‘I wouldn’t dream of speaking to them.’
‘Thank you.’ Real relief in her voice. ‘Rowan, look, I know you and Marianne had lost touch with each other but you were such an important part of her life – and not just hers, all our lives.’
‘I loved her – all of you.’
‘Please come to the funeral. It feels right for you to be there. It’ll be next week, Thursday, at the crematorium in Oxford. We’d all like it if you were there. We . . .’ She stopped talking as she realised. ‘Adam and I would, I mean. Both of us. We’ve missed you. I told Marianne that she should get in touch with you again, that with proper friends, it doesn’t matter if you have a stupid row and lose touch, however long it goes on.’
‘It was my fault, too. I should have . . .’ But what? What could she have done that she didn’t?
Rowan stood phone in hand as the news reverberated through her body. Dead. She felt the grief coming closer and closer, gathering, and then it broke over her, a wave of despair. She took the few steps to the sofa, swept the books onto the floor and lay down, curling in on herself as if she were being beaten, blows raining on her head and back. Marianne was dead. Gone beyond contact forever. She would never see her or speak to her again.
She cried silently, as if the sadness were too powerful for sound. It was a physical, muscular thing: her back ached, her mouth stretched open until her cheeks hurt. She was shocked by the depth of it: she’d lost Marianne as a friend years ago; surely, after all this time, she couldn’t really have thought they would make things up, be close again. Now she knew that part of her had still hoped, had nursed the idea that one year, perhaps, there would be a Christmas card with a tentative note. But now the possibility was gone forever. This was it, the full stop. The decree absolute. And to announce it – the irony – her first contact with the Glass family for ten years.
When the tears stopped, she sat up. She felt raw, hollowed out, and when she stood, she caught sight of her swollen eyes in the cheap sixties mirror above the fireplace. Her skin looked sallow and her hair was dark at the roots, its winter colour. It had reached the length, a couple of inches below her shoulders, at which its weight killed any volume; she would have to have it cut before the funeral. She wondered if Jacqueline and Adam would think she’d changed. She doubted it: she hadn’t really. Her face was still round and unlined, never arresting and elegant as Marianne’s had been even at sixteen, but pretty in a safe, old-fashioned way she’d never particularly liked, like a girl in a Victorian soap advert.
She went to the window and raised the blind, releasing a wall of cold air that had worked its way in around the rotten sash the landlord was too mean to replace. The wind was harrying light-stained clouds across the rooftops, rattling the topmost branches of the cherry tree that had been the reason she’d taken the flat. It had been a riot of flirty blossom when the agent had shown her round. ‘Like frilly pink knickers at the Folies Bergères,’ she’d said and the woman had looked at her as if she were mad.
Across the road, blue light flickered behind the curtains of the old woman who stood at her door each morning and berated her luckless Jack Russell in a language that Rowan had never been able to identify. The street was deserted.
The snow that had fallen here on Sunday had been gone by Monday morning, ploughed up and ruined even as it was coming down, leaving everything sodden and muddy, litter and dead leaves plastered to the pavement. She pictured the garden at Fyfield Road: the lawn white over; the wide stone steps to the patio padded and pillowy; the branches of the silver birch like lace against a creamy sky. The image was crisp and clean as winter light, and Rowan felt a burst of pure longing that she quickly suppressed. The snow at Fyfield Road hadn’t been perfect. It had been lethal.
Now she made herself examine the thing that had struck her the moment she heard it: the story didn’t make sense, not, at least, the version that Jacqueline wanted to believe. Marianne couldn’t have slipped. She had vertigo, paralysing vertigo: she never went near the edge of the roof, not within twenty feet of it. Not once in all the countless times they’d been up there had she ever moved – inched – more than three feet away from the safety of the hatch. Not once.