Every Contact Leaves A Trace (8 page)

My partners, on considering the issue, found themselves able to allow me a certain latitude, given, as they put it in their letter to me, the delicacy of my situation. The compromise that was negotiated with our insurers that week permitted me to retain my partnership on the condition that I agreed to be referred to a psychotherapist. My grief, though entirely understandable, was having a not insignificant effect on my performance and it had been decided, as was usual in cases such as this, that I should undergo a course of treatment designed to bring about a resolution to my situation in such a way as to avoid the risk of further negligence on my part.

I have little doubt that my partners had no choice but to ask this
of
me, but after the session I attended on Wednesday I made up my mind not to see him again, the man deemed capable of resolving my situation. And having made my decision, the prediction I’d imagined Haddon making turned out to be even more accurate than I had anticipated.

I met with my senior partner first thing yesterday morning to tell him face to face. The fact that a letter arrived at my desk within two hours of our meeting suggested to me that it was a development that had not been unforeseen. Of course, the letter said, my feelings about the appropriateness or otherwise of the idea that a complete stranger might be able to bring about a resolution to my grief were feelings that the partnership, as a whole, respected, and this was something they did unreservedly and with one voice. But equally, I must appreciate his position. Whilst he acknowledged that only five months had passed since the occurrence of that undoubtedly tragic event, he hoped I would not find him insensitive in making the observation that it was felt by the partnership that it was not unreasonable to expect me to have progressed somewhat further than I appeared to have done with what they referred to as my mourning process. It was noted that it had been my own choice to return to work so promptly, and it was noted further that I had done so rather sooner than might have been wise. In recent weeks, feedback received in relation to my pitches to prospective clients had made it apparent that it was no longer simply the matter of my one-off act of negligence that had to be considered. I must understand that it was no single event in particular that was being relied on by the partnership in justification of the decision they had reached, but rather, the combination of factors they found themselves facing. As it was, they were able to offer me a compromise: I could retain my equity stake for the time being on the condition that I agreed to take a sabbatical, the duration of which was negotiable but would not be less than three months. During that time I would take whatever measures I thought appropriate to recover sufficiently in order to return to work, and I would come back only when I felt able to fulfil my partnership duties and maintain the
same
standards of professionalism that I had demonstrated prior to the unfortunate death of my wife.

And that is why I have spent much of today looking down on the canal from Rachel’s desk, rather than looking out from my office at the dome of St Paul’s. As the evening falls, I realise with some unhappiness that I don’t know how I will spend the next three months, this being the first time in my adult life that I have faced the prospect of having to endure more than a week or so with time on my hands and the absence of any immediately obvious way to spend it. I may take the tube to Hampstead and walk on the Heath, though I am not sure I want to do this without Rachel, having so often been there with her. There are exhibitions to be seen and museums to be visited. I don’t remember the last time I went to the cinema. I might leave London altogether and visit the coast, or go further than that and travel properly in the way that people do who want to forget their past, or to bury it, by changing their environment for a time. I suppose I could just start with a weekend, having lost count of the number of times Richard and Lucinda have invited me away.

Or I may do none of these things and accept instead the invitation that awaited me on my return from the City yesterday. It was a strange coincidence that Harry should have sent it when he did; it must have crossed in the post with the card I wrote to him on Tuesday night telling him about the colour of the leaves that are gathering in the square where my psychotherapist lives. I sometimes find myself at a loss for what to write to Harry about, in much the same way that I could never think of what to say in my letters to my father after he left us at the end of that summer, even though I wanted so much to tell him every detail of my life since I had seen him last, and about how it felt to walk around the house longing for him to come back and announce that everything was forgiven, everything could be forgotten. It was, then, almost for the want of anything else to write that I had told Harry about the square. After what happened there on Wednesday morning as I sat waiting for what turned out to be my final appointment, and having seen what I saw
on
the wall of one of the houses as I left, I shall have to write again and correct the errors in my description.

I’d arrived a little early so I wandered through the square and sat on a bench to wait. After a moment or two a boy ran past me, carrying a balloon. He moved awkwardly, holding the balloon low down in front of him, and I realised it was full of water. I know this boy, I think to myself, and then I remember that I saw him last week as I sat on the same bench waiting. He can be no more than twelve years old and he has an unusual face, his eyes set wide apart and slanting slightly downwards. His hair is long, but in an artful rather than a neglectful sort of a way, and there is a brightness and a cleverness in his gaze when it rests on me. When he disappears with his balloon I close my eyes. He is there again when I open them, running past me at full pelt. His hair and his T-shirt are soaking wet and he is shaking water from his hands and his arms. A fight, I think. He is engaged in a water fight somewhere around the square. He reappears with a friend, a boy smaller than himself and smarter in his appearance, and they are laughing and excited. The balloon he is carrying this time is bigger and fuller than the one before, and he turns his head from side to side as he walks, looking at the people sitting on the benches smoking cigarettes, or making phone calls, or, like me, just watching.

Everyone has begun to notice them now, the boys and their water bomb. A few people laugh at what they see, but others frown and put their things away in bags and start to leave the square. At this point I also become uncomfortable, and it occurs to me that it would be inconvenient to find myself soaking wet minutes before I am due to knock on my psychotherapist’s door and take my seat in his hallway underneath the coat rack and opposite the children’s buggy that is propped against the stairs and festooned with tiny cardigans and picture books on strings.

The boys are standing on the path in front of me. They face away from one another, their backs together, as if in preparation for a duel. Then, walking in opposite directions, they count out five or six paces before they stop and turn to face each other. The smarter
friend
, I think to myself, has volunteered himself as some sort of a practice target. But then he shouts out, ‘Do it!’ and the long-haired boy bends his knees and lowers the balloon almost to the ground and hurls it up in the air and positions himself underneath it so that when it falls it bursts open on his own head and soaks him utterly. His friend is laughing, bending over and laughing and holding his sides and clapping and they are both laughing and they run towards me and disappear. As they go, shouting out words that are indistinguishable, I realise suddenly that the thing they have disappeared behind, the thing that the long-haired boy must also have been running around the first time I saw him, the thing looming white and wooden and enormous from the centre of the square in front of me, is a bandstand.

I thought to myself, as I sat there looking at the bandstand and reflecting on how extraordinary it was that it should be there, that I might begin my session by talking about what I had seen. And that if I was asked why I found it so extraordinary, the bandstand at the centre of the square, I would begin by saying that it was only the night before that I had sat at Rachel’s desk after dinner, watching the heron that sometimes visits my balcony. And then I would say that after I had seen it drift down the canal into the setting of the sun, I wrote a postcard to Harry Gardner about the leaves gathering in the square, and about how it seemed to me to be exactly the sort of square one would expect to see a bandstand in and how strange I found it that there wasn’t one. And then I would have told him that I’d realised as I waited on the bench that I must have seen this bandstand every time I had walked through the square, but that until that morning, I had never so much as noticed it.

That was not how the session began after all. I found, as I had done every time I’d visited him, that I didn’t know what to say after he had asked me to come through from his hallway and had closed the door and sat on the chair in front of the desk and wheeled himself across the room to where I sat, my back up against his bookcase. ‘So,’ he says, as he does each time we begin. And my mind becomes a perfect blank. That is to say, it becomes a perfect blank after an
intense
flurry of thoughts and images and things I want to say have launched themselves momentarily across it, each one more important than the other, so that in the end I short-circuit and find myself unable to speak. We smile at one another, him raising his eyebrows in expectation, me desperately hoping he will ask me a question, any question, thus restoring to me the power of speech. Eventually he does, but only after I have admitted defeat and told him I don’t know where to start.

‘Tell me about your family history,’ he says.

‘How far back do you want me to go? Where do you want me to begin?’ I ask, feeling only panic, sensing the impossibility of meeting his request with any kind of order, or helpful information, thinking it unlikely I will be able to tell him what it is he wants to know, and wanting instead to talk to him about my grief now, about how I wake in the mornings sometimes and forget that Rachel has died and about how I feel when I remember. He only shrugs in response, so I speak to him of the old vicarage I grew up in in Hampshire, the front half of the downstairs converted into a doctor’s surgery for my father’s patients, the key to the medicine cabinet kept on a string about my mother’s neck, and I go on to tell him in answer to his questions that no, I have no siblings, and nor did I ever have, but that for a time I had Robbie, my friend Robbie, and that I was eight years old at the time of the accident.

But I talk without talking, because I am thinking only of Rachel, on whom I have been allowed to dwell for the duration of each of my sessions thus far, piecing together how we’d first met, the night of her murder, the way I felt when I was with her, and I am thinking about the fact that although I sometimes feel I hardly knew her, it seems at times as if she was the only person ever to have loved me.

After the man had closed his door behind me I heaved out a sigh and turned and walked away. And it was at that moment, knowing I was incapable of having such a conversation again, that I decided never to return. As I reached the other side of the square I looked up and saw its name, Exeter Square, embossed on a white sign tacked to the front of one of the houses. I realised then that
when
I’d written to Harry the previous evening, I’d told him it was called something quite different, and the name I had given it by mistake was my own inadvertent fabrication, an amalgamation of other street names I must have seen nearby. So that if he were ever to look for it, say, on a map of London, he would never be able to find it. It would be, for him, as though it did not exist, this square with a bandstand at its centre.

Sitting here this evening with Harry’s invitation on the desk in front of me, it strikes me that apart from the day of Rachel’s memorial, I haven’t seen him since the morning after I was released, the morning he came and drank coffee with me in my hotel room. I saw a lot of people in the few days that passed between her murder and my returning to London, but I’m not sure I’d be able to say exactly who, if someone were to ask me. Friends of Rachel’s seemed suddenly to appear, asking if they could help, almost demanding to know if there was anything they could do, as if by going to the supermarket for me, or speaking to the funeral directors on my behalf, they could make things more bearable. I see now that it was not for me that they offered to do these things, but for themselves; for the assuaging of their own private grief at what had happened, or at other things that had happened to them at other times in quite unrelated ways.

Some of them surprised me by their visits, being people I’d barely met, so that I became confused, I think, about who I knew and who I didn’t. On the Saturday afternoon, the day after I was released, I had a fairly long conversation with a woman who showed up in the hotel, only to discover partway through that she was a reporter, rather than a friend of Rachel’s. Richard and Lucinda checked into the hotel just after this and they took it upon themselves from that point on to be my representatives, taking charge of me utterly and telling me to speak to nobody but them. Richard, whose anger on my behalf seemed a little disproportionate, and somehow misplaced, stayed downstairs in the lobby to discuss with the hotel manager the security arrangements he said would be necessary for the remainder of my
stay
, and Lucinda came with me to my room. She apologised for Richard’s temper. ‘He was really very fond of her you know, whatever he might have said about her.’ She carried on talking for a while, saying something about Richard having found out that he hadn’t made Silk again and it really bothering him even though it would have been unheard of at his age, and that he’d even been talking of doing a rush job on the New York Bar exams and ‘getting the hell out of here’ for a couple of years. And then she realised I wasn’t really listening and she came and sat by me on the bed and held me for a time, and she cried and said that I would too, eventually.