Free Rook by Jane Rusbridge Page B

cigarette.
    Tonight there’s a sheen about her, hair falling silvery over the crimson-and-black silk of her kimono. Ada lifts her hand to her mouth and a cigarette holder catches the light from the moon. She hasn’t smoked for years yet Nora watches her shoulders rise as she inhales, holds the breath and savours it, before tapping the holder on the arm of the bench. The smoke is acrid. The cigarettes will be French, skinny and brown, the ones she smoked when Nora was a child. Flick use to steal them to play at dressing-up, posing in front of Ada’s full-length mirror, wearing her shoes and hats.
    Outside, Nora lifts the lapels of her towelling dressing gown close round her neck and face against the cool air. ‘Mum, your coat.’ Holding the coat by the shoulders, she offers it, with a shake of the heavy fabric, inviting Ada to slip her arms into the sleeves, but with a second brisk tap of the cigarette holder against the bench, Ada looks away, turning the fine swoop of her jawbone towards her daughter.
    Nora says nothing. No point starting another argument in the middle of the night. No point mentioning the cigarette. She swings the coat invitingly. ‘Come on, Mum.’
    How often Ada must have held coats out like this when she and Flick were small; it’s something mothers do, a gesture of waiting. She has seen Flick’s impatience with her two daughters, flapping their coats at them, their little bodies jerking as she tugs coat edges to button them, or yanks zips up to their chins. Now Nora waits for her mother.        
    The shrubs cast moon shadows across the grass and at the bottom of the garden by the water’s edge the trees stir in the dark. A smell of algae and mud wafts up from the creek.
    Isaac held her coat out for her that first night, after her Wigmore debut. He kissed the back of her neck, just below the ear and she swung around in shock. Afterwards, he told her he’d thought she was going to slap him across the cheek.
    She is not going to think about Isaac, she is far from that other life.
    Ada raises her arms backwards a fraction to indicate her readiness to be helped into the coat sleeves. Hair falls either side of her face on to her collar as she watches Nora button up her coat.
    ‘Why not, I thought.’ Her voice is barely audible. ‘Why not treat myself? Make some changes?’        
    ‘Come inside now.’ Nora takes her mother’s hand, aware of the lightness of bone.        
    Ada sighs and straightens her shoulders. ‘After all, no one else is going to.’ She looks away towards the sloping lawn where dew is caught on the tips of the grass blades. ‘The garden has grown so wild.’
    ‘It’s always been wild, Mum.’
    Ada draws in a wavering breath. ‘Well, we have plans, Harry and I, big plans. So I’ve told him he can park his caravan here, at Creek House, down near the water.’
    On the lawn, footprints in the dew blur across the grass towards the old orchard. Nora wants everything to stay as it is, as it was in her childhood, with the seclusion created by overgrown laurels, hebes and tamarisks which shield the garden from the view of passing boats, or walkers on the creek path. She likes Harry well enough, but is not keen on the idea of his constant presence around Creek House. She knows better than to make a fuss. Besides, it’s likely Ada’s ‘plans’ will come to nothing. By next week she will have cooked up some other impulsive scheme and they’ll be buying grass seed to reseed the bare patch of lawn.
    ‘Come on inside now, Mum.’ Nora stoops to embrace her mother’s tiny frame, her cheek against the prominent line of collar-bone where Ada’s skin is thin and browned as an autumn leaf.
     
    Later, Nora lies awake. An owl hoots; another answers. Rook is downstairs, alone in the kitchen. Nora turns over on to her side.
    She will go and see Eve, tomorrow. She’s put it off far too long. I’m pregnant, I expect you guessed . She is a lousy friend. She should tell Eve