Every Contact Leaves A Trace (42 page)

She seemed reluctant at first, and when finally she agreed, it was almost as though she was doing so only because she’d used up all her energy in fighting her way out of a group reconciliation. ‘Alright,’ she said, ‘why not,’ and as they walked on further Harry asked her what she thought she would do about arranging the actual meeting, where it might take place and when. But she’d been evasive in her response, saying it didn’t really matter to him did it? She seemed to have accepted at face value his assurances that she was forgiven, and she told him, with her former self-confidence restored, ‘This is what will happen, Harry. Give me Anthony’s address and I’ll write to him and sort it out directly. Alex and I will come to dinner with you
on
the Thursday evening and we’ll all have a perfectly nice time. It will be good for Alex to meet you properly now we’re married, and then Anthony and I will meet at some point over the weekend. And that,’ she carried on, ‘will be that. But Harry,’ and she stopped walking and put her hand on his arm and looked at him and he saw there were tears forming in her eyes once more. ‘There’s absolutely no need for Alex to know about any of this. You must be quite clear about that, all of you. You see I love him, and he loves me, and none of this is relevant to him, and it would only hurt him if he found out. I haven’t had to tell him yet. And I don’t want to.’

By now the tears were running fast down her face; again he held out his handkerchief to her, and again she pushed it away.

‘He’s given me something I thought I’d never have, Harry. Never. He’s given me something uncomplicated, and loving, and he’s made me happy in a way I didn’t know was possible. So if you really are doing this for my benefit, I’d be grateful if you could leave him out of it. I’m not asking you for anything else, Harry. Not any more. Just this. Just do this one thing for me, Harry, please.’

21

WHEN HARRY TOLD
me about the conversation he and Rachel had had that day on the riverbank, I knew then that whatever else I might come to discover about her didn’t matter, and that none of the things I’d learned so far mattered either. I was sure that she had loved me, and I had come to a better understanding of the ways in which she’d done so. As I stared into the fire thinking about her, and how desperately she had wanted to keep these things from me so that I wouldn’t be hurt by them, Harry made an observation about how, to his mind, mourning the absence of a person was a little like falling in love with them again. I realised he was talking about himself, rather than me, and of his own wife, rather than of Rachel. What he said next though made me think he might have been reading my thoughts, so strangely aligned was it with them.

‘I think what I mean is this, Alex,’ he said, interpreting my silence for a lack of understanding. ‘If you were to ask me to tell you about the ways in which we loved one another, I am not sure I would be able to, not really.’ And then he was silent, and I thought that was all he was going to say, but instead he continued, insistently, as though I had asked him a question he was determined to answer, however difficult it might be. ‘I think I would have to say, rather, that it was in the quiet unfolding of our lives that we did so, she and I. It was more, perhaps, a question of being understood.’ He was looking away from me then, speaking so quietly it was almost as if I wasn’t there in the room with him, and I realised he’d been asking himself this question and considering his answer to it for some time, and that he was going to tell me something of his deliberations whether I wanted him to or not.

‘She would let me board the train to London before her, whenever
we
took it together,’ he said, sighing. ‘She wouldn’t get on until she knew that I was settled. I always had to sit facing the direction we were travelling in, you see, regardless of how busy the carriages might be, or how long it might take me to find a place. Regardless of how many people I might annoy. She would hover on the platform, moving along the outside of the train as I moved along its inside, until she was sure I had taken my seat, and then she would come and find a place as near to me as possible. It didn’t much matter if we couldn’t sit exactly side by side, you see. It mattered more to her that I was not out of sorts at the beginning of a journey. I asked her once if she minded the whole rigmarole and she said that she didn’t. I wasn’t sure whether to believe her,’ he said, smiling at the thought. ‘And then one day I saw her through the window of the train. Just when I’d found my place, and had asked someone to move all of their bags even though there were two seats opposite that were free where I could quite easily have sat. I looked through the window to wave to her that she could come in and I saw her standing there on the platform. I saw her before she could see me, that was the thing. Because her lips were moving I thought perhaps she was engaged in a conversation but I could see no one near her, and then I realised she was talking to herself. And when she raised her eyebrows and put her hands on her hips and heaved out a great sigh I realised she was fuming, Alex, do you see, quite literally fuming with frustration.’ And then he paused again, as though he was waiting for me to respond, but I could think of nothing to say. ‘I suppose,’ he carried on, eventually, ‘that was one of the ways in which I knew that she loved me. The fact that she lied to me like that, and pretended it didn’t bother her in the slightest, that ridiculous little habit of mine. She never said, not once. And now there is no one to do that for me, when I take the train to London. There is nobody there to pretend they do not mind my absurdities, great and small.’

We both of us sat quietly then, looking into the fire. I thought Harry might ask me to tell him something in return of the ways in which Rachel and I had loved one another but he didn’t, and I’m not sure I would have done even if he’d asked. But I did think to
myself
that I might have described for him how I would wake sometimes in the mornings to find her looking at me. She would smile, and I would see in her eyes something like relief, and she would say, ‘Where were you, Alex? Where have you been in your dreaming?’ And then, when I folded her into me and closed my eyes again she would say ‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. You’re back you’re back wherever you’ve been,’ and she would fall asleep again herself, tight in my arms, sometimes for so long I would have to wake her and when I did she would say, as though it had been me that had been keeping us there, ‘Let’s get up, let’s do something. Now, this minute before the day is gone,’ and so we would.

Sometimes though she would change her mind and we would stay where we were and make love, sleepily, and I would bring breakfast back to bed and draw the panels across, both the ones in the bedroom wall and the outer glass itself, so that there was no distinction between the outside and the in, and we would sit, and eat, and talk about all the things we might do together later on. Afterwards we would put the breakfast things on the floor and lie back down again and talk some more, sometimes for hours, the duvet pulled up under our chins and the two of us resting back on piles of pillows, nestling against one another. ‘Like a couple of stowaways huddling together for warmth,’ she’d said one Saturday in late October as she lay with her head resting in the crook of my arm and the length of her stretched out alongside me, and the air was cold and there was a breeze so strong it lifted things from surfaces and rattled at the lampshades so that the whole of the room was moving and we seemed to be the only still things in it.

On some of those mornings we talked of serious things and secret hopes, and on other mornings we talked of nothing very important at all, simply sharing some of the thousands of inconsequential fleeting thoughts that go to make up what might be called a consciousness. She spoke rarely of the past, not in any lingering fashion, and she volunteered nothing of what Harry had told me, nor anything about her childhood. ‘Had we but world enough, and time,’ was all she would say when I asked her once about what it
had
been like to grow up with Evie, and why there was so much tension between them. And nor would she tell me that morning what she meant by the phrase she had used, or where it came from, just turning away and lying on her side. Eventually I turned and lay that way also and said I was sorry for asking and she turned back and smiled at me and I no more understood that smile than I understood what she’d said; it was a smile that shut me out, one that invited no further questions.

I had learned something of the language of smiles from my mother. She’d sat me down at the beginning of one of my first holidays home from school and told me that she’d made up names for all of her smiles, in the way that one might have names for tempests out at sea or for winds across a desert. She taught me these names, one after another, showing me the smiles that went with them and waiting until I understood each one, and what it would mean about the way she was feeling were I to see it on her face. She said she was teaching me them so that when I came home from school in the holidays I would be able to read her more easily. Like a book, she said, so that our absences from one another would hardly matter. She told me that if I tried ever so hard to remember, we would be able to rub along together like stones on a river bed, she and I, despite those separations we’d had to endure. And when it came to the end for her, years later, I remembered them still, so that it didn’t matter when she had no energy to speak at the last: I sat by her bedside holding her hand and when she smiled at me, I knew what she was trying to tell me and I told her the same thing back.

I came to learn Rachel’s smiles also. The one I loved the most, or at least, the one that it made me happiest to see, was one that she smiled more often than the one I’d come to think of as her ‘cease and desist’ smile, but still no more than occasionally, and even then it was only ever by accident that she did so. There was a sweetness in it that sometimes stayed for days, and when I saw it there I knew it meant that she had, for a time, decided to believe me when I said I loved her. ‘Despite everything, Alex?’ she would say, frowning. ‘Despite absolutely everything?’

‘Despite what?’ I would reply, completely at a loss to know what she was talking about. ‘Despite everything what?’ and I would laugh, and she would smile that smile and come forward and kiss me and say, ‘It doesn’t matter, Alex. It doesn’t matter what. I know you do really. I know that you really do.’

I suppose it came to be a way we had between us, Rachel and I, of talking so rarely of the past. She intruded infrequently upon my own, although I think I would have become happier, in time, to speak of it, if she had lived. I did try to tell her about Robbie once, on one of the weekend mornings when we lingered in bed, but I’m not sure I was very successful in my attempt. We’d eaten some fruit, and drunk some coffee, and then we lay back down again, and she reached over and took my hand, placing it on her chest and closing her eyes. I watched her chest gently rise and gently fall, and watched my hand move with it, and neither of us said anything for a while until she moved again, wriggling around a bit and making herself comfortable, curling her head against my neck once, and then into my shoulder and away again, pulling my arm out from underneath her back and resting my hand on her chest again, like it had been before. And then she said, ‘Tell me something,’ and I said, ‘What?’ and she said, ‘Anything. Anything at all.’

‘Like what?’ I asked.

‘Really, Alex, anything,’ she said. ‘Just something. Tell me a story. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me something you’ve never told me before.’

And that was when, without intending to, and without knowing quite why I was doing so, I found myself starting to tell her about Robbie and me, and about our accident and about what had happened afterwards. I told her everything, slowly and particularly, and in a way that I had never told anyone before, not even when I was away at school and we all swapped stories about our fathers after lights out. That morning, as I talked on and on in our bed, Rachel said nothing, not a word, and I think I had a sense that the fact she was listening so carefully meant she didn’t mind me telling her, and that
she
wasn’t going to judge me. And so I carried on, and on, and told her everything there was to tell.

After I’d finished, still she said nothing, and I saw that my hand was rising and falling on her chest with a regularity that meant her breathing had settled into the rhythm of sleep. I don’t think I minded terribly at first. In fact I don’t think I minded at all until later on that afternoon, when she had gone out and I was standing in the kitchen making some tea, alone, and the thought occurred to me that she had in all probability fallen asleep as soon as I’d started to speak, and that this momentous occasion, the occasion on which I had finally told somebody the biggest secret I had ever kept, had gone entirely unwitnessed, so that my story remained unknown by anyone but me.

But Harry asked me about none of these things, and so I stayed silent until, soon enough, he carried on from where he’d left off. Soon after his meeting with Rachel on the South Bank Anthony had called briefly to say that he’d got Rachel’s letter and everything had been arranged, but when Harry asked him what exactly the plan was, he’d been cagey at first, and then suddenly said he had to go. He told Harry not to worry, it’d all be fine, and he thanked him again for his help and the line went dead and he was gone. Rachel had been just as reluctant to tell Harry what was actually going to happen, and this vagueness as to the precise arrangements for their meeting had concerned Harry on three counts. He was slightly uncertain as to whether to trust her to go through with her promise to meet Anthony. And he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of Anthony coming into contact with Rachel again, in that he still had some lingering doubts about what he referred to as Anthony’s ‘hold on reality’, and his tendency, on occasions, to resort to violence as a way of expressing his feelings. And third, he said, there was Anthony’s own indecision and general unreliability. Despite all they’d done to bring about the meeting, it had failed once before, and might fail again, and Anthony himself might be the cause of that if he
decided
at the last minute not to show up, rendering the whole exercise redundant and leaving Rachel exposed still to the threat of whatever he might choose to do in the future in terms of embarrassing her professionally.