He shrugged. ‘Busy – the writing and . . . Ro, I’m so sorry I wasn’t in touch earlier.’
At college, even in her twenties, she might have said it didn’t matter, waved it away as nothing, but now, wiser, she kept quiet.
‘As I said last night, I needed to get my head straight before I talked to you. I needed to work out what I was doing, whether I was . . .’ He rubbed his thumb over a watermark on the base of his glass. ‘But I’m sorry. I can see it was selfish. I didn’t mean to leave you hanging.’
‘Did you?’ she said. ‘Get your head straight?’
‘I think so. Yes. It’s . . .’ He looked at her. ‘I felt guilty. I felt happy on Friday and it felt wrong. Disloyal – to Marianne.’
‘Disloyal?’
‘It didn’t feel right, being happy about something so soon after her death, and for us to be together there, at the house . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think I would have done it if we hadn’t drunk so much.’
Rowan felt as if she’d been slapped. Blood rushed to her face, and even in the low light, Adam saw it. ‘God, no, no, that’s not what I meant! I meant, it shouldn’t have been there, at the house, not that I wouldn’t have . . . Aaargh.’ He put his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. When he looked up again, his expression was composed. ‘Let me do this the other way around. I like you a lot, Rowan, and I always have. On Friday I was happy, I felt like I’d finally got the opportunity to do something I wanted to do – should have done – a long time ago, but then I thought: am I some kind of monster, thinking about myself, a new relationship, when my sister has been dead less than a month? When the woman I like was my sister’s best friend.’
‘I know.’
‘And what I told you about Mazz asking me not to pursue things with you back then . . .’
Rowan thought of her father, the relationship he’d carried on with Jessica for four years, it turned out, before that lunch at the Randolph; the weeks when he’d been not in Lima or Buenos Aires, as he’d claimed, but a small village in Kent. ‘Adam, it’s all right,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to explain.’
‘No, I do.’
‘It was bad timing – you said on Friday. It’s one of those things; you don’t have to . . .’
‘What I’m trying to say,’ he cut her off, ‘is that I don’t think Marianne would mind. Now. Back then, when you two were so close, when we were younger, I can see why she wouldn’t have liked it, her brother and her best friend, but now – especially now – there’s no clash.’
‘I . . .’
‘I think she’d be pleased. If we can find something good in all this . . . I mean, if you want to, of course; I don’t know how you feel at all . . .’ He made another strangled sound. ‘I’m bad at this.’
She laughed, a soaring feeling in her chest. Steady, she cautioned herself, at least try to play it cool, but when he reached across and squeezed her hand, she felt herself grin like a fool.
‘With everything else that happened on Friday,’ he said, ‘I didn’t tell you but a couple of weeks before it happened, just after Christmas, Mazz and I had a drink and she mentioned – only briefly: she said it and then the conversation changed direction or her phone rang, I don’t remember – but she said she wanted to get in touch with you again. To sort out what happened back then.’
Rowan stiffened. ‘Did she?’
‘I don’t know whether you know or not but she’d become good friends with Michael Cory, the artist. They met through James, at the gallery.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That was what I wanted to say to you on Friday before we . . . got distracted. He’s been in touch with me – he’s been to the house, wanting to talk about her. He’s painting her portrait, Adam.’
She waited for the look of horror or else a gradual realisation as he worked through the implications but instead he nodded. ‘I know. She talked to me about it.’
‘You weren’t worried?’
‘About his reputation? No. You’ve met him?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you know it’s all a load of crap, then, the stuff about him setting out to destroy people. Undoing them – I love that idea, it sounds so Victorian, doesn’t it? All corsets and repression, like he’s some devil with a waxed moustache going round loosening stays. I haven’t met him yet – actually, he left a message on my phone earlier, while I was driving . . .’
‘Did he?’
‘Mazz said he was a good man. Sound was her word – she said she trusted him.’
‘I don’t know, Adam. I mean . . .’
‘Apparently the stuff about him and psychology is true, though. She said she shouldn’t have bothered seeing the shrinks back then, when she had her breakdown; she should just have called him.’
Adam had found a parking spot in Broad Street where, he told Rowan, developing a sudden interest in the empty picnic tables outside the window, the car could stay overnight.
‘So . . . ?’ She raised an eyebrow.