Every Contact Leaves A Trace (20 page)

And then he talks about the fact that he is approaching his retirement, saying he will miss his students most of all. ‘One never knows,’ he says, ‘at the start of every new year, quite what to expect. Of course I have met them all once already, in their admissions interviews. But only the once, and they change, in the time between. I am sometimes a little surprised by the people who walk through my door. I shall miss the luxury of their conversation, and of their company.’ And I remember again Rachel saying to me, when I had asked her about what actually happened in a poetry tutorial, that there was nothing to it, studying English. That it was just sitting around having conversations about books, and stories, and the ways there were to tell them. When I ask Harry how he will spend his time, he only jokes about obtaining a string bag and visiting the supermarket on a daily basis to buy a tin of beans, or a loaf of bread. He’ll carry on taking his visits to London, he says, keeping up with
exhibitions
, seeing his man at Trumper’s and continuing with his research. He intends to make a habit of dining as often as possible on veal and brandy sauce with whomsoever he should find at the O&C’s club table, safe in the guarantee that whatever they might lack in personality will be more than compensated for by the sharpness of their intellect. He will be, he says smiling, a man about town.

‘So you see,’ he carries on, ‘I shall have no shortage of things to do. That is not my worry, Alex.’ And then he stops his jokes and tells me that the real difficulty, the thing that is really troubling him, is the need to confront the fact that he will no longer be needed, that his opinion will no longer count, and nor will it be something after which people seek. The signs are already there, he says, despite his having another six months in his post. He has sensed it in the meetings of the Governing Body, where his powers of persuasion seem to hold less sway than they used to, and he is beginning to feel that there is no further purpose to be served by remaining. ‘My replacement was appointed over a year ago and he seems to be here more regularly now, preparing himself,’ he says. ‘Before the funeral meats are even slightly tepid.’ And then he smiles and looks at the piles of books lined up against the wall and says there are too many practical matters to be attended to for him to become seriously melancholy for any significant length of time, and that he will be given a desk in the Emeritus Fellows’ room which, as things stand, is little used, so that he will be far from evicted when it comes to it. ‘It is a shock though,’ he says, ‘to become aware of the idea of one’s own absence.’

I don’t respond to this last comment, thinking suddenly of my secretary ordering me a box up from storage on the last day before my sabbatical, and the embarrassment I’d felt when I saw the looks on the faces of the security guards as I left that evening. And then I become aware that Harry is speaking again and it seems that his topic of conversation has shifted to a discussion of various contemporaries of mine with whom he is still in touch and I think, all at once, of the photograph of Anthony sitting beside Rachel in her
car
, the one that was attached to the parking ticket I’d found just before leaving London.

‘I never heard from Anthony, you know, nor Cissy, after Rachel died,’ I say when Harry asks me who I am in touch with from among my peers. ‘I don’t suppose I had any reason to be surprised, not really, but I was. I mean, neither of them showed up for the memorial, that was one thing. Or at least, I don’t think they did. I saw someone who I thought looked a bit like Anthony. He came in alone, after the start, and stood right at the back. I couldn’t see him afterwards though, he must have gone straight away. But it can’t have been can it? He would have said something to me, don’t you think?’

And then I realise that Harry is saying nothing. When I stop and wait for a reply, he only shrugs his shoulders in response. I have no idea what he means by this gesture and it occurs to me that I might as well be talking to myself, but still I persist, saying that I hadn’t even had so much as a letter from either one of them, and didn’t that strike him as strange?

The silence I am met with again makes me feel uncomfortable, somehow, but I stumble on, asking Harry whether he himself had heard anything. ‘They were so close the three of them, weren’t they, Harry?’ I ask him. ‘You must have seen that, when you taught them?’ And it is only then, finally, that he speaks, choosing his words so carefully that he almost pauses between each one.

‘Theirs was a closeness that had about it the ephemeral quality that is, I think, evident in many such student liaisons, whatever their precise nature might be. But yes, I was a little surprised myself by their absence, and by their failure to communicate. On the other hand,’ and he takes his glasses from his face and looks down at them in his lap, before pulling a case from his pocket and taking out a cloth and starting to clean them, ‘people do drift apart, over time, don’t you find?’

And I tell him then what Rachel had said to me that day in June, about having lost touch with them both after our second year, and I say yes, people do drift apart, of course they do, but that she’d
seemed
somehow bitter when she’d spoken of it, and that I’d never understood why, or known what lay behind it all, if anything. ‘She never said,’ I tell Harry, ‘but it had seemed strange to me that they should go their separate ways like that, so suddenly.’

Harry cuts me off then, saying, ‘I suppose it is being back here that has made you think of it, Alex, that is all. The directions our memories take us in are so easily swayed, are they not, by our surroundings?’ He asks me instead about Richard, saying that he understands that he has been a good friend to me these last months, and I tell him about them moving to New York, and the fact that Lucinda is expecting twins, and that I will miss them when they are gone.

And then Harry changes tack again and we are speaking of Evie, and he asks me whether I have heard from her since her move to Tokyo, and did I know if she had made any progress in her negotiations with the Japanese government about the mess into which the restoration project had descended? I say that I haven’t, but that she’d told me not to expect to for a while, not until after she had settled and established herself in the museum.

‘But she was Rachel’s godmother,’ Harry says to me then, almost combatively. ‘And Rachel had no other family.’

‘“Ferociously busy” was the phrase she used,’ is all I can think of to say by way of explanation, feeling somehow reluctant to be entirely open about quite how precarious my relationship with Evie actually is. ‘I’m sure we’ll be in touch before too long,’ I carry on, not knowing how to tell Harry that we were never close, Evie and I, and that her relocation had made little difference to either of us in those terms, and that I had emailed asking how she was getting on, but when she’d finally replied it had been in a way that hadn’t invited any kind of a correspondence, and nor had she returned any of the calls I had made to her since.

And then suddenly it seems that Harry has run out of questions, and I start to wonder when he is intending to give me the things of Rachel’s that he’d found. I half expect that at any moment he will raise the question of the Browning again but he doesn’t, and I think
to
myself that it is fair enough if he has decided to leave it to me to bring this up, given the way I’d responded to his enquiry the day before. In the absence of this, there seems to be little else to speak of, and our tea having been drunk, I am not surprised when Harry gets to his feet and says that he will see me later on for drinks before dinner.

I stand also and I pat about in my pockets to make sure I have my key. ‘I lost it this morning,’ I say, and for no other reason than to fill the silence I tell him about it falling into the snow and disappearing without trace and how the porter had insisted on our searching for it before he would give me a spare. I told him about the conversation we’d had afterwards, and how the man had told me about his father doing the job before him, and about how, as a boy from St Barnabas, he had imagined he was entering Narnia when he’d come through the gate and seen the playing fields for the first time. And then Harry did as I had and questioned his description, saying that the view the porter would have seen first on coming into College would have been of the quad, not of the playing fields, and that he must have been mistaken in his recollection. I start to explain but he interrupts me. ‘He was very young at the time,’ he says, looking at his pocket watch again. ‘Childhood is another country, Alex, and we are none of us as clear in our memories as we like to think.’ But then I tell him what the porter had said when I’d questioned him, and I describe for Harry the old gate, forgotten since the paths were rerouted years ago, overgrown and unused and completely hidden now.

Harry lets go his hold on the door and it swings shut again and he goes over to the armchair and sinks into it, sighing as he does so an almost guttural sigh, as though it has come right from the depths of his stomach. He brings his hands together as if in prayer and he holds them up so that his chin comes to rest on the tips of his fingers and he closes his eyes.

‘Harry,’ I say, but he doesn’t seem to hear me. ‘Harry,’ I say again, and I am about to ask him what is the matter when he speaks, almost too quietly for me to hear him.

‘So. That is how.’

And then he is silent again, for at least a minute or two, until he opens his eyes and says, looking not at me but at the floor, ‘I wasn’t sure.’ He gets up from the chair and walks over to the window and looks across to the other side of the quad, to Haddon’s secret garden and the trees beyond, and then, his back still turned, says, ‘Six forty-five, Alex. Do be on time.’ I go to let myself out, and as the door closes behind me I think I hear him say to himself, ‘Of course. I had forgotten.’

12

THE GATHERING IN
the Old Bursary for drinks before dinner was no different from the night before in that Harry and I barely spoke, he was so busy about his work. When we went into Hall I found that he had arranged the seating plan so that I was some way down the table from him, and whilst I managed to catch him over coffee afterwards, it was only for a moment. He told me straight away that he had been called unexpectedly to London the next day, and I might like to consider a walk on Boars Hill, or in Wytham Woods, which would be quite magical in the snow. And then he said that there was always Evie’s collection of inr
ō
to be looked at in the Ashmolean should I find it too cold for walking. He couldn’t be sure he’d be back in time for dinner, he said, but that shouldn’t stop me from going to Hall; he would see to it that I was expected.

I got up early to make a start on one of the walks Harry had suggested, and I went to the lodge after breakfast to ask for a map. The porter said yes, of course, but just as he was reaching up to the shelf behind him, the phone began to ring. As he took the call I looked around me at the pigeonholes that lined the walls of the lodge, amazed to see that nothing, as far as I could tell, had changed since the time when one of them bore my name. It seemed that the call the porter had taken wouldn’t be a short one, so I started then to flick through the books on the counter in front of me. Eventually I found myself looking at the Old Members’ Visitors Book that I’d signed when I’d arrived, and turned the page to see if anyone else had come since then. They hadn’t, so I looked back to the week before and read down the list. There was someone from Nepal, who from his date of matriculation seemed to be in his early eighties, and another name, a German one, and that was all. And then, while
the
porter was still on the phone, I flicked back through until I found it: 21 June 2007, the night of Rachel’s murder. The page fell open easily and I saw that there were crosses in pencil beside each name, written down the left-hand side. There we were, Rachel and I, partway down the list, and I felt sick as I read in her hand this record of our visit: ‘Mr and Mrs Alexander Petersen, London N1, 1992’.

Rachel had never actually taken my name but she did this sometimes, for a joke, this calling herself Mrs Alexander Petersen, and I remembered her laughing that evening as she’d written it, and I remembered our holding hands as we’d walked from the lodge and gone over to Harry’s rooms before dinner. I looked down the rest of the list and saw the name of the American woman I’d ended up sitting beside that evening, her home town listed just as NY, NY, USA. There were other names, and other countries, and as I read them all, each of the people I’d met that night had come back to me in a vague sort of a way. And then I saw a name that had nothing written beside it in the address column, and nor did it have a note of the year of matriculation. I noticed also that the name was written in pencil, and that it had two crosses beside it rather than one. I had read it again, ‘B. Volio, Esq.’, and was wondering what kind of a name Volio was, when I realised the porter was holding out a map and telling me the bus number for Wytham. I shut the book and took the map and thanked him, putting on my gloves and leaving the lodge.

I walked first across Boars Hill that day, turning back to see the city spread out beneath me, and then I made my way to Cumnor and over to Wytham. The woods were as magical as Harry had said they would be, and this time I really did seem to be entirely alone. I walked for half an hour or so, soaking up the quietness and wondering about Harry and what it was that had taken him so suddenly to London, and as I did it occurred to me that if I had been made to feel comfortable on the day of my arrival, when he had welcomed me into his rooms and my nerves had dissolved almost immediately, it was only on account of the warmth of his fire and
the
kindness I had inferred from the simplest of things, like the way he had poured me my tea. Any sense of rapport between us had gone utterly by the end of that first meeting, when we had spoken so awkwardly about the Browning and he had reminded me about his own grief. It was entirely possible, I supposed, that the awkwardness had lingered into our second meeting, and that was what lay behind the sense of discomfort I felt now. That, and the fact that I’d had on my mind from the moment I arrived in Oxford the parking ticket I’d found just before I’d left London, and the question of why Rachel might have been lying to me about being in touch with Anthony, and what Evie was doing getting into the car with them. But it struck me that there was more to it than either of those things: I could not make Harry out, and it was becoming less and less clear why exactly he’d invited me, it being obvious that he was in no hurry to divest himself of the things he had of Rachel’s, the things he’d said he would give me.