If the curtains catch, the fire will take hold, become all-consuming. She must find a rug or floor mat before that happens. She must try to beat back the flames. Her eyes prick in the smoke leaking out under the door and around the hinges. Fire drill: teachers with shrill whistles hustling them out of the dorms. Do not stop to save valuables.
Do not stop. Her mind crawls.
A movement at the edges of her vision: Ada wafts down the hallway, silent as a ghost. Pausing, she draws on a cigarette held in an ebony holder, the silver of her hair doubled in the hall mirror behind her head.
The sight of her mother galvanises Nora into action. From the dining room comes the crack of wood. No time. She grasps Ada by the shoulders and turns her around, feeling the fragile jumble of bones beneath her hands as she guides her mother’s feather-light body towards the front door.
‘Out!’
The front door slams behind them, knocker banging. Outside it’s cool, silent and still. Under the vast starry sky, shut outside Creek House in her nightdress, Nora feels exposed. In a macabre mimic of dance, the pulsing light from the dining-room windows strobes orange across the damp lawn and into the shadows of the shrubbery. Ada’s cigarette holder gleams.
There’s a shout, and Harry appears, jogging across the grass in his dressing gown, his arms wide, reaching for her. Nora leans into him, the thud of his heart. Momentarily, she is reeled in. Then she opens her eyes. His stubble scrapes her cheek as she wriggles away and reaches out for Ada.
‘Look after Mum. Keep hold of her.’ Nora pushes her mother towards Harry and dashes back to the door. Phone the fire brigade. The phone is in the hallway. Flames writhe against the glass of the dining-room window. Nora shields her face from the heat’s intensity and daren’t, after all, go back inside. She turns on her heel to race in the opposite direction, hitching up her nightdress to skin over the wall into Arthur’s garden and tear up the path to his house. Her fists bang on his door. In her mind, the flames prowl and leap.
She should have gone back inside. She should have grabbed the cello, in its hard case in the hallway.
Humphrey the Great Dane gallops to and fro inside, bellowing, until the noise of his barking and clattering run brings Arthur to the door. Humphrey’s weight nearly knocks Nora to the floor, his paws on her shoulders. In Arthur’s hallway she hears her own voice rise in pitch as she gabbles an address into the telephone. ‘Be quick; be quick.’
A cluster of neighbours huddle together outside the house, awed faces like pewter in the cold of the fire engine’s blue light. Nora can’t quite recognise any of them. She shakes, though she is not cold. The grass is wet under her bare feet. The fire hose, monstrous and black, snakes up the front steps, in through the door, down the hallway and into the dining room, where firemen, shadowy and huge in their helmets and uniforms, stamp and call to each other. The orange glow has died down. Someone has put Harry’s heavy waxed jacket over her shoulders and rubs her back, but the hand is too small to be Harry’s. He, she realises, has disappeared. His jacket holds the strong smell of tarry rope.
‘It’s mostly smoke damage. Don’t worry. It looks much worse than it is,’ a woman’s voice says.
Nora’s mind is blank. She has forgotten something vital, and the absence nudges at her mind. She can’t think what it is until she sees Harry come running round the side of the house from the back with Rook’s basket. She flies across the lawn and whips off the black towel. In a stretch of wing and claw, Rook flaps up on to the side of the basket and launches himself at her. The surprise of his movement knocks her backwards and she finds herself sitting on the grass with Rook treading her lap with his claws, wings outstretched.
The ambulance arrives and Nora watches, as if from a great distance, as Harry helps the paramedics persuade Ada to be gently led into it. They come for Nora, who refuses to get up from where she sits on the damp grass. Rook screeches and thrusts himself at the paramedics. The woman shields her face with her forearm and steps back behind her male partner, even though Rook can’t lift himself higher than a few inches from the ground.
‘Bloody hell!’ the male paramedic mutters.
In their reaction Nora sees how much Rook has grown without her noticing. No longer the loose bundle of feathers he once was, he’s a big, powerful bird with a vicious-looking beak and claws, and coordination of movement.
‘C’mon, Miss. Just to check your breathing,’ the male paramedic coaxes, recovering himself.
Harry squats and reaches out with his square hands, but Rook flaps and flutters, beak open, at his fingers.
‘Don’t!’ Nora scrambles up. ‘He doesn’t like hands coming at him. Let me.’
Nora is silent in the back of the ambulance, thinking of the paramedics and Rook’s shriek of fury. It’s the loudest noise she has ever heard him make. She managed to settle him in his basket in the kitchen, with Harry promising to stay and keep him company until she gets back. The house is safe. She closes her eyes, overcome with weariness, bracing her body as the ambulance turns a corner. Her hands are linked in her lap, where Rook has taken to sitting every evening. Until now, because of his silence, she hasn’t worried too much about whether or not he has imprinted on her, but if he’s found his voice, he may now try to leave. She wonders whether he might soon discover he can fly up into the sky and join the circling cloud of rooks winding down over a copse at dusk, his heart beating fast as he soars and dips, the air around him filled with the caw and call of hundreds like him.
31
The morning after the fire Nora wakes late, to the smell of wet plaster and ash. She’s alone in the house apart from Rook, yet from downstairs comes a noise she can’t quite place, a creak or an echo. She strains to listen. The sound is like a swollen door opening. She sits up, suddenly alert: it can only be Rook. Rook cawing from the hallway, his caw cracked and wavering, his throat dry from disuse.
Sure enough, he’s there, waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, pacing to and fro, bowing and calling. She feels a rush of pleasure; his greeting is for her. Sinking down on the bottom stair, she watches the now familiar origami positioning of the fold of his wings, the angle of his neck outstretched, the lowering and raising of his head as he struts and bows in front of her.
Eventually his movements slow to a halt and he fluffs his feathers, regarding her, head at a sideways tilt. His white lid blinks slowly; it’s her turn to be polite. She rises and inclines her head in return.
‘Morning, Rook.’ She dips her head again before following Rook’s swagger and bounce, the leathery flap of his wings, along the hallway to the kitchen, drumming her fingers along the banister rails as she goes. Passing the hall mirror she catches sight of her face. She’s smiling to herself.
She peeks through the half-open door of the blackened dining room where wallpaper sags in sodden strips from the walls and the polished gloss of the mahogany tabletop is singed, a black hollow where a pile of letters caught. Gone up in smoke. The sun shines on sooty dust. It could have been much worse. Nora shuts the door on the debris. The clearing-up will keep. She’s starving and wants a celebratory breakfast with Rook. She can’t wait to tell someone he has at last cawed.
Rummaging in the shadow of the larder for the cherries she’s bought for Rook, she hums the Paganini Caprice. She tries Jonny’s mobile number but it goes straight on to answer phone. He will be busy. She’ll try again later. The only person who’ll really be interested in Rook’s new accomplishment will be Harry. The thought tightens something inside her gut, a twist of tension, like vertigo. Avoiding Harry has become almost a habit. She counts five cherries in to Rook’s saucer and licks the red stain from her fingertips. The cherries are overripe.
Rook struts and putters around Nora’s feet as she makes tea. Every time he passes the patch of loose plaster by the chimney breast, he stops and plucks at the flakes and edges of wallpaper until a bit more peels or crumbles away. The lathe and plaster of the wall’s inner structure is clearly visible now. She’ll have t
o check there for Rook’s hidden morsels – the pieces of cheese, cherries. He has so many hiding places for his food caches, under rugs, in curtain hems, between floorboards. She sniffs the air to see if she can smell any of his secret stores, but all she can smell is charred paper. Then she remembers her cello.
In the hallway, the cello case has been knocked sideways and lies half under some coats which the firemen must have brushed off the hooks as they bundled into the house with the hose. To her surprise the cello is not inside its case after all. Mentally, she retraces her movements yesterday afternoon: she remembers answering the phone on the way back up from the cellar, carrying her cello. It was Flick phoning, a long conversation about changing the dates for her visit. Something had come up, she was coming on her own, she said, without the girls. Nora propped her cello against the wall near the dining-room door and, for Ada’s sake, had worked on persuading Flick to change her mind.
Then what happened? Harry came in from the garden. She’d made him tea but, not wanting to be alone with him, left him to drink it while she busied herself upstairs in her father’s study, reading about the Bayeux Tapestry. Ada’s always nagging about it cluttering up the house, she must have moved the cello out of her way.
Nora pushes the door of the dining room open wide and steps in. The cello lies half underneath the table, knocked over during the fire. On the table and around the cello lie the charcoal remains of burnt letters or perhaps photographs, the remnants reduced to black rectangles, edges and corners, tissue-paper thin. They disintegrate at her touch. At some point burning paper must have fallen on to the cello and lain there as the wood caught fire. A large area of the curved back is charred, the wood layered like black feathers. She lifts the cello by its neck to examine the buckled wood. The cello’s body is completely ruined but, though she has no money to buy a replacement cello, nor enough to get this one repaired, even if it were possible, she feels nothing. If this cello had been her beloved Goffriller, she’d be weeping.
32
Later, after washing down walls and sweeping up burnt debris, Nora has showered and is ambling barefoot in the garden while Rook bathes in the old enamel basin. The tinny tango tune of her mobile, still upstairs in her bedroom, rings out, building rapidly to a crescendo. At the same time, footsteps clang on the ladder up from the creek and Harry’s head and shoulders, the bright Hawaiian fabric of his shirt, appear from the shoreline below. She acknowledges him briefly with a wave but turns to run in to the house for her mobile.
As she takes off across the lawn something ‘pops’ in the back of her right calf, the impact so severe she stumbles on to all fours, thinking she must have been hit by an air-rifle pellet. Tentatively, with a hand on the garden bench, she tries to stand again, testing her weight. Something has struck her, hard, in the calf, but there’s no mark. Her flesh feels badly bruised and the pain when she puts her weight on the leg is excruciating. From upstairs, through the open window, her ring tone sounds out once more. It might be important, Ada or Jonny. Rook is cawing a rowdy greeting to Harry, who shouts something as he reaches the top of the ladder, but she continues to hobble across the lawn and into the house as the ring tune builds to a demanding fortissimo. She’s got as far as the hall, leaning on the walls and hopping, when the strident ring tone abruptly stops again, cut off mid-phrase. A sob of pain escapes her and her legs fold.
The sound of Harry’s crocs approaches, scuffing into the house and through the kitchen. On the tiled floor, Nora gingerly draws her legs up beneath her and tucks her dress around her knees. She closes her eyes; the pain is deep.
In the kitchen, the fridge door opens and closes, the freezer drawer scrapes. She hears Harry’s breath as he crouches beside her and opens her eyes to find him offering her a bag of frozen peas.
She can barely speak. Sitting a little more upright, she tries to put her foot flat to the floor, but it’s too painful.
‘Can you phone the doctor for me? Where’s Rook?’
‘Sure. Let me?’
He kneels in front of her and lifts her heel on to his lap.
‘Is Rook OK?’
Rook is out in the garden alone. The wild rooks might attack him.
‘No worries. He’s on his way. Takes him a while, that’s all.’
Harry turns her foot gently in both hands and some of the tension of pain eases. Her eyes have closed. Her breath’s shaky as a child’s again, as when her father took a needle tip to a splinter or whisked the corner of his handkerchief against her eye to remove a piece of grit. Although Harry’s hands are warm on her skin, through the thin cotton of her skirt creeps the chill of the black and white floor tiles.
‘A sting?’ he asks, head bent to examine the sole of her foot.
‘No, no. It’s more my leg. Here.’ She points to the back of her calf. He places one hand around her leg and at the same time applies a light pressure to the ball of her foot, studying her face. As her toes are pushed upward, extending her calf muscle, the pain makes her gasp.
‘Let’s get you somewhere more comfy.’
‘I can manage.’ She levers herself partially upright, using the wall as a prop, but it’s a relief when he slides one arm behind her legs and scoops her up. His hair or his clothes smell of meadow hay. An involuntary shiver runs through her as he sets her down on the sofa and slides a cushion under her right foot. His expression calm, he rubs both her calves with his hands, warming her goose-pimpled skin as he tells her she must press the frozen peas against her calf, ‘To slow everything down’, while he fetches a blanket.
‘Where’s Rook got to?’ she says. ‘Can you check?’
Harry disappears outside into the sunshine. Nora shivers again and draws the blanket up to her chin. Her calf, under the frozen peas, grows numb.
Harry has brought Rook, her laptop, woollen walking socks, made tea, phoned Ada at Daphne’s to explain about Nora’s injury and to suggest she stays with Daphne another night. Harry carried out an online Google diagnosis and came to the conclusion Nora has ‘tennis calf’, a torn ligament, common to runners too. She must rest it, elevated, with ice, as Harry has already done. Now, he is cooking something, frying onions and garlic, whistling in the kitchen. The smell makes her mouth water. She should phone Jonny and tell him about the fire, but she’s very tired. She rests her head on the cushion Harry’s put on the sofa arm and closes her eyes. Rook flaps his way from the floor to her lap and up to her shoulder, the pads of his claws cool on her skin as he treads from side to side before settling down.
Her tango ring tone jangles from upstairs. Harry fetches the phone, but too late for her to answer it. She’s about to see if there’s a number she recognises in Missed Calls, when it rings again.
‘Hiya, is Dad there?’ The voice sounds girlish and there is some sort of rap music playing in the background.
‘Dad? No. I don’t think so. Who is this?’
‘Chelsea? Only this is his work mobile and he’s left it at home.’
It’s a young voice, with that confusing upward intonation at the end of each sentence as if everything is in question. It could be a pupil, but she doesn’t give out her mobile number and she doesn’t recognise the voice. ‘I think you must have the wrong number.’
There’s a sigh and the sound of rapid gum chewing. ‘Reckon? Well this number comes up, like, a zillion times in his History?’
‘This number? You’re sure?’ Nora begins to repeat her number, slowly, but the voice interrupts her.
‘Yeah? Anyways, so I reckoned it must be a work number or whatever, y’know, for his new project?’
‘No, I’m really sorry.’ Nora presses the red button to end the call and checks the number of the incoming call. It’s Jonny’s. She chucks the mobile on the blanket, wondering why she has been the one to apologise.
33
‘I’m so hot,’ Eve complains. She cups each breast, lifting them and peering down with a grimace. ‘These are getting way too heavy to lug around.’ She is sitting on the paving of her b
ack terrace, legs akimbo, a sarong loosely wrapped around her swollen belly. Her marbled breasts are half-out of a halter-neck bikini top.
‘You know your front door’s wide open?’
‘Through breeze. The house needs cooling down as much as I do.’
The tide is out and an underground smell wafts up from the drying mudflats. Nora limps across the terrace to admire the row of jam jars lined up on the wall, painted with fish and shells, curling waves and flying gulls. The colours, cobalt and emerald green, royal blue, turquoise, are transparent and intense.
‘Paint one yourself if you like. Watery colours only. They’re for the café, in case you hadn’t guessed. Like everything else in my life.’
The opening of Café Jetsam is only days away.
‘Where’s Zach?’ In the corner of the terrace, Zach’s teddy bear sits on a child-sized chair with a broken cane seat and the two back legs unpegged.
‘Walking the dog with Stavros. I hope they all come back exhausted.’ Eve looks up. ‘Sweet, isn’t it, the chair? We’re going to have a go at recaning it. Harry brought it round. He’s house-clearing for Daphne. Her mother’s just died.’
Harry has found all sorts of treasures in the attic, Eve says, and Daphne doesn’t want to know about anything unless it’s in pristine condition. She’s given him the job of disposing of everything else.
Nora sits beside Eve on the ground. Because of her injured calf she’s been unable to run for days, and it’s making her restless, fidgety. She picks up a jam jar from the pile and begins to pick off the sticky remnants of the Robertson’s Lemon Marmalade label. Eve clears her throat.
‘He was a rat. I’m so glad you finished with him.’
Rook Page 19