is thirsty after running and the coffee Daphne pours from her cafetière into exquisite bone-china cups amounts to a mere thimbleful or two. Its strength makes her mouth and cheeks hot.
Jerry, the chairman, hands over to Will Holden, who opens his file. His report covers the precise order of events on the day of the spring tide. Long and detailed, it includes a list of possible causes, problems encountered and how they were dealt with, suggestions for precautions to be taken in the future. He clears his throat several times and reads directly from his notes without looking up.
His obvious tension makes others around the table fidgety. Nora remembers her confident conversation with Jonny about the flood team, before she’d heard of the rumours circulating about Will’s resignation. She wonders when Jonny will next be down from London. She’s heard nothing from him, not that she was expecting to, exactly. One of her male colleagues at school asked her out for dinner last week and when she turned him down she found herself wishing the invitation had come instead from Jonny. And then she bumped into Steve as she left the church one evening after lighting a votive candle, and he told her two men from the television had been to see him, asking to look at the Reverend’s notebooks from the 1865 excavation of the Saxon princess’s tomb.
Discussion has now shifted on to side issues: a request to replace the noticeboard in the church porch, which Steve will have to pass on to the parochial church council. Ted delivers a tirade about litter and fly-tipping. Nora reaches for a piece of Daphne’s homemade shortbread and bites into it, scattering sugary crumbs all over the sheen of the table’s veneer. Sometime later, glancing up from doodling in her notepad, she realises the drop in noise levels is because they are all looking at her.
‘Do you know how much damage they do, my dear, scavenging in my maize fields for seed?’ Ted’s gnarled hands tremble as he lifts, for a refill, the delicate coffee cup still balanced on its saucer. He smiles benignly down the table at Nora. Her knee knocks the table as she uncrosses her legs.
George swallows a mouthful of shortbread. ‘My father bought that strip of land down by the manor specifically because there was a rookery in the copse.’
‘He bought a rookery?’ Nora’s surprised and pleased, eager to talk about rooks.
George nods. ‘Held regular rook shoots in spring to thin out the branchers. Had rook pie more than once.’
‘Really?’ Patricia pulls a long face. ‘Four-and-twenty black birds,’ she warbles.
‘Damn difficult to shoot in the field, rooks.’ Ted addresses George, ignoring his wife. ‘Not like pigeons.’
Patricia looks at her lap. A flush creeps up her throat.
‘Terrible trouble on the peas last year.’ Ted nods sagely at George.
‘I’m surprised your mother gives the thing house room. They’re evil.’ Daphne shudders. ‘A bad omen too. I’d get rid of the thing.’
Ralph puts down his coffee cup. ‘Old Herbert Caper used to tell stories about the rooks in Hundredsteddle Copse, where they’ve been for centuries.’
‘Doesn’t make them suitable pets,’ barks George. He snaps another shortbread biscuit in half. ‘Vermin,’ he says, with his mouth full.
‘No. My point was that in fact the rookeries are said to bring a household good fortune. Apparently one year they shot down too many at Hundredsteddle and the rooks didn’t return the following spring. That was the year four members of the family died. Flu epidemic, I believe.’
‘Pure folklore and ignorance.’
‘Actually, George—’
‘Ted, you’re whistling.’ Patricia points to her ear. Ted scowls and fumbles with his hearing aid.
‘Starvelings like yours would be killed by the parents. Nature always knows best.’ George leans back in his chair, arms folded across his belly as if that’s an end to it.
At the end of the meeting, Miss Macleod puts a hand on Nora’s arm. ‘A quick word, my dear?’ She slides a slim booklet from her canvas rucksack and holds it up for Nora to admire, her hand smoothing the cover. Pictured on the front is a reproduction of a section of the Bayeux Tapestry. ‘Professor Frank Barlow read my manuscript,’ she says. ‘We had several most interesting conversations.’
The cover shows stylised horses, soldiers in helmets and chain mail; axes, swords, shields and arrows, with the words HAROLD: REX: INTERFECTUS: EST sewn above the battle scene where a soldier with a moustache looks up at the letter O as he pulls at an arrow from the nose-shield of his helmet. This must be Harold. Underneath the picture, typed in large bold capitals, is the question: IS KING HAROLD II BURIED IN BOSHAM CHURCH?
‘This copy is for you, my dear, a present. Your father would have been interested.’ She offers the pamphlet to Nora and for a moment they hold it between them. ‘The only King of England since the Dark Ages whose burial place remains a mystery and I am this close,’ she releases her grip on the pamphlet to raise both hands to a position of prayer, a centimetre or so apart, squinting at Nora through the gap, ‘to being certain we have him right here, in Bosham.’
Nora holds the pamphlet against her chest. This is something Jonny would want to know about. Deciding it’s too early for bed, she heads for the church, striding along the lane in the dark with Rook in his basket.
To Nora, Creek Lane has always led towards the sky, until the dip in the road by
the kissing gate in the hedge where their father used to stand when he was back, hidden in the hedge, waiting to spring out on his girls as they walked home from school, waiting to kiss them, lift them high in the air and swing as they giggled and shrieked. She remembers the tilt of the flat wheat fields as he spun her, the roughness of his bristles on her neck. She’d told Isaac this once, stroking his fierce black beard that left her neck enflamed. ‘Girls and their daddies,’ he said, closing his eyes.
At the millstream, she sits on the bench. The bird rustles in his basket and she pulls back the towel. Rook is awake and alert, tipping his head to look up at her. He hasn’t yet managed to get out of the basket by himself but, at home, if she lifts him out, he fluffs his feathers to bulk himself up before he waddles and jumps around the kitchen, exploring under tables and chairs, pecking at the patch of cracking plaster in a damp corner by the fireplace. She’s constantly worried about treading on him.
‘Look at the stars, Rook,’ she whispers. She scoops the shaky bundle of feathers on to her lap. ‘Tell me what you know.’
Through her cotton dress, Rook’s toenails dig lightly into her thigh.
The Milky Way unfurls like a veil across the black, layer upon layer of stars. When they were children, she and Flick had a book called The Observer Book of Stars. It must be somewhere. She will have to search in the attic.
The winking light of an aeroplane makes steady progress across the night, reminding Nora of the plane she saw earlier, chugging out its love-heart. Humans read so much significance into the arrangement of stars and planets, signs and symbols in the sky. Like Halley’s Comet, the fiery star which appeared early in 1066 and is stitched into the upper margin near the start of the Bayeux Tapestry: a portent of doom.
Not far away, water crashes from the old millwheel. The wheel’s dripping wooden jaws – with their slow, relentless turning – terrified her as a child, reminding her of a picture she’d seen in one of her father’s books: the Lady of Shallot with her wet weed hair. She’d calm her fears by straining to hear instead the pianissimo sounds she listens for now: the sluggish trickle of the millstream as water licks the bank at her feet.
My Saxon princess, her father called her, a hand on her hair, and she basked in the glow of his attention. Her hair was almost white-blonde, while Felicity and Ada both had black hair which swung heavy around their faces. Nora would rest her elbows on the breakfast table, peep sideways at her sister’s plump forearms and push her own arm close to the waft of hairs which lay against Flick’s olive skin. Nora’s own skin stretched tight and translucent over knobbles of bone at her shoulder, wrist and elbow, veins showing blue beneath the marshmallow-white. She was the ugly duckling.
Her father often told them the story of the Saxon princess. Crouching forward on his thighs in a circle of lamplight between their twin beds, he removed his spectacles, squared his shoulders and ran his hands through his hair until it stood in crests and he was the fierce Viking – wild-haired, moustachioed King Cnut – who lived near their home a thousand years ago.
‘One whole thousand?’ Nora asked, voice muffled by her pillow. She slept on her tummy, sometimes with her head under the pillow, because feathers had magical properties which floated into the texture of her dreams.
‘Yes, a whole thousand. And fierce King Cnut had a pretty daughter.’
It was Nora’s birthday and she’d made a special request for the princess story. She was sucking her thumb, her curled hand cupping the burnt-sugar smell of condensed milk fudge she’d made with Ada as a special treat.
‘The princess—’ he continued.
‘What was her name?’
‘Her name was—,’ Dad rubbed his nose, ‘a secret.’
Nora sat bolt upright, hair fuzzy from the pillow. ‘If he was her Daddy it wouldn’t be secret from him!’
‘Well, sweetheart, fact is, nobody knows what her name was. That’s the truth.’ Dad leaned in to kiss Nora’s head. ‘King Cnut’s daughter had blue eyes and long golden hair.’
‘Like mine?’
‘Like yours. And her favourite game in all the world was to make boats and float them down the millstream.’
Dad said always this; floating leaf-and-stick boats in the millstream was what Nora and Flick liked to do.
Nora slid her thumb from her mouth. ‘Did she go crabbing too?’
‘She went crabbing too.’
‘And cockling?’
‘And cockling.’
‘And did she make drip people in the mud?’
At this, Flick thumped her bed with both feet, her face pinched with the furious effort of screwing her eyes shut. Nora slipped her thumb back into her mouth. She asked questions because questions delayed the story’s ending, when the pretty Saxon princess with the long blonde hair drowned in the millstream and proud King Cnut drummed his chest and wailed in grief. She asked questions because when the end of the story came, their father would kiss them goodnight and leave.
Nora takes the long way home through the graveyard. Inside the church, the rough stone walls hold the briny smell of a cave awaiting the return of the tide.
Near the chancel arch she stops at the memorial tile for Cnut’s daughter. She has seen this image countless times over the years but tonight she stares down at the etching, hit by a disorienting sense of a displacement of time. A charge runs through her like a current. The bird, drawn with oversized beak and claws, is so like Rook the shock of resemblance raises the hairs up her forearms in ripples.
17
Nora pushes her little finger loaded with chopped cheese and cherries mixed with egg deep into Rook’s throat, where the muscles clutch and squeeze, forcing the parcel of the food downwards. Between mouthfuls, Rook wilts, his beak dropping fast, head tilted, with one eye shining and focused on Nora’s face. His eyes have changed colour, blue darkening to black.
She dreamed last night about holding Eve’s baby. All day the dream’s sensations have haunted her, the weight of the baby in her arms, its wriggle and kick, a thrust of rounded limbs against her belly. They’d been to the cash and carry that evening, Nora lifting the boxes of café supplies for Eve.
‘I’m not chucking up any more,’ Eve had said. The top she wore was close-fitting and stretchy with horizontal stripes which emphasised the swell of her breasts and the curve of her growing belly. Her eyes shone as she bit into an apple. ‘I’m even back on sex.’ She giggled and rolled her eyes.
Rook makes a noise like a sneeze, head ducking and his body twitching violently, as if the food has travelled along the wrong passageway. Nora pauses to give him time to recover before offering the next morsel. Some people react to him with fear or repulsion, yet Rook is still small enough to cup in her hands, a lightweight and unsteady bundle with a wobbling neck and an elastic-sided beak which widens like a clown’s smile the moment he sees her. She recalls her own instinctive unease when she first saw him lying in the ditch. Not everyone would have felt the same, but she couldn’t have lived with herself if she’d left him there to die.
The superstitions surrounding corvids and the association with death, Harry says, are down to two simple things: the colour black, and the fact that corvids feed on carrion, the flesh of dead animals.
‘The human mind has a weird thing going on with colour,’ he’d said. Nora hoped she wasn’t blushing. One day when he was out, she’d seen one of his paintings through the open door of his caravan, on an easel, unfinished, and half-covered with sheeting. Most of the canvas was taken up with the back of a woman’s head and shoulders, her pale hair falling in waves down her back to her waist, strands here and there painted in brown, ochre, black and gold, like the colours found in grains of sand. In places, skeins of hair were twisted and three thin plaits were woven with white feathers. The woman pressed one hand against the fissured bark of the trunk of a silver birch, her fingers disproportionately long, the skin on the back of her hand and her forearm very white. Above her head, light filtered through a canopy of green oak leaves.
The colours of the painting disturbed Nora, or rather the bleached-out absence of colour. The bark was silver, and the sky beyond the leaf canopy was white. So too was the sun, or moon; it could have been either. The woman’s skin was a rosy-tinted white, and so were the feathers in her hair. The only colours apart from these shades of white were the green of the leaves, and the pale sand of the woman’s hair. The effect was ghostly. Nora had not mentioned seeing the painting, to Harry or anyone else.
She strokes the top of Rook’s head. His feathers, a lustrous black, are no longer patchy. His head, weighed down by the heavy beak, begins to wilt again as his appetite is sated. She wouldn’t like to see crows scavenging on dead human flesh, as they did during the Black Death. Witnessing a dead person, maybe someone you knew or loved, pecked at by the black birds would be horrifying, an image you’d never forget but, as Harry pointed out, ugly as it might have been to witness, their scavenging helped to prevent the spread of the disease.
Because rooks have lived closely with humans for centuries, stories about the birds’ habits have sprung up, embellished through repetition. Passed down over generations, legends and folklore entwine with omens and superstitions, taking root in the human mind. But not all are negative. North American legends, Harry told Nora, describe rooks accompanying the souls of the righteous to heaven.
Rook’s eyes are closed. ‘Go to sleep, little one.’ Nora strokes the top of his head again, where the feathers are silky.
As a child, she collected feathers, from her pillow, from cushions, any she found lying on the ground, and hid them in her ballerina jewellery box. Not a safe hiding place. Flick would lift the lid of the jewellery box to watch the plastic ballerina turn round and round while the music played, then she’d jump up and run off, leaving the lid open when the ballerina had stopped dancing. Once, Nora came across Flick standing on one foot in the doorway of their bedroom swooshing the door to and fro to make fat puffs of air. The ballerina box was open and Flick watched Nora’s feathers float up and away on the breeze.
Rook Page 10