Keep You Close

by Lucie Whitehouse

  ‘Strikingly incongruous – a lady of the night dragged blinking from the knocking shop into the light of a Christian morning,’ Rowan said.

  Marianne laughed. ‘Exactly.’ She put her hand out and stroked the velvet. ‘I love it. I want to paint it.’

  ‘Take it,’ said a disembodied voice, and they’d turned round to see a man in jeans and a baseball cap standing in the doorway. ‘Seriously. It was my aunt’s. I’ve never liked it – that’s why I put it out. If you want it, it’s yours.’

  They’d lugged it back to Fyfield Road, one arm each. The size and heft of it. ‘Like trying to carry an old drunk,’ Marianne said. It had taken them an hour and a half to go less than a mile and the episode had assumed an epic quality: Marianne and Rowan versus The Chair. There was blood when Marianne cut her finger on a rough piece of wood under the seat, sweat, and tears of hysterical laughter when they’d finally reached the house and Adam, opening the door, said, ‘Why didn’t you ring? I would have come with the car.’

  Suddenly the drawing blurred and Rowan swiped her hand across her eyes. The pain in her chest was intensifying. How could Marianne be dead?

  She lifted the drawing out of the box by its edges and laid it in the circle of lamplight on the rug. Underneath was another drawing of her hand, this time holding a Victorian glass etched with swallows in flight, their tails tiny tapering Vs. In the next, her palms were pressed together as if she were praying; in the one underneath that, she was holding an old paperback Heart of Darkness.

  Altogether, she had seven sketches of her hands but, over the years, Marianne must have drawn forty or fifty in pencil and charcoal, pen and ink, some done quickly, impromptu, on the back of an envelope; some carefully posed and laboured over. That was how she worked: she drew things again and again and again until she was satisfied, until what was on the paper reflected her mental conception in every detail. Also in the box were several drawings each of an intricate silver vinaigrette that had come down through Seb’s side of the family; of a plate of blemished windfalls; and then of the grey-striped cat that used to climb over the wall from the Dawsons’ place. Jacqueline was allergic but Marianne had let it into the kitchen one afternoon and it made a beeline for the sofa where her mother liked to read.

  ‘Read?’ Marianne’s voice all of a sudden, deep, dust-dry and as immediate as if she were sitting on the bed, released from the box along with the pictures. ‘Nap, you mean. Let’s have some honesty here.’

  Rowan felt herself smile and her eyes filled with tears. She caught them quickly with her cuff before they could fall and damage the sketch. For the first time, it occurred to her that, quite apart from their personal significance, the drawings might be valuable. Even the paintings in Marianne’s first exhibition had gone for several thousand pounds each and she was almost unknown then. And now, of course, there was a finite amount of her work: that would have a huge effect on prices.

  So far all the drawings had been A4-sized or smaller – here was a holly-leaf skeleton on pale blue Basildon Bond notepaper, its tracery of veins cobweb-fine – but towards the bottom of the box was a thick piece of paper folded several times. Rowan opened it gently and laid it out on the bed; at its full extent, it was perhaps five feet long.

  There she was, drawn in charcoal, her nineteen-year-old self, naked. She was sitting on a kitchen stool, facing away, bare heels hooked over the upper rung, head bowed so that her face was hidden from view, her hair tied up, because Marianne wanted to study the ‘machinery’, as she’d called it, of her neck and back: the muscle, the round ball of bone at the top of her spine, the twin tendons where her neck met her shoulders. Her scapulae were sharply delineated, their edges shadowed with hatching. Had she weighed less then? She looked at her neck and thought how narrow it was, how vulnerable.

  Her neck.

  The drawing had been made late in the year, maybe already December, and just before they’d started, while they’d been eating lunch at the kitchen table, a cloudburst had strafed the garden with hail. The house was cold; the space heater had to be on for half an hour before Marianne’s room was warm enough for Rowan to undress.

  The drawing had taken the whole afternoon and, eyes fixed on the floor, Rowan had watched her tripod shadow deepen and stretch like a spill of viscous ink in the fading winter light. Marianne worked without talking, the silence broken only by the low whirr of the heater and the scuff of her feet as she shifted position at the easel. Whenever the heater cut out, which was often, Rowan could hear the scratch of charcoal on paper and Marianne’s breathing. She’d synchronised her own so they breathed together, in and out, in and out, and it had become a meditation. Her mind had emptied but she’d become hyper-aware of her body: the tiny hairs on her arms that stood up just before the heater clicked back in, the straightness of her spine, the tendons in her feet tensed against the curve of the rung. Time became fluid, she imagined it eddying around the legs of the stool, and then she’d had the idea that what they were doing was creating someone else, a third person in the space between them: the image that Marianne was making on the paper using her own brain and eyes, and Rowan’s body.

  Kneeling on the rug now, Rowan bent her head until her forehead touched the sketch. The pain in her chest had spread to her stomach. She sat up and traced a finger down the charcoal line of her back, over the curve of her haunch, the rounded square of a shoulder. Marianne’s hand had been here, brushing the paper as she drew the lines to make this other person, the shadow Rowan who would be nineteen and her friend forever.

  She sat back on her heels. However valuable they were, she wouldn’t sell the sketches unless it was literally a case of starving otherwise.

  And even if she were starving, there was one she would never let go. It was still in the box, the last one, wrapped in several layers of tissue of its own and carefully Sellotaped. She lifted it out gently. Like the others, it was featherweight, just a single sheet of paper torn from a sketchbook, but resting it between her hands, Rowan could feel how solid it was, how heavy. She turned it over and examined the old tape but there was no need to undo it and look at the drawing inside. It was enough just to know it was there.

  Two

  The drift of post in the hallway testified to the frequency with which people came and went here. It was eighteen inches high and stretched further and further along the wall as the weeks passed. Every time she arrived home before the people downstairs and picked the day’s mail off the doormat, Rowan found things for three or four former residents, the now-familiar names of those who’d moved on recently but often ones she’d never seen before, too. It wasn’t just flyers and catalogues but meaningful things: voter registration cards, bank letters, birthday cards. The paper-chase evidence of disorganised lives.

  This evening she wasn’t first back – she’d heard the thump of bass from a hundred yards down the street – and the day’s post had already been tossed on to the pile. She wasn’t expecting anything and might not even have looked if she hadn’t seen a statement from Barclays lying on the top. She checked – yes, hers – picked it up, and stopped.

  Underneath was a cream envelope the size and shape of a postcard, her name and address written on it in black ink. The handwriting – she recognised it straight away.

  The shock was like a camera flash going off. The narrow hallway vanished, replaced by white light, silence, and then it rushed back in: the thumping bass behind the thin door, the hectic pattern of the cracked mosaic floor-tiles, suddenly dizzying. Like the box of sketches, the envelope pulsed with energy. Once, as a small child, she’d stood at the feet of a pylon and heard the electricity humming overhead. Alive. Deadly.

  Now, a decade later, the day after Jacqueline’s phone call – it couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Rowan hesitated a second longer then snatched up the envelope as if someone from the other flat might lunge out from their doorway and grab it. She held it pressed against her chest as she unlocked her door then, turning awkwardly on the bottom step
, locked it again from the inside and flicked the catch on the deadbolt.

  If she’d had cigarettes in the house, she would have smoked them. Instead, she poured a glass of wine and drank it like medicine as she paced the short distance between the kitchen sink and the sitting-room window. The bass coming up through the floor felt like a heartbeat now. Either Placebo or Muse: pounding, anxious music.

  The envelope was on the table, a magnet whose poles reversed constantly, pulling then repelling her. She wanted to open it but the idea made her nauseous.

  Marianne’s handwriting – broadly spaced letters; risers and descenders that spiked and plunged like the trace on a heart monitor. Extraordinary to see it again after so long, like getting mail from a different life. At university, they’d written; the letters had shuttled back and forth between them, Oxford to London, every few days. They’d texted and emailed, too, of course, but the letters were different, long and discursive, written late at night, as if, without ever saying so, they’d been continuing the conversations they used to have up in Marianne’s room when the lights went out and they lay in their beds in the dark. Rowan had looked for this writing for ten years, every day at first, and then, protecting herself from disappointment, less and less often until she’d let herself hope only around certain key dates: Christmas, New Year, their birthdays. The anniversary.

  And that it was this address; that told her something, too. That Marianne had known to write to her here could mean only one thing, realistically: that she’d got Rowan’s Christmas card and opened it. Saved it. Despite everything, the thought made her heart swell.

  The envelope was postmarked five days ago – Marianne had posted it the day before she died. Five days. Had it taken that long to make it the sixty miles from Oxford or had it been downstairs before today? She’d been back late every evening this week; she hadn’t once collected the post directly from the mat. Perhaps it had been in the pile and she just hadn’t seen it. Perhaps the people downstairs had picked it up with their mail by mistake. Marianne had died in the evening – it might have been sitting on a kitchen worktop in the flat downstairs as she fell from the roof at Fyfield Road.

  Rowan took a swig of wine and picked it up. Hands trembling, she tore it open and pulled out a matching cream postcard with the same black writing.

  I need to talk to you.

  Nothing else, no signature, not even an M, but there didn’t need to be. Blindly, Rowan pulled out a chair and sat down. She stared and the words started to pulse on the paper, their edges blurring then straightening, blurring again.

  Why? What had happened? Because something had – this eliminated any doubt.

  She stood up quickly, nearly knocking over the chair, and ran the few feet to the sink where she threw up the wine and what little remained of her lunch. As she straightened up, the film of sweat on her forehead turned cold.

  After all this time, she’d begun to believe that it could stay buried. With each year that went by, she’d imagined it sinking deeper and deeper, new earth settling on top, making it harder and harder to uncover. Now she could see that she had been naïve. What Marianne had done was only buried, not gone. It had been there all the time, lying dormant, waiting for the moment when it would stir, stretch and break out into the light.

  Three

  Rowan had lived in Oxford for twenty years but she’d never been to the crematorium. She’d been too young to go to her mother’s funeral. Looking online for directions, she’d discovered it on the very eastern fringes of the city, out among the fields beyond Headington. It made sense, of course, you wouldn’t build a crematorium in the centre of town, but at the same time, the location felt cruel, as if the idea were to remind the dead that they were out of it now, on their way to oblivion.

  Turning off, she followed the driveway between an avenue of trees and out across a sodden but immaculate swathe of grass dotted with rosebushes and weedy saplings. Restfulness and order were the intended effect, no doubt, but instead it felt soulless. Crematorium was a word that sounded right: ceremonious, foreboding, heavy with finality.

  The building itself was single-storey, made of bricks that the rain had turned the colour of turmeric. It was strikingly plain, its walls blank apart from a row of narrow windows high up under a roof of ugly clay tiles. It looked like a public lavatory.

  But there was the chimney, frank and unapologetic. Ready. Rowan was hit by sheer horror: they were going to burn her. They were all going to sit and watch as Marianne was trundled off into the fire.

  She parked the car and drank some water to moisten her mouth. A stream of people passed the window, some barely a foot away, but they were hunched under umbrellas, intent on keeping their feet dry, and it was impossible to tell if she knew any of them. In the rear-view mirror she watched them congregate in the porch. It was almost twelve-thirty. She took a moment to steady herself then opened the door and put up her umbrella. The cold air felt bracing as she made the dash across the car park.

  There were so many people waiting that she barely found space to stand under cover. The lobby area inside the large glass doors was packed, too. How many were here? A hundred and fifty? Two hundred? Nonetheless, it was quiet, the few murmured conversations almost drowned by the hiss of rain on tarmac.

  The air smelled of perfume and wet wool. She buttoned her umbrella and looked around. Next to her on one side stood an elegant couple in their late sixties, she guessed, both impeccably groomed. When Rowan’s hand brushed against it, the woman’s coat was soft as down, obviously cashmere. On her other side, by contrast, a woman with a biker jacket and an earful of studs rested her cheek on the shoulder of a shaven-headed man in a fringed cotton scarf. The crowd seemed to divide along these lines: those in their twenties and thirties belonging to the art world, she guessed, and older, affluent-looking people, Marianne’s patrons perhaps, the people who collected her work. Rowan scanned around for Charles Saatchi; she’d read a rumour that he was a fan. There was no sign of him but, of course, he wouldn’t be standing outside, would he? By the pillars, she recognised a man who’d come to lunch at the house years ago – he’d been a colleague of Seb’s at St John’s, another don – and then, with a jolt, she spotted Marianne’s aunt Susannah and her husband. Susannah was Jacqueline’s sister; they’d always looked alike.

  A ripple ran through the crowd, a collective straightening, and the murmured conversations died. A man in a morning suit pinned back the glass doors and Rowan heard the melancholy opening notes of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor. It would be Jacqueline du Pré’s recording, Marianne’s favourite. A flash of memory: lying on the sitting-room floor at Fyfield Road as twilight threw petrol colours across the sky outside the bay window, Marianne standing to set the arm of the record player back at the start of the first movement again and again. Neither of them had spoken and they’d let the music flow over them like water, revelling in the drama of it.

  Beyond the silhouetted heads and shoulders in the lobby was a large doorway through which came a pall of weak light. Into it now, shoulder-high, was lifted the dark shape of the casket. Stomach turning, Rowan joined the edge of the crowd as it began to shuffle its way forward.

  The chapel was much bigger than it seemed from the outside. The dais accommodated an organ, a substantial wooden lectern and a standing arrangement of Stargazer lilies six feet tall, but the space looked bare nonetheless. There was very little ornamentation; the thin January light fell on white walls and the twelve or fourteen long pews were modern and utterly plain. By the time she had filed in, the coffin with its spray of evergreens and white roses had been set down on a long covered trestle. She looked at it in disbelief: she was in there, Marianne was in that box.

  Rowan edged along the penultimate pew, moving up close to the woman next to her so as many as possible could squeeze on. She looked to the front, searching for Jacqueline and finding her almost immediately. She was in the middle of the first pew, sitting very upright, shoulders back, her chin lifted so that her pro
file and the outline of her famous brunette mane were picked out by the light from the narrow clerestory windows. Jacqueline the Lionheart. To her right, head bowed, was Adam, Marianne’s brother. His hair was cut shorter now, the waves gone, at least at the back, but it was as dark as ever, almost black. Like his father’s hair. At the sight of him Rowan felt an odd twist of emotion, pity mixed with a painful nostalgia.

  To Jacqueline’s left was a man Rowan had never seen in the flesh before, Jacqueline’s new partner, the Irish writer and commentator Fintan Dempsey. Partner or boyfriend: what had she called him? In an interview Rowan’d read, Jacqueline had said she hoped to be with him for the rest of her days but she didn’t want to marry again. After what had happened with Seb? the journalist had pressed, wanting blood, but Jacqueline had just said no, she’d had her children and that part of her life was over; she was in a different phase now. Middle age, said the journalist, late middle age, really; did she feel that her power as a woman – a woman who’d always been physically attractive – was diminishing? Light the touch paper, Rowan had thought, and retire.

  Next to Dempsey but encircled by the arm of the man on her other side was a woman – no, a girl – with long dark-blonde hair. Rowan watched as she brought a tissue to her face. She’d never seen her before, either, but she could guess who she was because the arm around her shoulders belonged to James Greenwood, Marianne’s boyfriend.

  An amplified cough and the room pulled itself to attention. Elgar stopped awkwardly, the stereo turned off mid-phrase. At the lectern a chubby man in church vestments and heavy square-framed glasses smoothed his notes and cleared his throat again before looking up.

  ‘Welcome, friends,’ he said in a Welsh accent. ‘We are here today to celebrate the life of Marianne Simone Glass. The fact that there are so many of you – apologies to those who are standing – is a tribute in itself.’ The room shifted, those in the pews turning to look at the twenty or thirty people packed in at the back.