Keep You Close

by Lucie Whitehouse

  If he sensed she was doing it on purpose, he chose to ignore it. ‘I think I’ve found something.’

  Her heart gave an exaggerated beat. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been in the library for hours, on Saturday and again this morning – God, I hate microfiche. It was just long enough ago that not everything was on the Net.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose and pressed his eyes shut. ‘The nationals were, obviously, but the archives of the local papers don’t go back that far online so I had to talk to the librarian, tell her what I wanted, get her to show me how to use the machine … It was like the seventies in there.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘The big public library in the centre of town. Hideous, over that shopping mall – what’s it called, the Watergate Centre?’

  ‘Westgate. Please,’ she said, ‘tell me you didn’t mention Marianne or Seb.’

  He gave her a withering look. ‘It was real needle-in-a-haystack stuff, to start. I was trying to find a woman with a connection to Seb who died just before him, within a period of time that meant he would still have been grieving when he got loaded and crashed the car.’

  Rowan shook her head to convey incredulity that he was still gnawing away at this crazy theory.

  ‘I took it week by week, working backwards, nationals first, just in case, then the microfiche – news and obituaries. I didn’t know if she would be here or in London. He travelled a lot, didn’t he, lecturing, book tours, so there was also the possibility that …’

  ‘Like I said on Saturday – again – you’re barking up the wrong tree. There’s no way Marianne killed anyone, accidentally or otherwise, full stop, and that includes any woman her dad may or may not have been seeing. She just …’

  ‘She was a grad student.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘The woman I found.’

  Rowan stared.

  ‘Lorna Morris. She died six weeks before him, almost to the day. The Oxford Times had a picture of her and as soon as I saw it, I got a feeling. She was twenty-six, beautiful. I focused on her, cross-referenced, and I found out that a) she was an experimental psychologist, and b) she’d been working at the labs where Seb did most of his research.’

  Stay calm, Rowan ordered herself. ‘There are a lot of psychologists at Oxford and I don’t know how many of them worked at those labs. Everyone who was doing experimental work, I should think – definitely the vast majority. I’m not sure how many other labs there even were for that.’

  ‘She died in a fire,’ Cory said as if Rowan hadn’t spoken. ‘Actually, an explosion. She lived on a houseboat on the river and there was a gas leak and …’

  ‘I know.’ She cut him off. ‘I remember. It was a big story here – in Oxford. Horrific. But it was an accident. There was a police investigation, obviously. An inquest.’

  ‘I read the reports. It said that it looked like she’d left the gas stove on, unlit. She went out, came back after dark, hit the light …’

  ‘It was horrendous. A terrible way to die.’

  ‘What if it wasn’t an accident, Rowan?’ He eyeballed her, demanding that she take him seriously. ‘What if Marianne did it? Messed with the stove, made it look like an accident.’

  She shook her head and moved towards the top of the kitchen stairs. ‘I can’t listen to any more of this.’

  Whip-fast, Cory reached out and grabbed her forearm. ‘She jumped for a reason.’

  ‘If she jumped at all,’ Rowan shot back, yanking her arm away. ‘Seb had lots of affairs, okay? Lots. He was a tart, a butterfly collector: he couldn’t help himself. It’s possible he slept with Lorna, I suppose, not that there were ever any rumours about it – and there usually were, I have to tell you, because he wasn’t the best keeper of secrets on that front. But if he did, if, she would have been one of three or four that year.’

  ‘Who would know?’

  ‘How the hell could I tell you that? I hadn’t seen the Glasses for years – I never knew Lorna.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Peter Turk about this?’

  ‘Of course not. You think I’m going to plough in and start spouting all these mad theories to her grieving friends?’

  ‘I’m going to.’ He took a step in the direction of the door, as if he were leaving to go and do it right away.

  ‘Stop,’ she said, too loudly. ‘Please – just stop.’

  ‘Why?’ He turned back, face alight with new interest.

  ‘He was here,’ she said slowly. ‘Turk was. On Saturday. He told me this story about wanting to find a pair of cufflinks he’d lent Marianne for a party but really he’d come to steal sketches.’ Despite all the unkind things he’d said, Rowan felt a pang of regret at betraying him to Cory. ‘He’s been selling them,’ she said. ‘He’s broke.’

  Cory strode to the bottom of the stairs and sat down. Elbow planted on his knee, he put his fist to his mouth, The Thinker in jeans and a top coat. Several seconds passed. ‘Were you going to tell me this?’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t I just done that?’

  ‘Under duress.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘If you hadn’t shoved your way in here all guns blazing, I might have got round to it earlier.’

  They faced each other off. Cory, to her satisfaction, looked away first. ‘Do you think he was blackmailing her? If he was broke, and if he knows something, maybe he was extorting money from Marianne, too.’

  ‘I thought about that,’ Rowan said. ‘I went through her financial paperwork yesterday, her bank statements, but there are no strange payments, no transfers or big cash withdrawals. I think we can discount the possibility that he was blackmailing her fifty pounds at a time.’

  ‘I still want to talk to him.’

  ‘Do it then but just wait a day or two. He’s … humiliated. He was so angry when I caught him – I’ve never seen that side of him before. Let him calm down and then talk to him. You’ll get more out of him.’

  Cory put his fist back to his mouth and considered her. ‘Okay,’ he said eventually. ‘But I will talk to him – I’m not going to let it go. I’m starting to get close here, Rowan, I can feel it.’

  Twenty-three

  Rowan hadn’t known Lorna but she had met her. It had been mid-June, a week after she’d put down her pen for the last time and stepped blinking from the Exam Schools into the heat of the midday sun, her scholar’s gown billowing behind her like a final puff of infernal smoke. As she’d crossed Radcliffe Square the day of the party, the cobbles had sparkled with the glitter that people threw like confetti as their friends made their exhausted way to the pub. The sky was high and cloudless, the kind that arced over pine-covered hillsides on scorched Aegean islands, a harbinger, as it turned out, of the heat that late July and August would bring.

  It was Seb’s fiftieth birthday. Demob happy after her graduation show and still in a state of ecstatic incredulity about the sales to Dorotea Perling, Marianne had driven up from London for the weekend. She’d phoned at nine that morning to ask if Rowan could come early to help. ‘It was supposed to be a sit-down lunch for sixteen,’ she said, ‘but Mum’s done her usual thing and invited everyone who’s crossed her path in the past fortnight. We managed to pin her down last night and it sounds like there might be ninety.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Maybe more, she says, if everyone brings partners. Pete’s asked his dad if we can borrow the Rotary Club barbecue and we’ve called the butcher with an emergency order.’

  ‘Emergency,’ Jacqueline scoffed in the background. ‘It’ll be fine. So dramatic, Marianne.’

  The van from the off-licence pulled up just as Rowan arrived and she showed the driver the side gate so the wine could go directly to the garden. In the kitchen, Marianne was stirring pesto through a huge bowl of pasta, hair stuck to her neck with perspiration, while Jacqueline sat at the table sipping a cup of coffee and writing a letter. An old claw-footed bathtub with copper stains under the taps lurked in the shade on the patio. ‘The Dawsons have lent it to us
for the drinks,’ Mazz said. ‘Ad’s taken the car to buy ice.’ She pointed at a sack of muddy new potatoes and grimaced. ‘Sorry. Online shopping – of course it had to be today they arrived filthy.’

  The phone rang again and again with people asking what time to come until Seb, who was writing a piece for the following day’s Observer, thundered down the stairs, yanked it out of the wall and carried it away to his study. ‘You can have it back when I’m finished. It’s like trying to work in bloody Bedlam.’ The door slammed shut.

  When Rowan looked at Marianne, she’d shrugged. ‘He’s been like that since I got home.’

  With planks from the shed, they constructed an ersatz buffet table and covered it with the Greek lace tablecloths Jacqueline had inherited from an aunt. They made bowl after bowl of salad and ran around putting out glasses and silverware, boards for nuts and cheese. Rowan sawed French bread until she felt as if she was developing tennis elbow. ‘Major health issue among the middle classes,’ said Adam, washing the barbecue tools. ‘Along with carpal-tunnel from lobster-crackers and choking on the olive in one’s third martini.’

  At two o’clock, Seb came downstairs, plugged the phone back in and went outside to the bath. Fishing out a beer, he knocked off the cap against the patio wall and took a long pull. As he lowered the bottle, he caught sight of the pair of undergraduates corralled at Marianne’s insistence to man the grill.

  ‘Jesus, Jacks,’ he said, ‘is someone getting married?’

  The first guests arrived as Rowan came down from getting changed. Standing at the sink to wash lettuce for a final salad, she watched Seb through the window. His editor at the Observer had already emailed an enthusiastic thumbs-up but Seb hadn’t relaxed like he usually did after a deadline. Here was his party avatar, voluble and charismatic, but there was an energy about him today that she couldn’t isolate, a potential, a glinting edge.

  The patio doors were wide open and his frequent laughter carried into the kitchen. He wore jeans and a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, its cotton softened and faded as if by countless summers on yachts off Capri. If you didn’t know otherwise, she thought, you’d have guessed he was thirty. Jacqueline had chosen a green sundress she’d bought on their honeymoon in Istanbul twenty-five years ago, she said, and a pair of cork-heeled wedges that her old Sussex crony Miriam Jacobs had talked her into buying after a boozy lunch in Spitalfields the previous week. She was trying not to look as if she cared too much but twice Rowan caught her surreptitiously turning her ankle to admire them.

  ‘Miriam is a good influence,’ Seb had said a couple of years earlier, when Jacqueline returned from London with a pair of black cigarette pants and a biker jacket. ‘Without her periodic interventions, you’d still be wearing the things you had at college.’

  ‘I am still wearing some of them,’ Jacqueline replied. ‘If I could get into them, I’d wear more.’

  The lawn quickly filled with people. By half-past three, the barbecue was running at capacity, Jacqueline’s first-years red-faced with heat and the pressure of maintaining a constant supply of lamb and grilled chicken. As they carried out the last two trays of raw meat, Rowan felt like a lion-tamer or a city steward tasked with keeping a ravening monster at bay, outside the gates. ‘Mum deliberately downplayed it,’ said Marianne in a low voice. ‘Again. Just counting the families, I’ve got seventy-four.’

  They were sick of food and too hot so they ate nothing themselves and plunged straight in to the middle of the crowd. Over the past seven years, Rowan had come to know a lot of the Glasses’ friends, and they asked about her exams and what she was planning to do next. Seb, she was touched to discover, had told several people about her job with Robin Poretta at the BBC. ‘Of course,’ he said, when she mentioned it. ‘I’m boasting – I want to bask in your glory.’ He’d glanced over her shoulder as he spoke, as if he were looking for someone.

  Afterwards, she remembered that hour as euphoric, hyper-real: the heat, the wine, the sense of belonging, being part of the team that had somehow pulled the party together, while the promise of the future unfurled like a banner against the exhilarating blue of the sky. She’d felt it in her chest, the expansion: a joyful growing pressure.

  She should have known.

  It was pure chance that it was she who opened the door. She’d been talking to Nina Dowling, a former protégée of Jacqueline’s who was tutoring at Trinity, and she had only gone inside to go to the loo. The bell rang as she jogged up the stairs from the kitchen. Hearing the din from the garden, those who knew the Glasses well were letting themselves in through the side gate so whoever this was, she thought, wasn’t part of the inner circle.

  Light was Rowan’s first impression – light shining on long straight hair, flashing off a silver bracelet. The sun was behind her, outlining the shape of her head and a crown of tiny new hairs round her temples. She wore a simple shirtdress in blue and white cotton with a woven tan belt and a pair of gold Grecian sandals that Rowan knew were from Accessorize because she’d seen them herself during one of her aimless post-exam afternoons. They’d been cheap, Accessorize was, but this woman made them look as if she’d bought them on Bond Street. Was it her posture, the way she seemed naturally to stand straight, her shoulders back, chin up?

  She’d adjusted the bottle of wine and the straw clutch bag tucked under her arm and smiled. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Am I in the right place for Seb’s party? I’m Lorna.’

  Rowan’s brain, so recently afloat on a sea of endorphins, had lit up like an old-fashioned switchboard. The last time she’d seen Seb for lunch had been at the end of April – ‘Before you disappear down the Finals rabbit hole,’ as he’d written in the note she’d found in her pigeonhole. They’d met in the University Parks and walked for half an hour or so by the river and under the cherry trees, then frothy with blossom. ‘Like frilly pink knickers at the Folies Bergères,’ he’d said, making her laugh. They’d had lunch at the Rose and Crown in North Parade, where the beer garden had been warm enough for them to sit outside comfortably for the first time that year, the vines on the trellises offering their tender green leaves to the sun.

  She’d known almost immediately that day that there was a new woman on the scene. He’d had the exaggerated lightness of movement and touch that he always had, the extra quickness of wit. She’d thought before – by then, she’d come to know the signs as well as Marianne did – that there was something puppyish about Seb in the first weeks of a new affair as if, waking up, he was raising his head and seeing the world afresh again, all his faculties rendered hypersensitive. Perhaps it was the knowledge that he was behaving badly that made him channel so much of that energy towards other people and their well-being or maybe he’d just wanted everyone to feel as good, as alive, as he did. He’d been particularly great that day, distracting her with an outrageous bit of gossip about a writer whom she’d met over supper at Fyfield Road, reassuring her that no one – it wasn’t possible – could read everything on the exhaustive reading lists that her tutor handed out twice a week. ‘I know you,’ he said, ‘so I know that when you say you haven’t done enough work, you’ll have done twice as much as anyone else. You’ll do well – very well. We’re all rooting for you so in moments of doubt, just think of us at Fyfield Road cheering you on.’

  He’d never been able to refrain from talking about or at least alluding to whomever it was he was seeing. ‘Mentionitis,’ Marianne had said a couple of years previously when he’d had an enthusiasm for an English grad from Somerville he’d met at a coffee concert at the Sheldonian. ‘Acute. Pathetic.’

  As she led Lorna down the stairs, Rowan remembered how Seb had told her about an incredible woman he’d met at the lab, the experiments she’d been running as part of her doctoral work on language development. She hadn’t yet finished writing the thesis itself, he said, but she’d already published articles in several august publications and she’d been invited to lecture at a conference in Sydney the following month at which Seb was the keynote
speaker. The previous Christmas, quite independently, Rowan had heard him talking to a colleague about a groundbreaking research project at UCL. It turned out, he said, excited, that the woman at the lab – her name was Lorna – had been headhunted for a job there. She’d start when she finished her PhD.

  ‘The one saving grace about Dad’s inability to keep it in his trousers,’ Marianne had told her the first afternoon they’d talked about Seb’s affairs, ‘is that he doesn’t get involved with bimbos. All his women have brains, at least.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I do my research,’ Marianne had said, trying to play it off as nothing. ‘I Google.’

  Rowan had never looked up one of Seb’s women before – she didn’t want the pictures in her head, these girls with the man who’d become her surrogate father – but the way Seb talked about this one was different. Usually, he was fond, smiling, but that afternoon at the Rose, she’d heard respect in his voice, an admiration that went beyond physical attraction. She’d felt almost as if he were trying to convince her of this woman’s excellence, sell her the idea. Back at college, she’d gone online. What she’d read had done nothing to soothe the prickling of alarm but then she’d had an essay to prepare, and revision, and gradually, Seb’s new affair had slipped off her radar.

  She didn’t know if Marianne had researched this woman, they hadn’t discussed her. Perhaps she’d been so preoccupied with painting for her degree show that she hadn’t paid enough attention. Or perhaps, after so many years of Seb’s messing around, she’d finally become inured to it, suppressing the anger and disgust and telling herself that he would get over it in a month or two, move on.

  But she would pay attention now, she would have to, because by inviting Lorna here, Seb had made an announcement. Blatant as his infidelities were, they had still, as long as Rowan had known the Glasses, been conducted according to certain inviolable rules, the most important of which was that he should never bring his women to the house. Also sacrosanct was the understanding that he would never knowingly let Jacqueline encounter one of them in public. Having affairs was one thing, humiliating her was another. And he loved her – rule or not, he would never have wanted that, the damage it would cause to their marriage.