16
THE FIRST HARRY knew of there being anything amiss at the Ball was when he received a telephone call from Haddon shortly before two o’clock in the morning. He’d been fast asleep for hours in his house on the Woodstock Road. Although he’d taken to sleeping in his college rooms more frequently since his wife’s death, he had stayed away that night because of the Ball. Haddon told him it was urgent, and that he should come straight to his cottage when he arrived. He would say no more on the telephone, other than that on no account should Harry mention it to anybody he might bump into on his way.
When he got to the college gates, Harry had some difficulty persuading the team of Moroccan security guards who had been hired for the night to let him in without a ticket, and in the end he had to ask them to call through to Haddon. The first thing that struck Harry about Haddon when he arrived to meet him was that he had undergone an almost total transformation, so that he looked not at all like himself. As Dean, Haddon’s role that night was what it always was at a college ball: that of superintendent of a team of students who spent the night working as stewards, their recompense taking the form of a free ticket. This was a job I had done myself in my first year without too much trouble, and I’d actually quite enjoyed the opportunity it gave me to experience the event without having properly to engage in it. Being unable to afford a ticket once more, and remembering how little effort it had required, I’d volunteered again and managed to persuade Richard to join me. Our job was to keep the gardens as clear of rubbish as possible throughout the night, and to watch for any kind of trouble, intervening where sensible or, if a situation looked as though it would escalate, contacting Haddon on one of the walkie-talkies he’d given us so that he could co-ordinate an appropriate response and bring in the outside security team if necessary.
That night differed from my previous experience in one regard only. The Ball Committee had written to Haddon to explain that an entire cast for the film had been assembled, each of its members picked either from the Senior Common Room, or from among the students themselves, and that the only part they hadn’t managed to fill was that of Captain Louis Renault. All that this notional cast had to do was look the part, the letter said; to meet and greet and be generally charming or villainous as the script dictated, in the broadest possible sense. Their letter was obsequious enough to have persuaded Haddon that he should allow the committee to hire costumes for him and his team so that we could carry out our work dressed as gendarmerie, with Haddon being fully made up to play the role of our leader, Renault. Haddon told Harry he’d accepted their invitation with some reluctance, though Harry said to me that as the night went on, Haddon seemed to be entering into his role with an enthusiasm that suggested otherwise.
And so Harry was met at the gates not by Haddon dressed in his customary three-piece tweed, brown brogues below and a deerstalker on top if the occasion so demanded it, but instead as a captain of the French military police, circa 1942, and one whose knee-high leather boots were a little too tight for him, whose pillbox hat was a little too small, and whose hands, clad in tiny white gloves, held a whistle that was a little on the shiny side. So transfixed was Harry by the false moustache that was plastered across Haddon’s face, it took him a moment or two to realise the man was furious with him for having ‘given the game away, dammit’. He told me that Haddon had muttered expletives under his breath all the way back across the quad, the two of them dodging groups of drunken students and saying no thank you to cigarette girls and palm readers, and the thought had occurred to Harry that they could have drawn considerably less attention to themselves by walking, rather than running, and by looking as if they were enjoying themselves rather than making for the scene of a crime. And he was right, they could have done, for of course that was when Richard and I had seen him and had our argument about what he was wearing, and whether, as a Yorkshireman, he was a tight-wad.
When they got inside the cottage Haddon let rip, calling Harry an idiot and asking him why he couldn’t just have let himself in through a back gate. By that stage, Harry said, he was completely disorientated. Not only had he been woken suddenly from a deep sleep, he’d also just walked though some extraordinary scenes with Haddon waving an imitation pistol in his face every now and again. The college had become another place entirely and its transformation was bewildering. He hadn’t been able to get to sleep after supper that evening, having been quite unsettled by what had happened with the letters, and feeling desperately sad about Anthony and how he had failed him. When he’d finally managed it, the sleep he fell into was so deep that the telephone had already gone to answerphone by the time he heard it, so that he was woken in the end by Haddon’s voice shouting at him to get up and answer the bloody phone.
All of these things together had made it possible for him to take quite some time to notice that Haddon and he were not alone in the drawing room. Partway through the argument they were having about the merits or otherwise of his having done what Haddon described as ‘involved the security chaps in the whole thing’, he looked across to the other side of the room and saw Anthony sitting on the floor in front of the bookcases, one eye blackened and blood smeared across his chin. He was staring wide-eyed and angry at something behind Harry, and when Harry turned and followed his gaze he saw Cissy sitting there, her face also smeared with blood. As far as he could see, she didn’t appear to be quite as badly hurt as Anthony. She was sitting on a chair, rather than on the floor, and instead of being hunched over in the way that Anthony was, she was bolt upright, staring back at him defiantly. He was thinking to himself that there was something else about her that didn’t look quite right, something he couldn’t place, beyond the blood on her face, and then he realised suddenly that it was just that he’d never seen her wearing a dress before, that was all. And that made him think about Rachel, and he was just beginning to look around the room for her when Haddon said, ‘She’s in the John Radcliffe, Harry. It may surprise you to know that at this precise point in time, a decision is being taken about whether it is necessary for your star student to have her stomach pumped, or whether she’s vomited enough of the alcohol out of her system for it to be safe to leave her as she is.’ Anthony laughed suddenly as Haddon said this, and looked as though he was about to speak, but Cissy shook her head at him and he said nothing.
‘On the advice of her friends I have telephoned her godmother. Although,’ he said, looking over at Anthony and back again at Cissy, ‘the term “friends” would seem, at this stage, to be something of a misnomer. Our business is not with her, Harry. Not tonight anyway.’ And then he turned to Cissy and Anthony. ‘You two. You know the form. There’s a reasonable chance we can keep this as college business if you stay where you are for the next ten minutes.’ And then he ran over and charged down the narrow staircase and Harry heard him locking the front door to his cottage. He emerged back into the room again and said, putting the key in his pocket, ‘There are windows without locks on this floor but I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s quite a drop. Just bear this in mind, the pair of you: I haven’t worked out what happened yet but I’m almost there, and the police would have no hesitation in arresting both of you on the strength of what I’ve got so far. To leave the university without a degree is one thing, but to do so with a criminal record would make life more than a little difficult. It’s your call, but I’m sure as hell I know what I’d do in your position. Ten minutes. We’ll be back. Harry, come this way.’ And he went over and opened the French doors and led Harry out into the secret garden, walking over to the low wall on the other side.
Standing there in the dark with the sound of fireworks going off on the playing fields, and the noise of a big band starting up beneath them on the lawns that led down to the lake, Haddon told Harry what had happened. About an hour or so previously, he and Towneley, who he’d appointed as his adjutant officer for the night, had been standing in exactly the same spot as he and Harry were now. They’d been carrying out their hourly check-in on their walkie-talkies with each of us gendarmes when they’d seen a woman emerge from the bushes into the light thrown by the fire pit on the southern edge of the lake and reel in an uncertain fashion towards the water. They had both instinctively made as if to run towards the steps down from the garden but had drawn back as she’d righted herself and carried on walking. They’d laughed to one another and, their checking-in completed, Towneley had lit for them each a slim cigar, ‘in character’, so he said, and they’d leaned on the wall and watched the Ball unfold beneath them. The woman they’d seen a moment or two beforehand had drifted into view again, much closer to them now, seemingly no longer able to keep herself upright. She fell onto the lawn in front of the plane tree and the whole of her body started to convulse, as though she was vomiting, or crying, or both. Towneley laughed at first, but when she’d carried on convulsing, over and over, eventually collapsing to the ground and becoming entirely still, Haddon gave his command and Towneley ran, climbing over the old iron gate in the wall and slipping and sliding down the steps that were built into it and going over to where she lay. He sat her up on the grass and gave her some water from a flask he was carrying, and Haddon said that from where he stood he could see Towneley stroking her back and wiping her face with a handkerchief. They talked to one another, Towneley and the woman, and Haddon assumed everything was under control and was going back inside when he heard his walkie-talkie crackling and he answered it.
‘She’s in a mess,’ Towneley told him. ‘I can handle it. Think I’m going to get her to the JR, the amount she says she’s drunk. Not exaggerating as far as I can tell, and she says she’s been vomiting constantly for the last half an hour or so. But that’s not why I’m calling you. She says there’s something going on behind the Pavilion. She specifically said you, Haddon. Said there was something you’d be interested in. I think you’d better get down there.’ And so Haddon, wondering who the woman was and what she was talking about, went inside and ran downstairs and let himself out of the front door of his cottage, walking back under the passageway beneath the secret garden and out across the lawns. It was only when he passed Towneley on the way that he was able to take a close enough look to see that the woman he was by now carrying in his arms was Rachel. He knew then that Anthony had made his way back into College somehow, and that it was him Rachel had seen behind the Pavilion. But what he hadn’t anticipated, he said, was quite what he’d discover when he got there.
In the course of packing up my apartment last week for my move to New York I came across a collection of things I had kept from my time at Worcester: old play programmes and invitations; concert tickets and receipts for dinners; even the occasional essay with which I suppose I must have been pleased at the time. And there, at the bottom of this pile of mementos, was a little packet of matches. Not a box, but rather one of those packets fashioned from a fold-over piece of cardboard with a strip on the back for striking a light. It was completely unused, the whole thing made up in a glossy black and still pristine. On the front was the college crest, embossed in silver, with the words ‘WORCESTER BALL 1994’ beneath, and on the back, a quotation in italics: ‘… This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship’. I dug through the rest of my box of things, hoping to find a ball programme, or some photos or something, but there was nothing, so I pulled off a match and struck it, and as I watched it burn down almost to my fingers the little flame grew until it became not itself but one of the towering flames of the fire pit that had been dug beside the lake that Midsummer Night, and I was there all over again.
My recollection of the early part of the Ball was fairly clear. Richard and I had received orders to report, dressed in our gendarme costumes, outside the front door of Haddon’s cottage at the south corner of the quad, at what he’d referred to in his memo to us all as ‘1800 hours’. ‘Jesus,’ Richard said as we walked across the quad, him trying unsuccessfully to make his hat stay on his head and me attempting, with equal ineptitude, to make my plastic rifle swing behind me rather than in front. ‘Haddon’s dream this, isn’t it, Petersen? I propose we’re on the case for an hour, tops, and then we knock off for the night. Not sure I can take much more of it than that. Won’t be missed anyway. Talk about overstaffing,’ he said, pointing his rifle at the crowd of gendarmes that awaited us. He gave up on his hat and tucked it beneath his arm. We both agreed we’d take a fairly relaxed approach to the night that lay ahead. That was the day I’d received Harry’s letter telling me I could stay up in College for the vacation, and I think it was because of that that I felt a certain freedom from things, knowing I wouldn’t be going home to my father after all.
Richard was right about our being surplus to requirements. There were at least twenty gendarmes standing outside Haddon’s cottage when we got there, which Richard and I agreed was about ten too many, each of us attributing the numbers to Haddon’s tendency towards megalomania rather than any real need. I’d looked at the circulation list at the top of Haddon’s memo earlier that afternoon and realised I knew most of the team. The only one who didn’t show in the end, as was revealed when Haddon went through the roll call, sounding just like a schoolteacher, was Anthony. ‘Trelissick,’ Haddon said, rushing down the list. When he was met with silence he shook his head as if annoyed, muttering to himself, ‘Of course not. My mistake,’ before carrying on to the end of the list and starting to bark out his orders. I think he was actually striding up and down on the grass in front of us as he spoke, if I remember correctly, stopping every now and again to click his heels together, and Richard leaned across to me and pointed out that hadn’t he got the wrong end of the stick and had he actually seen the film and didn’t he know Renault was a Frenchie not a Kraut? And then we were off, and the hog roast was smoking, and the quad was suddenly full of people taking photos of one another and drinking champagne.
We went through the passageway under Haddon’s secret garden and strolled across the lawns towards the lake. Richard, even though he was walking right next to me, took to radioing me on my walkie-talkie every time he saw a woman he liked the look of, reporting their location by reference to the hands of a clock. Exactly an hour later, and with a military precision of which even Haddon would have been proud, he announced that he had picked up and disposed of no fewer than three empty beer cans and that we had, therefore, done enough to pay our way. It was then that we started to drink in a serious fashion, depositing our hats and rifles in the cloakroom and sketching out a quick calculation to work out precisely how much we’d have to get through to make our tickets worth what they would have been had we paid for them. After standing in the Heineken tent and doing what Richard referred to as starting gently, with no more than a couple of pints, we stopped outside the fortune teller’s tent and said alright, why not, at least it would be amusing. I chose not to discover my future, standing instead at the back and watching Richard being told by the woman who sat opposite him, holding his hand and stroking his palm, that he’d become a wealthy man, but not a happy one. ‘Good good,’ he said to the laughter that broke out around him. ‘That’s the way I like it.’ The lights were low in that little tent and it was overcrowded, and the clouds of some kind of incense that the woman was burning made it even more difficult to see properly, but I was fairly sure I spotted Anthony standing in the shadows at the back of the crowd on the other side of the table. I raised a hand in greeting, but I never found out whether it was actually him or not; whoever it was failed to acknowledge me, only pulling their gendarme’s hat lower on their head and slipping suddenly out of the tent.
I hauled Richard out eventually and we wandered around for a bit before going to the Buttery bar, converted for the night into Rick’s Bar. ‘Oh good,’ he said, once we were on to our third martini. ‘Some titty action at last,’ and I looked up at the stage to see what he was talking about. I recognised Rachel immediately; I had seen her at black tie events before, and although she wore more make-up than usual, and her hair was set in a style that was new to me, the transition she had undergone was not so very startling. But when I saw Cissy I did a double-take, and my recognition of her was delayed, just for a second or two. I think it was largely because I’d never seen her wearing a dress before. It wasn’t that there was anything awkward about the way she did it; on the contrary, it was a look that seemed effortless, at the same time as being very strange. Richard and I compared notes later on and agreed that the only other time we’d seen her out of her customary shorts and deck shoes, jacket and scarf on top, was the week earlier in the term when her father had visited from the US. She’d appeared with him in Hall on the Monday morning and Richard had choked on his cereal when we saw her standing there in little fitted trousers, patent leather ballet pumps and a much smarter version of one of her jackets, all buttoned up and piped around the edges, just like the tiny blazer I’d worn when I was sent away to school. Her hair was smarter that day too, the fringe swept back into a quiff and standing slightly proud, so that her scar was clearly visible. And her nails, as I noticed when I stood next to her at the tea urn, were bright red and shiny. She’d taken him everywhere with her that week; to Hall for breakfast, to the Buttery bar for lunch, and even to lectures, or so we heard from Towneley. They didn’t show up at dinner though, and it was said that he’d taken her out every night to meet people he had connections with in Oxford, and that on the last night of his visit he’d driven her to Le Manoir to stay with him in his suite before he flew home again. And then, as soon as he had gone, her shorts came out once more, her hair flopped back down over her scar, and her nails were no longer red.
‘Bit sad that, don’t you think,’ Richard had observed at the time. ‘Like taking your daddy to school with you.’ I disagreed and said so, wondering to myself what it would be like to have a father who was capable of taking such a ready pride in my achievements in the way that hers was, or even to be aware of them, which would have been a start.
That night in Rick’s Bar her transformation was on another scale entirely. The scar was hidden again, her hair slicked down on her head in waves, and her face, as Rachel’s, was painted like a wartime glamour girl’s. Their dresses were worn so close and cut so low they were barely there; covered in sequins and catching the light, Rachel’s clung black to the whiteness of her skin and Cissy’s was a coating of silver, daubed across her tan. They stood face to face, so near to one another they were almost touching. They shared a single microphone and as the piano player began to play they turned and said hello to their audience and then they faced each other again and started to sing.
You must remember this,
A kiss is just a kiss,
A sigh is just a sigh …
They swayed slightly from side to side, placing their hands on each other’s bodies.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by …
The room began collectively to whistle, and to clap, and as they sang on, Rachel drew Cissy into her.
Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date.
Hearts full of passion,
Jealousy and hate …
One of the waiters walked over then and passed a note up to Cissy and she broke away and left Rachel to sing on alone, glancing at it briefly before turning to the front and looking out amongst the tables, frowning and shielding her eyes against the light. Then she folded it in two and tucked it in the top of her dress and took Rachel’s hand in hers.
It’s still the same old story,
A fight for love and glory,
A case of do or die …
By the end of the song they had put the microphone to one side and were kissing and someone was whistling and the piano player played on without them. I was surprised, I suppose, at the same time as not being surprised at all, having heard the rumours that I’d heard about Rachel’s parties. And then, as people called out for more, Haddon was at the door and marching up to the front and saying something to Rachel and Cissy and they were laughing at him, and at one another, and then he said something else and they stopped laughing and left the stage and went over to the bar, the room booing and hissing as Haddon marched out again.
We wandered fairly aimlessly after that, Richard and I, taking a turn on the Ferris wheel before sitting down beside the fire pit and pulling on a hookah together by the light of the flames. We had quite a good conversation as we sat there, the two of us, and for the first time he actually told me about his childhood, and we compared notes on what it was like being brought up as an only child, in the countryside, and how it had been for the both of us, being sent away to school. I’d drunk so much by then that I was almost on the point of telling him about Robbie, and I think I probably would have done were it not for the fact that Towneley had appeared suddenly and thrown himself down on the rug beside us and asked whether either of us had pulled yet.
After he’d gone again, and we’d found ourselves some food and spent a bit of time in the comedy tent, Richard said we ought to check on the seamstress’s room, and so it was that when the first of Haddon’s emergency calls came crackling though my walkie-talkie, we were perched together on a single chair in the corridor at the back of the ladies’ cloakroom, craning our necks to see through the tiny window that had been left open and watching one woman after another strip to their underwear whilst repair jobs were carried out on dresses torn by dancing, or falling from dodgem cars, or, as Richard put it, ‘overenthusiastic shagging in the bushes’. Because Richard told me not to be an idiot, and didn’t I realise we were about to get our first actual full-frontal, and because I was drunk enough by then to do whatever he told me to, I ignored Haddon’s call and turned the volume on my walkie-talkie right down, despite the fact that Haddon’s request for urgent assistance was being directed specifically to me rather than as a general Mayday, and was being broadcast only on my channel. As I leaned forward to see through the window more clearly, I heard the faint crackle start up again and could just make out Haddon’s voice. His speech was broken by his own panting and by the sound of him stumbling, or running, and he said something that sounded like, ‘Petersen where the bloody hell are you? Come in. Come in. Pavilion. Now. Urgent.’ And then I lost my footing and because Richard and I were actually on the floor when the next call came through, to Richard’s walkie-talkie this time, and because we had fallen so awkwardly on top of one another that neither of us could move, and because suddenly there was a woman standing over us calling us perverts and saddos and losers and telling us to f*ck off, we ignored that call as well, even though by now Haddon was swearing into his walkie-talkie and demanding that Richard find me and that both of us make our way to the Pavilion as quickly as we could. Richard stood then, pulling me up from the ground and saying, ‘Martinis. Titty bar. Tout de f*cking suite,’ before heading back along the terrace, stopping only to throw his walkie-talkie into the nearest bin.
I did the same, of course, and so it was that instead of running to Haddon’s side we fell into a corner of Rick’s Bar and spent most of the rest of the night in there, drinking ourselves not quite into oblivion, stepping outside every now and again for some air and a stroll across the quad to see if anything interesting was happening. Had we done as Haddon had commanded us to, and gone instead to the Pavilion and made our way round to the back as Harry told me that Haddon himself had done, our view would have been partly obscured by the bushes and partly by the darkness, but we would nevertheless just have been able to see Anthony, his gendarme’s trousers pulled down as far as the top of his gendarme’s boots and his hat and rifle thrown to one side, lying on top of Cissy with one hand across her mouth and the other trying again and again to pull her knickers far enough away from her body to be able to rape her.
Haddon told Harry that he’d chosen the wrong side of the Pavilion at first, so that he couldn’t get through the bushes to where they were lying and he’d had to run back out to the front and all the way round again to the other side. This, I realised as I sat listening to the tale unfold in Harry’s room earlier this month, was almost certainly the point at which Haddon had tried to use his walkie-talkie to get through to me, and then to Richard, shortly before we’d thrown ours in the bin and gone to Rick’s Bar. Having failed to raise either of us, he’d reached the other side of the Pavilion and pushed his way frantically through the bushes, but by the time he got to them it was Cissy who was on top of Anthony and she was punching him, hard, again and again, right in his face. Anthony was barely moving, just lying there and seemingly allowing himself to be thrashed. Cissy was going about her work quietly, he told Harry, and that surprised him. He would have expected a woman finding herself in such a situation to be screaming, and loudly. Instead, she was speaking in a low voice as she punched him, and although he couldn’t quite be sure, it sounded as though she might even have been laughing as well.
‘I think that’s enough, don’t you?’ Haddon said, and she stopped and looked round at him and he could see that she had been punched in the face also, and that there was blood running from her mouth and down her chin. She stared at Haddon for a moment or two, saying nothing, and then Anthony began to moan beneath her and shake his head and Haddon realised it was quite possible that his passivity in the face of Cissy’s assault had been due to unconsciousness, rather than acquiescence. He went towards them and Cissy climbed from Anthony and helped Haddon get him up. She stood and watched as Haddon retrieved Anthony’s hat from the bushes, holding him steady while Haddon put it on and made sure it was pushed right down on his forehead, and, once Anthony had pulled his trousers up, the three of them walked slowly back across the lawns.
‘No no, we’re quite alright thank you,’ Haddon said, smiling, each time someone offered assistance or enquired after the gendarme they were supporting between them, whose head was drooping forward and whose face was entirely hidden by his hat. ‘Drunk and disorderly while on duty, that’s all. Utter insubordination. Off to confine him to barracks I think, bread and water for a few days. I daresay that’ll do the trick. No no, absolutely no problem at all. We’re quite alright. Good night, good night. Thank you. Good night.’
Haddon told Harry as they stood in the secret garden that he’d been able to get nothing out of Anthony or Cissy since they’d reached his cottage, despite having questioned them for almost half an hour. He asked Harry if he wouldn’t mind having a go himself, suggesting that a different approach might be enough to get them talking. Harry went back inside and did his best, but it was clear that neither of them had anything to say, and, not having Haddon’s zeal for interrogation, he gave up fairly quickly and asked them instead whether they had any views on how things might be dealt with. Again, they didn’t say a great deal, and the only thing Harry could be certain of was that neither of them seemed to have any desire to press charges against the other. He went back outside and told Haddon he’d made no progress beyond that which Haddon had already achieved. Haddon thanked him and said that although he was completely baffled by the impasse they had reached, it lent itself very much to his preferred course of action, which was to keep the whole matter between the four of them. He told Harry how he’d tried without success to call for backup from his team of stewards and was relieved about his failure, given the need to keep the situation under wraps. Rachel would be too drunk to remember encountering Towneley, and Haddon could very easily tell Towneley, who he described as being hardly the sharpest tool in the box, that he’d found no one behind the Pavilion. Anthony had agreed to go, this time for good, and seemed to understand that any further return to College would lead to criminal charges. At the very least, he said, they’d be able to get him for breaking and entering, if they could only find out how he’d got in. Cissy seemed to be minded to return to the US as soon as possible and to remain there, and apart from the balance of the fees that were payable for the rest of her course, her absence would represent no great loss in any quarter but for the Boat Club.
Harry tried to disagree at this point, telling Haddon that Cissy had shown considerable promise, particularly in recent months, and that her departure would not be seen as insignificant when it came to the college publishing its Finals results a year down the line, but Haddon brushed this off, telling Harry that he really had lost the ability to be in any way objective about his students. It was then that Harry remembered Rachel, and he told Haddon that he thought he ought to go to the hospital to check up on her. Haddon said he didn’t see that this was necessary, and that her godmother would be there by now and that Rachel wasn’t really involved in the situation anyway, not properly. Harry said that he would go all the same, and Haddon responded that that was all very well, but if she should recall having asked Towneley to send Haddon to the Pavilion, it was essential that Harry keep as closely as possible to the story they’d agreed and tell her only that Haddon had gone, as requested, but that he’d found nothing of any particular interest when he got there.
When they came back inside from the secret garden Cissy was pacing up and down the room, looking at her watch and shaking her head, her face set hard and sullen and the blood drying on it. They asked her one more time if she intended to press charges of any description against Anthony. She looked at them both, and then back at Anthony, and she laughed. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘He’s not worth it. None of you are.’ Haddon asked her then if she’d be prepared to sign something to that effect before she left, at which point she simply held her hand out to him and said, ‘You’re a jerk, Haddon. Give me your keys. Unless you want my dad to file for false imprisonment.’ He did as she asked, but only after he’d said that the story must go no further than the four of them, and that meant that neither of them were to tell Rachel about what had happened, otherwise he’d have no choice but to invoke the most draconian of disciplinary proceedings against them. Harry thought he saw Cissy’s face change when Haddon said Rachel’s name but she hung her head before he could read the look properly, and when she raised it again to speak, whatever it was had gone. ‘You really have no idea about Rachel Cardanine do you Haddon. No f*cking idea at all. Like I said,’ she carried on, ‘you’re a jerk,’ and she took the keys and looked at them all in turn before saying to Anthony, ‘So long then,’ and walking down the stairs to let herself out of the cottage.
By the following morning she’d gone, and as the letter she left in Haddon’s pigeonhole said, she had no intention of coming back. As for Anthony, he’d got up and made as if to follow her, but Haddon had said ‘I don’t think so, Mr Trelissick, not on your own,’ and he’d asked Harry to join him in escorting Anthony from the premises. After Anthony had refused medical attention, and declined to answer Haddon’s question about how he’d managed to break through the security cordon, they’d walked him out of college.
Anthony thus dealt with, Harry shook hands with Haddon and took a taxi to the John Radcliffe. When he arrived in Rachel’s room he was surprised to find her sitting up in bed quite happily reading a magazine. ‘For god’s sake, Harry, Towneley totally overreacted and quite frankly I was too tired to argue with him by that point. They’ve been terribly nice to me here, really, considering there was nothing actually wrong with me,’ she said, putting the magazine down on the bedside table. ‘I just wanted a rest. I can go now that you’re here. Somebody has to take me home that’s all. I told them you’d probably show up at some stage. You’ll just have to pretend for the moment that you’re my dad if you don’t mind. It’s only the nurse, she’ll never know. Just sign the forms they give you and we can get the hell out of here. Alright?’ Through a combination of his own exhaustion and the fact that there seemed to be nothing obviously the matter with her, Harry agreed to do what she’d asked. ‘But what about Evie?’ he said, puzzled, as she pulled the screen across in front of her and started to get dressed. ‘Has she been here?’
‘Oh. Evie,’ Rachel said. ‘Now there’s a thing.’ She didn’t say anything else for a moment or two until, emerging from behind the screen, she turned her back to Harry and held her hair up on top of her head and said, ‘Do me up would you?’ And it was as he was in the process of working out how to hook Rachel’s dress back together again that he heard her say, ‘She’s been here alright, Harry. Stayed for a while actually. But she’s gone back to London now. In actual fact, it seems I have something of a problem.’ He fastened the last of the hooks and she turned, shaking her hair back down around her face and saying, looking at him, ‘You see, Evie and I have had a little bit of a falling-out.’ And then she smiled and carried on, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to need your help.’