Rook (11 page)

‘An ex-lover? You shouldn’t give him too much attention.’

Nora’s not sure what this means. She picks up the bow-saw to tackle the mass of ivy branches and roots, compacted hard as concrete.

‘Sometimes, when our present is a little too empty, our past moves in to fill the gaps. We have no room for our future to take root. This guy, he’s dead to you, or not?’

Nora hesitates, not sure she can trust her voice. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Was the sex good? Is it that you remember?’

‘Yes, it was good.’ She works the bow-saw to and fro.

Isaac turned her on with a raised eyebrow, a sidelong glance; that spark remained between them, even when they’d been seeing each other several years, though the time they had alone together was only ever brief and snatched, so perhaps the urgency grew from a necessity for speed rather than intensity of desire. Nora can no longer tell. The teeth of the saw blade gnaw through the bark of the thick ivy. As she saws, she describes the man she’s seen, his halting stride so like Isaac’s, his dark, shaggy mane – but Isaac is now in his sixties, and when she last saw him, his hair was already edged with white over his ears, along the nape of his neck, a line of white arching up away from his forehead to his crown.

As she picks away at the ivy, Nora dips in and out of the story of Isaac, working to keep the tone of a joke in her voice when she alludes to the many years of their ‘romance’. She rummages in her bag to show Eve the photo-booth picture, taken the first weekend they had away together. She was eighteen; Isaac was fifty.

Eve doesn’t pull a face or roll her eyes at the age difference. ‘So now he’s what, mid sixties?’

Nora nods. Isaac’s lapels are wide and his tie has a fat knot, his fashion sense arrested in an earlier decade. The photograph has faded to sepia, burnishing his skin. Showing the photo to Eve, Nora sees that even then Isaac looked a man past his prime.

‘It’s a bad photo. He wasn’t that dark-skinned.’

Though, with his eyes shadowed by prominent eyebrows – each strand thick as sewing thread – and the sleek gleam of his hair, Isaac did possess a quality of darkness. His profile, the line of his forehead running straight and firm to the tip of his nose, was powerful. Only when he played the cello, or during sex, did the strong lines between his nose and the downward turn of his mouth, soften; only when his eyes were closed was the brush-line of his thick eyelashes noticeable.

‘Hmm.’ Eve hands the photo back. ‘You always carry that around?’

‘Along with all this other junk, old till receipts, general rubbish, see?’ Nora pulls a few crinkled bits of paper out from the ink-stained depths of her denim bag. ‘Am I seeing him because he is dead?’ The photograph slides easily back into the little pocket in Nora’s wallet. ‘I know that does happen. I mean, to people who’ve lost someone.’

‘No, not necessarily, but there’ll be a reason.’ Eve idly rubs her belly in a circular motion. She picks up the bundles of ivy once more, chucks them over the high sides of the almost-full skip and brushes off her hands. ‘How about I make you some smudge sticks? Some herbs to cleanse and move the soul will help.’

Eve explains about smudge sticks, describes the woman who taught her how to roll the dried herbs, mentions white sage and mugwort.

‘Do you want him to be dead?’ she asks, abruptly.

‘For a long time – months – I wanted him to come and find me. I was sure he would. Crazy, isn’t it?’ Nora laughs to cover the crack in her voice.

‘But he didn’t.’ Once again, Eve’s tone is one of statement, not question, and her certainty stabs at Nora, deflating her attempt at flippancy.

Eve puts her hand on Nora’s forearm. ‘This is how it works. Smoke from a smudge stick attaches itself to negative energy. As the smoke clears, the negative energy goes with it, to be released into another space where it will be regenerated into positive energy – with me?’

Nora nods.

‘So, we might use a combination that embraces air, water, fire and earth – something like pine resin and sage. It’s not complicated. I’ll make you up a few sticks and you can do it yourself if you like. You might prefer that. All you need is a feather or fan to waft the smoke over you. Start at the top and work down.’

As usual, she speaks with such authority that Nora’s doubts seem born of ignorance. ‘No time like the present,’ Eve says. ‘I’ll drop round tomorrow. Let’s do it!’

She drags another solid chunk of stems and branches towards the skip. One side is flat, marked with the pattern of the bricks it has grown against for years. Eve pauses, bent over, hands on her thighs. ‘God, I feel like throwing up. It’s this smell.’ She sighs and pushes up her sleeves. ‘Any smell, to be honest. I can’t even clean my teeth.’

Nora picks up the bow-saw once more. She has almost sawn through the ivy trunk; after that she’ll tackle the roots.

12

After the brightness of the summer garden, the hallway is dark. Ada pauses to light a cigarette, shakes out the match and savours the first inhalation. She takes a step forward, and stops. What has brought her into the house with some urgency she now cannot recall. Patting her head, she finds her reading glasses are not balanced there, so she perhaps was about to fetch them. She moves purposefully down the hallway but when she arrives at the telephone table she knows for certain her glasses are not the reason she came marching into the house.

The telephone is reassuringly solid. Bakelite, provided by the GPO when she and Brian were first married and Creek House became their marital home. Ada chose ivory over the more common black.
A very nice example of the Ivory 332L with drawer
, a dealer once told her. Not long ago. A dapper little man with a peppery moustache; made her upper lip tickle to watch him speak.        

She reaches for the telephone. Across her forearm falls blue and green light from the half-moon of coloured glass in the front door and she clicks her tongue, pulling down the sleeve of her dress to cover her mottled skin. The Bakelite drawer of the telephone is stuck. What they kept in a drawer barely the size of a single receipt, heaven knows.

How she’d love to escape from this draughty cavern of a place. Make a fresh start. A little town house in Chichester, right in the centre of things, would suit her down to the ground. The hallway at Creek House, despite Nora’s recent spring clear-out, remains the same chilly corridor, with its black and white floor tiles and family belongings heaped in layers on the coat rack.        

Very likely the dealer with the moustache called the same time last year, when Nora donned her Marigolds in order to rush about like a simple-minded skivvy to dust off pieces of furniture and sort boxes of junk.

‘Mum?’ Nora’s forehead is crinkled as seersucker. One of her large hands holds down the cardboard flap of a cardboard box she’s lugged in from the garage.

Ada makes a show of consulting her wristwatch. ‘I’m expecting a call from Felicity at any moment.’

Even that doesn’t slow Nora down. She elbows by and climbs the stairs two at a time, arms and neck straining as she heaves the box of ancient paper upstairs. Always hiding something, that girl. Perfectly obvious what’s in the box, since it carries the must of old paper and glue: ancient sheet music which Nora never quite manages to throw out, moving reams of the stuff around from one room to another instead.

Ada picks up the telephone receiver and weighs it in her hand. She listens to the hum. Children can be most inconsiderate, at times, not to say inconvenient. She puts the receiver down again.

He telephoned from London the other day, the young man, the one who has called at the house twice, perhaps three times, she can’t be sure. Voice like treacle and well-turned vowels; privately educated at one of the better schools, without a doubt. Has her thinking of Robert with his voice and his gangling boyishness, the way he pushes at his flop of hair. Different colouring, but no doubt of his interest, asking questions, a hand on her elbow to guide her down the garden steps where the paving stones are loose. Though, in a man young enough to be her son, there’s something disconcerting about the practised widening of those brown eyes when he smiles. A ladies’ man if ever there was!

Ada slips off one of her pearl earrings and picks up the telephone receiver once more. She holds it to her ear, glancing upwards, a hand over the mouth of the receiver. Nora is thudding about upstairs. Lifting the telephone cradle, Ada walks with it away from the open stairwell. The flex is just long enough to reach into the dining room, where she leans against the far side of the door.

‘Oh, Nora’s having one of her fits of temper. Up and down like a barometer. Don’t know where we are with her, as I explained yesterday to dear Badger when he was here to talk about the garden –’

‘–’

‘No, it’s just my pet name for him.’

‘–’        

‘Of course your father spoiled her rotten when she was a child.’ Ada shakes her head at the memory of Brian and tiny Nora with her thistle-head of hair, the two of them affected by that curious intensity of concentration which excluded all else. Inseparable, until she told him. Put the cat amongst the pigeons.

Ada takes another drag on her cigarette and exhales with a sigh, watching the drift and curl of smoke.

‘Temperamental is not the word for it, darling. I don’t know what gets into her at times, chewing on her cuffs, twiddling at her hair. I’d like to slap at her hands, tell her to get dolled up and go out for a night on the town with that pretty blonde friend of hers, but she will fly off the handle at the slightest provocation.’

‘–’

‘She’s embarked on her annual clear-out, stampeding about the place like a herd of elephants.’

‘–’

The one-sided conversation is not very true to life because Felicity would be vociferous in her response to this last statement. Ada takes another pull on her cigarette, fingering the telephone flex. A kink uncurls and coils back.

‘Kind of you to ask. I’d like to take a nap.’

‘–’

‘Not so well. I was up all night with the storm.’

Last night, the lightning woke her, thunder grumbling in the distance. She went to close the sash, the air in the bedroom dense with the weight of rain to come. Another zigzag of lightning and she was certain she saw Nora outside, down by the old apple tree, lit by the flash of light, Nora with all that hair fanning at her waist. Ada waited by the window but when the lightning flared again she could see no one and rain had begun to fall in noisy sheets, a downpour.

Ada sighs into the telephone receiver, which is no longer humming. The line is dead.

‘So, darling, when do you think you might?’

‘–’

‘Simply delightful, and of course to see the girls. Au revoir for now then, darling.’ She depresses and releases the T-bar with her forefinger just as Nora comes banging downstairs and strides along the hallway back to the garden. Always been in a hurry, since the day she burst into the world. Smoke wreathes around Ada’s head as she meanders after her daughter, finishing her cigarette. Oh, to make it all disappear in a puff of smoke, the tiresomeness of life.

Out in the garden with the sun warm on the back of her neck, an image comes to her of Nora’s wild pale hair, ghostly in the dark last night. She flutters her fingers over her chignon, strokes the tight roll of her own hair.

The upper lawn is greatly improved. Only last week it resembled a field, with buttercups and thistles, grass in tufts and clumps, until Harry serviced the mower and made a start on it.

She walks towards the garage where Nora is galumphing about, shifting boxes from one place to another, flinging racquets and flippers, beach balls and plastic spades out on to the lawn. This sudden compulsion to put the house in order is out of character. Not enough to do, that’s Nora’s problem these days, but what can she be thinking of, to put the tennis comeback in the pile for the rubbish? Ada lifts the lid from the box and the sides collapse immediately into flatness, allowing the poles to spill out.

Wimbledon on the television when the girls were tiny: sighs, a spatter of clapping and the occasional grunt. Black and white. And the player with all that dark hair, the temper tantrums, who was it, sultry as a thunderstorm? Powerful square knees. She has always been petite and there’s something about a big man that makes one feel . . . She lifts her shoulders and shrugs.