Every Contact Leaves A Trace (37 page)

The girls had backed out pretty much straight away, just as he’d expected them to. So that when he told them he’d gone ahead and put the first of the letters into Harry’s pigeonhole they were furious. They swore they’d never speak to him again, and didn’t he realise how much shit they’d got themselves into already that term, and what had he been thinking and it was only ever a stupid joke and what the hell was he going to do about it now? He’d tried to calm them down, telling them it didn’t matter, it was only one, and
Harry
would never know who it was from, not for definite, and he was hardly the sort to confront them anyway, and they should just forget it.

They weren’t convinced, and the tutorial that Friday had been awful for him. He was amazed the two of them had even shown up. They’d refused to acknowledge him all week apart from one morning after breakfast when they’d waited for him outside Hall and marched him down to the lake and told him he had to go to Harry and confess and stop it all and make it alright. ‘OK,’ he’d said. ‘OK. How about you give me what you promised me first, and then I will?’ They’d looked at one another, he said, and then they’d laughed at him. ‘Grow up little boy,’ Cissy told him, and she’d started to walk away. Rachel had stayed for a minute or two longer, saying she was sorry about it all, but he should really get a grip now and sort it out, and she couldn’t help him if he wasn’t able to help himself.

Anthony said that she’d sounded just like his mother had when he was a child and he’d done something wrong to get her attention and she told him off and he hated her for it. And it was because of the way that he’d felt then that instead of going to make his amends with Harry, and putting a stop to the whole thing, he’d gone to the lodge on the way to dinner and put the second of the letters in Harry’s pigeonhole. Of course, when he told Cissy and Rachel, that was it. They froze him out completely and he’d spent the week alone, feeling as though he was going slightly insane. He was completely at a loss as to what to do with himself, and what to do about the letters. And then, when neither Cissy nor Rachel showed up for the last tutorial, and even Harry had rejected him and sent him away without so much as looking at him, he decided he may as well see it through to the end and send the final letter. After Haddon had called the three of them out of Hall and Rachel and Cissy found out that he’d sent that one as well, they’d stood with him on the terrace after Haddon had gone and told him he was on his own. They would deny everything, they said. There was no way of tracing their involvement, and if it came to it, it was their word against his. ‘Safety in numbers,’ Cissy said, and it was because Anthony knew
that
she was right that he’d owned up the next morning, almost before Haddon had started to speak.

He said to Harry that when he’d stood in Haddon’s study that morning and been told he was going to be sent down, he’d realised that his world as he knew it was over, and he’d found himself unable to shake the hand that Harry offered him. He’d lost everything, and he’d been too devastated at that point even to feel angry with Rachel and Cissy about what had happened. It was Harry’s visit to his rooms that’d been the final straw though, and that was when he’d decided to do what he did next. Harry’s forgiveness, he said, and his gift of the book of poetry, had somehow made him angry where he hadn’t been, and Harry’s kindness in the face of his own cruelty had shown him a clear and final glimpse of what he was about to lose. And so, as he stood on Gloucester Green waiting for the bus that would take him back to Manchester, he used up the last of his cash by making a telephone call to Evie, and, in his anger, telling her everything.

When I made my call to Evie in Tokyo and woke her from her sleep, she in her turn told me everything that Anthony had told her in the course of his call from Gloucester Green, and in the conversation the two of them had had later on that afternoon, when they’d met in her office at the Ashmolean and talked it all through once more. And when she had told it all to me, she reached the end of her contribution to my understanding of events. That was the moment when the lines that were scored on her tracing paper faded suddenly, when a man’s voice called out and interrupted our conversation, saying would she come back to bed now and hadn’t she been on the phone for long enough and she said yes, alright, I’m coming. She finished by saying that she didn’t see that we needed to speak again, repeating her previous admonishments with regard to my being in Oxford and telling me again to get back to London and get on with things and leave the police to it, saying that nothing Harry could tell me would bring Rachel back. She said at the last that she was leaving Tokyo the following day anyhow, and had no idea how long she’d be away, so there was no point in calling her again in the immediate future.

‘Don’t worry, Evie,’ I said. ‘I’ll find you if I have to, wherever you are,’ and she laughed and told me that there was really no need to threaten her, she had nothing to hide, and that I could carry on playing detectives with Harry if I wanted to but as far as she was concerned she could think of better ways to spend her time. And then the line went dead and I realised she’d hung up without my having asked her about the photograph on the parking ticket, and about what exactly she’d been doing with Anthony and Rachel that day outside the British Library. As I got ready to go and see if I was still in time to find Harry at dessert, I resolved to ask him about it before he got very much further in his tale.

Earlier on that afternoon, at about the point in the story where Evie’s rendition of the events in question had come to a halt, Harry’s own narration had come good again, so to speak. Having got through the sequence of events that he had found it so awkward to talk about, he’d become a better storyteller once more, so that instead of dots, he gave me images and dialogue and wove a fuller clearer picture in the way he’d done before. He reminded me that when Anthony had approached him in the British Library and taken him back to his Judd Street flat, he himself had still been of the understanding that Evie had disowned Rachel on the night of the Casablanca Ball as a direct result of Haddon’s phone call. However, when he sat in Anthony’s kitchen and Anthony began to tell him about standing in the phone box on Gloucester Green on the afternoon he’d been sent down, he realised that the conversation Anthony was about to describe was, in all probability, what had lain behind Evie’s rejection of Rachel, rather than Haddon’s phone call to her later that night.

Evie had persuaded Anthony to stay where he was until she got there, she was coming straight away, and when he’d pointed out that he was in a bus station and that there was really no need, he’d just wanted her to know, that was all, she’d given him directions to her office at the Ashmolean and said that she’d arrange for him to be let in, telling him to go there and wait until she arrived. So he did as she asked, and when she got there he gave her the document wallet
he’d
kept with the photocopies he’d made of the letters, and some other things he had wanted her to see.

‘What other things?’ Harry had asked him then.

‘Oh. Just the Browning essays, you know.’

‘The Browning essays?’ Harry replied. ‘What essays?’

‘You didn’t know about that, Harry? I thought you must have done.’

And when Harry said he had no idea what he was talking about, Anthony told him that he’d written every single one of Rachel’s Browning essays for her, week by week, in addition to the ones he’d written for himself, and that she’d copied them into her own hand before the tutorials began each time, so that there was no risk of Harry finding out about it.

Harry told me that this was perhaps the thing that had shocked him most that day in Anthony’s Judd Street kitchen, rather than anything Anthony had said about the sort of things the three of them had done together, or about Rachel and Cissy being lovers, or about the way they had been so cruel about him in their gossiping. ‘They were young,’ Harry said to me. ‘And she was very young. And her life, you know. What she’d grown up with. Or without, rather.’ But the cheating had saddened him. To think that she’d sat each week and read essays to him that were not her own, and that he’d never had so much as an inkling that it was happening. ‘Why did she do it?’ he said in his confusion to Anthony, remembering how her work had improved the following year, when she was working entirely alone. ‘There was no reason,’ Anthony explained. ‘She was just too lazy, that was all, and I was just too willing.’ And it was only then that Harry realised that every single thing Rachel had told him that night in the hospital, and throughout the summer that followed, had been founded on a series of untruths. He felt a bitter anger then but checked it straight away; he wasn’t entirely sure he’d understood Anthony correctly, and nor could he bring himself to really believe what he was hearing.

When Anthony had handed over the document wallet to Evie, and when he’d told her everything that had happened, and when
she’d
made him go over it again and again, so that she could have every last detail, she had been, he said to Harry, incandescent with rage. She’d asked Anthony to stay in her office and wait until she came back, and she’d gone straight over to College and found Rachel and told her she wasn’t welcome in Chelsea that summer, and nor would she ever be. And, she’d said, as far as money was concerned, Rachel was henceforth to make her own way in the world.

‘After all I’ve done for her,’ she said to Anthony when she got back. She’d been gone for almost an hour, and because he hadn’t known what else to do with himself he’d ended up idly rifling through the drawers of her desk and guessing her password before flicking through the emails in her inbox. He was wondering what he’d been thinking, agreeing to sit and wait for her like that, and he’d been on the point of giving up and leaving when suddenly she was there, slamming the door behind her and throwing her keys on the desk. He was surprised by the intensity of her reaction. If he’d thought for a moment that she would actually cut Rachel off in the way that she had, he would never have told her. He knew he’d made a colossal error of judgement, and one for which he was truly sorry. ‘I barely knew the woman at that stage,’ he said to Harry, as though in explanation. ‘I’d met her once or twice, that was all, at Rachel’s parties in Chelsea sometimes, the morning after, you know, over breakfast, when we were all on our best behaviour and Evie was grilling us about our work, demanding to know our plans for the future.’ What he hadn’t realised was that Evie was also on her best behaviour on those occasions, and that rather than the lovely maternal figure she had presented to them all, he described her as becoming, that day in Oxford, ‘a bitch from hell’. ‘When push came to shove, she just turned into a really nasty woman. I thought she was like, you know, Rachel’s kind of replacement mum or something. And I didn’t think someone’s mum would do something like that. My mum was always a bit of a nightmare but nothing like that. Took me straight back in when I got home to Manchester. No questions asked. And I’d been sent down from Oxford fucking University for god’s sake.’

As Harry sat there listening to Anthony, he realised that by the time Rachel had gone to the Ball that night, Evie had already passed her judgement. He ran through the events in his mind, only half listening to Anthony, and he tried as best he could to piece it all together. Having done so, the thought occurred to him that it was quite possible that the whole episode of Rachel convincing Towneley she was so inebriated as to need hospitalisation was nothing more than a scheme, and that she’d thought far enough ahead to know that all she’d have to do, when it came to it, was to ask Harry to arrange for the college to help her in some way, thereby solving her problem. He was completely amazed by what Anthony had told him, and when he remembered the way she’d turned her back that night in the hospital, lifting up her hair and asking him to do up her dress, he felt like a fool. It was as though the floor had shifted beneath him that day in Judd Street, and as if the walls had moved from their place as Anthony spoke, repositioning his understanding of their history. Partway through their conversation he’d had another sudden memory of Rachel, in the weeks leading up to her Finals. He pictured her lying on her back in his garden reading a book and reaching out to take the glass of lemonade he’d poured for her, without so much as looking at him, and at that moment of recollection, the nonchalance he’d read at the time as being born from the ease of their companionship became something entirely different.

‘I am sorry to say this, Alex, but I did become angry with her then. I did. Very angry indeed. Not for long, not at all, but it would be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise,’ and he looked away, scratching the back of his neck and coughing once or twice before carrying on.

He said that his anger passed almost immediately, and he found himself only saddened by what he’d discovered, deeply so. And even then he’d forgiven her straight away. She had always struck him as embodying a strange combination of immense vulnerability and excessive resilience. There was about her, he said, a toughness. He told me then how he had come in from the library one day in the Michaelmas term of her third year. He’d been standing at the bottom
of
the stairs, taking off his coat and his hat, when he heard her voice and realised she’d left her door open by accident. She was speaking to herself loudly enough for him to be able to make out what it was that she was saying, over and over, ‘Rachel fucking Cardanine you are such an idiot get a fucking grip. Idiot. For god’s sake. Idiot, idiot fucking idiot,’ and so on, so that he froze where he stood and waited until he heard her door close before he moved again, not wanting her to know that he’d been listening. And he often wondered, as he sat in his garden watching her revising, a book held up in the air above her face to protect her from the sun, or when he heard her singing in the bath or reciting a sonnet to herself when she thought he couldn’t hear, what it was that had made her so angry with herself. In the years that followed, observing the almost desperate competitiveness with which she built her academic career, he’d carried on wondering what had given her this need always to push herself. And he’d assumed it must have had something to do with the fact she’d lost her parents and had had to make do with Evie instead. That was how he’d explained her behaviour to himself that afternoon in Anthony’s kitchen: given the fact that she had been brought up by someone like that, and in the light of the parameters within which she’d been forced to operate for most of her life, he concluded that he should feel only compassion towards her, rather than any kind of anger. There was disappointment in his step as he’d made his way back to the library to collect his things and begin the journey home, of course there was. But none of the anger he’d felt at first, or, if any of it did remain, it was only slight, and already subsiding.