Every Contact Leaves A Trace (23 page)

He takes off his glasses and begins to clean them, and I think it is the way he performs this ritual, methodically, slowly, carefully, showing no apparent intention of responding to what I’ve just said, that makes me lose patience. I look once more at Rachel staring back at me, and decide I’ve had enough of waiting, and that it’s time, finally, to talk about the little book of Browning.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘I almost forgot. I’ve read the poems you asked me to.’

‘Good,’ he says quickly, not looking up from what he’s doing. ‘And how did you find them?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I said how did you find them?’

When I don’t answer he glances up, but only briefly, and I can read nothing in his face before he lowers it again.

‘It was the book itself that interested me, Harry, in actual fact, rather than its contents.’

‘Yes?’ he says, his head still lowered to his task.

‘You said in your letter you’d found it among some things of Rachel’s.’

Only then does he stop, putting his glasses back on and looking at me.

‘And?’

‘And I have a question for you,’ I reply, sitting down again and leaning right back in my chair, carrying on only when he sits down as well. ‘It’s just that she was reading it, that’s all, the month we came to visit you. I remember the cover you see. And the smell. She read to me from it, as a matter of fact, one night in our apartment. So when I opened the parcel you sent I recognised it straight away.’

‘Right,’ Harry says. ‘I’m not quite sure I—’

‘I know it’s the same book, Harry. I know it is. But what I don’t know is this. When exactly did you take it from her?’

I can see his jaw clenching and unclenching as he looks at me but he doesn’t answer.

‘You see, I don’t remember her being away from me that day we came to Oxford. Apart from when she went down to the lake after dinner. You will understand my difficulty, I think.’

‘Yes, Alex, I do.’

He says nothing else for at least a minute, and when he carries on he doesn’t answer my question, saying instead, ‘I believe the time has come for us to have that conversation.’

‘What conversation? We don’t need to have a conversation. You just need to tell me. When did you take it from her?’

‘It’s not quite so straightforward, Alex. You see—’

‘Oh come on, Harry. I think it is. Was it before she died?’

‘Alex. Please,’ and he stands again, suddenly, folding his arms in front of himself. ‘There are some things I have to tell you. Lots of things in fact. But before I can begin, I’m afraid there is more reading to be done.’

And then, to my amazement, he reaches over and takes something from the bookshelf and hands it to me, saying, ‘Tomorrow afternoon then, Alex. It’s late now, and dinner this evening will be the usual sort of affair so we shan’t have a chance to speak. Perhaps you could come a little earlier for tea tomorrow though, so we have plenty of time. Two o’clock, I think.’

I look down and see that what he has given me is a large padded envelope, taped up around the top and with something heavy inside.
‘I’m
sorry, Harry,’ I say, incredulous at his suggestion. ‘You don’t seem to understand what I mean, not exactly.’ I know that my voice is shaking, but I know also that I can’t control my breathing enough to make it stop, and when I try to give the envelope back to him he shakes his head and doesn’t take it.

‘What, Alex?’ he asks. ‘What is it that I don’t understand?’

‘Why did you ask me to come here, Harry? Why won’t you answer my question about the bloody book? Why did you say you found it among her things?’

‘Alex—’

‘What things, Harry? I know you lied to me in that letter. Do you seriously think I’m going to sit through dinner again making small talk with virtual strangers while you decide how to answer me?’

‘Alex,’ he says again. ‘I think it is you, if I may say so, who has not entirely understood the situation. The decision of how I am going to answer your question was one I took a long time ago. I have simply been waiting until you asked it. And now that you have, there are a few more things you must see before I begin my story, that is all. I am trying to give you the best chance of comprehending the sequence of events I will describe. It’s important, Alex, that things are revealed to you in the right order, so you may see them as I have done.’

Feeling that I’m completely losing control of the situation, I hear myself telling him I’m finding his approach at best bizarre, and at worst deeply disrespectful to Rachel, and then I feel a resurgence in my stomach of the nausea that has been always there since the moment I discovered, sitting on the ground beside the policeman who would arrest me, that she was dead.

‘Are we not beyond that point, Harry?’ I carry on. ‘Are we not beyond it yet?’

‘What point is that, Alex? Are we not beyond what point?’ and I see that he is angry also, at the same time as appearing to be genuinely confused by my question.

‘Beyond the point of discussing the relative merits of one narrative structure over another. For god’s sake, Harry, don’t you
see?
Rachel’s death was the end of a life, not the beginning of a fucking story.’

And then Harry looks at his pocket watch and walks over to the door, shaking his head as he goes. When he gets there and turns to face me it takes him a moment or two to catch his breath before he speaks.

‘You are right, Alex, of course you are. And I am sorry for you in your loss, you must know that by now. It’s just that the particular story I have to tell you is one that began a long time before Rachel died, a very long time in fact. And no matter how angry you feel, you must accept that I can say no more until you have read the things I’ve given you. It is best that you do so alone, and at your own pace.’ And he sighs. ‘Do not doubt the loss I suffered on the night that Rachel died. She was as a daughter to me, your wife.’

And then he reaches forward and holds the door open before saying, his voice grown quiet now, ‘I very much hope that will be something you come to see for yourself when you hear the things that I will speak of.’

I think it was because I was so surprised by what he’d just said, and because I was too bewildered to argue any more, that I did as he asked and went away. When I left his room I was holding against my chest the envelope that he’d given me, and as I walked down his staircase I heard him call out, ‘Six forty-five this evening then, as usual. Goodbye, Alex. And do make sure you find the time to read its contents before you go to sleep tonight. All of it. It is important that you do so.’

‘I’ll take you through to your father, sir,’ the nurse said. ‘I am so sorry we couldn’t. It was too late sir. It was twice in the air ambulance. It was a helicopter. It was the fastest they could have got him here. Twice they tried, and then on the table. His heart.’

I stopped her then and said there was no need to explain, that a doctor had taken me into a side room as soon as I’d arrived and told me everything there was to tell about my father’s death.

And this is what I would have told Harry when he’d asked me about it, if I’d been able to; this was the scene that came back to me as I walked away from his room that afternoon.

I would have told him that the doctor was almost as old as my father had been, and that he’d sat right back in his chair and kept his arms folded all the way through our conversation, as though he was afraid I might cry, or reach out to touch him, if he were to do otherwise. I heard very little of what he said to me, this doctor, my thoughts drifting instead to the helicopter rising above the fields of Hampshire and backing away towards Portsmouth. I imagined the pilot glancing down and seeing a line of traffic stretching out beneath him, and I imagined the police becoming smaller and smaller until they were indistinguishable from anybody else, their cars like any other but for their position pointing inwards in a ring around the burnt mess of my father’s car. And I realised then that there would have been nobody in the helicopter that afternoon who actually knew my father, who could have held his hand in theirs and recognised the weight of it, the particular softness of his knuckles against their skin and the warmth of it where it lay. And nor would there have been anyone to miss him when he hadn’t come home for lunch that day, or anyone to wonder where he was. No one who would even have known that he was driving that way, on his own, with nothing in the car but the bag of potatoes he’d just picked up from the farm shop.

As soon as my secretary had finally summoned up the courage to interrupt my meeting and to announce that the transport police had telephoned three times in the previous hour, I called them straight back and was told there had been an accident. When I said it would take me at least two hours to get there, no matter how fast I drove, they said not to hurry, and that the doctors would wait for me. And then they said it again. They would wait until I got there. ‘Don’t worry, sir. They can do that for you.’ I made the mistake of assuming this meant he would still be alive when I arrived, and it wasn’t until later on that afternoon that I discovered my father had died just after I’d set off on my journey. The doctor explained that sometimes they
said
this to people who were driving to the bedside of a dying relative. ‘It’s safer that way,’ he said. ‘Nobody rushes if we tell them that; nobody drives too fast.’

He would never have known what had happened to him, the doctor said. He could never have survived. He became unconscious almost on impact. Seconds, only. No more than that. It was almost certain that he wouldn’t have felt any kind of pain. ‘Often the best way,’ he said. And then he was up, and out of his seat, and grabbing my hand on his way out and shaking it, too hard, too fast.

And because I hadn’t got there any sooner, there was nobody there with my father when they switched off the machines and detached him from every kind of wire and drip and sack of fluid hanging from a stand and cleared away the blood such as they could and covered him in a blanket, a cotton blanket, white, with little holes all over it, the kind of blanket you might expect to see a baby in except it was big enough to cover the whole of his body, leaving him there, lying on a metal bed, quite on his own, right in the middle of the room.

Which is how I find him when the nurse has walked me along the empty corridors for what seems like an age, all the time staying just ahead of me and turning back to speak, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaking with every step like the laughter of children who know they shouldn’t be laughing. At first I can’t get into the room she’s taken me to. There are screens placed in front of the door, screens of fabric stretched across a metal frame, hinged into separate panels on top of wheeled feet. She directs me to step behind them. ‘You’ll find your way, sir. Behind there. That’s it.’ But the space is too narrow for me to turn in and, from where I am standing, I can’t get sufficient purchase on the handle of the door to open it. By the time she has stepped forward and wheeled away the screens so I can reach the door handle properly, my hands are shaking so much that she has to do it for me. I think she will come in with me but instead she closes the door behind me and we are alone together, my father and I. The lights have been switched off, and I look across to where he lies and as I see the familiar shape of him rising still under the
blanket
the room and everything in it disappears suddenly and for a second or two I can see nothing, only whiteness, and there is a kind of a roaring in my ears. When I can see again, I find that I am standing beside him and I have taken his hand from underneath the blanket and am holding it in my own. I look down at his face and see that the whole of his head has been strapped into some kind of a brace, giant screws on either side clamping his jaw together more tightly than it should be so that he looks as though he has been tortured rather than cared for. I place his hand on his chest and walk around to the other side of the bed and when I get there I remember the nurse telling me that it would perhaps be best if I didn’t look at that part of his head.

I am ashamed to say that I walked away from him then, over to the other side of the room, and I was sick into the sink that I found there and I ran the tap and washed it away and I didn’t tell the nurse later on that I’d done it. And then I went back to my father, on the other side this time, and I held his hand again and I realised that the reason his face was the colour of cold ash was because he had not one drop of blood left in him. His hand was too cold, and too heavy, and I leaned over his body and laid my head on his chest and I longed for it to rise and fall but it didn’t so I lifted up my head and kissed him once, on his forehead, and then I said goodbye.

The thing that seemed cruellest as I stood with him that afternoon was the violence of his injuries. They told me a week or so later that his neck had been broken and his skull fractured in twenty places. Six of his ribs had been smashed, and all the bones of both his arms had been rendered into pieces. Technically, his death had occurred when his heart stopped for the third time, with the shock of it, but there was never any chance, they said, not from the moment of impact. It seemed somehow unfair that a man as gentle as my father once had been should ever have known what it was to have suffered such violence himself.

When I went back to the nurses’ desk in the reception area I found the woman who had walked me to my father’s room and I thanked her, and then I asked her to thank the doctors on my behalf for what
they
had done. She handed me a folder of leaflets on bereavement counselling, and lists and lists of the things I would have to do in the months ahead. She held my hands in hers and said ‘I am so sorry,’ and I thought we had finished and I would be able to leave without having shed so much as a single tear in front of anyone. But then at the last she said, ‘Oh, and there’s me almost forgetting to give you these,’ and she reached down beneath her desk and passed me a plastic bag. ‘His shoes sir. And his watch and his wallet. There wasn’t anything else.’