‘It’s been translated into forty languages,’ Marianne had said as they tried to decipher his name in the different alphabets of the translated editions. ‘That one’s Hebrew. It’s sold nine million copies so far, world-wide. Weird, isn’t it? Somewhere in South Korea right now, someone might be reading Dad’s book.’
Also on the shelf was a photograph Rowan remembered, the lack of tarnish on the frame suggesting it had been recently polished. Picking it up, she looked at Seb and Jacqueline at the party celebrating the sale of the millionth UK copy of Lioness. It was like a wedding photo, the pair of them standing next to a giant cake iced to resemble the book’s cover, Seb brandishing a knife, about to cleave it in twain. They both looked so young, but then, they were. Seb had been in his early thirties when he’d written the first book, Rowan’s age now. She looked at him more closely. It was the late eighties when the photograph was taken but apart from the hair, which had a little too much volume at the front for current tastes, the picture was ageing well. Seb was wearing a classic black blazer – no risible boxy shoulders for him – and, underneath, a simple pale blue chambray shirt, the top button undone. Perhaps he’d chosen his clothes with posterity in mind; she wouldn’t have put it past him. He was laughing, shining with youth and success and acclaim, confident of all his powers, the hand without the knife resting on Jacqueline’s hip. Rowan put the frame quickly back on the shelf, the image striking her all of a sudden as prophetic. Cleaving things in twain had turned out to be a talent of Seb’s.
Seven
Compared to Jacqueline and Seb’s en suite, the bathroom shared by the other three bedrooms on the first floor was dated, even shabby, but it appeared that Marianne had been using it. A dressing gown with an embroidered hibiscus hung on the back of the door, and next to the basin were a toothbrush and paste. There were male things, too. Here on the shower shelf, a bottle of Molton Brown men’s shower gel nestled among the shampoos and conditioners, and in the cabinet Rowan had seen an electric razor. She wondered how often James Greenwood had stayed here. Marianne had lived alone; he hadn’t moved in. It seemed unusual for a couple who’d been together four years but, as Jacqueline said, Marianne had needed to be alone to work, and he had his daughter. How much time had they spent together, then, and where? The person to ask was Peter Turk. He was masochist enough to want to hear as much as Marianne would tell him about her love life, and he would have made it his business to find out about Greenwood.
Rowan turned up the temperature again and stepped closer to the showerhead. The cubicle was full of steam but she couldn’t get the chill out of her bones. Overnight, the temperature had dropped sharply; the frost on the lawn was so heavy that when she’d opened the curtains just now, she’d mistaken it for a fine layer of snow.
When it came down to it, she thought, how much did she really know about Marianne’s life in the past ten years? Beyond the little she’d gleaned at the funeral and the handful of facts in the papers, close to nothing. It was extraordinary, to know someone so well, intimately, and then not at all. She was starting almost from scratch.
Drying off, she wrapped herself in a towel and scurried down the arctic corridor to the guest room she’d chosen. It was minimally furnished, just a double bed with a patchwork cover and a small bedside table with a lamp and a pile of books – Katherine Mansfield, John Le Carré, Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters and a broken-backed copy of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There was a low chair and a framed Edward Lear print above the bed in which a man in a tailcoat danced with a giant fly, but the only furniture otherwise was the wardrobe, a huge beast with a yellowing, age-spotted mirror. When she’d opened it yesterday, its cavernous insides had jangled with empty hangers but last night she had unpacked, hung up her clothes and put the few precious things she hadn’t wanted to leave in London on the deep top shelf.
She dressed in jeans and a thick sweater then went down to the kitchen where she had toast and coffee at the table, surrounded by memories of other breakfasts. In those days, though, she would never have spent the night in a guest room; she’d slept on an airbed in Marianne’s room so they could talk in the dark. On clear nights, they’d left the blinds open so that the moon shone in and picked out the shapes of the furniture, their hands and faces, with its ethereal white light. Marianne’s idea, of course: she’d had a gift for that kind of alchemy, for transforming the everyday into something memorable, otherworldly.
Reaching for her laptop, Rowan Googled a number then tapped it into her phone. When the call was answered, she gave her name and asked for Theo Marsh.
His direct line only rang twice before he picked up. ‘Rowan?’ he said. ‘This is a blast from the past. How are you?’