Every Contact Leaves A Trace (10 page)

Evie said hardly a word, as I recollect, until right at the end of the dinner. We had finished our dessert and I was beginning to feel a little drunk and quite relieved about the way the whole thing had turned out when someone, Lucinda I think it was, asked her a question about her work. She started to talk about a project she’d been asked to advise on in Oxford, something to do with some kind of chest that had been purchased by the Ashmolean and needed to be restored. There had been terrible delays already, she said, some sort of row going on with the Japanese government about the materials that were going to be used for the restoration. I couldn’t follow what
she
was talking about, or rather, I didn’t want to, so instead I asked her to tell us more about the chest. It was a wedding casket, she said, a tiny thing really, but terribly significant in its context and a great mystery in terms of how it had come to be owned by the family who’d sold it to the museum. ‘Some Italians had it originally. Phenomenally wealthy of course. Merchants at some point, travelling salesmen really. Wanted it for a gift, as it happens,’ she said. ‘A wedding present, or perhaps a form of payment, something to seal a betrothal.’

I had stopped listening to Evie altogether and was wondering whether I should say a few words, something about Rachel, and about our engagement, when Lucinda stood up and said ‘Of course of course I almost forgot! We’ve all been having such an incredibly lovely time just chatting but we absolutely have to play a game before we go.’

‘Oh for god’s sake,’ Evie said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll go if you do.’

‘Oh come on!’ Lucinda said, clapping her hands together. ‘We have to.’

‘No we don’t Lucinda,’ Evie said. ‘I don’t do games. And I think I shall go now anyhow. It’s late, and I’m lecturing in Oxford tomorrow.’

Lucinda sat down again and said ‘Oh come on everyone, it’s the engagement game! Richard and I had to at our dinner and there were horribly loads of people there so I don’t see why you two should get away without doing it. Don’t be a bore Evie, really. Anyway you absolutely have to stay, you know more about Rachel than the rest of us put together I should think. Come on. Me first. Right. What shall I ask?’

Evie had put on her sunglasses and was already standing up but then she sat back down and took them off and said, ‘What do you mean the engagement game?’ And then she said it again, exactly the same thing, ‘What do you mean the engagement game?’ ‘Well,’ Lucinda said. ‘We take it in turns to ask Alex and Rachel questions. About themselves. About each other. They both have to answer the
same
questions and we get to compare the answers. It’s a kind of cross-examination. Richard’s always brilliant at it as I am sure you can imagine! You know, wheedling out people’s secret thoughts. Fantasies. Should they really be marrying one another. That sort of thing.’ Rachel had turned away from the table and was gripping my hand in hers and Evie was staring at her. And then Evie spoke, so quietly I could hardly hear her. ‘You might have told me Rachel. You might have told me. Don’t you think?’

Rachel said nothing. Eventually she turned to look at Evie. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and offered it to her and I saw that there were tears running down Evie’s cheeks. Evie shook her head and turned and stared at me instead. There was something angry in her gaze and I didn’t know what to say. Neither, it seemed, did she, until at the last she turned back to Rachel, her face composed again, and said, ‘There’s still time to change your mind darling. You always were a little impulsive.’ She reached out and took the tissue. ‘Grasping even, I used to think.’ She was smiling now, but I noticed that her hands were playing in her lap and she was tearing at the skin around her fingernails. ‘I remember when you were very small, if there was something you wanted, something you were told you couldn’t have, you used to—’ ‘Evie,’ Rachel interrupted. ‘Don’t you think you ought to go now?’ And Evie stood, quite suddenly, and did exactly that. Richard leaned over and whispered something to Lucinda and then they said they ought to go as well, and we were left alone, Rachel and I, waiting for the bill and not speaking to one another.

At the halfway point on the drive back to London on the Tuesday after Rachel died, I found myself starting to cry, just as Lucinda had said I would. I stopped being able to see the road ahead so I pulled over on the hard shoulder and got out. I was sick, kneeling on the grass verge and wishing Rachel was there, knowing she would have stroked my back as I knelt. She would have laughed at me a little, but she’d have said it would be alright and given me some water and she would have offered to drive the rest of the way home and when
we
got there she would have carried our things in and put me to bed and told me I’d be better in the morning.

I sat on the ground for a while longer until someone pulled over and stopped. They wound down their window and asked if I was alright and did I need help? ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I just felt unwell. It’s passed now.’ I picked myself up and brushed myself down and got back in the car and set off for home again, going more slowly than I had been before. But when I got into London and reached the turning for my road I panicked, feeling unable to face the apartment alone, and instead I carried on, driving all the way down through Moorgate and the City and swinging west towards Strand, thinking I would go to see the river.

Waterloo Bridge was heaving with people fresh from the West End. Walking in pairs, they held hands and moved with a certainty that seemed somehow misguided. I parked when I reached the halfway point and got out, walking a little further across the bridge and leaning against the wall looking down into the water, disappointed to have found the place so busy, wondering at the same time why I should have expected otherwise. When I was tapped on the shoulder and asked to take a photograph of a couple against the backdrop of Big Ben, I realised I’d had enough. I found my car and drove off again, looping once around the IMAX and back over the bridge, and as I started to head east the crowds thinned out. Instead of couples there were groups of men in suits, their ties undone, leaving the City behind. An old man with a beard and a briefcase, his cagoule stretched over his suit, struggled along hurrying to make his train, and a woman sat opposite St Clement Danes waiting for a bus. I found myself slowing down and looking back over my shoulder at her, trying to see her face more clearly, and I became aware then that I’d been doing this all evening: looking for Rachel without realising it, hoping she might emerge from among the bodies and run towards me and shout out my name and say it’s alright Alex, it’s alright. I’m here. For goodness’ sake don’t be such a cry-baby.

As I drove home that night I remembered doing the same thing pretty much constantly throughout the years that fell between our
graduating
and our meeting again at Richard’s wedding, this looking for Rachel and hoping she might emerge from among a crowd of strangers. And in all that time I never saw her, not once. At every street corner, in every underground station, I thought there might be a chance. On every park bench I walked past, at every neighbouring table in every restaurant I ever ate in. Occasionally I would hear from mutual acquaintances how she spent her time, and I knew where in town she was working, so I thought it was possible, theoretically at least, that we might meet. And I saw plenty of other people from Oxford in this way. It was the sort of thing that would happen in an interval at the Wigmore Hall, or in the queue for an exhibition, and would lead inevitably to the exchange of news and telephone numbers and insincere promises to meet on purpose the next time. There was a time, a few years after I moved to London, when it seemed to happen with an uncanny frequency, so much so that I started to see these meetings as precursors of a greater event to come. But I never saw Rachel. Of course, I didn’t actually try to find her as such, but if I happened to be in a part of London that I knew or thought she might frequent, particularly if I came to be walking along the street where she worked, I suppose I did look more closely than I might have done at passers-by, or at women in cafés, in case she was among them.

Every now and again I wondered if this behaviour was a little absurd. While I lived with a constant hope that we might meet by accident and start to talk, there was also something slightly comforting in the improbability of it actually happening. And perhaps it was that improbability that allowed me to indulge in this speculative keeping an eye out for her. I never seriously thought anything would come of it, and at no time did I plan for what I would do if we met. Well, not seriously plan. Fantasise maybe, but never strategise.

To have spent so many years looking at women as they approached me, hoping to see only the particular set of her shoulders, only the precise rhythm of her walk, only the way she smiled or turned her head, was a wearing sort of a business. I imagine it would be no trouble then, for someone to guess the effect it had on me when I
looked
across the table at Richard’s wedding to see her standing there, smiling. It was a kind of a physical shock, like the jolt of the body when one is dropping off to sleep and dreams of suddenly falling.

That night, after looking back at the bus stop and realising it wasn’t Rachel sitting there, I picked up speed again, but only briefly. The lights at the bottom of Ludgate Hill were broken and the traffic moved slowly, edging on to the crossroads with no guidance as to who should go first and who should wait. I hung back, gazing out through the rain that had started to fall and feeling the slow thud and suck of the windscreen wipers’ lull. I sat for an age without moving until I realised everyone else had gone, and then I drove on up towards the dome of St Paul’s, white against the night.

6

WHEN I WOKE
this morning and came through from the bedroom the sun was already slanting in and the whole of my apartment was filled with a filtering light. I sat at Rachel’s desk and looked down at the canal. There were streams of cyclists making their way to work: the nine a.m. towpath rush hour Rachel used to talk about. As I watched, the heron rose up from the water and flew straight towards me. It positioned itself on my balcony wall, side on to where I sat, a perfect silhouette. That first morning she was here with me, the morning after Richard’s wedding, Rachel had thought it was a sculpture. ‘It’s so still,’ she said when I told her. ‘It can’t be! I don’t believe you.’

I had walked through from the kitchen and found her naked, standing with her back towards me. I wasn’t sure if she knew I was there until she said ‘I like your pretend heron’ and she leaned forward and placed her hands flat on the glass, one either side of her face. After I told her it was real and she said it couldn’t be she made a fist and knocked with it and the bird rose up startled and heavy in the morning light and Rachel gasped and turned to face me. ‘That’s amazing! It’s just amazing I thought it wasn’t real!’ And then she said ‘I’m sorry for making it fly away’ and she covered her mouth with her hands and because she looked as if she might start to cry I walked over and folded her into me and held her there.

There had been no hesitancy in her desire that first night. None. She had stared and stared at my body, reaching out to me almost like a child might, greedy, hungry, touching me and rubbing my chest and my back and licking me until I was so hard I asked if I could be inside her and she said yes, and pressed me into her, and no, I wasn’t being too rough, and she bit into my neck as I came.
And
later on, when I tasted her, she pushed herself against my mouth and lifted her hips up from the bed and moved as I moved and then she said I can’t I can’t wait and she turned me onto my back and she was there looking down at me and moving so quick and saying jesus fuck and then it was over and she was in my arms and we slept. When I woke and buried my face in between her legs the scent was of oranges and something sharper and she opened her eyes. Later on she took me in her mouth again, all the way in, holding me there and moving her tongue around the tip of me and drawing me back out and back in and I pressed both my hands onto the back of her head and afterwards she sat up and stared at me again, licking my slick from her lips.

She liked it here. That first morning she said she would have preferred one of the outside walls to be made of something other than glass, but when the evening came and it went dark we sat in the middle of the living room looking out across London and she saw how beautiful it is.

The apartment covers the whole of the top of the building and has at its core a cluster of three central rooms: my bedroom, my bathroom and my study. Each of these rooms has a window hung with a slatted blind and a sliding panel in the wall so that they can either be made entirely open to the views beyond them, or instead, completely private. The little cluster they form is surrounded by a series of open spaces that flow from one another to make up the rest of the apartment. These spaces are loosely divided so that the kitchen and the living room look out to the south-west while the north-east end is much emptier, holding only a piano and a table and chairs for reading.

When she had been living here for a few months Rachel persuaded me to have the pictures removed from the outer walls so that nothing interrupted her view. I held out for some time but I could see what it was that she wanted, and in any case, she could do a lot of her work at home and would come to spend more time here than I did. She told me that she loved the apartment most of all when it was warm enough to push the panels in the outer walls right across as
far
as they would go, and that when we did it felt as though we were living outside rather than in. One summer night as we sat holding one another in the half-light, she said that we were a pair of travellers making camp in a desert of sky: our very own airborne oasis.