‘You could have called me,’ he said.
She looked at his face, his serious eyes, and wondered if she would ever be able to tell him that, no, after what Turk had said about her getting her claws into him, she couldn’t. If they had a relationship, she had to know that he’d chosen it. If Turk ever said it to his face, she wanted Adam to be able to dismiss without a thought the idea that she’d pursued him.
She shook her head. ‘I needed to know you were sure. And that it wasn’t too soon.’
‘It’s not too soon.’
He fell asleep before she did and after she’d reached gingerly over him to turn off the light, she lay awake again. Was she tough? Yes, when she had to be. If she had to fight, she could do it.
Twenty-nine
When she woke, the other side of the bed was empty. She sat up quickly. A thin grey light came around the edge of the curtains, enough for her to see that his clothes were gone from the chair. His shoes were gone, too. She slid her hand across the fitted sheet and, discovering it was still slightly warm, she threw back the blankets and stood up, the sudden change in posture giving her a head rush. When it passed, she threw on her clothes and went out to the landing. Silence at first and then, like music, the sound of crockery being taken out of the dishwasher. The relief was so intense that when she turned on the bathroom light and saw herself in the mirror, she was grinning. She brushed her hair quickly, rubbed the mascara from under her eyes and cleaned her teeth. The room was warm and slightly humid; he’d taken a shower.
As she came in to the kitchen, the kettle was boiling. ‘I thought you’d gone.’
‘Really?’ He was surprised. ‘No, I wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.’ He came over and kissed her.
‘What time is it?’ She peered at the clock on the cooker.
‘Half-seven. I wish I could stay – not that I want to distract you,’ he tipped his head in the direction of her untouched books, ‘but I’ve got to give a lecture at two and God knows how long it’ll take me to get back. I should have come on the train – it’s a hassle having to go into London and out again but the drive’s so boring, all those crappy little roundabouts. There used to be a direct line, apparently, years ago.’
He filled the coffee pot then took the milk from the fridge. She watched him from the corner of her eye. Even under-slept and mildly hungover, he had the elegance she’d noticed at Gee’s: his hands moved lightly over the cups and spoons, as if he were conducting the process of coffee-making rather than actually doing it. She wondered which distant ancestor had bequeathed him that gene; it wasn’t his mother.
‘You’ve got to stop poisoning me with all this booze,’ he said, bringing her a cup.
‘I’m poisoning you?’
He smiled. ‘Shall we do it again tomorrow? I’ve got a meeting in college in the early afternoon but I could come back tomorrow night?’
The tentative note at the end of the question surprised her but it made her happy, too. This mattered to him; he wasn’t taking it for granted. A sensation of warmth, as if the sun had broken through and come streaming through the window. ‘I’ll buy some Alka-Seltzer,’ she said.
Before getting out of the shower, she turned the water to cold and stood under it until her back and shoulders started to go numb. She needed a clear head today, perhaps more than ever.
Adam’s pillow still held the shape of his head, and when she came back downstairs, her eyes went straight to his coffee cup on the table. It had an elegiac poignancy, as if it already belonged to a past she would never recover. She gave herself a sharp mental shake, telling herself to stop being mawkish. As long as she didn’t mess it up, he was the future, not the past.
Cory’s sketch was on the table, too, where Adam had left it last night. She picked it up and looked herself in the eye. When he’d called yesterday, Cory had said he’d pick her up at two-thirty. She tapped her phone to check the time. Nine o’clock.
Thirty
‘Will you take me there?’ he’d asked her on the telephone. ‘I’ve read the reports, you’ve told me, but I need to see it.’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t picture it – in my mind. I’m trying to understand how the person I knew could actually have done what she did and I can’t.’
With a glance down the street now, Rowan opened the door of his car and lowered herself into the passenger seat.
Cory leaned forward to turn off the radio. ‘Hello. How are you doing?’
‘All right.’ She paused. ‘Michael, are you sure you want to do this? I don’t know if it’s going to help. I mean, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to understand it. Maybe we should just forget about it.’
He frowned. ‘Forget?’
‘Not forget … Just, it was years ago – there won’t be anything left there and …’ She trailed off. ‘I suppose I’m just trying to ask if you’re sure you still want to go.’
He turned to look at her properly. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Why would I change my mind?’
It was quiet inside the car, even the engine barely audible, and as it passed by on the other side of the tinted glass, the city had a foreign, filmic quality, as if she were looking at old footage. She gave directions and he drove the way she’d taken on Tuesday, his callused hands whispering against the leather steering wheel. As they passed the Head of the River pub, she remembered how she’d had to pick her way through the undergrowth to get out of the meadow. A week ago today. She put her fingers to her cheek but the scratch was almost gone. Cory glanced across.
‘That looked sore,’ he said. ‘When you got it.’
She ignored the implied question. ‘Not really.’
‘Didn’t you tell me you grew up in this neighbourhood – south Oxford?’
‘Yes. Just … there, in fact. Vicarage Road. Quick: keep driving.’
He laughed.
The houses and shops were set further back from the road here, making the sky seem wider. At eleven or so, a breeze had come up, riffling the evergreens in the front garden, but a stronger wind was at work among the clouds now, blowing them across the sky like soap-scum, shades of cream and grey against a torn and dirty backcloth.
As they waited for the light at Weirs Lane, Cory looked over again. ‘Have you seen Martin since we went round there?’
‘Yes, just now – I was up in my bedroom before I came out.’
‘Did he wave?’
‘He did, and I waved back.’ In fact, it had been the other way round. She’d turned on the light – it had been so gloomy in there – and as she’d gone towards the window, she’d seen him appear at his. She’d raised her arm in salute and after a moment, he’d done the same. She’d stood there for a few seconds, self-conscious, then given him another quick wave and walked away.
Over the years, she’d trained herself to shut down any memory of that day the moment it started, but when they made the turn and came along between the facing rows of terraced houses, some of them redbrick, some pebbledashed and sprouting satellite dishes like fungus, their images in her mind were as crisp and well-kept as Marianne’s sketches in their box.
The lights were flashing at the zebra crossing a few hundred yards along, a woman waiting with two little boys, and as they stopped, Rowan leaned forward and retied her shoelace.
‘Did you come this way?’
‘What?’ She sat up again as they moved off.
‘When you came here with Marianne.’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t walk all the way from Park Town? Or did you come from Vicarage Road?’
‘No, we never used to stay there. We were at Fyfield that morning. We took a bus down Abingdon Road then walked this part. It was hot – it was hot most of that summer.’
She remembered the sun beating down on her hair and the back of her neck, her forearms turning pink. She’d forgotten to bring any water and she’d been so thirsty by the time she’d reached the bank that the river had felt like a taunt. Water, water everywhere, murmured
Marianne’s voice in her ear. Rowan thought of Adam’s breath on her cheek last night as they’d left the pub, the way he’d kissed her.
They passed a cyclist and then, at the foot of the bridge, a woman in jogging gear. As they came over the water, Rowan made herself look. It had sparkled that day, dappled with sun and shimmering leaves. This afternoon it was dull pewter, the reflected branches like stress fractures around its edges, the clouds formless creatures moving under the surface.
‘That’s it?’ said Cory. ‘A lot of bridge for so little water.’
‘It’s strange. That’s the main body of the river but there’re lots of small inlets and creeks, too. Here – this turn.’
Meadow Lane, so innocuous-sounding. Cory slowed down and they cruised past the entrance to the rowing club. She’d brought the baseball cap and she put it on, tucked her hair behind her ears. The car park had been busy that day but now, in the middle of the afternoon in the first week of February, there wasn’t a single vehicle on the muddy patch by the boatsheds, and only a handful of cars were parked outside the houses across the road. The pavement was empty: too early for the school run.
She pointed to the second, smaller car park among the trees, overflow parking for the club or perhaps the scout hut further down. ‘We can go in there,’ she said. ‘I’m sure no one will mind – we’ll only be a few minutes. If you go up on the grassy bit, we won’t get too muddy.’
When he turned off the engine, the world went quiet. She closed her eyes as a sudden intense wave of nausea swept over her and she heard the creak of leather as he shifted in his seat.
‘Are you sure you can do this, Rowan?’
‘I have to.’
‘You don’t. If it makes you feel …’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, and opened her door. A thunk as he closed his and then the double beep of the electronic fob. The sidelights flashed brightly. She peered ahead into the trees. ‘We can get through this way, it looks like; we don’t have to go back to the road.’
She’d borrowed Seb’s old wool overcoat and she was grateful for its weight, the protection both from the brambles and the wind, which seemed harder and colder now. As they came out on to the unmade track, she took her gloves out of her pocket. On their right was the open meadow for which the road was named, the wind blowing runnels in the unkempt winter grass. Rowan’s mind served her a sudden snapshot of that afternoon: two girls in bikinis stretched on their fronts reading magazines; an older woman talking on the phone while she watched a baby kicking in the shade of a parasol. The sky had been high and blue, cloudless. She’d kept her head down.
The meadow was deserted today and the cars passing on Donnington Bridge were hidden by the trees. The river was ahead of them, marked by a line of willows, and when the track came to an end, Cory followed her across the grass towards the gentle slope to the water’s edge.
‘It’s isolated,’ he said. ‘Much more isolated than I imagined. It’s like being out in the country.’
‘It must have helped, when she did it. It took us a long time to find the place, when we came. Marianne knew it was near the bridge somewhere, on the river, but we went down on the other side first, walked through scrub for what felt like miles.’ She could remember it so clearly, the heat, the long grass tickling her hands, covering her with dust and seed. There had been an electrical substation and, just beyond it, a homeless man, old and toothless, had reared up out of the undergrowth and scared them half to death.
Cory looked back along the track and with a flare of alarm, Rowan looked, too. No one – it was deserted. ‘Lorna really lived down here on her own?’ he said. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘Look.’
At the top of the bank, Rowan stopped walking. That afternoon, the view had made her catch her breath. They were two hundred yards at most from the bridge but this world had nothing to do with tarmac and streetlights and pedestrian crossings. What she’d seen was a private creek, almost a lagoon, hidden from view from the main part of the river by a narrow island overgrown with willows. Even now, leafless, the branches were dense enough to screen the inlet from anyone who might motor downstream, but that day, the place had been a riotous pixellating spill of green in every shade, the surface of the water mirroring the sky and the trees so precisely that after she’d stared for a minute, the lines had blurred and she’d no longer been sure where one ended and the other began. And there, nestled into the creek, had been the houseboat, white as a wedding cake, its long low sides lined with windows, the base of the flagpole on the foredeck surrounded by pots planted with herbs and tomatoes, hot-pink geraniums.
‘It was moored there,’ she said, pointing. ‘Totally secluded, hidden in a sort of green private world. It’s hard to explain how beautiful it was.’
‘I’ve seen photographs of it. And the drawing.’
Rowan shook her head. ‘Not just the boat. The whole thing … the river, the trees, the sky. And the peace – it was like going back in time. It could have been nineteen twenty. Eighteen twenty. The isolation was the point.’
The wind whispered across the meadow behind them, stirred the willows’ whip-like branches.
Cory walked a little way down the bank. ‘What happened to it?’ he asked. ‘Afterwards.’
‘After the investigation? It was destroyed, I think. Broken up, what was left of it. It must have been so badly damaged – the explosion as well as the fire. No one would have wanted to live on it after that, anyway. Even if it had been rebuilt, it would still have had that history.’
In the mud just in front of her there was a flat grey stone about eight inches long, five wide. Its edges were rough, as if it had been quarried once upon a time, used for a wall or a path, perhaps. Why was it here? Had it been part of the barge set-up? Her mind slipped a memory across the table like a card: Marianne on stepping-stones to the gangplank, Rowan herself standing under the willows begging her to come away.
‘She must have been insane,’ Cory said. ‘Temporary insanity caused by psychological stress. Maybe the pressure of finishing her degree combined with grief at the idea of losing her father. It’s the only way I can explain it.’
‘Have you been in touch with Adam yet, Michael? Have you called him?’
A momentary pause, imperceptible unless you were listening for it. ‘No,’ he said, without turning around.
‘Have you got his number?’
‘No.’ Still he faced away, hiding his lying eyes. ‘Could you give it to me?’
Now. Do it now. Keeping her feet clear of the mud, Rowan crouched and, as silently as possible, picked up the stone. It was heavy – heavy enough. With a final look around, she raised her arm and, summoning the full force of her anger, she brought the stone down on the back of his head.
A sickening crunch. For a moment, the world seemed to stop – the birdsong went silent, the lapping of the river, even the stir of the breeze among the leaves. They were on the point of time, a fulcrum.
But then – a warning flag – the blood. It welled up in a second; nothing and then, all of a sudden, a torrent. There was so much of it, blood running down his head, the back of his neck – he had no hair to absorb it or even interrupt the flow. She panicked: she couldn’t risk him falling with his head on the bank. If it were going to look like he’d slipped, hit his head, fallen in the water – an accident – there couldn’t be blood spattered on the mud.
Staggering, knees buckling beneath him, Cory turned. His eyes were wide – stunned, disbelieving – but then, even as he started to lose focus, she saw realisation. ‘You …’ he said.
She gathered her strength again and shoved him. For all his heft, it didn’t take much: he was already reeling. He fell straight backwards, feet on the bank, head and shoulders in the water. Thank God. The splash set the birds chattering, excited, and the leaves seemed to carry the sound: Did you see? Did you see?
Stepping on areas of stones, she waded in after him. His eyes were open, unseeing, but when she took off her glove and
put her hand close to his mouth, she felt his breath, warm in the cold air. Glove on again, she plunged her hands into the water, grabbed the back of his coat and pulled. Now his weight was a problem, and the water in his clothes made him heavier still – she felt her back strain. Another moment of alarm – what if she couldn’t turn him? Then, though, planting her feet firmly, she took hold again and with every ounce of her strength, she managed to roll him on to his side and then his front.
Hand at the base of his skull, careful not to touch the wound, she held his face under the water. The resistance was physical only, his body’s unconscious fight for survival, but she held him firm until the bucking slowed then stopped and the bubbles came to an end.
Thirty-one
The miniature woman huddled in foetal position, downy forearms hugging her skeletal knees, scalp gleaming white through her lifeless hair. From her spot beneath the window, Rowan could see the three who preceded her, each smaller than the one before, and for the first time, she had the idea that the women were shrinking not just from the world, the anonymous viewers who would stand in front of them in galleries and museums, no doubt, in years to come, but specifically from her. She looked at the way the last one curled in on herself, turning her face towards the pitiless varnished boards, and the posture struck her suddenly as defensive, fearful. Cowering. ‘Why?’ wailed the ruined O of her mouth. ‘Why, Rowan?’
She’d waited for Marianne at Vicarage Road all that day, listening to the busybody tick of her father’s fussy carriage clock and the bulletins on Fox FM. She’d watched the local news on TV, too, but she hadn’t needed it to tell her what had happened. Just after eleven o’clock the previous night, down in the dark in the scrubland beyond the allotments, she’d heard the explosion for herself. Minutes later, as she’d let herself back into the house, the sirens had come screaming down Abingdon Road followed by the dull beat of the helicopter overhead. From her father’s bedroom window, she’d seen the spotlight angling down over Donnington Bridge.
Rowan had expected her sooner but it was five o’clock by the time Marianne came. She’d beaten on the front door as if she were going out of her mind, pounding with her fists, leaning on the bell. In the few seconds it took Rowan to get there, Marianne started shouting her name. She’d opened it and pulled her inside as quickly as possible. ‘For God’s sake, are you mad? What are you doing?’
Keep You Close Page 27
