Keep You Close

by Lucie Whitehouse

  ‘As we all know,’ said the vicar, if that was what he was, ‘though it was cut tragically short, Marianne’s life was one lived to the full and made remarkable by great talent and achievement. We’ll hear a tribute from Marianne’s mother, Jacqueline,’ he made a sort of half-bow in her direction, ‘but let us start with a prayer and then the first of our hymns, Lord of All Hopefulness.’

  He spoke the prayer quietly, as if he were murmuring its promises of resurrection and renewal to Marianne in her casket rather than the mourners. The raw sound of crying could be heard from the front of the room, rising over it the single sustained note that Rowan had heard on the telephone. The sound brought tears to her eyes, too, and she fumbled in her pocket for tissues only to discover she’d left them in the car.

  It was a relief when a slight blond man slipped onto the stool at the organ and without any preamble started to play. Caught out, the congregation got quickly to its feet but they were several lines into the verse before the singing assumed any kind of conviction.

  ‘Jacqueline,’ she heard the vicar say as the last notes faded and they took their seats again. Leaning to see around the man in front, Rowan watched her stand. Adam was still holding her hand. Jacqueline turned to whisper something to him and for a few seconds, Rowan had a view of her face. A movement in the room, an intake of breath quickly suppressed, told her that everyone else was watching, too. Jacqueline looked as if she’d been beaten. Her eyes were so swollen, the lids and the skin underneath so pink, that from a distance, she appeared to have been punched. The rest of her face, by contrast, was gaunt, the blood and flesh leeched away, leaving her pallid and eerily aged. She was sixty or sixty-one but usually looked ten years younger. Today a stranger wouldn’t question it if she’d said she was seventy.

  They watched as she squared her shoulders and walked to the microphone. She took a few seconds then gripped the sides of the lectern and looked out over the room.

  ‘My daughter,’ she began and then stopped. She’d brought nothing with her, no notes, but her eyes were down and she held on to the stand as if a rip tide were running round her feet. Rowan felt the tension in the room, the sudden collective alarm that they were about to see Jacqueline Glass fall apart. Come on, she willed her. Come on.

  Inhaling sharply, as if drawing strength from the air, Jacqueline pulled herself upright. ‘My daughter. How proud I am to be able to stand here and say those words, my darling.’ She looked at the coffin and gave a small nod: yes. ‘No one could be prouder of a daughter than I am – and always will be – of you.’

  She dipped her head momentarily but then raised it again and looked squarely ahead: See my face. I am not ashamed.

  ‘What can I say about Marianne? She was wonderful – absolutely wonderful. I know you’re not supposed to say these things about your own children, not if you’re English, but I’m going to: she was wonderful. Which is not to say she was perfect … of course not, far from it … but she was full of spirit.’ Jacqueline’s voice cracked and she cleared her throat once and then again. ‘She was a creature of contradictions: fiery sometimes but kind, very kind, spiky sometimes and bloody stubborn but tremendously loyal. If she loved you, she loved you – she’d forgive you anything, walk on hot coals to help you. She could be a loner at times – she needed to be alone to think and work, that was essential to her – but she was also very funny and she had many, many friends and people who loved her in return.’ She looked around the packed room and smiled.

  ‘If Marianne is remembered, though – and I think you will be, darling – it won’t be as a daughter or a sister or a friend or a partner,’ Jacqueline’s eyes lighted on James Greenwood for a moment, full of pity, ‘but as an artist. That she achieved so much in so short a time – thirty-two years – is incredible. Talent, yes, she had that in spades, but talent is nothing without work. Marianne was a worker. Even as a child she worked at her painting with a fury. It was all she ever wanted to do, and she did it.

  ‘As most of you will know, she did her degree at the Slade, finishing with a show that earned her a top first, and she sold two paintings from that show to Dorotea Perling. For those people not in the art world – there are three or four of you here,’ a painful attempt at a laugh, ‘Dorotea is considered to be building one of the finest collections of contemporary painting in the world. She bought a work from Marianne’s first solo exhibition, too, and so did Tate Modern and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma. Her work’s been shown in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Israel. One of her life’s ambitions …’ Here Jacqueline seemed to lose focus. There were several seconds’ silence and the room held its breath but then the microphone picked up the sound of a hard swallow. ‘One of her life’s ambitions was to have a solo exhibition of her work in America. That’s about to happen, at the Saul Hander gallery in New York.’

  Jacqueline turned to look at the casket again as if she, too, had to keep reminding herself that it was real. She was shaking, it was visible even to Rowan in the penultimate row, but when she resumed speaking her voice was strong. ‘I have a thousand memories of Marianne as a child, of course,’ she said, ‘some of my favourite memories of all, but one in particular captures her for me. When she was seven, she fell in love with a huge book of paintings that we – her father, Seb, and I – had bought at the Louvre. For months and months Marianne was inseparable from it. She carried it everywhere – she could barely lift it – she wouldn’t go to sleep unless it was open by her bed, refused to eat unless she could have it at the table. So for her birthday, as a surprise, we decided to take her there. When we told her – God, forget Christmas or presents, I’ve never seen excitement like it.

  ‘To cut a long story short, we lost her. The Louvre – it’s so huge, of course, and so busy, and the moment we turned our back for a split second, she was gone. It was one of the worst half-hours of my life – Seb and I running through the museum trying to find our newly eight-year-old daughter, imagining all the horrors that might have befallen her. I found her in the end. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor – completely hidden, of course, by the people standing behind her – in front of Rembrandt’s Saint Matthew and the Angel. Eight years old – you’d have thought she’d like Degas’ ballet dancers or Dürer’s animals – but no, there she was in front of a Rembrandt, and a religious one at that. I shouted at her, I’m sorry to say, I’d been so terrified I couldn’t help it, but it didn’t matter because she was in another world. “But look, Mummy,” she said, as if I were missing the whole point. “Look at the book. Look how he painted the book.”’

  Another long pause. ‘That was one of the worst half-hours of my life until I heard, my darling. Since then, it’s been one worst half-hour after another. Goodbye, Marianne, and thank you for all the passion and brilliance and love and light you brought into our lives. Sleep well.’

  Four

  As a teenager, Rowan had spent an hour or so every Saturday browsing in Waterstones or Blackwell’s. She’d never told anyone but she harboured the idea of one day writing a novel of her own, and standing surrounded by shelves and shelves of books, breathing their fresh sawdust smell, had given her a feeling of expansion, possibility, a waiting world. Her allowance had covered a new paperback every week and two cappuccinos over which she lingered as long as she decently could.

  One afternoon the autumn she was fifteen, it had been raining almost as hard as it was today and, leaving Blackwell’s, she’d made a run for the Covered Market. Georgina’s, the tiny café up in the eaves, was usually packed, but that day, a couple at the corner table had been putting their coats on just as she arrived.

  She’d been reading for ten minutes when Marianne appeared at the top of the stairs. It was early October and she’d only started at St Helena’s at the beginning of term; Rowan had never seen her out of school before. She was wearing a man’s tweed coat that hung from her shoulders like a cape, so huge that the pockets were beyond reach of her hands. A couple of pencils held her hair in a bun and
there was a bag from Blackwell’s Art and Poster Shop tucked under her elbow. She looked like an undergraduate.

  By chance, another table was coming free but, after ordering at the counter, Marianne had walked straight over. ‘Can I?’ When Rowan nodded, she’d shaken off the giant coat and slung it over the back of the chair. Underneath, she’d been wearing a thin cotton shirt of the sort Rowan’s father wore with his business suits and a pair of denim dungarees smeared with cygnet-feather patches of grey and white paint.

  She had a hot chocolate and one of the soft flapjacks with a seam of raspberry jam through the centre that Rowan still thought of as peculiar to Oxford cafés. As she came to discover, Marianne lived largely on biscuits and pastries; she wasn’t bothered about meals. Left to her own devices, Seb had said, she’d live like a honeybee, existing on nips of sugar taken at random points through the day. That afternoon, she’d broken off a corner of the flapjack, eaten it and nodded at Rowan’s book. ‘What are you reading?’

  Rowan held it up: Love in the Time of Cholera.

  ‘I loved that.’

  ‘You’ve read it? Well, obviously, if you loved it – stupid question.’

  ‘Over the summer, on holiday. One Hundred Years of Solitude as well.’

  ‘I’ve read that this year, too. Do you like South American stuff, then? I’m going through a phase. Have you read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter? Or any Borges?’

  Marianne shook her head. ‘Bit intimidated, to be honest.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘You read a lot.’ It was a statement rather than a question. Marianne swallowed her mouthful of flapjack and clarified. ‘I’ve seen you at lunch at school – you’ve always got your nose in something.’

  Rowan made a non-committal noise but she was surprised. She was definitely visible at school and being one of the most academic girls there drew attention, too, but she wasn’t part of the cool gang. To be fair, though, Marianne hadn’t shown much interest in the cool gang, either. ‘What have you got in the bag?’ she asked.

  Opening it, Marianne handed her a brand-new coffee-table-sized hardback. Rowan raised her eyebrows, surprised.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just, I like him, too, Andrew Wyeth.’

  ‘You know about him?’ Marianne looked almost suspicious. ‘How?’

  ‘I saw a postcard of Christina’s World in the art shop and I liked it so I got a book out of the library. I like his portraits best. Do you mind if I … ?’

  Marianne shook her head and Rowan opened the book and leafed carefully through the glossy pages. ‘Like this one – Karl Kuerner.’ She showed Marianne the plate of a ruddy-cheeked man whose head seemed to float disembodied beneath a cracked ceiling studded with vicious black hooks. ‘Wyeth painted him a lot, didn’t he? Kuerner in the winter in Pennsylvania, Christina in the summer in Maine.’

  A crease had appeared between Marianne’s eyebrows. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s your thing, isn’t it? Art?’ That was a stupid question, too, though. Marianne had established herself as the best artist in the school within days of arriving, and for the past three weeks, Mrs Orvis, the head of the art department, had put her charcoal sketches on the big easel at the front of the class and analysed them, explaining what made them so good, how each effect had been achieved. Marianne had sat on the edge of a table swinging her legs but watching carefully. ‘Embarrassing,’ she’d said afterwards to deflect bad feeling but there wasn’t much bitchiness about it. Most people liked Mrs Orvis, which helped, but from the beginning Marianne herself had – in her low-key way – commanded respect. She hadn’t tried to insinuate herself into one of the established groups as the other new girls had done. In the canteen at lunchtime she joined in the conversation, often dryly funny but always un-showy. She gave an impression of self-containment, as if she knew what she was doing and was getting on with it regardless of what anyone thought.

  That first afternoon at Georgina’s, she’d crossed her legs, extending a flaky-looking snakeskin boot from under the table, and, without any hint of self-consciousness, said, ‘I’m going to be a painter.’

  On a Saturday evening when she hadn’t arranged to meet Niamh and Emma at the cinema, especially after the clocks went back and it was dark, Rowan had often felt depressed as she let herself into the house. She’d started teaching herself to cook from a copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, partly because she was bored of omelettes and soup but mostly because moving around making a noise made her feel less isolated than reading or watching TV. Since the spring, when her father had been promoted to handle Stern Rizer’s pharmaceutical business in South America, he had been away more and more often at weekends. He’d dispensed with Mrs Roberts, thank God, eighteen months earlier, the week Rowan had turned fourteen and he’d deemed he could reasonably leave her alone without legal repercussions.

  That evening, however, instead of feeling lonely, outside the circle to which everyone else belonged at weekends, Rowan had felt restless, excited. She had friends – Niamh and Emma, and also Rachel, who liked to read – but no one she talked to like she’d just talked to Marianne. Even with Rachel, she sometimes had to be careful not to look like she was showing off, but that afternoon, if anything, she’d needed to be on her mettle. She’d read more South American novels but Marianne, it transpired, had read Flaubert and Zola and a lot of Dickens.

  The following week they’d eaten lunch together in the common room three times, and on Friday, when the Upper Fifth was allowed into Summertown at lunchtime, Marianne had waited to walk with her. The week after that, when they were talking about the drawings she was working on, she’d asked Rowan to come over on Saturday and look at them.

  Parked across from the house now, rain drumming on the roof of the car, Rowan remembered she’d been nervous that afternoon, and she’d stood a little way down the street and scoped the place out for a minute before going to the door. Her father’s house, an Edwardian terrace in Grandpont, had three bedrooms and a back garden big enough for the mouldy summer house she’d used as a hideout when she was younger, but this was something else.

  Park Town was the most beautiful area of the city. In summer, its huge trees cast a dappled shade over the streets and even now, at the tail end of January, the laurels and camellias in the walled front gardens gave the place a dripping evergreen lushness. The houses here were redbrick Victorian mansions for the most part, detached or semi-detached but either way large enough to contain six or seven bedrooms each. For that reason, many had been used by the colleges to house graduate students and some still were, those easily identifiable by the bicycles chained to their railings and the thin curtains. Mostly, however, they’d been sold off and the drives were filled instead with Mercedes and Range Rovers.

  Fyfield Road was one of the furthest back from the Banbury Road, nearest the river and Lady Margaret Hall. It was accessed by a network of other streets of similar grandeur but got no through-traffic itself. The Glasses’ house was the left-hand side of a handful of four-storey semi-detacheds that looked substantial from the kerb but revealed their true size only once you were inside. How much was it worth now? Two million? Three? Even in 1999, Seb and Jacqueline must have paid a million. But Seb had had no shortage of money: The Lioness Who Loved the Silverback had been a bestseller around the world.

  ‘They’re not famous famous,’ Marianne had said that first week. ‘It’s book fame, which doesn’t count – I mean, no one’s going to recognise them walking down the street.’

  Which hadn’t been true, in fact. They weren’t Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, obviously, but both Jacqueline and Seb were memorable-looking and, in a town with a high concentration of Guardian readers, Marianne’s mother in particular drew attention. It irritated Seb, Rowan had understood even at sixteen, that though he earned far more and his writing was the result of cutting-edge psychological research, his commercial appeal lowered his stock among the academic community. He had the cash but Jacqueline had the
intellectual kudos.

  From the outside, the house hadn’t changed in seventeen years. The old willow tree still overhung the pale gravel at the front and helped shield the bay window from any passing gawpers, and Virginia creeper still covered the façade. In autumn, its leaves turned flame-red, setting the house on fire, but it was in its winter avatar now, a great network of veins that spidered up from roots outside the kitchen windows. The carriage lamp by the door was on and light shone from the bay, though upstairs the windows were dark and blankly reflected the scudding clouds, as if the house were trying to put on a brave face but couldn’t sustain the effort where no one was looking.

  Rowan had taken the long way around to make sure she wasn’t one of the first to arrive but there had been heavy traffic through town and now she imagined she’d be one of the last. As she quickly ran a brush through her hair, the rear-view mirror showed her a man in a waxed jacket getting into the old silver Audi parked behind. It was a second or two before she realised who he was.

  At the crematorium there had been a nasty scene. As the service had ended, the rain had stopped for a few minutes and, grateful for fresh air, the congregation had followed Jacqueline and Adam outside. Rowan had been coming through the door when a man’s voice shouted, ‘Jacqueline!’ and, seconds later, there was a scuffle on the far edge of the crowd. She hadn’t been able to see, there were too many people, but she’d heard sharp intakes of breath from those at the front.

  Quickly she’d made her way forward and seen Adam pulling Fintan Dempsey off a man with blood streaming from his nose. Ten feet away, and partially screened by a laurel bush, another man, the one now getting into the Audi, had been taking shot after shot: Fintan straining, Adam holding him back, Jacqueline being gathered away into the safety of the group like a wounded animal. A large camera lay in a puddle on the tarmac.

  ‘Leave her the fuck alone!’ Fintan shouted, trying to shake himself free.

  James Greenwood’s voice was low and calm. ‘Let it go, Fint. You’ll just make it worse.’