11
AS HARRY OPENS the door to me later on that afternoon I see that he has his pocket watch in his hand and I realise I am late. He snaps it shut and says, ‘You have been busy?’ Because I can’t tell whether the frown on his face is irritation or simply puzzlement, I tell him about my walk around the lake, and the hoar frost, and the depth of the snow that was there. I stop when I get to the part about my climbing up the steps to Haddon’s garden, sensing somehow that I should withhold this transgression from him. And then he pours our tea and tells me that the last time the lake had frozen as hard as this was more than twenty years ago, just after he had arrived at the college to take up his post. ‘There seems to be something of the valedictory in its return this last week,’ he says. ‘As though it is telling me it is time to go elsewhere.’
And then he talks about the fact that he is approaching his retirement, saying he will miss his students most of all. ‘One never knows,’ he says, ‘at the start of every new year, quite what to expect. Of course I have met them all once already, in their admissions interviews. But only the once, and they change, in the time between. I am sometimes a little surprised by the people who walk through my door. I shall miss the luxury of their conversation, and of their company.’ And I remember again Rachel saying to me, when I had asked her about what actually happened in a poetry tutorial, that there was nothing to it, studying English. That it was just sitting around having conversations about books, and stories, and the ways there were to tell them. When I ask Harry how he will spend his time, he only jokes about obtaining a string bag and visiting the supermarket on a daily basis to buy a tin of beans, or a loaf of bread. He’ll carry on taking his visits to London, he says, keeping up with exhibitions, seeing his man at Trumper’s and continuing with his research. He intends to make a habit of dining as often as possible on veal and brandy sauce with whomsoever he should find at the O&C’s club table, safe in the guarantee that whatever they might lack in personality will be more than compensated for by the sharpness of their intellect. He will be, he says smiling, a man about town.
‘So you see,’ he carries on, ‘I shall have no shortage of things to do. That is not my worry, Alex.’ And then he stops his jokes and tells me that the real difficulty, the thing that is really troubling him, is the need to confront the fact that he will no longer be needed, that his opinion will no longer count, and nor will it be something after which people seek. The signs are already there, he says, despite his having another six months in his post. He has sensed it in the meetings of the Governing Body, where his powers of persuasion seem to hold less sway than they used to, and he is beginning to feel that there is no further purpose to be served by remaining. ‘My replacement was appointed over a year ago and he seems to be here more regularly now, preparing himself,’ he says. ‘Before the funeral meats are even slightly tepid.’ And then he smiles and looks at the piles of books lined up against the wall and says there are too many practical matters to be attended to for him to become seriously melancholy for any significant length of time, and that he will be given a desk in the Emeritus Fellows’ room which, as things stand, is little used, so that he will be far from evicted when it comes to it. ‘It is a shock though,’ he says, ‘to become aware of the idea of one’s own absence.’
I don’t respond to this last comment, thinking suddenly of my secretary ordering me a box up from storage on the last day before my sabbatical, and the embarrassment I’d felt when I saw the looks on the faces of the security guards as I left that evening. And then I become aware that Harry is speaking again and it seems that his topic of conversation has shifted to a discussion of various contemporaries of mine with whom he is still in touch and I think, all at once, of the photograph of Anthony sitting beside Rachel in her car, the one that was attached to the parking ticket I’d found just before leaving London.
‘I never heard from Anthony, you know, nor Cissy, after Rachel died,’ I say when Harry asks me who I am in touch with from among my peers. ‘I don’t suppose I had any reason to be surprised, not really, but I was. I mean, neither of them showed up for the memorial, that was one thing. Or at least, I don’t think they did. I saw someone who I thought looked a bit like Anthony. He came in alone, after the start, and stood right at the back. I couldn’t see him afterwards though, he must have gone straight away. But it can’t have been can it? He would have said something to me, don’t you think?’
And then I realise that Harry is saying nothing. When I stop and wait for a reply, he only shrugs his shoulders in response. I have no idea what he means by this gesture and it occurs to me that I might as well be talking to myself, but still I persist, saying that I hadn’t even had so much as a letter from either one of them, and didn’t that strike him as strange?
The silence I am met with again makes me feel uncomfortable, somehow, but I stumble on, asking Harry whether he himself had heard anything. ‘They were so close the three of them, weren’t they, Harry?’ I ask him. ‘You must have seen that, when you taught them?’ And it is only then, finally, that he speaks, choosing his words so carefully that he almost pauses between each one.
‘Theirs was a closeness that had about it the ephemeral quality that is, I think, evident in many such student liaisons, whatever their precise nature might be. But yes, I was a little surprised myself by their absence, and by their failure to communicate. On the other hand,’ and he takes his glasses from his face and looks down at them in his lap, before pulling a case from his pocket and taking out a cloth and starting to clean them, ‘people do drift apart, over time, don’t you find?’
And I tell him then what Rachel had said to me that day in June, about having lost touch with them both after our second year, and I say yes, people do drift apart, of course they do, but that she’d seemed somehow bitter when she’d spoken of it, and that I’d never understood why, or known what lay behind it all, if anything. ‘She never said,’ I tell Harry, ‘but it had seemed strange to me that they should go their separate ways like that, so suddenly.’
Harry cuts me off then, saying, ‘I suppose it is being back here that has made you think of it, Alex, that is all. The directions our memories take us in are so easily swayed, are they not, by our surroundings?’ He asks me instead about Richard, saying that he understands that he has been a good friend to me these last months, and I tell him about them moving to New York, and the fact that Lucinda is expecting twins, and that I will miss them when they are gone.
And then Harry changes tack again and we are speaking of Evie, and he asks me whether I have heard from her since her move to Tokyo, and did I know if she had made any progress in her negotiations with the Japanese government about the mess into which the restoration project had descended? I say that I haven’t, but that she’d told me not to expect to for a while, not until after she had settled and established herself in the museum.
‘But she was Rachel’s godmother,’ Harry says to me then, almost combatively. ‘And Rachel had no other family.’
‘“Ferociously busy” was the phrase she used,’ is all I can think of to say by way of explanation, feeling somehow reluctant to be entirely open about quite how precarious my relationship with Evie actually is. ‘I’m sure we’ll be in touch before too long,’ I carry on, not knowing how to tell Harry that we were never close, Evie and I, and that her relocation had made little difference to either of us in those terms, and that I had emailed asking how she was getting on, but when she’d finally replied it had been in a way that hadn’t invited any kind of a correspondence, and nor had she returned any of the calls I had made to her since.
And then suddenly it seems that Harry has run out of questions, and I start to wonder when he is intending to give me the things of Rachel’s that he’d found. I half expect that at any moment he will raise the question of the Browning again but he doesn’t, and I think to myself that it is fair enough if he has decided to leave it to me to bring this up, given the way I’d responded to his enquiry the day before. In the absence of this, there seems to be little else to speak of, and our tea having been drunk, I am not surprised when Harry gets to his feet and says that he will see me later on for drinks before dinner.
I stand also and I pat about in my pockets to make sure I have my key. ‘I lost it this morning,’ I say, and for no other reason than to fill the silence I tell him about it falling into the snow and disappearing without trace and how the porter had insisted on our searching for it before he would give me a spare. I told him about the conversation we’d had afterwards, and how the man had told me about his father doing the job before him, and about how, as a boy from St Barnabas, he had imagined he was entering Narnia when he’d come through the gate and seen the playing fields for the first time. And then Harry did as I had and questioned his description, saying that the view the porter would have seen first on coming into College would have been of the quad, not of the playing fields, and that he must have been mistaken in his recollection. I start to explain but he interrupts me. ‘He was very young at the time,’ he says, looking at his pocket watch again. ‘Childhood is another country, Alex, and we are none of us as clear in our memories as we like to think.’ But then I tell him what the porter had said when I’d questioned him, and I describe for Harry the old gate, forgotten since the paths were rerouted years ago, overgrown and unused and completely hidden now.
Harry lets go his hold on the door and it swings shut again and he goes over to the armchair and sinks into it, sighing as he does so an almost guttural sigh, as though it has come right from the depths of his stomach. He brings his hands together as if in prayer and he holds them up so that his chin comes to rest on the tips of his fingers and he closes his eyes.
‘Harry,’ I say, but he doesn’t seem to hear me. ‘Harry,’ I say again, and I am about to ask him what is the matter when he speaks, almost too quietly for me to hear him.
‘So. That is how.’
And then he is silent again, for at least a minute or two, until he opens his eyes and says, looking not at me but at the floor, ‘I wasn’t sure.’ He gets up from the chair and walks over to the window and looks across to the other side of the quad, to Haddon’s secret garden and the trees beyond, and then, his back still turned, says, ‘Six forty-five, Alex. Do be on time.’ I go to let myself out, and as the door closes behind me I think I hear him say to himself, ‘Of course. I had forgotten.’