Seb was dead. Seb was dead, and she’d lost Marianne forever.
The wall was cold against her back, and the moonlight streaming through the window over her head picked out the shapes of the canvases, areas of white and cream paint, flesh tones. She saw the last woman again, her skin pale in the half-light like something dug up from the earth: a tuber, a worm. Repulsed, Rowan stood up to go.
At the top of the stairs, however, she stopped, switched on the lights and went to the back window. She looked over to the flats in Benson Place. The first two floors were dark but light shone from the third, deep and yellow, and sure enough, as she watched, a large figure moved into view.
Her heart thumped but then she had an idea: Jacqueline used to have a pair of binoculars – where were they? She moved casually away from the window then ran down through the house. In the cupboard under the stairs, she searched the tangle of shopping bags and gardening jackets on the back of the door. They’d usually been here, hanging by their leather strap. She looked on the shelves among the cache of spare light bulbs, an old hand-vacuum, a dusty wicker basket of hats and gloves, and then among the coats on the pegs by the front door. She also drew a blank down in the kitchen, in the deep drawer where the odds and ends accumulated, old sunglasses and instruction manuals, a ball of rubber bands. Maybe Jacqueline took the binoculars with her when she moved out. They’d had sentimental value, Rowan remembered; they’d belonged to her father.
She’d have another look tomorrow, in the daylight. For now, she poured a glass of wine and carried it upstairs. She couldn’t sit on display in the kitchen, like a mouse in a laboratory cage for the man in Benson Place to observe. Who was he? How could she find out? Maybe she just had to swallow her pride – her disgust – and ring Theo: he’d know. But then she remembered how close she’d sailed to the wind with him that night. ‘Do you know something, Rowan?’ he’d asked directly. No, she couldn’t risk letting him know she was still digging, not unless she had to.
In the sitting room, she turned on the lamps, drew the curtains then called Peter Turk. The phone rang for a while and she was formulating a message when he picked up.
‘You sound echoey,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’ There was a splash, the sound of a large amount of water being displaced. ‘Oh, God, you’re in the bath. And I thought the day couldn’t get any weirder.’
‘There was a time when this would have made you the envy of thousands.’
Despite everything, she laughed. ‘What did that feel like? Knowing girls – and boys – you’d never met were fantasizing about you. I can’t imagine it.’
‘Bizarre,’ he said, and she heard water again, pictured him sliding lower, his torso filling the width of the tub. ‘I hated all that; it was really . . . unsavoury. It made me feel sleazy.’
She believed it. Even in the early days, when he and the band had played the pub circuit in Oxford and Reading, the occasional small London gig, he’d never, as far as she knew, got off with any of the girls who’d sidled up to him when he came off-stage.
‘In the nicest possible way,’ he said, ‘what do you want? My arm’s getting cold.’
‘I wanted to ask you about Michael Cory.’
‘Cory? Why?’
‘Did you know he was painting Marianne?’
‘What? No.’ A slap of water. He’d sat up again.
‘James Greenwood told me, and then he – Cory – came here this afternoon.’
‘She never told me.’
‘I don’t know how long it had been going on,’ said Rowan, hearing the hurt in his voice. ‘And the whole thing seems to have been on the down-low, as far as I can tell.’ She paused. ‘Cory’s an odd fish.’
‘No kidding.’
‘You’ve met him?’
‘Twice. Once at his show at the Greenwood, the photographs, and then there was a dinner last year, end of September, October, maybe. And he was at the funeral, obviously, but I didn’t talk to him. Hold on, I can’t have this conversation in the bath.’ There was a tapping sound as he put the phone down, a surge of water, then footsteps on tiles. A few seconds later, he picked up again. ‘Hi.’
‘Did you talk to him at the dinner?’
‘A bit, yeah, afterwards.’
‘What about?’
‘Mazz,’ he said, realisation dawning. ‘Fuck.’
‘What did you say to him?’
‘Nothing.’ He tried to remember. ‘No, nothing important – nothing personal. Just that we’d been friends for a long time – teenage misadventures, all that. Christ, and he was painting her? The sly fucker.’
‘How much do you know about him?’
‘A bit. Well, quite a bit. I read up, before the show – and the dinner, actually. I wanted to look like I knew what I was talking about.’