Keep You Close

by Lucie Whitehouse

  Cory was right. Of course he was right.

  She remembered what Turk said about Marianne taking on her father’s guilt as a way of staying close to him. Self-flagellation, he’d called it. ‘She thought that if she pushed herself to breaking point, denied herself everything, even her health, she could pay. Atone.’

  Consumed, destroyed from the inside out.

  Light-headed suddenly, Rowan kneeled on the floor and leaned forward until her forehead touched the boards. With a rush, the room seemed to pull away, taking with it the twilight, the sound of a car on the road outside, the solidity of the floor beneath her. She was suspended, floating.

  She was back in that afternoon again. Walking along Fyfield Road, Echo and the Bunnymen playing on the iPod that the Glasses had given her for her twenty-first, the sky deep blue and wide, the leaves on the trees still green, not yet turned brown by the drought that came later. The distant sound of children on one of the Dragon School’s summer programmes shouting and laughing in the outdoor swimming pool. Then, through the bushes inside the front wall, she’d caught sight of something white, large. When she reached the end of the wall, she saw what it was.

  She yanked the buds from her ears, feeling the blood drop from her face in a single sheet. The nausea was instant, too – intense sickness, as if the ball of fear suddenly thrust into her stomach was something she could vomit up, rid herself of that way. If only.

  Oh, shit, Marianne. Oh shit, oh shit.

  A police car squatted on the drive again, incongruous as a spaceship and just as terrifying.

  Her heart thumped the back of her ribs like a fist and sweat made beads on her forehead. The days had begun to slip past, one after another, and she’d allowed herself to hope. Now she saw how naïve she’d been. What Marianne had done could never have stayed hidden.

  The front door was open. The Glasses weren’t good at security, they came home all the time to find they’d left the garden door unlocked, a ground-floor window ajar, but even they never left the front door open.

  She took a series of steadying breaths and started walking but her mind seemed to have disconnected from her body. Her movements felt unnatural, as if she were operating her limbs with controls, a new driver in the cab of a bulldozer. Jerking, ungainly. Across the drive to the steps, skirting the car as if it were a dangerous animal. She stopped to listen. Silence in the house, not a sound apart from the beating of her heart. The world had gone quiet.

  The door creaked as she pushed it further open. ‘Hello?’

  A moment passed and then she heard movement in the sitting room on her left. ‘Rowan,’ said a low voice. ‘A family friend.’

  Jacqueline’s voice but cracked, barely recognisable.

  Soft footsteps across the carpet and a uniformed policewoman appeared in the doorway, her face arranged in professional compassion. ‘Rowan.’

  ‘What is it? What’s going on?’

  ‘Come and sit down.’ The woman reached out and put a hand under her elbow.

  On unsteady legs, she traversed the carpet. At the sitting-room door, her eyes went straight to Jacqueline’s face. Shock and disbelief. Desolation.

  ‘What is it?’ she heard herself say.

  ‘Ro, Seb’s had an accident.’ Jacqueline’s voice rose and fell, reaching her ears in waves.

  An accident? Seb? For a moment she didn’t understand. Then she realised – she’d misheard. Or Jacqueline had got it wrong – she was disorientated by what she’d just learned about her daughter; she was … But no, a man was talking now. Rowan swung around. In the car, she caught. Dead at the scene; severity of the accident; a second fatality – a woman.

  Dead, dead, dead – the word replaced the beat of her heart.

  ‘The A34,’ said the policeman, and she had the sudden dizzying urge to laugh. The A34! As if he were giving directions. As if they needed to know. As if it mattered what fucking road it was.

  That was when she’d made herself look at Marianne. Rowan had known where she was sitting from the moment she came round the door, her stare had burned, but when their eyes met now, the look Marianne gave her branded Rowan like an iron. Shock and loss and a warning, fierce and unmistakable: Don’t you DARE.

  She’d had to get out of there. She’d turned and run, the door banging against the wall as she pushed it out of the way. The steps were a blur, she’d missed one, landed on her knees in the gravel. Torn denim, dirt. Up on her feet again and away down the street, not thinking, not stopping even when she heard the crack of the iPod on the pavement. To Norham Gardens then the University Parks, the lawns covered with people, picnics, newspapers, a game of boules. Pelting down the path, breath jagged, people turning to stare, but she reached the footbridge, took the steps at full tilt and down the other side, falling again then wading off into the undergrowth.

  Long grass, cow parsley, nettles. She staggered, tripping on roots and brambles as she worked her way further and further in, away from the world and the people until their voices faded and she slumped against a tree, chest heaving, lungs and legs burning with acid. She slid down, bark rough through the fabric of her T-shirt. The rich smell of earth that never saw direct sun, dappling light, not lovely now but flickering and uncertain. She pulled up her knees, wrapping her arms around them so tightly that the ligaments in her back and shoulders hurt for days afterwards.

  Seb was dead. Seb was dead, and she’d lost Marianne forever.

  The wall was cold against her back, and the moonlight streaming through the window over her head picked out the shapes of the canvases, areas of white and cream paint, flesh tones. She saw the last woman again, her skin pale in the half-light like something dug up from the earth: a tuber, a worm. Repulsed, Rowan stood up to go.

  At the top of the stairs, however, she stopped, switched on the lights and went to the back window. She looked over to the flats in Benson Place. The first two floors were dark but light shone from the third, deep and yellow, and sure enough, as she watched, a large figure moved into view.

  Her heart thumped but then she had an idea: Jacqueline used to have a pair of binoculars – where were they? She moved casually away from the window then ran down through the house. In the cupboard under the stairs, she searched the tangle of shopping bags and gardening jackets on the back of the door. They’d usually been here, hanging by their leather strap. She looked on the shelves among the cache of spare light bulbs, an old hand-vacuum, a dusty wicker basket of hats and gloves, and then among the coats on the pegs by the front door. She also drew a blank down in the kitchen, in the deep drawer where the odds and ends accumulated, old sunglasses and instruction manuals, a ball of rubber bands. Maybe Jacqueline took the binoculars with her when she moved out. They’d had sentimental value, Rowan remembered; they’d belonged to her father.

  She’d have another look tomorrow, in the daylight. For now, she poured a glass of wine and carried it upstairs. She couldn’t sit on display in the kitchen, like a mouse in a laboratory cage for the man in Benson Place to observe. Who was he? How could she find out? Maybe she just had to swallow her pride – her disgust – and ring Theo: he’d know. But then she remembered how close she’d sailed to the wind with him that night. ‘Do you know something, Rowan?’ he’d asked directly. No, she couldn’t risk letting him know she was still digging, not unless she had to.

  In the sitting room, she turned on the lamps, drew the curtains then called Peter Turk. The phone rang for a while and she was formulating a message when he picked up.

  ‘You sound echoey,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’ There was a splash, the sound of a large amount of water being displaced. ‘Oh, God, you’re in the bath. And I thought the day couldn’t get any weirder.’

  ‘There was a time when this would have made you the envy of thousands.’

  Despite everything, she laughed. ‘What did that feel like? Knowing girls – and boys – you’d never met were fantasizing about you. I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘Bizarre,’ he said, and she heard
water again, pictured him sliding lower, his torso filling the width of the tub. ‘I hated all that; it was really … unsavoury. It made me feel sleazy.’

  She believed it. Even in the early days, when he and the band had played the pub circuit in Oxford and Reading, the occasional small London gig, he’d never, as far as she knew, got off with any of the girls who’d sidled up to him when he came off-stage.

  ‘In the nicest possible way,’ he said, ‘what do you want? My arm’s getting cold.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you about Michael Cory.’

  ‘Cory? Why?’

  ‘Did you know he was painting Marianne?’

  ‘What? No.’ A slap of water. He’d sat up again.

  ‘James Greenwood told me, and then he – Cory – came here this afternoon.’

  ‘She never told me.’

  ‘I don’t know how long it had been going on,’ said Rowan, hearing the hurt in his voice. ‘And the whole thing seems to have been on the down-low, as far as I can tell.’ She paused. ‘Cory’s an odd fish.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘Twice. Once at his show at the Greenwood, the photographs, and then there was a dinner last year, end of September, October, maybe. And he was at the funeral, obviously, but I didn’t talk to him. Hold on, I can’t have this conversation in the bath.’ There was a tapping sound as he put the phone down, a surge of water, then footsteps on tiles. A few seconds later, he picked up again. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Did you talk to him at the dinner?’

  ‘A bit, yeah, afterwards.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Mazz,’ he said, realisation dawning. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He tried to remember. ‘No, nothing important – nothing personal. Just that we’d been friends for a long time – teenage misadventures, all that. Christ, and he was painting her? The sly fucker.’

  ‘How much do you know about him?’

  ‘A bit. Well, quite a bit. I read up, before the show – and the dinner, actually. I wanted to look like I knew what I was talking about.’

  In front of Marianne, thought Rowan. ‘When you were doing your homework,’ she said carefully, ‘did you come across the name Greta Mulraine?’

  His silence answered for him. She could almost hear him following the ramifications through. ‘You think,’ he said slowly, ‘that Mazz jumped – committed suicide – because of Michael Cory?’

  ‘No, I’m not saying I … I mean, who knows what happened with Greta. Clearly Cory’s interested in people who aren’t simple, isn’t he? Or stable. Maybe he knew Greta had suicidal tendencies and that was why he was drawn to her in the first …’

  ‘She killed herself in his studio,’ Turk cut her off. ‘Did you know that? She bled to death on the floor. Kind of eloquent, don’t you think?’

  Rowan took the few steps to the nearest sofa, sat down and bent her head towards her knees.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said a small voice from the phone.

  When she was more or less confident she wasn’t going to throw up, she asked him, ‘Pete, did Mazz ever mention being watched?’

  ‘What? What the hell, Rowan?’

  ‘Look, it might be nothing, it might just be that I’m here on my own and she’s dead and I’m freaking out, I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s this guy who stands at his window all the time in the building behind here – you know that little block of flats? Even at three in the morning.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I’m not sleeping brilliantly,’ she admitted. ‘And I keep thinking there’s someone in the garden but if I open the door or look out of the window, there’s no one there.’

  ‘Then …’

  ‘Jacqueline told me Mazz thought her work was going missing. She thought someone was getting in here, taking sketches. She even went to the police.’

  ‘They investigated that, though.’ He sounded a little calmer. ‘They didn’t find anything – no evidence of a breakin. They thought she’d probably just got confused, mislaid the things she was looking for.’

  ‘Confused? Marianne?’

  ‘Well, either way, it can’t have anything to do with what happened, can it? She was on her own then.’

  ‘What about the guy in the flat opposite?’

  ‘She never mentioned him to me.’

  ‘You think she would have?’

  ‘Until about three minutes ago,’ he said, ‘I would have said yes.’

  ‘This is going to sound a bit mad but do you think it might be Michael Cory?’

  ‘Cory? In one of those poky flats?’ Turk gave a bark – Ha. ‘What do you think he’d be doing?’

  ‘What if that’s part of his process – you know, watching people secretly?’ Peeping: call a spade a spade, Rowan.

  ‘You think he was hoping to catch sight of her in her underwear? If he was painting her, she was probably stripping off for him anyway.’ Again the barely concealed hurt.

  ‘They’re selling the house, Pete,’ she said. ‘Adam told me.’

  The out-breath was gentle, barely a sigh, but she heard it. ‘I knew they would,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t live there again, could they? Not now.’

  Seventeen

  On the radio last night, the forecast had talked animatedly of snow but she’d opened the curtains this morning to sheer blue and a rush of light that made her eyes water. Cory had called a few minutes later – while she was putting her clothes on – to announce that he’d come to the house at ten. Irritated, she’d told him that she was working and she’d meet him at half-one in the Covered Market.

  There were a couple of things she wanted to do before then, the first being to come here to Benson Place and take a look around.

  She could see at once that her mental image of it was out of date. She’d been picturing the flats as tired sixties constructions on a shabby cul-de-sac hidden away behind Fyfield and Norham Roads like a poor relation, but the tide of money that had swept through North Oxford had reached this little inlet, too, and the strip of grass that separated the flats from the pavement was manicured, as were the privet bushes and the japonica trained around the freshly painted windows. The first cars she saw were an Audi and a BMW.

  She’d borrowed a baseball cap and as she walked the length of the little road, she kept it pulled down over her forehead. No silver Mercedes but that didn’t mean anything. If Cory were living here in secret, he’d likely have the wit not to park outside. He could also be out.

  She glanced around then went up the short path to the second door along. There were three buttons on the intercom box, and through the glass panel, she saw a brass ‘1’ on the door of the ground-floor flat. The strip of card next to the buzzer for number 3 said ‘Johnson’ but again, she thought, that needn’t be definitive. Maybe Cory put it in to deflect attention or maybe he was sub-letting the place. Ha, said Turk in her ear again.

  In broad daylight, noon on a weekday afternoon, it was true the idea seemed ridiculous – how likely was it, honestly, that Michael Cory was lurking here, amusing himself by spying on her across the back gardens? But maybe he wasn’t lurking, at least to his own way of thinking. What if he’d taken the flat to be close to Marianne and now couldn’t bring himself to leave? She purposely hadn’t said anything to Turk but she couldn’t yet rule out the possibility that Marianne and Cory had been in a relationship.

  Rowan reached up to press the button – she could lay the whole thing to rest right now – but then she stopped. If it wasn’t Cory in the flat, it would be hard to explain herself, and if by some remote chance it was, she didn’t want to show her hand until she had at least some idea of what he was doing.

  When she emerged from the pedestrian shortcut on to Charlbury Road and took off the cap, she saw a line of cloud advancing across the sky. By the time she reached St Helena’s, it was halfway over, a curdled grey cove
r on an azure pool, its edge bruised yellow.

  She took the same spot by the laurel bush and waited. Three minutes after the bell rang for lunch, girls started coming through the gate, some in groups that Rowan recognised from last time. They looked up at the sky and rearranged their enormous scarves, shoved hands into blazer pockets. She rehearsed her approach. With luck, Bryony would come out in a group; it would be easier to get her to talk for a few minutes if she didn’t have to keep a lone friend waiting. Rowan stamped her feet surreptitiously as the body heat she’d generated on the walk began to dissipate. Come on, Bryony.

  For five minutes, the gate seemed to open every few seconds but then the gaps lengthened, became a minute, then two. Just before one o’clock, a handful of those who’d been first out returned with M&S carrier bags and vats from Starbucks. She waited until ten minutes past then put her phone back in her pocket and turned to go. Those who were coming out this lunchtime were out; she’d missed Bryony somehow or she’d decided to keep warm and eat at school. Either way, Rowan couldn’t wait any longer.

  A number of bus routes ran down the Banbury Road, a straight shot to the city centre, but she kept walking. She felt jumpy, over-caffeinated even though she wasn’t, and walking helped, the beat of her feet along the pavement regulating the rhythm of her heart. The air was static, expectant.

  The first tentative flakes of snow started to fall as she passed the Lamb and Flag, and as she rounded the corner onto Broad Street, she experienced a flash of déjà vu: the afternoon she’d bumped into Seb just here, it had been snowing, too. She’d been coming from a lecture at the Taylorian, heading back to college for lunch, when she’d collided with him coming out of the porter’s lodge at Balliol. He’d been on the phone, of course, not looking where he was going, and he’d put his spare hand out and said a distracted sorry before doing a double-take. Then he’d smiled broadly and mouthed, Hold on a moment.

  ‘Richard? I’ll call you back. I’ve just bumped into a friend.’

  A friend, not ‘my daughter’s friend’ or even ‘a family friend’ – it was a casual phrase but she’d been charmed.