She was starting to develop a siege mentality about the house, she recognised, as if as soon as the sun went down, a ring of darkness pulled around it, filled with threats. She’d never liked being alone at night. As a teenager, she used to sit up until the small hours when her father was travelling, her body tensing at every sound outside. Several times over the years she’d stood at the back door, knuckles white on the carving knife as she waited for the handle to turn from the other side. She’d gone to school exhausted. She’d be able to cope with that house now but Fyfield Road was different.
There was no blind at the window over the sink and at the end of the evening, she kept her eyes down as she washed up the dinner things. Reaching to turn off the tap, however, she caught her own eye in the reflection and thought about Cory at the wake.
I see you, his stare had seemed to say. I see you and I am not afraid to look.
She turned quickly, hair lifting off her shoulders, and as she did, she saw a movement on the other side of the glass. She went cold.
Giving herself no time to hesitate, she grabbed the key from the ladybird dish and rammed it into the hole. In a single fluid move, she unlocked the door, kicked it open and sprung out on to the patio.
Nothing. The patio was empty. She scanned the rest of the garden as far as it was visible – surely as far as anyone could have moved in the time – but no one was there. The bare branches of the birch trees rattled in the breeze, an ironic round of applause. She’d seen something blown on the wind, that was all, perhaps just the dead leaves that even now were whirling around her feet.
Fourteen
Summertown was the northernmost part of Oxford, the last airy streets before the bypass and then fields and villages, Woodstock, the Cotswolds. Beyond a certain point on the Banbury Road, there were few, if any, faculty buildings or university offices. The city’s professionals lived here, doctors and lawyers, the more financially successful of the dons, sending their children to its clutch of over-achieving schools – Oxford High, Cherwell, St Edward’s and St Helena’s.
Resolutely middle-class, then, always, but since she’d last been back, the flavour of the place had changed. The Oxfam shop still held out, along with the Blue Cross and the independent bookshop, but Farrow & Ball had muscled in, and JoJo Maman Bébé. Bang & Olufsen was round the corner on South Parade. The video shop, the family-run Italian and the bakery where they used to buy sandwiches were gone and instead there were estate agents. How many, for God’s sake? Hamptons, John D Wood, Savills, Chancellors, Knight Frank – by the end of the little parade she wanted to laugh.
She stopped to look in the window of Strutt & Parker. The prices were dizzying: two and a half million, three and a quarter. Her eyes found a house very like the Glasses’ on Bradmore Road, the street that ran parallel to Fyfield. Like theirs, it had six bedrooms but the garden was smaller and a note said it needed updating, agent-speak for a total gut-job. The price was still four million pounds.
We’re going to sell. Did Adam and Jacqueline own it together, then? Had Marianne owned a third? What if she’d been in the way, living there, while Adam had needed the money? The madness of the idea: Adam – hey, why not her mother? – bumping Mazz off to realise some cash.
She’d brought Jacqueline’s African basket with her, planning to go to the Co-op, but in a what-the-hell frame of mind all of a sudden, she went to Marks & Spencer instead. She wanted that version of life today, easy and comfortable, no cutting corners, getting by. Under the bright lights, in front of fridges stocked with expensive pre-prepared meals, the phantoms of the small hours disappeared, vampires turned to ashes by the sun.
Shopping done, she headed back towards the centre of town but instead of going directly to the house, she turned left on Belbroughton Road and then left again.
St Helena’s occupied a redbrick building with the same Neo-Gothic architecture as Keble College. A long grey-stone wall ran the length of the site, enclosing the playground and the netball courts, and blocking any view of the ground-floor classrooms. ‘A castle’s curtain wall,’ Marianne said once.
Rowan had laughed. ‘Keeping the succulent damsels of north Oxford safe from marauding gallants.’
Some of the current damsels were playing netball; the scuff of plimsolls on asphalt and urgent calls of ‘Here!’ reached her over the top. Until she met Marianne, Rowan had spent a significant amount of time devising ways to get out of games. At thirteen and fourteen, she’d relied on the old standards – chilblains, twisted ankles – but then the fact that her father wasn’t around to write notes became an advantage. The times she’d got him to do it – she only had to say the word ‘period’ – he’d written the letters on his computer, printed them off and signed at the bottom with an indecipherable tangle of blue biro. For her fifteenth birthday, he’d given her his old laptop.
Friendship with Marianne changed her attitude. On paper Mazz had looked like the classic games-dodger but though she’d drawn the line at the human misery of hockey, she’d been enthusiastic about swimming and netball. She did it for herself, she explained, not because she was obliged to. ‘Apart from swimming, I actually don’t like sports – and I much prefer swimming in the sea. But you think better when you exercise. I sleep better and think better so I paint better, and I get it done on school time. Where’s the negative?’
The idea that your attitude could repurpose a necessary thing, turn it into something you did for yourself, was one of several subtle but key shifts that Marianne caused in Rowan’s thinking and, with each one, she felt less like a pinball batted between the twin flippers of school and her father, and more self-determining, in control.
But her relationship with the Glasses had opened her eyes in so many ways. Successful as her father was by that point, and despite the travelling, his focus somehow remained narrow, his engagement with the world confined to the sector of it in which he operated; he read the business pages, and the news for its effect on business. Jacqueline and Seb, on the other hand, were hungry for all the knowledge they could lay hands on, whether it related to their expertise or not. At Fyfield Road, newspapers and periodicals were filleted, every flake picked off the bone. They offered their opinions easily, in public forums as well as private. At an instance of gender inequality in any field, Jacqueline considered it her duty to engage. In those years, there had been several protracted scraps across the pages of the Guardian.
Rowan still detected an ‘us and them’ attitude in her father, lingering doubts about his right to be seen and heard in the world. He seemed to operate with the question, ‘Why would it be me?’ whereas, drafting an op-ed piece for the New York Times at the kitchen table one afternoon, working herself into a righteous stew, Jacqueline said, ‘If not us, girls, then who?’
He’d only met Jacqueline and Seb on two occasions: once when he’d come to a Sixth-Form parents’ evening and the second time when, to Rowan’s amazement, he’d picked her up on his way home from the airport. Seb had said a brief hello before disappearing to his study but Jacqueline had cajoled him into having a glass of wine with her and Rowan had had to endure the spectacle of her father trying to appear undaunted by Jacqueline’s intelligence and confidence, her untamed hair and bangles.
She remembered her own anxiety that he would embarrass her by saying something that highlighted the gulf between them and the Glasses, or else by morphing into Uriah Heep in the face of Jacqueline’s glory. At the same time, she’d felt proud: she, Rowan, was part of the furniture at Fyfield Road by then, accepted and liked by the whole family. The people who intimidated her father were her friends.
Until Marianne began at St Helena’s, Rowan had been waging a campaign to start boarding. At the end of Lower Fifth, three teachers wrote in her report that she seemed tired and less able than usual to concentrate. In April, just as the term had begun, someone actually had tried the front door in the middle of the night. From an upstairs window, she’d watched as the old drunk who shambled up and down their road after c
losing time staggered away, but she’d had weeks of insomnia afterwards. Her father dismissed it, saying Jimmy Pagnell was harmless. ‘And the only reason you go to St Helena’s is because you got a scholarship – we definitely can’t afford for you to board.’
‘Aren’t you head of South America now?’ she’d yelled at him from halfway up the stairs. ‘And you still earn nothing?’
‘How dare you?’ he’d growled and she’d watched him master the urge to come charging after her. ‘Everything I do is for you – all the travel, all the hours.’
She’d looked him in the eye. ‘Bullshit.’
By October, however, she’d been glad he’d said no. Strict rules determined when boarders could leave the school grounds; living at home, alone, she governed herself and could spend as much time at Fyfield Road as she wanted.
When James Greenwood told her he’d moved to Oxford so his daughter could live at home, she’d been jealous. It was ludicrous, she was thirty-two, but the contrast still hurt. What was it like to have a father who would uproot himself from London and commute for hours every day to give you a stable home life?
Inside the school the bell rang, the sound unchanged since their day. Lunchtime: 12.35. The scuffing stopped, and a minute later the girls filed off to the locker rooms, voices fading.
Bryony was eighteen, Turk said, she would leave school in the summer so, unless the rules were different now, she’d be allowed out for an hour at lunchtime. Sixth-formers would start coming through the side gate any minute.
Could Rowan really talk to her? Going to see Greenwood was one thing but waiting for his daughter outside school was a huge risk. Bryony was bound to tell him and if his antennae weren’t up already, they surely would be then. She had to be so careful that, in trying to keep Marianne’s secret, she didn’t alert people to its existence. On the other hand, if they had been as close as Turk said, Bryony might know something valuable.
She crossed the road and hovered near the laurel bush where the Cherwell boys used to wait for them. Jacqueline’s bag was heavy so Rowan took it off her shoulder and propped it carefully on top of the wall. Over the road, the heavy bolt was drawn and the side gate opened, emitting three girls in the Sixth Form’s version of uniform: pleated navy skirts that took a liberal interpretation of ‘on the knee’, oversized navy jumpers and the grey school blazer. Patent loafers and scarves so huge they were better suited for the gulag than a trip to Starbucks. All three clutched mobiles between fingers that barely protruded beyond their cuffs. Rowan felt a burst of nostalgia. Things had been so much simpler then, pure potential, nothing screwed up. Nobody dead.
Another pair came out, deep in conversation, one with a messy blonde topknot, the other with a dark one. The blonde girl took a pair of sunglasses out of her blazer pocket and put them on. Would she recognise Bryony? Rowan wondered. She called up a mental picture of her at the funeral and remembered her fine features and high forehead. Her hair was a honey shade of blonde, golden, not pale like that.
The gate opened again and again, barely closing between the little groups now, and she remembered the urgency of making the most of the hour outside school walls. Pairs and trios, a couple of fours. No one came out alone, it wasn’t allowed. She used to think it was funny, the school’s excessive caution regarding her safety for that one hour of broad daylight when, at night, she’d been home alone for years. A few girls glanced over, trained to be suspicious of anyone hanging round, but they saw a woman and looked away.
Her phone began to ring and she took it out of her pocket. Another unknown number. Casting a brief smile at a pair of girls who were looking over, she answered.
‘Is this Rowan Winter?’
She barely had time to register the voice – male, an American accent – before he said, ‘This is Michael Cory. I’m sorry to call out of the blue. James Greenwood gave me your number – I’m a friend of Marianne’s.’
She spun around, turning her back on the school. ‘Yes, this is Rowan.’ She’d given Greenwood her number yesterday; Cory must have spoken to him since then.
‘I’m a painter,’ he said, as if she wouldn’t know. False modesty? Yes: if they’d talked about her, Greenwood must have mentioned she’d asked about Cory. ‘I was painting Marianne’s portrait.’
‘James told me. I saw him yesterday.’ On the other side of the wall, a spider negotiated the frosty spokes of a web constructed between the branches of a rosebush.
‘He said. I wondered, could I come talk to you? I want to finish the portrait – more than ever now – and James said you knew Marianne very well.’
‘As teenagers, a long time ago. We met when she moved here from London.’
‘Right. I’d love to talk to you about her. It’s very important to me, for my work, to understand the person I’m painting. Now she’s gone, I’m having to find other ways. Would it be possible?’
‘Yes,’ she said, mind whirling. ‘I think so.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow?’ It seemed very soon.
‘In the afternoon, about three o’clock. You’re not busy?’ It was a question but only just.
‘I can make time,’ she said. ‘We could meet for coffee at Chez Gaston on North Parade – do you know it? It’s a few minutes’ walk from Fyfie—’
‘I’ll come to the house,’ he said, and before she could reply, ‘I’ll see you then – three tomorrow.’ He hung up without saying goodbye.
Fifteen
As Rowan reached for the box inside the wardrobe, the spring in the chair seat gave way under her back foot. Without thinking, she grabbed at the shelf but the whole wardrobe came with it, empty hangers ringing in alarm. It loomed over her, poised at tipping point; time stopped. By some miracle, she regained her balance and shoved her shoulder against it as hard as she could. It smacked the wall, tottered, then rocked heavily back into position, hangers jangling. Looking down, she saw that the floor was visibly higher at the wall than at the wardrobe’s front feet. It was a great lump of Victorian hardwood, a thug of a piece of furniture: it could have killed her. It certainly would have broken bones. Pulse beating in her head, she stepped gingerly down from the chair. The hangers chimed – next time, next time – as she transferred her weight back to the floor.
On top of the box was the velvet pouch with the silver locket she’d inherited from her grandmother and her mother’s single string of pearls. She never wore them so they were visible, a girl in pearls she was not, but occasionally, if she was wearing a high-necked jumper, she put them on just to have them next to her skin. They’d been too precious to risk leaving in London.
Setting the bag aside, she put the box on the bed and lifted the lid off, feeling the little whoomph of suction. She’d thrown away the postmarked envelope but she’d kept Marianne’s card and put it in here with the sketches; it had seemed the best place.
I need to talk to you.
Holding the card with both hands, she stared at the words as if they would tell her something new. Just as when she first saw them, they seemed to pulse with energy.
Why, Marianne? she asked. Was it Cory? What does he know?
As she put on her make-up, she rehearsed her answers again as if she were getting ready for an interview. ‘Girding your loins?’ said a dry voice, and Rowan smiled at the mirror. They’d come across the expression in an old translation of the Aeneid.
She looked better today, at least. Nights of broken sleep had made her feel sick with tiredness, and needing a clear head, she’d come looking in the bathroom cabinet last night for antihistamines or Nytol to help knock her out. Instead, among a clutch of pill pots, she’d discovered a tub of Ambien with Marianne’s name on it. The bottle had contained twenty-eight pills, the label said, one per night as needed for sleep, but when Rowan tipped the contents on to her palm, there were only five tablets left. It was dated last month. She’d put four pills back in and swallowed the other. When she’d turned off the light twenty minutes later, sleep came almost immediately, hea
vy hands pressing her body down into the darkness.
Ten to three. In the kitchen, she made sure that nothing telling would come up if she had to open her computer and then, to be safe, she cleared her search history.
Coming back upstairs to the first floor, she opened the door to Seb and Jacqueline’s old bedroom. She’d been in when she’d searched the house but only briefly; that Marianne didn’t use it had been obvious at once. Time seemed to have stopped here, too. Nothing was new or perishable, there were no magazines or house plants, but it didn’t have the same museum feel as the study, the reverence implied by the order and cleanliness there. This room was clean, dusted regularly, but the air felt old, trapped unstirring, and though the curtains in the big bay window were open, the light was oddly muted, as if it came filtered through gauze.
The right-hand side of the dresser was empty but the left, she’d discovered, was still filled with Seb’s things: socks, cotton boxers, white T-shirts, jumpers that she remembered. The short top drawer held his reading glasses and a dark leather wallet with some old credit cards, a paper driving licence, and a creased white-bordered photograph. Opening the wallet, Rowan eased the picture out again.
Twenty-five at the most, Jacqueline stood on a beach in winter, boots planted firmly on shingle, the backdrop a mass of leafless trees and a turbid sky rendered hyper-real by the film and the print’s high-gloss finish. She wore a woollen greatcoat, her hands thrust deep in the pockets, and her hair streamed sideways in the wind as she looked at the photographer, her face soft with love. Twenty-five – before Adam and Marianne, before she was married. Rowan looked at her with a skein of emotion: nostalgia, love of her own, pride – here was her Jacqueline, a woman of substance even then – and yet, knowing what the future held, Rowan felt pain, a protective urge so strong she wanted to reach into the picture and grab her, King Kong-like, pull her out of the narrative that was already being written for her. Rowan felt her determination strengthen: she would do what she could. She would protect her now.
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