‘Okay. I’m back in Oxford for a few days and I wondered if I could buy you a drink.’
When she’d turned off the light last night, Rowan had lain awake for a long time. In the dark, the task of working out what had happened grew until it felt monumental, impossible. Her chest started to tighten but then, as she’d trained herself to do if ever she felt overwhelmed, she remembered the advice Seb gave them when they’d had a revision panic the week before A-levels. ‘Gradatim,’ he’d said. ‘Remember your Latin? Step by step.’
The call to Theo, she’d decided, would be her first step; the second was going through the two large lidded baskets she’d noticed yesterday under the worktable in Marianne’s studio. Kneeling now, she pulled the first one out into the open. It was about eighteen inches square and, when she took the lid off, she saw that it was three-quarters filled with loose paper. Looking at a couple of random points in the pile confirmed that this was where Marianne had kept her sketches, or where someone else – Jacqueline or Adam, Greenwood perhaps – had collected them since.
Marianne’s voice piped up suddenly, half amused, half incredulous. ‘You’re really going to do this? You’re going to go through my stuff?’
‘Sorry, Mazz. I have to.’
At the top, over several pieces of high-quality paper, was a study of a horse chestnut tree in its various parts: a leaf; bark; a number of conkers in different stages of growth, and then mottled, wrinkling decay. Rowan lingered on one that hadn’t been fully mature. Somehow, with lines of black ink, Marianne had captured the spiky greenness of the shell, its foamy lining and then, like a rolled eye, the blind white orb of the conker inside.
There were other studies – a dead sparrow with stiff scaled legs; a fox-fur with beads for eyes; a pair of knitted gloves – but informal sketches, too, things she seemed to have done on the hoof but liked enough to save. The back of an old window envelope had a little pencil acorn on it, and Rowan imagined Marianne standing at the hall table, the phone jammed under her ear while she drew it. Perhaps she’d picked it up on a walk and dropped it there when she came in. She’d used to do that a lot, collect small things and put them in her pockets to study later.
Most of the sketches, maybe four out of five, were preparatory work for the anorexia portraits. In charcoal, chalk and red pencil, Marianne had drawn body after body: hands, feet, shoulders and collarbones, backs, tiny breasts, forearms whose radius and ulna were like bow and string. Girls faced forward, faced away, stood or lay on their fronts and backs and sides, stretching, curled. Some of the drawings were lovely, those that still had some softness, but the ones that studied the emaciation were powerful. In a disembodied knee or forearm, she’d managed to convey both suffering and pity for it, both particularity – this knee, with its mole and fine white scar – and something universal.
‘Incredible, Mazz,’ Rowan said out loud.
When she’d seen them all, she put the sketches back in the exact same order then reached for the second basket. This one held admin paperwork and correspondence and would take a lot longer to deal with. The thatch of paper was about a foot deep and, if the top half-inch was anything to go by, without any order at all. Apparently, Marianne had simply tossed things in as she’d dealt with them or, maybe, as they’d arrived.
On top was a letter from Yale University Press requesting permission to reproduce Blood Sport II, one of the paintings from her graduation show. Underneath it, a letter from an art school in Glasgow invited Marianne to address its students. Both were dated mid-December. Had she replied? There was no way of knowing.
Two phonebook-size exhibition catalogues – one from the Met in New York, the other from Tate Britain – accounted for a good deal of the box’s weight and there were glossy brochures from numerous private views and openings as well as twenty or thirty invitations.