When Rowan looked at Marianne, she’d shrugged. ‘He’s been like that since I got home.’
With planks from the shed, they constructed an ersatz buffet table and covered it with the Greek lace tablecloths Jacqueline had inherited from an aunt. They made bowl after bowl of salad and ran around putting out glasses and silverware, boards for nuts and cheese. Rowan sawed French bread until she felt as if she was developing tennis elbow. ‘Major health issue among the middle classes,’ said Adam, washing the barbecue tools. ‘Along with carpal-tunnel from lobster-crackers and choking on the olive in one’s third martini.’
At two o’clock, Seb came downstairs, plugged the phone back in and went outside to the bath. Fishing out a beer, he knocked off the cap against the patio wall and took a long pull. As he lowered the bottle, he caught sight of the pair of undergraduates corralled at Marianne’s insistence to man the grill.
‘Jesus, Jacks,’ he said, ‘is someone getting married?’
The first guests arrived as Rowan came down from getting changed. Standing at the sink to wash lettuce for a final salad, she watched Seb through the window. His editor at the Observer had already emailed an enthusiastic thumbs-up but Seb hadn’t relaxed like he usually did after a deadline. Here was his party avatar, voluble and charismatic, but there was an energy about him today that she couldn’t isolate, a potential, a glinting edge.
The patio doors were wide open and his frequent laughter carried into the kitchen. He wore jeans and a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, its cotton softened and faded as if by countless summers on yachts off Capri. If you didn’t know otherwise, she thought, you’d have guessed he was thirty. Jacqueline had chosen a green sundress she’d bought on their honeymoon in Istanbul twenty-five years ago, she said, and a pair of cork-heeled wedges that her old Sussex crony Miriam Jacobs had talked her into buying after a boozy lunch in Spitalfields the previous week. She was trying not to look as if she cared too much but twice Rowan caught her surreptitiously turning her ankle to admire them.
‘Miriam is a good influence,’ Seb had said a couple of years earlier, when Jacqueline returned from London with a pair of black cigarette pants and a biker jacket. ‘Without her periodic interventions, you’d still be wearing the things you had at college.’
‘I am still wearing some of them,’ Jacqueline replied. ‘If I could get into them, I’d wear more.’
The lawn quickly filled with people. By half-past three, the barbecue was running at capacity, Jacqueline’s first-years red-faced with heat and the pressure of maintaining a constant supply of lamb and grilled chicken. As they carried out the last two trays of raw meat, Rowan felt like a lion-tamer or a city steward tasked with keeping a ravening monster at bay, outside the gates. ‘Mum deliberately downplayed it,’ said Marianne in a low voice. ‘Again. Just counting the families, I’ve got seventy-four.’
They were sick of food and too hot so they ate nothing themselves and plunged straight in to the middle of the crowd. Over the past seven years, Rowan had come to know a lot of the Glasses’ friends, and they asked about her exams and what she was planning to do next. Seb, she was touched to discover, had told several people about her job with Robin Poretta at the BBC. ‘Of course,’ he said, when she mentioned it. ‘I’m boasting – I want to bask in your glory.’ He’d glanced over her shoulder as he spoke, as if he were looking for someone.
Afterwards, she remembered that hour as euphoric, hyper-real: the heat, the wine, the sense of belonging, being part of the team that had somehow pulled the party together, while the promise of the future unfurled like a banner against the exhilarating blue of the sky. She’d felt it in her chest, the expansion: a joyful growing pressure.
She should have known.
It was pure chance that it was she who opened the door. She’d been talking to Nina Dowling, a former protégée of Jacqueline’s who was tutoring at Trinity, and she had only gone inside to go to the loo. The bell rang as she jogged up the stairs from the kitchen. Hearing the din from the garden, those who knew the Glasses well were letting themselves in through the side gate so whoever this was, she thought, wasn’t part of the inner circle.