Her heart thumped. ‘When did you last see her? How did she … ?’
With a dull thud from inside, the kitchen door opened. It had always stuck in wet weather; you had to kick it. Holding an old Fair Isle sweater over her head, Jacqueline ran up the steps and across the lawn, the heels of her shoes sticking in the mud. ‘Have you got one of those for me, Peter?’
They stood in a line behind the bead curtain of rain coming off the shed roof. Jacqueline cupped shaking hands around the flame that Turk gave her and her swollen face lit up in the gloom. It was three o’clock at the latest but the day was already shutting down around them, the darkness gathering.
‘I’m sorry, Rowan, about just now.’
‘Please. Don’t even …’
‘I had a bit of a moment,’ she said to Turk. ‘It all just … overwhelmed me.’
‘You’ve been incredibly brave,’ he said.
‘I’m lost,’ she said. ‘Shipwrecked.’
‘You’re strong.’
‘I don’t know.’ Jacqueline pulled the sweater around her shoulders. It was pilled and a little shrunken-looking and Rowan recognised it as one that Marianne used to wear sometimes when she was painting. Had it been one of Seb’s originally, a relic from the seventies?
‘It’s strange, seeing you both again,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Together like this, I mean. The three of you then … I keep expecting Marianne to come through the gate.’ Her eyes filled with tears that she brushed quickly away.
For a few seconds, only the crackle of burning tobacco interrupted the low hiss of the rain but then she asked, ‘What are you studying, Rowan? You said on the phone you were a student.’
‘Seventeenth-century history – I’m doing a PhD.’
‘I thought you were in TV,’ said Turk.
‘I was but I realised it was the research I enjoyed, and the more senior I got, the further away I was from it so …’
‘Brava,’ Jacqueline said. ‘It’s hard, giving up a salary.’ She reached over and rubbed Rowan’s arm in a way she’d seen her do to other people a hundred times before, part encouragement, part, Rowan had always suspected, consolation. Then she finished her cigarette and ground the butt underfoot. Her shoes were covered in mud. ‘I just want to stay out here all day but I’d better go back in. I haven’t even spoken to James since the service, or Bryony. Come inside, Peter, have a drink – you look like you need one. I know I bloody do.’
They followed her back in via the kitchen, carefully skirting the area of ruined grass. As she walked by, Rowan felt it pull at her, tugging at her sleeve as if Marianne herself were trying to get her attention: Look, Rowan, look. She’d died there, just there, on that patch of muddied, flattened ground. Died – the enormity, the utter finality of it. In a matter of seconds, Marianne’s personality – the very stuff of being a person: Rowan had never understood the word literally before – was extinguished and her body turned into a thing, a collection of cells that almost at once started the process of breaking back down into the water and minerals of which they were made.
But had it been seconds? In the days since Jacqueline’s call, she’d tried hard not to think about the details. Confronted with the blunt fact of the muddy ground, however, there was no choice. Marianne had broken her neck. What did that mean? Immediate death or had it taken time? Some people who hanged died slowly of suffocation. Had Marianne been conscious? Rowan imagined her lying in the snow, paralysed, knowing she was going to die, and she wanted to lift her own face into the rain and shout with the horror.
As they came into the kitchen, the smell of food and the ravaged trays of canapés on the work-surfaces made her feel sick. Upstairs, the crowd had thinned out and, though she’d never wanted a drink more in her life, she turned down the wine Jacqueline offered. ‘Driving,’ she said, and could have kicked herself.
Jacqueline seemed not to notice. ‘Do you have to go?’ she asked. ‘Or have you got time to say hello to Adam? He’d be disappointed not to see you.’ She started to make her way across the hall then stopped to say goodbye to a man in his sixties with hair so thick and straight it seemed to stand perpendicular to his scalp. Rowan waited by the table at the foot of the stairs. Hearing someone coming down, she looked up and locked eyes with Josh Leavis. ‘Hello,’ she said as he neared the bottom but he passed her without a word. She frowned, puzzled: hadn’t he recognised her?
Jacqueline turned. ‘That was Brian,’ she said, as they started walking. ‘Marianne’s framer. They used to drink tea and talk art for hours on – oh!’
As she’d rounded the sitting-room door, she’d been talking back over her shoulder and almost collided with James Greenwood coming the other way, his eyes trained on the carpet. He put his hands up, shocked out of his reverie.
‘Sorry, James, I didn’t mean to startle you.’ Jacqueline rubbed his arm. ‘Have you two met?’
His hand, when Rowan took it, was surprisingly cool to the touch. She had the odd sensation that she was seeing not the man himself but a poor copy. She knew him from the newspapers – his silver hair, side-parted fifties-style, was almost a brand in itself – but there was a blurred, out-of-focus quality to him today, as if he were both here and not. Perhaps it was because he himself seemed to be struggling to focus: his eyes were wide open and barely appeared to blink. If he was in shock, she thought, it wasn’t doing much to cushion him. Interviews always mentioned a glint in his eye, the irreverent sense of humour that prevented his intelligence being intimidating, but looking at him now, it was hard to believe he’d ever laughed in his life.
‘Rowan was one of Marianne’s best friends from school – well, for years,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Not just Marianne’s – a family friend.’
‘Yes, she talked about you,’ Greenwood said.
‘Did she?’
‘They were thick as thieves,’ said Jacqueline, ‘when they were Bryony’s age. Where is … ? Ah.’ She put out her arm and drew the blonde girl Rowan had identified as his daughter into the circle. She was tall and slender, fine-featured, sixteen or seventeen, Rowan guessed, with the same high forehead and deep brown eyes as her father. Her hair was the colour of golden syrup, shining and heavy.
‘Okay?’ Greenwood asked her and she nodded.
‘Rowan.’
Adam’s voice. It came from behind her, and, turning sharply, she saw his face for the first time. He looked tired out, sadness had sapped the energy she remembered, but in her chest she felt an echo of the old buzz nonetheless. He stooped to kiss her cheek. ‘I saw you earlier but then you disappeared.’
‘We’ve been out by the shed,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Smoking.’
‘You rebels.’ A smile that failed to reach his eyes.
‘You’ve changed,’ Rowan said, without thinking.
‘I’ve aged.’
‘No, not that. It’s …’ She stopped, embarrassed. Adam looked at her, expectant.
‘It’s probably the suit, Ad.’ Jacqueline took pity on her. ‘I doubt Rowan’s ever seen you in one.’
She smiled slightly. Maybe that was part of it. Adam had barely seemed to notice what he wore back then. The last summer she’d been here, he’d arrived home after a research trip to Cuba in jeans so grimy that Jacqueline, only half joking, had lifted them out of the laundry basket with a pair of barbecue tongs. But even given the circumstances, the suit seemed to signify a deeper change.
‘How would you describe Adam?’ Marianne had asked her once, their old game. She’d been working on an oil portrait and couldn’t get it right. ‘It’s him but it’s not him.’
Rowan had thought carefully. ‘Like Ariel,’ she’d said at last. ‘A sprite.’ It had been his energy – he’d seemed to vibrate even when he was sitting down, his knee bouncing under the table, fingers drumming – and his brain, of course. Also, very basically, it had been his eyebrows, dark circumflexes that gave him a permanently quizzical look.
They hadn’t changed but the rest of his face had. Like Josh Leavis, he’d filled out a
nd with the new solidity had come gravitas. Whenever she’d thought of him over the years, she’d pictured the old Adam, twenty or twenty-two, wearing jeans and Adidas sneakers, hollow-chested under a Joy Division T-shirt or his threadbare grey flannel workshirt. That man – that boy – was gone.
‘The suit,’ she said, ‘and the tan.’
‘I’ve been in California, at Berkeley. I was there for a couple of years, got back just before Christmas.’
‘Are you here now? At Oxford, I mean?’
He shook his head. ‘Back at Cambridge. Mum said you’re in London?’
‘Yes, and I’m at university, too, but I’m just a student. I saw your Observer piece about the economics of extremism – it was very interesting.’ She’d read so many of his pieces over the years, the sight of his byline causing her the same odd twist in the stomach every time.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m doing a book on it – trying. I’m supposed to be done at the end of February – it’s due to be published in September so I was up against it anyway and now …’
‘Will you be able to concentrate enough to write?’
‘Work first; fall apart later. And there’s so much to sort out, too. I don’t want you to have to do it all, Mum, just because I’ve got a deadline. It’s too hard.’
‘It’d be hard for you, too. The thing I’m most worried about at the moment,’ she said to Rowan, ‘is the house. There’s so much of Marianne’s work here and the story’s been all over the papers. Her work sells for quite a bit of money these days’ – she looked slightly embarrassed – ‘so an enterprising thief could do very well.’
‘Would someone break in and steal her work, do you think? I mean, to sell art at value, you’d need specialist knowledge, wouldn’t you? Contacts?’
‘To get the right sort of money, yes. It wouldn’t be like knocking off a TV.’ Jacqueline glanced at James Greenwood, who gave a slight nod. ‘The thing is, Rowan,’ she lowered her voice, ‘Marianne had been saying for a while that she thought someone was taking her work.’
‘What?’
‘She said things were going missing. Not big things, paintings, but smaller pieces – sketches, preparatory drawings. They wouldn’t sell for the same sort of money, obviously, but given the kind of prices she was beginning to fetch, they still would have been valuable.’
‘And harder to trace and a lot more portable,’ said Adam.
‘She thought someone was getting in here?’ Cold fingers on the back of Rowan’s neck.
Jacqueline nodded. ‘But I don’t know. You know what she was like – she never got the hang of filing. And you remember how many sketches she made before starting anything – could she really keep track of them all? The police came a couple of times but there was never any sign of a breakin.’ She ran her fingertips through the roots of her hair, leaving the shorter strands at the front standing up like antennae. Rowan had seen her do it a hundred times. ‘I don’t know. Probably it was disorganisation but I want to move the work somewhere secure just in case. James is going to keep it at the gallery’s storage space until we figure out what we want to do. The work for the New York show’s still upstairs. She’d only just finished it.’
‘Saul Hander’s people are going to come and pack it up,’ said Greenwood. ‘She was going to fly over there, of course, to help hang it.’
There was silence for several seconds and Rowan guessed they were all thinking the same thing: that Marianne would never fly anywhere now or hang a show again. Before she’d even thought it through, Rowan opened her mouth and started talking.
‘If it would help – just until the work can be moved – I could come and house-sit. Keep an eye on everything, put the lights on at night so the place didn’t look empty.’
Jacqueline looked at Adam.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rowan said quickly. ‘It would be too odd, wouldn’t it? We haven’t seen each other for so long and I didn’t mean to put you on the spot like that. It was just a stupid, spur-of-the-moment idea. I …’
‘No – no,’ Jacqueline said. ‘That’s not it at all. It’s just – it might be brilliant, if you mean it? We’d even thought about hiring someone – Adam’s term’s just started and I …’ She looked down while she wrestled herself under control. ‘I can’t be here, Rowan. I can just about cope with it today, with the place full of people, but without that, knowing what happened out there … I just can’t.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I understand. To be completely honest, it would help me, too. There’s a couple of archives in the Bodleian I really need to look at and I’ve been putting it off because I haven’t got anywhere to stay. The hassle of driving back and forth, especially in the winter …’
‘Your father’s not here any more?’
‘No, he moved years ago – ten or eleven years. He remarried and his new wife – not so new – is from Kent. Just outside Canterbury.’
‘Oh, of course, that’s right – I remember now. But, Rowan, yes. If you’re absolutely sure and it really would help you, too, then we’d be very grateful if you’d come and be here for a while. Incredibly grateful.’
Five
It was dark when she let herself out of the flat, sunrise still more than an hour away. She’d been awake since four, her humming brain making it futile even to attempt getting back to sleep. In the end, she’d got dressed and made some coffee.
The grilles were still down at the corner shop so she walked on, hoping the newsagent on Replingham Road would open at six. Only a handful of houses showed lights in their upstairs windows and the streets were quiet. The Tube clattered by behind the little blocks of flats across the road, overground here.
In the spill of light from the window, the newsagent’s son, a boy of sixteen or seventeen already dressed in his school uniform, was loading the papers into the stand on the pavement. She waited while he cut the binding on a bale of Independents and stacked them in the last empty cube, weighting them against the breeze with a grubby block of wood. He nodded as he bounced back inside, the automatic door releasing a gust of warm air.
Fintan was on the front page of the Mail. The photographer had caught him mid-lunge, eyes ablaze with righteous fury. Leave My Woman Alone: Fintan lashes out at funeral of lover’s daughter. New agony for Jacqueline as art world gathers to pay tribute to Marianne. Full story, pages 4 and 5. The Express had a picture of Jacqueline holding Adam’s arm, her face gaunt, eyes staring as if she’d just witnessed the end of the world: The Lioness Who Lost Her Daughter.
Inside, the newsagent put the papers in two bags. ‘A lot of reading here.’
‘Work,’ Rowan said.
Back at the flat, she microwaved the last of the coffee then laid the papers out next to Marianne’s card and the copy of the Mail she’d bought at the Tube station the morning after Jacqueline’s call. She’d said on the phone there were photographers at the house, but Rowan hadn’t expected the story to make the front page. With her shining hair and full mouth, though, her soft eyes, the editors had known Marianne would sell papers. Oblivious to the commuters elbowing past, Rowan had stood at the kiosk and stared at her. Marianne had stared back, demanding engagement: Look, Rowan. Look at me. Her card had arrived that evening.
Today the Mail gave the story a whole double-page spread, a long report and several pictures. One close-up showed the photographer with a bloody nose; another Jacqueline and Adam, her head bowed with grief, his usually gentle face grim. The three photos of ‘celebrity mourners’ included Peter Turk.
The largest picture was captioned Happier times: Marianne and James Greenwood at last year’s Venice Biennale. Taken at a party, it showed them standing together, Greenwood in a dinner suit, Marianne wearing a yellow cocktail dress and tuxedo jacket that by rights should have looked awful. They were pressed together and smiling, her head tipped towards his shoulder, his arm round her waist. It was an odd way to describe a man but as she looked at James Greenwood, the word ‘radiant’ came into Rowan’s mind. His eyes were shining, e
very nuance of his body language expressing pride and love.
The article was broken into several sections, each with its own lurid subheading: Fintan Attacks, Art World Grieves, Tragic Family and, inevitably, Broken Marriage. Four years ago, when it happened, that story had run for days. It was tabloid catnip: Greenwood had been married to Sophie Lawrence, the Channel 4 arts journalist and daughter of Derry Lawrence, the former cabinet minister, who, famously hot-tempered, had seen Greenwood and Marianne having lunch together near the gallery in Mayfair and barged into the restaurant to confront them, eventually sweeping a carafe of water to the floor in dumb fury. It had all been regurgitated last week with the first reports of Marianne’s death but here it was yet again, no detail omitted: the beautiful, intelligent wife – blonde! – traded in for the beautiful, intelligent artist – younger! Bryony, the bewildered daughter; thunderous Old Harrovian Derry. The tone of the piece was one of lip-biting reproof, as if Marianne could only have expected this after luring poor vulnerable James away from his wife of twenty years. There was something almost comforting, Rowan thought, about the Mail’s confidence in cosmic justice being served. Steal a husband and plunge to your death, scarlet woman.
Deadly Fall was the final subheading. There was no question that anyone else was involved, the piece reluctantly admitted: Marianne was alone and the death had been pronounced accidental. Nonetheless – and no doubt the wording had been carefully vetted by the paper’s lawyers – they couldn’t resist including the fact that Marianne had taken antidepressants after Seb’s death. Yes, it was ten years ago, but still, wasn’t this evidence enough of instability, the kind that might lead someone to jump?
But if no one else had been involved, then Marianne had jumped, she must have. Before speaking to Turk, Rowan had permitted herself a cotton-thread of hope that in the years since they’d last seen each other, Marianne had somehow conquered her fear of heights. Vertigo: the terror not of falling but of being compelled to jump. She never went near the edge, she’d told Rowan once, because she was afraid of how it made her feel. It was like a fight within herself, she said: the conscious part of her mind screamed at her to come away while another, darker part held her there, woozily infatuated, reeling, out of control.
Keep You Close Page 5