Every Contact Leaves A Trace (22 page)

Hearing what sounded like a floorboard creaking outside my door, I cupped my palm and poured the teeth back into their casket and quickly pulled the covers over all three of the inr
ō
. But it was nothing, I had imagined it, and so I took them all out again and picked up the second one, shaking it gently and hearing something shift lightly against the sides. I opened it with slightly less enthusiasm than I had the first, uncertain now whether I actually wanted to know what was in it. I brought the lamp closer and tipped up the casket and what fell out was a lock of hair, thick and dark and shiny, tied with a little velvet ribbon attaching a tiny label, yellowing with age. I stroked the hair with my fingers and found it to be soft, and I turned the label over and saw the initials, in thick black ink, R.C., and a date, September 1981. I brought the lock of hair to my face and inhaled its scent, and after that I held it against my mouth, feeling it silky against my lips, and I wondered what Rachel would have looked like as a child.

The contents of the last of the inr
ō
was perhaps the most intriguing, if only because I was interrupted before I’d finished looking at it properly. I held the casket upside down and shook it but whatever was inside became caught, so I reached in two of my fingers. What I pulled out was a piece of paper, folded and folded so it would fit. I could sense its age as soon as I began to unfold it,
and
the fact that the ink had faded and the handwriting was rambling and uneven meant it was quite difficult to make out the script I found myself looking at. I got up and took my glasses from my jacket pocket and sat back down on the edge of the bed, holding the piece of paper right up under the lamp and beginning to read as best as I could.

Iona, June 21, 1981

My darling Rachel
,

I know this last month has been so very difficult for you, and so very sad. Before Daddy died he asked me to tell you as often as I could, and always, how very much he loved you. You were his only little girl, his best lady, that’s what he always said, and I sometimes even thought he loved you more than me he spoke of you so often towards the end!

I am so sorry that I left when I did, but I have a need to be on my own, and in some wide open spaces. I hope you can understand. And I hope she is looking after you; I told her she had to. I’ll be back soon my darling, I promise, and I ask only this of you: you must be strong for me when I return from this time away. I know you are little still, but you were Daddy’s best lady and I’m only writing to you like this because I know you’re grown up enough to understand what it is that I am asking of you
.

Some of these nights on the island I have stayed awake until dawn thinking of you, and remembering when you were a tiny baby, and what it was like to hold you for the very first time. And I can only begin to fall asleep when I feel certain that I will come back to you soon and hold you in my arms
—

And then there is the very definite sound of someone coming up the stairs, and fast, so I fold the letter up as best I can and slip it back inside its casket and run over to the mantelpiece and put them all back in what I think is the right order and I am jumping back into bed again just as Rachel opens the door. ‘Alex what are you doing? You’re awake! You’ve got the lamp on and the window open and it’s freezing in here! Why didn’t you come and get me if you weren’t sleeping either? You’re such a weirdo do you know that?’
And
she switches off the lamp and pulls the curtain across and climbs into bed and I hold her and tell her I was too hot, and that I’d only just woken up that minute, and I’d needed some air, and I start to stroke her head where it rests on my chest and soon she has fallen asleep and I think about the letter and wonder what the rest of it said. I knew by then, of course, about Rachel’s father’s illness, and about how her mother had gone away to Iona for the whole of the summer that followed, leaving Rachel in London with Evie, and that she’d returned in the September only to go to Oxford Street on her first morning back and walk straight under a bus, and that the inquest had returned an open verdict. But having told me the bare facts once when I’d asked her, Rachel wouldn’t talk about it again, saying she’d rather not, and that there were some things it wasn’t necessary to discuss, and that if I couldn’t handle that I could just walk away there and then.

And then I fell asleep as well, wishing as I drifted off that she could talk to me about those things, and thinking that if she would let me I might perhaps be able to help her, or to comfort her in her sadness.

13

HARRY, AS HE
had anticipated, didn’t make an appearance at dinner that night, and when I went to the porter’s lodge the next morning I found he’d left me a note apologising for his absence and saying he’d be pleased to see me for tea at the usual time. In the afternoon, he welcomed me in and took my jacket and I sat back in my chair and said nothing, thinking he might begin by offering some sort of explanation for his trip to London, but he only asked me how I had spent the previous day. It wasn’t until after I’d told him about my walk in the woods at Wytham, and the Ashmolean, that he made any reference to it, and even then it was only in passing. He told me he’d got back early enough to make it to dinner, but only just, and that because he tended to find the journey tiring these days, he’d ordered a quiet supper in his rooms. He’d spent the evening alone, sorting through some of his things and continuing the slow process of deciding what he would keep and what he would let go when it came to his retirement.

He gestures then to a stack of pictures resting in their frames against the sofa, saying that the cataloguing of his collection is something he is actually quite enjoying. He reaches forward and takes one from the top of the pile and passes it to me. The photograph I am looking at is about half a foot square and printed in black and white. There is a boy in this photograph, a small boy of no more than eight or nine years old. He is standing in front of one of the lions on Trafalgar Square and is wearing a winter coat and a scarf. He is flanked by two adults, each of them clasping one of his hands so that they are strung out in a line like figures cut from folded paper. The photograph is slightly faded, and from the way the three of them are dressed it appears to have been taken
some
time in the 1950s. The boy is wearing glasses, and when I look up at Harry and see that he has brought his glasses back down from his forehead, I realise that the photograph is of him. ‘These are your parents?’ I ask, and he says yes, and he tells me that what I am holding is the only picture he has of them, and how relieved he was to have come across the negative when sorting through the contents of their house after his mother’s death. ‘Until I found it I had to make do with my memory of the day. It was vivid enough, but it is good to see them there, all the same,’ he says, and he tells me about the three of them catching the train from Hull and tracking the banks of the Humber, heading west towards Goole before swinging south, and what it was like to arrive in London and find themselves among crowds suddenly. And how they had stopped a policeman on Trafalgar Square who, having given them the directions they wanted, had offered to take their picture and suggested they stand in front of one of the lions, and hold hands, and how as he’d stood there he’d been quite sure that his father wouldn’t have wanted to be photographed holding hands, not in public, and that it was only because it was the policeman’s idea that he had allowed it.

He talks then about his childhood in Hessle, his mother’s voice always singing, and how she had longed to become a pianist until her own mother had sold the piano one day, saying it took up too much space in the drawing room, and that it was because she had never recovered from this dashing of her hopes that she hadn’t let him learn a musical instrument, not wanting him to know what it was to experience something wonderful only to have it taken away. As he talks I stop listening properly, looking once more at the photograph that sits just to the left of Harry’s head, the one of the group of students standing on the Provost’s steps with Rachel in their midst, standing next to Harry, and it occurs to me that had I been in Harry’s position, I am not entirely sure I would have left it hanging there, knowing that I was coming to visit. Or, to put it another way, had I done so, I might have acknowledged its presence by talking about it in detail or at least
by
making some reference to it, rather than simply leaving me to notice it for myself.

And then, as Harry talks on about the East Riding he had known as a boy, I remembered him having told me over our tea that the reason he hadn’t stayed on for what he called ‘the Ball proper’ was because he hadn’t wanted to go alone, it being the year that his wife had died. My mind wandered again to the Ball, and to the fact I’d spent the whole of it with Richard. As far as I could remember, we’d made a fairly good night of it, the two of us together; I’d been almost happy as we wandered around in our drunkenness, feeling excited about the summer that was to come, and about being free from things for a time. I focused back in on Harry’s voice for a moment, hearing him talk of how his father had taken him running at Little Switzerland as soon as he was old enough, and how, when Harry had started to compete, he’d been there to see him win every race, whatever the weather and no matter how far he had to drive to wherever it was taking place. More images of the Ball began to flit in front of my eyes, one after the other, and it was as they did so that I realised that despite what he’d said about not having stayed on, I had seen him later on that night, I knew I had.

My realisation was, I think, prompted by my recollection of Richard having made a joke about what he was wearing, something about him being so much of a ‘Yorkshire tight-wad’ that he hadn’t even stretched to black tie. I couldn’t remember with any clarity the visual context in which I’d seen Harry, not at that stage. I remembered Richard’s joke though, probably because I’d thought to myself that Richard himself was far more obsessed with money than any Yorkshireman I’d ever met, and I’d said so, and we’d ended up arguing about it. In any case, I knew Harry had been there, and I couldn’t think why he would have told me so specifically that he wasn’t, it hardly being likely he’d have forgotten a night like that, particularly given the photograph that must have been hanging on his wall for at least the previous decade.

I begin to tune back in to the pattern of his speech, intending to take the next opportunity that arises to interject and ask him again
about
the Ball, wondering whether perhaps I’ve misunderstood him, but being almost certain at the same time that I haven’t, when I become aware that he has stopped talking altogether and is staring right at me.

‘Alex?’ he says, and I realise he has asked me a question. ‘You must forgive me if I’m being intrusive,’ he continues. ‘And you need not speak of it if it will distress you to do so.’ I smile, not having any idea what he’s talking about, and he is encouraged by this and carries on. ‘I heard of his death at the time of course, but I didn’t know you then, not in the sense that I do now. Not, at any rate, well enough to write and offer my condolences, if you understand. It was about five years ago, I think?’

When I understand that he is talking about my father I am caught off guard and I start to tell him about the shock of it, and how at first I had wondered whether perhaps he shouldn’t have been driving at his age, but that when it came to it, his innocence was proved beyond doubt. I start to tell Harry about the funeral, and how it rained throughout, but I stop when I get to the part about standing at the graveside under my umbrella afterwards thinking I was alone only to look up and see that a handful of people had gathered at the side of the church. It took me some time to work out who they were but eventually I recognised one of them, and then another, and realised they had been neighbours of ours from the village at the time of the accident, and that they’d come to watch the burial of Dr Death, as they’d sometimes referred to him in the years that followed when they thought neither my mother nor I was listening. Remembering the humiliation I felt the first time I overheard them calling my father this, knowing it wasn’t true, and knowing how angry it would have made him if he’d heard them himself, I get no further than that with the telling of my story, finding it is too much, after all, to talk of it.

‘We live by death’s negligence,’ Harry says, mistaking my sudden silence for grief rather than shame. ‘“Men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things,”’ he carries on, ‘“But who shall so forecast the years and find in a loss a gain to match?”’ I become
aware
that I am beginning to feel slightly sick, and uncomfortably hot. Because I want him to stop talking, I smile and thank him, and I say that I would like to go back to my room.

‘Of course, Alex,’ he says, standing with me. ‘Of course, I am sorry. And there is no need to thank me for the things I said; they are not my words. But there is consolation in them, I think, of a kind. You are right though, perhaps we have spoken enough for today. I am sorry if I touched on a subject I should not have done.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘of course not,’ and I turn to leave, but as I do my eye is caught by Rachel’s face looking out at me from the photograph on Harry’s wall. Without meaning to, I hesitate just long enough for him to notice me looking at her, and then I say to him, quite simply, that I remember having seen him that night, long after the Ball had started.