Rook by Jane Rusbridge Read Free Book Online Page A

she refers to cello practice, or a particular line of enquiry in her ongoing historical research.
    Once Miss Macleod has left, Nora thinks again of the little woollen figures feasting in an upper room before tucking their tunics at their hips to paddle into the water as if they are on holiday. In contrast, later scenes are dominated by horses, disproportionately large and stitched in terracotta or forest-green, their riders weighed down with chain mail, helmets and battle-axes. In the margins of the battle scenes, fantastic-looking birds and beasts give way to semi-naked figures lying horizontally, some without heads. The dead stripped of their armour.
    In the dust on the hall table are smudged outlines of the photographs Miss Macleod collected up and slipped into a plastic wallet as she left. Nora wipes a hand across the surface and blows the dust from her skin.

8

     
    How she does enjoy a drink with Giovanni in the Anchor Bleu of an evening. Charming man, with those dark eyes and his marvellous Italian accent, though he leaves early, as always, says his wife will have cooked for him, there are the children to put to bed.
    Brian had been putting the girls to bed, she told Giovanni, while she had a snifter on the terrace, and afterwards there was just something of a disagreement. They didn’t row. Brian was a quiet man. Giovanni nodded, but must have thought her quite doolally because she remembered, too late, that he and Brian had never met and everything was too far in the past for him to know who or what she was talking about.
    Giovanni is young. Let him go back to his wife and his two little girls.
    ‘Like me, you, two daughters.’ What was she doing, holding up her fingers – Two – like a nincompoop? Giovanni’s understanding of English is perfectly adequate. Her mind is becoming soft.
    Giovanni has never met Flick either. He thought there was only Nora. If Nora hadn’t come back from London he might have supposed Ada to be a spinster. The very thought! So she told Giovanni about her last visit to Spain to see Flick and her granddaughters, the olive trees with their silvery leaves and almond blossom in February. It’s possible she sounded a touch maudlin because Giovanni patted her shoulder when he got up to leave, told her she should fly out to Spain again, soon, for the sunshine. Heat the bones, he said. Warm the heart.
    Why come and sell ice cream in the godforsaken damp of this country, this village? How Giovanni must miss the sunshine! Even with the fire lit this evening, it’s impossible to drive out the chill trapped within the ancient walls. Even in the height of summer, the windows are too minute to allow any heat from the sun to find its way through to the gloomy interior. And Jason continues to labour under the misconception that an open door suggests a welcome to passers-by.
    Ada rubs her palms together, rubs her upper arms. Giovanni and all the talk of Spain has made her long for the heat. How she adored those hot climates! Though in the latter years, she believes working long days in the heat affected Brian’s mind. Unlike him to be whimsical – he was a man who measured and recorded with meticulous detail – but what he had described to her was most strange. After he left she’d been unable to shake off his words. They clung like a premonition. When he was excavating a tomb or a burial mound, he said, he’d feel the sweat on his back or neck cooled, as if by a shadow. Then he knew by a drop in temperature he was in the presence of the dead. Concentrating on the point of his trowel, his tools, the digging, while the shadows of their presence breathed at his shoulder, crowding him as they spurred him on to dig faster and for longer.
    Their whispers drive me . Those were his words.
    The night they rowed, Brian started on again, about telling Nora. He brought the matter up every time he was home. Sod’s law, the things you want to forget are the things which haunt you.
    She will understand ,