Every Contact Leaves A Trace (34 page)

The weeks that followed the kiss had been extraordinary for me. When I’d gone to see Haddon the next morning, as he’d ordered me to when he’d stormed from his French doors in the middle of the night and thrown us out of his garden, I was worried he might spoil things for us, but when I got there he just wanted what he called ‘a quiet word’, making a series of inscrutable comments about the sort of company I was keeping. Nothing of what he said meant a great deal to me and I’d taken very little notice; I was just relieved he wasn’t going to be heavy-handed. And then he went the next day anyway, somewhere abroad for his own vacation, so I didn’t see him again until October. After that, there had been hardly anyone else around that was known to either Rachel or me. Most of the other rooms were let out to summer schools or visiting academics, so that we were in our own world, somehow. The flow of our togetherness was interrupted by no one, and we made the college our own and devoted ourselves to one another entirely.

That was how things were until the last ten days or so of September, when the air began to turn and she started to cut herself adrift in ways so tiny I managed to persuade myself they weren’t happening, until one day, just before the beginning of term, when we stood at Oxford station waiting for her train and she took her hand from mine and told me it was over. It was crowded that day
on
the platform, and noisy, so that when she said it would be a good idea if we stopped seeing one another, I thought for a moment I had misheard her. But then, when I tried to take her hand again she repeated herself and carried on, saying, ‘It should never have happened should it, Alex, you and I? We were simply thrown together by circumstance, wouldn’t you say? And I suppose we were both lonely, that was all.’

She didn’t really seem to be speaking with complete conviction, and it was almost as though she was acting out a part she’d learned, hesitating slightly over her words and smiling strangely, in a way I’d never seen her smile before. I tried to talk her out of it, asking her why and saying she was wrong, she must be out of her mind, we were happy, we should talk, she could tell me if there was something I needed to do differently. But she said simply that there was nothing to talk about, and that since we’d never been friends before the summer anyway there was no need to see one another again was there, not really. Her own friends would be coming back in a day or two for the new term, and so would mine, and there was our work to think about, and it was just a summer fling, and I was completely overreacting.

I was stunned, and said so, recalling for her some of the things she had told me in the mornings when we had woken together that month, but she said don’t be an idiot and didn’t I realise I sounded like a teenager. And it was then that I told her I loved her, and she stopped speaking and started to cry, silently. She wasn’t shaking or sobbing or making any noise at all; she was just standing there, still as a stone, the tears falling slowly down her cheeks. She made no attempt to brush them off, just letting them land and staring at me. Eventually, unable to stand it any longer, I reached out towards her face, but she took my hands in hers, gently, and moved them away from her, pushing me back and telling me never to say anything like that to her again, and that she was sorry, she really was, but there were things that had happened, things she couldn’t explain, things she hoped I would never know, and that all of them together meant she had to be on her own, without distraction for a time, to focus on her work, and she really had no choice, and it would be better
for
both of us if we didn’t speak of it again. After I’d stood staring back at her for a while, unable to understand clearly what was going on and wishing desperately that it wasn’t happening, I realised there was nothing I could say that would make her change her mind and I said goodbye and walked away and left her there, standing on the platform waiting for her train.

I hadn’t really seen her again after that, not to speak to. Richard came back and did his best to shake me out of it, which helped, and I supposed that that was what she’d meant about our friends coming back and us returning to the lives we’d lived before the summer. I was puzzled though, by the fact that the people I’d thought of as her friends hadn’t come back, and that she’d removed herself so completely from college life, not even living on site any more.

That morning in bed in my apartment, the morning after Richard’s wedding, when I asked her to tell me what had really happened, and why she’d broken things off in the way that she had, she said she couldn’t remember, not exactly, and please could we talk about something else, and I said no, it mattered to me, and I began to recall for her, in as much detail as I was able to, the things we’d said to one another on the station platform that day. And she stopped me halfway through saying please, that was enough, and of course she remembered, she just didn’t want to talk about it, and I looked at her where she lay on the other side of the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and I saw a tear running down her cheek.

‘I can’t explain, Alex, I can’t. I’m sorry, I should go.’ She started to get up, reaching for her clothes.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why do you have to go all of a sudden just because I asked you to talk about that?’

‘Do you want me to stay?’ she said, sitting back down on the edge of the bed and looking at me, puzzled.

‘Of course I want you to stay. Of course I do,’ I said, and she got back under the covers again and I told her it didn’t matter, we didn’t have to talk about it if she really didn’t want to, it was such a long time ago, all that did matter was that we were together again and of course she shouldn’t go for god’s sake, I’d only just got her
back
and as far as I was concerned I wasn’t going to let her out of my sight again for quite some time, if ever.

‘What do you mean, ever?’ she’d said, quietly, burrowing her face into my neck and wrapping herself around me.

‘I love you, Rachel,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you that and I mean it. I don’t care what happened then. I really don’t care, whatever it was. It isn’t important, not any more. I just don’t want you to leave me again, please.’

She said alright, I’ll stay, but there are things I won’t be able to talk about, you have to understand that. And she put her face up to mine and stared right into my eyes and said, ‘Alex, this is the thing. There are some stories that can never be told. And you shouldn’t say you love me because you can’t do, not properly. You don’t even know me, and you wouldn’t if you did, really you wouldn’t.’ But I told her then that I saw things differently from her, and that it was my belief that one could never really know another person anyway, not completely. I said I was fairly certain I was capable of loving someone without question, and that was what I understood to be the meaning of unconditional love. ‘You mean you’re saying you love me unconditionally now, Alex? Are you crazy?’ she asked, smiling through her tears. And I said yes, I supposed that was what I was saying, but that it was all getting a bit complicated and philosophical for me and I was just very glad to have her back, having lost her once already. ‘Prove it to me,’ she said then. ‘Prove it to me that you love me unconditionally.’

‘How?’ I asked. ‘How should I prove it?’ and because she buried her face into my chest and pressed her mouth right up against me as she spoke, so that I couldn’t see her any more and nor could I make out her reply, I pulled her head back away from me which meant that we were looking right into one another’s eyes when she said, for a second time, ‘Marry me, Alex. Prove it by marrying me.’

Much later on, when the evening had fallen and she said ‘Let us go then, you and I,’ and led me out on to the balcony, she told me that it really should have been me who had proposed, and so I did.

And that is a scene that comes back to me sometimes, the two of us out there against an evening sky that burned with a low red sun, her face looking down at me where I knelt on the ground in front of her, her expression utterly unguarded for one of the very few times I would ever see it so. It is a scene I have replayed for myself endlessly, taking it carefully from the store I have of such scenes, and wondering as I do so about the wisdom of looking at it, or at any of them, such is the sadness that will follow. And sometimes this scene will show itself to me unannounced, emerging from the tapestry of my grief that is there when I wake in the mornings and find, as I sometimes do, that I have become trapped in a frame of sadness which has been constructed around me in my sleep, so that there can be no escaping from it. And when this happens I can only watch, feeling the shuttles rattle above me and underneath me and the threads run back and forth beneath my skin until pictures start to emerge, hundreds of them in turn. Each one takes its shape gradually at the beginning, and then, at the last, becomes suddenly, rapidly, clear before being replaced a moment or two later by another. At first, I will notice only that one colour of thread, red perhaps, is emerging from the warp of my skin more frequently than any other and forming itself into nubbly patches here and there, dotted across my torso. And then a different colour will do the same, and I am trying to read these patches and make sense of them and I cannot until the moment when everything begins to move too quickly for me to be able to keep up and there we are, running hand in hand on a Sunday morning across the lawns in front of Kenwood House, caught by the rain without coats or umbrellas and neither of us caring in the slightest, and Rachel’s hair is wet like pelt and when we reach the trees I stop and pull her into me and kiss the water from her face. And then we disappear, and instead I am watching us walk out across Camber Sands and squeeze ourselves onto a rug too small for all the things we’ve brought with us for our picnic, the picnic which is to be the last of the summer in which we were reunited. It was a weekend that fell a fortnight or so after Richard and Lucinda’s wedding, still hot enough to swim in the sea, or at
least
to paddle. After we had dried ourselves and eaten our lunch we’d tried, each of us, to paint a watercolour with the set I’d given Rachel as a gift that morning. We’d been silent for an hour or so, sitting side by side and sketching first, Rachel saying she knew I didn’t want to bother with that bit but I must, that’s what the book I’d given her with the box of paints said we had to do. And then, later on, when I told her I’d finished my painting, she looked across at what I’d done and she looked out to sea once more and back at my picture again and said, Alex I think you might be colour-blind have you ever had a test?

It takes almost nothing these days, just one tiny thing really and I am with her, falling and tumbling and drowning in the memory of her.

She is everywhere for me, without compass or restraint.

The rain came in early that day on Camber Sands, and as we walked back to the car, her hand held fast in mine and her steps falling more rapidly than my own so that we might keep a pace together, I looked back once and saw our footprints strung across the blank canvas of the beach, marking out our separate rhythms in a cursive falling there, carefree on the wetness of the sand.

19

SO LOST AM
I in my thoughts it takes me a moment or two to realise Harry is no longer sitting on the sofa opposite me, and I think perhaps he has gone out and left me on my own. But then I hear him moving about in the other room, clearing up from our lunch and making more tea. I look at the photos hanging on the walls and I wonder about the ones Rachel had sent him, the ones of the day we were married. When he comes back in I ask if he will show me them and he looks surprised, standing still in the middle of the room as though uncertain. But then he puts the teapot down and walks over and starts rootling around among the pine cones and postcards that are lined up in front of his books. Apparently finding nothing there, he removes one after the other of the invitations that stand there also and stacks them neatly on the floor beside him so he can look in some of the box files they were hiding. I am beginning to think he is playing with me, and has no intention of actually showing me the photographs, but at last he finds them and walks back towards me. Before he relinquishes his hold on them though, and just as I am about to take them from him, he says that while he doesn’t mind me looking at them, he would prefer it if I did so on the understanding that he would like them back when I have finished. He can arrange for copies to be made, of course, but he would like to keep the originals, if I have no objection. Because of the anger I feel when he says these things, anger at his controlling fumbling attempts to negotiate terms as to his release of these images of Rachel, I do not reply. Instead I lower my arm and leave him holding the photographs out in front of him and I sit back in my chair, shaking my head involuntarily, repulsed by what he’s tried to do.

Eventually, and appearing to have become as embarrassed as I
hoped
he would, he hands them over. I look at them with more haste than I would have liked to, my frustration and irritation being so intense that it actually feels as though it is coursing like boiling water up and down the inside of my arms and across my chest and I want, suddenly, to punch him. I have to flick through them only once to know I have seen them all before and have them almost by heart, so familiar are they. All of them were taken on the day we were married and are either copies of ones from our own album, or of the ones that I found when, in the week before I visited Harry, I’d finally opened the envelope of photographs that Evie gave me in the police station on the day after Rachel was murdered. And so I hand them straight back to him, noticing as I do so that I am unable to stop my hand from shaking.

‘And the letter?’ I say, my voice so clipped I feel as though I have hit him rather than spoken. ‘Or do you require a written agreement of some sort prior to your releasing it?’