Every Contact Leaves A Trace (40 page)

It was only in the spring of 2007, once he had settled fairly comfortably into his London life, he said, seeing a little less of Evie with every month that passed and finding satisfaction instead in the beds of other, much younger, women, that Evie had broached the subject of Rachel again. He’d agreed to stay over one weekend in Chelsea and she’d said over breakfast, with what Anthony told Harry was more than a hint of bitterness in her voice, that he may as well pop into the British Library to see if he could find her, given that he lived so close to where she worked these days, and that he ought to really, if only to offer his congratulations.

‘What for?’ he said, amused by Evie’s woefully unsuccessful attempt to cover up her jealousy of her god-daughter even after all this time, and genuinely puzzled as to what it was that he should be congratulating her for.

‘Oh, Anthony, my love, my dove,’ Evie said, smiling. ‘Surely you’ve heard? It was last December for goodness’ sake. Rachel is married.’

‘Christ,’ Anthony replied. ‘Who the fuck to?’

‘You mean you really don’t know? Why, to Alex Petersen of course.’

He hadn’t heard, he told Harry, and nor had he managed to hide his shock, agreeing with Evie’s observation that, whilst it was odd that someone like Rachel had chosen to marry a lawyer, it was no surprise that she should have engineered a situation that would place so few demands on her at the same time as providing the material comforts she’d never be able to obtain for herself as an academic.

Harry had apologised when he’d told me this, saying that he didn’t for one moment want to cause me any offence but that it was his intention to give me as full a picture as possible of the story that Anthony had told him, and of the way in which he had told it, and I said of course, there was no need to apologise, I’d been perfectly aware at the time that there would be few people who understood the relationship that Rachel and I had enjoyed, and that at times I had even found myself wondering why she loved me quite as much as she seemed to.

Harry continued, telling me that Anthony had apparently done nothing about what Evie had told him until just after Easter. When he got off the train back from Manchester after the holiday weekend he walked back towards Judd Street and found himself stopping in front of the British Library. He stood outside its gates and gazed at its entrance, wondering where Rachel and I would have spent our Easter holiday, and when she’d be coming back, and it was when he’d unpacked his things that he did it, for the first time in such a long time, tapping her name out on the keyboard and seeing entry after entry come up, just like they had so long ago in Tucson. It was so easy, he said, to catch up on everything she’d been doing, and so strange to think he was living so close to where she worked. It was some time still before he went into the library to see if she was there, having to travel to Edinburgh again on business, and he found in the meantime that it was enough just to look at her pictures on the internet and think about what he’d say if he did see her, and to wonder how he might approach her. When Evie asked him a few days later, jokingly, whether he’d been to the library yet, he laughed it off and told her to grow up and act her age and that it was all behind him, she knew it was, and she’d believed him.

And then one day in early May he’d made what he described as a terrible mistake. He’d been staying in the Chelsea house for the Bank Holiday weekend and had taken his chance on the Sunday morning, when Evie had gone to the gym. He’d spent an hour or so flicking through a few of the pictures of Rachel he’d been able to find online, and then he’d scanned the pages of some online journals and other people’s Facebook sites for more before reading a few of her internet articles and catching up on the various blogs she posted. When he’d finished he switched off Evie’s computer and went for a run to try to clear his mind. So successfully had he done so that he’d forgotten about it by the time he got back, and it wasn’t until later on, when he heard her key in the lock, that he remembered what he’d done and realised he’d forgotten to clear his browsing history. He didn’t have a chance to cover his tracks before he left that evening but there was nothing he could do about it. He told himself it would be fine, she’d never check anyway, and he didn’t know what he was worrying about. But of course she did check, and she telephoned him a couple of hours after he’d gone to bed, saying he’d better get back over there and damn quick and explain himself.

He did as she asked and they had a furious row. Evie called him a stalker, saying he should make up his mind whether he loved her or her god-daughter, and couldn’t he at least have kept his nasty habits to his own bloody computer. He shouted back at her that she was insane, what did she mean, love her, he’d never said he loved her, he’d just given her what she wanted and it had only ever been about sex. She cried when he said that, and then, to his amazement, so did he. They opened a bottle of wine, and then another, and he told her almost everything then, about the emails he’d sent from Tucson, and about how Rachel had responded. Evie grilled him at first, asking him if he was sure he’d told her everything and what had he actually written to make her react like that? Anthony said he couldn’t remember exactly, it seemed like a long time ago now, but it definitely wasn’t as bad as Rachel had made out, and when he started to cry again Evie accepted what he’d said and consoled him,
saying
he shouldn’t take it so much to heart. She told him Rachel always had been a bit melodramatic, coming home from school in the holidays with pathetic little stories about being bullied, or teachers being unkind to her, that were clearly invented just to get some attention. Evie held him and let him cry some more, saying she knew he was growing away from her, and she knew it had only ever been about sex, and that it was coming to the point where their paths would stop crossing in the way that they had, and she understood that. But she said that he was her concern whether he liked it or not, and that she was worried about him, and that he had to find a way to sort himself out and work out why it was still happening. She said he should look at his life and see what a success he’d made of it, and he should just forget what had happened in Oxford, and that he’d achieved just as much as Rachel had but in different ways, and in different places, and he should let it go and make his own way in the world.

And when he tried to say it wasn’t really anything serious she told him she knew he’d browsed online for Rachel for more than two hours that morning and that someone would have to be properly insane to want to look at pictures of her god-daughter for that long and they laughed, the two of them, and he came out with it then, saying that he was jealous, and a little bit angry still. He told Evie that all he really wanted from Rachel was an apology for what had happened, and that that was all he’d ever really wanted when he was doing the same thing in Tucson. He simply wanted Rachel to tell him, face to face, that she understood what it meant to him to have lost the chances that she’d taken instead of him, and to agree that she was just as much to blame as he was for the events of that summer term. And he told Evie that he knew he’d never get them back, the opportunities he’d lost, and that he’d probably never be able to completely overcome the sense of shame he felt about it all, but if Rachel would only talk to him, and recognise the part she had played in him being sent down, it would somehow release himself from the hold that she had on him still.

Evie said then that she completely understood, and that she’d help
him
. By the following weekend she’d asked Rachel out for lunch and put it to her. She’d gone back to Anthony and said it had been an unmitigated disaster, that Rachel had stormed out of the restaurant having asked Evie whether she had any idea that it was a psychopath she was talking about, and did she have any idea what a fool she was making of herself hanging around with someone like Anthony Trelissick, and having told her that she’d go to the police about both of them if Evie brought it up again since she clearly didn’t realise what he was capable of. Evie asked him then whether he was absolutely sure he’d told her everything about the emails he’d sent, and when he said yes, and reminded her that she herself had called Rachel ‘melodramatic’, she said alright, of course, and she promised Anthony she’d try again, saying she’d had an idea about how to bring Rachel round. And though he never quite got to the bottom of what it was that Evie had done to persuade her, a day or so later she reported that Rachel was considering the idea, and that she’d agreed to come up with some terms and conditions for a meeting.

And so it was that Anthony found himself standing outside the British Library at eight o’clock one morning in mid-May, waiting with Evie for Rachel’s car to appear. She’d said that she would only meet Anthony if Evie was there as well, and that she’d pick them both up at that exact spot and take them somewhere of her choosing, and that they mustn’t be late since it was a red route. In the end it was Rachel who was late, by more than twenty minutes, so that by the time she’d arrived Evie had grown impatient and was at the espresso bar just along the road. She told Anthony later on that when she’d heard her mobile phone ring and had seen Rachel’s name come up at exactly the same time as she’d also heard the frantic hooting of a car horn, she’d known it wasn’t going to work. And she was right, leaving her coffee on the bar and running back along the road to find that Anthony was already sitting in the front seat and Rachel was very, very angry. She was so angry, in fact, about Evie not being there and about Anthony getting in the car and sitting right beside her, that as soon as Evie opened the back door and started to get in herself, she’d told them both to get straight out again and forget it.
They
did as she said and stood by the side of the road and watched as she pushed her way into the line of rush-hour traffic, jabbing at the horn in anger.

As Harry told me this part of Anthony’s story, sitting across the room from me on the last day of my visit, I’d reached into my jacket pocket and felt for the parking ticket that had been stuffed down the back of Rachel’s desk. It was still there where I’d put it when I rushed from my apartment to catch the train to Oxford, and as I heard Harry telling me about the events depicted in the photograph, I left it where it was, rubbing it between my fingers once or twice before taking my hand back out again and thinking to myself, not for the first time, that if only Rachel had been able to tell me any of it, I could have protected her.

By later on that evening, Anthony told Harry, Rachel had apologised to Evie and agreed to consider another meeting, but over the next few days she’d started to become evasive about the whole thing and Anthony had gone off the idea, telling Evie it was all a bit ridiculously cloak and dagger and they should just leave it. But having seen her in her car that morning, and for such a brief moment, he wanted to see her again, so he went to the library the very next day and looked out for her, and when she arrived he melted into the queue behind her and followed her to the reading room, standing back in the shadows and gazing at her while she worked. It had only been for about ten minutes, he said, the first time, and when she hadn’t so much as noticed him, he’d convinced himself it wouldn’t hurt to do it again a couple of days later, and then just once more after that. And of course it had become a habit, and one that was no trouble to him, finding it quite easy to convince his boss that he could just as well work from home in the mornings for the rest of the month, his diary being almost entirely empty of client meetings.

He said to Harry that by going to the library each day and watching her, he was simply building up the courage to speak to
her
, and he was comfortable there was nothing odd about his behaviour. He decided that he’d relied on Evie for long enough, and that he was perfectly capable of sorting it all out on his own, and that in any case he didn’t see that it was for Rachel to dictate the terms of their meeting. He had made what he described as a completely straightforward plan to approach her one day and just ask her to have coffee with him, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Catch her unawares, he said to Harry. Take her off guard, you know. And in a public place, where she couldn’t very well cause a scene. But then one morning, standing with his back against the furthest wall of the Rare Books and Music Room wondering if he should make his move, he’d scanned the room once or twice and back again and had found himself, to his amazement, looking at Harry. As he watched, almost unable to believe his eyes, he saw Rachel raise her head and smile at Harry, and he saw the two of them gather up their books and leave the reading room together.

He’d said nothing to Evie by that stage about having been to the library and it had been his intention to keep it that way, but when the following week he’d seen Harry sitting there again watching Rachel, he hadn’t been able to help himself and it had somehow slipped out over dinner that night, such was his fascination with the situation. ‘Harry bloody Gardner,’ he began, ‘would you believe it!’ and then he realised what he’d said, and of course he had to explain what he’d been doing in the library, and Evie and he had the same awful argument all over again.

‘And what did you decide to do this time,’ Harry asked him, ‘you and Evie?’

‘We decided we had to try again,’ Anthony said. ‘Of course we did. But however much we talked it through, and however many ways we found of looking at the situation, we kept coming up against the same problem.’

‘And which problem was that?’ Harry asked, sensing what was coming and hoping he was mistaken.

‘The problem we kept coming up against, Harry, the problem we
couldn’t
find a way round, no matter how hard we tried, was what we could do about Rachel.’