‘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.’