15
THE STORY HARRY began to tell me that night as we sat by the fire in his rooms was, in the end, not so very complicated. It was a sad tale, and a tawdry one, but it could not be said to have followed a narrative path that was, when it came to it, anything other than fairly direct. He warned me that it would take some time in the telling, and that I would have to be patient with him, since it was not one story but many, woven together. Other than that, he had only one caveat before he began, only one reservation about the jigsaw he was about to lay out: he told me right at the start that although he was going to describe a sequence of events which he believed to have culminated in Rachel’s murder, he could not claim that his was anything approaching an authorized version. There were questions that remained unanswered, and problems that remained unsolved. Perhaps the biggest flaw of all, he said, was the absence of more than one of the protagonists of the piece, which meant that what I was about to learn would have, for the time being at least, to remain no more than a theory, and one which I would have to take from him on trust; he hadn’t found a way of corroborating it, and nor could he see that he’d be able to.
He apologised for the way he’d gone about things. He knew I had found my visit thus far somewhat bewildering, and he was aware that he might have arranged the whole thing more satisfactorily from my perspective. But until he’d had an opportunity to observe me in situ, as it were, in the way that he’d been able to over the previous few days, until he had watched my reaction to some of the things he had told me, or shown me, or asked me to read, he had been more than a little uncertain of my own role in the proceedings.
His intention on inviting me to Oxford had therefore been first, to discover how much I knew of the events concerned and whether I had had any greater involvement in them than that of which he was already aware; and then, depending on what had been established in answer to those questions, either to tell me the whole of the tale or to withhold it. He said that he had satisfied himself that I knew very little of it, if anything at all, and could now be almost certain that the entirety of the story he was therefore about to reveal was known only to himself, to Evie, and to Anthony. On my becoming part of that circle of confidants, he wanted me to be absolutely clear that what I chose to do with the information was entirely at my discretion.
‘We are none of us blameless in this sorry affair, Alex. We are some of us less culpable than others, but not one of us can avoid a share of the burden of responsibility for what happened to Rachel. Not one. I would be grateful if you would hear me out, and listen to my conclusions before you make a decision about what to do. After that, I recognise I can have no further hold on you. It will be in your gift, Alex, when you know the whole of it.’
‘What, Harry?’ I asked him. ‘What will be in my gift?’ He sat back into the sofa then and raised his glasses to his forehead and frowned at me, as though I failed to keep up with what he was saying. ‘Our salvation, Alex,’ he said. ‘Our salvation. Or, if you so wish it, our damnation. You must decide whether to conceal our story, or to disclose it, and in so doing, you must be our judge.’ And then, having poured us each a glass of whisky from the bottle that stood on the mantelpiece, he began.
He’d received the first of the three letters at the end of Sixth Week in the summer term of my second year. His wife had died just before Christmas. Because her death had happened during the vacation, he’d been able to keep it relatively private, arranging for the briefest of notices to be put on one of the boards outside the porter’s lodge, announcing that he would not be resuming his college duties, nor his teaching timetable, until the start of the summer term, and noting the address of the hospice to which donations could be sent should anyone wish to make one.
As he told me this I remembered having seen the notice, and having listened to the English students talking about it in the Buttery bar once or twice. I’d overheard them gossiping in a half-hearted sort of a way about how Harry’s wife had died, and wondering if it was suicide, or if she’d been murdered by a jilted lover. They’d moaned about how much time he’d had off already, saying that they now understood the frequency of his absences the previous term, unexplained at the time but clearly, with hindsight, relating to what must have been hospital visits, surgery, chemotherapy, but that all the same, it was they who had had to do with graduate students instead, stepping in at the last minute and never having the slightest idea what they were talking about. I was surprised by the way they spoke about him and his wife. Harry had always been someone they’d talked of with something approaching adulation, even awe, and the conversations that I overheard in the bar at around that time seemed remarkable to me in the light of this; there was something in their speculation that was, if not quite salacious, then certainly disrespectful, and that would have been more understandable had its target been a tutor who was less well-liked.
Harry had come back at the start of the summer term to find that Rachel and Anthony and Cissy had all three elected to study Robert Browning as their Special Author, which meant that they would together attend a tutorial with him every week for the whole of that summer term. At the end of that time, over the vacation, each of them would write a dissertation on the poet’s work, which would be submitted as their Special Paper for Finals. He was not displeased about this, though he was perhaps a little surprised by the uniformity of their decision. It was not unprecedented to have three students studying the same author for their Special Paper, but it was unusual. At any rate, when looked at in the round, he regarded it as a welcome surprise: they were a group whose company he found stimulating, even convivial, and the intensity of the dynamic between them, which had been apparent from the start, was something for which he came to be grateful, in that it provided him with some distraction in those early weeks after his return from a dark and desolate winter.
Fairly soon though, this was a dynamic that crossed a line from the merely intense to the almost wild, and one that he realised early on would have to be carefully managed in order that the right balance might be struck. They had an energy in their discourse, the three of them, which he knew from the start was something that could either serve to assist them in their learning, or hinder them even to the point of obstructing it. The discussions they had each week were extraordinary in their creativity, and in their combativeness, and the ideas that were thrown out in those sessions developed into something quite original, startling even. He couldn’t say that it was any one of them that was responsible for this; it was by their union that it was generated. While the debate would reach its most fevered pitch in the exchanges that took place between Rachel and Anthony, each of them throwing quotes across the room at one another like cricket balls, Cissy was nonetheless a constant part of the dialogue, just in a different way.
‘It wasn’t that she was any less brilliant,’ Harry said. ‘On the contrary, I think that if she’d stayed, she might even have exceeded the potential either one of them displayed. Her written work was her forte though, from the start. It was there that she was really herself. Careful, analytical. On another level altogether from the others. She was older than them, you see. She’d already started a course in the US and given it up halfway through to come over here instead. But she was almost too careful initially, too controlling. It took the whole of the first year to get her to let go, to be comfortable with the idea of being spontaneous. To take risks with her ideas, rather than always seeing things in black and white.’
I thought to myself then that I’d known plenty of people like that at Worcester, remembering Richard’s frequent observation that most of our fellow law students were such pedants they’d end up as tax lawyers or parliamentary draftsmen, though he usually only made it after one of them had torn him to pieces for having too few precedents at his fingertips in support of what he’d considered to be an otherwise brilliant argument.
‘We see it from time to time,’ Harry carried on, ‘in some of our first-year students. They will arrive so well-read you know they’re in abject terror of something. It usually turns out to be one of their parents, or both of them. In Cissy’s case, she’d treated her first reading list like a contract, rather than a guide. There was nothing wrong in that, of course, although it meant that while the others read everything they’d neglected to before coming up, she started on literary theory, the sort of material most of them never even get to. And it actually held her back for a while, this relentless pursuit of perfection, leading as it so often does to a formulaic kind of blandness,’ Harry said. ‘But we got there in the end, with careful encouragement and a few chats at the end of her first year when she didn’t get the results she wanted and I told her she wasn’t being adventurous enough.
‘By the time it came to the Browning tutorials she’d got the knack of it, and she was able to take things less seriously, and not to think so much in terms of right and wrong. She gave as good as the other two from then on. But she did it always in her own way, and of course, however much she had adapted to our method of doing things, there was always the fact of where she came from. “Our little American friend”, Anthony called her when he was building up to one of his more withering put-downs. She would sit bolt upright on the sofa, her head turned a little to one side, watching the other two tearing into one another. She’d said to me once, the year before, that she thought we ought to spend less time talking and more time writing, and I would watch her sometimes and wonder whether her reticence was because she was still sceptical about this. But then she would come out with something, right at the end of an argument; something she’d gleaned from a piece of secondary literature the other two hadn’t even heard of, and she’d finish it with a killer blow, just like that. It wasn’t reticence at all, you see; she’d been listening all the way through, storing things up and preparing her point, so that when it came out, there was rarely any answer to it. Her written work stayed much as it had been though, and I suppose I couldn’t fault it. It was just an approach I wasn’t accustomed to. Slightly overassertive, perhaps, and a little laboured. Pedantic even. Like a—’ and he stopped, looking embarrassed.
‘Like a lawyer, you mean,’ I finished for him.
‘Yes, actually, that was what I was going to say. Her father was one, of course; perhaps that was where she got it from. I should apologise though, for my slip. A kinder way to describe her style would be to say it was simply too cumbersome. Even leaden. Rachel and Anthony were, how shall I say it, more playful with their dialogue, and easier with their knowledge. It was a kind of game for them, though they took it none the less seriously. They were able to be freer with their ideas, that was all, and to be jocund with books, rather than always seeing them as something rule-bound.’
In any case, he said, as the early weeks of the term went by, he was nothing short of delighted with their progress. Their commitment to the Special Paper meant they were able to take in a range of material far beyond the confines of their subject, their studies even approaching at times what he considered to be academia in the widest sense of the word. Because they each seemed to be working as hard as one another on the days that passed between the tutorials, he was able to push them in their reading, and in their thinking, and consequently their debates each week became something he looked forward to a great deal.
Despite all of this, and notwithstanding their brilliance, there was the occasional incident which made him question whether they were approaching things in exactly the way he would have wished them to. He had detected, once or twice, an increased flippancy in their behaviour which, had he dwelt on it for any length of time, would have concerned him, and which, looking back, perhaps should have done. He sometimes had a sense, and it was nothing more than that really, just the slightest feeling, that what lay behind the intellectual meteor showers he was witnessing each week was nothing more than a planned exercise, and one from which he was excluded. It was almost as though the three of them were putting on a charade and, rather than engaging in any really serious way with the task in hand, were merely playing with him, trying to provoke him to question them more closely, knowing all the while that he would not.
One such incident took place early on in the term, perhaps even in the second or third tutorial. At the end of the previous week’s session he had set them a question from an old Finals paper, something fairly straightforward on Browning’s use of the dramatic monologue, as far as he could remember. It was Anthony’s turn to read out his essay and he sat deep in the armchair, his head lying back and the pages held up in front of his face. The girls sat side by side on the sofa, as they always did. ‘Just here,’ Harry said, ‘where I am sitting now,’ and, rubbing each of his hands on the fabric that stretched away either side of him, he looked up and met my gaze. He looked away again immediately and stared for some time into the fire before carrying on, his voice quieter than before.
‘I remember Rachel taking her shoes off that day, and tucking her feet up beneath herself. And then she stretched out her legs and put them in Cissy’s lap. She did that sometimes.’ I shut my eyes then against the tears that I felt forming, and I stopped listening. When I tuned back in, it was to hear Harry explaining something about Browning’s use of the first-person narrator, and as he saw only incomprehension in my face, he shook his head and told me it wasn’t important, and he apologised. In any case, Anthony had gone about answering the question in the way he usually did, straying so far from the topic that Harry may as well not have given him a question in the first place. ‘But it was all to the point, Alex. That was the thing,’ he carried on. ‘It just wasn’t what I had expected to hear. But he always made a case for its relevance, an unassailable one, whatever it was that he had written about. It was Conrad that day, I think. The Heart of Darkness, if I recollect. The debt the modernists owed to Browning. Not that it hadn’t been said before, of course it had. But not quite like that. The girls were on to him straight away, as soon as he had finished, both of them this time. They leaned so far forward from their seats to argue they were almost sitting in his lap,’ Harry said. ‘Rachel actually stood up on the sofa then to make her point, throwing her arms about and jumping up and down until I said, “That’s enough, Miss Cardanine, I think you will find that you are sufficiently well served by your natural eloquence to launch your sallies with equal efficacy from a seated position, don’t you agree?”’
Of course he’d regretted his words as soon as he’d spoken them, realising they would pick up on this mode of address he had chosen and use it for the rest of the afternoon, and there would be nothing he could do about it. And that was exactly what they did, Miss-Cardanining and Mr-Trelissicking and Ms-Craiging one another with a hilarity they hardly bothered to mask, though the force of their arguments suffered not a bit for their new frivolity. So fluid was the fight that day he half suspected they might have rehearsed it, there being in the speed of their parrying something almost too quick; something too slick for him to believe it was spontaneous. But since their most rapid-fire debate came in response to his own questions, the rate by which his admiration for them increased was easily matched by the speed with which any doubts he might have had about their integrity were quelled.
At the end of the session that day he had asked Anthony to give him the piece of work he had read from, only to be met with something along the lines of, ‘Actually I won’t, if you don’t mind. Wasn’t one of my best,’ or some such nonsense to the effect that Anthony was refusing to hand in his essay to be formally marked. Harry assumed it was a joke and had kept his hand out, waiting for the essay, but Anthony said it again, and, as he did so, one of the girls had laughed. It was Rachel, he rather thought, or at least it was until Cissy had nudged her and told her to shut up, and that was the point at which he thought something odd might be going on. All at once he felt exhausted by the whole thing and, losing interest suddenly in their little game, he stepped forward and placed his hand on the essay Anthony was holding under one arm, intending to take it from him and see the three of them out without discussing it further. He felt worn out, all patience with them and their ebullience gone. Their antics seemed to him suddenly like those of unruly children instead of second-year undergraduates, and he realised that not only was it the end of the day but also the end of the week, and that another weekend lay ahead of him with nobody but himself for company.
He pulled sharply on the pieces of paper and, catching Anthony off his guard, found that he had them in his hand. He had opened the door and was about to say goodbye when he registered that there was something more than surprise on Anthony’s face, something, in fact, almost like dismay. He looked down at the pages he was holding to see that rather than the tiny cramped and pencilled handwriting he was expecting to find there, what he was looking at was nothing at all. He was holding three or four sheets of A4 paper, sure enough, but when he turned them over again and again, shuffling through them once more just to be sure, he saw that every single one was entirely blank.
He tried to work out what was going on, and to understand what he’d just witnessed as he’d sat watching Anthony’s eyes move across the pages in front of him, listening, or so he’d thought, to the man apparently reading out his essay. And then, all at once, Anthony started to speak.
‘I’m sorry, Harry, I mean, I’d written it, you know. But then,’ and his voice trailed off to nothing.
‘But then what, Anthony? What happened?’
‘Well, OK. I suppose I’ll have to explain. It’s not what it seems, Harry, really it’s not. I was sat there in my room, right? It was early, you know, this morning, and it’d been a hard one, you know. I’d been up all night really, working on it. Wanted to make it perfect, Harry.’
And Harry turned to see the girls smiling at one another and shaking their heads and he said, ‘Don’t trouble yourself to explain, Anthony. Just go,’ and he handed the pages to him and stood back to let them leave the room. It was Rachel who spoke then, telling him he shouldn’t take it so personally, that Anthony really had written the essay, but that he’d been so tired when he’d finished that he’d made a pot of coffee to wake himself up and at the last minute he’d knocked it over, the whole thing, and it had completely soaked the essay and there was no way of retrieving it, and when the girls had gone to get him for the tutorial they’d found him in a total state and told him just to recite it off the top of his head, he’d spent long enough writing it he must have memorised half of it already, and so that was what he’d done, and it had worked hadn’t it, and what could Harry actually say was wrong with it?
‘Absolutely nothing, was there Harry? He’s brilliant isn’t he? He just is,’ Rachel said, staring at Harry and daring him to question her.
‘That’s not quite the point, Rachel,’ he said. ‘There’s a little more to it than that, don’t you think?’
‘Like what, Harry?’ she said, smiling. ‘Like what?’
‘Well. There are other questions to be considered, I think. There is, for example, the question of respect, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Of respect?’ she said, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes wide. ‘Respect for what, Harry?’
‘For the way we do things here, Rachel. For the system that we follow, such as it is.’ But then he stopped, realising that what he had meant to say, what he had actually wanted to say but hadn’t, was ‘For me, Rachel. Respect for me and for the time I spent this afternoon listening to Anthony, thinking that he was reading from a script, believing the image he presented to me. And all the while I was the only one who didn’t know what was going on.’
‘Oh come on, Harry,’ she said, her voice softer, and her face chastened, a little. ‘You know that isn’t important. Not really. And anyway, that’s not the Harry we all adore, is it?’ and she looked at the others quickly before turning back and placing a hand on his arm. ‘You know what, Harry Gardner? I’d never have thought of you as the sort of man who’d fall back on the idea of a system. You’re far too interesting for that.’
‘You might say so, Rachel,’ Harry responded, irritated by the way she was speaking to him. ‘But you will one day learn, perhaps, that the ability to at least show a modicum of respect for a system isn’t such a terrible thing to cultivate.’
‘But it wasn’t his fault,’ she replied straight away. ‘You heard what he said. You know he’s done the work. So it’s alright then, isn’t it?’
Harry looked at her face then and realised she wasn’t going to let it drop. Finding himself unable to summon up the energy to contradict her reasoning, he agreed to put his objections aside. As the three of them turned to go Anthony stretched out his arm towards Harry, smiling his lopsided smile and saying, ‘No hard feelings eh, mate?’ and before Harry could stop himself he was shaking his hand and smiling back at him, admitting to himself, albeit reluctantly, that what Rachel had said was true: it mattered little that Anthony had written nothing down. What mattered more was that he had read the texts so closely, and had engaged with them in a way that was, as far as Harry could tell, entirely original. What bothered him though, looking at the three of them smiling at the joke they had played, and, he suspected, at the fact that they’d got away with it, wasn’t the question of Anthony’s commitment to his studies, nor of his grasp of his material. Instead, he said, it was the duplicity of the thing that unsettled him. That, and the fact that they were all three of them in on it and had clearly found it amusing to tease him in the way that they had.
After they’d gone, it was Rachel’s voice he heard floating back up the stairs to where he stood. ‘I told you,’ she said, still laughing. ‘I told you he’d let it go if you pulled it off well enough. He loves us.’ And then her voice faded a little as they reached the bottom of the stairs, so that he had to lean forward to be able to make out the end of her sentence. ‘As far as Harry’s concerned,’ she carried on, ‘we three can do no wrong.’
He closed the door then and went to stand by the window, watching them walking straight out across the quad instead of going round it and, when the porter appeared on the terrace and called out to them, quickening their pace and carrying on right to the other side, ignoring the man’s request that they step away from the grass immediately. And he said to me, almost apologetically, that as he’d stood there watching, he decided there was something he hadn’t quite liked in the way Rachel had spoken when she’d thought she was out of earshot. He had detected something jubilant, even crowing, in her tone, and he almost wished he hadn’t heard it.
Still, there was little point in making any more of what had happened than he’d done already, and he quite forgot the whole thing until the middle of term, when, being given cause to be concerned once more, he wondered whether perhaps he should have taken a firmer stance after all, simply as a matter of principle. The difficulties that arose this time were not, he said, within the tutorial room, but outside it. If anything, their work had begun to improve yet further when he began to receive reports from Haddon about some bizarre episodes involving the three of them, episodes in relation to which Haddon had felt obliged to take disciplinary action.
There were no more than two or three occasions on which Harry was called in to see Haddon about them. The first time, Haddon had received a call from the porter one morning to say that he’d seen something on his night rounds he thought Haddon ought to know about. It had started innocuously enough, the porter told him, when he’d had a call from one of the Fellows whose bedroom overlooked the quad. The man had been woken by shouts, and when the porter went to investigate he found the three of them playing French cricket. He chased them off immediately, but not before they’d tried to argue that it wasn’t so late, only one in the morning. And when he told them they shouldn’t be on the grass anyway, no matter what time of the day or night it was, they ran away then, leaving the racquet behind and completely ignoring him when he shouted after them to come back and fetch it.
That in itself wouldn’t have been worth a report to Haddon, not on its own, so he’d gone back to his lodge and simply logged it in his record. Later on though, on his three a.m. rounds, he’d found them again. He’d been on his way back from the north-west side of the lake when suddenly the silence was broken by a splash, and a stifled scream, and he picked up his pace and walked on and saw them swimming out towards the middle. He shouted at them to get out but they pretended they hadn’t heard him, submerging themselves in the water and bursting back up again once or twice before heading towards the other side. He ran round and caught them as they reached the tip of the eastern shore and were clambering out, and he saw that all three of them were naked. They stood there shivering as he hollered at them and shone a torch in their faces to make sure they were who he thought they were, and from their responses to his questions it was clear they were drunk. He told them to get back to their rooms and they went off across the lawns, howling with laughter and stumbling and tripping as they went. The punishment Haddon gave them for this was relatively minor; they were required to spend the following Sunday clearing the stretch of undergrowth that ran alongside the boundary between the college and the canal, bagging up the litter that had been thrown there from passing boats and making the route more accessible by cutting back some of the brambles and transporting all of the debris to the compost heap over by the orchard.
The second incident had some overlap, in that it was the porter again who had reported it to Haddon one morning, but this time the man had been quite distressed by his experience, rather than simply annoyed. It had happened later in that same week when, once more on his night rounds, he’d been tracking the edge of the playing fields and heard music coming from the direction of the Pavilion. Only faintly though, so he wasn’t completely sure he hadn’t imagined it. There were no lights on, as far as he could see, and when he reached the building and stepped up into the porch, everything seemed to be normal. But as he turned to step back down to the grass, he noticed something draped over the railing. He shone his torch on it and saw that it was a stocking, and then he trod on something soft and reached down and picked up another. And then he heard the very definite sound of a laugh coming from inside, just one, followed by a sudden burst of music and a woman’s voice saying, ‘Oh for god’s sake, Anthony, shut up,’ and he knew it was them again.
He went straight in and held up his torch and there they were, Rachel and Cissy, both undressed and lying on the floor beside one another, covering their eyes with their hands and telling him to switch that bloody thing off you’re blinding us. There was a crash from behind them, and a thud outside, and he stepped back out again and went to the side of the building to see Anthony running away across the playing fields. ‘Loser,’ Cissy shouted from inside. ‘You’re a loser Trelissick, you know that. Face the f*cking music.’ Having gone back inside and told the girls to get dressed and clear everything up and go back to their rooms, he’d left them to it and returned to the lodge, disgusted by their behaviour. Seeing them like that had been one thing, he’d told Haddon, but it was what he found the next morning that really upset him. When he’d gone back to the Pavilion at about six a.m. he wasn’t expecting it to be perfect, but nor did he think he’d find it strewn with cigarette stubs, empty bottles, candles melted directly onto the floorboards, chocolate wrappers and tissues everywhere across the room. Not only that, he said, but they hadn’t even bothered to take their CD player with them, just leaving it there with a stack of CDs beside it. When Haddon heard what they’d done, he ordered the three of them to report to him at six o’clock every morning for a fortnight and barred them from drinking in the Buttery bar for the same period.
On those first two occasions Harry had argued their corner, framing their antics as the exuberance of youth rather than anything more sinister or alarming, and it was because he had pleaded for a softer line to be taken that they’d received only the punishments that they had. But where Haddon backed down both those times, he hadn’t even consulted Harry the third time, simply writing him a letter after the event and attaching a copy of the memo the three of them had been sent about their punishment: each of them had received a hefty fine and a warning that a repeat of any such behaviour would lead to a suspension from College for a period of such significance it would threaten their academic performance in the long term. Harry told Haddon he thought he’d gone completely over the top, given what had actually been complained about this time, but Haddon said he was treating all of the incidents cumulatively; since Harry’s softly-softly tactics clearly weren’t getting the message across, he had decided it was time to draw a line. It seemed that a student who lived on the same staircase as Rachel and Cissy had complained to Haddon that he’d been kept awake for four nights in a row by music coming from the set of rooms that the two women shared. The first time, apparently, when the man had asked them to, they’d turned it down, but after that, they had stopped even answering their door when he knocked, Anthony and Cissy calling out from inside that he should leave them alone, they were busy, and hadn’t he ever heard of having fun and why didn’t he act his age for a change. By the end of the week he was too tired to concentrate, and with only a fortnight left until his exams, he’d approached Haddon and demanded that he do something.
His complaint, innocuous though it might have seemed, had been made in a manner that Haddon said he couldn’t ignore if he was to maintain credibility in his role as Dean. The student in question was clearly in some distress, and he’d told Haddon he didn’t want to go into details, but that if something wasn’t done about the noise there were plenty of other things he could start complaining about. When Haddon asked him what he meant by that, the man said it didn’t matter, he didn’t want to get any more involved than he had to and it was a free country and Rachel and Cissy could do what they liked with whoever they liked whenever they liked. None of that bothered him; it was just the noise. It was keeping him awake, and after almost a week without sleep he felt like he was cracking up. He assured Haddon he wasn’t suggesting anything illegal was happening, but there were things he had seen that he wished he hadn’t. He’d made what Haddon had interpreted to be oblique references to their behaviour having some sexually threatening elements to it, and that was enough for Haddon: something of the same offensiveness had characterised all of their escapades, and the situation had to be nipped in the bud if the college was to avoid the sort of publicity that would be attracted if a firm line wasn’t taken.
Harry himself didn’t raise the topic with them, and nor did he mention the matter of the fine, preferring not to disturb the equilibrium that had grown up between what he had come to think of as their little group of four. As far as he knew, they were entirely unaware of his involvement in any decisions that had or had not been made regarding their punishments. And he was relieved when things inside the tutorial room continued much as they had done before, if in a slightly more subdued fashion. After a couple of weeks he noticed that the edge seemed to have gone from their wildness, and he interpreted this to mean that some kind of balance was being restored. He found himself thinking that by not having spoken to them of their misdemeanours he had been kind, and that they probably felt some degree of gratitude towards him for the lightness of touch he had shown by not referring to the affair.
But then, on the Friday of Sixth Week, he’d come out of Evensong and dropped into the porter’s lodge as he always did, wanting to check his pigeonhole before going for sherry with the Provost. He marked the way he’d been addressed on the envelope as unusual straight away, noticing that his name had been typed in the bold capitals of some kind of faculty communication, but with the Esq. placed after his surname that only his students, and particular colleagues, bothered to use. His curiosity making him impatient, he opened it as he stood there, but on seeing what it contained he went straight back to his rooms to look at it again in privacy. In the end he missed sherry altogether, only just getting to Hall in time to eat, and then, when he got there, finding that he was unable to do so, such was his shock, and his upset.
He knew, of course, that the letter had to have come either from Cissy, or Rachel, or Anthony, but there was nothing about it that suggested it was from more than one person, and he couldn’t decide which one of them to suspect. He told himself he had a week in which to think about what to do, given that their next tutorial wasn’t due to take place until the following Friday afternoon. By the end of the weekend, he’d convinced himself that he wasn’t completely certain after all that it had come from one of them. The particular choice of Browning poem was so crushingly obvious as to be almost entirely lacking in imagination, and he could hardly believe that students of their ability would have made it. Any number of people would have known that they were studying Browning, and anyone could have written the letters, knowing that the three of them would have been the first to be suspected.
That, in the end, was Harry’s undoing. He had thought too much of them, and not enough of himself. He had been blinded by his desire to think well of them and, if he was entirely honest, by his admiration for their youthfulness. At any rate, by the time their next tutorial came round the following Friday, he had done precisely nothing about it, only biding his time and telling himself that the most sensible course of action was to wait and see whether it was a one-off before approaching Haddon about it, a course of action he knew would lead inevitably to some sort of a confrontation with one or all of them.
He realised almost as soon as the tutorial began that he’d made a serious mistake. The atmosphere that afternoon was almost unbearable in its half-repressed hostility, in the barely restrained ferocity with which they spoke to one another, and to him. Something between the three of them had changed. He was baffled by it, and frightened. A link had been broken, a connection destroyed, and he didn’t see that it was within his power to restore it, being quite certain that such mediation was beyond him. The three of them seemed suddenly to have gone outside his sphere of influence. Some kind of schism had occurred, and one that had nothing to do with him. That much was obvious, but what he couldn’t work out was which way the dividing lines had been drawn. There was an anger circulating between them, he could think of no other way of describing it, and when it came to the end of the tutorial, he was, for the first time, relieved to close the door behind them.
When he reached the porter’s lodge after Evensong he wasn’t surprised, somehow, to find a second letter waiting for him. He noticed that although it was still signed off as if it had been written by only one of them, ‘I AM A WELL-WISHER’, the rest of it suggested that the signatory wasn’t working alone. Again, he was surprised by what he described as the laziness of the choice of text, the excerpt having been taken from slightly further on in the same poem, and by the cheapness of the language of the threat. There was something almost careless in the turn of its phrases, and he found that puzzling from three of the brightest students he’d ever taught. Again, he had managed to convince himself by the end of the weekend that there would be no sense in going to Haddon. It was almost the end of term, they were clearly struggling with some sort of difficulty between themselves, and he couldn’t see any real risk in giving the situation a chance to settle of its own accord. He knew also that as soon as he reported the matter it would in all probability be the final straw for them, for the rest of term at least.
‘I could see clearly what that would mean. And I simply wasn’t prepared to do that to them. They would have lost so much more than they even knew they were risking, the three of them. Of course they did come to lose so much more than that in the end, all of them. We all did, I know that now, Alex. So much more than I could have imagined. At the same time though, I somehow thought that if I let things lie, they would come to realise the error of their ways. That they would be able to approach me, and to apologise, if I only gave them the space.’ But he also knew that there was more to his reluctance than this. ‘To tell you the truth, Alex,’ he said to me, ‘I suppose I was scared. I was afraid of what it was that they were trying to do to me.’
By the end of that weekend he’d resolved to think of a way of confronting them himself, and of negotiating some kind of a truce. He considered for a day or two how he might bring it up at the next tutorial, deciding that he would simply present them with the letters and set out for them precisely what the consequences would be were they unable to explain themselves satisfactorily.
The tutorial the following Friday was the final one of the summer term, which meant that it would be the last time he would be seeing them before they went off for the vacation to write up their dissertations. Their titles had been chosen weeks ago, and they all knew what they were doing by then. In the ordinary course of events, this last session wouldn’t have been one in which any new ground would be broken; rather, it was an opportunity to recapitulate, to consolidate, and to make sure of the way that lay ahead. But he was amazed when, ten minutes into their allotted hour, only Anthony had turned up. Neither of them had spoken a word, only sitting and waiting for the others to arrive, when Anthony suddenly laughed and looked at him as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, his eyebrows creasing together in his customary frown as he said, ‘They’re not coming, Harry, you know that, don’t you?’
Without knowing why, but being aware that he was feeling suddenly angry with Anthony, and with all of them, Harry said, ‘There is no need for you to stay, Mr Trelissick. You may see yourself out. I think you will agree it is better that way.’
Anthony laughed once more, smiling his lopsided smile and saying, ‘Mr Trelissick? Not that again, Harry. Come on, don’t be a spoiler. I’ve got questions for you, loads of them.’
But Harry insisted, finding himself barely able to look Anthony in the eye, and when he had gone, he spent what remained of the afternoon in his armchair, the outer door closed and the rest of his teaching for the afternoon cancelled, trying to think through what to do next, but knowing deep down that he would do nothing until after Evensong, when he would go to the lodge to fetch the letter that he was almost certain would be waiting in his pigeonhole.
When he opened it and saw the extract that had been chosen, sensing the new note of violence that had crept into the correspondence, he walked back to his rooms to collect the other two letters and then he went straight across the quad and started knocking on Haddon’s door, not stopping until he got a response.
Within minutes of Harry handing him the letters and telling him who he thought had sent them, Haddon went over to Hall, where dinner had already started, and he called Rachel, Anthony and Cissy out to the front and told them they were to report to him at nine the following morning. He wouldn’t ordinarily have given them any notice of the interviews but for the fact that the following day was a Saturday, and it fell technically after the end of term. Even though the three of them were likely to be staying up for the Commemoration Ball that was to be held that night, it would be difficult to track them down if they left early for the summer vacation. Haddon decided against calling them in straight away, since he wanted some time to talk with Harry in order to make a plan. He took the precaution, though, of issuing the three of them with the sternest of threats and making it clear that their attendance at his rooms the following morning was compulsory, and that a failure to present themselves would lead to their immediate and permanent exclusion from College.
Harry came clean with Haddon that evening. He told him everything about the letters, and about the change in the dynamic between the three of them. He also made the suggestion that, in his opinion, the letters had been the work of all three of them acting together. He hadn’t managed a particularly convincing rationale for the tardiness with which he’d informed Haddon, finding himself unable to explain the particular bond that had arisen in those tutorials, and Haddon was generous to a fault in his avoidance of any kind of comment on the reluctance Harry had shown to punish the three of them earlier in the term.
After he and Harry had talked it through, Haddon announced that his intention was that they should each interview one of the three, simultaneously, in separate rooms, and then swap and do the same again before moving on to the other. ‘We shall find them out, Harry, you’ll see. It won’t be difficult,’ he said the next morning, walking with Harry back to his rooms after breakfast and setting up a desk and a chair in a side room off the drawing room. Harry’s suggestion that such tactics were hardly necessary was met with derision by Haddon, though in the end he was proved to be right about this, if nothing else. His protest having been dismissed, Harry went through with the exercise as Haddon had dictated he should, taking Cissy into the side room while Rachel waited in the corridor and Haddon set to work on Anthony in the drawing room. Harry realised fairly quickly that he wasn’t up to the task. All that Cissy would say was that first, because the actual sending of the letters had been nothing to do with her, she didn’t need to go into any more detail; that second, if necessary, she would contact her father, who, she reminded him, was a federal attorney in Washington DC, and who would be more than happy to fly over and represent her should Haddon wish to pursue the ridiculous line he was taking; and that third, she also wanted it noted for the record that since she regarded Haddon’s behaviour in Hall the night before as threatening, she would be taking that up with the Provost as a separate matter. Harry found himself apologising to her on Haddon’s behalf, and was at a loss as to how to progress when Haddon knocked on the door and called them both through to the drawing room. He was standing there with Anthony beside him, and when Rachel came in from the corridor where she had been waiting, he spoke to them all together.
Anthony had, it seemed, confessed to sending the letters entirely of his own volition. He took complete responsibility for the situation as a whole, and, Haddon went on, he had accepted that this meant he would be sent down from the university, given the warning he’d received earlier in the term. As Haddon spoke, Anthony looked at the floor, and although Harry couldn’t be sure, he appeared to be crying. He noticed Rachel and Cissy looking at one another a couple of times, and although he wasn’t quite able to interpret their gaze, they seemed shocked by the turn of events that was occurring. Shocked, he said, but also relieved. And then he drew things to a close and sent them on their way, telling Rachel and Cissy as they left that he didn’t feel it necessary to remind them that they should still consider themselves to be on notice of the strongest possible disciplinary action should he hear of any further misdemeanours on their part before they left for the vacation, suggesting at the last that they might like to keep a particularly low profile that night at the Ball if they valued their places at the university. Rachel didn’t react in the slightest when he said this, but Harry saw Cissy shaking her head as she left, and, although he couldn’t quite be sure, he thought he heard her utter the word ‘jerk’ under her breath as she did so. Haddon missed this, having started to discuss with Anthony the arrangements for his departure, telling him he had to be out of College by two o’clock that afternoon, that there was no reason for him to linger beyond that time, and that all of his university identity cards and keys and passes should be returned to the lodge in an envelope marked for Haddon’s attention. ‘We certainly do not want to see you here tonight, Mr Trelissick. I will, of course, notify security that you are not to be admitted to the Ball under any circumstances, so I shouldn’t try to come back if I were you.’ Anthony raised his eyes from the floor only after Haddon stopped speaking, and when he did it was to look at Harry rather than Haddon. As Harry met his gaze he saw that he had been right, and that Anthony was crying, and when Harry put out a hand to shake his, Anthony kept his arms folded across his chest, smiling through his tears and saying nothing before turning and walking from the room.
Harry couldn’t leave it at that. Not after the time he’d spent with Anthony, and not without at least trying to articulate how sorry he was that it had come to this, and to acknowledge the strength of his admiration for Anthony’s ability, despite what had happened. And so, after he and Haddon had had what Haddon insisted on calling a ‘debrief’, he’d gone and fetched a book of poetry from his shelves that he thought he might give to Anthony as a parting gesture, and he’d walked over to see if he was still in his rooms.
Anthony had almost finished packing when Harry arrived, and when he opened his door in response to Harry’s knock, he seemed surprised to see him. He let him in but didn’t stop what he was doing, carrying on shoving things into bags and emptying file after file of papers into a bin liner. ‘There’s nothing to say, Harry, is there?’ he said. ‘Only that I’m sorry. Of course I am. I’m really really sorry. I can’t explain. I think you may as well go.’ Harry didn’t know how to respond. He felt sure there was more to it than the version of events that Anthony had presented to Haddon. Instead of answering any of Haddon’s carefully prepared questions, he’d apparently given a brief statement to the effect that he had become jealous of Harry’s complacency, of the life that he had, and at the same time he’d become convinced of his own mediocrity in those tutorials, feeling more beaten down by Rachel and Cissy each time they met, and more and more certain that he would only fail where they would succeed. And this had become a kind of a madness for him, spiralling into something approaching hatred for the girls, and for Harry. He had felt angry, and he hadn’t known how to channel that anger. ‘Look at me,’ he said to Harry that afternoon in his room, brushing away more tears. ‘What was I thinking, turning up here, trying to fit in? Trying to make my way with people like them? With people like you?’ Harry tried to interrupt, and to contradict his line of reasoning, but Anthony carried on, his speech quickening and his voice sounding almost strangulated as he described how everything had got completely out of hand and, without really knowing what he was doing, he’d sent the first letter. He had wanted to hurt Harry, and it seemed clear to him that the memory of his wife was the easiest way to do it. After that, Anthony said, there had been no turning back. He’d set a course that would lead only to self-destruction, he’d known that at the time, and there had been nothing he could do to stop himself.
Harry was puzzled, feeling certain there was something about Anthony’s explanation that didn’t ring true. Realising he wouldn’t be able to communicate with him properly, not that afternoon at any rate, he’d handed him the book of poetry and said that he wished him the best and would like him to understand that he was forgiven. And then he left him there, still throwing things into bags and tearing down posters from the walls. As he walked away down the corridor he felt that he had failed Anthony somehow, more than he had ever failed anyone in his whole life. The only thing he could compare it with, that sense of failure in relation to another human being, was the way he’d felt on the day his wife had died, when he’d walked away from the hospice thinking that if he’d only done something, anything, differently, she would perhaps have been able to pull through.
He went back to his rooms and sat beside the window in the afternoon sun. He drank some tea, looking down on the quad below and watching the preparations taking place for the Ball that night. Some students dragged a table to the bottom corner of the quad and rigged up a film projector, and the chefs from the kitchen positioned a hog roast on the terrace outside Hall. As he watched, he thought about the fact that, had his wife still been alive, he would have brought her to the Ball. He sat and read for a couple of hours, not really taking anything in, and then he packed up his things and closed the curtains and locked up his rooms and left. He made his way to the Provost’s rose garden, feeling obliged, despite the events of the afternoon, to make a brief appearance at the drinks party that was being thrown there before the Ball proper, though he did wonder, as he walked along the terrace, about abandoning the thing altogether and going straight home.
He did his duty at the party in a kind of a haze so that he wasn’t entirely aware of what was going on around him, or whom he was talking to, or who it was that was taking so many photographs. When he did finally leave for the evening, he stopped in at the lodge and saw that a bulky envelope with Haddon’s name on it had been placed on the side ready for collection, and he realised that Anthony had gone. And then he looked in his own pigeonhole and saw that Anthony had also left behind the book of poetry Harry had given him. There was no note with it, nothing, just the book, so he took it and put it in his briefcase and walked out of College along the red carpet that had been laid there.
That, then, was how things stood at about six o’clock in the evening on the 21 June 1994, an hour or so before the gates were due to open on the Casablanca Ball.