11

Much to M’Synder’s consternation, Corvin persuaded me to join him on some cross-country runs over the hills and down into the various secluded valleys that cut into them from the east. One evening as we huffed and puffed up the muddy lane I heard again the sound of my mother’s old lawnmower, and we turned to see a single round headlight bobbing after us through the dusk. We waited outside the cottage, standing in our mud-spattered shorts like two sweaty, steaming, curly-haired schoolboys, until the familiar car lurched to a halt. A slim figure got out, indistinct behind the headlight’s glare, lifted a small case from the boot and stepped forward.

‘Hi,’ said Rose, glancing sharply at Corvin as though she hadn’t expected him, but recovering quickly. ‘Wow, you boys turned out in your Sunday best,’ she added, looking us up and down. ‘I feel honoured.’ She herself was wearing a long printed skirt and prim dark jacket. Corvin bowed and took her case as the car swung into its turn and gave a coy farewell toot.

‘I’ll be takin’ that,’ said M’Synder sternly at the door, looking down at Corvin’s sodden trainers and barring his way. ‘What have you done to my respectable lodger?’ He bowed again without speaking, the lamplight showing off a big black beauty-spot of mud on his cheek, then jogged away into the dusk leaving us only the fading tick, tock, tick of his feet pounding the track.

‘I talked them into giving me early release,’ said Rose later, when I was once again respectable, scrubbed, pink-cheeked, damp-haired and fragrant in my smart pullover. ‘A week of private study before the holidays.’

‘Oh well, our Mr Browne knows all about that,’ said M’Synder, winking at me. ‘He’d be teacher’s pet for sure, if there was a teacher. Bunched over his notebook all evening, copyin’ out little squiggles that nobody reads, in a language that nobody speaks.’

‘Well,’ I began, valiantly casting about for a riposte, ‘I suppose the word squiggle comes from squirm, which comes from worm, which comes from the Old English wyrm, which is surely related to the Latin vermis, which is in turn related to the Greek rhomox. So you speak the language, for one.’ M’Synder looked unconvinced.

‘Squiggle from rhomox,’ laughed Rose, taking her seat beside me. ‘That’s pushing it. You’d do better to remind her that it’s the language of the New Testament — although that was Common, not Attic Greek.’

‘It’s all Gree— oh, never mind,’ muttered M’Synder, helping herself to the salt.

The constant sight of Rose’s jagged scar, for which, according to Corvin, she had always refused reconstructive surgery, troubled me even more now that I knew its precise origin — I could not rid my mind of imaginings of the avalanche, of the idea of being trapped, buried alive, hearing the faint, desperate thuds of a steel edge. The scarf she had just hung on the hook in the hall — was it the same one? Why not, let it be — the longest of those red lines drawn against the terror of oblivion.

‘Doctor Comberbache will certainly make sure you keep your word, and do your studyin’,’ said M’Synder pointedly, serving us slices of forced rhubarb crumble with custard.

‘Oh, I’ll be sketching, mostly,’ replied Rose. ‘You know, making studies. That’s what I meant.’

‘Hm. Well, per’aps you should show Mr Browne the pictures in your room — he’s quite the connoisseur, y’know.’ Rose turned to me just as the doctor had at the door of the temple.

‘Alright,’ she said.

I suppose I had imagined that Rose’s room would be similar to my own — plain and squarish, but instead it was long and narrow, with a bed jammed across the far end and furniture crowded along each side so that there was barely room to walk between. Laden shelves leaned precariously over the bed and a small writing desk stood at a window overlooking the lane, the ragged hedge and the stream beyond. But of course it is the pictures that I remember most — swarming over the walls, stacked under the bed, leaning against the wardrobe and pinned to its doors.

‘Do you consider it a kind of communication, like writing?’ I asked, looking from one to the next. I was thinking of Furey trapped in his garret, dreaming of recognition: they were the same age. Rose stood with her arms folded, watching me. She shrugged at my question.

‘Communion is a better word — between my own selves, maybe,’ she replied. ‘It allows me to orientate myself. It allows me to — listen to my past and address my future.’

‘Alas, not the reverse!’ I said. ‘So, a kind of diary in pictures? But you paint for other people as well, don’t you?’

‘It allows of that too,’ she answered, simply.

Two pictures in particular caught my eye. One was a bold watercolour hanging by the door — a pink rose against a wash of dappled green, with the petals torn away on one side. The tones of those remaining deepened from a pale base to a narrow fringe of scarlet pressing up against the massed green tint of the background, defying the tendency of watery things to merge and diffuse, maintaining an edge.

‘My self-portrait,’ she said, with one eyebrow raised. ‘It was painted a couple of years ago, so perhaps you don’t recognise me.’

‘I do,’ I said, smiling. The other was a vivid portrait in crayon on grey paper, hanging over the bed: a man of about thirty in half-profile, executed in two colours — chocolate brown for the shadows and cool sky blue for the highlights. A neat, handsome man with dark hair clipped short and a ruminative curl to his lips, looking out of the side of the picture and perhaps nodding slowly: ready to act, but in no hurry. I stepped closer and leaned to read some words written in crayon across the bottom corner: ‘Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, nor altar heap’d with flowers.’

‘Your father?’ I said, and she nodded curtly.

‘It was done from a photograph.’

On the day before the equinox the slow, resonant clip of Juliet’s footsteps rang once again in the hall and the company was complete for what Frizzo the Clown had called the last blast.

‘Mr Browne!’ she said, pausing in mid-stride when she passed me in the dining room. Her hair was still half-caught in the collar of her cardigan, and the three slender frown lines deepened over the cool eyes. ‘Still here? What have these co-conspirators done to you? Shouldn’t you be earning a living, meeting friends and family, living a normal life?’ My lips were parted to answer when Corvin swept in behind me.

‘Move along, there,’ he said, briskly ushering me forward into the library. ‘Don’t dawdle. Oh, hello sis,’ he added, looking over his shoulder, ‘great to see you!’