Altogether, she had seven sketches of her hands but, over the years, Marianne must have drawn forty or fifty in pencil and charcoal, pen and ink, some done quickly, impromptu, on the back of an envelope; some carefully posed and laboured over. That was how she worked: she drew things again and again and again until she was satisfied, until what was on the paper reflected her mental conception in every detail. Also in the box were several drawings each of an intricate silver vinaigrette that had come down through Seb’s side of the family; of a plate of blemished windfalls; and then of the grey-striped cat that used to climb over the wall from the Dawsons’ place. Jacqueline was allergic but Marianne had let it into the kitchen one afternoon and it made a beeline for the sofa where her mother liked to read.
‘Read?’ Marianne’s voice all of a sudden, deep, dust-dry and as immediate as if she were sitting on the bed, released from the box along with the pictures. ‘Nap, you mean. Let’s have some honesty here.’
Rowan felt herself smile and her eyes filled with tears. She caught them quickly with her cuff before they could fall and damage the sketch. For the first time, it occurred to her that, quite apart from their personal significance, the drawings might be valuable. Even the paintings in Marianne’s first exhibition had gone for several thousand pounds each and she was almost unknown then. And now, of course, there was a finite amount of her work: that would have a huge effect on prices.
So far all the drawings had been A4-sized or smaller – here was a holly-leaf skeleton on pale blue Basildon Bond notepaper, its tracery of veins cobweb-fine – but towards the bottom of the box was a thick piece of paper folded several times. Rowan opened it gently and laid it out on the bed; at its full extent, it was perhaps five feet long.
There she was, drawn in charcoal, her nineteen-year-old self, naked. She was sitting on a kitchen stool, facing away, bare heels hooked over the upper rung, head bowed so that her face was hidden from view, her hair tied up, because Marianne wanted to study the ‘machinery’, as she’d called it, of her neck and back: the muscle, the round ball of bone at the top of her spine, the twin tendons where her neck met her shoulders. Her scapulae were sharply delineated, their edges shadowed with hatching. Had she weighed less then? She looked at her neck and thought how narrow it was, how vulnerable.
Her neck.
The drawing had been made late in the year, maybe already December, and just before they’d started, while they’d been eating lunch at the kitchen table, a cloudburst had strafed the garden with hail. The house was cold; the space heater had to be on for half an hour before Marianne’s room was warm enough for Rowan to undress.
The drawing had taken the whole afternoon and, eyes fixed on the floor, Rowan had watched her tripod shadow deepen and stretch like a spill of viscous ink in the fading winter light. Marianne worked without talking, the silence broken only by the low whirr of the heater and the scuff of her feet as she shifted position at the easel. Whenever the heater cut out, which was often, Rowan could hear the scratch of charcoal on paper and Marianne’s breathing. She’d synchronised her own so they breathed together, in and out, in and out, and it had become a meditation. Her mind had emptied but she’d become hyper-aware of her body: the tiny hairs on her arms that stood up just before the heater clicked back in, the straightness of her spine, the tendons in her feet tensed against the curve of the rung. Time became fluid, she imagined it eddying around the legs of the stool, and then she’d had the idea that what they were doing was creating someone else, a third person in the space between them: the image that Marianne was making on the paper using her own brain and eyes, and Rowan’s body.
Kneeling on the rug now, Rowan bent her head until her forehead touched the sketch. The pain in her chest had spread to her stomach. She sat up and traced a finger down the charcoal line of her back, over the curve of her haunch, the rounded square of a shoulder. Marianne’s hand had been here, brushing the paper as she drew the lines to make this other person, the shadow Rowan who would be nineteen and her friend forever.
She sat back on her heels. However valuable they were, she wouldn’t sell the sketches unless it was literally a case of starving otherwise.
And even if she were starving, there was one she would never let go. It was still in the box, the last one, wrapped in several layers of tissue of its own and carefully Sellotaped. She lifted it out gently. Like the others, it was featherweight, just a single sheet of paper torn from a sketchbook, but resting it between her hands, Rowan could feel how solid it was, how heavy. She turned it over and examined the old tape but there was no need to undo it and look at the drawing inside. It was enough just to know it was there.
Two