18
I LEFT THE Nuffield Building with the intention of going straight over to Harry’s rooms and confronting him, but instead I made for the lake. As I came to the place where I had found Rachel’s body I felt a sudden rush of anger towards Harry, and hatred towards Evie. It took me by surprise and I began to run, half sobbing and half howling as I went, not stopping until I reached the far side of the playing fields. I sat on the ground then and waited until I had cried myself out. When it passed, eventually, I felt only irritation with myself for having lost control like that, and I stood and walked back and forth for a while, trying to clear my head.
I thought about the firmness with which Evie had written. Either she was completely secure in her position, knowing there was nothing I could discover that would alter it, or she was a very good liar, and, having something worth hiding, had chosen to brazen things out in an attempt to destabilise my view of Harry to the point where I would give up on him and go back to London. I felt nothing but disdain for her then, and for the way she’d assumed she could so easily steer me from my chosen course of action.
She had, of course, made an entirely unjustified assumption in questioning my having decided to trust him, since I’d done nothing of the sort; the only decision I’d taken was to listen to him, which is a very different thing altogether. But what she’d said about there being no truth in his tale did have an impact on the way I regarded him, of course it did. When eventually I walked back round the lake, making for his rooms again, I reflected on the fact that if Evie really hadn’t been at the hospital, then Harry was either as gullible as she’d suggested he might be, and had fallen for a story Rachel had made up, or he had made up the story himself and was, as Evie had put forward in the alternative, telling me lies. But even if I did believe Evie’s version of events instead of his, there was something about Harry’s behaviour that made me hold back from agreeing with either of her readings of it. Whatever was going on was more complicated than that, I knew it was. When he had begun his tale in the middle of the night he’d come clean about having invited me to Oxford on false pretences, and he’d offered an explanation for what he’d done. I had agreed to listen until he’d finished, and that was what I intended to do. He’d made no secret of the fact that he was executing a plan he’d drawn up before my arrival, and that what he had begun was a series of revelations of a long and complex nature. What Evie was proposing about my leaving was unthinkable: that he was playing some kind of a game was clear, but if there was one thing I was certain of it was that I wanted to watch him at it a little longer.
Whilst Evie’s email had in no way altered my resolve to stay, it did, I suppose, mark the point at which I drew back somewhat from Harry’s tale and my feelings began to shift into a new territory, becoming somehow harder than they’d been before, and colder also, so that they resembled something I can only describe as a fairly straightforward sort of scepticism. Harry had made no claim that the version of events he was relating to me was an authorized one, and I had learned enough from the cases I’d conducted over the years to know that the narrative he had begun, the one that Evie had already splintered apart by telling me she hadn’t been at the hospital, would be likely to fracture further as it continued. And I knew it was probable that it would do so in ways I couldn’t foresee, so that an as yet unheard testimony might be given that would turn everything on its head, or so that the characters themselves might begin to move at will up or down the table of dramatis personae that Harry had drawn up, stepping altogether from the positions they had been allocated to allow other characters, previously considered altogether too minor for inclusion, to take their place.
It was with a kind of resigned anticipation of that happening that I walked up the stairs to his rooms and knocked on the door and took my seat opposite him, deciding as I did so that I would say nothing of Evie’s email, and that instead I would wait and see how he went about explaining things further. He asked me if I would like something to eat with my tea before he began again, seeing as it was lunchtime, and when I said yes, he went off into his side room to prepare it. I sat back in my chair and as I listened to him moving about, clattering a knife on a plate and opening and closing the door of his fridge, I allowed my mind to become a blank canvas once more, ready for him to take his brushes to it.
Harry came back through with some cheese and biscuits on a tray, and once he had poured me a cup of tea, he began to talk. He said he hadn’t really thought very carefully, in those early stages, about precisely what he was taking on when he cleared the grant of Rachel’s vacation accommodation, gratis, after the end of that summer term. He certainly couldn’t have predicted she’d end up as a lodger in his house on the Woodstock Road for the whole of her third year and longer. Evie had written to her at the end of August and said she had no intention of assisting her financially throughout the autumn, and it became apparent to Rachel that she would have ongoing difficulties funding her third year. Her scholarship helped, but when she told Harry towards the end of September that she was looking for a job, and that the only way she could carry on with her course would be to do her studying in the evenings, he’d stepped in and offered her the attic flat in his house, saying he’d been meaning to find a lodger and hadn’t done so and she may as well have it for the time being. Those were the reasons that he gave her, and they were true as far as they went. But he knew his offer was motivated also by his own loneliness, and by the emptiness there was in that house now that he lived in it alone.
He invited her up to see the place, so she could be sure, and over tea in his kitchen he set out for her, on and off, the way he lived then, so that she would know how best to live around him. He told her the hours that he kept, and who she might expect to see there; when it was that the cleaner came and what it was that she did as well as a myriad other domestic details he thought Rachel would need to know. He made it clear from the start that he’d accept no payment from her, telling her that in many ways he regarded what she was doing by moving in as a kind of favour to him, since she’d be keeping that part of the house lived in and looked after. He hadn’t wanted to make her feel in any way obliged to him, but nor had he been able to see a way of avoiding mentioning that he’d had a job persuading Haddon of the wisdom of what he was doing. He told her he’d talked Haddon round by saying he’d keep an eye on her, so to speak, and would ensure that she was aware that the college’s expectations of her academic performance were high, and that it would be in her interests if she could see a way of meeting them, or, if at all possible, exceeding them.
Rachel hadn’t said a great deal in response, but she’d seemed to take on board what he was saying. He thought it best, while he was at it, to outline a few of the things he’d prefer her not to engage in; parties, loud music, that sort of thing. And although, as far as he had been able to make out, she wasn’t involved with anyone in particular, or at least not in any serious fashion, he’d decided to be safe rather than sorry, given some of the things she seemed to have been caught up in the previous term, and to add in passing that he’d prefer it if she didn’t have overnight guests. He’d been a little surprised when she’d mentioned something about there being someone who might visit her, every now and again, and would that be alright. He responded by saying yes, of course, occasionally, if it really wasn’t possible for them to stay elsewhere, but it was to be understood that her priority should be affairs of the mind, rather than those of the heart, at least for the immediate future. He wondered afterwards whether he’d been a little draconian about it, but he felt on balance that what he’d said was no more than fair, under the circumstances, and that even if there was someone who’d seemed to be important, it wouldn’t have been more than a fling of some sort, and one that would in all likelihood have petered out sooner or later, in the way that student flings did.
Once the term was underway they’d retreated from one another slightly, getting on with their own lives and their own work in the way that he’d expected them to. Harry dined in Hall most evenings and Rachel seemed quite content with her own company, working away at the top of the house. Having settled into a pattern of sorts, they didn’t see a great deal of each other; the attic flat was almost self-contained, and he’d given her a front-door key when she’d moved in. But he liked the idea that she was up there, and he liked the sounds that she made, singing to herself in the bath, or thudding back down to the floor after a headstand, or clattering pots and pans in the kitchen. And sometimes she would drop in on him in the evenings to say hello, if she was lonely herself, and they would sit by his fire and talk about a poem that was troubling her, or a novel she couldn’t navigate a way through. He said that he wondered occasionally if she was only humouring him by having these conversations, and they were perhaps an attempt to repay him somehow for what he’d done, but she really did seem at ease as they sat there talking, in a way that she hadn’t been at any point during the previous year. She came to see him more frequently as time went by, and in the summer term she took to doing her revision in his garden, on the other side of the lawn from where he sat reading, so that sometimes he would bring out a jug of lemonade and she would take a break and tell him what she’d been working on, running through her ideas for an essay, or suggesting something she’d come across that he might like to write an article about.
Initially he had been fairly confident that Evie would see sense, and he’d even telephoned her himself on one occasion to try to reason with her and ask her whether she hadn’t perhaps overreacted. He’d tried to make light of the situation at first, saying they weren’t in a Fielding novel were they, and didn’t she think she’d made her point well enough, and wasn’t it time to let bygones be bygones? What really shocked him about the conversation wasn’t so much what she’d said as how she’d said it, and the anger that he sensed when she told him to mind his own business and that if he actually knew what Rachel was capable of he wouldn’t be questioning the situation. There was something almost like hatred in her voice, so he’d given up in the end, and besides, Rachel seemed perfectly satisfied with the arrangement they’d come to. Her work maintained a steady improvement throughout the year, so that nobody was surprised, least of all him, when she got her First and the British Academy funding that she needed in order to stay on as a postgraduate.
And that, Harry said, was that, for a number of years at least. It was inevitable that he should be Rachel’s supervisor for her MPhil, and it wasn’t until she moved to London to study for her doctorate that she finally did what he described as ‘making the break’. The teaching post that came with the PhD funding meant she was more than capable of supporting herself from then on. They kept in fairly close contact in the years that followed and he tracked her progress with pleasure, taking a certain degree of pride in her achievements. The two of them met from time to time in the British Library, at least once a month or more. If he was up in London for his research, or for any other reason, they would have coffee there together, or lunch if he was making a whole day of it. She’d told him that she’d renewed her acquaintance with me, having known me at Worcester, and that she had been surprised to find herself falling in love. She’d explained that it was because we’d married so quickly that she hadn’t had time to even think of inviting anyone to the ceremony apart from Richard and Lucinda, who were our witnesses, and Evie of course. He was a little hurt, but he knew that he had no reason to be, and he’d told her he understood, and that instead she must allow him to invite us to dine on High Table as soon as we were able to, in celebration. She’d sent him photographs of the day and written to him all about it, telling him of her happiness. It was a happiness he shared, not having a daughter of his own. And he was pleased when she’d told him that her marriage had been a catalyst for a reconciliation with Evie, to the extent that their relationship had become one that could at least be described as functional, and sometimes even cordial.
That was the way of things by the early summer of this year. For a number of years he’d thought nothing of Anthony, or of Cissy, or of what had happened on the night of the Casablanca Ball. He wasn’t particularly surprised not to have heard anything of Anthony in all that time, it being the case with most of the students he’d ever had to send down from the university, and certainly with those who had brought their disgrace on themselves so completely in the way that Anthony had done. He assumed that perhaps he had relocated abroad, there being such a comprehensive silence about him, even from his closest contemporaries. It was rumoured once or twice that he’d graduated from another university and managed to reinvent himself somewhere in the US, but Harry had avoided looking too closely into it. Rachel never spoke of him and Harry never pressed her to, and he had almost begun to forget Anthony altogether until one day in late May, just a few weeks before the night of Rachel’s murder.
He’d been sitting one morning at his favourite desk in the Rare Books and Music Room, one of the quieter reading rooms in the British Library and the one that he and Rachel preferred to work in. He was checking his pocket watch every now and again and wondering how much longer it would be until she signalled to him that she was ready to take a break. He looked once or twice across the room to where she sat reading, a strand of hair falling across the book in front of her and the frown flickering on her face that was always there when she was concentrating. And that was when he’d become aware somehow of another presence, of someone else intruding on his gaze.
He scanned the room about him feeling suddenly uncomfortable and not knowing why and then he saw him out of the corner of his eye. He stared, and then he stared some more, trying to make sure it really was Anthony who was standing there watching Rachel. He looked over at Rachel and back at Anthony, checking it was definitely Rachel who was the object of Anthony’s gaze and becoming certain also as he did so that she was entirely unaware of her observer. And then she looked up and mouthed the word ‘coffee’ to him, a smile on her face and her eyebrows raised in expectation. Harry stood from his seat, feeling sure that Rachel must also have seen Anthony by now, but when he turned around to point him out, he’d completely disappeared.
Harry didn’t raise the issue with Rachel over coffee that day. The opportunity simply didn’t arise, and he decided afterwards that if she’d known Anthony was in the library she’d have said something to him about it, and if she wasn’t aware of his presence, he didn’t see that it was necessary to alert her to it, telling himself it must be a one-off, a coincidence, or that it hadn’t been Anthony after all, just someone who looked like him. But when exactly the same thing happened the following week, and the week after that, and still Rachel said nothing, he decided, reluctantly, to approach Anthony and initiate a conversation in order to find out what was going on.
In the end it was done for him. It happened one day in early June, as he stood queuing in the main café of the British Library, the one that sits up behind the King’s Library in the atrium as you come in from the Euston Road. Rachel had cancelled on him at the last minute and he was all alone, thinking about Anthony, and about how strange the situation was. Even though he wasn’t absolutely sure whether Anthony had been aware of his own presence in the reading room at any stage, he’d somehow known from the first moment he’d caught sight of him that an actual meeting was inevitable. Despite this, when finally it occurred, it took him entirely by surprise.
The first thing he heard as he stood there in the queue was a laugh. It reminded him of the way Anthony had laughed in his tutorials with Cissy and Rachel, and he decided straight away he must be daydreaming, so intently had he been thinking about Anthony and what he would say to him if they spoke. It was a soft low laugh that he heard, and one that seemed to come from right behind him, almost as though the person whose laugh he had summoned up was so close they could have been leaning their head on his shoulder. And then he slowly became aware that the laugh was real rather than daydreamed, and he turned to see Anthony standing there smiling his old lopsided smile, his eyebrows creased together slightly to give his face its familiar air of puzzlement. And then Anthony said something that had never occurred to Harry as a possibility in any of the conversations he had imagined them having.
‘Come round to mine for coffee instead. I’m just across the road, won’t take us five minutes.’
‘I’m sorry? I’m not sure I— Ah! Anthony, isn’t it? Anthony Trelissick?’ and he knew as soon as he’d spoken that Anthony would see right through his feint.
‘Give me a break, Harry. I know you’ve been watching me. I need to talk to you that’s all. And I don’t want to do it here. Come on, I’ve thought it all through. Trust me.’
And when he turned and made for the door Harry followed him, just as Anthony seemed to have known he would. As they left the library and walked across the courtyard, Anthony jumping up the steps two by two ahead of him, Harry paused for just a moment to consider what it was that he was doing, so that he had to jog slightly to catch Anthony up as he went out on to the street. When he reached the street himself, he found Anthony had disappeared amongst the crowd. Harry thought he’d lost him altogether but suddenly he was there again, standing on the other side of the road and holding one hand in the air, waving.
He crossed over to join him and it began suddenly to rain. It was the kind of rain that falls only in summer, heavy and driving and warm, and the air was full of it before Harry realised he’d left his umbrella, along with the rest of his belongings, on the counter in the café. There was nothing he could do, he decided, except to carry on jogging after Anthony, who by now was dodging taxis and buses and slipping quickly down an alleyway that took them south from the main road and brought them out at the back of a redbrick mansion block. Anthony stopped and stood there, looking back at Harry as he caught up and reached him. ‘Blue plaque,’ he called out through the rain, turning and pointing up at the wall of the block they stood beside. ‘You’ll like this, Harry. Paul Nash no less. Paul flipping Nash. On my flipping wall. What do you reckon to that?’ and he jumped up the steps in front of where they stood. They passed through a door and down a narrow staircase and crossed some sort of a courtyard, but because they were moving so fast, and because it was raining so hard, Harry saw little other than that it was filled with ferns, and trees of a tropical nature, these last trembling under the weight of the water falling on their branches. Then they were standing in front of a low green door and shaking the rain from their clothes, and Anthony was fumbling with his keys and they were inside.
Harry told me that the only word he could think of as the two of them stood there looking at one another, the only word that seemed halfway suitable to describe Anthony’s kitchen, was ‘forlorn’.
‘This always happens in the summertime. Can’t be helped,’ Anthony said, wafting ineffectually at the pair of flies that floated in a drugged and hazy fashion in the centre of the room. ‘And it gets damp, you know, being the lower ground floor and that. Can’t be helped either.’ He handed Harry a tea towel, telling him to dry his hair with it, and he took off his shoes and stuffed them with newspaper. He did the same for Harry, lining both pairs up side by side in the hall and telling Harry to take a seat at the kitchen table. It wasn’t so much the flies circling above them as they sat that morning, and nor was it the damp that he could almost feel on his face as he looked about at the papers curling on the table and the pictures creasing in their frames. It wasn’t those things that made the word forlorn come into Harry’s mind, so much as the fact that nothing in the room looked to have been moved for several months, or perhaps longer. It was as though it was all in aspic, Harry thought to himself. Aspic, or something harder.
I know the café Harry was referring to, the one in the British Library where Anthony made his approach that day. I went there once, after Rachel died. It was one of the weekends that fell between my return from Oxford and the start of my sabbatical. During that time, from the Monday to the Friday of every week that passed, I was hardly aware of the memory of her, or of the two of us, finding it possible to lose myself in my work. She had a habit of creeping back into my mind at the weekends though. She was there as soon as I woke on a Saturday morning and when eventually I opened my eyes I would be surprised to find myself alone in the bed, having felt such a strong sense of her presence.
Not having anything better to do, and wanting to know more about the life she’d led while I was at work, I started to seek out the places she’d talked about. I sat on the benches in Bloomsbury squares where she said she had eaten her lunch, and I swam in the open-air pool at the top of Endell Street. There was a café in a bookshop on Bury Place where I began to read the weekend papers, and I even went to a recitation one Saturday evening at the Poetry Library on the South Bank.
And then there was the British Library. One Saturday morning, a few months after she was killed, instead of lying in bed having one of our imaginary conversations, I walked down the canal to where the towpath stopped just north of King’s Cross and I strolled along the Euston Road to have a look at it. I think I had intended even to go so far as registering for a reader’s card, meaning to make it a regular trip in the hope I might find a project to embark on, something to research. When it came to it I had only to go as far as the atrium, and to sit in the café for a while, to realise it wouldn’t help me. I’d stood first and gazed at the King’s Library stacked up against acres of glass and then I’d wandered through to look at the exhibition of maps. After that, I went and found a postcard to send to Harry before walking up a few flights of stairs to buy myself a coffee. I sat down and watched people eating, and talking, and laughing, and I started to feel the kind of anger that I felt quite often at that stage, in those situations. I sat for a while longer, until I became aware that I was staring at someone without meaning to, and that they were staring back at me, and I realised I ought to leave. And as I walked back down the stairs I wished I had accepted one of Rachel’s invitations to meet her there for lunch, instead of always saying that I hadn’t the time, not during the working week; that I had my hourly targets to meet, and that lunchtimes, if they were for anyone, were for clients. ‘Always your work,’ she said once. ‘It wouldn’t kill you you know, to slack off a bit from time to time. See the real world for a change.’ I think I pointed out then that the British Library was hardly the best place to do it, and she hadn’t asked me again.
When I asked her one day why she went there rather than the library at UCL, she said she just preferred it sometimes. It wasn’t only that she needed to look things up; it was also the being there, in amongst strangers. A change of scene, she explained, that was all. She’d never said much about meeting Harry there. I knew from the steady stream of postcards that arrived that they were in touch, and I knew they saw one another from time to time. But as with so many things about Rachel, the degree of intimacy they shared and the level of involvement he’d had in her life, as well as the responsibility he’d taken for her well-being at Oxford, were things she didn’t talk of, and consequently, things I only found out about after her death. And although Evie has come to be someone I think of as a woman so much mistaken about so many things, she’d been correct when she’d written in her email from Tokyo that her god-daughter had a tendency to keep things to herself. I knew already that Rachel was someone who was capable of small deceits, having closed the drawers she would leave ajar after working at my desk in my absence, never saying a word to me about the fact that she’d looked in them. And if any of what Harry has told me is true, I see now that she was capable of larger ones also. I have not, however, seen fit to judge her for that tendency she had, given the fact she grew up with someone like Evie in charge of her.
Sitting in Harry’s room that afternoon and looking at him spreading a piece of bread with butter and taking another slice of cheese for himself from the plate he’d prepared for us both, I wondered if he had any idea that I’d been the other half of what he’d surmised to have been no more than a student fling, the one he’d encouraged Rachel to break off at the end of the summer vacation we’d spent together in College. As I watched him chewing on his food and dabbing occasionally at his mouth with his napkin, I pictured him sitting in his kitchen and setting out the terms and conditions of her gratis occupancy of his attic flat and I hated him then. I hated him for having imposed his embargo on our relationship. I hated him for what he had done to her, and for what he had done to me.
She told me once, when I asked her to, why she had dropped me so suddenly at the start of that Michaelmas term, and I realised as I thought about what Harry had said that her account fitted almost exactly with his own.
We had talked of it, she and I, on the morning after Richard and Lucinda’s wedding when we’d woken together in my apartment. I brought the subject up, after we’d eaten our breakfast and had gone back to bed again. We were talking about that summer vacation we’d spent together in College, recreating for one another our memories of the conversations we’d had each evening on our strolls around the lake. We’d compared our recollection of that first time we kissed, lying on the grass in the middle of the night in Haddon’s secret garden, and I told her then that that was the moment at which I’d fallen in love with her, properly. She laughed at me a little when I said that, and I put my hand over her mouth to stop her and I told her I was being quite serious, and that, as a matter of fact, I’d been in love with her ever since.
‘How could you have been?’ she said. ‘How could you have been in love with me all that time? We didn’t even see each other, Alex. And you’d never really known me anyway, not properly. What, you mean you remained chaste for me always? Pining away in Islington with only your heron for company?’
And I laughed too then, saying that of course there had been other women, on and off. And yes, I had walked with them on Highbury Fields and there had been moonlight in the trees and my hands in their hair while I kissed them and I had taken them home sometimes and listened as they told me about themselves after we’d slept together, and I would offer them breakfast before they went, promising to call them again sometime. And when she asked me whether I’d called them like I’d said I would, these other women, I told her I’d done so only rarely, and I described for her the emptiness I would feel as they talked, these women, and how each time it had happened I would have a sense of wanting to be elsewhere, and that it was almost as though the person whose body was moving against mine wasn’t really there, so entirely were my thoughts turned in another direction. And then I asked her about her why she had dropped me at the end of the summer.
‘What happened?’ I said, taking her face in my hands as we lay entwined together in the sheets. And then I said it again, ‘What happened?’ and I looked her right in the eyes and brought my head closer to hers. ‘You never said, not really.’ She drew away from me then, lying back on the pillow and placing her hands over her mouth and closing her eyes as I carried on. ‘It was horrible, you know, what you did to me. I couldn’t understand it. Not after the way we’d been together, not after that summer.’
The weeks that followed the kiss had been extraordinary for me. When I’d gone to see Haddon the next morning, as he’d ordered me to when he’d stormed from his French doors in the middle of the night and thrown us out of his garden, I was worried he might spoil things for us, but when I got there he just wanted what he called ‘a quiet word’, making a series of inscrutable comments about the sort of company I was keeping. Nothing of what he said meant a great deal to me and I’d taken very little notice; I was just relieved he wasn’t going to be heavy-handed. And then he went the next day anyway, somewhere abroad for his own vacation, so I didn’t see him again until October. After that, there had been hardly anyone else around that was known to either Rachel or me. Most of the other rooms were let out to summer schools or visiting academics, so that we were in our own world, somehow. The flow of our togetherness was interrupted by no one, and we made the college our own and devoted ourselves to one another entirely.
That was how things were until the last ten days or so of September, when the air began to turn and she started to cut herself adrift in ways so tiny I managed to persuade myself they weren’t happening, until one day, just before the beginning of term, when we stood at Oxford station waiting for her train and she took her hand from mine and told me it was over. It was crowded that day on the platform, and noisy, so that when she said it would be a good idea if we stopped seeing one another, I thought for a moment I had misheard her. But then, when I tried to take her hand again she repeated herself and carried on, saying, ‘It should never have happened should it, Alex, you and I? We were simply thrown together by circumstance, wouldn’t you say? And I suppose we were both lonely, that was all.’
She didn’t really seem to be speaking with complete conviction, and it was almost as though she was acting out a part she’d learned, hesitating slightly over her words and smiling strangely, in a way I’d never seen her smile before. I tried to talk her out of it, asking her why and saying she was wrong, she must be out of her mind, we were happy, we should talk, she could tell me if there was something I needed to do differently. But she said simply that there was nothing to talk about, and that since we’d never been friends before the summer anyway there was no need to see one another again was there, not really. Her own friends would be coming back in a day or two for the new term, and so would mine, and there was our work to think about, and it was just a summer fling, and I was completely overreacting.
I was stunned, and said so, recalling for her some of the things she had told me in the mornings when we had woken together that month, but she said don’t be an idiot and didn’t I realise I sounded like a teenager. And it was then that I told her I loved her, and she stopped speaking and started to cry, silently. She wasn’t shaking or sobbing or making any noise at all; she was just standing there, still as a stone, the tears falling slowly down her cheeks. She made no attempt to brush them off, just letting them land and staring at me. Eventually, unable to stand it any longer, I reached out towards her face, but she took my hands in hers, gently, and moved them away from her, pushing me back and telling me never to say anything like that to her again, and that she was sorry, she really was, but there were things that had happened, things she couldn’t explain, things she hoped I would never know, and that all of them together meant she had to be on her own, without distraction for a time, to focus on her work, and she really had no choice, and it would be better for both of us if we didn’t speak of it again. After I’d stood staring back at her for a while, unable to understand clearly what was going on and wishing desperately that it wasn’t happening, I realised there was nothing I could say that would make her change her mind and I said goodbye and walked away and left her there, standing on the platform waiting for her train.
I hadn’t really seen her again after that, not to speak to. Richard came back and did his best to shake me out of it, which helped, and I supposed that that was what she’d meant about our friends coming back and us returning to the lives we’d lived before the summer. I was puzzled though, by the fact that the people I’d thought of as her friends hadn’t come back, and that she’d removed herself so completely from college life, not even living on site any more.
That morning in bed in my apartment, the morning after Richard’s wedding, when I asked her to tell me what had really happened, and why she’d broken things off in the way that she had, she said she couldn’t remember, not exactly, and please could we talk about something else, and I said no, it mattered to me, and I began to recall for her, in as much detail as I was able to, the things we’d said to one another on the station platform that day. And she stopped me halfway through saying please, that was enough, and of course she remembered, she just didn’t want to talk about it, and I looked at her where she lay on the other side of the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and I saw a tear running down her cheek.
‘I can’t explain, Alex, I can’t. I’m sorry, I should go.’ She started to get up, reaching for her clothes.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why do you have to go all of a sudden just because I asked you to talk about that?’
‘Do you want me to stay?’ she said, sitting back down on the edge of the bed and looking at me, puzzled.
‘Of course I want you to stay. Of course I do,’ I said, and she got back under the covers again and I told her it didn’t matter, we didn’t have to talk about it if she really didn’t want to, it was such a long time ago, all that did matter was that we were together again and of course she shouldn’t go for god’s sake, I’d only just got her back and as far as I was concerned I wasn’t going to let her out of my sight again for quite some time, if ever.
‘What do you mean, ever?’ she’d said, quietly, burrowing her face into my neck and wrapping herself around me.
‘I love you, Rachel,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you that and I mean it. I don’t care what happened then. I really don’t care, whatever it was. It isn’t important, not any more. I just don’t want you to leave me again, please.’
She said alright, I’ll stay, but there are things I won’t be able to talk about, you have to understand that. And she put her face up to mine and stared right into my eyes and said, ‘Alex, this is the thing. There are some stories that can never be told. And you shouldn’t say you love me because you can’t do, not properly. You don’t even know me, and you wouldn’t if you did, really you wouldn’t.’ But I told her then that I saw things differently from her, and that it was my belief that one could never really know another person anyway, not completely. I said I was fairly certain I was capable of loving someone without question, and that was what I understood to be the meaning of unconditional love. ‘You mean you’re saying you love me unconditionally now, Alex? Are you crazy?’ she asked, smiling through her tears. And I said yes, I supposed that was what I was saying, but that it was all getting a bit complicated and philosophical for me and I was just very glad to have her back, having lost her once already. ‘Prove it to me,’ she said then. ‘Prove it to me that you love me unconditionally.’
‘How?’ I asked. ‘How should I prove it?’ and because she buried her face into my chest and pressed her mouth right up against me as she spoke, so that I couldn’t see her any more and nor could I make out her reply, I pulled her head back away from me which meant that we were looking right into one another’s eyes when she said, for a second time, ‘Marry me, Alex. Prove it by marrying me.’
Much later on, when the evening had fallen and she said ‘Let us go then, you and I,’ and led me out on to the balcony, she told me that it really should have been me who had proposed, and so I did.
And that is a scene that comes back to me sometimes, the two of us out there against an evening sky that burned with a low red sun, her face looking down at me where I knelt on the ground in front of her, her expression utterly unguarded for one of the very few times I would ever see it so. It is a scene I have replayed for myself endlessly, taking it carefully from the store I have of such scenes, and wondering as I do so about the wisdom of looking at it, or at any of them, such is the sadness that will follow. And sometimes this scene will show itself to me unannounced, emerging from the tapestry of my grief that is there when I wake in the mornings and find, as I sometimes do, that I have become trapped in a frame of sadness which has been constructed around me in my sleep, so that there can be no escaping from it. And when this happens I can only watch, feeling the shuttles rattle above me and underneath me and the threads run back and forth beneath my skin until pictures start to emerge, hundreds of them in turn. Each one takes its shape gradually at the beginning, and then, at the last, becomes suddenly, rapidly, clear before being replaced a moment or two later by another. At first, I will notice only that one colour of thread, red perhaps, is emerging from the warp of my skin more frequently than any other and forming itself into nubbly patches here and there, dotted across my torso. And then a different colour will do the same, and I am trying to read these patches and make sense of them and I cannot until the moment when everything begins to move too quickly for me to be able to keep up and there we are, running hand in hand on a Sunday morning across the lawns in front of Kenwood House, caught by the rain without coats or umbrellas and neither of us caring in the slightest, and Rachel’s hair is wet like pelt and when we reach the trees I stop and pull her into me and kiss the water from her face. And then we disappear, and instead I am watching us walk out across Camber Sands and squeeze ourselves onto a rug too small for all the things we’ve brought with us for our picnic, the picnic which is to be the last of the summer in which we were reunited. It was a weekend that fell a fortnight or so after Richard and Lucinda’s wedding, still hot enough to swim in the sea, or at least to paddle. After we had dried ourselves and eaten our lunch we’d tried, each of us, to paint a watercolour with the set I’d given Rachel as a gift that morning. We’d been silent for an hour or so, sitting side by side and sketching first, Rachel saying she knew I didn’t want to bother with that bit but I must, that’s what the book I’d given her with the box of paints said we had to do. And then, later on, when I told her I’d finished my painting, she looked across at what I’d done and she looked out to sea once more and back at my picture again and said, Alex I think you might be colour-blind have you ever had a test?
It takes almost nothing these days, just one tiny thing really and I am with her, falling and tumbling and drowning in the memory of her.
She is everywhere for me, without compass or restraint.
The rain came in early that day on Camber Sands, and as we walked back to the car, her hand held fast in mine and her steps falling more rapidly than my own so that we might keep a pace together, I looked back once and saw our footprints strung across the blank canvas of the beach, marking out our separate rhythms in a cursive falling there, carefree on the wetness of the sand.