Rowan remembered Turk huddling against the shed in the rain, lighting one cigarette after another. He thought she’d jumped, too.
She reached for the Express. The tiny credit printed up the side of the photo was the same. When Fintan had smashed the other paparazzo’s camera, he’d handed this one a pay-cheque. The Lioness Who Lost Her Daughter. She looked at Jacqueline’s desolate face and burst into tears.
On the mantelpiece at Fyfield Road yesterday she’d looked for one photo in particular. It was the smallest, six inches by four, and unlike many of the later ones, its frame was wooden. From a distance, the wood looked like mahogany but when you picked it up, it was too light. Its border of raised beads, though pretty, was clumsily carved.
Many of the silver-framed pictures showed the Glasses on special occasions or foreign holidays: in the Piazza Navona in Rome or on board a ferry in Puget Sound. In one, Seb wore black tie to give a speech at his Goddaughter Emily’s wedding, Jacqueline next to him snorting with laughter, her hair a full-blown dandelion clock. In the wood-framed picture, the major background detail was a revolving washing line.
But in the foreground, Jacqueline held a baby Marianne tight in her arms. She was in profile, her eyes half-closed against a low sun, her nose pressed into the fin of velvety hair on the top of her daughter’s head. Marianne was eight or nine months old; her birthday was in February, and the leaves on the beech hedge just visible were turning golden brown. She was looking at the camera and smiling with her whole face, her mouth a joyous O, her little eyes sparkling. Her hands were pressed against the front of Jacqueline’s plaid shirt. Me and my mummy.
Rowan didn’t have a picture like it taken with her own mother – her father wasn’t very interested in cameras at the time, he’d said. The closest thing was a professional shot taken at her grandmother’s insistence, apparently, at a photographer’s studio in Abingdon, Rowan buried inside a frothy christening frock, her mother – who by all accounts had been near-crippled with shyness – wearing a startled expression and a suit that would have done for a job interview. Six months after it was taken, she’d been dead.
As a child, Rowan had had a collection of scenes that she’d imagined in such detail they felt like memories. In her favourite, she stood on a chair while she and her mother made cakes together. Her mum wore the turquoise ribbed sweater she had on in her honeymoon pictures; the paper cases were red with white polka dots; sun streamed through the kitchen window. Rowan had almost been able to feel the stickiness of the spoon.
In another, it was her mother, not Mrs Roberts, who picked her up from school, chatted to her friend Alison’s mother at the railings, pocketed a letter about swimming lessons. She was wearing a trench coat and had just come from the hairdresser’s; that one was accompanied by the scent of Alison’s mother’s Elnett hairspray. There were scenes for all the major annual events: Rowan’s birthday, Easter, Bonfire Night. At Christmas, they decorated the tree together, unwrapping baubles from the tissue paper in which her mother kept them carefully packed. The scenes had been talismanic, comfort and protection. Whenever she’d felt aggrieved or sad or unfairly accused, Rowan had summoned one up and pulled it around her like a blanket. Mum would have looked after me.
It was only when she started spending time at Fyfield Road that she’d understood how alone she’d really been. Letting herself into the house in Vicarage Road one weekend when her father was in Mexico City, she’d had the idea that their front door was a portal and every time she went through it, she disappeared. If no one saw her or spoke to her or even heard her moving around, maybe she ceased to exist.
The front door at Fyfield Road was a portal, too, but behind it, life had been more real, and loud: the phone rang every five minutes, Seb ground coffee beans, Bizarre Love Triangle played on repeat in Adam’s room, the postman needed signatures for boxes of books. Unless Jacqueline was writing, Radio 4 babbled constantly in the kitchen. The doorbell rang with deliveries of pizza in the evening or curry from Saffron in Summertown and there was the noisy unpacking of cartons, the clatter of plates, rattling ice. Unless Rowan put the TV on, the silence at Vicarage Road was absolute.
Within weeks of meeting Jacqueline and starting an intensive self-prescribed course of feminist reading, Rowan became aware of how hackneyed her scenes were and how 1950s: Betty Friedan might never have written a word. Jacqueline had no interest at all in things domestic – when they moved in, it was Seb who hired someone to organise curtains, Marianne told her. But the picture in the wooden frame, the tightness with which Jacqueline held Marianne, the look on her face as she smelled her baby head, captured for Rowan the essence of her imagined scenes, the feeling she needed when she conjured them up: warmth and love. Protection. And while she’d been Marianne’s friend, part of the family, almost, at Fyfield Road, that protection, that warmth, had surrounded her, too, like a circle of light.
How much had the papers paid for the photographs? Many thousands, surely, if they’d put them on the front page. She could never have bought them, she didn’t have that sort of money – any money, actually – but if she had, she would have spent every penny of it to spare the Glasses pain, offer them some protection in return.
Picking up the card, she ran her fingertip over the letters that Marianne had written, as if by doing so she would hear her voice.
I need to talk to you.
I’m sorry, Mazz, she said silently, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.
The last time Rowan had seen her, that afternoon on the pavement in Fyfield Road, she’d made a promise. ‘If you ever need to talk,’ she’d said, ‘if you ever need me, I’m here.’
Marianne had stared at her, that look on her face, and then she’d grabbed Turk’s hand and pulled him after her. ‘Come on, Pete. Let’s go.’
‘Mazz, hold on,’ he’d said. ‘Just wait a moment. At least listen to what she …’
‘No.’ The loudness of Marianne’s voice had startled them both. ‘I said no.’
They’d fallen silent as the Dawsons’ front door came open. The air between them shimmering with Marianne’s hostility, they’d waited until a car door slammed and Angela Dawson’s throaty diesel Volvo started up.
‘Are you coming or not, Peter?’ Mazz said quietly. ‘Your choice.’ He’d looked between them, bewildered, and then, shooting Rowan a look of mute apology, he’d followed Marianne through the gate.
But she had listened. She’d heard. Ten years later, she’d known that she could send those six words and Rowan would know exactly who they were from.
With every hour that passed yesterday, she’d become more and more certain that Marianne’s death was connected to what she’d done. Many people had loved her – Jacqueline and Adam; James Greenwood; Turk; new friends, no doubt, among the throngs at the crematorium and the house – and yet finally, after all these years, Rowan was the one to whom Mazz had reached out. It was her help she’d needed because she, Rowan, was the only person who knew. Or had been.
She’d kept Marianne’s secret for ten years, a decade in which they hadn’t spoken a word to one another. She’d proved she was trustworthy: there could have been no doubt in Mazz’s mind that she could rely on her.
That it had been too late, that the card hadn’t reached her in time, was too painful to think about. When it came to it, though by no fault of her own, Rowan had broken her promise. She hadn’t been there.
Could she have prevented her death, if she had got the message in time? She’d never know. Marianne was gone, and Rowan would have to live with the question for the rest of her life.
There was only one thing that she could do for her now: she could keep Marianne’s secret – go on keeping it. She could make sure that what Marianne did stayed buried. That Jacqueline and Adam never found out.
But had someone else found out? The question had kept Rowan up past midnight and woken her again at four. If Marianne’s death was connected to what had happened back then, why, after ten years, had she needed to talk now? Why
had she jumped now? Something must have changed. Something had frightened her. Threatened her. What? Or who? If she was going to keep the secret, preserve Marianne’s memory, Rowan needed to find out.
To spare the remaining Glasses some pain, to repay, albeit silently, some of the care and support they’d given her when she’d needed it, she would do everything she could. With a final look at their pictures, Rowan closed the Mail and turned it face down. Marianne’s death was front-page news but if what she’d done ever came to light, the media storm would rage for weeks. And the effect on Jacqueline and Adam would be devastating.
Six
A key had been left with the Dawsons but, as she rang their bell, Rowan saw an envelope with her name on it propped against the porch window. The door was unlocked and when she reached in and picked it up, she felt the weight of a Chubb inside. A note from Angela Dawson said they’d gone to help their daughter for a few days at short notice; she had a new baby.
The street was quiet, and Rowan’s boots crunched conspicuously on the gravel in the front garden. She scratched up the wide stone steps to the door and glanced over her shoulder, feeling like a burglar. The house loomed, all its windows dark. No need for the public face today.
When she shut the door, silence closed over her head like water. Here, where there had always been noise, it was jarring. Bags still in her hands, she stood and listened. Nothing at first but as her ears grew used to it, the silence came alive. She heard Adam’s voice – ‘Maz-zer, Rowan’s here!’ – then, b-bump, b-bump, b-bump, the sideways gallop at which she’d always come down. ‘Marianne, for the love of God, stop running on the bloody stairs!’ – Jacqueline’s voice from the kitchen. The phone, and then the click of Seb’s door as he took the handset into his office. Rowan felt a longing so intense it was physical. I’m here, she wanted to say. I’m back. Let’s do it again. Let’s not fuck it up this time.
She let the emotion wash over her. After ten years, she’d thought she’d never come back. Three days ago, filled with mourners, the house had felt different but now it was as if she’d opened the door and stepped back in time. On the motorway this morning, she’d thought about homecoming. To Oxford, yes; she’d been born and brought up here, she’d done her degree at the university; but really it was to this house. When she’d left, she’d mourned for it. If her primary motivation for house-sitting was unselfish, she acknowledged now the less altruistic part of her that had jumped at the opportunity to spend time here again.
She dropped the key in the china dish and the chime echoed up the stairs like a warning. The air had a heavy, ashy smell but when she went into the sitting room, the fireplace was swept and the furniture had been moved back into position. The room looked almost exactly as it always had; Marianne hadn’t changed it. The pale light through the bay window fell on the two low sofas and the chest that served as a coffee table, and Rowan had the idea that she was looking at a stage lit for a play in which two of the main actors were dead.
Briskly, she walked back to the hall and switched on the elephant lamp. Apart from what looked like a bill from Thames Water and something from HSBC, the mail tray held only flyers. A car passed on the street outside but, within seconds, the silence settled back in after it.
She carried her bag of groceries down to the kitchen. The epicentre of life here – Jacqueline had called it the engine room – it took up the entire lower-ground floor. At the front of the house were two sash windows, the reading sofa between them, but at the back were folding glass doors to the garden that made the room bright even on a sunless day like this. The zinc-topped table was long enough to seat ten. Rowan saw Marianne in her paint-covered dungarees wriggled down low in a chair with her feet up, Seb pushing them off as he walked past to get a bottle of wine. His office upstairs was large and expensively equipped but Jacqueline said working in the kitchen kept her in the real world. On her hard wooden captain’s chair at the far end, she’d been the ship’s navigator, plotting their course.
Opening the fridge, Rowan found butter, eggs and a pint of milk. R: a few things to get you started, said a Post-it on the bread-bin in Jacqueline’s distinctive square writing. Inside, a crusty white loaf nestled in a sheaf of tissue. Everything perishable had been thrown away but the cupboards were stocked with bags of beans and rice, cans of tomatoes. Marianne’s food, bought but never eaten.
Putting the kettle on felt like a gentle first step in establishing herself here, legitimate occupation. Burglars didn’t make tea, generally speaking. While she waited for it to boil, she went to the door and looked out. Winter had the garden in a stranglehold. Frost covered the patio and the roses that climbed the wall by the shed. Against the colourless sky, the silver birch trees looked wraithlike.
The back door key was where it had always been, in the clay ladybird made by Adam at primary school. On the back of a chair hung the Fair Isle sweater that Jacqueline had used to keep her head dry on the day of the funeral. Rowan put it on, catching a trace of bergamot scent.
Her lungs tightened with the cold as she climbed the steps to the lawn. Underfoot, the ground was adamantine. The temperature hadn’t risen above freezing since Friday and it had been sodden then. There would be flooding when it thawed.
As she neared the ruined grass, she experienced the same strange pull she’d felt before, as if what had happened here had created an energy field. The area was four feet wide by eight long – about the size of a cemetery plot. Stepping carefully, she examined the ground. Rain had flattened the earth but at the far end, frost glittered on ridges of mud raised by shoes or boots with heavy treads.
To her relief, there was nothing more to see. What had she expected, though? Whoever dealt with these things would have cleaned up when they finished; they wouldn’t have left anything significant or distressing.
What did surprise Rowan now she was thinking more clearly was how far the area was from the house: twelve or fourteen feet, the width of the patio and the little flowerbed. She looked at the roof and tried to visualise a trajectory. Granted, she didn’t know much about the physics of falling but she’d have guessed that someone slipping off the roof would have landed much nearer the house. Clearly, there was nothing remarkable about it, however: if there had been, the police would have been on to it.
Back then, the top floor had belonged to Marianne and Adam. To give her the space she needed to paint, Adam had let Mazz have the bigger room at the back of the house, which also got the best natural light. Even at fifteen, she’d treated it more like a studio than a bedroom.
When the three doors to the upper landing – their two rooms and the skinny bathroom they shared – were closed, the top of the house had been dark but now, even though the day was beginning to fade, it was filled with light. The doors weren’t open, however: they were gone.
On the middle landing Rowan hesitated, apprehensive. There was a growing tension in the air, as if all the time that she had been down in the kitchen, drinking her tea, Marianne had been up in the studio, waiting. Come on, Rowan, what are you doing? Hurry.
When she reached the top floor, she saw that it wasn’t just the doors that were gone, but the rooms themselves. Instead, there was one huge white space interrupted only by a short surviving section of what must have the bathroom wall, presumably load-bearing. The carpet was gone, too; her boots made a hollow, stranger-at-the-saloon sound on bare boards. The change was disorientating, violent, as if a bomb had gone off. Apart from the bit of wall, all that remained of the bathroom was the plumbing. The bath and old washbasin had been torn out and replaced with a deep china trough underneath which huddled a stash of dirty glass jars full of brushes, the source, she guessed, of the boat-yard smell of oil paint and turps.
She was standing now where Marianne’s easel had been the day she had posed naked on the stool, the old heater panting like a lecher in the cold. What would she have thought that afternoon, if she’d known that fewer than fifteen years later, Marianne would be dead? That she wouldn’t have spoken
to her for a decade? It was ridiculous, Marianne was a professional artist, of course she’d needed a proper studio, but nonetheless, Rowan was hurt. Her old room had been the locus of their friendship, too, their op centre, and its transformation felt personal, as if Marianne had chosen to rip up that time and start again with this big blank canvas. When had she done it? Had Rowan spent years imagining her in a room that no longer existed?
Footsteps ringing, she walked further in. There were windows to the east and west now as well as the two large north-facing sashes that gave the pure light Marianne used to talk about. The sun would slowly rotate around the studio as the day went on, eventually setting beyond Adam’s dormer.
Rowan ran her eyes over a pine table covered with plastic bottles and aerosols, wrinkled aluminium paint tubes, a Mason jar full of pens and pencils, a pile of sketchpads, a folded cloth stiff with paint. On the wall next to it, a huge corkboard bristled with sketches and postcards, handwritten notes, newspaper pages, a swatch of Art Deco Liberty lawn. Marianne had always had a board, a repository for anything that triggered an idea, a spark of inspiration. She’d called it her external brain.
Rowan walked into Adam’s part of the space and immediately stopped.
Ranged along its three sides was a series of paintings of girls – young girls. There were ten or twelve, variously posed, all of them naked or very nearly. She found the switch and hit it, replacing the gentle natural light with the searching glare of artificial.
The canvases were the same size, all stretched on frames about six feet high by four wide, all leaning against the wall at the same gentle angle. At a fleeting glance, the first couple looked like traditional nudes but it was quickly obvious that Marianne’s purpose was both more complicated and more disturbing.
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