J A N E RU S B R I D G E
Obediently, the circle of faces turns Nora’s way. She plays SaintSaëns first, ‘The Swan’: lushly romantic. Some listen with their eyes closed. Music has the power to speak straight to whatever is our human soul. Nora remembers Isaac’s odd, dramatic turn of phrase. He’d make a fist and knock his heart. You must transmit the music’s inner emotional message with simplicity. Speak for the composer. When Nora has finished playing, a hubbub erupts. The session has run out of time. While Eve moves around the circle of people saying goodbye, Nora zips her cello into its case. She can think of nothing to say to anyone here so she leaves the room and waits for Eve in the hallway, where posters, faded and small, hang too high on the wall. The front door is bolted and locked with a security keypad for which Nora does not know the code. From beyond a swinging door behind the unmanned reception desk, someone shrieks, whether in laughter or fear it’s impossible to tell. To live in a place like this, Ada would require sedation. At Creek House, Harry’s red van is parked in the drive with the doors open, the ladder with a rag tied to the end poking out and his window-washing buckets and equipment lying on the gravel. Harry is bent over the bird bath with his shirtsleeves rolled up. Harry, as Ada says, is a man of few words. The sort who turns his hand to anything: household repairs and gardening; windowcleaning. Someone in the village saw him with a canvas and easel painting in the ruin of the warehouse down behind the boatyard, Nora has heard, but his chipped knuckles and broad palms like a cowman’s look all wrong for a painter. 16
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