Keep You Close

by Lucie Whitehouse

  KEEP YOU CLOSE

  Lucie Whitehouse

  In memory of Old Finger, my lovely dad,

  James Paul Whitehouse, 1938–2014

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Acknowledgements

  Also by the Author

  Also available by Lucie Whitehouse

  Prologue

  Before she opens the door – before she even sets foot on the drive – she is on her guard. She knows he’s there, he’d told her he would be, and yet the house is dark. If he’d left for any reason, he would have texted – Gone to buy wine. Back in ten – but when she checks her phone, there’s no message.

  The moon slips between a gap in the clouds, sending a momentary gleam across the house’s blind eyes. It is still early, not even seven, but with the emptiness of the street, the absence of any human-made sound, it feels like the small hours. The only movement comes from the wind shivering the leaves on the evergreens, rattling the thin branches of the willow that bows its head on the drive.

  She glances over her shoulder then crunches across the gravel and up the steps to the front door. The carriage lamp is off so she locates her keys in her bag by touch.

  A strange pressure on the door makes it harder than usual to open, as if someone is pushing against it from the other side. When she turns to close it behind her, a gust of wind seems to come from within the house and slams it shut. In the silence, the sound is violent.

  She is not imagining it: the wind is coming from inside the house. There must be a window open but where? Not at the front, she would have noticed. But why would he open a window at all? It’s below freezing outside.

  Something’s happened. As soon as she thinks it, she knows she’s right.

  ‘Hello?’

  She puts on the light and the hallway materialises around her. The draught, she realises, is coming down the stairs. She stands at the bottom and calls up but again there’s no answer. The sitting-room door is open and she slaps the light on, goes quickly to the fireplace and picks up the poker.

  When she reaches the landing, fear forms a fist in her stomach. The cold air is coming from the very top floor. The studio. She climbs the final set of stairs with her pulse thrumming in her temples.

  In the glow of the moon she sees the chaos of sketches strewn across the worktable and the floor. When she sees the open skylight, the stepladder underneath, the poker drops to the floor with a heavy clang. She is almost sick with fear but a breakin, even an intruder, is not what frightens her now.

  As she starts to climb the ladder, her hands are shaking.

  He is waiting for her at the top, perspective making him a colossus, his feet planted wide. The wind snatches at the sheet of paper in his hands but she doesn’t need to see it to know what it is. She has lost him forever; that is clear – his face is closed. Hard. Vengeful.

  The paper buckles and cracks, wind-whipped. There is nothing she wouldn’t do, literally nothing, for it to be torn from his hands and erased from his memory. To go back even one day.

  Behind him is the roof-edge. She can feel its power, the force field it exerts, the weird push-and-pull. It’s so raw, unprotected – a four-storey fall, death almost guaranteed. He sees her looking and steps to one side.

  ‘Do it,’ he says.

  One

  The parcel of fish and chips was warm under Rowan’s arm as she agitated the key in the lock. ‘Come on.’ She pulled the key out then jammed it in again just as the automatic light timed out and plunged the hallway into darkness. At the same moment, she heard the first shrill note of her ringtone.

  ‘Christ’s sake.’ Leaving the key in the lock, she pulled the phone from her pocket. Its screen was a bright rectangle in the dark. A London number but she didn’t recognise it. ‘Yes?’ Impatience made her brusque.

  ‘Rowan?’

  She hadn’t heard it in years – a decade – but she knew the voice immediately. The sound of it was otherworldly, seeming to reach through time as well as space, light from a distant star. Her heart gave a beat like a punch in the sternum. It was a moment before she could speak.

  ‘Jacqueline?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is. Oh, I’m so glad I’ve got you – thank God. I didn’t know if you’d still be on this number – you weren’t on her phone. I’ve found an old address book but most of the stuff in here’s useless – everyone’s moved and changed number or …’

  ‘I haven’t.’ Rowan’s stomach clenched and, despite the cold, there was suddenly sweat on her forehead. Something had happened to Marianne. ‘How are you? How—’

  A low keening sound came wheezing down the line, a single corrosive note. It went on and on, only for five or six seconds in reality, but to Rowan it felt like forever. She knew that sound, how time stretched around it, became irrelevant, a joke. The aching, hollowed-out kind of loss that could never be made better.

  ‘I’m … heart-broken,’ Jacqueline said, as if she understood the true meaning of the word for the first time. Then, after a pause, ‘Marianne’s dead, Rowan.’ The sound again, its eerie, awful note. ‘She came off the roof into the garden. Her neck …’

  A momentary flash, the floor giving way underfoot, and the horrifying image of a body in freefall.

  Jacqueline was talking and crying at the same time. ‘It was Sunday night, in the snow, but she wasn’t found until Monday morning. She was out there all night in the dark. She was soaking – freezing cold. Her skin – Rowan, they told me her fingers were frozen. I can’t stand thinking about it but I can’t stop—’ She broke off and started sobbing desperately.

  Marianne’s hands – the long fingers with the nails she’d kept short for her work, always stained with ink or paint. Her hands – frozen, white. Lifeless. Rowan closed her eyes as pain and horror swept through her.

  In the dark hallway, the sound of Jacqueline’s sobs was harrowing, too much to bear. Rowan put out a hand and ran it up and down the wall’s cold flank. Where the hell was the light button? She was on the brink of tears herself now, grief threatening to bubble up and overwhelm her. She took a deep breath but her voice shook as she said, ‘Came off – do you mean, she … slipped?’

  A hard swallow at the other end, an audible attempt at control. ‘The police said it was an accident. She used to go up there for cigarettes when she was working – you remember, don’t you?’

  I remember everything. ‘She was still doing that?’

  ‘In the snow, the roof would have been slippery and … she slipped,’ said Jacqueline, and to her horror, Rowan understood that she was telling herself, too. ‘But no one saw her. No one can tell us what actually happened. After Seb died … I used to worry – I banned her from going up there – you remember?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ Rowa
n’s skin was prickling, cold running down her back. ‘Jacqueline, there’s no chance she could have … ?’ She couldn’t say the words. ‘She didn’t … ? I mean, did it ever come back? The depression.’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. She’d have told me, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t have tried to hide it? But I don’t know – unless she thought it would hurt me.’ A gulp. ‘As if anything could hurt as much as this.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything going on that might have upset her? Brought it back?’

  ‘No. Everything was going so well. Her work – she’s got a show coming up in New York, a solo exhibition …’ Jacqueline stopped talking and for a moment there was silence on the line.

  Rowan heard footsteps outside and then the rattle of keys against the front door. Before she could compose herself, the door swung open and the fox-faced man from the ground-floor flat slapped the light on. Blinking, she raised a hand, as if it were completely to be expected that she would be standing here in the dark. She felt his eyes on her back as she gripped the key in the lock and forced it. At last, the door yawned open, revealing the steep flight of stairs immediately on the other side.

  ‘Jacqueline,’ she said, but the back of her throat was dry; she coughed, tried to swallow. ‘I’m so, so sorry. What can I do? I’m still in London, just south of the river – if there’s anything you need, anything at all, will you tell me?’ She reached the top of the stairs and carried the fish and chips to the kitchen where she dropped them straight in the bin. ‘I’m studying at the moment, I’m a student, so I’m around, I’m flexible.’

  ‘Thank you.’ There was another pause. When she spoke again, Jacqueline’s voice had an edge that Rowan could only remember hearing once before, that dreadful night in the kitchen. ‘I had a call this morning,’ she said.

  Rowan felt a cold hand come to rest on the back of her neck. ‘A call?’

  ‘From some poisonous little cretin at the Mail. He wanted my “reaction”. My reaction. Can you imagine?’ The horrible keening wheeze again, twisted with laughter. ‘What did he think my reaction was going to be?’

  ‘My God, that’s … monstrous.’

  ‘It’s not just the Mail – they’re all here. I’m surrounded.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Men with cameras – just like old times, sitting across the street in their cars. Waiting. I hate them,’ she said savagely. ‘I want to fetch Ad’s old cricket bat from under the stairs and get out there and batter them, crack their heads open. I would – if it weren’t for him, I’d do it. Can’t you see it? A picture of me on the front page of the Mail, all pig-eyed and wild. Bereaved Mother of Sex-scandal Artist Hits Out.’ The laughter became bleak sobbing.

  ‘Jacqueline …’ But what could she say? What would make the slightest difference?

  ‘It’s all right.’ With an effort, she brought the crying under control. ‘It’ll die down when they realise there’s no fresh meat. They’ll just rehash the old stories and move on. But if they do track you down, could you … ?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of speaking to them.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Real relief in her voice. ‘Rowan, look, I know you and Marianne had lost touch with each other but you were such an important part of her life – and not just hers, all our lives.’

  ‘I loved her – all of you.’

  ‘Please come to the funeral. It feels right for you to be there. It’ll be next week, Thursday, at the crematorium in Oxford. We’d all like it if you were there. We …’ She stopped talking as she realised. ‘Adam and I would, I mean. Both of us. We’ve missed you. I told Marianne that she should get in touch with you again, that with proper friends, it doesn’t matter if you have a stupid row and lose touch, however long it goes on.’

  ‘It was my fault, too. I should have …’ But what? What could she have done that she didn’t?

  Rowan stood phone in hand as the news reverberated through her body. Dead. She felt the grief coming closer and closer, gathering, and then it broke over her, a wave of despair. She took the few steps to the sofa, swept the books onto the floor and lay down, curling in on herself as if she were being beaten, blows raining on her head and back. Marianne was dead. Gone beyond contact forever. She would never see her or speak to her again.

  She cried silently, as if the sadness were too powerful for sound. It was a physical, muscular thing: her back ached, her mouth stretched open until her cheeks hurt. She was shocked by the depth of it: she’d lost Marianne as a friend years ago; surely, after all this time, she couldn’t really have thought they would make things up, be close again. Now she knew that part of her had still hoped, had nursed the idea that one year, perhaps, there would be a Christmas card with a tentative note. But now the possibility was gone forever. This was it, the full stop. The decree absolute. And to announce it – the irony – her first contact with the Glass family for ten years.

  When the tears stopped, she sat up. She felt raw, hollowed out, and when she stood, she caught sight of her swollen eyes in the cheap sixties mirror above the fireplace. Her skin looked sallow and her hair was dark at the roots, its winter colour. It had reached the length, a couple of inches below her shoulders, at which its weight killed any volume; she would have to have it cut before the funeral. She wondered if Jacqueline and Adam would think she’d changed. She doubted it: she hadn’t really. Her face was still round and unlined, never arresting and elegant as Marianne’s had been even at sixteen, but pretty in a safe, old-fashioned way she’d never particularly liked, like a girl in a Victorian soap advert.

  She went to the window and raised the blind, releasing a wall of cold air that had worked its way in around the rotten sash the landlord was too mean to replace. The wind was harrying light-stained clouds across the rooftops, rattling the topmost branches of the cherry tree that had been the reason she’d taken the flat. It had been a riot of flirty blossom when the agent had shown her round. ‘Like frilly pink knickers at the Folies Bergères,’ she’d said and the woman had looked at her as if she were mad.

  Across the road, blue light flickered behind the curtains of the old woman who stood at her door each morning and berated her luckless Jack Russell in a language that Rowan had never been able to identify. The street was deserted.

  The snow that had fallen here on Sunday had been gone by Monday morning, ploughed up and ruined even as it was coming down, leaving everything sodden and muddy, litter and dead leaves plastered to the pavement. She pictured the garden at Fyfield Road: the lawn white over; the wide stone steps to the patio padded and pillowy; the branches of the silver birch like lace against a creamy sky. The image was crisp and clean as winter light, and Rowan felt a burst of pure longing that she quickly suppressed. The snow at Fyfield Road hadn’t been perfect. It had been lethal.

  Now she made herself examine the thing that had struck her the moment she heard it: the story didn’t make sense, not, at least, the version that Jacqueline wanted to believe. Marianne couldn’t have slipped. She had vertigo, paralysing vertigo: she never went near the edge of the roof, not within twenty feet of it. Not once in all the countless times they’d been up there had she ever moved – inched – more than three feet away from the safety of the hatch. Not once.

  With a crack, Rowan yanked the blind shut. Her heart beat against her ribs as she left the front room and went down the narrow landing, feeling the usual rush of cold as she opened her bedroom door. Stooping, she moved her hand gently through the darkness until she touched the hessian shade of the bedside lamp. Down on her knees on the old rag rug, she cast around beneath the bed until her fingertips found the glossy cardboard box. She paused then pulled it out into the light.

  For a minute she looked but didn’t touch. Originally it had held printing paper, the expensive ivory stuff she’d bought at Ryman’s in her final year at university when she started thinking about job applications. In August last year, when she’d split up with Anders and packed the car, she’d chocked it carefully next to her on the passenger seat, with
in arm’s reach, but she couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d opened it. Over the years, it seemed to have become heavier, and it had power now, a presence. Hearing the pulse of blood in her ears, she had the idea that it wasn’t her heart that was beating but the box’s: open, open, open.

  ‘Marianne’s dead, Rowan.’

  Quickly she picked up the box and turned it over. The Sellotape was yellowing, and when she tried to peel it off, little dry shards of it stabbed the tender flesh under her thumbnail. There was a small whoomph of suction as she lifted the lid.

  On top was a wad of tissue to hold the contents in place. Immediately underneath, fingers curling towards its palm, was a hand – her hand: the short round nails, the pronounced vein over the knuckle of her index finger, the teardrop scar on her thumb that she’d had since the age of five when, Mrs Roberts’ attention focused on one of her afternoon chat shows, no doubt, Rowan had put her fist through the glass in the kitchen door. The drawing was black and white, just ink on a page torn from a spiral-bound sketchbook, but it had energy, reality: it brought the hand to life. Even someone who’d never seen an artist’s work before would have known this was good. No, not good – exceptional.

  Her hand rested, palm up, on a single line that ended in a whorl like the top of a fiddlehead fern: the arm of that button-back chair. Into Rowan’s head came a vivid snatch of memory. A Saturday morning in late May or the first week in June, the air already warm at nine o’clock. Marianne wore a red-and-white striped Breton T-shirt and her denim dungarees; her hair was in a knot on the top of her head. Green Flash tennis shoes grungy with age; no socks. The chair had been standing on the pavement outside a house in Observatory Street. It was antique, with lovely arms and ball-and-claw feet, but it had been reupholstered in tarty cherry-red velvet and overstuffed to the point where it looked positively buxom. Marianne had stopped; she’d always had an appreciation of the dissonant.

  ‘How would you describe it?’ she asked. It was a game they played all the time, challenging each other: describe that colour; that sky, that man.