Rook

by Jane Rusbridge

  The argument was about Ada’s reasons for selling the house. Or it was, to begin with, but became snared with questions about the disappearance of Nora’s handbag, her missing cash, questions which Ada turned into accusations about Nora earning only enough to support a flea. At any moment she knew Nora would start on about the afternoon drinking, so Ada was pleased to be able to pre-empt this discussion by mentioning the bottle of gin secreted in Nora’s wardrobe. One thing led to another, Brian’s shoes, Brian leaving, until finally they arrived at the very heart of the matter: why Nora came home last spring and had never left again.

  ‘I want to know what happened,’ Ada demanded.

  Nora had a foot up on the kitchen stool – her long legs must have been cold, all that bare skin in those shorts – one of her gym shoes, hideous things which cost a fortune, fell to the floor with a thud.

  ‘I didn’t tell you, because I realised,’ Nora said – shouted, to be precise, startling the ugly bird on her shoulder into a hop and flap. It opened its beak to contribute a racket of its own to the mayhem. ‘I realised you wouldn’t want to look after a baby.’

  Ada’s mind swam. Since the boat accident, creek water silted in the nooks and crannies of her mind and sometimes the sense of what she wanted to say or even think had washed away or sunk.

  ‘You got rid of it.’ This was not a question, no. A mother knows these things, and she’d known all along, there was a baby, once upon a time, and then there was no baby, no happily ever after, only Nora with her pent-up misery – never communicating, never writing home when she was away, shutting herself in her bedroom for weeks on end when she was home, wrapping packages in newspaper to hide in her wardrobe. Brian’s shoes, for pity’s sake!

  ‘Him, Mother, not it; my baby was a little boy.’

  At that, Ada sat down. A cherub, an angelic baby grandson with the white blonde curls and blue eyes Nora was born with, both of which came from Robert. She put down her whisky glass with care; picked it up again to swill the ice cubes; put it down again. She could only whisper the words: ‘You mean you gave your own son away?’

  Nora slumped to the kitchen floor, one gym shoe still on. She shook her head but she didn’t speak. The creature was making an almighty racket, feathers flying, knocking into things as it danced to and fro, edging towards Ada’s feet, vicious claws clicking on the flagstones.

  ‘His name was Noah.’

  Ada could barely catch Nora’s words because she was addressing her knees.

  ‘I did not give him away.’

  ‘Where is he then?’

  ‘He was . . . taken from me.’

  What she meant precisely, Ada has no idea, because at that moment the phone rang and it was Stavros, his Greek accent obscuring the sense of the words he spoke but not the urgency. Ada handed the phone to Nora, who pulled on a coat over her shorts and left.

  The bird fluttered up on to the back of a kitchen chair opposite, folded its black wings and balefully blinked one white eyelid at her. Outside, the mist obliterated trees and fields. The landscape had disappeared. Robert, Brian, her mother, Felicity and her girls; a baby grandson called Noah – all gone – leaving her where she has been for seventy years or more, at Creek House, and with no one but a bird for company. The blasted thing stole the last of the cherries. Nevertheless, she would mix herself another whisky sour.

  Hours later, when Nora still had not returned – goodness knows where she could be, wearing that ridiculous get-up – Ada could bear to be alone no longer. It was time. She considered the bottom of her glass – lead crystal, the best – where the orange slice lay juiceless and squashed. It was time for Brian, as was his right, to be involved in the Godwin Grave Project.

  When Ada can walk no longer against the drag of sand into which her feet sink with each step, she slumps down in a hollow where, mercifully, the wind is less vicious. Grains of wind-blown sand have stuck to her skin, to her scalp. Edges sharp as glass in the roots of her hair, beneath her fingertips, in her mouth, between her back teeth. The Ancient Egyptians sometimes walked out into the desert, Brian told her, to die in a cave, the life scoured out of them by sun and wind, their skin leathered and preserved by rapid desiccation.

  For a moment she’d forgotten why she was wandering the dunes. She has lost Brian. When they told her the news of his death a part of her mind switched off: Ping! The noise a bulb makes when it blows. She should have tried to discover what happened to him and why, but there’s only so much one can bear to dwell on at the time. All the same, she should have come looking sooner.

  39

  The swoops and curves of Ada’s handwriting make Nora picture her mother as a girl in school, hair in plaits, laboriously tracing over the lines and loops, each ‘y’ and ‘g’ joined to the following letter, but when she reads the words themselves, the message written there, time halts.

  This note must have been on the kitchen table when she came in last night, because the ink is smudged by a circular mark from the empty milk bottle Nora picked up, rinsed and put out on the front step before she turned off the lights. All of which means Ada has been out all night.

  The police officer who answers the phone has a Welsh accent, the gentle musicality of which makes Nora want to weep.

  ‘And what is it which makes you concerned about her absence? Will she not have popped out to the shops?’

  ‘She’s been out since last night.’

  ‘Were you at home?’

  ‘No, I went out, to babysit for a friend.’ Nora left the house in the middle of the row with Ada, driving in the grip of a white-hot fury. Eve had been taken into hospital. On the telephone, fear had exaggerated Stavros’s heavy accent.

  This is not the right time, Nora, is too early for our winter baby.

  ‘When I came home, I thought she’d gone up to bed,’ she tells the police officer.

  ‘She doesn’t usually take herself off of an evening, or decide to stay over at a friend’s house?’

  ‘No. Yes, she does take herself off, but not . . . She’s in her seventies. She left a note. It doesn’t make sense.’ Nora hesitates. ‘She may have been a little bit tipsy.’

  Gone to look for your father. Nora begins to explain the note: her father’s death, years ago, what few details she knows, the accident, underground. As she recounts a version of the story she has created for herself, the familiar desert images play through her mind and it occurs to her she knows where Ada might have gone.

  She bangs out through the back door and runs down the road to the Anchor Bleu. Yesterday’s mist has cleared, it’s a sunny midday and the pub is full. She slams her hand down on the bar, aware of faces turning, blurred, towards her. Jason looks up from changing a beer barrel.

  The thought of the sand has dried her mouth, so she points out of the window, towards the creek where sea-scum froths with the incoming tide, covering the mud. ‘My mother is missing!’

  She’s already heading for the creek path down to the dunes by the time Jason stands in the open door of the pub, jangling his keys as he shouts, ‘Everybody out!’

  Later, Nora would find pinpricks of blood on her shins and her forearms where the marram grass had needled. On the top of a high sand dune, buffeted by the wind, she scanned the miles of sand and grass, the stake and wire fencing, the vast stretches of wet sand to the south, sweeping towards a scribble of sea in the far distance. Ada might be anywhere, lying in any dip or hollow, out of sight. She wouldn’t hear Nora’s shouts, snatched away on the breeze.

  Dogs, police, a helicopter, holidaymakers, people from the pub and village, everyone dropped what they were doing and joined the search for Ada. Dr Robertson’s daughter set off on horseback along the shoreline. The sea had by now reached the edge of the pebbles and shadows stretched over the dips in the dunes, where sand flew like spray lifting off water.

  Nora kept running. Though she was wary of sudden stops or starts, her calf injury of a month ago had healed and she felt no twinges. She left the line of searchers who mo
ved slowly across the dunes and jogged back inland through fields of harvested rape, following narrow footpaths she hadn’t crossed since childhood, hidden short-cuts familiar only to those who’d grown up nearby. Ada could have headed for the dunes last night, but she might not have reached East Head. Or she might have turned back for home and fallen. Nora beat back the undergrowth with a stick. Brambles caught at her arms and hair; rabbit holes trapped her feet and turned her ankles. She moved like an automaton, breath jolted from her with each step. If she stopped running, she would cease to breathe. As if from a high summit, she watched her body make laboured progress across the fields.

  The day after Noah’s birth she had run upstairs, taking the stairs two at a time, because she’d heard his cries from downstairs in the kitchen though the doors in between were closed and Ada was chopping carrots with the radio turned up full volume. She was out of breath when she lifted him and kissed the top of his head. Noah. He was quiet. She unwrapped his tiny limbs all the same and climbed into bed with him, holding him close, skin to skin, as she had when he was born. Then, the two of them had lain in the bathwater until it cooled and her teeth began to chatter. She’d swaddled him in the hand towel and was on the way to her room with him when she felt another contraction, and looked around for somewhere safe to put him down. In the bottom of the wardrobe was the Italian leather bag Isaac had bought for her months ago, before everything changed. The bag was wrapped in tissue tied with slim ribbon, slipped inside a red and black plastic carrier bag, exactly as it had been when Isaac passed it to her over the table at Fortescue’s. Another contraction made her pant and fold at the waist; she thought about climbing straight into bed with her baby but was worried the pain might mean she would not be able to hold him safely. What shall I do? she asked her absent father, seeing him in his study, head bent under the circle of light from the Anglepoise. What shall I do? She spoke the words out loud.

  The handbag smelled of new leather but was supple, with a silk lining, and as big as a holdall. The opening was easily long enough to allow her to place Noah, wrapped in the hand towel, inside, without scraping his head or toes on the ends. She placed the bag on her bed near the wall. Later, she wrapped her placenta in another towel and put it in the red and black plastic carrier bag. Without the energy to wash or finish undressing, she crawled under the covers and fell asleep. When she woke in the morning, the night’s events were wiped from her mind until her hand crept to the looseness of her belly. A sticky soreness between her legs, and when she lifted her hands to her face, a metallic smell. A little blood had dried around the thumbnail of her right hand.

  The whole village is out, including Steve, Eric the Swan-man, Daphne and Terry, Jason from the pub and the waitresses from Mariner’s teashop, searching along the shoreline and moving across the flat arable land behind the dunes. At the far edge of the wheat field, a part-time fireman, the father of one of Nora’s youngest pupils and the son of a man who’d grown up with Ada, thrashes the bulrushes at the throat of the rife, shoulders burly with rage. Above, a skylark flutters and falls in the blue.

  When the heartbeat thud of the helicopter’s blades recedes, Nora can hear other searchers in the far distance calling her mother’s name. Ada. Ada.

  She is no longer running. The footpath cuts through a field of ripe wheat, rustling, waist-high and rippling with shadow and light. Here and there, flattened by the recent rain which has delayed cutting, the wheat appears trampled. The farmer, Ted’s son, has begun to harvest the field but abandoned his combine to join the search. Nora’s strides have taken her into the field’s centre, walking over the cracked mud where the footpath is the width of a single tractor tyre, a right of way for hundreds of years; all those feet passing. In the private, swaying warmth of the wheat, Nora’s voice sounds hoarse from calling. Her stomach churns. Through the pale stalks she can just make out the line marked by the other tractor-tyre; tramlines, the farmers call them. Shadows move near the unwalked tramline, a blot of shade squatting in the wheat stalks. Her pace slows. A boy is there, a toddler, not fair-haired like Zach, but with a cap of hair, dark and sleek as an animal pelt.

  Nora folds her arms against her body. Not this again. This was finished months ago, seeing him. She concentrates on a slow breath, on the reassuring rise and fall of her ribs beneath her forearms. She turns her mind from the memory resolutely, the way she has taught herself to do. It is possible. Eventually, she opens her eyes to look again. There is nothing, only a sense of movement in the sway of shadows.

  Hands on her thighs, Nora crouches to ease the stitch in her side. The wheat stirs again, a breeze eddying over the ears in sudden swirls drifting to stillness. She puts her hands to the ground where the earth’s surface lifts like a scab. Between the lines of stalks, weeds with tiny red flowers and heart-shaped leaves spread their tendrils across dried fissures of mud. The wheat stems hold back a silence, rippling with something waiting.

  A cry goes up. Coooeee! In the field’s entrance, Mary, Steve’s childminder, has raised both arms, her forearms scooping the air to beckon them back, her pink mobile phone clutched in one hand. ‘She’s safe, Nora!’ She points at her phone. ‘Harry’s found her!’

  40

  ‘I thought you’d be at the hospital with Mum.’ Flick rubs at the lower part of her bare arms and Nora’s reflection jiggles up and down in the mirrored surfaces of her sister’s sunglasses. Behind Flick’s back, Eve pulls a face like a gargoyle.

  ‘Are you cold? Do you need a jumper?’

  Flick’s wearing a white, closely fitted sundress with killer heels which make her about five foot four. Her tanned calves and forearms are pimpled with cold but she shakes her head and reaches up for one of Ada’s old coats on the hooks by the front door.

  ‘No, but I do need a fag. Back in a tic.’ Her heels click down the tiled hallway and out through the French doors.

  Despite having spent the night in a hollow in the dunes, Ada is suffering only mild hypothermia, the doctor says. The coat she was wearing is an old heirloom, a full-length beaver fur coat which once belonged to Nora’s grandmother. Without its protection the hypothermia would, in all likelihood, have been severe. In the morning, in a shaky and confused state, the doctor says, it seems Ada might have fallen as she tried to scramble up the steep slope of a dune. Her hip is broken. She will be in hospital for a while.

  Eve, however, is out of hospital, sent home the next day while everyone was out searching for Ada. A false labour. Eve reaches up to give Nora a kiss. She checks her watch. ‘Right, I’m off. Don’t let her bully you, sweetheart.’

  ‘Thanks for driving all that way to pick her up. She should have caught the train from Gatwick.’

  ‘I enjoyed the trip – got me out of the house and away from Stavros and his fussing.’

  Benjie spots Eve’s approach and leaps to and fro over the seats of the 2CV. When Eve stops mid-stride Benjie stops too, tongue lolling and a paw poised up at the closed car window. Eve has scooted back to whisper in Nora’s ear. ‘Only one topic, so be prepared.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Nope – husband, soon to be ex.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Oh yes. She plans to nail him with those stilettos.’ Eve fishes in the pockets of her denim jacket for her car key. ‘Prime candidate for anger management classes.’

  Nora laughs.

  ‘I’m serious.’ Eve jabs the air with her car key. ‘She’ll gnaw away, chew up the kids at the same time and still feel self-righteous about it. Forgive me, she’s your sister but she’s a money-grabbing cow.’ She opens the car door and Benjie scrambles all over her, licking her face.

  In the kitchen, Harry is washing up. He rinses a glass under the hot tap and holds it up to the light. Polishing fast and with a flourish, he turns the glass expertly, lifting it to the light a second time for inspection before placing it on the shelf. He plunges his hands back in the water.

  ‘You must be Harry,’ Flick says, stepping in the back door from the garden. Peti
te as a child beside him, she offers her hand, high and straight-armed, as if intending Harry to kiss the back. He gives a shrug towards his hands, covered with bubbles in the sink, but smiles and nods.

  ‘Those are lead crystal. They mustn’t go in the dishwasher.’

  Harry smiles and over the top of Flick’s head his eyes meet Nora’s. He slowly raises the submerged glass from the bubbles in the washing-up bowl.

  Flick’s neck flushes.

  ‘Harry, this is my sister, Flick.’ Too late, Nora remembers she hates her name being shortened. ‘Felicity will be staying for a few days.’

  At breakfast, Felicity scraped butter on to toast, edge to edge, crust to crust, and said she wanted Rook moved out.

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Out of the house, out of the way.’

  ‘Out of the way.’

  ‘It’s just a bird, Nora. It won’t feel excluded.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  With exaggerated care, Flick put down the slice of toast and marmalade and rested her wrists on the table. ‘You’ve heard the expression “bird brain”? It won’t work out what’s going on, will it? It’ll just be in the shed instead of the kitchen.’ She picked up her toast again and delicately bit off a corner, her rosebud lips moving round and round with the chewing movements of her jaw.

  They argue most of the time, but manage a united front in the hospital for Ada, visiting her together once or twice. More often they take it in turns. Felicity’s talents lie in getting things done with speed and efficiency. She is adamant Ada cannot be left to live alone and, since Nora is vague about her future plans, it is agreed Ada will go out to Spain for a month or so once she is discharged, to recuperate and to see how she likes the expat life. Nora cannot argue against Ada’s obvious enthusiasm for the idea. Flick and Ada draw up a list of jobs to be done by a ‘handyman’, and Flick even suggests Harry. Now she has met him she apparently no longer finds him a threat to her inheritance. By the time Flick leaves at the end of a fortnight, Creek House has been valued. They have started to fill packing cases for storage and Nora is exhausted.