Rook Read Free Page B

music, the crowded rooms. A blast of male laughter – and they were introduced across a throng of people squeezed into a hallway. Ada leans forward, glancing a little to one side to feign coyness, and places her hand in his. Someone says again, meet Robert. He stoops to catch her name and smiles as he looks down at her, his hand enveloping hers with warmth.
    The way he looked at her. She had his attention, she could tell. His hands – Ada sees her hand stretched out over the water, grasping at air. It doesn’t matter. She lets her arm fall. She rips another hunk from the loaf and drops it in the water. He said he would be back.
    1954. That summer, she and Cicely had to air all the beds, beat the rugs and fling wide the windows. Creek House was full. They came down from London, the men in their snazzy suits, to look at the graves. Brought with them their canvas bags of equipment, tape measures, pencils and notebooks; took off their sports jackets, rolled up their shirtsleeves and drank Pimm’s in the garden in late afternoons, before the shadows yawned across the lawn. Her husband was too busy getting overheated with his measurements and sketches; Robert was the one who carried the tray of glasses for her, back out on to the terrace where the others were laughing and excitement zipped the air tight.
    Ada paused to dash some extra slugs of gin into the Pimm’s as she refilled the jug. Nothing like gin on a hot day!
    He came back in and closed the pantry door. The pantry shelf dug into the small of her back and his tongue tasted of mint. All afternoon Robert watched her as she crossed her legs, or leaned forward for him to light her cigarette.
    Robert’s body was so different, long and muscular, and his vigour took her by surprise. Under the macrocarpa, the smell of pine resin, the prick of needles on her spine and buttocks.
    Simply for ever afterwards, ripping up the roots of mint that spread along the cracks and edges of the crazy paving, she’d think of Robert, of his huge hands tenderly cupping her face. The memories of him come to her only in snatches: Robert’s head bent to the garden sieve, sifting the grit and rubble from the opened tombs, his hair falling forwards; his big, strong hands.
    The young man yesterday had come about the graves. He ran his hands through his hair and asked for Nora. Eyes brown as a spaniel’s, with the twitchy eyebrows one finds so appealing on a dog.
    The ball of bread which Ada has squashed and rolled and stretched drops into the water. The white globule sinks and rises again, floating on the surface.
    That time she met Robert in London.
    Afterwards, whenever Brian was away, she went up to London to meet Robert – and Brian was always away on digs in foreign climes, leaving her waiting here, rattling around Creek House at the end of the long straight lane, no roads branching off, the last house before the water, looking out over nothing but mud and sky. But always those first days come back to her, the afternoons of that first summer. In a striped deckchair, Robert rests his forearms on his thighs and taps out a cigarette, offers the box to her, his gaze drifting over her ankle.
    The number of years – and there were many – and the precise reason for their ending, she has forgotten. One time, near the end, when she announced her news, pulling off her gloves in Lyons’ Corner House amid the clink of china and teaspoons, the waistband of her skirt so tight it hampered her breathing, Robert was gazing elsewhere across the room and, only reluctantly, when she touched his arm, looked back to her. Why now? he demanded, Why now, Ada, when it’s far too late!
    And it was. Too late for her to have another child, too long after the first, and it did cross her mind, as she said last week to the young doctor – whose name escapes her, these days one never sees the same doctor twice – after he’d asked her to breathe into a mouthpiece, when he placed his chilly stethoscope between her