The Whole World (6 page)

He waited, but I didn’t say anything else.

“All right,” he finished at last. “Thank you for your time, Miss Bailey. May I give you my card? I’d like you to ring me if you think of anything else. I’ll come by again.”

I’d hidden my hands inside my sleeves. Two fingers peeped out to take the card.

“He’s not really missing,” I called out to the policeman’s back. He turned around and stared hard at me. I realized what I’d said was ridiculous. “I mean,” I added in a whisper, “that this isn’t happening. Okay?”

The policeman nodded slowly. Allison stepped in. I think she’d listened through the door. “We have a lot of work to do,” she announced.

She watched out the window to see the policeman leave. She waited for him to pass the Porters’ Lodge before turning back to me. “Polly, you look awful,” she said, surprised. Then, to make everything better: “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

I burst out laughing. Now I know where my mother got it from. It’s not a personal tic, it’s just English.

“The police came to talk to me,” I told Liv. We faced each other cross-legged on my bed, in my room at the top of St. Peter’s Terrace. The ceiling was all jagged from the slant of the roof and the protruding window. “Well,” I amended. “One policeman. Singular.”

“What? About Nick?”

“Yes. Did someone talk to you too?”

She picked at the clasp of her bracelet. “No. Not yet. Why did they want to talk to you?”

“Somebody said I was Nick’s girlfriend.”

“What?”

“I know.”

“You’re not his girlfriend.”

“I said I know.”

“Why would somebody say that?”

“Because they’re stupid? Why does anybody say anything?”

“What did you tell him?”

“He wanted to know if Nick had problems. I told him that Nick was the last person in the world to be in trouble.” Nick had started life as a coddled baby, become a much-flattered boy soprano, and finished his childhood at fancy boarding schools. He easily attained an undergraduate “first,” the highest grade, at Magdalene, and currently pursued his doctorate there, much doted on by the faculty. He did what he did because he loved it, and had absolutely nothing to prove. I’d never met anyone with such a lack of unfinished business. “Nick is, like, the nicest person I’ve ever known. He’s just … he’s a sweet, gentle person, and I just—”

“You sound like a girlfriend,” she accused me.

“I’m not anybody’s girlfriend, okay? I’m not. And I know you like him. But I can’t make him like you back. Okay? He’s not even here anymore. What is it that you want me to do?”

She sprang across the duvet and hugged me. She did this crying thing that made her head bounce on my shoulder.

Then she showed me a card she’d made for Nick’s family. She’d folded a piece of parchment paper and sketched one of the arches of Pepys Library on the front. “They put those flower baskets up in the spring,” she explained. I felt like a little kid, needing to be told. I’d only been here two months, months too cold for flower baskets. Liv had seen them hanging from the arches last year.

I was surprised by the envelope. “His family is in Cambridge?”

“Sure. They moved here when he was a kid, when he became a chorister at King’s.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Liv sat up straight and smiled. “That’s okay,” she comforted me. “I mean, you’re not his girlfriend, right?”

“He told me about his sister. I just didn’t know she lived
here.”

“It’s okay, Polly. You don’t need to get competitive.”

“I’m not!”

But she knew his family address. She knew his parents’ first names. She knew that flowers are hung from the arches of Pepys Library in the spring. She knew everything that I didn’t.

A group of undergraduates made the “Have you seen …?” posters that went up all over town. One of them wanted me to tell them Nick’s eye color, which is when I blathered about his hands.

The poster had two photos on it, recent enough, but both before his last haircut: a formal picture in a tie, and a candid shot of him punting on the river, on one of those thin, flat boats. It wasn’t the time he’d taken me and Liv.

Of course he’d taken many people punting in his life, of course he had…. He had a whole other life, a history. Of course. I wondered who’d taken the photo, who’d been sitting in the boat, looking up at him standing at the end, driving the pole into the water. I was jealous, which was stupid. The posters were everywhere, wet through from that week’s unusual, near-constant rain. Because it had become December, the posters shared space with holly and fir branches, tinsel and little twinkling lights.

The policeman came back to me like he said he would. His name was Morris. I don’t know if that was his first or last name, but he said I should call him that. I’d lost his card.

Morris told me that the cleaner for Earth Sciences said Nick’s office was a mess on Tuesday evening. Apparently he’d been sick. Did I know anything about this, since I’d been with him Tuesday?

This was the worst thing he could have asked me. I didn’t lie immediately. I considered whether and how much to lie.

“That was me. I had a bug. When he saw I wasn’t feeling well he brought me up to his office.”

“Oh. All right.” Morris fiddled through his notes. “I understand his office is up several flights of stairs and near the end of a long corridor? How is it that he thought that would be a comfort to an ill friend?”

“I don’t know, Morris, but that’s how it was.” There was something about calling him by his name that felt satisfyingly insubordinate, even though he had asked me to call him that.

“Look, Miss Bailey, I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, but I do think you could shed some light on his state of mind. I really don’t see the motivation behind your brevity. If you’re not attached, and neither was he, there’s no one to protect….”

Morris may have been a shrewd cop but he was a naïve person. There was myself to protect, of course. My sanity. Who else would be more important?

“It’s all right to tell me,” he said. Then he waited. His not-going filled the room more and more until it pressed me near flat.

I sucked in a breath. He cleared his throat. It took that little to crack me.

He swore he didn’t know how it ended up in the news. He wouldn’t share his case notes with the press, he said. Nevertheless, there it was, all I’d told him, leaked by whatever usual gutters ran between the police and the paper. They described it more luridly than I had, but they did capture my vehemence that we were nothing to each other.

It was reported in Monday evening’s edition. On Tuesday, everyone knew.

I was grateful for the rain; it allowed me an umbrella to hide under. I didn’t want to look at anyone, even my friends. Liv would lord it over me. I was broken and she wasn’t.

She was coming out of the big brick library as I headed in. I’d just pulled my umbrella down for the revolving door. We saw each other through the glass, spinning around the same axis. She went all the way around to end up back inside. “You bitch,” she hissed at me.

I wished to be outside, anonymous in the rain. I wished to be upstairs among the books, where she wouldn’t be allowed to talk to me. I wished she would let go of my arm. My closed umbrella pressed against my leg and soaked my jeans through.

People stared. The person behind the desk asked if there was a problem. Liv said in a raised voice that the problem was that I was ungrateful, which was baffling. Did she mean I’d been ungrateful to her for something? But it was Nick. She meant toward Nick. She called me an ungrateful bitch. We were asked to leave.

I pushed through the revolving door as fast as I could. Liv squeezed herself into the next compartment and spilled out onto the front steps right after me. She chased me down them, out into the parking lot. A car pulled out right in front of me. I had to stop. Liv put her hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry, okay?” she said. We were both breathing hard. We were both wet.

Nick had been gone six days by this time. Speculation was drifting more toward death, either by murder or by accident. No one had suggested that he might have killed himself; no one could make his personality fit that. But, however it had happened, it didn’t look like he was coming back. I guess that’s a good reason to get hysterical. All of us were kind of hysterical, just set off by different things.

Liv asked me to go with her to Kettle’s Yard. She held my arm, but loosely, squeezing it gently. I said okay.

We went into a gallery full of life-sized photographs of empty walls where famous works of now-stolen art had once been displayed. It was more stunt than art, but effectively mournful. We sat on the floor with our knees tucked up and our backs against the wall. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay. This has been awful for everyone.”

“Do you think he’s dead?”

I just shook my head because I no longer had it in me to say a confident no.

“Why did you call me ungrateful?” I asked.

She sighed. “Because you didn’t want him. He offered you something good, and you didn’t take it.”

I understood her jealousy, but I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone. She could tell I was bristling.

“Okay, I know,” she soothed. “I’m not saying that I have a right to feel that way, just that I do. Okay? I’m just explaining.”

“I know you liked him.”

“Yeah.” And she smiled, like I didn’t really know, not everything.

“What?” I asked.

“I was out with Gina that afternoon. You know Gina?” I shook my head no. But it didn’t matter. “She’d given me a cute sweater she didn’t want anymore, and a pair of earrings. I felt really pretty. I ran into him later. He seemed kind of down. I tried to cheer him up, you know, I was being silly. I pulled him into this staircase party. It was just what he needed. And we ended up dancing a little, I mean it was too crowded to really dance, but there was music and we were standing near each other. I pretty much threw myself at him. Then the porter broke the party up and we went into my room and went at it.”

“Oh,” I said. My mouth was dry. This was agony. This recitation was a form of revenge.

“We didn’t do it all, okay? It was a kind of President Clinton thing.” She smirked, but her hands were shaking. “I’m a virgin, okay? And I’d never done that before either. And I knew he was yours, but I wanted to try.”

“He wasn’t mine,” I said. She said “yours” like this was borrowing a shirt and getting a stain on it. She said “yours” like when she had taken ten pounds from my bag without asking.

“Whatever,” she said. “When everyone else said that you were the girlfriend, what was I supposed to say? That I was, really? Because I didn’t know that. I was waiting to find that out. I knew that what we’d done wasn’t a sure thing, it wasn’t a ‘progression’ in our ‘relationship.’ It was a thing that maybe would make him see me that way, or maybe it wouldn’t. I was waiting to see what it was to him.”

She wiped her face on her sleeve and went on. “I knew I was second choice, okay?” she blurted. “But it wasn’t until yesterday that I found out
from the freaking newspaper
what had really happened that day. I thought he’d gone upstairs with me because I’m maybe more exciting than you are, or prettier, or more enthusiastic, or more obviously into him.” She took a deep breath, glanced at me to see how I was reacting. “He only let me do it because that was the day you got him all high like a kite but then wouldn’t get him off. I was just … finishing the job. But he wasn’t hard for me, you know?”

She was a mess by this time. For a few minutes she couldn’t talk. I stared at a photo of an empty wall. Finally she said, “You’re my best friend and I hate you.”

I got up. I had to get out. Liv followed me. We almost knocked into a sculpture of a woman made out of hard wire knots.

“I have to go. I’m meeting somebody.”

“Who?” she demanded.

I hesitated. This would make her angry too.

“Nick’s sister,” I confessed. “She asked to meet with me.”

She gaped. She shook her head. Liv had sent the card to his family. Liv had sung with Nick in the choir. Liv had put out. But his sister wanted to meet me.

“Sometimes the whole world is just crazy,” I agreed.

We’d wandered into the way of the gallery’s spot lighting. Liv squinted and looked down. I put my hand, flat, above my eyes, like I was looking at something far away.

“You’d better go,” Liv said. “It must be pretty awful, missing a brother.”

That’s all it takes to realize you have no right to be so precious about your feelings, your loss, your trauma. There’s always someone with more rights to it than you.

Liv’s story made sense of the mention in the paper that Nick had been seen at a party at Magdalene in the days before he disappeared. Some person there had noticed that he’d been friendly with a girl, and it had been reported, I guess by someone making assumptions, that that girl had been me.

Alexandra went to Perse Girls, like the Chander daughters. It’s not far from St. Peter’s Terrace, where she offered to meet me after school. She looked nothing like Nick, and much, much younger. She was about fourteen and dressed, as required by her school, entirely in navy and light blues.