Every Contact Leaves A Trace (25 page)

Perfectly pure and good: I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

In one long yellow string I wound

Three times her little throat around
,

And strangled her. No pain felt she
;

I am quite sure she felt no pain
.

WERE YOU ANGRY WITH HER HARRY? IS THAT WHY YOU DID IT? IT’S NOT YOUR SECRET ANY MORE HARRY. YOU SEE, WE KNOW EVERYTHING. AND WE MEAN, EVERYTHING.

I AM A WELL-WISHER

As soon as I’ve read this final letter various options present themselves to me. I sit and turn each one over a few times, feeling slightly dizzy as I try to work out what to do. I delay for no more than a moment or two before I grab the papers from the table and shove them back into the wallet, running from the room and throwing myself down the stairs as fast as I can and out into the night, dashing through the passageway to the quad and taking a course straight across the middle of it. I notice as I run that the snow has begun to melt slightly so that the lawns are beginning to emerge in patches that show up as smudges of brown in the light of the moon. As I run up the steps on the other side it occurs to me that Harry might not even be there at this time of the night, and that I should perhaps go first to the porter’s lodge to check, and, if necessary, to demand his home address.

In the end there is no need. I take the stairs up to Harry’s rooms two at a time and when I get there, my chest heaving from the cold and the exertion, I bang on his outer door as hard as I can. I stand back and wait and when after a time I have heard nothing I bang again, harder this time, and for longer.

I am still banging when I hear his voice calling out, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming. Please, wait a moment.’ And then suddenly he is there, a dressing gown wrapped tight around him and high about his neck, his hair dishevelled and his eyes staring. ‘You have read the letters then,’ he says, standing back as though he is afraid of me. And when I nod in response, he opens the door a little wider and gestures to me to come inside.

15

THE STORY HARRY
began to tell me that night as we sat by the fire in his rooms was, in the end, not so very complicated. It was a sad tale, and a tawdry one, but it could not be said to have followed a narrative path that was, when it came to it, anything other than fairly direct. He warned me that it would take some time in the telling, and that I would have to be patient with him, since it was not one story but many, woven together. Other than that, he had only one caveat before he began, only one reservation about the jigsaw he was about to lay out: he told me right at the start that although he was going to describe a sequence of events which he believed to have culminated in Rachel’s murder, he could not claim that his was anything approaching an authorized version. There were questions that remained unanswered, and problems that remained unsolved. Perhaps the biggest flaw of all, he said, was the absence of more than one of the protagonists of the piece, which meant that what I was about to learn would have, for the time being at least, to remain no more than a theory, and one which I would have to take from him on trust; he hadn’t found a way of corroborating it, and nor could he see that he’d be able to.

He apologised for the way he’d gone about things. He knew I had found my visit thus far somewhat bewildering, and he was aware that he might have arranged the whole thing more satisfactorily from my perspective. But until he’d had an opportunity to observe me in situ, as it were, in the way that he’d been able to over the previous few days, until he had watched my reaction to some of the things he had told me, or shown me, or asked me to read, he had been more than a little uncertain of my own role in the proceedings.

His intention on inviting me to Oxford had therefore been first,
to
discover how much I knew of the events concerned and whether I had had any greater involvement in them than that of which he was already aware; and then, depending on what had been established in answer to those questions, either to tell me the whole of the tale or to withhold it. He said that he had satisfied himself that I knew very little of it, if anything at all, and could now be almost certain that the entirety of the story he was therefore about to reveal was known only to himself, to Evie, and to Anthony. On my becoming part of that circle of confidants, he wanted me to be absolutely clear that what I chose to do with the information was entirely at my discretion.

‘We are none of us blameless in this sorry affair, Alex. We are some of us less culpable than others, but not one of us can avoid a share of the burden of responsibility for what happened to Rachel. Not one. I would be grateful if you would hear me out, and listen to my conclusions before you make a decision about what to do. After that, I recognise I can have no further hold on you. It will be in your gift, Alex, when you know the whole of it.’

‘What, Harry?’ I asked him. ‘What will be in my gift?’ He sat back into the sofa then and raised his glasses to his forehead and frowned at me, as though I failed to keep up with what he was saying. ‘Our salvation, Alex,’ he said. ‘Our salvation. Or, if you so wish it, our damnation. You must decide whether to conceal our story, or to disclose it, and in so doing, you must be our judge.’ And then, having poured us each a glass of whisky from the bottle that stood on the mantelpiece, he began.

He’d received the first of the three letters at the end of Sixth Week in the summer term of my second year. His wife had died just before Christmas. Because her death had happened during the vacation, he’d been able to keep it relatively private, arranging for the briefest of notices to be put on one of the boards outside the porter’s lodge, announcing that he would not be resuming his college duties, nor his teaching timetable, until the start of the summer term, and noting
the
address of the hospice to which donations could be sent should anyone wish to make one.

As he told me this I remembered having seen the notice, and having listened to the English students talking about it in the Buttery bar once or twice. I’d overheard them gossiping in a half-hearted sort of a way about how Harry’s wife had died, and wondering if it was suicide, or if she’d been murdered by a jilted lover. They’d moaned about how much time he’d had off already, saying that they now understood the frequency of his absences the previous term, unexplained at the time but clearly, with hindsight, relating to what must have been hospital visits, surgery, chemotherapy, but that all the same, it was they who had had to do with graduate students instead, stepping in at the last minute and never having the slightest idea what they were talking about. I was surprised by the way they spoke about him and his wife. Harry had always been someone they’d talked of with something approaching adulation, even awe, and the conversations that I overheard in the bar at around that time seemed remarkable to me in the light of this; there was something in their speculation that was, if not quite salacious, then certainly disrespectful, and that would have been more understandable had its target been a tutor who was less well-liked.

Harry had come back at the start of the summer term to find that Rachel and Anthony and Cissy had all three elected to study Robert Browning as their Special Author, which meant that they would together attend a tutorial with him every week for the whole of that summer term. At the end of that time, over the vacation, each of them would write a dissertation on the poet’s work, which would be submitted as their Special Paper for Finals. He was not displeased about this, though he was perhaps a little surprised by the uniformity of their decision. It was not unprecedented to have three students studying the same author for their Special Paper, but it was unusual. At any rate, when looked at in the round, he regarded it as a welcome surprise: they were a group whose company he found stimulating, even convivial, and the intensity of the dynamic between them, which had been apparent from the start, was something for which he came to be grateful, in that it provided him with some distraction
in
those early weeks after his return from a dark and desolate winter.

Fairly soon though, this was a dynamic that crossed a line from the merely intense to the almost wild, and one that he realised early on would have to be carefully managed in order that the right balance might be struck. They had an energy in their discourse, the three of them, which he knew from the start was something that could either serve to assist them in their learning, or hinder them even to the point of obstructing it. The discussions they had each week were extraordinary in their creativity, and in their combativeness, and the ideas that were thrown out in those sessions developed into something quite original, startling even. He couldn’t say that it was any one of them that was responsible for this; it was by their union that it was generated. While the debate would reach its most fevered pitch in the exchanges that took place between Rachel and Anthony, each of them throwing quotes across the room at one another like cricket balls, Cissy was nonetheless a constant part of the dialogue, just in a different way.

‘It wasn’t that she was any less brilliant,’ Harry said. ‘On the contrary, I think that if she’d stayed, she might even have exceeded the potential either one of them displayed. Her written work was her forte though, from the start. It was there that she was really herself. Careful, analytical. On another level altogether from the others. She was older than them, you see. She’d already started a course in the US and given it up halfway through to come over here instead. But she was almost too careful initially, too controlling. It took the whole of the first year to get her to let go, to be comfortable with the idea of being spontaneous. To take risks with her ideas, rather than always seeing things in black and white.’

I thought to myself then that I’d known plenty of people like that at Worcester, remembering Richard’s frequent observation that most of our fellow law students were such pedants they’d end up as tax lawyers or parliamentary draftsmen, though he usually only made it after one of them had torn him to pieces for having too few precedents at his fingertips in support of what he’d considered to be an otherwise brilliant argument.

‘We see it from time to time,’ Harry carried on, ‘in some of our
first-year
students. They will arrive so well-read you know they’re in abject terror of something. It usually turns out to be one of their parents, or both of them. In Cissy’s case, she’d treated her first reading list like a contract, rather than a guide. There was nothing wrong in that, of course, although it meant that while the others read everything they’d neglected to before coming up, she started on literary theory, the sort of material most of them never even get to. And it actually held her back for a while, this relentless pursuit of perfection, leading as it so often does to a formulaic kind of blandness,’ Harry said. ‘But we got there in the end, with careful encouragement and a few chats at the end of her first year when she didn’t get the results she wanted and I told her she wasn’t being adventurous enough.

‘By the time it came to the Browning tutorials she’d got the knack of it, and she was able to take things less seriously, and not to think so much in terms of right and wrong. She gave as good as the other two from then on. But she did it always in her own way, and of course, however much she had adapted to our method of doing things, there was always the fact of where she came from. “Our little American friend”, Anthony called her when he was building up to one of his more withering put-downs. She would sit bolt upright on the sofa, her head turned a little to one side, watching the other two tearing into one another. She’d said to me once, the year before, that she thought we ought to spend less time talking and more time writing, and I would watch her sometimes and wonder whether her reticence was because she was still sceptical about this. But then she would come out with something, right at the end of an argument; something she’d gleaned from a piece of secondary literature the other two hadn’t even heard of, and she’d finish it with a killer blow, just like that. It wasn’t reticence at all, you see; she’d been listening all the way through, storing things up and preparing her point, so that when it came out, there was rarely any answer to it. Her written work stayed much as it had been though, and I suppose I couldn’t fault it. It was just an approach I wasn’t accustomed to. Slightly overassertive, perhaps, and a little laboured. Pedantic even. Like a—’ and he stopped, looking embarrassed.

‘Like a lawyer, you mean,’ I finished for him.

‘Yes, actually, that was what I was going to say. Her father was one, of course; perhaps that was where she got it from. I should apologise though, for my slip. A kinder way to describe her style would be to say it was simply too cumbersome. Even leaden. Rachel and Anthony were, how shall I say it, more playful with their dialogue, and easier with their knowledge. It was a kind of game for them, though they took it none the less seriously. They were able to be freer with their ideas, that was all, and to be jocund with books, rather than always seeing them as something rule-bound.’

In any case, he said, as the early weeks of the term went by, he was nothing short of delighted with their progress. Their commitment to the Special Paper meant they were able to take in a range of material far beyond the confines of their subject, their studies even approaching at times what he considered to be academia in the widest sense of the word. Because they each seemed to be working as hard as one another on the days that passed between the tutorials, he was able to push them in their reading, and in their thinking, and consequently their debates each week became something he looked forward to a great deal.