Every Contact Leaves A Trace (12 page)

As well as all of these things, there was the letter the police had already spoken to me about. Twice in the fortnight after Rachel’s death they had brought it to me, when I had stayed at home falling apart as I waited to return to Oxford to discover whether I was going to be released from bail or not. They had found it buried among the documents they’d taken from her desk drawers, and they said, both times, how important they thought it was, almost begging me to tell them something about it, anything at all, but I couldn’t help them. And as I sat on the floor of my apartment I read it through over and over, thinking that when they’d shown it to me previously I must simply have been so distracted that something had passed me by, something I would be able to spot this time, if I looked more closely. I remembered that the original had been written on airmail paper, in a hand I was quite sure I had never seen before, and nor did I recognise it when I read it this time.

We spoke of love once, you and I, when we fell on the grass and held each other. And I really thought you meant it when you told me that you cared for me
.

I found out last night just how wrong I was
.

Like I said, I’ll never forget you, whatever happens, and I don’t think you’ll forget me either, not for a long time anyway. You might think now that you will one day, but this much I know for sure: you won’t be able to, however hard you try
.

So long then. I’m going this afternoon and I won’t be coming back. I guess that’s the way you wanted it
.

And because it meant no more to me that night than it had done before, I put it away again and moved on to the next thing. The detectives had seemed disappointed when I’d been unable to tell them anything about it, but they’d agreed with me that they had perhaps been optimistic in their expectations of my being able to do so, given the absence of either a date, or a signature, or even so much as an envelope bearing a postmark. That it was a love letter was clear enough, but when they realised I could tell them nothing else, they had taken it away again and added it to the rest of the contents of her desk to be photocopied and returned to me, eventually, in those boxes.

I sit quite often at her desk, now that she does not use it. I find that it has become one of the ways in which I am able to be near her in her absence. I have developed other methods besides this, such as sleeping on her side of our bed instead of mine. Or occasionally, when I am out, phoning the apartment and hearing her voice telling me that we are busy and can’t take my call right now and that I can leave a message after the tone but not a long one. The strange thing is that Rachel used to do this too when she was alive. Sit at my desk instead of hers, I mean. Despite her protestations that she had no need for a room of her own, I would find signs sometimes that she had been using my study. Little signs, the sort of things that a less observant man might perhaps have missed, but unmistakable ones nevertheless. There would be an impression in the cushion on my chair, as though a cat had curled itself up and slept there all afternoon. Or I might notice that a stack of papers had been moved to one side and not replaced. Once or twice I found an apple core in the bin, or biscuit crumbs and a half-drunk mug of tea on the bookcase. And my desk drawers, which it wouldn’t have occurred to me to lock, were sometimes left ajar. I never said anything to her about these things, and she never once mentioned that she used my room. It was no trouble to me, and there was something endearing about the way she made so little effort to cover the tracks she left on my desk at the same time as insisting that she worked every day at her own. They never felt like any kind of intrusion, these incursions
into
my territory that she made and pretended not to. I find I miss them very much.

I look up from Rachel’s desk now and I see through the darkness that the heron has come back to the balcony. It is difficult to be completely sure from this angle, but I think it might be asleep. The lights are coming on across London and it is the time of the evening when Rachel and I would normally have started to think about going to bed. I know I ought to do the same, but it feels odd to think of sleep after a day in which I have done precisely nothing. The desk in front of me is covered in things I could have seen to but didn’t. There are the photographs Evie gave me at the police station, still sealed tight in their envelope. And there is also the letter that she gave to me then, the one that Rachel wrote to her after our wedding. I have developed a habit of allowing myself to read this letter once, and then to let a few weeks pass until I read it again. This method is starting to work less successfully now that I have it by heart, but there is still that sense of surprise every time, that happiness on reading the things Rachel said about me, and about us. Beside that is the bundle of correspondence from Rachel’s friends and colleagues and students that I keep meaning to reply to, and of course there are the boxes of things from her desk that I know I should have gone through again, more closely this time, to see if I might have missed anything, anything that could trigger some memory that would assist the police in their investigation.

I haven’t even managed to dress myself, having had no good reason to do so. I have, in fact, done nothing more than wander aimlessly from one part of the apartment to the other, making cups of tea and failing to drink them, finding them cold and abandoned on a bookcase before washing them up and starting all over again. I took blankets and a woollen hat and ate my lunch on the balcony, sitting like a tramp beside the raised beds, looking at them and imagining my mother pausing in her digging and sitting back on her heels and saying to me, ‘Now really come on Alex this is silly isn’t it? What would your father say if he was here, hmmm lovey? Come on, chop
chop
, get dressed and we’ll think of something fun to do together, just you and me eh?’

In any case, I know I won’t sleep until I make up my mind about Harry’s invitation. He has written often since her death, but until yesterday, and apart from the letter offering his condolences, he has sent me only postcards, or occasionally the briefest of notes enclosing a cutting from the
Oxford Times
about Rachel, or about the investigation. The postcards arrive in a steady stream, the message always linked in a careful way to the image. Some describe exhibitions he has seen and thinks I might like to know about, others carry quotations he has come across and considers pertinent. Once or twice a card has come without any message at all, bearing instead a pasted-on clip from
Private Eye
of his most recent contribution to Pseuds Corner. They are all, though inconsequential in their way, strangely comforting. Before her death it was Rachel he sent them to, these postcards of his. I assume that he sends them to me not for my own sake but for the sake of her absence, in a kind of continuing acknowledgement of it, and of my sorrow.

Harry’s letter of condolence arrived in early October, almost four months after she died. I remember him describing its timing as intentional, rather than negligent. He explained that the correspondence he had received in the immediate aftermath of the death of his own wife, an event he had grieved bitterly, made no impact on him, numbed as he was to sensation of any kind. As I read his letter, I remembered coming back from the Christmas vacation of my second year at Worcester and seeing the notice that had gone up outside the porter’s lodge, and how it carried the most perfunctory of announcements about her death, stating the request that nobody should speak to him of it directly. It was not until much later on, he wrote, that he was able to reread those letters and have any sense of what it was that people had intended to convey with their clichés and their expressions of sympathy, always clumsy, always inept. Because of this, he said, he had developed a custom of delaying the
sending
of such letters until the initial period of numbness, as he referred to it, might have passed, or might at least have begun to lessen. He wrote further that he hoped to avoid the risk of cliché himself by allowing another to speak for him, and he set out a quotation from Tennyson, something about wheat and chaff, something that meant little to me.

When I opened Harry’s parcel last night I found that he had sent me poetry again: a whole volume of Browning this time. It was the poetry that had accounted for the weight of the thing when I’d picked it up from outside my door. I’d stood looking at the label, noting the fact that he still gave me the Esq. after my surname and feeling happy that he’d written. The letter itself, which I’d expected to be pages and pages long given the weight of the parcel, was, as it turned out, no more than a single side of paper.

Worc. Coll
.

27.xi.MMVII

Dear Alex
,

There was a hoar frost around the lake this morning. Ordinarily there would be nothing noteworthy in its presence; this year’s winter is far colder than last, and we are late in November. I write of it only because I have never known it to be so beautiful, nor so thick as this
.

You said when last we met that you would like to visit again at some point, and I wondered whether this might be as good a time as any, now that the frost is here? The students go down next week and there will be rooms at your disposal in College. You may stay for as long as you like; there are Christmas concerts, and there will doubtless be fine weather for walking
.

I have begun the great task of preparing the contents of my own rooms for the embarkation I must face in the summer and, in so doing, I have come across some things of Rachel’s that I thought you might like to see, or even have. They are not the sort of things I felt it necessary to give to the police, despite the fact that their work remains undone, but nor would I want to dispose of them without at least letting you look at them first
.

If you find that what I suggest is amenable to you, do please telephone to
let
me know whether you will be able to arrive next Friday afternoon in time for tea. The enclosed was among the things I found; you could perhaps read it before you come
.

Yrs. ever
,

Harry

It is a smallish sort of a book, and it has sat on the desk all day inviting me to open it. I think I will take it to bed with me tonight. I feel certain there is something familiar about the volume. Its cover is a faded pink, part of the front of it darker than the rest as though someone has left it in the sun for months, half-hidden by another book. And the heft of it sitting in my hand: it is a book I am sure I have held before.

And then, all of a sudden, as I bring it to my face and inhale its scent, holding the cloth cover right against my nose and breathing in deep, I turn and see Rachel lying on the sofa behind me. It is early June and the setting sun has made the room pink and everything in it. Rachel glows with it, the light finding orange and golden swathes in her hair, and she closes her eyes, not so much to avoid its brightness as to bask in it more deeply. A few moments later I look up again from where I am sitting and I see that she is asleep. Her mouth is slightly open and one of her legs has fallen to one side so that I can see she is wearing nothing beneath her skirt. I stand up and walk over to her and I kneel in front of her. Her arms slip away and the book she is holding starts to drop from her hands. I catch it as it falls and I sit back on my heels and decide not to touch her. Instead I hold the book to my face and breathe it in to myself and as I watch her I know what it is to be content.

I remember her waking a few moments later and saying ‘What are you doing? Why are you sitting there? What time is it?’ and I told her she had been asleep and she smiled and said ‘Let me read to you. Go and sit down again and stop staring at me like that.’ I handed it to her, the book with part of its pink cloth cover faded by the sun, the book that I am holding now, and as the sky grew darker she read one and then another of the poems and it was I who closed
my
eyes. The evening had fallen and the first scent of jasmine was drifting in from the balcony when she said, ‘One more then I have to eat. What do you want? Something spooky?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘something spooky,’ thinking to myself that I didn’t much mind what she read as long as she carried on.

And now as I sit at her desk in the darkness without her, it falls open at the poem she read me then, the last poem, and I hear her voice again.

The rain set in early tonight
,

The sullen wind was soon awake
,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite
,

And did its worst to vex the lake:

I listened with heart fit to break
.

When glided in Porphyria; straight

She shut the cold out and the storm
,

And kneeled and made the cheerless grate

Blaze up, and all the cottage warm
;

Which done, she rose, and from her form