Every Contact Leaves A Trace (13 page)

Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl
,

And laid her soiled gloves by, untied

Her hat and let the damp hair fall
,

And, last, she sat down by my side

And called me. When no voice replied
,

She put my arm about her waist
,

And made her smooth white shoulder bare
,

And all her yellow hair displaced
,

And, stooping, made my cheek lie there
,

And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair
,

Murmuring how she loved me – she

Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour
,

To set its struggling passion free

From pride, and vainer ties dissever
,

And give herself to me forever
.

But passion sometimes would prevail
,

Nor could tonight’s gay feast restrain

A sudden thought of one so pale

For love of her, and all in vain:

So, she was come through wind and rain
.

Be sure I looked up at her eyes

Happy and proud; at last I knew

Porphyria worshipped me; surprise

Made my heart swell, and still it grew

While I debated what to do
.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair
,

Perfectly pure and good
—

She broke off there I think, right in the middle of the line.

‘God Alex I’m so sorry did you hear my tummy rumbling? I’m ravenous.’

‘Rachel you can’t!’

‘Can’t what?’

‘You can’t stop there! You can’t start the last one and not finish it! I can’t believe it!’

‘Oh. I’m sorry. I wasn’t even sure if you were listening. I mean you looked like you were asleep.’

‘Of course I wasn’t asleep. I just had my eyes shut. I was concentrating.’

‘You fibber!’

‘I’m not. I was really listening!’

‘Oh. Well, I’m sorry. But if I don’t eat something right this minute I think I might die of starvation. Anyway, it’s not such a great ending.’

‘Rachel! That’s so unfair.’

‘Alright. Alright, I’ll finish it after we’ve eaten. You must be hungry too, it’s so late. Come on.’

We had supper outside and stayed up for hours and hours. She didn’t finish the poem in the end, but she did tell me more about poetry and how it worked and said I should read some for myself and it wouldn’t hurt me and what was I scared of? I said I wasn’t
scared
of it, I’d just rather she carried on reading to me, that was all, and she said alright, she would, another time. And it was then that she said, ‘I think we should go back.’

‘Where?’ I said. ‘Go back where?’

‘To Oxford, silly,’ she said. ‘Where do you think? I’ll write and ask Harry. He’s always going on about it, especially now I’ve married a Worcester man. It’ll be fun. We’ll get to wear our gowns and drink sherry and sit on High Table and pretend we’re Fellows. Come on, I’m sleepy,’ and she stood and carried the things through to the kitchen.

I stayed on the balcony and looked across the night for a time and when I came in she was in bed already and fast asleep. The book lay on her chest where it had fallen. In the days that followed she seemed to read nothing other than this little pink book, and I realise now that she must have taken it with her when we went to Oxford later that month, and somehow ended up leaving it with Harry, who has sent it back to me without any explanation of how he came to have it.

And that is the question that is troubling me as I stand up from the desk and pull my dressing gown tighter around me, clasping the book to my chest. While there is nothing of any certainty about the half-formed answers that begin to occur to me, beyond the fact that each of them is accompanied by a similarly undefined sense of disquiet, I realise as I go through to my bedroom that I have decided what to do. I’d normally prefer to take a more considered approach to this kind of question, and certainly a lengthier and a more systematic one. I suspect this may well be the first time in my life that I have resolved to do something purely because of the absence of a good enough reason not to. In any case, I have made up my mind: I will go to Oxford, and I will see what it is that Harry has to show me, and I will ask him if there is anything he can tell me about Rachel, anything I don’t already know.

P
ART II

London, Friday 21 December 2007
Early Morning

7

I MISS HER
. That’s the long and the short of it.

I missed her before I took my trip to Oxford to visit Harry, and I missed her on my return, and this last week or so since I’ve been back, trying to work out what to do with myself, I have felt her absence more keenly still. And it is because I can’t be with her that I’ve decided to leave London, and to start again elsewhere.

I have booked a car to the airport and I have a few hours to pass until it is due to arrive. I’ve done everything there is to be done, or at least, everything that I can think of. Until it is time, I shall stand out here on the balcony, wrapped up against the cold, looking out across the city I’m leaving behind.

It wasn’t difficult to arrange in the end: my senior partner spoke with the New York office and Richard pulled all of the strings he’d been promising to pull since he and Lucinda had relocated there at the beginning of December. They’d started trying to talk me into joining them almost as soon as they’d arrived, saying it wasn’t going to be the same without me around, it just wasn’t, for either of them. Lucinda has taken the credit for having won me over in the end, and she did put her all into the task. She told me first that neither of them wanted one of their as yet unborn sons’ godfathers on the wrong side of the Atlantic, and then, when that didn’t work, she asked what Rachel would have said if she’d known I was hanging around in London pretending she might come back at any minute. Until he’s finished the New York Bar exams Richard’s own work will be in an advisory capacity, and so many of the projects he is working on involve clients I’ve been instructed by in London that his wanting me on board made perfect sense to everyone involved. Once he’d garnered enough support for my transfer, things happened very quickly.

I had some work to do initially, convincing people I’d moved on sufficiently to take the step I was proposing. And I won’t be able to start work until the end of January, having managed to negotiate only a partial reduction in the agreed term of my sabbatical. I had to visit the man in Exeter Square again, and when he reported back to the partnership that he was satisfied with the progress I’d made, and that my visit to Oxford seemed to have brought about the necessary shift in my behaviour and in my thinking, I was relieved, assuming the worst was over. But then the New Yorkers had their own requirements, insisting I take part in an hour-long conference call with a psychologist. The woman fired question after question at me, working her way through a list of what she called ‘depression indicators’ and ticking boxes until she realised she had nothing more to ask and said she’d file a report in a couple of days. And of course I’ve had to agree to a short-term contract, renewable only on my meeting certain performance targets; anything more permanent is a distant prospect until the Americans are quite content I’m no longer what they refer to as a loose cannon. I have a sense also that my exposure to clients will be restricted, to a certain extent, for some time, and that I’ll start off working only with the ones that already know me. I don’t think I’ll mind a great deal though, being kept back from the front line proper in this way. I am perhaps better suited to the role they’ve put together for me, it being more in my nature to remain almost behind the scenes and to be only listening, advising, correcting and suggesting, rather than performing and touting for business in the way that Richard seems to relish.

When I had packed the last of my things this morning and booked my car, I sat at Rachel’s desk and wrote a note to the tenant who will take over my apartment tomorrow. Afterwards, I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and as I did I saw that Rachel was there also, standing in front of me and leaning towards the glass. ‘You can come in if you like,’ she’d said, hearing me waiting on the other side of the bathroom door, not sure whether she was inside or not, not wanting to disturb her if she was. It was in the early days, before we knew each other’s boundaries, or at least before
our
curiosity in one another had subsided enough for us to be able to see them clearly and abide by them.

‘I’m cleaning them. It’s so dull. Can you believe it’s taken me this long to get them pierced! I should’ve done it when I was a teenager. God knows why Evie wouldn’t let me.’ I was barely listening to what she said, I was just watching. And then she stopped talking and I put my arms around her and held myself to her as she cleaned first one earring and then the other before twisting them and turning them and snapping them back into place and I pressed my face into her neck and she wriggled away from me for a moment and back again.

I miss the way her neck smelt that day, and I miss the ease of our silence, and I miss the fact that she wanted me to be with her.

8

I TRAVELLED TO
Oxford by train when I went to visit Harry earlier this month, and it was as we pulled out of Paddington that the snow began to fall. I had intended to drive but when it came to it I doubted my ability to concentrate for long enough. It struck me though, as I pulled my case across the station concourse, that it was somehow right that I was doing as I had at the start of every term all those years ago, especially since it was in answer to Harry’s summons that I was making my winter journey. And I found myself doing the same as I’d always done, standing in front of the announcement boards waiting to find out my platform and looking around for a face that was familiar. Feeling the same slight sense of disappointment that I had each time on realising there was nobody I knew, I was reminded of the occasion at the start of my second term when, having resigned myself to that fact, I’d gone to the platform and boarded the train only to see Rachel sitting partway down the carriage I’d chosen. She was wrapped in an enormous scarf and half buried in a book and the place opposite her was empty and for one ridiculous moment I considered tapping her on the shoulder and asking her if I might take it but instead I walked straight past, pretending I hadn’t seen her, assuming that this would be precisely what she was doing in return.

The train this time was only half full, and I managed to find two places to myself. I took the seat by the window and put my bags on the other. As London fell away the sun sat almost at eye level, so I closed my eyes and felt its warmth on my face and I slept for a while. When I woke it was still just as bright, slanting across meadows that spread into the far distance, wide and rimed like salt flats. For much of that part of the journey a plane flew just ahead of us, marking
out
our course, but as the landscape opened out and the light began to flash from patches of water round about, it veered off and left us to find our way alone and I closed my eyes and slept again.

When I woke we had gone past Reading and the view was bosky and deep and a mist lingered in the hollows of the fields and everything was spiked with frost. The landscape was utterly blank, every branch of every tree looking as though it had been coated by hand with thick white paint. And then suddenly we were dipping down into a hollow and the air became white also, as though we had flown into a cloud, as though we were lost, as though, almost, we had stopped existing. We skimmed along, passing in and out of that cloud of frozen mist. A figure loomed out of the whiteness alongside the train, close enough for me to have thought we might hit him at any moment. He was surrounded by dogs and he skirted the edge of the field as if floating through the air until he was gone again, as suddenly as he had appeared. All at once there was a church spire, conjured by the mist a moment later into rugby posts rising from a playing field and clad in red wraps as though they were horses’ legs, and then they were hidden from us, and we from them, and there was nothing to see except the whiteness and we were hurtling once more through time without leaving so much as the ghost of an impression of ourselves.

Shortly before the end of our journey an inspector came through the carriage and I reached into my jacket pocket for my ticket. What I pulled out with it meant that I almost missed my stop, so absorbed was I in what I’d found. I thought at first, before the inspector went and I looked at it again more closely, that it was nothing more noteworthy than the parking ticket I’d come across just minutes before leaving my apartment earlier that day. I had been closing all of the blinds when the one behind Rachel’s desk, the one that had always been a little difficult to operate, fell too quickly and shot down behind the radiator instead of in front of it, getting stuck there. I moved the desk forwards and knelt on the floor and tried as carefully as I could to release the blind and as I did so, the parking ticket was dislodged and fell to the floor beside me. I picked it up
and
read the car registration number printed on it and saw that it was one of Rachel’s and I smiled as I knelt there, thinking it was exactly like her to have put it at the back of her desk and let it fall without noticing, and, when it had disappeared from view, to have forgotten about it entirely. I stopped smiling when I saw the date, working out that she must have received it about five weeks before she was killed, and feeling suddenly, bleakly alone. And then I realised I would be late if I lingered any longer, so I stuffed it in my jacket pocket and finished closing the blinds and locked up the apartment and left for the station.