Rook (33 page)

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. Petite 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.

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.