Light was Rowan’s first impression – light shining on long straight hair, flashing off a silver bracelet. The sun was behind her, outlining the shape of her head and a crown of tiny new hairs round her temples. She wore a simple shirtdress in blue and white cotton with a woven tan belt and a pair of gold Grecian sandals that Rowan knew were from Accessorize because she’d seen them herself during one of her aimless post-exam afternoons. They’d been cheap, Accessorize was, but this woman made them look as if she’d bought them on Bond Street. Was it her posture, the way she seemed naturally to stand straight, her shoulders back, chin up?
She’d adjusted the bottle of wine and the straw clutch bag tucked under her arm and smiled. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Am I in the right place for Seb’s party? I’m Lorna.’
Rowan’s brain, so recently afloat on a sea of endorphins, had lit up like an old-fashioned switchboard. The last time she’d seen Seb for lunch had been at the end of April – ‘Before you disappear down the Finals rabbit hole,’ as he’d written in the note she’d found in her pigeonhole. They’d met in the University Parks and walked for half an hour or so by the river and under the cherry trees, then frothy with blossom. ‘Like frilly pink knickers at the Folies Bergères,’ he’d said, making her laugh. They’d had lunch at the Rose and Crown in North Parade, where the beer garden had been warm enough for them to sit outside comfortably for the first time that year, the vines on the trellises offering their tender green leaves to the sun.
She’d known almost immediately that day that there was a new woman on the scene. He’d had the exaggerated lightness of movement and touch that he always had, the extra quickness of wit. She’d thought before – by then, she’d come to know the signs as well as Marianne did – that there was something puppyish about Seb in the first weeks of a new affair as if, waking up, he was raising his head and seeing the world afresh again, all his faculties rendered hypersensitive. Perhaps it was the knowledge that he was behaving badly that made him channel so much of that energy towards other people and their well-being or maybe he’d just wanted everyone to feel as good, as alive, as he did. He’d been particularly great that day, distracting her with an outrageous bit of gossip about a writer whom she’d met over supper at Fyfield Road, reassuring her that no one – it wasn’t possible – could read everything on the exhaustive reading lists that her tutor handed out twice a week. ‘I know you,’ he said, ‘so I know that when you say you haven’t done enough work, you’ll have done twice as much as anyone else. You’ll do well – very well. We’re all rooting for you so in moments of doubt, just think of us at Fyfield Road cheering you on.’
He’d never been able to refrain from talking about or at least alluding to whomever it was he was seeing. ‘Mentionitis,’ Marianne had said a couple of years previously when he’d had an enthusiasm for an English grad from Somerville he’d met at a coffee concert at the Sheldonian. ‘Acute. Pathetic.’
As she led Lorna down the stairs, Rowan remembered how Seb had told her about an incredible woman he’d met at the lab, the experiments she’d been running as part of her doctoral work on language development. She hadn’t yet finished writing the thesis itself, he said, but she’d already published articles in several august publications and she’d been invited to lecture at a conference in Sydney the following month at which Seb was the keynote speaker. The previous Christmas, quite independently, Rowan had heard him talking to a colleague about a groundbreaking research project at UCL. It turned out, he said, excited, that the woman at the lab – her name was Lorna – had been headhunted for a job there. She’d start when she finished her PhD.
‘The one saving grace about Dad’s inability to keep it in his trousers,’ Marianne had told her the first afternoon they’d talked about Seb’s affairs, ‘is that he doesn’t get involved with bimbos. All his women have brains, at least.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I do my research,’ Marianne had said, trying to play it off as nothing. ‘I Google.’
Rowan had never looked up one of Seb’s women before – she didn’t want the pictures in her head, these girls with the man who’d become her surrogate father – but the way Seb talked about this one was different. Usually, he was fond, smiling, but that afternoon at the Rose, she’d heard respect in his voice, an admiration that went beyond physical attraction. She’d felt almost as if he were trying to convince her of this woman’s excellence, sell her the idea. Back at college, she’d gone online. What she’d read had done nothing to soothe the prickling of alarm but then she’d had an essay to prepare, and revision, and gradually, Seb’s new affair had slipped off her radar.