The Devil's Music (41 page)

    Andy. Now Andrew, a drifter, Susie has told her. An adult man Helen doesn’t know. Over the past months there have been phone calls and letters from Susie, scrawled pages and photos of her three boys, of herself and Richard just married, standing under the green dark of a yew tree at the gateway of a churchyard. And Susie also sent one picture of Andy, a tall, gaunt man caught, half turning in a doorway, entering or leaving it’s hard to say, not smiling but frowning at the camera, unshaven and with dark hair shaggy around his face: almost a stranger.

    But last week, in a package with a Greek postmark, the hemp bracelet had arrived. She peered into the jiffy bag, shook out the bracelet, but there was no note. The bracelet is an alternating Crown Flat Sinnet, fastening round her wrist with a complex button knot that she thinks may be a variation of the six-strand Matthew Walker Knot. But she’s unsure. These days, the knot work she learned as a small child from her father is rusty. Ian researched on the net but they’d been unable to identify either the Button Knot or the knot, formed from interconnected circles with no apparent beginning or end, that dangles from the bracelet. It reminds her of a Celtic Shield Knot. She holds the bracelet as a sign, an answer to her unvoiced question. It will be all right.

    She slips Elaine’s photograph out of the envelope in her shoulder bag. Elaine, hands resting in her lap, sits on the terrace where they often sat together. Her face, translucent, is turned away from the camera towards the west and the smudged edges of the line of hills on the other side of the valley. Light from a low sun picks up the sweep of her jaw line, emphasises the sculpted hollow of her cheek. Elaine’s eyes are a startling blue in contrast to the tissue-paper pink of the bougainvillea flowers. When the photograph was taken, although they didn’t know it, she was already dying. The slow seep of blood from a bleed in her brain was just beginning to affect her already limited co-ordination of movement. Helen knew that now. Later the same night, they’d had friends around. When Helen was feeding her at supper, Elaine leaned towards the spoon, eyes on Helen’s, but something slipped, something clogged the mechanics of the familiar process and put them out of sync. Elaine closed her mouth on the spoon at an angle and meaty sauce streaked across her cheek. It was the first indication that something was wrong. Helen, distracted by the conversation around the table, thought at the time the droop in Elaine’s eyelid simply meant she was exhausted, as Helen was, by the day’s heat.

    Below, alone on a row of chairs surrounded by milling crowds, a woman sits, rigid, tears streaming down her face. Helen recognises the solitude of grief.

    It has been hard hearing Susie break down on the phone. Other things – the decision over Michael’s money – have been easy. She has no right to it, no desire for it. More than that, Michael’s money has no place in her life with Ian. And it is clear Susie needs her, needs some tenderness and rest during her recovery; wants mothering.

    The last time she went back to the house to plead with Michael, the children were at school. She begged to be allowed to take them with her. Michael was brisk, self-righteous. He’d kept her standing on the steps. Through the open front door Helen could see Mrs Hubbard’s back, the floral overall wrapped around her bony frame. She was kneeling before the grate in the sitting room, laying up the fire. Michael came out on to the top step, a hand on the knocker pulling the door almost closed behind him. Helen stepped backwards down a step as, standing above her, voice brusque, he threatened to take Elaine too, unless Helen ceased ‘to persist in this vein’.

    Later, she lurked in a shop doorway. She caught sight of Susie, satchel on her back, pushing her bike, surrounded by other schoolchildren leaving the grammar school. She’d waited and waited, until dark, for Andrew to come through the high wrought-iron gates. He didn’t. She was almost undone by it.

    Hobson’s choice: to stay and lose herself, or leave and lose her children.

    Helen has had to live with grieving over memories and photographs, an unacknowledged mourning. She soon learned it was easier not to tell people, easier not to feel their incredulity, their cooling towards her. Here, in Almeria, Lucia is the only person Helen has told. Lucia has listened to every detail about The Siding. She knows about Helen’s kitchen all those years ago – the wallpaper, the pantry, the coal bunker. She knows about the children’s wigwam, about Andy’s dark head resting on Helen’s pregnant belly.

    ‘Can I listen again?’ Andy had said, smoothing her dress. He put his mouth to the fabric and murmured, ‘
Shhhh
,’ to the baby that would be Susie. ‘
Shhhh!
We’re having a rest. Lie still. Do you like it when we all sleep together? I do.’

Helen comes to, catching the tail-end of an announcement in Spanish echoing over the tannoy. She should be paying attention. Again, the same female voice speaks, this time with hesitation, in English. The ups and downs of her Spanish accent – the weighty extravagant ‘
I
’s and back-of-the-throat ‘
h
’s – lend a flamboyance to the words. ‘Passengers for flight ESY5932 to London, Gatwick should please make their way to gate number fourteen where the plane is preparing to board.’

    The sound of the English language, the Spanish woman struggling to reproduce its tonal flatness, conjures up a memory of wheat fields; of moss and furled ferns in copses; high banks of silky ribboned grass.

    Under a changeable sky, she will spread a rug on damp grass and make daisy chains with her grandchildren. She will see her son again and perhaps Sarah, the woman Susie has talked about with affection. Helen twists the bracelet on her wrist.

    There have been more difficult things in her life than this.

I would like to thank the many who have helped, directly and indirectly, in the writing of
The Devil’s Music
. For their continuing encouragement and inspiration, thank you to: tutors, colleagues and students, past and present, at the University of Chichester, particularly Vicki Feaver, Stephanie Norgate, Melanie Penycate, Ann Jolly and Maria O’Brien, who, a long time ago and over many weeks, read the beginnings of this novel; writing friends Alison Macleod, Karen Stevens and Jackie Buxton, and also Jill Dawson, Jane Rogers and Lesley Glaister, all of whom very generously gave much appreciated input at various later stages.

    Thank you also to: Erica Jarnes at Bloomsbury; Penelope Beech for her knot drawings; my neighbour, Sarah Parrish, for her driftwood fence and lost-on-the-beach shoe tree; Vera Lemprez, for the tango; Mike Howarth (The Ropeman (www.ropeman.co.uk), for his knots; Lucas Cooper (www.insightstudio.co.uk), for technical input with knot pictures and the glossary; my godmother, for her name; and my parents, for the books and stories.

    For all their love and support at home, thank you to my three daughters, Katie, Stephanie and Natalie Miller (thanks for the photos too, Nat) and to David Rusbridge.

    Most especially, I owe many, many thanks to three people: my agent, Hannah Westland for her warmth, advice and enthusiastic belief in the novel before it was even finished; my editor, Helen Garnons-Williams, whose perceptive criticism was the best sort for a writer, pointing out what needed to be added/subtracted but leaving me with freedom to handle the details; and Kathryn Heyman, who, with her gift for language and her trademark energy and humour, has been such an inspirational and stimulating mentor and friend.

Jane Rusbridge lives on the coast in West Sussex with her
husband, a farmer, and three of their five children. She taught
at primary and preschool levels before returning to education
herself as a mature student to read English at the University
of Chichester, where she went on to gain an MA in Creative
Writing. For the past ten years she has worked at the
University of Chichester as an Associate Lecturer in English.

Rook

‘A novel of layers and textures, patiently crafted, and beautifully finished’ Katie Ward, author of
Girl Reading

Nora, a cellist, returns home to the Sussex coast with memories she must banish in order to survive: a charismatic teacher with gold-flecked eyes, a mistake she cannot unmake. Her mother Ada is waiting: a fragile, bitter woman who distils for herself a glamorous past as she smokes French cigarettes in her unkempt garden. A documentary maker has arrived in the village to shoot a film about King Cnut and his illegitimate daughter, whose body lies beneath the flagstones of Bosham church. As he digs up tales of ancient battles, Ada and Nora find themselves face to face with the shameful secrets they had so carefully buried.

A mesmerising story of family, legacy and turning back the tides,
Rook
beautifully evokes the shifting Sussex sands, and the rich seam of history lying just beneath them.

‘Rusbridge’s sympathetic and respectful handling of a sensitive issue conveys an emotional impact that resonates long after the closing pages’
Times Literary Supplement

‘Beautifully describes the landscape of the Sussex coast, echoing with battles, buried bodies and Nora as she finds her own way of working through the knots of her life and those close to her’
Guardian
Readers’ Books of the Year

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

Copyright © 2009 by Jane Rusbridge

First published in Great Britain 2009

Illustrations by Penelope Beech

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com

The entries in the glossary are from
The Ashley Book of Knots
© 1944 Clifford W Ashley, used by kind permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc., except the entry for the Royal Crown, which is from
Knots, Ties and Splices
by Tom Burgess and Commander John Irving, used by kind permission of Taylor & Francis Group, and the entry for the French Shroud Knot, which is from
Knots, Splices and Rope Work by A Hyatt Verrill, used by kind permission of Dover Publications.

This electronic edition published 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The right of Jane Rusbridge to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978-1-4088-0328-8

www.bloomsbury.com/janerusbridge

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