17
SHORTLY AFTER DESCRIBING this scene in the hospital Harry paused for the first time since he’d begun his story. He sat forward in his chair and rubbed his eyes and said that if I didn’t mind, he would very much like to get some rest, and he hoped I would understand that all the talking was taking its toll.
He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it before snapping it shut and saying, ‘A few hours, Alex, that’s all I ask of you. There is much more to come, a great deal in fact, and, not being as fortunate as you in your youthfulness, I fear I will not last the course without some respite from it now.’
I had, I think, been so completely absorbed in his story that it took me a moment or two to realise what he was suggesting. My initial reaction was one of amazement, and, feeling the same anger that I had felt on his insisting I read the Browning letters before he began, I was on the point of telling him he had to carry on, that he couldn’t stop, not then. But when I looked at him across the room he seemed suddenly older then than he had been before, almost as though he had shrunken into himself somehow. It was clear that he was exhausted, and so, it occurred to me, was I. Seeing from my own watch that it was past four o’clock in the morning, and that there was some sense in his suggestion, I did as he asked me and left him, having agreed that I would return at noon.
I walked straight out across the middle of the quad, and as I made my way back to my room I ran through the very last part of Harry’s story, the part he had related to me immediately before telling me he needed a break.
According to what Rachel had said to Harry that night in the John Radcliffe, as soon as Evie had received Haddon’s telephone call, she went straight to the hospital and severed her ties with her god-daughter. It was to be several years before they were reconciled, Harry had said, although at the time Rachel told him that it would only be for a couple of months, saying, ‘She’ll get over it. She’s always threatening to cut me off without a penny. Has been since I was about fifteen, actually.’
Haddon had told Evie about the other things that had happened earlier in the term, and in particular the fine that Rachel had incurred by way of punishment for her misdemeanours. ‘There was absolutely no need for him to have told her about that. Don’t you see, Harry? I mean, she would never have known if he hadn’t gone and opened his big mouth. Like I said,’ she carried on, and Harry said he remembered being struck by that phrase, recalling it to have been a favourite of Cissy’s and realising how close the two of them must have been to have absorbed one another’s language in this way, ‘she’ll get over it. But not for the rest of this summer apparently. I can’t go back to Chelsea, that’s for sure. And I’m completely broke after that fine so I can’t rent a place for myself now. Not with college bills as well. I’ve got no choice Harry. Unless you help me I’ll have to give up the course and move back to London and get a job or something. Until she snaps out of it.’
Harry told me that he’d had no idea whatsoever that Evie would go through with this threat to cut Rachel off. As he understood it, the woman might as well be Rachel’s mother, and he’d assumed that somebody in that position just wouldn’t do that sort of a thing to someone for whom she’d apparently assumed parental responsibility so early on in their life. What Evie eventually ended up doing, by disowning Rachel for far longer than Rachel had thought she would, was, Harry said, to threaten her chances of finishing her degree, a fate that Harry couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to bring on someone they cared for even a little.
When I reached the staircase to my room I realised how cold I had become, just in the time it had taken me to walk back across the quad. I ran up the stairs, two at a time, and when I was inside, and had closed the door behind me, I got straight into bed in my clothes. In the sudden heat of the room I felt flushed, and nauseous, not just in my stomach but in my limbs as well, as though not only my mind but my body also was drifting apart from itself into pieces with the effort of trying to keep up with Harry’s story. I must have fallen asleep as soon as I lay down, and I suppose I’d been passing in and out of consciousness for a few hours or so when I woke suddenly from a dream. Images from it lingered in a way that meant there was no point trying to sleep again, so I got up and opened the window and breathed in as deeply as I was able to, filling my chest with air so cold it hurt. There was a silence like none other I had ever experienced, almost as though the cold had frozen the atmosphere into something solid and thick, so that even if there had been any movement round about, or noise being made somewhere, it would not have been able to travel to my window until that air was melted.
I leaned a little further out and listened to the silence, turning my head so that I could see across the lawns towards the lake. I pictured Towneley striding across them with Rachel in his arms on the night of the Ball and I tried to work out what Richard and I had been doing at that point. I recalled us disgracing ourselves outside the seamstress’s room and ignoring Haddon’s Mayday call, before throwing our walkie-talkies away and taking ourselves off to huddle in the corner of Rick’s Bar, completely oblivious to the events that were unfolding not so very far away from us, and as I did so I had a sudden urge to speak to him and tell him everything and ask him to tell me in return what to do. I took out my phone and brought his number up, my thumb hovering over the button to call him as I considered what exactly I would say, and how he might respond.
I put my phone back in my pocket in the end without having made the call; Richard, of course, knew precisely nothing of what Harry had told me, nothing whatsoever, and even if I could at that point have managed to string together a coherent explanation of what I’d learned so far, I thought it unlikely he’d do anything other than tell me to get a grip and go straight back to London. He’d sent me a fairly terse email back when I’d written and told him about accepting Harry’s invitation, saying it wasn’t, in his opinion, the most sensible decision I’d ever made, not by a long shot, and that he and Lucinda both felt I should start to think seriously about their idea of my moving to New York, sooner rather than later, if not immediately. He said that I really ought to start getting used to the idea that the police were doing their job and would get there eventually, and I would be better off, however painful it might be, looking to the future and making something of it, rather than consigning myself to a life spent dwelling always on the past. I knew that he’d said what he’d said with nothing other than my best interests in mind, and that underneath his dogmatism lay only affection, coupled with a genuine concern for my well-being. But at the same time I was shocked by his lack of patience, and by the complacency with which he assumed that the police would come up with anything more than they’d done already.
I knew, when it came down to it, that there was only one person I could speak to about what was going on, and that was Evie. She was the only person who could answer the questions that had started to flit through my mind as I stood there looking out into the night, questions about the document wallet full of essays and letters, and about the call she’d made asking me to courier it to her on the night I got back to London, and only she could tell me what had passed between her and Rachel at the John Radcliffe after Rachel had been taken there by Towneley, and why she had reacted in such an extreme way to Haddon’s phone call.
I called her number in Tokyo and went straight through to her answerphone, twice, leaving a message the second time saying that I was in Oxford at the invitation of Harry Gardner and would appreciate it if she could telephone straight back and clarify for me a few of the things he’d told me about Rachel. Then I walked over to the computer room in the Nuffield Building to send her an email as well, asking her to explain exactly why she hadn’t discussed the contents of the document wallet with me at the time, and why she hadn’t handed it straight over to the police when I’d couriered it to her. In the end I suggested also that it was perhaps appropriate that this information should be made known to them now, writing further that I had a feeling Harry would be telling me a lot more that was new to me and wondering, therefore, whether she might like to get there first, so to speak.
It wasn’t until I began to type, my fingers punching out my questions on the keys, that I became aware how angry I was with her for keeping things from me, and how upset I was about the fact that Rachel had never found a way to tell me herself. I finished my email by referring to what Harry had said about Evie visiting Rachel in the John Radcliffe on the night of the Casablanca Ball and cutting her off, and I said to Evie that I’d appreciate it if she could tell me her side of the story. Finding by the time I pressed the send button that my breathing had grown shallow, I walked quickly from the room and stood in the building’s porchway in the morning sunlight, trying to feel more measured about the situation.
I had no sense of where it was that Harry was going with his story, nor of how he would unravel it and put it back together again into what he had described as a theory about Rachel’s death. Nor was I at all sure that speaking to Evie was going to help me, not in any specific way. I was simply aware that there were things she might have disclosed to me but hadn’t, and I didn’t feel at all comfortable about her having kept them from me. Hating the powerlessness that I felt then as I looked out across the lawns towards the lake, I tried to tell myself that Harry had said quite clearly that he would take some time to get through everything, and that since I had agreed to hear him out before making any kind of decision about what to do, I should attempt to relax and let things take their shape, and that if I was able to, my perception and understanding of what was to come would be all the better for it.
As I reminded myself of this agreement Harry had persuaded me to enter into, it struck me that the position I was in was, in many respects, no different to the one I always encountered at the start of a new piece of litigation, and that things would be bound to improve. The sense I usually had at that point, of being surrounded by a mass of seemingly unrelated issues moving too fast for me to be able to clutch hold of even one of them, was something I had disliked intensely the first few times I experienced it. It wasn’t until I’d seen a number of cases through to trial and out the other side that I got used to it, coming instead to feel a strange kind of certainty that against whatever odds I was confronting, a narrative would eventually be constructed and lowered successfully into place on top of what had seemed at the outset to be a foundation of facts shifting so constantly about one another that they would not bear the weight of it.
But it was an analogy that gave me no comfort, despite its promise of eventual clarity. I had no team of eager juniors waiting to retrieve unopened files and read them for me, or to go off to libraries and research seemingly unanswerable questions. There were no rows of night secretaries ready to take our Dictaphones and type up our findings into letters listing issues to be addressed and documents to be requested, and there would be no team meetings held late at night, analysing and strategising and formulating plans of attack. I was all alone with only Harry as my guide, and if I could be said to have a client of any description, there was only Rachel, staring out at me from the photograph on Harry’s wall and unable to issue me with any instructions whatsoever.
I walked slowly back across the lawns and when I got to my room I ran myself a bath and lowered myself into it, feeling a kind of bleakness as the steam clouded around me. Once I was dressed again, sitting on the chair by my window, I began to think seriously for the first time about abandoning the whole thing and walking over to the police station on St Aldates. I reached inside my jacket pocket to check my phone only to realise I’d left it in the computer room. I ran over and found it but Evie hadn’t called, and because I was sure she must have picked up my message by then, I logged on to the computer. The email that was waiting for me was a single block of prose, seemingly written with the same angry haste that had inspired my own.
Alex I can hardly believe you’re there with Harry Gardner. I’m not really sure why I’m even bothering to reply to your email but I can’t talk to you now I’m going to a party and no I can’t miss it, not for you or anyone so don’t call. What you wrote was extremely insulting. Fine, I can see you might be frustrated with me for having kept things from you but it was for your own sake. There are things about Rachel you’re better off not knowing. And anyway if you’d thought about things sensibly for even one minute you’d realise I’d never have been allowed to leave the country and relocate to Tokyo if the police hadn’t been 100% content about the fact I’d told them everything. I’d proceed very carefully with Harry if I were you. In fact on second thoughts I’d just forget about him and get back to London and get on with your life. Why you’ve decided to trust him is completely beyond me. You know nothing about him Alex, nothing at all. For god’s sake, he’s feeding you a pack of lies. Either that or he’s really never clocked Rachel’s habit of keeping things from people, him included. Let’s just take one little example shall we, just one – what Harry said about me visiting Rachel in hospital on the night of that ball just wasn’t true. I was never there. Yes, Haddon called and told me she was there, and that she’d spent most of that term devoting herself to the task of finding as many dissolute ways as possible to fritter away the allowance I was giving her. I was sick to the back teeth with her by that point Alex, really fed up. After all I’d done for her. I phoned the JR and they told me she was in absolutely no danger whatsoever – they put me through to her and we spoke, briefly, and that was the end of it. I never went there and I have no idea why he told you I did. This is hard for me Alex, really hard. Of course there are things I could have told you but I’ve made a judgement call, and not just for my own sake but for yours as well. For goodness’ sake Alex get a grip. Get some perspective. Get back to London. I don’t really see why we have to speak but if that’s what you want then fine. I’m out tonight though, all night, so don’t call until tomorrow.
I switched off the computer and tried her number at the same time. When I got her answerphone I hung up and walked down the corridor and out into the open air, my breath coming even more rapidly than before.