Rook

by Jane Rusbridge

  41

  Nora sits on the floor in the hallway of Creek House, a bowl of cold porridge on her lap. Outside, Harry whistles ‘Sweet Sixteen’. His ladder scrapes the crazy paving. She’s left money for the window-cleaning in an envelope with his name on it, poking out of the letterbox. Sitting here, she cannot be seen, because the only windows in the hallway are stained-glass panels set high in the front door. Unless he lifts the letterbox flap to peer in, he will presume she’s out.

  Last night she got back late from dropping Flick off at Gatwick. After she’d put Rook to bed, because the road was still with her, lines and lights streaming towards her vision, she wandered out with an apple into the cool garden. It was high tide, the creek frilling against the retaining wall at the end of the garden where the lawn drops to the shoreline. From the millwheel came the sound of water rushing. She looked out over the harbour at the lights on the boats. Only when she turned back towards the house to go in did she see it, and the muscles around her heart contracted.

  Harry has finished digging the vegetable patch. The area, freshly dug-over with manure, stretches right up to the overgrown hedge on the left-hand side of the garden. Right up to the apple tree. Fleetingly, she imagined climbing straight back into the Wolseley and driving away.

  They did talk about Ada’s vegetable garden, she and Harry and Flick; she remembers that much. And it was agreed Harry would finish preparing the ground, perhaps even do some preliminary planting before they put Creek House on the market, but Nora hadn’t thought things through. As usual, she hadn’t been thinking straight at all. Last night, not knowing what else to do, she took the hired cello down to the cellar, where she played for hours: the final coda; its intense, yearning ppp as the cello slowly glides from the heights.

  This morning, Harry had left a message for her in the kitchen. After cleaning the windows, the note announced in sketchily printed capital letters, he will prepare the ground for the path round the vegetable area.

  Harry improvises as he whistles – warbling trills and extravagant cadenzas. Her memory dredges up words to fit the repeated musical phrase: ‘I love you as I’ve never loved before’. Nora prods at her porridge, an island floating on milk. The edge dips under as she prods with her spoon, but bobs up again. She’s been sitting so long the porridge is too cold to eat and under her buttocks the chill from the floor tiles has spread into her hip bones.

  Harry would stop and come in, if she asked him. Sit with his chipped-knuckle hands around a mug of tea. Talk with her about – anything – help fill her mind with something other than the memories, half-formed and fragmented, which now insist on rising to the surface.

  Last night she stood under the apple tree and placed both of her hands on the cankered bark. She thought about how time has passed since Noah’s birth, the days and weeks and months and seasons since she last held him.

  This May the apple tree had very little blossom. Since her childhood, it has borne no more than a handful of apples and the branches have a lopsided look through competing for space and light with the vigorous growth of the hebe hedge. One branch, which should have been pruned back long ago, stretches out low and far into the garden and here Nora hung the wind chimes she’d remade after the spring gales. Underneath the tree, grass is beginning to recover from the summer drought. Last winter a flattened track across the grass led from the house to the tree, showing the path Nora walked at night. Ada never once commented on the trail, which looked much like an animal track, a fox or a badger on its nightly travels along the edge of the lawn.

  The capital letters of Harry’s message make it very clear what he is about to do. She has seen the plan for the vegetable patch, studied the drawings spread out on the kitchen table. She knows where the path will run around a low box hedge, and she knows that the space between the hedge and the dug-over area is not big enough, at the moment, to make any room at all for a path. Today, when he’s finished the windows, Harry is going to prepare the ground for the path. To do that, he will have to cut back the hebes, just beginning their autumn blooming. She could use this fact as an excuse to stop him. She knows she won’t.

  Across the skin of Nora’s sloped thighs, lozenges of red and blue light fall from the stained glass. The hallway at Creek House is long and narrow as a timeline. Her legs are too long, now, years too long to be sitting here on the tiled floor with her back pressed against the wall, her bare toes gripping the rim of the skirting board opposite. Harry will soon start digging.

  Even now her mind skates away. Before she left with Flick for Gatwick, the hebes were taller than a man, shaggy and dense, but by the time she returned, Harry had cut the glossy leaves back to reveal skinny knobbles and kinks, their inner branches deformed by lack of light. Now, in the open, hangs the wire she once threaded with holed pebbles, bending the wire into the shape of a heart.

  Nora puts down the bowl and hugs her knees. Fifteen years since he left and one of her father’s trilbies still hangs on the hat-stand. The breeze of her family’s comings and goings lifts the hairs on her arms, their busyness in other rooms, at other times. Not any more. And not here, where she sits, halfway between the front door and the kitchen.

  Her father’s bee-keeper’s veil and gloves are piled on to the shelf above the coat rack where layer upon layer of the family’s coats hang on scooping hooks of wrought iron. None of her father’s shoes are here. Nora doesn’t know whether he took them, or whether Ada gave them to charity or chucked them out with the rubbish. The only pair of her father’s shoes left in the house, as far as Nora knows, is upstairs, in a newspaper-wrapped package at the bottom of her wardrobe.

  That May night she wrapped her beloved baby tight and held him close for the last time. She took him down the garden to the orchard. Masses of forget-me-nots covered the ground beneath the trees, the blue of thousands of tiny flowers hovering over the earth like a mist.

  Harry’s whistling moves with the clank of his buckets along the side of the house. She should call out and ask him to come in now. She imagines herself going to the door and shouting his name, sees her hand on the latch opening the door, leaning out, her mouth open wide to call out to him but her mind stutters and fails to follow thought with action. She whispers another name: Noah.

  Harry’s footfall passes back along the side of the house to the front. Perhaps he’s leaving, had enough for one day.

  A window must be open somewhere in the house because a breeze carries the watery sound of the poplars, the chime of halyards against masts.

  Strapping man, Ada always says, built like a barrel. Harry has physical stamina. Cleaning the windows won’t have tired him.

  The blue hand towel was embroidered with a border of swans. Nora tucked the corners of the towel under the swathes of fabric so as to hold her tiny baby safe. She kissed the top of his head. She couldn’t say goodbye.

  She hunches over her arms. Rook sidles along the hallway, head on one side. With a sandpapery rustle of feathers, he places a cool foot over her toes.

  The poplar leaves are lapping. The submerged drift of her mind has registered the sound of footsteps, boots approaching on the brick of the garden path, but her body is no longer part of her. Her mind is frozen. The kitchen door falls open. Harry stands there, a red sky behind him, warmth from the low sun pouring in. Sparrows squabble in the hedge. Harry stands with his legs apart, breath heavy from digging. His shirt is undone. In the crook of his elbow, against his chest, he cradles a mud-covered, raggy bundle.

  Nora feels her body rise from where she is sitting at the kitchen table. Her face is dry.

  ‘Look what I’ve found, Nora,’ he says, still looking down, his voice a murmur.

  She sways over to Harry and holds out her arms.

  42

  The police officer closes the door into the garden. He is Welsh and his voice is both comforting and familiar though she doesn’t know why, or what he means by waiting for SOCO.

  ‘We mustn’t touch anything else now,’ Harry had said, a
fter he’d phoned the police and repeated to them everything she’d told him.

  The police officer puts a hand on her shoulder then briefly touches the top of Noah’s head, wrapped in the hand towel. Nora would like to get up and wash the towel so that it is the right shade of blue again, so that the border of swans shows white and clean, but she doesn’t move.

  Blue and white tape festoons the garden: POLICE.

  Her arms around Noah hold him close, against her body warmth.

  The police officer makes tea for himself and brings Nora a mug too, although she shook her head when he asked if she wanted one and shakes her head again when he lifts the mug into her line of vision before setting it on the table. Lights are bright in the garden, the shadows of people moving in and out of lit-up areas. Someone is taking pictures, a flash bouncing light off the glass in the window. Then a camera flashes, twice, and the rumble of Harry’s voice travels to her from somewhere at the front of the house. Nora looks in the direction of the hallway. She doesn’t want Harry to go anywhere.

  The police officer says something to her which includes the words witness and questions, and which doesn’t make sense.

  ‘There were no witnesses. No one else was there,’ Nora says to the policeman. ‘No one else knew.’ Not quite accurate, because Isaac knew and Ada had guessed at something, but no one knew about Noah’s birth or his death and that is what she means.

  She wants to tell the truth so she must be sure not to forget anything, not to leave anything out. Impossible though, because already she is not certain what she remembers and what she has forgotten and whether, between those two extremes, some details are those her mind has invented.

  ‘I hadn’t even met Harry then.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ The Welsh police officer’s neck is too thick for the stiff collar of his shirt; he pulls at it with a forefinger and says something about an unexplained death.

  She would like her baby’s death to be explained. Whether he had died because she fell on the stairs after drinking gin or whether it was something she did wrong or failed to do. She would like to ask the kind policeman what he thinks about this, but she is too exhausted, scraped out. She closes her eyes.

  She rocks to and fro, curled around her baby. The police officer puts his hand on her shoulder again, and his touch helps her mind focus. She keeps her eyes closed. She keeps thinking about the heart-shaped cockle shell, its two halves shut together, the spines pricking her hand. Inside, the shell was bone-white and empty.

  ‘Do you think he drowned in the bath?’ Nora’s voice croaks. ‘They can breathe underwater when they’re born, can’t they?’

  He doesn’t answer, perhaps because a woman has entered the kitchen. Nora didn’t hear her come in, but she can smell perfume or body lotion and the woman’s heels clack on the floor. She says something in an undertone to the Welsh police officer about securing the scene then comes nearer and pulls up a chair. Nora opens her eyes. She holds Noah closer, lifting her hand to protect the side of his head. The woman’s face fills her vision. Particles of face powder cling in the hair above her ear, close to her cheek. She has put on her make-up in a hurry.

  After all this time, everything is happening at once. Nora sits up. A constriction scrapes her throat. ‘You’re going to take him away from me, aren’t you?’

  The woman glances to one side, down to the floor, and then to the other side, out through the window at the lights and movement – and she could be shaking her head, she could be saying No, we’re not going to do that, but then the woman looks down at her hands in her lap and Nora knows the answer is Yes, we are.

  She’s choking then, the constriction in her throat building and building.

  The woman begins to talk rapidly and while she talks Nora wails, No, no, no, over and over, thinking of nothing but the tide retreating, mud and weed exposed, water held stagnant, the smell of Salthill Creek.

  43

  ‘You can have Noah back later.’ Another woman, nearer her own age, holds Nora’s hand as she says this.

  The room at the police station has no windows. Nora does not remember how she came to be here. The lights in the ceiling pulsate. Rook, a starveling, his tiny body pulsing with each beat of his heart. She had saved him.

  They have taken Noah away for a post-mortem, the woman explains as she rubs her thumb to and fro over Nora’s knuckles. ‘We need to find out why he might have died.’ The woman’s hair is pulled back from her face in an unbrushed ponytail and she wears no make-up. This honesty makes Nora feel safer.

  ‘Can we turn off those lights?’

  ‘Of course we can.’

  The darkness is comforting. She will be able to talk into this darkness.

  ‘I ran a bath. I’d had some gin. I wasn’t thinking.’

  The woman’s thumb continues to move across Nora’s knuckles, stroking. She tells Nora her name is Clare and she is a family liaison officer.

  ‘I was frightened,’ Nora says. ‘I hadn’t told my mother. It was all too soon. I thought he would be born at the end of the summer, not at the beginning. I didn’t know what the pains were. I got into the bath.’

  Clare explains it is an offence to conceal the birth of a child, but Nora does not understand what she means.

  ‘What happened to you was not a miscarriage,’ Clare says. ‘We think your pregnancy was too far on for that. Which means Noah was stillborn.’ Illegal disposal of a dead body, Clare goes on to tell her, carries a prison sentence. They have to collect the evidence. If it is in the public interest to prosecute, there will be a court case.

  A police officer had fetched the gin bottle and the red leather bag from the bottom of her wardrobe and brought them downstairs in clear plastic bags that are on the table in front of her.

  Almonds and lemon juice from Spain, cassia bark and orris, grains of Paradise from West Africa: exotic ingredients from far-flung places and the drink she associated with Isaac, the beginning of their love affair. She had twisted off the cap. Aromatic fumes flowered at the back of her nose and throat.

  Juniper and liquorice. She drew the bedroom curtains across the dark window and eased off her jeans with a sense of relief. The button had been undone all day, the zip’s teeth catching on her flesh and biting a raw place on the fold of her skin. All day there’d been a dragging sensation in the small of her back which made her weary. Her mother fussed over lunch and supper. You’re not eating properly. No wonder you’re skin and bone. She’d gone to her room wondering how she could stand living like this. The neat gin burned her lips; she needed to fetch tonic water.

  She listened out for the click of her mother’s bedroom door, then tripped on the hem of her nightie on the way back up, her foot missing the stair so that she had to grab for the banister to prevent herself from tumbling all the way down. She found her shin skinned from the carpet burn the next day.

  She had woken some time later, her stomach churning. A cramp squeezed the hollow of her back and she thought her bowels were about to open. Stooped double, she crossed the landing to the loo. As soon as she sat and leaned forward on her thighs, her muscles unclenched and liquid gushed from her in a watery flood. She felt momentary relief until a cramp squeezed at her bowels again and forced a grunt of pain: less liquid this time. The pain was familiar, like period cramps, but stronger. She peered between her legs into the toilet bowl. Another cramp wrung the small of her back and spread fingers of pain, muscular and demanding, round to her womb, squeezing the breath from her. She lowered herself to the floor to inch across the smooth linoleum to the high-sided bath, where she turned both taps on full. Her mother might wake at the emptying gurgle of the hot tank, but warm water would help her relax. She thought the neat gin had made her sick.

  Grains of Paradise.

  Noah’s head was like a pomegranate, his skin red and wrinkled. Wisps of dark hair lay flat against his head and his eyes were closed, the lids pressed together as if sealed. He didn’t make a sound. She kissed his minute, translucent fingers.
He did not stir. She wrapped him in the blue hand towel but unwrapped him again to study his chest. He was not breathing. She cupped his tiny body in her long hands.

  Winter

  44

  Hinetone, mid-eleventh century

  In the deep of winter, what remained of his bones was brought to her in a fishing creel.

  The horse’s flanks heaved and the salty scent of wet dog told her the broad-shouldered stranger had travelled hard and fast. When he dismounted, though the light from the fire inside had scorched her vision, she saw a gathering basket slung across his body beneath his furs which he took time to unstrap. It was too late in the day for a fisherman to come selling, no silver-bodied fish slithered at the basket’s opening. The unfamiliar shape and size and the manner in which he cradled the basket gave her pause. She obeyed his gesture to step outside, but her hand shook as she protected the flame of the lamp.

  The stranger showed respect and stood more than a stride away, straight-backed as a warrior, the basket at his chest shielded by his crossed arms. A blade had slashed one forearm in the recent months; the wound was puckered, still livid. The basket he clasped had a dense weave of rush. Her heart, brittle as a wick snuffed, pinched with unease.

  On that night in October, the stranger said, young men, a group from Harold’s village in Sussex, had disguised themselves in garments stripped from the Norman dead. Their fathers, whose bodies lay for the women to reclaim, had been Harold’s playmates, and one among them had been schooled in the French language. They followed William Malet through the glo¯m, and heard Guillaume le Bâtard order him to bury the Norman dead. The digging and shovelling would take all night and more so. At the second command, Malet’s shoulders slumped. He was required to reassemble Harold’s corpse, wrap it in purple linen and return to the camp at Hastings to bury the remains on the white cliff’s crumbling edge. In this way, le Bâtard jested, Harold was to be granted his wish made in arrogance, and be left to guard for ever the sea he had so desired to rule.