Rowan had thought carefully. ‘Like Ariel,’ she’d said at last. ‘A sprite.’ It had been his energy – he’d seemed to vibrate even when he was sitting down, his knee bouncing under the table, fingers drumming – and his brain, of course. Also, very basically, it had been his eyebrows, dark circumflexes that gave him a permanently quizzical look.
They hadn’t changed but the rest of his face had. Like Josh Leavis, he’d filled out and with the new solidity had come gravitas. Whenever she’d thought of him over the years, she’d pictured the old Adam, twenty or twenty-two, wearing jeans and Adidas sneakers, hollow-chested under a Joy Division T-shirt or his threadbare grey flannel workshirt. That man – that boy – was gone.
‘The suit,’ she said, ‘and the tan.’
‘I’ve been in California, at Berkeley. I was there for a couple of years, got back just before Christmas.’
‘Are you here now? At Oxford, I mean?’
He shook his head. ‘Back at Cambridge. Mum said you’re in London?’
‘Yes, and I’m at university, too, but I’m just a student. I saw your Observer piece about the economics of extremism – it was very interesting.’ She’d read so many of his pieces over the years, the sight of his byline causing her the same odd twist in the stomach every time.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m doing a book on it – trying. I’m supposed to be done at the end of February – it’s due to be published in September so I was up against it anyway and now . . .’
‘Will you be able to concentrate enough to write?’
‘Work first; fall apart later. And there’s so much to sort out, too. I don’t want you to have to do it all, Mum, just because I’ve got a deadline. It’s too hard.’
‘It’d be hard for you, too. The thing I’m most worried about at the moment,’ she said to Rowan, ‘is the house. There’s so much of Marianne’s work here and the story’s been all over the papers. Her work sells for quite a bit of money these days’ – she looked slightly embarrassed – ‘so an enterprising thief could do very well.’
‘Would someone break in and steal her work, do you think? I mean, to sell art at value, you’d need specialist knowledge, wouldn’t you? Contacts?’
‘To get the right sort of money, yes. It wouldn’t be like knocking off a TV.’ Jacqueline glanced at James Greenwood, who gave a slight nod. ‘The thing is, Rowan,’ she lowered her voice, ‘Marianne had been saying for a while that she thought someone was taking her work.’
‘What?’
‘She said things were going missing. Not big things, paintings, but smaller pieces – sketches, preparatory drawings. They wouldn’t sell for the same sort of money, obviously, but given the kind of prices she was beginning to fetch, they still would have been valuable.’
‘And harder to trace and a lot more portable,’ said Adam.
‘She thought someone was getting in here?’ Cold fingers on the back of Rowan’s neck.
Jacqueline nodded. ‘But I don’t know. You know what she was like – she never got the hang of filing. And you remember how many sketches she made before starting anything – could she really keep track of them all? The police came a couple of times but there was never any sign of a breakin.’ She ran her fingertips through the roots of her hair, leaving the shorter strands at the front standing up like antennae. Rowan had seen her do it a hundred times. ‘I don’t know. Probably it was disorganisation but I want to move the work somewhere secure just in case. James is going to keep it at the gallery’s storage space until we figure out what we want to do. The work for the New York show’s still upstairs. She’d only just finished it.’
‘Saul Hander’s people are going to come and pack it up,’ said Greenwood. ‘She was going to fly over there, of course, to help hang it.’
There was silence for several seconds and Rowan guessed they were all thinking the same thing: that Marianne would never fly anywhere now or hang a show again. Before she’d even thought it through, Rowan opened her mouth and started talking.
‘If it would help – just until the work can be moved – I could come and house-sit. Keep an eye on everything, put the lights on at night so the place didn’t look empty.’
Jacqueline looked at Adam.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rowan said quickly. ‘It would be too odd, wouldn’t it? We haven’t seen each other for so long and I didn’t mean to put you on the spot like that. It was just a stupid, spur-of-the-moment idea. I . . .’
‘No – no,’ Jacqueline said. ‘That’s not it at all. It’s just – it might be brilliant, if you mean it? We’d even thought about hiring someone – Adam’s term’s just started and I . . .’ She looked down while she wrestled herself under control. ‘I can’t be here, Rowan. I can just about cope with it today, with the place full of people, but without that, knowing what happened out there . . . I just can’t.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I understand. To be completely honest, it would help me, too. There’s a couple of archives in the Bodleian I really need to look at and I’ve been putting it off because I haven’t got anywhere to stay. The hassle of driving back and forth, especially in the winter . . .’