‘Are you?’
‘I’ve booked a hotel. I’ve just driven up from London now, I came straight here, so I’m going to go and check in but I’ll come by again tomorrow. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’
Sixteen
She listened as he crunched away across the gravel. She’d been standing in exactly the same spot, naked bar the patchwork quilt, when Theo stamped off home to his wife. She shuddered at the memory, and as she did, the telephone started ringing. There had only been two calls since she’d been here, one a gas supplier scouting for new business, the other Miriam Jacobs, Jacqueline’s old roommate from her undergraduate days at Sussex, who’d just returned from a kibbutz, heard the news and phoned in a panic, having failed to get Jacqueline on her mobile. When she picked up this time, Rowan was surprised to hear Adam’s voice.
‘You’re in,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d probably be at the library.’
‘I haven’t actually got there yet.’
‘One of those days?’ Before she could clarify, he said, ‘I wanted to give you a call: I’ve been in touch with Savills to ask if they’ll value the house and they’ve suggested Friday morning. I don’t know what time you usually leave but I wondered if you’d mind letting them in? It won’t take long, apparently. I’m sorry, it’s a pain and . . .’
‘No, it’s absolutely fine. No problem.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course. And if there’s anything else, will you let me know? I’m watering the plants.’
‘Oh, yes – thank you. I totally forgot about that. Actually, though, I had another reason for calling. I’ve got to be in Oxford again on Friday, I’m coming to see Marianne’s solicitor, but not until later, the afternoon – I won’t be able to get there any earlier. Anyway, I wondered whether you were doing anything.’
For a moment, she was confused. Did he want her to go with him?
‘In the evening, I mean,’ he said, ‘afterwards. Can I take you out to dinner?’
Rowan saw him on the stairs ahead of her, the moon through the landing window casting him in silhouette, Blondie’s Atomic booming up from the ground floor. Of course he wasn’t thinking about that, though. Even if he was single, he was grieving. He’d just lost his only sister.
‘As a thank you,’ he said, as if he’d read her mind, ‘from us both, Mum and me.’
‘You don’t need to thank me. But yes, I’d love to.’
A blanket of heavy white cloud had covered the sky since the morning but while Cory had been at the house, the wind had picked up and driven it away. When she reached the studio again, the setting sun was a ball of brilliant orange. It poured through Adam’s old window, filling the room with a peachy light that looked balmy and inviting but in fact offered no warmth at all.
One by one, she examined the paintings again. The girl on the chair with her unsettling smile and that luscious red apple: a low-calorie food but temptation, too, of course. Into Rowan’s head came the lines of a poem she’d learned at school. If you should meet a crocodile / Don’t take a stick and poke him; / Ignore the welcome in his smile . . . The second girl was sitting on the floor, her body tucked tightly into a corner. A book balanced on her bony knees, but she stared into middle-distance with a look in her eyes that was either dreamy or glazed. The third, incrementally smaller, hunched over a desk, her little head clamped between a pair of bright red Beats headphones. Hollow cheeks and, etched either side of her mouth, the faint beginnings of the lines Rowan thought of as anorexic parentheses. For as he sleeps upon the Nile, / He thinner gets and thinner.
The final picture was propped directly opposite the window, and it glowed as if the light were coming not from outside but from within it. She approached slowly, as if the tiny wasted figure curled on the floor might find a final desperate burst of energy and lunge out, snarling. That mouth – maw, she’d thought, the first time she’d seen it – all black and angry red, the missing teeth. She’d interpreted it as slack, open because its owner had no energy to close it, to suggest hunger, but now it was a scream, The Scream, a stretched O of fear and anguish turned towards the lovely varnished floor because there was no point in crying out any more: no one could help.
Cory was right. Of course he was right.
She remembered what Turk said about Marianne taking on her father’s guilt as a way of staying close to him. Self-flagellation, he’d called it. ‘She thought that if she pushed herself to breaking point, denied herself everything, even her health, she could pay. Atone.’
Consumed, destroyed from the inside out.