They followed her back in via the kitchen, carefully skirting the area of ruined grass. As she walked by, Rowan felt it pull at her, tugging at her sleeve as if Marianne herself were trying to get her attention: Look, Rowan, look. She’d died there, just there, on that patch of muddied, flattened ground. Died – the enormity, the utter finality of it. In a matter of seconds, Marianne’s personality – the very stuff of being a person: Rowan had never understood the word literally before – was extinguished and her body turned into a thing, a collection of cells that almost at once started the process of breaking back down into the water and minerals of which they were made.
But had it been seconds? In the days since Jacqueline’s call, she’d tried hard not to think about the details. Confronted with the blunt fact of the muddy ground, however, there was no choice. Marianne had broken her neck. What did that mean? Immediate death or had it taken time? Some people who hanged died slowly of suffocation. Had Marianne been conscious? Rowan imagined her lying in the snow, paralysed, knowing she was going to die, and she wanted to lift her own face into the rain and shout with the horror.
As they came into the kitchen, the smell of food and the ravaged trays of canapés on the work-surfaces made her feel sick. Upstairs, the crowd had thinned out and, though she’d never wanted a drink more in her life, she turned down the wine Jacqueline offered. ‘Driving,’ she said, and could have kicked herself.
Jacqueline seemed not to notice. ‘Do you have to go?’ she asked. ‘Or have you got time to say hello to Adam? He’d be disappointed not to see you.’ She started to make her way across the hall then stopped to say goodbye to a man in his sixties with hair so thick and straight it seemed to stand perpendicular to his scalp. Rowan waited by the table at the foot of the stairs. Hearing someone coming down, she looked up and locked eyes with Josh Leavis. ‘Hello,’ she said as he neared the bottom but he passed her without a word. She frowned, puzzled: hadn’t he recognised her?
Jacqueline turned. ‘That was Brian,’ she said, as they started walking. ‘Marianne’s framer. They used to drink tea and talk art for hours on – oh!’
As she’d rounded the sitting-room door, she’d been talking back over her shoulder and almost collided with James Greenwood coming the other way, his eyes trained on the carpet. He put his hands up, shocked out of his reverie.
‘Sorry, James, I didn’t mean to startle you.’ Jacqueline rubbed his arm. ‘Have you two met?’
His hand, when Rowan took it, was surprisingly cool to the touch. She had the odd sensation that she was seeing not the man himself but a poor copy. She knew him from the newspapers – his silver hair, side-parted fifties-style, was almost a brand in itself – but there was a blurred, out-of-focus quality to him today, as if he were both here and not. Perhaps it was because he himself seemed to be struggling to focus: his eyes were wide open and barely appeared to blink. If he was in shock, she thought, it wasn’t doing much to cushion him. Interviews always mentioned a glint in his eye, the irreverent sense of humour that prevented his intelligence being intimidating, but looking at him now, it was hard to believe he’d ever laughed in his life.
‘Rowan was one of Marianne’s best friends from school – well, for years,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Not just Marianne’s – a family friend.’
‘Yes, she talked about you,’ Greenwood said.
‘Did she?’
‘They were thick as thieves,’ said Jacqueline, ‘when they were Bryony’s age. Where is . . . ? Ah.’ She put out her arm and drew the blonde girl Rowan had identified as his daughter into the circle. She was tall and slender, fine-featured, sixteen or seventeen, Rowan guessed, with the same high forehead and deep brown eyes as her father. Her hair was the colour of golden syrup, shining and heavy.
‘Okay?’ Greenwood asked her and she nodded.
‘Rowan.’
Adam’s voice. It came from behind her, and, turning sharply, she saw his face for the first time. He looked tired out, sadness had sapped the energy she remembered, but in her chest she felt an echo of the old buzz nonetheless. He stooped to kiss her cheek. ‘I saw you earlier but then you disappeared.’
‘We’ve been out by the shed,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Smoking.’
‘You rebels.’ A smile that failed to reach his eyes.
‘You’ve changed,’ Rowan said, without thinking.
‘I’ve aged.’
‘No, not that. It’s . . .’ She stopped, embarrassed. Adam looked at her, expectant.
‘It’s probably the suit, Ad.’ Jacqueline took pity on her. ‘I doubt Rowan’s ever seen you in one.’
She smiled slightly. Maybe that was part of it. Adam had barely seemed to notice what he wore back then. The last summer she’d been here, he’d arrived home after a research trip to Cuba in jeans so grimy that Jacqueline, only half joking, had lifted them out of the laundry basket with a pair of barbecue tongs. But even given the circumstances, the suit seemed to signify a deeper change.
‘How would you describe Adam?’ Marianne had asked her once, their old game. She’d been working on an oil portrait and couldn’t get it right. ‘It’s him but it’s not him.’