A crease had appeared between Marianne’s eyebrows. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s your thing, isn’t it? Art?’ That was a stupid question, too, though. Marianne had established herself as the best artist in the school within days of arriving, and for the past three weeks, Mrs Orvis, the head of the art department, had put her charcoal sketches on the big easel at the front of the class and analysed them, explaining what made them so good, how each effect had been achieved. Marianne had sat on the edge of a table swinging her legs but watching carefully. ‘Embarrassing,’ she’d said afterwards to deflect bad feeling but there wasn’t much bitchiness about it. Most people liked Mrs Orvis, which helped, but from the beginning Marianne herself had – in her low-key way – commanded respect. She hadn’t tried to insinuate herself into one of the established groups as the other new girls had done. In the canteen at lunchtime she joined in the conversation, often dryly funny but always un-showy. She gave an impression of self-containment, as if she knew what she was doing and was getting on with it regardless of what anyone thought.
That first afternoon at Georgina’s, she’d crossed her legs, extending a flaky-looking snakeskin boot from under the table, and, without any hint of self-consciousness, said, ‘I’m going to be a painter.’
On a Saturday evening when she hadn’t arranged to meet Niamh and Emma at the cinema, especially after the clocks went back and it was dark, Rowan had often felt depressed as she let herself into the house. She’d started teaching herself to cook from a copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, partly because she was bored of omelettes and soup but mostly because moving around making a noise made her feel less isolated than reading or watching TV. Since the spring, when her father had been promoted to handle Stern Rizer’s pharmaceutical business in South America, he had been away more and more often at weekends. He’d dispensed with Mrs Roberts, thank God, eighteen months earlier, the week Rowan had turned fourteen and he’d deemed he could reasonably leave her alone without legal repercussions.
That evening, however, instead of feeling lonely, outside the circle to which everyone else belonged at weekends, Rowan had felt restless, excited. She had friends – Niamh and Emma, and also Rachel, who liked to read – but no one she talked to like she’d just talked to Marianne. Even with Rachel, she sometimes had to be careful not to look like she was showing off, but that afternoon, if anything, she’d needed to be on her mettle. She’d read more South American novels but Marianne, it transpired, had read Flaubert and Zola and a lot of Dickens.
The following week they’d eaten lunch together in the common room three times, and on Friday, when the Upper Fifth was allowed into Summertown at lunchtime, Marianne had waited to walk with her. The week after that, when they were talking about the drawings she was working on, she’d asked Rowan to come over on Saturday and look at them.
Parked across from the house now, rain drumming on the roof of the car, Rowan remembered she’d been nervous that afternoon, and she’d stood a little way down the street and scoped the place out for a minute before going to the door. Her father’s house, an Edwardian terrace in Grandpont, had three bedrooms and a back garden big enough for the mouldy summer house she’d used as a hideout when she was younger, but this was something else.
Park Town was the most beautiful area of the city. In summer, its huge trees cast a dappled shade over the streets and even now, at the tail end of January, the laurels and camellias in the walled front gardens gave the place a dripping evergreen lushness. The houses here were redbrick Victorian mansions for the most part, detached or semi-detached but either way large enough to contain six or seven bedrooms each. For that reason, many had been used by the colleges to house graduate students and some still were, those easily identifiable by the bicycles chained to their railings and the thin curtains. Mostly, however, they’d been sold off and the drives were filled instead with Mercedes and Range Rovers.
Fyfield Road was one of the furthest back from the Banbury Road, nearest the river and Lady Margaret Hall. It was accessed by a network of other streets of similar grandeur but got no through-traffic itself. The Glasses’ house was the left-hand side of a handful of four-storey semi-detacheds that looked substantial from the kerb but revealed their true size only once you were inside. How much was it worth now? Two million? Three? Even in 1999, Seb and Jacqueline must have paid a million. But Seb had had no shortage of money: The Lioness Who Loved the Silverback had been a bestseller around the world.