Every Contact Leaves A Trace (39 page)

When he went to leave the following morning, he found that she’d paid his bill in advance, just as she’d said she would, and she’d left him a letter as well. Or at least, that was what he assumed it was until his train pulled out of Euston later on and he opened it and found a bundle of fifty-pound notes inside. There were ten of them in all, and he told Harry it had made him feel a little sordid in a way, as though he’d been paid off somehow, for something. He’d even thought about how he could get it back to her, imagining that if he’d opened it while he was still with her he might have thrown it down on the ground and told her he was worth more than that. But he’d kept it, giving it to his mum at the end of the summer for putting him up and for asking him no questions and for loving him in the way that she did.

It was, he said, probably the hardest summer of his life, and he’d sunk into what he called a fairly dangerous depression. But
eventually
he’d found a job working for his mum’s boyfriend’s company and he spent the evenings in town with his old school-friends, drinking beer rather than vodka and keeping all his clothes on while he did it, or instead, just staying at home with his mum, doing nothing in particular and liking it. When in the following September her boyfriend offered him a traineeship with his company he took it, absorbing himself in his work. He became an IT geek, he told Harry, finding that his mum’s boyfriend had been right about what he had called Anthony’s ‘aptitude’ for programming. There was something satisfying in writing scripts and eradicating flaws and seeing something follow his commands so obediently, and he found a strange kind of beauty in this new language he was learning to parse. By the time he finished his training he’d achieved a kind of stability in his life, and when he found himself in need of a change of scene and with no real ties to speak of, he’d taken up the offer of a programming job in Tucson, Arizona. It was an escape of a kind, and the relocation package he’d negotiated was almost ridiculous. He’d gone there with no real plans for his future beyond an intention of working hard and saving as much as possible. The experience of moving there and discovering an entirely new world was so absorbing that it wasn’t until he’d been there for just over a year that he found himself beginning to dwell again on what had happened.

It started with a woman in a bar, on a night when he was lonely. She asked him what part of England he came from and when he said Manchester, she asked him if he’d ever lived anywhere else and he said yes, he’d lived in Oxford once. There was something about this woman, and the conversation they had, which brought it all back to him, and vividly, so that over the next few days he’d thought of little other than Rachel and Cissy, and about what he had lost on the day he’d been sent down from Oxford.

He told Harry that when he started to look online he’d been able to find virtually nothing on Cissy, whereas when it came to Rachel, the internet was heaving with her. Her photo on the English department website came up straight away and when he looked at his computer screen and saw her looking back at him, one eye half
covered
by the strand of hair that fell across it and the beginnings of a smile on her face, it was the start, he said, of what quite quickly became an obsession. He was perfectly aware he could probably have ended up becoming fixated with either of them; it was just that Rachel was everywhere he looked, and Cissy wasn’t.

Initially he’d been jealous, of course he had. It wasn’t as though Rachel had done what she’d always said she would and made it at Oxford, but she’d got her post at UCL, and from the pages of entries that followed, it was clear she was already developing a strong profile in her field. ‘It could have been me,’ he said to Harry. ‘In fact it probably would have been, wouldn’t it?’ It was easy to start ordering back copies of her articles, and sending for details of the conferences she’d be speaking at, or the lecture programmes she was running, and the more he did of that kind of thing, the more he had a sense almost that they were getting to know one another again, having simply lost touch for a while. In the end any jealousy that he’d felt was transformed into a straightforward admiration for what she had achieved. He told Harry that he’d come to feel fond of her again, in the way that he’d done before.

It was inevitable that he would try at some point to resume contact with her. He was aware that she might at first be reluctant to rekindle any kind of friendship, and that he would have to take it slowly. But he hadn’t anticipated quite how bluntly she would respond. The first letter he sent was returned, unopened. He looked in the envelope she’d put it in to see if she’d given some sort of explanation, or justification, but there was nothing other than a compliments slip on which were written the words, ‘Please don’t write again, Anthony.’ ‘She hadn’t even bothered to sign it,’ he told Harry. ‘That was bad enough. But what really got to me was the fact that it was one of those compliments slips with all her details set out at the top, all her qualifications, everything.’ It was seeing the ‘Dr’ that was printed before her name, he said, that had made him jealous all over again, and angry.

He took the English department number from the slip and telephoned with a story about being a friend who had lost her email
address
, saying he needed to send through something personal so he couldn’t use the department one. At first the woman laughed at him and said of course she couldn’t give out a personal address, but then he said he had a flight to catch, and he’d try again another time, and he chatted to her for five minutes or so, dropping enough little details about Rachel’s life into the conversation for the woman to think that he was sufficiently bona fide to be given the email address after all. He took the precaution of setting up an internet identity that couldn’t be traced, and he sent his first email the next day, signing himself off as BEN VOLIO, knowing she’d recognise that as the name they’d argued about using for the letters they’d written to Harry. He asked her to give him a chance, and he attached a PDF of the letter she’d returned, telling her that reading it was the least she could do if their friendship had ever meant anything to her.

He waited a few days, but eventually he realised that he should interpret her silence as a further rebuke. He’d installed some monitoring software on his laptop before sending the email, and he knew she’d opened it, and knew how many times she’d looked at it, and for how long she’d done so each time. He got over his upset after a week or so, he said, and decided to give her one final chance, taking a fairly soft approach so as not to scare her off. He forwarded the previous email to her and wrote at the top that he wasn’t sure whether she’d got it the last time, but just in case she had and was ignoring him, he thought it was only fair to point out that he didn’t think it was really on just to blank him in that way, after all they’d shared, and he’d be grateful if she’d at least reply, just once. He finished by saying he’d completely understand if she didn’t want to, and if he’d heard nothing within a week he’d back off and wouldn’t write again.

That hadn’t worked either, but he knew he’d drawn her in more successfully this time: he could see that she’d looked at the email a few times a day over the following week, for a good quarter of an hour or more each time. And so he wrote again, abandoning his former restraint and telling her she was being a bitch and she should grow up and snap out of it and just pick up the phone and call him. Again she hadn’t responded, and again the frequency with which
she’d
looked at the email increased, as did the length of time she’d spent doing so on each occasion.

He realised as soon as he sent the next email that he’d crossed a line, but he’d been drinking and hadn’t been able to help himself. He told Harry that he’d been sitting in his office one night after an evening spent cruising the bars of Tucson with very little success, and he looked at the clock on his laptop and realised she’d probably just be walking to work in London. He pictured her strolling through Bloomsbury with her bag of books and he closed his eyes and imagined her giving her lectures, and going to the canteen for her lunch. He wondered who she’d have sat with, and then he started to think about what she’d do when she got home that night, and who she’d be doing it with. And that was why, he said, he’d ended up writing a few things he probably shouldn’t have, and finished by telling her that if she didn’t start replying to his emails he’d have to write to her department head instead and tell him that she’d copied his Browning essays that summer term. He was pretty sure this would do the trick, this little threat, innocuous though it might seem at first. He was almost certain she’d have used the content of those essays for her dissertation that summer, and that it would have been a pretty big part of her having got a First in the end, which in turn would have secured her funding for her MPhil and led ultimately to her PhD and her departmental post. He said that she would realise, as he had, that he was therefore in a position to expose her as a fraud.

He received a reply straight away. He told Harry she’d completely overreacted, telling him she regarded his communications as harassment, and that she’d go straight to the police if she ever heard from him again. She said she trusted he’d agree that they stood in positions of equal strength in regard to the damage they could do to one another’s lives by any such revelation of their shared histories. She would, she said, take his silence as an indication that he’d seen sense. And so, he told Harry, he had.

It wasn’t just the content of her email that had snapped him out of what he called his ‘brief spell of insanity’. Just after the email had come, and at the precise moment at which he was reading it for a
third
time and trying to decide what to do, his mum’s boyfriend had called from Manchester with the news that she was ill, properly ill, and that Anthony should come home if he could, that night if possible. He’d suddenly realised how very stupid he’d been, and how close he had come to making the same kind of mistake he’d made in Oxford. And because he’d decided there and then that he didn’t want to throw his life away a second time just because of Rachel Cardanine, he’d done as she asked and resolved not to contact her again, deleting all trace of their correspondence from his laptop and leaving for the UK the following day.

His mum had been pretty much fine in the end. Her recovery had been made against the odds though, and he was glad he’d been there to nurse her through it. By never having taken more than a couple of days off in all the time he’d been in Tucson, he’d built up enough leave to be able to stay for the whole of the month that followed. When it came to going back, he decided against it. He told Harry he’d been scared by how strange his behaviour had become, attributing the whole episode to the soullessness of the life he’d been living, and the lack of any real connections in Tucson. So he’d based himself back in Manchester, not far from his mum, and started to work alongside her boyfriend again, settling fairly soon into some kind of normality.

Things had continued in much the same vein for some time, and he was fairly sure they would have continued to do so were it not for the fact that that he’d bumped into Evie the following September. He’d been seconded to Edinburgh on a short-term contract, just for a fortnight, and he’d gone out one evening to while away a few hours before he went to sleep. Intending to see a film, or perhaps a play, he’d dropped into a bar first for a drink. He was standing waiting to be served when he caught a scent in the air that was familiar to him and had looked at the back of the head of the woman in front of him and thought suddenly that it was Rachel. He was about to tap her on the shoulder when she’d turned and looked him in the eye and said, ‘Anthony. Oh my god,’ and he’d seen Evie staring back at him, looking just as surprised as he was.

They’d had a drink together, and, both of them being in the same position, with time to spare and an expense account to burn, one drink had turned into another, and another, and they arranged to meet again the following evening. On that first evening, Anthony said, they’d run through the events of that summer and Evie told him she’d pretty much patched everything up with Rachel, and he told her in return that he’d lost touch with her god-daughter and he was fine with that, things having moved on in the way that they had. They’d briefly compared notes on how well Rachel was doing at UCL, and how it had all worked out for Anthony in the end, and how the whole thing was in the dim and distant past now and there was no need to rake over it endlessly, was there? By the following evening, each of them seemed to be in agreement that they’d avoid that topic of conversation and stick to the present instead, and they found that the time passed quickly enough without either of them having to stray much further than the trials of travelling with their work, and the projects by which their lives were being consumed at the time, or the films they had seen, or the holidays they’d have liked to have taken had they only been able to find the space in their diaries.

On the third night, when she asked him if he’d like to have dinner with her and suggested trying the dining room of her hotel, Anthony wasn’t at all surprised to hear her asking him up to her room afterwards, saying it didn’t have to be complicated: she was lonely, she wanted sex; he was there, and she thought he probably did too. Of course, Anthony had said to her, why not. And he told Harry it had been easy enough to do what she’d asked, and that he found that with the lights off, and his eyes half closed, he was able to imagine it was someone else, so that when she’d invited him back the next night, and the next, he hadn’t been able to see any reason to turn her down.

Their affair had continued in a desultory kind of a way over the following few years; they had, in a slightly non-committal fashion, and invariably at Evie’s behest, started to co-ordinate their travel plans where possible, spending the occasional fortnight sharing a
hotel
room at the expense of either one of their employers. Once they’d started, it seemed simple enough to carry on. Evie professed not to mind in the slightest about the fact he had a girlfriend, and the arrangement suited him, providing a welcome distraction from his more than ordinary home life. When in the spring of 2006 the opportunity came for him to take up a post in London he’d accepted it, wanting an excuse to make the break from the woman he was by then living with in Manchester. Evie had tried to persuade him to live nearer to her in Chelsea and he’d been tempted, liking that part of town. But then at the last moment he was offered the long loan of a flat on Judd Street that belonged to someone he knew through his work. He’d taken it straight away, telling Evie it made more sense for him to do that and be based around Euston rather than living in west London as she’d suggested, since he’d be going back up and down to Manchester to visit his mum and it would save him hours of travelling time.