When they reached the kitchen door, Rowan hung back and let Lorna go into the garden alone. She wanted nothing to do with her; refused to be seen as endorsing her in the slightest way.
But if she was aware that she was on her own as she went up the steps, Lorna gave no sign. Self-possessed, she stood and scanned the garden until she spotted Seb’s dark head. At the moment her eyes landed on him he turned, seeming to sense her presence, and Rowan watched a change come over his face. In a second, the sharp, anxious energy commuted into a look of pure happiness. Love. It shone from him like a beacon, so private and yet now horribly, obscenely public. She wanted to cover him, throw a blanket over the light before everyone saw it.
With a single touch on the shoulder, he excused himself from Roger Stevas and forged his way through the crowd towards Lorna. Rowan darted up the steps behind her and skirted the knot of people at the food table. Where was Jacqueline? The last time she’d seen her, just before going inside, she’d been talking to Andrew Farrell, a psychology don from St John’s, glass in one hand, untouched plate of food in the other. Yes, there she was – thank God, thank God – still with Farrell, angled across the garden in the direction of the Dawsons’ side of the house, her back almost turned.
Where were Marianne and Adam? Desperate, Rowan searched the lawn. If one of them could collar Seb, demand that he get Lorna off the premises, perhaps the day – their marriage, said a small voice – could still be saved.
Over the shoulder of a couple she didn’t recognise, Rowan caught sight of Marianne but as she started towards her, Vita Singh, an old family friend, put her hand on Jacqueline’s shoulder. Jacqueline swung around to greet her and as she turned, her eyes snagged on Seb and Lorna at the edge of the crowd.
Even a couple of mouthfuls of wine gave her a high colour but under the two red stripes across her cheeks, Rowan watched her turn pale. Jacqueline knew who Lorna was – she recognised her. She’d always projected utter disinterest in Seb’s women, diminishing their power by the sheer force of her apparent obliviousness, but even if she’d never looked up another one of them, it was plain that she’d done her research this time. Seeming to feel the weight of her stare, Seb turned and met her eye, and Rowan saw them look at each other in mute acknowledgement. Jacqueline let go of her plate and it fell to the grass, surrounding her new shoes with a spray of pasta salad.
Marianne got drunk. Stupidly, dangerously drunk. Adam took his father inside for what seemed like a long time and when he returned, expressionless, Seb found Lorna again, excused her from the conversation she’d been having with Ben Milford, the philosopher, and ushered her away. He was gone from the party for an hour. Jacqueline disappeared upstairs for twenty minutes and returned with the pained pallor of someone who’d recently undergone surgery. She’d borrowed the pair of huge vintage sunglasses that Marianne had bought the previous summer at Portobello Market and she kept them on for the rest of the afternoon.
It wasn’t easy to judge how many people were aware that something had happened. Among those who were, there seemed to be an unspoken decision to pretend everything was normal, born either from an English impulse to sweep things under the carpet and carry on or, Rowan thought with a rush of tenderness towards them all, a collective urge to reassure and support the plainly stricken Jacqueline. Booze no doubt played a part but the conversations got louder and so, too, a few minutes after she reappeared, did the laughter, as if by putting on a good enough show, they could make it the truth.
Rowan kept a close eye on Marianne who at no point in the afternoon, as far as she saw, was separated from her glass. Twice she begged her to slow down, have some water, but Marianne just rolled her eyes and walked away. In the early evening, as the light began to mellow, Rowan was caught in conversation with Angela Dawson – their daughter had just finished at Durham; she had a place on the management training programme at BP – when she realised that Marianne had disappeared.
Excusing herself, she ran through the house flinging open doors until she discovered her lying on the floor in the top bathroom, her sweating white forehead pressed against the cold tile. The bath was splattered with vomit, the smell of ethanol in the windowless room almost overwhelming. Every few seconds, Marianne retched so physically it shook her whole body, as if she was trying to bring up not liquid but something bulky, enormous. She was too weak to stand or even to kneel so Rowan propped her against the wall with the cleaner’s mop bucket between her knees.
After a particularly vicious bout of sickness, she started crying, silent tears rolling down her cheeks. There were footsteps on the stairs and, looking up, Rowan saw Adam standing in the doorway. He dropped to his knees and put his arms around Marianne and she wept against the side of his neck. Despite herself, Rowan had felt a pang of envy at the unthinking way Marianne could wrap herself around him, that physical closeness.
‘I hate him, Ad,’ she said. ‘I hate him.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘I do.’ A burst of ferocity. ‘How could he do that?’ Sobbing became retching again and she pulled away and threw up another gust of white wine. Pulling a tissue from the box, she swiped ineffectually at her mouth. ‘He can’t do anything without Mum. He can’t even fucking leave her without getting her approval of the tart. That was why he brought her here, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?’
Twenty-four
The call itself had come as no surprise. She’d expected Greenwood to ring the moment Bryony got home from school yesterday, if not before, and last night while she’d been trying to read, she’d been primed for his name to appear on her phone at any moment. When he’d finally called this morning, however, he hadn’t mentioned her visit to St Helena’s but asked instead if he could come and look at the new paintings.
‘Apologies again for the short notice,’ he said when she opened the door. ‘As I said on the phone, I thought I was going to Birmingham for a studio visit this morning but the artist’s had a family emergency and called to put me off.’
‘It’s no problem. Really.’
‘It felt like a sign that I should stop prevaricating. Get it over with.’
For all his social skills and familiarity with the house, he seemed ill at ease. She’d expected him to sit on Jacqueline’s sofa or pull out a chair at the table while she made the coffee but he paced around, going to the window to look out at the garden and then turning quickly away as if he’d just remembered what had happened there. He’d arrived with a burgundy leather portfolio and held on to it as if it were anchoring him in reality. Rowan remembered Cory’s self-assurance the first time he’d come here, how casually he’d picked up her book, slung his jacket over the back of a chair.
‘Are you managing to get any work done?’ Greenwood asked, glancing at her laptop, but that was it, none of the usual follow-up questions about her thesis or when she expected to finish. To spare them both the awkwardness of another exchange, she busied around decanting milk into a jug and filling the sugar bowl the Glasses had never used. Was it possible Bryony hadn’t told him she’d been to the school, that the timing of his visit was a coincidence? She glanced round to see what he was doing and was startled to find him staring at her. In the unguarded moment before he composed his face, his expression was hard. She turned away, feeling unsettled.
The kettle boiled at last. Before the coffee had a chance to brew properly, she plunged the filter and poured him a cup. He’d returned to absent mode and seemed only to come back to full awareness as she handed it to him. His smile did little more than lift the corners of his mouth. ‘Thank you. Do you mind if I go straight up?’
‘No, of course not.’ Please.
He’d said he needed to see the paintings again to write catalogue copy but she wondered how well he already knew the work. Had he seen the paintings as they developed and discussed them with Marianne, or had she waited, shown him only when they were finished? When it came to her work, was he her boyfriend first or her dealer? Rowan thought of the remittance advices among her pa
perwork, the six-figure sums.
He had to hand over a kidney on a golden platter. She looked around for the leather portfolio and saw that, yes, it had gone upstairs with him. Was he broke, too, after his divorce? Given the gallery’s hefty commissions, it seemed unlikely but the running costs must be hefty as well, that Mayfair location, and who knew what went on in people’s lives. Maybe Sophie Lawrence was extracting punitive maintenance payments; maybe he was paying for elderly parents in care; maybe he had unmanageable debts, a gambling problem. She wondered again who would benefit financially from Marianne’s death. People would know by now; the will must have been read.
She waited half an hour before going up and took the final flight of stairs quietly, just in case, but when she reached the studio, Greenwood was sitting on the old wheel-backed chair at the mouth of Adam’s space, the paintings surrounding him on three sides. The portfolio was open on his knees, a pad of lined yellow legal paper attached by leather corners inside. A ballpoint dangled between his fingers, unused. He seemed not to be aware of her and as she got closer, she saw that his cheeks were wet.
‘James?’
He whipped around, eyes wide.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘No, no, you didn’t.’ He put his hands to his face as if to say, God, look at me, then brushed his cheeks with his fingers. ‘I knew it would be hard, that was why I was putting it off but …’ He shook his head. ‘These girls, getting thinner and thinner – it’s like watching her disappear in front of me.’ He frowned, making a vertical crease between his eyebrows, and Rowan saw a glimpse of Bryony, the straight genetic line between them.
‘You know Michael Cory’s been here?’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘Yes.’
Rowan turned to the painting on her right, the last, most ravaged woman. ‘He said he thought they were a self-portrait, the pictures.’
‘What?’
‘Not individually, obviously – taken all together, as one.’
‘Did Marianne tell him that?’
Rowan shook her head. ‘No, he said not.’
‘Well, I don’t know where he got that idea,’ Greenwood snapped the portfolio shut and zipped it, ‘but he’s way off-beam. They’re a statement about the pressure on young women to conform to an approved body image, to be good enough. Her mother’s work’s in there, she’s a huge influence, of course; Susie Orbach and Naomi Wolf as well.’ He stood, thrust the portfolio under his arm and picked up the chair.
‘How much do you think she drew on her own …’
‘They’re portraits of the individual girls, too – that must be apparent.’ Even to you. He looked at her, eyes hard again, the chair between them a barrier or, she thought suddenly, a potential weapon. ‘Marianne spent months – months and months – going to the clinic, getting to know the girls, talking to them about their illness. Before she could even broach the subject of allowing her to paint them, she had to win their trust – they thought they were so ugly, so … despicable. It was a huge achievement, and to suggest anything else is very hurtful. Hurtful and insulting.’
‘I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean …’
‘What did you mean?’ He dropped the chair back into its corner and spun round. ‘Do you have any idea how damaging it is to go around broadcasting that kind of rubbish? What are you trying to do? Turn her into Sylvia Plath? Let her talent be eclipsed by some utter bollocks,’ he spat the word, ‘about the poor tragic woman plagued by mental illness just because she was depressed when her father died?’
‘No, of course not. Again, I’m sorry, I didn’t …’
‘Do you think that’s what her family want? Jacqueline? Adam?’
‘I know it isn’t.’
‘Well then, perhaps you should just keep your … bloody mouth shut.’
She followed him down the stairs, pulse beating in her ears. She’d heard the tremor in his voice, as if he was barely keeping the lid on a bubbling vat of rage. The contrast with his usual gentility, the sophistication and manners, made it so much worse, as if an elegant curtain had been pulled aside to reveal something malevolent. He’d wanted to swear at her, really let her have it, she could tell; even now, as they made their way down in silence, the air seemed to vibrate with the force of what he was holding inside.
At the front door, he took a deep breath and turned to face her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I apologise. That was … uncalled for. I’m afraid you caught the brunt of my anxiety. Even though she’s gone, it’s still my job to protect her – her reputation. I can’t let her become some sort of tragic footnote. I won’t.’
‘I shouldn’t have said what I did.’
‘No, I’m glad you did. I needed to know. I have to talk to Michael before he bandies that idea around any more. It’ll be taken as gospel immediately, of course, if it comes from him.’
‘Well, if I’ve helped – in however roundabout a way – then I’m glad, too.’
He nodded quickly, as if to say, Well, good, so let’s leave it at that. He looked down, checked the zip on the portfolio and reached for the door handle. Then, just as Rowan had allowed her shoulders to drop a half-centimetre, he turned around again.
‘Bryony said you went to find her at school yesterday.’
Fuck.
‘Please don’t do that again.’
Greenwood’s anger had soured the air in the house and she was glad to pull the door closed behind her. The relief was short-lived, however, and as she crossed the road to the car, the uneasiness returned as a sort of hyper-awareness, a prickling at the back of her neck as if she were being watched. She even turned to look but of course no one was there.
She started the engine without a destination in mind, wanting just to put some distance between herself and the house, but she found herself heading down through the centre of town, past the Randolph Hotel and Worcester College. At the bottom of Hythe Bridge Street, she surprised herself by turning left.
For years now, she’d avoided this part of town if she ever had to come to Oxford. There were some happy memories – a few good evenings with Marianne and Turk at the Head of the River and, at university, she’d gone out for a month or so with a guy from Pembroke who’d lived just over the bridge – but for the most part, she associated it with loneliness and abandonment and, later, overwhelming claustrophobia. Today, however, as she passed the end of Vicarage Road, she made herself look. There was the Crooked Pot on the corner, an ugly mean-windowed building never meant to be a pub, and beyond it, in two diminishing terraces, the jumble of houses, some still brick-fronted, others plastered and painted, that had included her father’s. Hers. Theirs, she supposed.
She accelerated away, waiting until she’d passed the end of Norreys Avenue before she inhaled again, as if even breathing the air of Vicarage Road was enough to carry her back there. University College sports ground on her left, the allotments, and then the untidy snaggle of shops and low houses that lined the unlovely way out of town.
At the junction with Weirs Lane, she averted her eyes.
Boar’s Hill was another world: detached houses set back from the road behind huge established trees and security gates, a Jaguar on this drive, a Range Rover on the next. She’d never really known who lived here. The Oxford houses she understood were low-key and book-filled, slightly shabby even if they sold for millions, but these were ostentatious, many of them modern, the sort of houses she imagined Premier League footballers buying.
The top of the hill was different again, however. Here, the trees ended and the vista opened up: rolling fields of drab winter grass, scrubby hedgerows. English countryside unchanged for a hundred years. There was a single car at the side of the road, a red Nissan Micra, its owner nowhere to be seen. She parked behind it, locked up and went over the stile into the field.
A couple of hundred yards from the road, she climbed to the top of the hill and perched on the wooden fence. The ends of her scarf flapped behind her, twin flags in the wind t
hat drove the cloud across the sky, a tumble of white and grey so low Rowan felt she could reach up and touch it.
The view was a green patchwork quilt, the fields ancient and irregular, stitched roughly together, darned here and there with copses and knots of tiny houses. Four or five miles away, in the shallow dish carved by its rivers, the rooftops and spires of the postcard Oxford floated above a foam of distant trees like the vision of a place, a mirage. Such a small patch of land, a few square miles, and yet how much it contained, so much struggle and striving, Sturm and Drang.
She took deep breaths, pulling cold air into her chest. The conversation with Greenwood had disturbed her – she still felt shaken. The suddenness and strength of his anger, so barely contained, had been frightening. Had Marianne known that side of him, had he unleashed it on her? Could that have been why she jumped, or part of it? Rowan examined the idea, turning it round in her mind, but it didn’t feel right. She didn’t believe that Marianne, with her upbringing, her deeply engrained belief in a woman’s right to security and self-governance, would stay with a man who intimidated her. She wasn’t alone or without resources; she didn’t have children to consider: if she’d been in a bad relationship, she would have left.
Of course, the person who would know was Bryony but even if she ignored Greenwood’s request, if that was the right word for it, and went to the school again, Rowan doubted Bryony would talk to her. She’d made it clear she was loyal to her father.
Another avenue of investigation closed, another person – two people – pissed off. Rowan focused her eyes on the glimmering view of the city. The other person who might know about Marianne’s relationship was Adam but it had been three days now without a word. Lying in bed last night, the silence in the house thickening, she’d wondered if something had happened to him. Had there been an accident? Exhausted and hungover, had he crashed the car? No – she’d stopped herself. She would have heard about it, someone would have called. Nothing had happened; he just didn’t want to talk to her.
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