‘How are you?’ He’d dropped the phone into his pocket and leaned in to kiss her cheek. A momentary impression of stubble, warm skin, coffee. ‘We haven’t seen you in weeks. Here—’ He stepped back under the cover of the archway, out of the snow.
‘Finals next year,’ she said, following. ‘The work’s starting to ratchet up.’
‘Of course, yes. I haven’t seen Marianne since October, either. She’s been holed up in that garage in Bethnal Green painting all the hours that God sends, apparently.’
Rowan smiled: that garage. ‘I went down to see her a couple of weekends ago.’
‘Did you? So she’s still alive? That’s good.’ He buttoned his coat and she’d thought he was about to say that it was nice to run into her and no doubt they’d see her at Christmas when Mazz was back, but instead he’d checked his watch and asked what she was doing.
‘Now?’ she’d asked, surprised.
‘Yes. I was on my way to the White Horse. Have you had lunch?’
‘I was just heading back to college to do that.’
‘Come and keep me company instead.’
As they walked the few hundred yards along Broad Street, the snow was still light, a grey whirl in the air overhead, barely a dusting on the lawn at Trinity. Seb held the door open and she stepped down off the street into the semi-subterranean cave of the pub with its wood floor and enveloping scent of warm beer. Tinsel twinkled among the bottles on the bar-back, and though it was only the first week in December, the atmosphere was anticipatory, expansive. There were office Christmas lunches going on at two of the tables. Seb insisted on paying and carried their drinks to the large table in the window. Across the street, the great stone heads on the columns around the Sheldonian glared balefully down through the thickening snow.
Rowan had been out to dinner with the Glasses numerous times over the years but she’d never eaten alone with Seb before. Away from the house and his role there, he seemed different, younger. He was forty-nine – he and Jacqueline had both been twenty-eight when Marianne was born – but he could have passed for forty. His hair was still very dark, and his jeans and navy coat were classic, the kind he might have worn at twenty and could still wear at sixty. While they were eating their steak and ale pies, a couple of women in their mid-twenties walked in and, seeing him, came to say hello. ‘Alison and Katya, two of my Experimental Psychology grads. This is Rowan.’ They’d found a table at the other end of the room but she felt eyes trained on her several times and when they left, waving a flirty goodbye, she looked up in time to catch Katya, the prettier one, giving her an assessing stare through the window. Seb hadn’t given the girl a second glance.
‘I can’t believe you two are graduating next year,’ he said, recalling Rowan’s attention. ‘Do you know what you’re going to do?’
‘Actually, I’ve got an interview in London next week with Robin Poretta.’
‘Have you? The Time Capsule guy?’
She nodded. ‘My tutor put me in touch with him. One of his researchers is leaving in the summer and he asked Derek to recommend someone. He taught Poretta, too, years ago.’
‘Is that what you want to do, then? TV?’
‘Maybe. I thought about post-grad but I feel like I need to earn some money.’
‘I was the same.’
‘But you’ve got a PhD.’
‘Got it later. I went to work on a research project for a couple of years first, found myself in an intense relationship with a rhesus macaque called Peggy Sue.’ Seb smiled. ‘Occupational hazard.’
He launched into a fond anecdote and Rowan drank her wine, watched the snow coming down and listened. She’d never had Seb to herself for so long and it was different – he was different from the versions of him she knew from Fyfield Road: husband and father; distracted academic trying to work in a house filled with noise; host at one of the regular kitchen suppers he and Jacqueline had for friends and colleagues. He wasn’t the Seb she hated, either, the philanderer who couldn’t help himself; instead, cocooned in the pub, she had the sense that they’d fallen back through time to when he was her own age and all the other stuff – marriage, Adam and Marianne, the books, the money, the girls – had yet to come.
‘I should let you go,’ he’d said abruptly, finishing his beer. ‘I don’t want to be responsible for you not getting your first.’
‘A first?’ She’d waved it away, self-deprecatory, but she was flattered and there had been talk of her getting one, Derek had mentioned it last week, though he’d made plain how hard she would have to work.
‘My God,’ said Seb as they climbed the steps back to the pavement. He seemed not to have realised how much snow had fallen in the hour they’d been inside. Where it was undisturbed, it lay an inch thick, and the giant stone heads looked down from under white caps like the negatives of judges passing a death sentence. She’d shivered and he’d reached out to rub her upper arms. ‘Back to college. Go and warm up.’
‘I will. Thanks for the lunch.’
‘Thank you. It was fun – we’ll have to do it again in the New Year.’
She’d said yes but without any expectation, and when she’d seen him over Christmas at Fyfield Road, they hadn’t mentioned it. Her impression of the afternoon as a self-contained bubble of time outside the usual stream crystallised but then, two weeks after the new term started, she’d gone to the lodge to check her mail and found a hand-delivered note in her pigeonhole: Lunch, redux – Lamb & Flag, Tuesday at one?
She’d accepted the invitation – he hadn’t flirted with her at the White Horse, there had been nothing inappropriate – and then spent two days beforehand questioning her decision: hurting or offending Jacqueline or Marianne was the very last thing she’d wanted. As soon as she’d walked into the Lamb and Flag, however, she’d seen that she had nothing to worry about. Seb had brought Steven, the new protégé he’d been talking about in hyperbole for the past year. ‘I thought you two should meet,’ he said, taking their orders for a first round. ‘You’ll get on like a house on fire.’
Entering the Covered Market from the High Street, one saw its fragrant side, the gift shop and the jeweller, the florist and the special-occasion cake-maker. Ben’s Cookies filled the narrow alleys with the scent of melting chocolate. Coming in from Market Street at the back, though, you encountered a different, grubbier face, one closer, Rowan always thought, to how it must have looked in the seventeen hundreds when it first opened. The usual scurf of sprouts and onionskins lined the gutter by the entrance, and inside, the air had a rich animal-vegetable smell of ripe cheese, damp greens, cooking pasties, the fishmonger’s and, underneath it all, the iron tang of the butcher’s where deer carcasses hung on hooks outside, their flanks furry as children’s toys as you brushed past, their necks circles of bloodied bone and cartilage.
She’d told Cory to meet her at Morton’s, one of the cafés at the heart of the market. She’d lived in Oxford for more than twenty years but it seemed she could still be confused by the aisles that ran the length of the place. Thinking of other things, she took the wrong one and had to double-back past the barbershop and the place with all the tie-dye that reeked of incense.
Late as she was, she was the first to arrive so she took a table facing the door and ordered some coffee. As she picked up her phone to check the time, it buzzed in her hand.
A text from Peter Turk: Lent M cufflinks for party & want to retrieve them b4 her things sorted. Can I come & collect?
Can find and put in post, she typed. What do they look like?
A few seconds later: Not to worry, coming up to Ox anyway.
She was surprised; he hadn’t mentioned it on the phone. When?
Sat – coming to visit my mum. Rock ’n’ roll!
The waitress brought the coffee. Cory was ten minutes late now and, remembering how punctual he’d been yesterday afternoon, Rowan couldn’t help enjoying the idea that he might be lost somewhere in the maze of alleyways, cursing her for not choosing somewhere easier. As she had the
thought, though, the bell chimed above the door and she saw him come in.
The waitress approached but he pointed to Rowan and made his way over, pulling the chair out and sitting down almost before he’d said hello. ‘I like this place,’ he said. ‘The market.’
‘You’ve been here before?’
‘No.’
‘Really? I thought Marianne would have brought you. She liked it, too.’
‘We didn’t go out too much.’ An upward flick of the eyebrows.
Touché? she wondered.
‘Coffee, please,’ he said without turning to look at the waitress who’d come up behind him.
‘Which hotel are you staying at?’ Rowan asked.
‘The Old Parsonage.’
‘That’s lovely.’
‘As an American, of course,’ he said, eyebrow lifting again, ‘I get a kick out of old places, the idea that parsons were in there doing their thing before George Washington was a twinkle in his daddy’s eye.’
‘How long have you been in the UK?’
‘Since two thousand twelve.’ His coffee arrived and he turned to say thank you.
‘What brought you?’
‘Curiosity.’
She smiled to encourage him but he said nothing more. ‘About what?’ she prompted.
‘Everything. Living overseas – I’d never done it. London, which I love. Your history, the culture. I like National Trust houses – what an amazing organisation that is.’
‘You live in London?’
‘I do.’
‘But you worked with Marianne here for the most part, you said.’
‘Yes.’ He looked at her and Rowan thought she saw amusement in his eyes: I know where this is heading.
‘Did you stay at the Old Parsonage then?’ she said anyway.
The amusement vanished and he looked down, breaking eye contact. Again, she thought, his face was carefully composed to give nothing away. The silence stretched but she resisted the instinct to speak into the void. His move.
The women at the next table were leaving, taking their time to put on coats and gather their shopping, and it dawned on Rowan that he was waiting for them to go. She felt a burst of alarm that she quickly fought down. Whatever he was about to say or do, she had to stay calm. She sipped her coffee and tried to look as if it were natural for them to sit in silence.
Eventually the women moved out of earshot and Cory raised his head. He glanced around and then leaned forward. ‘Look,’ he said, barely audible. ‘I think we should level with one another.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Clearly you’re suspicious about Marianne’s death and so am I.’ He looked around again. The café was busy, though, the table next to them the only one vacant now, and with the stone floor and plate-glass window, the acoustics were awful: it would be hard for anyone to hear him over the ambient roar of conversation, the coffee machine, the clatter of plates and cutlery.
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I went up on the roof with her three times, Rowan. I thought she was joking about the vertigo until I saw it. She was fucking terrified – terrified. There’s no way that she went near the edge and slipped. That’s bullshit.’
Rowan looked at him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘So something else happened.’
‘But she was on her own – no one else was there.’
‘They’re sure?’
Sparing him the details of how she’d come by the information, she told him what Theo had said about the footprints.
‘And there’s no way someone could have been hiding in the house before it started snowing and then left afterwards?’
‘He said not. They searched the place top to bottom.’
Cory sat back heavily in his chair, as if he’d been listening to a long story and had finally heard the ending he’d been dreading. ‘You looked at the pictures again?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded. ‘When we talked, she kept coming back to dying – death. Almost every time. The idea of it, the absolute finality.’
Rowan stared at him. ‘Did you know she’d had a breakdown? Did she talk to you about that?’
‘When her father died? Yes, she did.’
‘And you didn’t think to tell anyone she was obsessed with dying? Or suggest it might be a good idea to get some help?’ Her voice drew the attention of the couple sitting two tables over, who looked up, startled, then quickly looked away.
Saying nothing, Cory turned around, motioned for the bill and stood up. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
He walked fast, striding through the market as if he were the only real thing in it, the tables outside the café, the shop-fronts and other people all just stage-setting for a drama in which he was the lead. Angry, she followed him, weaving around window shoppers and a double buggy, struggling to keep him in sight. He headed towards the High Street, barely looking over his shoulder. The snow was falling faster, starting to settle now where it wasn’t disturbed, and as he came out onto the pavement, he pulled a blue knitted hat from his pocket. She saw him look at the road, assessing his chances, but the lights had just turned green and a line of city buses revved at the crossing, engines emitting clouds of oily breath. As they waited, not speaking, Cory lifted his chin and offered his broad face to the sky.
Across the road, he headed towards Carfax then turned the corner on to St Aldate’s. ‘Where are we going?’ she called to his back.
‘Somewhere we can talk.’
Past the entrance to Christ Church and on towards the river. Her heart was beating quickly, half in alarm, half because of the sheer speed at which he was forcing her to move. The pavement was slick, and twice she slipped and nearly fell.
When they reached the gate to the meadow, he made an abrupt left. Untrodden, the lawns of the formal college gardens were white over. The cathedral loomed, a dark hulk against the marbled sky. A group of tourists was taking pictures from the flagged path but for the first time she could remember, the wide unpaved avenue that bordered the meadow itself was deserted, not a soul in sight. Nonetheless, Cory went halfway to the river before he started to slow down.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘What the hell is this?’
‘The reason I didn’t try and get help for her,’ he said, spinning round, ‘is that I didn’t think she was talking about suicide. Okay? You think I would have stood by and let that happen? You think I’m a monster? For fuck’s sake!’
‘What am I supposed to think? You tell me her pictures of dying girls are self-portraits, you tell me she couldn’t stop talking about death …’
‘Yes! I said she couldn’t stop talking about death. Death. Not suicide.’
Rowan felt rage billow through her, hot and red. ‘You …’
‘They’re a self-portrait because they describe how she felt. Eaten – consumed, you remember?’
She opened her mouth but anger made her temporarily speechless. She took a breath. ‘Everyone says she was happy – or content. She had so much good stuff going on, things to look forward to. She was …’
Cory nodded, as if she was finally getting it. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Marianne wasn’t suicidal.’
‘Then what?’
He looked around, checking again that they were alone. When he spoke, his voice was barely a murmur. ‘I think she might have killed someone.’
The world went silent. The snow on the field, the avenue, the expanse of white sky over her head – everything was still. Inside Rowan’s head, though, the blood started to roar.
Cory was staring at her, she understood; his face loomed and receded, loomed again.
‘That’s … insane,’ she said.
‘It sounds it. Yes, I know. But I think it’s what happened.’
‘Why? Why would that even cross your … ?’
‘In my early twenties,’ he cut her off, ‘I had a girlfriend who committed suicide. Greta. I know wh
at it’s like, despair, because I’ve seen it. Marianne, when she was talking, it was different.’
‘How?’
‘It was like she was exploring the idea. Sometimes it felt intellectual, philosophical, but other times it didn’t – there was a point to it, in the real world. I told you she talked about finality? She talked about “crossing the line”, doing something that can never be undone. Black and white, dead and alive.’
The ground pitched under Rowan’s feet, and the snow, coming down obliquely, added to the impression of a world that was tilting, shifting on its axis.
‘Marianne was painting – spending a lot of time with – women who were very ill,’ she said. ‘Mortally ill, I think, some of them – the last one, almost definitely.’
‘No, it wasn’t that.’ Snow was starting to settle on the shoulders of Cory’s coat, frosting the wool. ‘Listen to me. She talked about guilt.’
‘Guilt?’
‘How it crushed you – how you could never get away from it. She was eaten up with it – that’s what I meant by consumed. I felt like she was fighting with her conscience – fighting to the death, as it happened. She couldn’t talk about whatever it was so she was talking around it, as if that would help take even a little of the pressure off.’
‘Peter Turk – you’ve met him – he was a mutual friend, mine and Marianne’s.’
Cory looked at her: And?
‘You know her father killed someone else when he crashed, a woman in another car? Turk says Mazz took on that guilt – felt it like it was hers – as a way of staying close to him. Emotionally. She paid for the woman’s son to go to university; he said she …’
‘I know, I know. She told me – we talked about that. That wasn’t it.’
The frustration was almost overwhelming. ‘Who, then? Who did she kill?’ The words echoed among the trees, too loud.
‘Be quiet,’ Cory hissed, glancing back up the avenue. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know yet.’
Eighteen
Rowan walked until he was out of sight then broke into a run. Down the avenue towards the river, the wet snow hitting her face, her feet scratching the muddy gravel. Gloom gathered under the trees, and lights came on in a houseboat against the opposite bank as the low cloud brought the evening in much too early. The wide river path was deserted.
Keep You Close Page 16
