Keep You Close Page 7

  They were arranged in sequence, starting by Adam’s window. The first one showed a girl who looked a little too slim, perhaps, but otherwise healthy. She was sitting on an old wooden school chair, her legs crossed, arms folded across small breasts. In a pale hand with nails painted glittery blue, she clutched an apple so shiny and red Eve might have offered it to Adam. The off-note was her smile, which, though pretty at first, gradually revealed itself as sly and withholding.

  By the third picture, it was clear that Marianne’s real subject was anorexia. The girls got thinner and thinner as the series progressed. The fifth was a redhead with an unravelling bun who stood directly in front of a mirror so that her reflection was hidden from the viewer. She wore the sort of plain white cotton knickers sold in packs of five at Marks & Spencer, and their sheer ordinariness gave the painting poignancy. Her hips were barely wide enough to hold them up; her spine was a string of pearls beneath her skin.

  The last girl lay on her side on a beautiful varnished floor, her knees pulled up to her chest, her wasted arms wrapped around them. Down covered her cheeks and forearms, her body’s attempt to keep itself warm. As the series went on, the palette changed, the yellows and pinks of the first paintings giving way to an increasingly bleak range of blues and greys and whites. Where her hair had fallen out, this girl’s scalp was a morbid ivory, but for her slack mouth with its missing teeth, Marianne had used black and furious shades of red.

  The girls shrank not only in weight but in their painted dimensions. The first couple were life-sized, five foot five or so, but the girl in the third painting was smaller, both in height and general proportion. The sixth girl was perhaps three-quarters the size of an actual adult or adolescent, and she’d noticed the floor in the final picture, Rowan realised, because there was so much of it: standing up, the woman curled in foetal position would have been two and a half feet at most.

  Marianne’s work had often been political but these paintings vibrated with a new anger. What is happening to these girls? they demanded to know. What for? Why are they starving themselves?

  Killing themselves, because death was in every picture. The first one hinted at it, the end of Eden, but it loomed larger and larger as the sequence progressed, so that by the end, it was impossible not to think of famine, concentration camps. The woman in the last picture was near death, no doubt, but she seemed also, Rowan thought, to personify it, to be it, with that raw, hideous mouth – that maw. Here is suffering, said the painting, here is pain. Here is the end of hope.

  Going up on the roof had been Rowan’s idea. The summer they left school, there had been a heat wave that lasted three weeks, the temperature in the high eighties day after day, the sky deep and cloudless. They’d spent most of their time sprawled on blankets on the lawn but at four o’clock every afternoon, the sun had disappeared behind the gable and thrown the garden into shade. After a week, Rowan had started looking at the flat roof above Marianne’s bedroom and wondering if the sun stayed longer up there. Eventually she’d persuaded her they should find out.

  The first time, they’d moved a chest of drawers under the skylight and pulled themselves up; but when they saw the view, they’d made a trip to Homebase to buy the stepladder now propped against the wall by the sink.

  Arms above her head, Rowan shoved the hatch open. The ladder wobbled under her as she climbed gingerly on to the top step and put her hands either side of the opening. As she clambered out, she felt a physical echo: Marianne must have done exactly this the night she died.

  The daylight was fading quickly now, the sun almost set. She moved away from the hatch and waited for her eyes to adjust. Along the backs of the houses, the gardens were dark, the branches of the trees like black coral in silhouette against the sky. In the three-storey block of flats in Benson Close, the little dead-end street behind, the windows glowed yolk-yellow.

  Fyfield Road was the last full street before the River Cherwell, and on a summer’s day, the view from this flat expanse at the rear of the house reached in a dazzle of blue and green across the grounds of Lady Margaret Hall and the playing fields of the Dragon School to the meadows on the other side of the river and all the way to Marston. Now, in the thickening twilight, Rowan could see the John Radcliffe Hospital glistening at the top of Headington Hill.

  The band had been around a lot the summer they finished school. On the first day the temperature touched ninety, Turk had turned up at lunchtime with an inflatable paddling pool. They’d taken turns in it, cooling off, and then, when the sun left the garden, they’d come up to the roof. While the rest of them had stretched out on their blankets, Marianne had stayed on the low wall by the hatch, her back pressed hard against the chimneystack as she sketched a view of the rooftops.

  ‘Come on, Mazz,’ Turk had called, ‘don’t be antisocial.’ He’d rolled gingerly on to his side, keeping a careful eye on the opening of his boxer shorts. He’d had the brainwave about the pool on his way over and couldn’t be bothered going all the way home for his trunks. ‘There’s room on my blanket for you.’

  ‘And mine.’ The new guy gave her a twinkling smile. He’d been one of five potential bass guitarists who’d answered the band’s ad on Daily Information and, according to Josh, he’d been promising, which was why he was with them that afternoon. With his big brown eyes and blond hair, he was good-looking, though, and Rowan knew from the death-stare Turk gave him that he’d just signed his own marching orders.

  ‘I dare you, Marianne,’ Turk had said, less flippant. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of – we’re nowhere near the edge. Come on, what have you done with your balls?’

  She’d carried on sketching without looking up. ‘I don’t need to air mine to the four winds for everyone to be sure I’ve got them.’

  Rowan walked towards the back of the house now until she had a view of the patio. She was eighteen inches from the edge. Her eyes saw the muddy patch of lawn directly below and her heart started to pump faster. She was standing where Marianne must have gone off.

  All of a sudden, the roof-edge came alive. Like the ruined grass, it seemed to develop a force field – it tugged at her, pulling her forward. The drop was dizzying, sickening, almost irresistible. No – no. With an effort of will, she took a heavy step back and then, as if someone had let go of her hands without warning, several stumbling short ones.

  She walked quickly back towards the hatch, shaken. It would have been so easy – a second, not even that. A split second’s decision – Yes! – and it would all have been over. She’d never had a problem with heights; she’d never felt anything like that in her life. That – it was what Marianne had been talking about.

  —

  Rowan’s hands shook as she grappled with the corkscrew. The cooker said 5.47 but it felt like midnight, and the darker it got, the larger and stranger the house became. Walking downstairs, she’d thought about all the empty rooms behind the closed doors, all the places someone – a thief, an intruder – could hide. With the Dawsons away, the other side of the house was empty, too.

  But if she was going to do this, she couldn’t cower in the kitchen. Filling a glass, she carried it back upstairs to the first-floor landing where she stopped outside one of the closed doors. She took a long swig, cranked the handle and went in.

  When she turned on the light, she was startled. She’d guessed that Marianne would have kept it as it was, so little else having changed in the main part of the house, but this was something else. It was a tableau, like a room in one of those museums that preserved things as they’d been at a precise moment in time, Mary Celeste-style. Should Seb ever come back from the dead with work to do, his study was ready, the scorpion-esque ergonomic chair pulled up to the desk, his iMac G4 with its bubble base – cutting-edge then, geriatric now – still plugged in. To the right of the mouse pad, a week-to-view diary lay open, a pen laid ready across the pages. The gold letters in the top right-hand corner read 2004.

  On the other wall, reaching from floor to ceiling, w
ere the fitted shelves packed with The Lioness Who Loved the Silverback and its two sequels. Standing here, Seb had been photographed countless times for the newspapers and magazines, British and foreign, in which he’d expounded his theories of mate selection in the animal world and what humans might learn from it, more often than not, as Jacqueline pointed out, to good-looking female journalists.

  ‘It’s been translated into forty languages,’ Marianne had said as they tried to decipher his name in the different alphabets of the translated editions. ‘That one’s Hebrew. It’s sold nine million copies so far, world-wide. Weird, isn’t it? Somewhere in South Korea right now, someone might be reading Dad’s book.’

  Also on the shelf was a photograph Rowan remembered, the lack of tarnish on the frame suggesting it had been recently polished. Picking it up, she looked at Seb and Jacqueline at the party celebrating the sale of the millionth UK copy of Lioness. It was like a wedding photo, the pair of them standing next to a giant cake iced to resemble the book’s cover, Seb brandishing a knife, about to cleave it in twain. They both looked so young, but then, they were. Seb had been in his early thirties when he’d written the first book, Rowan’s age now. She looked at him more closely. It was the late eighties when the photograph was taken but apart from the hair, which had a little too much volume at the front for current tastes, the picture was ageing well. Seb was wearing a classic black blazer – no risible boxy shoulders for him – and, underneath, a simple pale blue chambray shirt, the top button undone. Perhaps he’d chosen his clothes with posterity in mind; she wouldn’t have put it past him. He was laughing, shining with youth and success and acclaim, confident of all his powers, the hand without the knife resting on Jacqueline’s hip. Rowan put the frame quickly back on the shelf, the image striking her all of a sudden as prophetic. Cleaving things in twain had turned out to be a talent of Seb’s.

  Seven

  Compared to Jacqueline and Seb’s en suite, the bathroom shared by the other three bedrooms on the first floor was dated, even shabby, but it appeared that Marianne had been using it. A dressing gown with an embroidered hibiscus hung on the back of the door, and next to the basin were a toothbrush and paste. There were male things, too. Here on the shower shelf, a bottle of Molton Brown men’s shower gel nestled among the shampoos and conditioners, and in the cabinet Rowan had seen an electric razor. She wondered how often James Greenwood had stayed here. Marianne had lived alone; he hadn’t moved in. It seemed unusual for a couple who’d been together four years but, as Jacqueline said, Marianne had needed to be alone to work, and he had his daughter. How much time had they spent together, then, and where? The person to ask was Peter Turk. He was masochist enough to want to hear as much as Marianne would tell him about her love life, and he would have made it his business to find out about Greenwood.

  Rowan turned up the temperature again and stepped closer to the showerhead. The cubicle was full of steam but she couldn’t get the chill out of her bones. Overnight, the temperature had dropped sharply; the frost on the lawn was so heavy that when she’d opened the curtains just now, she’d mistaken it for a fine layer of snow.

  When it came down to it, she thought, how much did she really know about Marianne’s life in the past ten years? Beyond the little she’d gleaned at the funeral and the handful of facts in the papers, close to nothing. It was extraordinary, to know someone so well, intimately, and then not at all. She was starting almost from scratch.

  Drying off, she wrapped herself in a towel and scurried down the arctic corridor to the guest room she’d chosen. It was minimally furnished, just a double bed with a patchwork cover and a small bedside table with a lamp and a pile of books – Katherine Mansfield, John Le Carré, Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters and a broken-backed copy of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There was a low chair and a framed Edward Lear print above the bed in which a man in a tailcoat danced with a giant fly, but the only furniture otherwise was the wardrobe, a huge beast with a yellowing, age-spotted mirror. When she’d opened it yesterday, its cavernous insides had jangled with empty hangers but last night she had unpacked, hung up her clothes and put the few precious things she hadn’t wanted to leave in London on the deep top shelf.

  She dressed in jeans and a thick sweater then went down to the kitchen where she had toast and coffee at the table, surrounded by memories of other breakfasts. In those days, though, she would never have spent the night in a guest room; she’d slept on an airbed in Marianne’s room so they could talk in the dark. On clear nights, they’d left the blinds open so that the moon shone in and picked out the shapes of the furniture, their hands and faces, with its ethereal white light. Marianne’s idea, of course: she’d had a gift for that kind of alchemy, for transforming the everyday into something memorable, otherworldly.

  Reaching for her laptop, Rowan Googled a number then tapped it into her phone. When the call was answered, she gave her name and asked for Theo Marsh.

  His direct line only rang twice before he picked up. ‘Rowan?’ he said. ‘This is a blast from the past. How are you?’

  ‘Okay. I’m back in Oxford for a few days and I wondered if I could buy you a drink.’

  When she’d turned off the light last night, Rowan had lain awake for a long time. In the dark, the task of working out what had happened grew until it felt monumental, impossible. Her chest started to tighten but then, as she’d trained herself to do if ever she felt overwhelmed, she remembered the advice Seb gave them when they’d had a revision panic the week before A-levels. ‘Gradatim,’ he’d said. ‘Remember your Latin? Step by step.’

  The call to Theo, she’d decided, would be her first step; the second was going through the two large lidded baskets she’d noticed yesterday under the worktable in Marianne’s studio. Kneeling now, she pulled the first one out into the open. It was about eighteen inches square and, when she took the lid off, she saw that it was three-quarters filled with loose paper. Looking at a couple of random points in the pile confirmed that this was where Marianne had kept her sketches, or where someone else – Jacqueline or Adam, Greenwood perhaps – had collected them since.

  Marianne’s voice piped up suddenly, half amused, half incredulous. ‘You’re really going to do this? You’re going to go through my stuff?’

  ‘Sorry, Mazz. I have to.’

  At the top, over several pieces of high-quality paper, was a study of a horse chestnut tree in its various parts: a leaf; bark; a number of conkers in different stages of growth, and then mottled, wrinkling decay. Rowan lingered on one that hadn’t been fully mature. Somehow, with lines of black ink, Marianne had captured the spiky greenness of the shell, its foamy lining and then, like a rolled eye, the blind white orb of the conker inside.

  There were other studies – a dead sparrow with stiff scaled legs; a fox-fur with beads for eyes; a pair of knitted gloves – but informal sketches, too, things she seemed to have done on the hoof but liked enough to save. The back of an old window envelope had a little pencil acorn on it, and Rowan imagined Marianne standing at the hall table, the phone jammed under her ear while she drew it. Perhaps she’d picked it up on a walk and dropped it there when she came in. She’d used to do that a lot, collect small things and put them in her pockets to study later.

  Most of the sketches, maybe four out of five, were preparatory work for the anorexia portraits. In charcoal, chalk and red pencil, Marianne had drawn body after body: hands, feet, shoulders and collarbones, backs, tiny breasts, forearms whose radius and ulna were like bow and string. Girls faced forward, faced away, stood or lay on their fronts and backs and sides, stretching, curled. Some of the drawings were lovely, those that still had some softness, but the ones that studied the emaciation were powerful. In a disembodied knee or forearm, she’d managed to convey both suffering and pity for it, both particularity – this knee, with its mole and fine white scar – and something universal.

  ‘Incredible, Mazz,’ Rowan said out loud.

  When she’d seen them all
, she put the sketches back in the exact same order then reached for the second basket. This one held admin paperwork and correspondence and would take a lot longer to deal with. The thatch of paper was about a foot deep and, if the top half-inch was anything to go by, without any order at all. Apparently, Marianne had simply tossed things in as she’d dealt with them or, maybe, as they’d arrived.

  On top was a letter from Yale University Press requesting permission to reproduce Blood Sport II, one of the paintings from her graduation show. Underneath it, a letter from an art school in Glasgow invited Marianne to address its students. Both were dated mid-December. Had she replied? There was no way of knowing.

  Two phonebook-size exhibition catalogues – one from the Met in New York, the other from Tate Britain – accounted for a good deal of the box’s weight and there were glossy brochures from numerous private views and openings as well as twenty or thirty invitations.

  Four letters came from galleries hoping to lure Marianne away from James Greenwood. Painstakingly worded – Rowan imagined their writers labouring over every phrase – they boasted about the careers they had made and let her know that should she ever think of changing representation, ‘for whatever reason’ as one of them said, they would be delighted to talk to her. Two went so far as to suggest meetings. Were they just fishing or had there been rumours that Marianne might move? If so, what did that say about her relationship with Greenwood?

  Another request for a university visit; an invitation to contribute to a literary journal discussing the body in contemporary art; a batch of printed emails about an interview for a German magazine; and then an eau de nil envelope embossed with the linked Gs of the Greenwood Gallery. It had been opened but the paperwork was still inside. Easing it out, Rowan saw a remittance advice form dated November for a work referred to as Eldritch. The amount at the bottom, transferred by BACS to Marianne’s account, it said, was £227,500 plus VAT. The payment was net of the gallery’s commission of thirty-five per cent: the sale price of the picture had been £350,000. For a few seconds, Rowan stared at the numbers. She’d known, of course, that Marianne’s work sold for a lot of money, she’d even guessed at these sorts of prices, but it was something else to see it. A third of a million for one picture.