Every Contact Leaves A Trace (4 page)

He broke off when Anthony punched him in the side of the head. He fell from his stool, more because he was drunk than because Anthony had hit him particularly hard, but as he did so his hand hit the bar and his glass flew through the air and smashed against the wall, so it seemed a little more dramatic than it actually was and a few hopeful chants rose up from across the room. Richard pulled himself up from the floor and said straight away, ‘I don’t fight I’m afraid. Terribly sorry.’ He brushed off his trousers and pressed his hand against the side of his head where Anthony had punched him. ‘Well I don’t insult women when they aren’t around to defend themselves,’ Anthony replied, rubbing his hand, ‘I mean, it’s just not on mate.’ ‘Look here Anthony, you and I both know I’m not your mate.’ Richard was smiling now, and I could tell he was beginning to enjoy himself. ‘Stood you up this evening has she? Is that why you’re in here all alone? Feeling a bit rejected are we? And where’s your little American friend? Getting sweaty somewhere with her crew?’

I think, looking back, that Anthony almost regained a kind of a moral high ground by saying nothing in response. He walked over to his table and collected his things and came and put some money on the bar and said to me, ‘For the glass. Sorry mate,’ before walking out and leaving Richard and Towneley in silence as I started to sweep up the mess and fill out an incident form for Haddon, who, being more than zealous in his performance of his duties as Dean, insisted on these things being done properly.

The thing people talked about most frequently though, and the thing that allowed the persona we created for Rachel to command a certain degree of sympathy from us all, was her near-legendary status as an orphan. There were plenty of students I came across
who
, like me, had lost one parent, my mother having died shortly before I went up to Oxford, but to have lost both lent her a kind of mystique. This was further enhanced by the story that went round that it had happened when she was very young and that since then, she had been supported, if not quite adopted, by her godmother, a woman said to be an art dealer who, because she spent most of her time in Italy, gave Rachel the run of her house in Chelsea. ‘Godmother Evie’, Rachel called her when she talked about her in the bar with Anthony and Cissy. Never just ‘my godmother’, or ‘Evie’, but always both at once. I found myself wishing sometimes when I was at Oxford that I had a Godmother Evie. I suppose every one of us is capable of falling for a notion like that, the idea that there might be someone out there other than our parents, someone who will look after us and lend us vast houses and send us money when we need it.

I heard from time to time that Rachel gave weekend parties at Godmother Evie’s house, a house said to be so tall it had its own lift and so grand it came with a butler. There were stories about these parties, and it was rumoured that Rachel gave them names. For Menagerie Night, everyone was instructed to wear fancy dress, and Rachel herself appeared at the head of the staircase as a cat, her naked body spray-painted black. She wore only stilettos, with whiskers drawn wide across her face and a feather boa attached to a piece of ribbon about her waist so that it hung from the base of her spine. And at the party she called Anti-Orgy, the men were invited to compete in turn to see how long they could withhold an erection, Rachel and Cissy stroking them and licking them, Anthony standing by with a stopwatch. Because my source for these stories was usually Richard, who in turn heard them from Towneley, I never took them particularly seriously. She was just that sort of a woman, I used to think. The sort of woman people made up stories about.

As an undergraduate I saw the house in Chelsea only once. It was at the very end of the Michaelmas term of my second year. I had caught sight of a parcel one day in the porter’s lodge. Because it was too big to fit into a pigeonhole it had been left out on the side to
be
collected. I noticed Rachel’s name on the label and took a closer look. The original address had been crossed through and it had been sent on to her at Worcester. That was how I found out where the Chelsea house was. I didn’t set out to remember the address, as such, but it stuck in my mind somehow. There was something about the name of the street, I suppose, that must have been familiar to me, and when at the end of that term I found myself in Sloane Square, I thought I would look it out. I had been in Peter Jones, as it happened, picking something up for my father. I was due to spend Christmas with him in Hampshire and he’d ordered an electric blanket or a mattress cover or something like that and hadn’t wanted to pay for the postage. Because I found it more quickly than I thought I would, I had a bit of time to spare before catching the train back to Oxford.

The street when I reached it was empty. It was growing dark and the frost that had fallen crunched under my feet as I walked. It was a much smaller house than I had been led to expect; more of a cottage really. Rather than the steps I’d imagined I would see leading up to a huge front door, perhaps with a lion’s head for a knocker, there was in front of me a path, lined with a box hedge on either side and so short I could have passed up it in no more than a couple of strides. The curtains were closed and lights shone from behind them, a lamp burning low over the door, so that the whole cottage glowed against the evening. I put my parcel down on the pavement and rested my hands on the gate, wondering whether it was Godmother Evie who was inside, or Rachel, or if in fact there was nobody there at all, the curtains closed each day by a neighbour and the lights switched on by timers. And then I saw someone looking down at me from an upstairs window so I picked up my parcel and walked away without once looking back at the house.

3

HAD I KNOWN
that night beside the lake that I would never see Rachel again, I would have struggled more than I did. Fought, even, to break free of the man who was restraining me; to run to her and lie down beside her and hold her and burrow my face into her neck. These are some of the things I want to do now and can’t. It simply didn’t occur to me that we would not at some point be reunited. I don’t mean that I thought in any coherent or logical sense that we would be together again. I knew, to the extent I knew anything clearly that night, or in the weeks that followed, that she was dead. But I had no idea of the finality represented by the fence that was put up around her in the minutes before I was led across the lawns and driven away.

It was Godmother Evie who identified Rachel’s body the next morning, while I was in custody, and much later on, when the police had finished with her, I allowed myself in my grief to be persuaded that it wouldn’t help me to see her. They had tried to put her back together again, they said, but the injuries she had sustained and the work they had had to do on her head meant that she was no longer herself.

I looked back just once as we walked towards the college gates, the policeman and I. The whole area had been cordoned off with tape sweeping wide around the tree and forming a barrier across the path up from the lake. More people had arrived and yet more were walking down towards the cordon carrying bags, floodlights, ladders even. A line of figures dressed in white boiler suits was strung out across the lawns and moved as one, each of them waving a torch back and forth across the grass in front of them as they went so that they looked like some sort of alien landing craft newly come to
earth
. I could see the porter standing under the tree and talking to the policeman who had stayed behind with Rachel. He sat on the ground and put his head in his hands and the policeman sat down beside him. I know now the story that he started to tell. I have been told by my lawyer, and in some cases, by the authors themselves, all of the stories of all of the people who were there that night. I know something also of the tales told by the cameras at the college doors and across the road; by the blood on my clothes; by the stone that was found beside the lake with tiny pieces of Rachel’s skin still stuck to it. In some places they fit with one another, these stories, and with my own, but in other places they do not.

As for the porter’s tale, he’d been puzzled not to have seen us on his tiny TV screen leaving the college. He’d heard us standing outside his lodge saying our last goodbyes to Harry and thanking him for dinner and telling him we’d always wondered what it was like to dine on High Table and now we knew, and how kind he was and how good the food and the wine and the company and how glad we were to have been invited back. So he’d decided to go on his rounds a little early, just to make sure we hadn’t slipped in again.

I remember that when we’d arrived that evening for dinner and reported in at the lodge and signed the Old Members’ Visitors Book he’d asked us whether we’d be staying the night and when we told him we weren’t he said, ‘Well then, you’ll be gone by midnight please. No creeping around or I shall have to ask you to leave. Old members do that sometimes,’ he carried on. ‘They come over all nostalgic and think they can linger and no one will mind letting them out at three in the morning when they remember they have to go to work the next day and realise they’d rather be sleeping in a bed than on the grass.’ He told us he’d found them down by the lake more often than he’d like, reliving their student days. Had to get quite shirty with some of them once, throw them out more or less. ‘Of course,’ we promised, and we laughed, and I really believed that was a promise we would keep, Rachel and I.

He told the police that when it came to it he’d thought he ought
to
check, just to be sure, especially since he hadn’t actually seen us leave. And it seems that as he set off from his lodge and turned from the alcove before walking to the right, past the chapel doors and on towards the terrace forming the north face of the quad, he hadn’t seen me sitting in the shadows of the library staircase, waiting for Rachel to come back.

‘Actually, can you wait just a moment?’, she had said suddenly, placing her hand on my arm as I was about to duck out through the little wicket door on to Beaumont Street so that we could walk back to our hotel and I could take her to bed, which was what I’d been wanting to do all evening. ‘I’m going to run down to the lake before we leave. I want to see it in the moonlight. No, please don’t come. Wait here for me. I always used to love that, walking past it at night on my own.’ We discuss it for a few minutes, almost arguing I suppose. I say that she didn’t always do it on her own, that we walked there together once and doesn’t she remember, and why can’t we do it again, like we did that summer night, but of course she goes, and I’m left looking at the notice boards and remembering doing exactly this over a decade ago: standing around on my own after the Buttery bar had closed, wishing I was in bed with Rachel. When I have read all the notices, twice, I realise how tired I am. I turn around and see through the doorway immediately opposite the porter’s lodge the staircase spiralling up to the Old Library that overlooks the quad. I slip into the shadows and sit on the coldness of the stone, leaning against the banisters. I put my head in my hands and, having drunk too much over dinner, I doze off almost immediately.

It seems from the porter’s story that by the time I woke with a jolt and looked around me, feeling puzzled as to why Rachel hadn’t come back yet, and wondering why she wanted to do this thing alone, he had already trodden his path through the orchards, on past the student blocks that sit at the northern edge of the lake, and was starting to swing back round again, making for the lodge. I see myself standing up slowly and stretching my arms above my head, yawning, hoping she hasn’t walked straight past and gone back to the hotel on her own thinking I’ve given up waiting for her and done the
same
. And then, as I stand there, I realise that I am not only puzzled but also a little hurt that she hadn’t wanted me to be with her. Placing the porter’s story against my own, I can see him skirting the edge of the playing fields as I am on the stairs thinking these things. He checks for us beneath the trees and as he walks back up towards the point at which the path starts to follow the line of the canal, he stoops slightly under low-hanging branches, shooing away the geese he has woken.

And that is the point at which I hear it. Just as I am considering whether to leave my shadowy corner to find out where Rachel has got to. It is the sound of her screaming. I jump down the stairs two or three at a time and start to run and my mind becomes strangely calm. Sufficiently so for the thought to occur to me that it is a curious thing, my immediate and unquestioning knowledge that it is Rachel who is screaming. Rachel, who I have never heard scream in all the time that I have known her. I run faster than I am really able to and I stumble slightly on the steps that lead down into the quad so that my glasses fall from my face. As I reach to pick them up I manage instead to kick them further away and then to fall forward, landing hard and fumbling around for what seems an age until I find them. At the same time as being terribly afraid, I am somehow elated. There is in my recognition of Rachel’s scream something immensely reassuring, joyful even: it seems suddenly that the connection we share has become something elemental, overwhelming. I think all this as I stumble, fall forward, pick up my glasses and take a quicker route than the porter, running through the first of the passageways that cut through the cottages forming the south side of the quad.

All at once she is there in the distance, stretched out on the grass near the lake at the foot of one of the plane trees. I have scratched my glasses when I dropped them and I cannot see entirely clearly and it looks at first as though she is lying gazing up at the moon with her arms flung out on the ground behind her head. I slow my run to a jog. There is, it seems, nothing whatever the matter. Either I have imagined the scream altogether, or the powers of recognition
that
so excited me were not so accurate after all and I was simply mistaken. Had there been a scream it must have come from the street outside the college walls; it must have issued from the lips of a perfect stranger. I am afraid she will find me ridiculous in having run to her rescue. And then I become aware that I am a little angry with her for abandoning me like this in favour of some romantic notion of lying around on the college lawns looking up at the night sky, and that tomorrow, she will complain about having spoiled her dress.