‘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.