Every Contact Leaves A Trace (15 page)

Cissy laughed then, shaking her head and saying, ‘You’re on. But
you’re
a jerk. You know that don’t you?’ and she turned and walked over to the bar. Towneley followed her, glancing back at his group, raising his eyebrows and grinning again, and Rachel and Anthony got up abruptly and left. Cissy saw neither of these things; she was already sitting on a stool, drumming on the bar with her fingernails, so I came back over and poured them their drinks and within an hour or so, when the two of them were as drunk as one another, Towneley felt comfortable enough to reach over and sweep back her fringe and say, ‘So how’d’you get the famous scar then?’

And that was how I discovered it had happened out at sea, with her father, on one of their sailing holidays. They were a week or so off finishing the trip, she said, when, one stormy afternoon, she’d forgotten to duck as the boom swung round. It hit her so hard she passed out. She came round to find that her father had patched her up as best he could and put her to bed down below with a bandage tight around her head. She slept it off and when later that night she came back up on deck, he took the view it was hardly worth calling sea rescue over something like that, so it wasn’t until she got back to shore that she went to hospital and had it stitched. It had been open for so long an infection had set in and it didn’t heal well, not for a while. And still, years later, it sat a bright white patch against the brownness of her face. I saw it properly that night in the Buttery bar, and it looked as though it had been scraped from her forehead with a spoon, so marked was the hollow in her skin. And then Towneley let her hair back down again and it was hidden.

We left the library then, Richard and I, after I’d told him this story, and when he suggested a stroll around the lake before our tutorial I said no thanks, and let him go alone. Instead I walked around the quad a few times, keeping half an eye on Rachel, who was still sitting on the steps with Cissy and Anthony, waiting, I supposed, for their tutorial with Harry. When the half-past bell rang out, a minute or two later, the three of them stood and turned to walk on up to the terrace. A piece of paper slipped from the pile Rachel was carrying. It floated back down the steps behind her and landed on the grass. She didn’t notice, so I called out, but none of
them
heard me. I jogged round the quad and picked up the piece of paper and followed them. I stood for a moment at the bottom of the steps and read the page I was holding. I was surprised, not having seen Rachel’s handwriting before. I don’t know what I had expected. Something grandiose, perhaps, or striking, and in purple ink rather than black maybe. What I saw instead was written in a tiny crabbed hand, perfectly even and readable but tiny nonetheless, and all in pencil. There seemed to be no paragraphing, as such, just one long stream of prose answering the question written across the top line. I’d read only the first few sentences of Rachel’s essay when a couple of students came out of Harry’s staircase talking about the tutorial they’d just had, so I let them pass and rushed up, taking the steps two at a time. And that was how I came to stand outside his door for the first time, and how I came to be too late to enter. The outer of the two doors was open, indicating Harry’s presence, but the inner door was closed on the tutorial that had already begun. The wooden panels in front of me were covered in postcards, political cartoons cut from newspapers, poems and songs and posters advertising London exhibitions. There were black and white photographs of the lake, and snatches of what looked like medieval English but could have been in any language, it was so strange to me.

As I stood there looking at the door I had a very great longing to be inside the room with the others. I thought of the door to Haddon’s study, the wood bare apart from lecture lists, or photocopies of the most recent amendments he had made to the ‘Dean’s Rules and Regulations as Currently Enacted’, a document he kept always posted there. I was about to knock on Harry’s door, to interrupt and hand over Rachel’s work and explain about having seen her drop it, when I heard the sound of laughter from inside, Rachel’s laughter, and then the others joining her, uncontrollably it seemed. Harry’s laugh rang louder than the rest, and I went back down the stairs and walked round to the porter’s lodge and put the piece of paper in Rachel’s pigeonhole.

Towards the end of the summer term of my second year though, I did knock on the door and go inside, in answer to Harry’s summons.
It
was early June, late on a Friday afternoon. He didn’t have long, he apologised, taking from his jacket pocket a gold watch on a chain and raising his glasses for a moment to look at it before gesturing to me that I should sit in the armchair facing the window. However far I went into the chair, which sat so low on the ground that I had half stumbled as I sat down, I couldn’t seem to reach the back. I panicked slightly until I felt the cushion behind me, and then I panicked again as I sensed that, in reaching it, my feet had lifted from the ground and were hovering in mid-air. I pulled myself up and perched on the edge, hunching forward so as to avoid starting the inexorable slide back again. And then I realised that because the sun was falling directly in my eyes I was unable to make out Harry’s expression, being able to see only his silhouette against the window.

‘I wonder if I might ask you to shut the curtain a little,’ I asked. He moved into the shadows on the other side of the room and said, with a half-smile that I could see clearly now he was out of the light, ‘I tend not to when I am with a student. I hope you don’t mind.’ And so we sat, the sun streaming through the glass and me holding up my hand to shield my eyes, Harry standing partly in the shadows and looking down at me, while I told him, in the most abstract terms I could think of, about my difficulties. I was acutely embarrassed. He said barely anything until I finished, when he asked me what it was like at home, in the holidays, living with my father. Was I able to work in the house with him in that state? Humiliated now to the point of positive discomfort, I said that it was something of a challenge and that, on occasions, I had felt the strain of it more than I would have wished to. He nodded, and pulled out his watch again and raised his glasses for a moment to look at it, before disappearing into a side room. He came back holding his gown and started to put it on, signalling the end of our interview. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

I heard nothing for three days, and I never found out exactly what it was that had shaken my father from his torpor, but by the end of the week my grant cheque had arrived and I was able to pay my bill. And then, on the last day of term, I received another letter
in
my pigeonhole addressing me with the ‘Esq.’ that Harry had used before, informing me that the college had considered my request for vacation accommodation and decided I was a suitable candidate. I could keep my room on through the summer, without charge. I was amazed, not having made such a request, and not having admitted to myself how much I was dreading having to spend two months in Hampshire with my father, and his drink, and his rages.

A couple of days after he’d sent me the letter, Harry put an identical one in Rachel’s pigeonhole. Because there were only a few of us staying up in College that summer, no more than a handful, Rachel and I became aware of one another’s presence almost immediately. On the very first morning she interrupted my solitary breakfast by walking into Hall and, to my surprise, sitting down beside me. ‘Hello,’ she said. When I said nothing in response, she smiled and carried on. ‘Looks like you’ll have to make do with me if you want any company this summer.’

I said hardly anything that day, being uncertain what to make of her approach. On the second morning I assumed she’d think better of it and go for breakfast at another time, or that perhaps she’d make a point of sitting on the other side of Hall and ignoring me. But she did the same thing again, and the next day, and the day after that, and eventually I grew comfortable in her presence, and realised they would carry on happening, these breakfast conversations, and that Rachel was enjoying them as much as I was. At that stage, I knew nothing of the circumstances which had led to her needing accommodation over the vacation, and despite the amount of time we ended up spending together that summer, and the intimacy that grew up between us, the opportunity somehow never arose for me to ask her why she was there, and why she hadn’t gone home to Evie instead.

And that was a question I never did put to her. At the very beginning of October, as soon as the Michaelmas term began, Rachel dropped me just as suddenly as she had picked me up. I was shocked of course, and hurt. Devastated, even. Richard only laughed when I told him, asking me why I had thought she would treat me any
differently
from the way she treated everyone else, and going on to make sure that as many people as possible knew that I had been ‘Cardanined’. I took my consolation, such as it was, not from his rather brutal attempts to align me with what he described as most of the male population of the college, but from the fact that Rachel, from that point on, seemed to lead an almost entirely solitary life. Cissy had gone back to America at the end of what had apparently only ever been a two-year exchange programme, although I was sure I had heard her in the Buttery bar talking about which authors she’d chosen to study for her Finals at the end of the third year. And Anthony, to everyone’s amazement, had been sent down, never to return and never to take his degree. The story went round that he had failed his college exams, or that he hadn’t met some sort of a minimum performance standard that Harry was said to have imposed on him during that summer term in response to a generally poor work record. We were surprised though, all of us, given the amount of time he had always spent in the library, and the reputation he enjoyed for being obsessively intellectual. Still, he was gone, and Rachel took her tutorials with Harry on her own after that. She seemed to spend most of her time working, or away from College altogether, staying, or so we all presumed, in Chelsea with Godmother Evie.

Of course I know now that that wasn’t the case, and that Evie, having cut Rachel off on account of what happened at the end of that summer term, refused to have her in the Chelsea house, thus beginning an estrangement that would last for several years. That was one of a number of mysteries that Harry solved for me earlier this month when I visited him in Oxford. His invitation had, as it turned out, been almost entirely disingenuous, its only accuracy being with regard to the presence of a hoar frost around the lake. The motivation that lay behind it was not, as he had written, to give me some things of Rachel’s that he thought I might like to have, but instead to reveal to me the circumstances of her death. And he wanted to seek to persuade me, even as he revealed it, that there was no purpose to be served by the story’s wider disclosure. I stayed for
only
a few days in the end, our business together being concluded more quickly than he had anticipated. In the series of meetings that we had during my visit, as we sat together in his rooms with the fire crackling in the grate and a cold wind blowing outside, he told me two tales. The first concerned the sequence of events that had led to Rachel’s long estrangement from her godmother; to Anthony’s disgrace and Cissy’s return to America; to Rachel and me spending our summer together before she so abruptly ended our relationship; and, a long time later, to her death and my great sadness. The second story he told me was that of the weeks that had led up to her murder, and of what had happened beside the lake on Midsummer Night as I sat on the library steps waiting for her to come back.

It is because of those stories that I am standing here now on my balcony, in the dark of a December morning. There is nothing left for me here, and no one who needs me to stay. Richard and Lucinda had no trouble persuading me in the end to relocate as they have done, and I didn’t mind letting Lucinda think she was right about the swiftness of my decision being entirely due to their having asked me to be godfather to one of the twins born to them this week. She wrote in her email that she hoped the baby’s arrival might give me some sense of a future which would hold meaning for me. There was a kindness in her sentiment, and I felt no need to contradict her, nor to tell her that I am going only because I have a need for new surroundings, and a longing to be away from the places Rachel and I shared. It is for the want of her that I am going, and in the hope that that want may fade a little, eventually, by reason of my being elsewhere.

The air about me is harsh and I have grown cold as I wait for the car, cold in a way that I don’t remember feeling in Oxford, despite the snow that fell then. There is a pain in the tips of my fingers, and I wonder about whether to put a brazier out here, but as soon as I do, I remember that I am leaving. I stop thinking about the cold and I wonder instead whether the tenant who will come tomorrow to live in my apartment will think, as Rachel did that first morning, that the heron sitting beside me is a sculpture, because it is so still.

9

I TOOK A
taxi from the station when I arrived in Oxford to visit Harry earlier this month. By the time we pulled up at the gates on Worcester Street it was snowing even more heavily than it had been all day, so heavily in fact that I could barely make out the shape of the facade that lay behind those gates, looming out at me from the whiteness before disappearing again almost immediately. In the moments in which it was visible it triggered in me the same feelings that it had at the beginning of each new term when, as a student, I had stood there and sensed something like fear, or anticipation, I was never quite sure which.

It was precisely the sensation I remember feeling for the first time on the September afternoon when, shortly after Robbie and I had our accident, I was sent away to school. I had come in from the garden one Sunday morning to find my mother in tears, kneeling on my bedroom floor and packing all my things into a trunk. When she had finished I helped her to carry it down the stairs. I stood in the driveway and watched, amazed, as she loaded it into the back of our car and turned to me and announced that later that day she would be taking me away from our home, and away from her. The feeling came back every year after that, presaged by the first cooling of the air and the rain feeling cold rather than warm, and by spiky globes appearing in amongst the leaves of the horse chestnut trees.