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.’