Every Contact Leaves A Trace (26 page)

Despite all of this, and notwithstanding their brilliance, there was the occasional incident which made him question whether they were approaching things in exactly the way he would have wished them to. He had detected, once or twice, an increased flippancy in their behaviour which, had he dwelt on it for any length of time, would have concerned him, and which, looking back, perhaps should have done. He sometimes had a sense, and it was nothing more than that really, just the slightest feeling, that what lay behind the intellectual meteor showers he was witnessing each week was nothing more than a planned exercise, and one from which he was excluded. It was almost as though the three of them were putting on a charade and, rather than engaging in any really serious way with the task in hand, were merely playing with him, trying to provoke him to question them more closely, knowing all the while that he would not.

One such incident took place early on in the term, perhaps even
in
the second or third tutorial. At the end of the previous week’s session he had set them a question from an old Finals paper, something fairly straightforward on Browning’s use of the dramatic monologue, as far as he could remember. It was Anthony’s turn to read out his essay and he sat deep in the armchair, his head lying back and the pages held up in front of his face. The girls sat side by side on the sofa, as they always did. ‘Just here,’ Harry said, ‘where I am sitting now,’ and, rubbing each of his hands on the fabric that stretched away either side of him, he looked up and met my gaze. He looked away again immediately and stared for some time into the fire before carrying on, his voice quieter than before.

‘I remember Rachel taking her shoes off that day, and tucking her feet up beneath herself. And then she stretched out her legs and put them in Cissy’s lap. She did that sometimes.’ I shut my eyes then against the tears that I felt forming, and I stopped listening. When I tuned back in, it was to hear Harry explaining something about Browning’s use of the first-person narrator, and as he saw only incomprehension in my face, he shook his head and told me it wasn’t important, and he apologised. In any case, Anthony had gone about answering the question in the way he usually did, straying so far from the topic that Harry may as well not have given him a question in the first place. ‘But it was all to the point, Alex. That was the thing,’ he carried on. ‘It just wasn’t what I had expected to hear. But he always made a case for its relevance, an unassailable one, whatever it was that he had written about. It was Conrad that day, I think.
The Heart of Darkness
, if I recollect. The debt the modernists owed to Browning. Not that it hadn’t been said before, of course it had. But not quite like that. The girls were on to him straight away, as soon as he had finished, both of them this time. They leaned so far forward from their seats to argue they were almost sitting in his lap,’ Harry said. ‘Rachel actually stood up on the sofa then to make her point, throwing her arms about and jumping up and down until I said, “That’s enough, Miss Cardanine, I think you will find that you are sufficiently well served by your natural eloquence to launch your sallies with equal efficacy from a seated position, don’t you agree?”’

Of course he’d regretted his words as soon as he’d spoken them, realising they would pick up on this mode of address he had chosen and use it for the rest of the afternoon, and there would be nothing he could do about it. And that was exactly what they did, Miss-Cardanining and Mr-Trelissicking and Ms-Craiging one another with a hilarity they hardly bothered to mask, though the force of their arguments suffered not a bit for their new frivolity. So fluid was the fight that day he half suspected they might have rehearsed it, there being in the speed of their parrying something almost too quick; something too slick for him to believe it was spontaneous. But since their most rapid-fire debate came in response to his own questions, the rate by which his admiration for them increased was easily matched by the speed with which any doubts he might have had about their integrity were quelled.

At the end of the session that day he had asked Anthony to give him the piece of work he had read from, only to be met with something along the lines of, ‘Actually I won’t, if you don’t mind. Wasn’t one of my best,’ or some such nonsense to the effect that Anthony was refusing to hand in his essay to be formally marked. Harry assumed it was a joke and had kept his hand out, waiting for the essay, but Anthony said it again, and, as he did so, one of the girls had laughed. It was Rachel, he rather thought, or at least it was until Cissy had nudged her and told her to shut up, and that was the point at which he thought something odd might be going on. All at once he felt exhausted by the whole thing and, losing interest suddenly in their little game, he stepped forward and placed his hand on the essay Anthony was holding under one arm, intending to take it from him and see the three of them out without discussing it further. He felt worn out, all patience with them and their ebullience gone. Their antics seemed to him suddenly like those of unruly children instead of second-year undergraduates, and he realised that not only was it the end of the day but also the end of the week, and that another weekend lay ahead of him with nobody but himself for company.

He pulled sharply on the pieces of paper and, catching Anthony off his guard, found that he had them in his hand. He had opened
the
door and was about to say goodbye when he registered that there was something more than surprise on Anthony’s face, something, in fact, almost like dismay. He looked down at the pages he was holding to see that rather than the tiny cramped and pencilled handwriting he was expecting to find there, what he was looking at was nothing at all. He was holding three or four sheets of A4 paper, sure enough, but when he turned them over again and again, shuffling through them once more just to be sure, he saw that every single one was entirely blank.

He tried to work out what was going on, and to understand what he’d just witnessed as he’d sat watching Anthony’s eyes move across the pages in front of him, listening, or so he’d thought, to the man apparently reading out his essay. And then, all at once, Anthony started to speak.

‘I’m sorry, Harry, I mean, I’d written it, you know. But then,’ and his voice trailed off to nothing.

‘But then what, Anthony? What happened?’

‘Well, OK. I suppose I’ll have to explain. It’s not what it seems, Harry, really it’s not. I was sat there in my room, right? It was early, you know, this morning, and it’d been a hard one, you know. I’d been up all night really, working on it. Wanted to make it perfect, Harry.’

And Harry turned to see the girls smiling at one another and shaking their heads and he said, ‘Don’t trouble yourself to explain, Anthony. Just go,’ and he handed the pages to him and stood back to let them leave the room. It was Rachel who spoke then, telling him he shouldn’t take it so personally, that Anthony really had written the essay, but that he’d been so tired when he’d finished that he’d made a pot of coffee to wake himself up and at the last minute he’d knocked it over, the whole thing, and it had completely soaked the essay and there was no way of retrieving it, and when the girls had gone to get him for the tutorial they’d found him in a total state and told him just to recite it off the top of his head, he’d spent long enough writing it he must have memorised half of it already, and so that was what he’d done, and it had worked hadn’t it, and what could Harry actually say was wrong with it?

‘Absolutely nothing, was there Harry? He’s brilliant isn’t he? He just is,’ Rachel said, staring at Harry and daring him to question her.

‘That’s not quite the point, Rachel,’ he said. ‘There’s a little more to it than that, don’t you think?’

‘Like what, Harry?’ she said, smiling. ‘Like what?’

‘Well. There are other questions to be considered, I think. There is, for example, the question of respect, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Of respect?’ she said, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes wide. ‘Respect for what, Harry?’

‘For the way we do things here, Rachel. For the system that we follow, such as it is.’ But then he stopped, realising that what he had meant to say, what he had actually wanted to say but hadn’t, was ‘For me, Rachel. Respect for me and for the time I spent this afternoon listening to Anthony, thinking that he was reading from a script, believing the image he presented to me. And all the while I was the only one who didn’t know what was going on.’

‘Oh come on, Harry,’ she said, her voice softer, and her face chastened, a little. ‘You know that isn’t important. Not really. And anyway, that’s not the Harry we all adore, is it?’ and she looked at the others quickly before turning back and placing a hand on his arm. ‘You know what, Harry Gardner? I’d never have thought of you as the sort of man who’d fall back on the idea of a system. You’re far too interesting for that.’

‘You might say so, Rachel,’ Harry responded, irritated by the way she was speaking to him. ‘But you will one day learn, perhaps, that the ability to at least show a modicum of respect for a system isn’t such a terrible thing to cultivate.’

‘But it wasn’t his fault,’ she replied straight away. ‘You heard what he said. You know he’s done the work. So it’s alright then, isn’t it?’

Harry looked at her face then and realised she wasn’t going to let it drop. Finding himself unable to summon up the energy to contradict her reasoning, he agreed to put his objections aside. As the three of them turned to go Anthony stretched out his arm towards Harry, smiling his lopsided smile and saying, ‘No hard
feelings
eh, mate?’ and before Harry could stop himself he was shaking his hand and smiling back at him, admitting to himself, albeit reluctantly, that what Rachel had said was true: it mattered little that Anthony had written nothing down. What mattered more was that he had read the texts so closely, and had engaged with them in a way that was, as far as Harry could tell, entirely original. What bothered him though, looking at the three of them smiling at the joke they had played, and, he suspected, at the fact that they’d got away with it, wasn’t the question of Anthony’s commitment to his studies, nor of his grasp of his material. Instead, he said, it was the duplicity of the thing that unsettled him. That, and the fact that they were all three of them in on it and had clearly found it amusing to tease him in the way that they had.

After they’d gone, it was Rachel’s voice he heard floating back up the stairs to where he stood. ‘I told you,’ she said, still laughing. ‘I told you he’d let it go if you pulled it off well enough. He loves us.’ And then her voice faded a little as they reached the bottom of the stairs, so that he had to lean forward to be able to make out the end of her sentence. ‘As far as Harry’s concerned,’ she carried on, ‘we three can do no wrong.’

He closed the door then and went to stand by the window, watching them walking straight out across the quad instead of going round it and, when the porter appeared on the terrace and called out to them, quickening their pace and carrying on right to the other side, ignoring the man’s request that they step away from the grass immediately. And he said to me, almost apologetically, that as he’d stood there watching, he decided there was something he hadn’t quite liked in the way Rachel had spoken when she’d thought she was out of earshot. He had detected something jubilant, even crowing, in her tone, and he almost wished he hadn’t heard it.

Still, there was little point in making any more of what had happened than he’d done already, and he quite forgot the whole thing until the middle of term, when, being given cause to be concerned once more, he wondered whether perhaps he should have taken a firmer stance after all, simply as a matter of principle.
The
difficulties that arose this time were not, he said, within the tutorial room, but outside it. If anything, their work had begun to improve yet further when he began to receive reports from Haddon about some bizarre episodes involving the three of them, episodes in relation to which Haddon had felt obliged to take disciplinary action.

There were no more than two or three occasions on which Harry was called in to see Haddon about them. The first time, Haddon had received a call from the porter one morning to say that he’d seen something on his night rounds he thought Haddon ought to know about. It had started innocuously enough, the porter told him, when he’d had a call from one of the Fellows whose bedroom overlooked the quad. The man had been woken by shouts, and when the porter went to investigate he found the three of them playing French cricket. He chased them off immediately, but not before they’d tried to argue that it wasn’t so late, only one in the morning. And when he told them they shouldn’t be on the grass anyway, no matter what time of the day or night it was, they ran away then, leaving the racquet behind and completely ignoring him when he shouted after them to come back and fetch it.

That in itself wouldn’t have been worth a report to Haddon, not on its own, so he’d gone back to his lodge and simply logged it in his record. Later on though, on his three a.m. rounds, he’d found them again. He’d been on his way back from the north-west side of the lake when suddenly the silence was broken by a splash, and a stifled scream, and he picked up his pace and walked on and saw them swimming out towards the middle. He shouted at them to get out but they pretended they hadn’t heard him, submerging themselves in the water and bursting back up again once or twice before heading towards the other side. He ran round and caught them as they reached the tip of the eastern shore and were clambering out, and he saw that all three of them were naked. They stood there shivering as he hollered at them and shone a torch in their faces to make sure they were who he thought they were, and from their responses to his questions it was clear they were drunk. He told them to get back to
their
rooms and they went off across the lawns, howling with laughter and stumbling and tripping as they went. The punishment Haddon gave them for this was relatively minor; they were required to spend the following Sunday clearing the stretch of undergrowth that ran alongside the boundary between the college and the canal, bagging up the litter that had been thrown there from passing boats and making the route more accessible by cutting back some of the brambles and transporting all of the debris to the compost heap over by the orchard.