Alex saw them off, standing in the winter sunshine long after the car had disappeared, left dwelling on the affection there’d been between father and daughter, and on the things Mr Shaw had said in his office. The whole experience had left him feeling ashamed.
He thought then of the other girl he’d mentioned, wondering now if he’d got the name completely wrong, if perhaps it hadn’t been Lara or Laura, but Emily. And thinking of her, he realized he was standing only a few hundred yards from a bench which had been bought in her memory, the synchronicity sending him off in that direction.
It had been bought with a collection raised by friends in her college, situated now in front of a small thicket of trees, looking down over the landscaped campus to the lake and the woods beyond, a thin silvery line of sea above them in the distance.
He went there maybe once a year, drawn by the need to reread the plaque that told him just a little of who she was, or rather, who she’d been. This seemed like as good a time as any and he sat huddled against the chill wind, looking out at the view for ten minutes or so before turning to look at the weather-dulled plaque.
Emily Barratt, nineteen, only nineteen when she died, still a month short of her twentieth birthday. And there were the mawkish words with which her friends had tried to capture her essence, for all the people who would sit on this bench in the future and wonder who she was - “an angel walked among us”.
Perhaps her friends would have been embarrassed ten years on to remember what they’d written in a heightened state of grief, but even so, it spoke of someone good and gentle, someone who shouldn’t have died, not the furious angel who’d infiltrated his own mind.
That was how she’d looked too, ten years before. It was hard to remember now, but that brief glimpse had been of someone angelic, like the angels he remembered from da Vinci paintings. And yet it was a face that his subconscious had twisted and filled with spite and malevolence.
He turned again and looked at the view. Two female students were walking slowly along one of the paths up the hill, cutting diagonally across his vision before disappearing to his right. They were a long way off but he could hear them talking as they walked, laughing occasionally, carefree.
It was a strange place to have a memorial, a university campus, a place where nothing ever changed, where history was simultaneously repeated and airbrushed in an unchanging three-yearly cycle. The students walking the hill below him knew nothing of the people who’d left three months before their own arrival, let alone three years, ten years, more.
But here was a memorial bench, a reminder of a dead person who no one here remembered. And despite that, it was still comforting somehow, the thought that strangers might sit here to enjoy the view and be moved for even a second or two to think about who she might have been.
He imagined a similar plaque bearing Will’s details. There’d be no sugary epitaph, and anyone studying it would see that he hadn’t died so young, but they’d still be given cause to wonder, who he’d been, how he’d died, why someone had cared enough about him to want him remembered.
Despite everything Alex had imagined though, the people who cared about Will were his family, not the friends who’d thought nothing of marking his life. And he felt guilty, because Will’s father blamed himself for his son’s slide into heroin, and yet the blame should have been aimed just as much at his friends, people who’d forced him into a straitjacket ten years before and then abandoned him.
He got up and headed back, not towards his own department but to the alumni office. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before, but he was determined now that Will should have a memorial and that he should pay for it, a tree perhaps rather than a bench, a distinction Will would have appreciated.
He’d pay for a tree, something to mark Will’s passing, and in the process he’d ease his own mind of any sense that he’d done too little to help someone he should have helped. It was a memorial though, he kept telling himself that, not a talisman to ward off his own guilt but a memorial.
When he got to the alumni office he found two women sitting at computers, one of them in her early twenties, looking like she’d been a student herself fairly recently. They looked expectantly at him, a warmth that somehow suggested they saw him as a visitor to be welcomed, not one of the residents.
He said hello and then, ‘I want to pay for a tree to be planted, for a former student who died.’
‘Oh,’ said the younger one, looking puzzled.
The older woman, probably no older than him now that he looked at her, began to search through papers on her desk and said, ‘Yes, I’ve got a note somewhere with the name of the person you need, someone in Estates I think.’ She seemed to become distracted then and said, ‘While we’re at it, maybe I could make a note of your friend’s name? We’ll amend the records and include him on our memorial page.’