Rook

by Jane Rusbridge

  Jonny slings his jacket over one shoulder. His red cufflinks are shaped like scarab beetles and he’s dressed very formally compared to Steve, in dark grey trousers, charcoal-grey button-down collared shirt and a silk tie patterned with bright wriggles of red, which make Nora think of tadpoles, or sperm. She should probably go back on the pill.

  As Steve unlocks the front door, she hears Jonny ask him about his wife, and where she works. He’s drawn the wrong conclusions from Steve’s mention of a childminder. Nora had assumed Jonny knew already about the family dynamics at the vicarage.

  ‘Frannie,’ Steve says, swinging his daughter between his legs, up and over the front-door step and into the hall, ‘shall you and me make a cup of tea for our visitors?’

  The child nods and disappears through a doorway into a large front room where the floor is strewn with brightly coloured toys.

  ‘I’ll finish unloading the car later. Kitchen’s this way,’ Steve says, with a jerk of his thumb.

  ‘My wife left,’ he adds over his shoulder. Jonny looks back at Nora and mimes zipping his mouth.

  ‘I’m—’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Steve holds up a hand to stop him. ‘Easily done and I won’t bore you with divorce statistics, which is what I used to do. Vicars and their wives are, it seems, refreshingly human. As well as Frannie, I have two sons, five and seven. Just about manageable now that they’re both at school.’

  Steve fills the kettle and reaches into a cupboard for teabags and three Cath Kidston mugs, which surely must have been bought by the restless vicar’s wife before she left. Jonny swings his jacket over the back of a kitchen chair and lounges against a worktop, cracking his knuckles.

  When Nora explains why they are here, and the change of plan for the TV project, Steve runs his sea-glass pebble to and fro along the thong around his neck before he answers. ‘Well.’ His thumb rubs the lump of clouded glass.

  He’s going to say no. No exhumation, no DNA testing. No project and no more trips down here for Jonny. Nora holds her breath. Jonny leans forward, studying Steve’s expression.

  Finally Steve looks up. ‘It’s more complicated than with your first project. Much more is involved.’

  ‘Yeah-yeah-yeah.’ Jonny nods. ‘This is a one-off, Steve. Already created a great deal of interest among specialists in church archaeology, many of whom will want to roll up their sleeves and get involved. It’s unique, a programme which will shed light on history and mysteries reaching one thousand years into England’s past.’

  ‘All sorts of people will need to have a say on the matter.’

  ‘Rightly so. It will be a substantial historical programme.’

  They discover Elsa Macleod talked to Steve about her ideas months ago. He had known of her theory before Nora, and read through a draft of her pamphlet before it was published. He aims to have it on sale in the church.

  ‘Of course, some would say a conclusion that the grave is not Harold II’s might be almost as valuable,’ Steve adds. ‘Some parishioners aren’t keen on the church as a tourist attraction.’

  ‘The situation and the coffined nature of the burial both indicate high status. Bosham would have been a much more practical place for Harold’s burial after the Battle of Hastings than Waltham, which is the only other real contender. Waltham would have been difficult to access.’

  Steve holds up his hand. ‘I know, I know. You don’t need to persuade me of all the probabilities, Jon, Elsa has already spent several evenings convincing me. However, before we so much as lift a trowel in the church, permission must be sought. There will be objections, naturally, to the interruption, the intrusion for regular churchgoers.’

  Frannie edges into the kitchen, carrying two plastic teacups on saucers, but when she sees their mugs of tea on the kitchen table, she bites her bottom lip. Steve sweeps her up off the floor and holds her high in the air, throws her up and catches her. Soon she is giggling wildly. He goes to the sink with her on one hip and fills a washing-up bowl with water.

  ‘We need some water for tea, don’t we, Frannie?’

  He disappears from the room, Frannie still on one hip, and they return with the plastic teapot and two more cups with saucers. ‘Enough for one each.’ He winks at Nora.

  He lifts the washing-up bowl on to the floor, sits down beside it and offers the teapot to Frannie. She plunges the teapot under the water.

  ‘I have an idea,’ says Steve.

  He tells them a recent five-yearly inspection of the church has shown up some pews with woodworm, and an area of the Victorian floorboards which is rotten, all of which will need to be replaced. Coincidentally, the rotten floorboards are very close to the position of the tomb. It would be possible to argue that the excavation of the tomb will cause very little extra disturbance. The next meeting of the parochial church council is in a week’s time. Steve will raise the matter then, and let Jonny know of the outcome as soon as possible.

  ‘Just one question, which I know will be asked of me at the PCC meeting,’ Steve says, as they leave. ‘The costs, all these experts, the technology . . .’

  ‘Costs will all be met by us, our company, absolutely everything. Please assure everyone of that fact, Steve.’

  ‘Where does the money come from?’ Nora asks, once they have left the vicarage and are walking through the village.

  ‘We’ll have the funding squared away in no time, don’t worry. Once the proposal’s written.’ Jonny grins and takes hold of her shoulders to kiss her. ‘The discovery of the burial place of Harold II, our last Anglo-Saxon king – they’ll be falling over themselves to snap up this one, no shadow of a doubt. They can’t possibly turn this one down.’

  25

  As he stepped on to the train they had exchanged brief promises to phone each other, but for some reason Nora can’t settle once she gets home from dropping Jonny at the station. She walks to the church to light a votive candle and on the way back to Creek House, stops off at the post office for milk. With the milk pressed against her belly, she dawdles along the lane, her hands linked around the carton. She tries to imagine holding Eve’s baby in her arms. She might be able to, although at one time she couldn’t even look at a baby without seeing her own.

  Down by the mossy base of the wall is a purple wide-toothed comb with gaps where the teeth have snapped off: her comb. Her lip salve lies where the tarmac dips to the drain. She pockets both items just as Stavros, shrugging on a cracked leather jacket in the doorway of their cottage, yells, ‘Nora! Is yours?’ He waves a bundle of frayed denim, her shoulder bag.

  ‘I thought I was losing my marbles. Where was it?’

  ‘It is by bins in car park but,’ he points inside the bag and pulls an exaggerated moue, raising his hands, ‘is now ninety-nine percent empty, only cheque book.’

  Nora peers into the ink-stained bag, her throat tight. Stavros puts an arm across her shoulders. He smells of Eve’s patchouli oil and his dark-lashed eyes are full of concern. ‘Someone take? You hurt?’

  She shakes her head. ‘It was the other day. There’s nothing else?’ Her voice trembles. She’ll have to check the ground by the recycling bins.

  ‘Money? Cards? You want me phone people?’

  She shakes her head again.

  Benjie’s whines grow to a crescendo and he yaps once, high and sharp. He glances up at Stavros, down along the lane and back up at Stavros, who tugs once on the leash and looks severe. The dog’s tongue flicks over his lips, but he sits quietly, panting.

  ‘The lessons are working?’

  ‘Very fine.’ Stavros gives a thumbs-up.

  Nora turns the denim bag inside out and shakes. A few hair grips fall to the ground. She unzips each pocket and pulls out the linings, peels open the crinkled, in-folded corners filled with crumbs and dust, but Isaac’s photograph has gone.

  ‘At Café Jetsam I have made cheese pies,’ Stavros says. ‘Good for the hips.’ He slaps his own skinny thighs and grins. ‘You want some?’

  Nora has nothing
else planned so she walks with Stavros to the boathouse. Harry has been helping to sand down the double doors ready to paint and he’s in the kitchen talking to Eve about the significance of the black bird on the memorial stone in the church.

  ‘Just a white silk banner, plain white.’ Harry’s fingers make a scritch scritch noise on his chin. ‘According to the legend the black raven only appeared in times of war. If the Danes were going to win, the raven appeared, beak open.’ Harry lifts his arms and spreads them wide in the narrow kitchen. ‘Wings flapping, jumping about like crazy.’

  Like the bird etched on the memorial tile. And just like Rook whenever Jonny is nearby. Nora has to shut him in the kitchen if she’s expecting Jonny to visit.

  ‘If the raven appeared on the banner and didn’t move,’ Harry adds, ‘it meant a Danish defeat.’

  The four of them eat the cheese pies out on the wooden balcony of the boathouse. It’s very hot. The creek slides below and the skin on Nora’s face tightens with sunburn.

  Harry plays with Stavros’s string of worry beads as he tells them about the Danish god of war, Odin. He had two ravens, Hugin and Munnin – mind and memory – who sat one on each shoulder. It turns out the bird on the memorial for Cnut’s daughter is a raven, not a rook, despite the startling similarities to Rook when he was a starveling. A symbol of war seems to Nora an odd choice to mark the tomb of a child, but the tile was placed 900 years after the princess died, by which time no one remembered the little girl herself, only her father, the warrior king who lives on in the stories told centuries after his death.

  ‘If the child’s tomb is not, after all, Cnut’s daughter,’ Harry says, ‘will Elsa’s theory still stand?’

  Nora looks at him in surprise. She had no idea he even knew Elsa. ‘Why?’

  Harry flicks the string of black beads up. They fall with a click-click-click before he deftly catches them. ‘I’ve been reading about the stone effigy.’

  In the north wall of the chancel is a canopied recessed tomb on which lies the damaged stone effigy of a girl with a lion at her feet. At some point in the past her body has been broken in two and repaired. The effigy is unnamed, but believed to have been carved in the late thirteenth century as a memorial to Cnut’s daughter. Nora has often stroked her head, the outline of hair in a simple style which frames what remains of the girl’s face. Though the arch of an eyebrow and the bridge of her nose are still visible, her mouth and most of her lower face have been worn away by time, or the stroke of hands like Nora’s.

  ‘Does it make any difference now we know the effigy was not made in the eleventh century?’ Nora says, following her own train of thought. ‘If that’s what you’re talking about. It’s crazy to use that as an argument against Cnut’s daughter being buried in the church, surely?’ Nora snatches Harry’s plate from where it is balanced on the arm of his seat. ‘Have you finished with this plate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean she wasn’t carved as a memorial at a later stage, does it?’

  ‘No.’ Harry closes his hand around the worry beads and looks steadily at Nora. ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘She’s been moved around. It’s said she originally lay on a tomb which stood on the exact spot where the coffin was discovered, did you read that anywhere, in any of your books or papers?’ She carries the plates indoors, glad to be out of the sun’s glare.

  Later, Harry had made them smoothies. He piled fruit from Eve and Stavros’s fridge on to the counter: peaches, blueberries, mango and blood oranges, and began peeling and stoning fruit, his back to Nora, his hands, broad across the knuckles, thorough and slow.

  ‘Here,’ he said, throwing her an orange, which she caught. A mango, a peach – her mouth watered at the smell of them. Peaches: her mother’s favourite fruit. She used to freeze them, years ago, buying wooden cratefuls heaped with them at the market when peaches were cheap and in season. A scented sweetness filled the house as Ada peeled and cut the peaches into slices, which she covered with home-made syrup before freezing. Nora preferred the taste of defrosted peaches to fresh ones.

  Nora cradled the collection of fruits. Each had a different weight, texture, colour, shape. She held them up one by one, testing the weight and substance, then began to juggle, the technique coming back to her. She’d learned as a teenager, taught by a boyfriend. Orange, peach and mango: different shapes and colours flying through the air, between her hands.

  The liquidiser’s rattle was gritty and loud. Harry poured the smoothie, deep red, into two glasses, adding fresh black cherries on a cocktail umbrella. Nora was thirsty. She gulped down the delicious, icy concoction.

  The two of them stood in the narrow space between work counters as Harry refilled her glass, and filled another glass for her to take out to Eve. His hand passed, quickly, down over his own face before brushing hers lightly, lifting her chin to inspect it, running his thumb across the edges of her mouth.

  ‘Juice,’ he said, and paused, before kissing her, not on her lips, but either side and below her mouth. The sudden shock of his body against hers made her start, pulling sharply away. She snatched up her drink and the glass for Eve, raised the glass in thanks, without meeting his eyes, and hurried back outside into the sunshine to join the others.

  26

  Nora is worried the cockle-shell heart will break. She puts down the drill. The rotten wood of the wind chimes she has already replaced with freshly collected sticks of driftwood and she’s added swan feathers to the assortment of pebbles. The cockle-shell heart would finish the whole thing off perfectly. Nora turns the shell over in her hands, opening and closing the two halves. Rook hops towards her feet and stops. He thinks she has food. He hops again, trying to get her attention, head twitching this way and that, tilted to one side, to examine her face from various angles. Only on the ground do rooks become awkward and jerky; in the air they soar and swoop and glide.

  ‘One day, Rook,’ she says to him, ‘you will be able to fly.’

  The spines of the cockle shell are fierce; the fragility lies in the brittle hinge which joins the two halves. She places the shell on the fireplace beside her axe-head, where it’s more likely to remain whole.

  Once she’s tied the final knot in the string, she holds the mobile up to check the hang is balanced. She will tie it to the same branch, the branch which already has string wrapped round it in various places from previous wind chimes. She’s used tarred string this time, so perhaps it will last longer. She knocks one of the pebbles with a finger and watches the mobile spin and bob.

  ‘I had a baby once.’

  At her feet, Rook blinks, twitches his head to see her face.

  Nora shuts her eyes against an image she doesn’t want to remember, her baby’s limbs swaddled close to his body. She had kissed his forehead to say goodbye. She sits down on the floor beside Rook.

  ‘I had a baby once,’ she tells him again.

  The feathers on Rook’s head rise and he stretches his neck towards her.

  ‘I called him Noah.’

  She called him Noah because, as a child, she loved the story of Noah and his ark, a round boat built against all odds. Her father told her the story of the ark illustrated the triumph of imagination over catastrophic events. She also called him Noah because the name sounded so close to her own. Names do have a certain magic, as Eve says. Noah, with his too-thin limbs, ribs which pressed through his skin. He was so tiny and fragile she couldn’t bear to be separated from him, to leave him alone in her room for longer than half an hour at a time. Her breasts were painful and heavy with milk, a constant reminder. She found excuses to go to him, tried not to disturb his miniature fingers, his curled toes and soft nails which peeled like skin. She trembled each time she unwrapped him to marvel at the translucency of his skin. She loved the dark hair stuck flat on his pomegranate-sized head; his old man’s neck. She lay with him in the crook of her elbow for hours as she studied his body, his eyelids and the wrinkles of his face. He was going to be safe and lo
ved. Every night, she kept him close beside her on the pillow.

  In Mothercare she’d seen mobiles for hanging over a baby’s cot; wind-up toys; a music box to attach to the bars. Though she hadn’t bought a cot for Noah, on the last night they had together she made him some wind chimes. She swaddled him well and carried him down the garden to hang the chimes on the apple tree where the forget-me-nots which reseeded every year spread a haze of starry blue.

  In the hallway, the phone rings. Nora carries the repaired wind chimes downstairs, Rook sitting on her shoulder.

  ‘Who is he then, this man Mum’s always talking about?’ It’s Flick.

  ‘Hello, Flick. I’m well thanks, how are you?’ Nora transfers Rook from her shoulder to her hand. His feathers brush skin as he hops on to the floor to run, stiff-legged and tail up, in to the kitchen.

  ‘Too bloody hot! We’re thinking of coming over to England to escape.’

  ‘Great. Mum will be pleased.’ Nora leans against the wall, cool against her back. ‘All of you?’

  ‘There’s plenty of room for us all in that great mausoleum of a place. Mum wants to sell up, you know. Move into a bungalow near the shops. I think we should encourage her. This man hanging around, he after her money?’

  A knot forms and tightens below Nora’s ribs. She slides down the wall until she’s sitting on the hall floor. ‘It’s her money.’

  ‘And it’s our inheritance. We don’t want her marrying some man who has flattered his way into her affections.’

  ‘She’s not dead yet, Flick. She may leave her money to the Cat and Rabbit Rescue Centre. She wants to move into a bungalow, or you want her to move into a bungalow? I don’t think—’

  ‘It’s not all about you, Nora, I have enough on my plate without . . .’ and so the conversation with Flick continues. Whenever Nora tries to say something, Flick snaps, ‘Please don’t interrupt. Let me finish a sentence.’