Ranged along its three sides was a series of paintings of girls – young girls. There were ten or twelve, variously posed, all of them naked or very nearly. She found the switch and hit it, replacing the gentle natural light with the searching glare of artificial.
The canvases were the same size, all stretched on frames about six feet high by four wide, all leaning against the wall at the same gentle angle. At a fleeting glance, the first couple looked like traditional nudes but it was quickly obvious that Marianne’s purpose was both more complicated and more disturbing.
They were arranged in sequence, starting by Adam’s window. The first one showed a girl who looked a little too slim, perhaps, but otherwise healthy. She was sitting on an old wooden school chair, her legs crossed, arms folded across small breasts. In a pale hand with nails painted glittery blue, she clutched an apple so shiny and red Eve might have offered it to Adam. The off-note was her smile, which, though pretty at first, gradually revealed itself as sly and withholding.
By the third picture, it was clear that Marianne’s real subject was anorexia. The girls got thinner and thinner as the series progressed. The fifth was a redhead with an unravelling bun who stood directly in front of a mirror so that her reflection was hidden from the viewer. She wore the sort of plain white cotton knickers sold in packs of five at Marks & Spencer, and their sheer ordinariness gave the painting poignancy. Her hips were barely wide enough to hold them up; her spine was a string of pearls beneath her skin.
The last girl lay on her side on a beautiful varnished floor, her knees pulled up to her chest, her wasted arms wrapped around them. Down covered her cheeks and forearms, her body’s attempt to keep itself warm. As the series went on, the palette changed, the yellows and pinks of the first paintings giving way to an increasingly bleak range of blues and greys and whites. Where her hair had fallen out, this girl’s scalp was a morbid ivory, but for her slack mouth with its missing teeth, Marianne had used black and furious shades of red.
The girls shrank not only in weight but in their painted dimensions. The first couple were life-sized, five foot five or so, but the girl in the third painting was smaller, both in height and general proportion. The sixth girl was perhaps three-quarters the size of an actual adult or adolescent, and she’d noticed the floor in the final picture, Rowan realised, because there was so much of it: standing up, the woman curled in foetal position would have been two and a half feet at most.
Marianne’s work had often been political but these paintings vibrated with a new anger. What is happening to these girls? they demanded to know. What for? Why are they starving themselves?
Killing themselves, because death was in every picture. The first one hinted at it, the end of Eden, but it loomed larger and larger as the sequence progressed, so that by the end, it was impossible not to think of famine, concentration camps. The woman in the last picture was near death, no doubt, but she seemed also, Rowan thought, to personify it, to be it, with that raw, hideous mouth – that maw. Here is suffering, said the painting, here is pain. Here is the end of hope.
Going up on the roof had been Rowan’s idea. The summer they left school, there had been a heat wave that lasted three weeks, the temperature in the high eighties day after day, the sky deep and cloudless. They’d spent most of their time sprawled on blankets on the lawn but at four o’clock every afternoon, the sun had disappeared behind the gable and thrown the garden into shade. After a week, Rowan had started looking at the flat roof above Marianne’s bedroom and wondering if the sun stayed longer up there. Eventually she’d persuaded her they should find out.
The first time, they’d moved a chest of drawers under the skylight and pulled themselves up; but when they saw the view, they’d made a trip to Homebase to buy the stepladder now propped against the wall by the sink.
Arms above her head, Rowan shoved the hatch open. The ladder wobbled under her as she climbed gingerly on to the top step and put her hands either side of the opening. As she clambered out, she felt a physical echo: Marianne must have done exactly this the night she died.
The daylight was fading quickly now, the sun almost set. She moved away from the hatch and waited for her eyes to adjust. Along the backs of the houses, the gardens were dark, the branches of the trees like black coral in silhouette against the sky. In the three-storey block of flats in Benson Close, the little dead-end street behind, the windows glowed yolk-yellow.