‘Please don’t do that again.’
Greenwood’s anger had soured the air in the house and she was glad to pull the door closed behind her. The relief was short-lived, however, and as she crossed the road to the car, the uneasiness returned as a sort of hyper-awareness, a prickling at the back of her neck as if she were being watched. She even turned to look but of course no one was there.
She started the engine without a destination in mind, wanting just to put some distance between herself and the house, but she found herself heading down through the centre of town, past the Randolph Hotel and Worcester College. At the bottom of Hythe Bridge Street, she surprised herself by turning left.
For years now, she’d avoided this part of town if she ever had to come to Oxford. There were some happy memories – a few good evenings with Marianne and Turk at the Head of the River and, at university, she’d gone out for a month or so with a guy from Pembroke who’d lived just over the bridge – but for the most part, she associated it with loneliness and abandonment and, later, overwhelming claustrophobia. Today, however, as she passed the end of Vicarage Road, she made herself look. There was the Crooked Pot on the corner, an ugly mean-windowed building never meant to be a pub, and beyond it, in two diminishing terraces, the jumble of houses, some still brick-fronted, others plastered and painted, that had included her father’s. Hers. Theirs, she supposed.
She accelerated away, waiting until she’d passed the end of Norreys Avenue before she inhaled again, as if even breathing the air of Vicarage Road was enough to carry her back there. University College sports ground on her left, the allotments, and then the untidy snaggle of shops and low houses that lined the unlovely way out of town.
At the junction with Weirs Lane, she averted her eyes.
Boar’s Hill was another world: detached houses set back from the road behind huge established trees and security gates, a Jaguar on this drive, a Range Rover on the next. She’d never really known who lived here. The Oxford houses she understood were low-key and book-filled, slightly shabby even if they sold for millions, but these were ostentatious, many of them modern, the sort of houses she imagined Premier League footballers buying.
The top of the hill was different again, however. Here, the trees ended and the vista opened up: rolling fields of drab winter grass, scrubby hedgerows. English countryside unchanged for a hundred years. There was a single car at the side of the road, a red Nissan Micra, its owner nowhere to be seen. She parked behind it, locked up and went over the stile into the field.
A couple of hundred yards from the road, she climbed to the top of the hill and perched on the wooden fence. The ends of her scarf flapped behind her, twin flags in the wind that drove the cloud across the sky, a tumble of white and grey so low Rowan felt she could reach up and touch it.
The view was a green patchwork quilt, the fields ancient and irregular, stitched roughly together, darned here and there with copses and knots of tiny houses. Four or five miles away, in the shallow dish carved by its rivers, the rooftops and spires of the postcard Oxford floated above a foam of distant trees like the vision of a place, a mirage. Such a small patch of land, a few square miles, and yet how much it contained, so much struggle and striving, Sturm and Drang.
She took deep breaths, pulling cold air into her chest. The conversation with Greenwood had disturbed her – she still felt shaken. The suddenness and strength of his anger, so barely contained, had been frightening. Had Marianne known that side of him, had he unleashed it on her? Could that have been why she jumped, or part of it? Rowan examined the idea, turning it round in her mind, but it didn’t feel right. She didn’t believe that Marianne, with her upbringing, her deeply engrained belief in a woman’s right to security and self-governance, would stay with a man who intimidated her. She wasn’t alone or without resources; she didn’t have children to consider: if she’d been in a bad relationship, she would have left.
Of course, the person who would know was Bryony but even if she ignored Greenwood’s request, if that was the right word for it, and went to the school again, Rowan doubted Bryony would talk to her. She’d made it clear she was loyal to her father.
Another avenue of investigation closed, another person – two people – pissed off. Rowan focused her eyes on the glimmering view of the city. The other person who might know about Marianne’s relationship was Adam but it had been three days now without a word. Lying in bed last night, the silence in the house thickening, she’d wondered if something had happened to him. Had there been an accident? Exhausted and hungover, had he crashed the car? No – she’d stopped herself. She would have heard about it, someone would have called. Nothing had happened; he just didn’t want to talk to her.
Twenty-five