Every Contact Leaves A Trace (21 page)

The previous day’s discourse had been shot through, for my part, with a sense that I was being led by the hand through a series of quite pointless conversations. I began to wonder whether perhaps my visit was something he had conceived of entirely for his own benefit, because he was lonely and wanted to carry out some kind of mourning ritual for Rachel, in the same way that he’d begun to send me postcards after her death simply because he could no longer send them to her. But there was something odder about it than that, this need he had to be involved still. As I walked on, I wondered why he’d been quite so interested in my relationship with Evie, and it occurred to me that I should perhaps have asked some questions of him in return: how it was that he knew about her move to Tokyo, and about the work she was doing there, and why he was suggesting that I go to see her inr
ō
. Such was my unease about the way the conversation had gone, and my embarrassment about Evie and I getting on so badly, on top of the confusion I had felt when I’d asked question after question about Anthony only to be met with a complete lack of responsiveness from Harry, that when it came to the end of our meeting I’d neglected to ask him about how he’d
come
to have Rachel’s book in his possession, feeling pressurised instead to justify myself for not having read it.

I was looking up at the canopy formed by the branches above my head, hearing only the steady tread of my boots and thinking of how Harry had reacted so strangely to what I’d said about the old gate at the bottom of the playing fields, when I stumbled suddenly and fell, landing awkwardly on my right shoulder. I picked myself up and brushed myself off, and when I looked back to see what it was that I had tripped on, I saw the body of a woodpigeon lying right in the middle of the path, mangled and bloody and red against the snow.

I had seen a bird fallen in the snow once before, when I was a child. It happened right at the beginning of my first Christmas holiday home from school. After lunch one day, having decorated the tree together, my mother and I went through to the kitchen to make some scones for our tea. We’d put them in the oven and set the timer and their scent was already seeping out around us. I stood on a chair at her side so that I could reach the sink and we did the washing-up together, and then she swept the flour from the floor where I had spilt it. After that she took off her apron and told me that she had to make a phone call, and that I mustn’t listen. I asked her why not and she held my face in both her hands and said, ‘I have to talk to Daddy. It’s just a conversation for grown-ups, that’s all.’ And she kissed me and I ran and put on my boots and my scarf and I went outside and wished that Robbie was there to see the snow. I ran round to the back of the house and started to throw snowballs against the wall. I was beginning to become bored, and a little too cold, when suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, a bird hurled itself from out of the sky just above my head and flew directly into the wall of the house. I watched, amazed, as it fell straight and heavy to the ground. I looked in through the sitting room window and I saw my mother sitting in her armchair, holding the phone to her ear and talking to my father.

She had already told me that he wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas, and that it would just be the two of us, so I thought to
myself
that perhaps they were discussing what he wanted her to give me as a present from him. I looked across to where the bird had fallen and I wanted at that moment to run in and tell her what I had seen, and to describe for her the speed with which the bird had appeared, as if from nowhere, or as though somebody had been standing behind me and had thrown it against the wall, straight into the hardness of the brick. And I wanted to ask her why the bird had done such a thing, but I knew she would be cross if I did this while she was still having her conversation with my father. So instead I walked over to the bird and knelt down to look at it. It was trembling slightly, no more than tiny shudders really, and blood was seeping slowly from its broken neck, melting out a circular hollow from the snow and collecting there, a little steaming pool of redness. And suddenly I began to cry and I got up and ran inside to my mother and when she saw me she put down the telephone and started shouting at me. I was so surprised I stopped crying immediately and I heard her say that she had told me not to listen, she had known it would only upset me, and couldn’t I just have waited and did I have any idea how difficult the decision had been, and then she told me to go to my room immediately and not to come down until supper time. So I turned and ran upstairs and I climbed under my bedclothes and closed my eyes. I thought about the scones and wondered whether they were still in the oven and whether she would remember them, and I thought about how nice it would have been if she had cut one of them open for me while it was still warm and how she would have turned to ask me if I would rather have jam or honey. I wrapped my arms about myself and began to cry again, imagining the bird lying outside in the snow and wondering whether, if only I had picked it up and brought it inside, my mother would have known that I hadn’t been listening to her conversation, and then I thought about whether we could perhaps have bathed it and bandaged it and put it into the bottom of the Aga and that if we had, it might have come back to life.

Standing in Wytham Woods that afternoon I looked down at the woodpigeon that had fallen in my path and I nudged it with the toe
of
my boot. It had frozen solid where it lay. I kicked it once, and then again, harder the second time, so that it lifted into the air and landed some way away, in amongst the trees. And then I walked on and out of the woods as fast as I was able to.

I went straight to the Ashmolean when I got back. Apart from the shop, which was full of people buying Christmas cards, the museum was almost empty. Evie’s inr
ō
were strung out in a line of glass cabinets on the second floor. Each of the tiny laquered boxes hung from a string or a short length of rope that would originally have been tied onto the sash of a kimono. Gold, or red, or both of these and black, every one was a different shape, some of them taking the form of an animal, a tortoise or a tiny rabbit, and none of them bigger than a cigarette case or a tin of travel sweets. I read on the display boards that the collection had come almost as a whole, its original owners an Edwardian couple who, honeymooning in Japan, had purchased one after another of these little caskets as souvenirs and brought them home to England.

Rachel had told me about Evie’s work during the summer vacation of our second year. We were halfway round the lake on one of our evening strolls when, trying to think of a topic of conversation that would keep her talking, I asked her whether her godmother was an Italian art dealer or a dealer in Italian art. She laughed and said, ‘She’s English, Alex. And it’s Japanese stuff, not Italian. And she’s a curator, not a dealer. There’s a difference you know. There’s nothing remotely commercial about what she does. She’s an academic basically, if you really are interested. She’s got one post in London and another in Oxford. Where do you get your information from anyway?’ I told her that lots of the stories I heard about Evie, and about Rachel herself, came from Towneley, via Richard, and she stopped laughing then and said that I shouldn’t listen to a word Towneley said about anyone, not ever, and especially not about her. I realised I’d said completely the wrong thing and, keen to get her talking again, I asked her what exactly a curator did, and whether
it
meant that Evie looked after things. ‘I wouldn’t say looking after, no,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s not Evie’s bag, looking after things. More like preserving things. Keeping things as they are. Wrapping them up and hiding them and making sure they’ll never change.’ ‘Tell me about Japanese art,’ I said, glad that I seemed to have retrieved the situation a little. ‘It’s not art really, Evie’s stuff,’ Rachel said. ‘I mean it’s not paintings. It’s lacquerware. Boxes. Chests. Caskets. Things to keep secrets in.’ But then she said ‘Jesus Alex she’s so boring why do you want to know about her anyway? Can’t we talk about something other than my bloody godmother?’

Standing there that afternoon in the Ashmolean, looking at the inr
ō
hanging in a line in front of me, I remembered the time I’d found some of them on the mantelpiece of the bedroom Rachel and I had slept in when we’d stayed in Evie’s house at Chelsea. Harry had described them to me as ‘Evie’s inr
ō
’ only because she had procured them on the museum’s behalf, and overseen their restoration, but she’d purchased some of them for herself and the Chelsea house was where she kept them. We’d visited her there only once, when she’d given a party on the Boxing Day after we were married. She’d asked us to help her prepare for it, saying that it was the least we could do given that it was in our honour that it was happening, and whilst the two of us agreed that this was slightly absurd, since neither of us had ever met a single one of the people she’d invited, we turned up in the afternoon anyway. There wasn’t much for me to do when it came to it: whilst Rachel and Evie were in the kitchen, cooking and talking and writing place cards, I was sent to pick up the wine. When I came back they said they didn’t need me, so I went upstairs to the sitting room I’d seen earlier, intending to read the paper. I think I fell asleep in my chair fairly quickly, and when I woke later on and went downstairs I found a note on the kitchen table saying that everything was ready and they’d gone for a walk, they wouldn’t be long.

Finding myself alone I wandered through the rooms, toying with the idea that I would come across something interesting about Evie that I could share with Rachel on the way home, thinking I might
impress
her with my detective work. As it turned out, there was very little to be discovered. The whole place was immaculate and furnished sparely. It was almost as though nobody actually lived there, so little was there to be seen of a personal nature. Most of the furniture was in a Japanese style, and the walls were either covered in screen prints, or simply left bare in a cold sort of a white. There were thick rugs stretched across polished wooden floors, and I was beginning to think the house was improbably anonymous when I came to the bathroom and opened the cabinet and found a packet of contraceptive pills, almost finished. I don’t know why this should have surprised me but it did, and I wondered who Evie was sleeping with, and whether we’d meet him that night. And then I heard the key turning in the front door so I closed the cabinet and stepped out of the bathroom, slipping down the stairs just before Rachel and Evie came in from the street.

When the evening was over we helped Evie clear everything away and we put the room back to how it had been before we started. Evie and I were standing in the hall, waiting for Rachel to come back downstairs with our coats, when she said we may as well stay if we wanted to, and that Rachel’s old room was all made up as it always was, just in case anyone came. It seemed a perfectly sensible suggestion to me so I said yes, why not, given that it was so late and we had no plans for the following day. ‘Fine,’ was all Rachel said when she came back downstairs and I told her what had been agreed. And when she turned then and went upstairs without saying another word, I followed her. Having drunk more than I should have done over dinner, and being fairly shattered from the deal I’d closed on Christmas Eve, I fell asleep almost immediately. Rachel, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep, turning and turning so much that eventually she woke me up. I groaned at her I think, and she said she couldn’t help it, she could never sleep in Evie’s house, and that if I’d even so much as asked her whether she actually wanted to stay there she would have told me that. Eventually she said she’d get up and go downstairs if she was keeping me awake, but after she’d gone I couldn’t get back to sleep again. The room was slightly too hot, and
the
hangover I would have for the whole of the next day was already beginning to make itself felt. I went to the bathroom for a glass of water and when I came back I opened the curtains and pulled up the window and stood looking out, wondering if I should go downstairs and tell Rachel to come back up so that we could console one another in our sleeplessness.

I didn’t in the end, walking over to the mantelpiece instead and seeing the inr
ō
that had been placed there. There were three of them, all in a line and quite beautiful in the beam of the street light that fell on them. I picked one of them up meaning simply to feel the weight of it, sensing somehow that I shouldn’t be, Rachel having told me when we’d put our coats in the room that afternoon how valuable they were. But there it was in front of me, and there I was on my own and in the half-light. As I turned it over in my hand there was a rattle and I felt something moving about inside. I put it down and picked up the next one and did the same thing. This time there was no rattle, but instead, the soft and almost imperceptible thud of something shifting against the sides of the casket. I wasn’t surprised to feel that there was something inside the third one as well; it was lighter, and scratchier somehow, but there was certainly something there.

Suddenly feeling wide awake, I picked up all three of the inr
ō
and took them back over to the bed. I sat with my legs crossed under the covers and lined them up in front of me, trying to decide which one to open first. I stayed still and listened for a while, in case Rachel was coming upstairs again, but when all I heard was the ticking of the clock in the hall I turned back to my task. I was bored I suppose; bored and still a little drunk. And so, having picked up the first one and shaken it again, hearing whatever was inside rattling like tiny dice against its sides, I opened it and tipped it upside down, emptying the contents into the palm of my hand. I couldn’t quite make out what it was that I was looking at at first, so tiny were they, so I closed my hand into a fist to make sure I didn’t lose any of them and I stretched over to switch on the bedside lamp, feeling them pressing sharp against my palm as I did so and wondering whether
perhaps
I had happened upon a stash of rough-cut diamonds. When I unfurled my hand I saw that it wasn’t diamonds I was holding but teeth. They were tiny, the teeth of a child, and there were perhaps six or seven of them nestling there. The sharp points that I’d felt as I squeezed them were the little roots of the things, and as I held them up closer, moving the lamp so that it shone on them, I saw that there were a few small pieces of soft tissue still attached to them, darkened with time and grown hard where they clung to the bone. I stared at them, thinking of tooth fairies and five-pence pieces and the fact that when I was a child, I had never even thought to wonder about what had happened to the teeth that were taken from under my pillow at night by my mother, or by Matron, but that I was quite sure I had never seen them again.