With a crack, Rowan yanked the blind shut. Her heart beat against her ribs as she left the front room and went down the narrow landing, feeling the usual rush of cold as she opened her bedroom door. Stooping, she moved her hand gently through the darkness until she touched the hessian shade of the bedside lamp. Down on her knees on the old rag rug, she cast around beneath the bed until her fingertips found the glossy cardboard box. She paused then pulled it out into the light.
For a minute she looked but didn’t touch. Originally it had held printing paper, the expensive ivory stuff she’d bought at Ryman’s in her final year at university when she started thinking about job applications. In August last year, when she’d split up with Anders and packed the car, she’d chocked it carefully next to her on the passenger seat, within arm’s reach, but she couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d opened it. Over the years, it seemed to have become heavier, and it had power now, a presence. Hearing the pulse of blood in her ears, she had the idea that it wasn’t her heart that was beating but the box’s: open, open, open.
‘Marianne’s dead, Rowan.’
Quickly she picked up the box and turned it over. The Sellotape was yellowing, and when she tried to peel it off, little dry shards of it stabbed the tender flesh under her thumbnail. There was a small whoomph of suction as she lifted the lid.
On top was a wad of tissue to hold the contents in place. Immediately underneath, fingers curling towards its palm, was a hand – her hand: the short round nails, the pronounced vein over the knuckle of her index finger, the teardrop scar on her thumb that she’d had since the age of five when, Mrs Roberts’ attention focused on one of her afternoon chat shows, no doubt, Rowan had put her fist through the glass in the kitchen door. The drawing was black and white, just ink on a page torn from a spiral-bound sketchbook, but it had energy, reality: it brought the hand to life. Even someone who’d never seen an artist’s work before would have known this was good. No, not good – exceptional.
Her hand rested, palm up, on a single line that ended in a whorl like the top of a fiddlehead fern: the arm of that button-back chair. Into Rowan’s head came a vivid snatch of memory. A Saturday morning in late May or the first week in June, the air already warm at nine o’clock. Marianne wore a red-and-white striped Breton T-shirt and her denim dungarees; her hair was in a knot on the top of her head. Green Flash tennis shoes grungy with age; no socks. The chair had been standing on the pavement outside a house in Observatory Street. It was antique, with lovely arms and ball-and-claw feet, but it had been reupholstered in tarty cherry-red velvet and overstuffed to the point where it looked positively buxom. Marianne had stopped; she’d always had an appreciation of the dissonant.
‘How would you describe it?’ she asked. It was a game they played all the time, challenging each other: describe that colour; that sky, that man.
‘Strikingly incongruous – a lady of the night dragged blinking from the knocking shop into the light of a Christian morning,’ Rowan said.
Marianne laughed. ‘Exactly.’ She put her hand out and stroked the velvet. ‘I love it. I want to paint it.’
‘Take it,’ said a disembodied voice, and they’d turned round to see a man in jeans and a baseball cap standing in the doorway. ‘Seriously. It was my aunt’s. I’ve never liked it – that’s why I put it out. If you want it, it’s yours.’
They’d lugged it back to Fyfield Road, one arm each. The size and heft of it. ‘Like trying to carry an old drunk,’ Marianne said. It had taken them an hour and a half to go less than a mile and the episode had assumed an epic quality: Marianne and Rowan versus The Chair. There was blood when Marianne cut her finger on a rough piece of wood under the seat, sweat, and tears of hysterical laughter when they’d finally reached the house and Adam, opening the door, said, ‘Why didn’t you ring? I would have come with the car.’
Suddenly the drawing blurred and Rowan swiped her hand across her eyes. The pain in her chest was intensifying. How could Marianne be dead?
She lifted the drawing out of the box by its edges and laid it in the circle of lamplight on the rug. Underneath was another drawing of her hand, this time holding a Victorian glass etched with swallows in flight, their tails tiny tapering Vs. In the next, her palms were pressed together as if she were praying; in the one underneath that, she was holding an old paperback Heart of Darkness.