Halfway through his main course, however, he gestured to the waiter for more champagne and she knew that something was going on. She’d attributed his animation to the first glass, the effect of lunchtime drinking on someone who wasn’t used to it, but with the second glass she realised that, in fact, her father was nervous. He was fortifying himself. Girding his loins.
He’d waited until she’d finished her risotto, at least. Then, downing a full inch from his glass in a single swig, he’d looked across, almost bashful. ‘We’re celebrating two things today,’ he said. ‘Three, actually.’
‘Are we?’ Her heart started pumping harder.
He smiled. ‘I know this will come as a surprise but I didn’t want to bother you with it before the exams and … Well, no point beating around the bush: I’m getting married.’
Something at the very centre of her collapsed. She felt it behind her ribcage: a house of cards, a shirt slipping off a hanger to fall shapeless to the floor. The room pulled away, and she had the impression that she was looking at it from the end of a tunnel, her father a tiny figure far removed across the white plains of the tablecloth. A rushing sound in her ears, the sea heard in a shell, and the floor tipped dangerously beneath her chair. She grabbed the edge of the table.
Her father didn’t notice. ‘… waiting for dates but probably the second week of December,’ he was saying. ‘Jessica – she’s looking forward to meeting you – wants a winter do. The village church is very pretty there and, of course, it’s traditional for it to happen on the bride’s home turf so …’
‘What’s the third thing?’ said Rowan, her voice sounding as if it belonged to someone else.
‘What?’
‘Three things.’
Her father gave a smile she could only describe as coy. ‘Well, I promised Jess I wouldn’t say anything because it’s early days and you’re not supposed to tell anyone until the three-month all-clear, are you, but …’
She stood up, dimly aware of dragging the tablecloth with her, and on uncertain legs she made her way back across the room. ‘Rowan,’ he hissed, but the restaurant had been almost full by then and he hated scenes. Down the passageway into the gloom of reception and then out, gathering speed as she came down the steps to the pavement and emerged into the full glare of the sun.
She hadn’t had to think about where to go. On legs like heat-softened plastic, she took St Giles’ at full tilt, the lump of risotto a painful pendulum in her stomach. People looked at her – a couple at the crossing near the church turned to stare as she passed, her breath coming hard by then, her back damp with sweat. The soles of her summer shoes had been so thin that she bruised the balls of her feet. It had hurt to walk for days afterwards.
She’d rung the doorbell and while she’d waited, she’d begged: Let them be in. Please, let them be in. The seconds stretched and the door took on symbolic significance: would it open or was she always going to be left outside, belonging to no one, loved by no one?
She’d started to shake by the time she saw the dark silhouette swim up behind the glass. When Seb opened the door, he understood at once that something had happened. He’d put his arms around her and held her tightly. ‘It’s all right,’ he’d said. ‘We’ve got you. We’ve got you.’ When her breathing began to normalise a little, he’d pulled back to look at her face. ‘Bad?’
‘Quite bad.’
He’d frowned, real concern in his eyes. ‘Everyone’s here,’ he said. ‘All four of us. We’re in the garden, doing the crossword. Come with me – come and tell us what’s going on. We’ll get you straightened out.’
When the bells chimed the hour, she stood up and started to make her way along Broad Street. It had worked: just looking through the window and remembering had been enough. Since she’d been back in Oxford, especially since the night with Adam, the old feeling had been pushing at the lid of its box, the insidious idea that she was not just unloved but fundamentally unlovable, that her life before she met the Glasses hadn’t been bad luck, the result of a mother who died too young and a father who couldn’t handle his situation, but her fault, the consequence of some deep essential flaw in her. Tonight, before going to meet Adam, she’d needed to be reminded that she had been loved; that even though her own family had been a disaster, she’d been welcomed into someone else’s. Wasn’t that better, in a way, a stronger confirmation? The Glasses hadn’t needed to envelop her as they had, there had been no biological imperative. They’d chosen to.
On the phone, Adam had given very little away. He’d apologised for the radio silence, saying that he’d needed to think, and then he’d asked if he could drive over and see her. She’d said yes, of course, but she’d suggested they meet at The Turf, a good fifteen-minute walk from the house. Even if it was what he was hoping, which she doubted now, she’d wanted to make the point that after letting four days pass before ringing, he couldn’t just take up where they’d left off at the weekend. As well as a symbolic retrenchment, the distance was practical: he wouldn’t be able to drink much if he had the car, and if they did go back to the house, she’d have a sobering walk in which to ask herself some stern questions.
A stranger to Oxford was unlikely to stumble on The Turf by accident. It was entirely enclosed by other buildings, invisible from the road and accessed only by two obscure alleyways. There was something of the faerie about the building itself, too: timber-framed with crooked windows in an assortment of styles, it was covered by a roof as steeply pitched as the lid of a toadstool.
Inside, the ceiling was ribbed with beams and barely cleared Rowan’s head by a foot. She made her way down the little passage to the back bar and found Adam waiting at the table by the window. He saw her as she came in and stood up immediately.
‘Hello,’ he said, kissing her cheek. ‘Thank you for coming.’
It struck her as a strange, formal thing to say and there was an awkward second or two in which she searched for the right response and failed. After insisting that she take the better seat on the old church pew, he went to the bar and she had a chance to look at him. He was wearing almost exactly the same as he had on Friday: jeans and a round-necked navy jumper though, this time, the shirt just visible at the neck was faded denim. His hair had been cut since then, however, exposing a new quarter-inch of pale skin at the nape of his neck and, when he’d kissed her, his cheek had been smooth, shaved more recently than this morning.
He returned with two glasses of red wine. ‘How’s your week been?’ he asked and she imagined what would happen if she told him the truth.
‘Okay. Yours?’
He shrugged. ‘Busy – the writing and … Ro, I’m so sorry I wasn’t in touch earlier.’
At college, even in her twenties, she might have said it didn’t matter, waved it away as nothing, but now, wiser, she kept quiet.
‘As I said last night, I needed to get my head straight before I talked to you. I needed to work out what I was doing, whether I was …’ He rubbed his thumb over a watermark on the base of his glass. ‘But I’m sorry. I can see it was selfish. I didn’t mean to leave you hanging.’
‘Did you?’ she said. ‘Get your head straight?’
‘I think so. Yes. It’s …’ He looked at her. ‘I felt guilty. I felt happy on Friday and it felt wrong. Disloyal – to Marianne.’
‘Disloyal?’
‘It didn’t feel right, being happy about something so soon after her death, and for us to be together there, at the house …’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think I would have done it if we hadn’t drunk so much.’
Rowan felt as if she’d been slapped. Blood rushed to her face, and even in the low light, Adam saw it. ‘God, no, no, that’s not what I meant! I meant, it shouldn’t have been there, at the house, not that I wouldn’t have … Aaargh.’ He put his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. When he looked up again, his expression was composed. ‘Let me do this the other way around. I like you a lot, Rowan, and I always have. On Friday I was happy, I felt l
ike I’d finally got the opportunity to do something I wanted to do – should have done – a long time ago, but then I thought: am I some kind of monster, thinking about myself, a new relationship, when my sister has been dead less than a month? When the woman I like was my sister’s best friend.’
‘I know.’
‘And what I told you about Mazz asking me not to pursue things with you back then …’
Rowan thought of her father, the relationship he’d carried on with Jessica for four years, it turned out, before that lunch at the Randolph; the weeks when he’d been not in Lima or Buenos Aires, as he’d claimed, but a small village in Kent. ‘Adam, it’s all right,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to explain.’
‘No, I do.’
‘It was bad timing – you said on Friday. It’s one of those things; you don’t have to …’
‘What I’m trying to say,’ he cut her off, ‘is that I don’t think Marianne would mind. Now. Back then, when you two were so close, when we were younger, I can see why she wouldn’t have liked it, her brother and her best friend, but now – especially now – there’s no clash.’
‘I …’
‘I think she’d be pleased. If we can find something good in all this … I mean, if you want to, of course; I don’t know how you feel at all …’ He made another strangled sound. ‘I’m bad at this.’
She laughed, a soaring feeling in her chest. Steady, she cautioned herself, at least try to play it cool, but when he reached across and squeezed her hand, she felt herself grin like a fool.
‘With everything else that happened on Friday,’ he said, ‘I didn’t tell you but a couple of weeks before it happened, just after Christmas, Mazz and I had a drink and she mentioned – only briefly: she said it and then the conversation changed direction or her phone rang, I don’t remember – but she said she wanted to get in touch with you again. To sort out what happened back then.’
Rowan stiffened. ‘Did she?’
‘I don’t know whether you know or not but she’d become good friends with Michael Cory, the artist. They met through James, at the gallery.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That was what I wanted to say to you on Friday before we … got distracted. He’s been in touch with me – he’s been to the house, wanting to talk about her. He’s painting her portrait, Adam.’
She waited for the look of horror or else a gradual realisation as he worked through the implications but instead he nodded. ‘I know. She talked to me about it.’
‘You weren’t worried?’
‘About his reputation? No. You’ve met him?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you know it’s all a load of crap, then, the stuff about him setting out to destroy people. Undoing them – I love that idea, it sounds so Victorian, doesn’t it? All corsets and repression, like he’s some devil with a waxed moustache going round loosening stays. I haven’t met him yet – actually, he left a message on my phone earlier, while I was driving …’
‘Did he?’
‘Mazz said he was a good man. Sound was her word – she said she trusted him.’
‘I don’t know, Adam. I mean …’
‘Apparently the stuff about him and psychology is true, though. She said she shouldn’t have bothered seeing the shrinks back then, when she had her breakdown; she should just have called him.’
Adam had found a parking spot in Broad Street where, he told Rowan, developing a sudden interest in the empty picnic tables outside the window, the car could stay overnight.
‘So … ?’ She raised an eyebrow.
‘So,’ he said, ‘we could have another glass of wine if you’d like one.’ She laughed.
They left when they finished their third, just after ten o’clock. A handful of hardy smokers huddled around one of the patio heaters but otherwise the courtyard was deserted, and in the unlit passage that led out to Bath Place, Adam reached for her hand, pulled her back to him and kissed her. ‘I’ve wanted to do that since you walked through the door,’ he said quietly, his mouth still close enough that she felt his breath on her cheek. ‘The soul-searching this week – please don’t let it give you the wrong impression.’ Rowan felt the joyful soaring in her chest again, a rush of desire as strong as the one all those years ago, up in his room.
Parks Road was quiet, and on the stretch before the turn to the science area, he drew her off the pavement. It was like being back at college, these drunken walks home punctuated by shameless public kissing. Ivy covered this part of Wadham’s long perimeter wall, a huge sheepskin rug thrown over the top. Perhaps he’d thought it would be more comfortable than the stone but its leaves were cold as he pressed her into them, enveloping them both with an odd scent, dusty and chemical at the same time, that made her think of the graveyard at St Sepulchre’s, the smell of the dry earth path beneath the avenue of yews with the bench where she and Marianne used to sit and talk. Adam kissed her harder, pressing the full weight of his body against her.
Male voices approaching, young and drunk, and as he cupped her head between his hands, one of them called, ‘Get a room.’ Adam pulled away as if he’d been burned and she looked at him in the darkness, expecting embarrassment, the return of his reserve, but instead she saw he was grinning. ‘It’s not a terrible idea.’
With the coldness of the air and the speed at which they walked, she was breathing fast by the time they reached Fyfield Road, and as she turned to him on the top step, her breath made clouds in the pool of light under the carriage lamp. For the past five minutes, her mind had been whirring. She couldn’t tell him the truth, there was no way, but she had to say something. It pained her to lie to him, especially now, when they were just starting out, but the truth would ruin his life.
‘Adam,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a confession to make.’ She watched his face turn serious. ‘No, it’s nothing major. Just – yesterday, when I went out, I forgot my keys and locked myself out. The Dawsons are still away – I know you used to leave a spare set with them – so in the end I had to break in through the kitchen.’
‘You broke in?’
‘I didn’t want to smash the glass so I kicked the door, hoping it would force the lock, but it broke the jamb – the whole lock came out, the wood just shattered.’
‘Wow, Karate Kid.’
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about it, we can get it mended.’
‘It’s already done. A carpenter came this morning.’ True to his word, Cory had called her at ten o’clock and the carpenter had been there at half-past. ‘He replaced the whole jamb – he said it was rotten, anyway. Damp – probably why it always used to stick.’
‘You paid him?’
Rowan hesitated momentarily. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ll pay you back.’
‘No. No way. It was my fault – if I hadn’t forgotten my keys, it wouldn’t have happened.’
‘You’re a student, Ro. You’re doing us a favour, anyway.’
‘I had a job for years; I’m not a complete down and out.’
‘We can argue about it later. Have you got your keys now? It’s cold – let me in.’
She’d left the elephant lamp on so that she wouldn’t have to walk into a dark house; she remembered thinking she’d almost certainly be coming back alone.
‘So the back door’s safe again?’ Adam hung up his coat. ‘Secure, I mean?’
‘Yes. Come and see it.’
He followed her downstairs. ‘I haven’t painted it yet,’ she said, as they came into the kitchen. ‘I’ve bought the paint but I hoped I’d get away without telling you until it was done.’
He ran his thumb up and down the new upright and unlocked the door, letting in a blast of cold air. ‘It looks like a very good job,’ he said, shutting it.
‘I’m glad.’ She had no idea how much Cory had had to pay the guy to do the work so quickly but she’d been more grateful than she’d wanted him to know. Last night the house had felt like a birdcage, she the canary inside while an unseen
cat prowled the shadows. She’d lain awake past three o’clock, tensing at every creak and tick. Thinking she heard something in the garden, she’d got up twice to peer out from behind the curtain but there had been nothing to see except the large lit rectangle of Martin Johnson’s window.
Adam locked the door but as he turned and came towards her again, he caught sight of the drawing on the table. ‘Is that … ? It looks like Michael Cory’s style.’
‘It is. He did it while we were talking. It’s not much – just a sketch.’
‘May I?’
‘Of course.’
Adam slid it very gently to the edge then picked it up with the tips of his fingers. Rowan thought of the three million dollars Hanna Ferrara had paid for her painting and wondered suddenly how much this was worth. Something, surely, even if she was nobody. Adam looked at it in silence for several seconds.
‘Does he like you?’ he said finally.
‘What?’
‘It’s you, obviously, but it’s not how I’d draw you. You look … tough.’ He frowned. ‘Not to be messed with.’
‘That’s not how you see me?’
She was teasing but Adam took the question seriously. ‘No, not tough. Self-sufficient – wasn’t that what I said on Friday? It’s one of the things I’ve always admired about you.’ He put the sketch down and turned to her, putting his hands around her waist. They kissed and she pulled him closer, wanting to breathe him in. She was surprised when, a minute later, he pulled away.
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