Shopping done, she headed back towards the centre of town but instead of going directly to the house, she turned left on Belbroughton Road and then left again.
St Helena’s occupied a redbrick building with the same Neo-Gothic architecture as Keble College. A long grey-stone wall ran the length of the site, enclosing the playground and the netball courts, and blocking any view of the ground-floor classrooms. ‘A castle’s curtain wall,’ Marianne said once.
Rowan had laughed. ‘Keeping the succulent damsels of north Oxford safe from marauding gallants.’
Some of the current damsels were playing netball; the scuff of plimsolls on asphalt and urgent calls of ‘Here!’ reached her over the top. Until she met Marianne, Rowan had spent a significant amount of time devising ways to get out of games. At thirteen and fourteen, she’d relied on the old standards – chilblains, twisted ankles – but then the fact that her father wasn’t around to write notes became an advantage. The times she’d got him to do it – she only had to say the word ‘period’ – he’d written the letters on his computer, printed them off and signed at the bottom with an indecipherable tangle of blue biro. For her fifteenth birthday, he’d given her his old laptop.
Friendship with Marianne changed her attitude. On paper Mazz had looked like the classic games-dodger but though she’d drawn the line at the human misery of hockey, she’d been enthusiastic about swimming and netball. She did it for herself, she explained, not because she was obliged to. ‘Apart from swimming, I actually don’t like sports – and I much prefer swimming in the sea. But you think better when you exercise. I sleep better and think better so I paint better, and I get it done on school time. Where’s the negative?’
The idea that your attitude could repurpose a necessary thing, turn it into something you did for yourself, was one of several subtle but key shifts that Marianne caused in Rowan’s thinking and, with each one, she felt less like a pinball batted between the twin flippers of school and her father, and more self-determining, in control.
But her relationship with the Glasses had opened her eyes in so many ways. Successful as her father was by that point, and despite the travelling, his focus somehow remained narrow, his engagement with the world confined to the sector of it in which he operated; he read the business pages, and the news for its effect on business. Jacqueline and Seb, on the other hand, were hungry for all the knowledge they could lay hands on, whether it related to their expertise or not. At Fyfield Road, newspapers and periodicals were filleted, every flake picked off the bone. They offered their opinions easily, in public forums as well as private. At an instance of gender inequality in any field, Jacqueline considered it her duty to engage. In those years, there had been several protracted scraps across the pages of the Guardian.
Rowan still detected an ‘us and them’ attitude in her father, lingering doubts about his right to be seen and heard in the world. He seemed to operate with the question, ‘Why would it be me?’ whereas, drafting an op-ed piece for the New York Times at the kitchen table one afternoon, working herself into a righteous stew, Jacqueline said, ‘If not us, girls, then who?’
He’d only met Jacqueline and Seb on two occasions: once when he’d come to a Sixth-Form parents’ evening and the second time when, to Rowan’s amazement, he’d picked her up on his way home from the airport. Seb had said a brief hello before disappearing to his study but Jacqueline had cajoled him into having a glass of wine with her and Rowan had had to endure the spectacle of her father trying to appear undaunted by Jacqueline’s intelligence and confidence, her untamed hair and bangles.
She remembered her own anxiety that he would embarrass her by saying something that highlighted the gulf between them and the Glasses, or else by morphing into Uriah Heep in the face of Jacqueline’s glory. At the same time, she’d felt proud: she, Rowan, was part of the furniture at Fyfield Road by then, accepted and liked by the whole family. The people who intimidated her father were her friends.
Until Marianne began at St Helena’s, Rowan had been waging a campaign to start boarding. At the end of Lower Fifth, three teachers wrote in her report that she seemed tired and less able than usual to concentrate. In April, just as the term had begun, someone actually had tried the front door in the middle of the night. From an upstairs window, she’d watched as the old drunk who shambled up and down their road after closing time staggered away, but she’d had weeks of insomnia afterwards. Her father dismissed it, saying Jimmy Pagnell was harmless. ‘And the only reason you go to St Helena’s is because you got a scholarship – we definitely can’t afford for you to board.’