Every Contact Leaves A Trace (3 page)

‘Come on cry-baby. Let’s get you home,’ she said then, and she led me out of the garden, bending over once to say ‘Oh god look what I’ve done to my bloody dress the grass must have been soaking.’

2

IT IS EVENING
now and the darkness is spreading out against the sky as though something viscous has been spilt there. This is the time of day I have come to dislike the most, when I start to reflect on the loneliness of the hours that have passed, at the same time as sensing the unease that accompanies my drift towards sleep. I dream of Rachel every night, almost to the exclusion of anything else. I understand this to be quite normal in my situation, though I would have expected the frequency of these dreams to have decreased a little by now, or their content to have begun to vary more than it does, or that I might at least have started to hear something in them: since Rachel’s death, my dreams are all in silence.

The one that recurs most often is of the night I found her body. I am not surprised by this, but I do find it strange that what seems to surface most often is not the moment I actually ran to her and found her, but instead, a brief episode that took place shortly after that. The first of the policemen have arrived in response to the porter’s call and I sit on the grass and listen as one of them asks me questions and I don’t answer because instead I am hearing the other policeman attempt to resuscitate Rachel. I look across and see him raising his head and shouting out numbers and then lowering his head and pressing his face onto hers and raising his head and shouting his numbers again and then I realise the first policeman has started to shout at me because I am not answering so I turn back to him and focus on what he is saying and I have answered one or two of his questions when I become aware that I can’t hear the other policeman shouting out his numbers any more and then I realise that this is because he has stopped and we all fall silent.

I hear him saying into his radio to cancel the ambulance and I am
shouting
now and I ask my policeman why they are cancelling it and he says, ‘No need sir, we’re calling for a doctor’ and I say ‘Why?’ and he looks away from me and says ‘To verify the death sir.’ And then I see that the other policeman has started to place something around Rachel that looks like a short white fence but it is made of cloth. I am watching him do this and I think to myself that it looks like the windbreak my father used to hammer into the sand each summer in Cornwall to keep my mother warm and then I realise I can’t see Rachel any more and I stand and start to move towards her and I am shouting at the man to stop what he is doing and to let me see her but I can’t move and my policeman is holding me and talking to me quite gently now and putting handcuffs on me and explaining that he is arresting me.

In my dream I hear none of the speech, and none of the shouting. I see our lips move and I know what we are saying but I hear nothing. It is somehow more than silence, this absence of speech: it is a space devoid even of the idea of sound, as though hearing has become a sense not yet thought of.

The dream continues. I turn away from the cloth fence that has been put up around Rachel and I look up the lawns in the other direction and it is an October morning fifteen years ago and I am watching another moment unfold, the moment I have come to think of as being the precise point from which I can say that I knew her. Of course, by the time we found ourselves looking at one another across the table at Richard’s wedding we’d known each other for years already; it was just that there had been what you might call a long pause in our acquaintance, until that night in Middle Temple Hall when Lucinda’s seating plan brought us together again.

In my dream, a man with a megaphone stands under a tree and calls out to us to Go quietly and Be careful and Get a move on, except that in my dream he only holds the megaphone to his mouth and watches as we file silently on to the stands and face him. Another man is standing beside him, hunched over a camera. And then a woman appears behind them, the figure of a woman running, and we all turn to look at her instead of at the camera.

And then the dream is over.

When I say that I think of that moment as being the point in time from which I can say I knew Rachel, I mean that in a qualified way of course. So that if someone were to ask me how long I’d known my wife before she died, that is the point from which I would count the days. But in truth, I would have to explain that I knew her then only in the sense that a lot of people did: she was the sort of person that a lot of people knew. We went up to Oxford together in the autumn of 1992, Richard and Rachel and I, and it was as Richard and I stood waiting to be photographed in honour of that occasion that she made herself known to us, running towards the great plane tree we stood beside.

The stands had been erected just beneath my window early one morning in the first week of October. It can’t have been more than one or two days into the term. I had been allocated a room up in the eaves of the Nuffield Building, a 1930s block standing alone in the gardens just to the south of the main quad. It was a tiny space, with a low door and a ceiling that slanted on one side of the room, right down to the ground. There was a narrow iron bed just inside the door and beyond the bed was a desk pushed into an alcove formed by one of the windows. The window emerged from the roof, jutting out into the sky, so that when I sat at my desk I was afforded a view of the whole of the lawns stretching down to the lake, dotted about with those enormous trees that I would come to see swaying in night breezes like ships at sea. At the other end of the room was another window looking down towards the lake, and behind that, on the opposite wall, a tiny basin with a mirror above it.

On the day I arrived in College I found a letter waiting for me in my pigeonhole in the porter’s lodge. I had been addressed on the envelope with an ‘Esq.’ after my surname, the first time I’d ever been given one. I saw from the signature that the person who had done this thing was Mr H. P. Gardner, Senior Tutor and Fellow in English Literature. His letter instructed me to be on the lawns in front of the Nuffield Building by eight a.m., dressed in what he called subfusc, so that the picture could be taken before we went over to the
Sheldonian
for the matriculation ceremony that would make us members of the University. It was the choreography that would take the time, the letter said. Getting all of us up on to the stands in the right height order and then off again without injury or mishap; that was why we had to be there so early. When it came to it I was woken at six by the sound of men laughing and the clanking of metal poles beneath my window. I remember feeling strangely nervous, so much so that instead of going over to Hall for breakfast, which I had promised myself I would do every day regardless of how I felt about being with people, I took a bowl of cereal with me into my bath and ate with the steam filling the room and sweat running into my mouth. Afterwards, my face flushed red, I stood in front of the mirror trying to do up my white bow tie, second-hand and slightly marked, and thought to myself that I would have preferred a new one. And then I swung round and looked out of the window.

The leaves were turning and there was a mist hanging over the lake, spreading a little way up the lawns towards the students who were gathering in groups around the tree just to the right of my building. Suddenly I didn’t want to go down. I didn’t want to be among them, having to think of something to say. I felt that if I could stay in my room, with my books, I would be alright. I had a sense then that I would remain like this for the whole of my time at Worcester College: looking on groups from the outside. To a certain extent that was exactly what happened, and thinking about it now, I realise that is how I have felt for most of my life, the way I did that October morning. On the edge of things, apart from people, not wanting to be among them. For most of my life, that is, apart from the months that passed between the night of Richard’s wedding and the night when Rachel died. The months when I was finally with her, and loved by her.

I went out when a man with a megaphone, who later became known to me as the Harry P. Gardner who had sent me my letter, started to organise the groups, now grown larger, into height order. I nodded in acknowledgement to a few of the students I had met at
Haddon’s
tea, Richard included, and then we were being filed up on to the stands. The mist had cleared and Harry was standing beside the camera now, watching as the photographer raised his hand in the air to count down to the moment we would be captured forever. And then she appeared, running from one of the passageways that cut through from the main quad. She cried out as she ran, ‘Wait! Oh please wait for me oh bloody hell I’m so unbelievably sorry I got the wrong lawns!’ and everybody laughed, the whole of the stands laughed as she ran towards us in her black and white, pulling up one of her stockings and fixing her hair back with a clip. She had that ability, my wife, to make a whole crowd of people laugh, almost unintentionally. And then she laughed as well and said, ‘I did! I really did! I thought it was on the quad and then there was nobody there so I went round to the playing fields through the Sainsbury Building and I had to run all the way back again and—’ ‘Miss,’ the photographer said. ‘Quieten down miss. Stand there. Smile. That’ll do. And, one!’, as Rachel, smaller than the rest of us, took her place in the middle of the first row, directly in front of me. ‘Two!’, the photographer called out. And then he had to stop again while she fixed another clip in her hair. She lifted it all back behind her and it fanned out in the air, long and dark. It flicked into my face, catching me in both my eyes. I must have reacted in some way, out loud. ‘Oh god I’m so sorry!’ she said and turned round and I caught the scent of her perfume as she did, and she put her hand on my arm. ‘I’m so sorry are you OK? I’m being utterly hopeless this morning.’ ‘I’m fine,’ I said, wiping my eyes and feeling embarrassed. ‘I’m fine.’ ‘Oh god,’ she said again, still looking at me. ‘You’re not are you? Tell you what, could you just hold this a minute?’ and she passed me a black ribbon and leaned forward and shook up her collar to straighten it and as she did her shirt fell open and I could see that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts were small, her nipples pointed and dark. She stood back up and looked at me and said ‘Thanks’ and took her ribbon and tied it under her collar in a sort of a half-knot and pulled on her gown and turned back round. ‘One! Two! Three!’. And it was over.

We would not speak again on such intimate terms, Rachel and I, until the end of our second year, when we both found ourselves staying up in College for the summer vacation. I had assumed, as the shutter clicked again and again, that the photograph represented no more than a pause in our conversation, but Rachel disappeared immediately and I was left alone on the stands, looking around, confused about where she had gone and why she hadn’t waited for me to go with her. I felt pretty foolish when she ignored me on the way over to the ceremony. Richard told me that the group she was with were the English students. He said that this explained why they were making so much noise. ‘As natural attention-seekers,’ he went on, in what I would come to know as his customary tone, ‘they will labour throughout their sojourn at Worcester under the perpetual misconception that whatever they choose to say will be of the utmost interest to the rest of us, and that we, in contrast, will have nothing whatever about us that might be of interest to them. And that is how things will remain for at least a decade or so, until they realise that the rest of the world finds them far less fascinating than they thought themselves to be and they’ll start to seek us out and marry us.’

‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘Why us?’

‘Because by that point old man,’ he replied, ‘we’ll be stinking bloody rich.’

Unlike Richard, I did come to find them interesting, the group that Rachel walked with that October morning, the group who were louder than the rest of us and seemed to notice no one but themselves. As far as I could make out, they did very little work as such. In the winter, if they came anywhere near the library at all it was not to sit inside at the desks, but outside on the spiral staircase, talking so loudly that I sometimes gave up trying to concentrate and took my books back to my room instead. When the summer term arrived Richard and I used to see them on our strolls around the lake, and then they seemed to do nothing other than lie all afternoon on the lawns, smoking and passing novels between themselves and arguing, or telling each other the plot to save them having to read everything for Harry Gardner.

I have described them as a group, but it was one that split fairly soon into smaller units. Rachel’s was made up of only three. The other two were her tutorial partners: a smallish and slightly effeminate northerner called Anthony Trelissick, and an American woman, Cissy Craig, who had whiter teeth than the rest of us and coxed for the college Boat Club.

I was especially interested in Rachel herself. Of course she was known to us all from the moment she ran towards the stands for the photograph, from the moment we turned collectively to look at her, but there were plenty of other things that brought her to everyone’s attention. In addition to the way she chose to make her entrance that morning there was the matter of her appearance, a topic that came to be much discussed in the Buttery bar. And then there was her reputation as a pricktease, a title given to her by the men she came to reject. It was a word I first heard used with reference to Rachel one evening at the start of the Hilary term of our first year. Richard had surprised me by giving up on his reading and coming to sit at the bar. I noticed he was drinking a lot, keeping up with the man he sat next to, Philip Towneley, who himself had announced his intention to drown his sorrows before closing time. Towneley had, it seemed, thought he stood a chance with Rachel until earlier on that evening when she’d asked him to leave the set of rooms she and Cissy shared, ‘just’, he said, ‘as things were getting interesting.’ And that was when Richard, nodding into his pint and drawing the corners of his mouth down into an upside down ‘U’, said the word pricktease. ‘That’s what the story is,’ he went on. ‘Shouldn’t take it personally if I were you.’ And then I remember seeing Anthony, who had been sitting at a side table reading a novel all evening, look up at Richard and frown. He seemed always to be frowning, Anthony, but where it was usually a frown that suggested puzzlement, or, with his eyebrows creased together just a little and the beginnings of a lopsided kind of a smile breaking out across his face, something like bewilderment, there was no doubt about the fact that he was angry that night as he watched Richard. ‘Women like Rachel Cardanine,’ Richard continued, not noticing Anthony, who by now
had
put down his book and was walking across the bar towards him, ‘tend eventually to get what it is they seem to be asking for, whether they like it or not.’ He picked up his pint at this point and started to gesticulate with it, beating time to the rhythm of his own speech, the volume of which was beginning to rise. ‘And if she continues to go about the place treating men in the way that she does, there won’t be a lot of sympathy for her when it happens, I can—’