Every Contact Leaves a Trace

19



SO LOST AM I in my thoughts it takes me a moment or two to realise Harry is no longer sitting on the sofa opposite me, and I think perhaps he has gone out and left me on my own. But then I hear him moving about in the other room, clearing up from our lunch and making more tea. I look at the photos hanging on the walls and I wonder about the ones Rachel had sent him, the ones of the day we were married. When he comes back in I ask if he will show me them and he looks surprised, standing still in the middle of the room as though uncertain. But then he puts the teapot down and walks over and starts rootling around among the pine cones and postcards that are lined up in front of his books. Apparently finding nothing there, he removes one after the other of the invitations that stand there also and stacks them neatly on the floor beside him so he can look in some of the box files they were hiding. I am beginning to think he is playing with me, and has no intention of actually showing me the photographs, but at last he finds them and walks back towards me. Before he relinquishes his hold on them though, and just as I am about to take them from him, he says that while he doesn’t mind me looking at them, he would prefer it if I did so on the understanding that he would like them back when I have finished. He can arrange for copies to be made, of course, but he would like to keep the originals, if I have no objection. Because of the anger I feel when he says these things, anger at his controlling fumbling attempts to negotiate terms as to his release of these images of Rachel, I do not reply. Instead I lower my arm and leave him holding the photographs out in front of him and I sit back in my chair, shaking my head involuntarily, repulsed by what he’s tried to do.

Eventually, and appearing to have become as embarrassed as I hoped he would, he hands them over. I look at them with more haste than I would have liked to, my frustration and irritation being so intense that it actually feels as though it is coursing like boiling water up and down the inside of my arms and across my chest and I want, suddenly, to punch him. I have to flick through them only once to know I have seen them all before and have them almost by heart, so familiar are they. All of them were taken on the day we were married and are either copies of ones from our own album, or of the ones that I found when, in the week before I visited Harry, I’d finally opened the envelope of photographs that Evie gave me in the police station on the day after Rachel was murdered. And so I hand them straight back to him, noticing as I do so that I am unable to stop my hand from shaking.

‘And the letter?’ I say, my voice so clipped I feel as though I have hit him rather than spoken. ‘Or do you require a written agreement of some sort prior to your releasing it?’

‘I’m sorry, Alex, really, I am so sorry,’ and he almost jumps back over to the bookcase and as he starts to open and close the files again, sifting through the papers inside, I can see that his hands are shaking also and he is become hunched over, like an old man, and I realise I have upset him and I am ashamed for the cruelty I have shown. Of course, when I read the letter he hands me, I find it contains nothing that is not already known to me, being simply a description of the tiny ceremony we held in the register office, and of Rachel’s dress, of how handsome she thought I looked, and of the menu we chose for the lunch we went for with Richard and Lucinda afterwards. And I understand then that Harry’s reluctance to share these things, the letter and the photographs, is born not from a desire to keep anything back from me, but rather from a fear that I might take away all that remains to him of Rachel. My anger softens and instead, I feel only pity. But while I have calmed down, it seems that he has not. He takes the letter from me and tries to fold it back into its envelope but he can’t make it fit. It drops from his hands and shoots under the sofa and as I lean forward, meaning to retrieve it for him, he flinches, so I sit back and leave him to it. When finally he has found it, and put it away on the shelf, he takes his place on the sofa once more and pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket and starts to wipe both his eyes with it, over and over, and we sit for some time in silence, neither of us making any mention of the fact that he is weeping.

Eventually he puts his handkerchief back in his pocket and he coughs, once or twice. He stands and pours us some tea and says he will begin again from where we left off, returning to Anthony’s Judd Street kitchen, and as he starts to speak we are there once more, the flies circling above him where he sits and the pictures curling on the walls.



‘Did you really think I’d written them on my own, Harry?’ Anthony said, standing over Harry where he sat at the kitchen table, still attempting to dry his hair with Anthony’s tea towel. ‘I mean, “My Last Duchess”, for god’s sake. Bit of an obvious choice, isn’t it?’ he carried on, pulling up a chair as he spoke and sitting down opposite Harry. ‘And such a girl’s choice. You could have credited me with a slightly more finely honed imagination than that, couldn’t you?’ and Harry thought suddenly about getting up and leaving there and then, unsure he wanted to hear what Anthony was about to tell him. He stayed though, and that was how he found out the letters had been Rachel’s idea, in the beginning.

Just as I am beginning to settle into Harry’s story again, sitting back in my chair and following, in a grim kind of a way, the soft rhythms of his voice, he stops suddenly, almost as soon as he has begun. He says nothing, simply staring into the fire and looking very much as though he is going to cry again. When I ask him if he is alright he looks up and he raises his eyebrows as though he is surprised to see me there, as though he has been thinking about something else entirely.

‘I am quite alright, Alex, yes. It is just that it will be difficult for me to tell you these things, that is all. If I were to be frank, I would have to say that I would rather not be the bearer of any of this tale, let alone this particular part of it. But that much, I suppose, is obvious to you by now. As it is I have begun, and I must carry on. I would simply ask that you be patient with me.’

I nodded and he continued, but for the next few hours, as he picked a route back and forth through the events Anthony had related to him during the first part of his visit to Judd Street, it was in so awkward a manner, and by way of a narrative so shot through with digressions and periphrases, and so crowded with ellipses and euphemisms, that I found it difficult to follow what he was saying with any degree of clarity, however hard I tried. It was, I think, both the fact that I’d upset him just before he began, as well as the very obvious ill ease he felt about having to relate events that would not show Rachel in a guise with which I would be familiar, that accounted for his awkwardness. I did my best to follow him, though I suppose I must bear some responsibility for having done so without a great deal of success. Were Harry to have been a client I was preparing for cross-examination I would have been able to interject at will, to question and to challenge. Or, alternatively, were his to have been the voice of an opposition witness, speaking to me from the pages of a written statement, I would have been able to scrawl exclamation marks in the margin, sticking Post-it notes full of questions all over the pages so that someone else more junior than me could take them away and draft a letter seeking further particulars, thus eliciting the information I knew was being kept from me.

But instead I could only wait, storing away the facts as they were parcelled out and hoping to be able to piece them together later on. That I also contributed to the somewhat shoddy quality of the resulting narrative is something I would be the first to acknowledge; my frustration was so intense I sometimes found myself losing concentration altogether and drifting off, filling in the gaps that Harry was leaving, all too aware as I did so of the dangers inherent in such an approach. When he’d finished his attempt, and we had broken once more so that we could each of us change for dinner, I went back to my room and telephoned Evie, just as I had warned her I would. It was during that call that she told me her version of the same events, amongst other things, and only afterwards was I able to construct any sort of a cohesive picture for myself from the glimpses Harry had given me of the circumstances in which the letters had been written, the letters purporting to blackmail him for the murder of his wife.

I’d said nothing to Harry about Evie’s email, and nor did I see any reason to tell him it was my intention to speak with her. He’d revealed to me that afternoon that Evie knew at least as much as he did of the events surrounding the writing of the letters, and also that the two of them shared a common source for their knowledge. It seemed that Anthony had contacted her on the day he was sent down. After he’d confessed to Haddon, taking sole responsibility both for writing and sending the letters to Harry, he’d packed up his rooms and gone, leaving behind him the book Harry had given him as a parting gesture. And almost as soon as the wicket door had closed behind him, he’d found a phonebox and made a call to Evie. I knew very little at that stage of what kind of relationship, if any, had existed between Evie and Anthony. I already had a sense that their paths would have crossed on and off, Anthony having been so often a guest at the weekend parties Rachel had apparently thrown in Evie’s house at Chelsea. And then of course, playing at the back of my mind, there was the photograph on the parking ticket, the one that had been taken years later, a few weeks before Rachel’s murder. But it wasn’t until the following day that Harry would explain why Evie and Anthony were still in touch by the time of that photograph, and reveal what lay behind that May morning meeting outside the library where Rachel worked.

When Anthony had spoken with Evie on the afternoon he’d been told to pack his things and go for good, he’d broken down and told her everything, so distraught was he at what had happened over the previous few weeks. Where Harry had been reticent with me in the telling of the tale, Evie, when I telephoned her, had relished it, seeming to take a strange kind of pleasure in conveying the most sordid of its details to me, and doing so with such visceral clarity that it was almost as though I had been there myself.

My call to Tokyo was answered straight away, but it was a man’s voice that greeted me rather than Evie’s. When I asked to speak to her he muttered a few expletives before passing me on and from the drowsiness in her voice I gathered I had woken them up. I apologised to her, saying I’d given no thought to the time difference and asking when I could call back, but she told me that she’d rather get it over and done with there and then. She said she’d thought things through since sending her email and had decided that, while of course it was none of her business how I wanted to spend my time, or to waste it, she wanted to make it clear that if I insisted on staying in Oxford with Harry Gardner I had to understand she had no intention of keeping up a running commentary on whatever else he was going to tell me. She was happy to speak now, briefly, but after that I was on my own. And then she added, reminding me quite how nasty she could be, that she couldn’t help observing that if I’d acquainted myself rather better with my wife than I had done, it perhaps wouldn’t be necessary for me to go around the place bothering people about things that had happened such an awfully long time ago.

‘Evie,’ I said in response, determined not to rise to her goading, ‘shall we talk or are you just going to carry on insulting me?’ and she said right, fine, let’s talk. And then she yawned, slowly, and told me to get on with it.

I said there were a number of things I wanted to ask her about, but that it might perhaps be best to start with the letters that had been inside the document wallet she’d made me courier to her. I said Harry had told me a certain amount about them already, and that he had described for me, in a manner of speaking, the way he understood them to have been written. I explained that whilst he’d clearly given me as full an account as he was able to, I would be grateful if she would tell me a little bit more about it, knowing as I did that she and Anthony had discussed it on the day he’d been sent down. ‘Why of course, Alex, why ever not?’ she said, and I noticed at once that there was no longer any drowsiness in her voice; what I heard there instead was a strange kind of excitement, and an energy that was distinctly vindictive.

She began by saying that she’d warned me in her email about the wisdom of asking too many questions, and that she would proceed only if I was quite certain that was what I wanted. And then, when I said nothing, she told me that the phone call she’d received from Anthony, the one that he’d made immediately after leaving Worcester on the day he’d been sent down, was something she would never forget, such was his distress and his anger about what had happened. The way he’d been later on that same afternoon was no less raw and unrestrained, when she’d met with him in her office and asked him to tell her everything again so that she could be quite clear in her understanding of the part Rachel had played in the events he was describing. And that was an affect that she managed to recreate for me in her retelling, even from such a distance and from such a time removed.

Once she started to talk there was no stopping her, despite the reluctance she’d professed to at the outset, so that by the time we came to the end of our conversation I saw from my watch I had missed dinner altogether. Realising that if I hurried, I might still be able to find Harry at dessert, I jogged across the quad and straight up the steps on the other side. But when I reached the top I slowed my pace and walked back and forth along the terrace a few times, wanting to sort the facts as Evie had described them into some sort of order in my own mind. It was my intention to place them one by one alongside Harry’s, these facts of hers, so that I could test the links between them and find the ones which held most fast, and most true. I placed those of the resulting sequences of images and statements that were sufficiently coincident for my task on top of one another, as though they were drawings sketched on separate pieces of tracing paper, and then I moved them up and down and back and forth, turning them over and over to see if I could find a position whereby they could be aligned with one another closely enough to form what I considered to be a cohesive, single, image. If Harry had given me a page torn from a children’s puzzle book, then Evie had taken a pencil and scored in the lines between each of his dots, so that as I reached the end of the terrace for the last time and made my way down the narrow set of steps that led to the room where dessert was being held, something like a composite version was beginning to emerge, and I knew that with a little more time and left to its own devices, what I was looking at would become clear enough for me to feel almost as though I had been a voyeur on the events, if not quite a participant in them.

I opened the low oak door at the end of the corridor and found that dessert had only just begun. All I’d really missed was the procession out of Hall and the stroll along the terrace, each of the guests and Fellows who had been sitting on High Table clutching their linen napkins and following Harry as he would have led them towards the room that I stood looking into. It took a moment or two for my eyes to adjust after the brightness of the lights in the corridor, but eventually I made him out through the glow of the candles that had been placed everywhere, and the soft flickers of the fire he sat beside. As he saw me he stood, gesturing that I should make my way towards the one empty place that remained. It was with some relief that I became aware that the people I would be joining were so deeply engrossed in one another that I’d be unlikely to have to contribute to their conversation. The seats were arranged in little groups of three around the room, loosely forming a large circle, with tiny walnut tables in front of each group, but to describe it thus would be to suggest a greater degree of order than was conveyed by the scene I looked on as I sat and took the plate that Harry handed me. If the layout of the furniture was designed to imply a kind of clumsy chaos, then so was the content of the large table that sat just beyond this gathering. It was covered with silver bowls and plates and platters piled with fruit so ripe that some of it was dripping, a little. Pomegranate seeds spilt deep crimson, landing on peaches that sat in a curious perfection beneath them, the juice running slowly down each yellow globe until it slipped, at the last, onto the tabletop’s sheen and sat in a glistening pool. Everything seemed to glow amber in the half-light of the fire, and the darkness of the panelling, combined with the complete absence of any electric light, made that low-ceilinged room seem crowded, almost suffocating. I loosened my tie and took the first of the decanters that was passed to me and poured myself a crystal beaker full of something dark and sweet and I sat back, breathing in its heavy scent as deeply as I could before beginning to drink.

Every evening thus far, when we have come through to this little room after dinner, I have seen only the surface of things, so involved have I been each time, albeit reluctantly, in the conversations forced upon me. Tonight though I am able to observe things more closely and I notice there is more of a system than I have been aware of hitherto. When I arrived Harry had still been checking the seating plan he’d drawn up on the back of an envelope during dinner, making sure everyone was in the right place and talking to the people they were supposed to be talking to. And now we are all settled, he stands every once in a while and nods to one of the other Fellows. His chosen assistant, thus selected, rises as soon as he is able to extricate himself without offence from the conversation in which he has been engaged. He steps forward to the large table and takes, according to the way in which he has interpreted Harry’s nod, either a decanter, or a bowl of fruit. He carries it over to one of the little groups of three and offers them its contents before replacing it on the table and returning to his seat, easing seamlessly back into the conversation. Before too long, Harry is on his feet again, nodding and signalling once more, so that none of the guests have to trouble themselves for an instant and neither are their plates ever empty nor their glasses unfilled. They are, in this way, almost continually waited on by one or other of their hosts, disturbed only when it is necessary to encourage them with the politest of reminders that they might like to pass a decanter to their left or to their right, should they have forgotten to do so.

This is a rhythm that is disturbed only once on this particular evening, when a man appears from a door cut so unobtrusively from the panelling that until he opens it I haven’t even realised it is there. He nods at Harry before moving briskly across to the table and setting down a plate of papaya with quarters of lime. After this, he circles the room once, replacing a candle that has burned too far down, and picking up a stray grape from the floor where it has fallen. And then he is gone and we are become once more an orrery suspended, this little circle of guests, with Harry a dark star somewhere at our outer reaches ensuring we are always static, that our glasses are turned from gold to purple and back again, and watching us wipe juices sticky from our chins as he observes the liaisons he has engendered taking place all around him.

This is the scene that surrounds me in this little room, the darkness only held off by the fire and the occasional glint of a candle’s flame flashing back from a piece of silver as I sink further into my chair and allow the wine to settle in my veins. And this is the point at which I summon for myself once more the pieces of tracing paper that are Harry and Evie’s stories, drawing them out from the back of my mind where they have continued unaided in the task of aligning themselves so that I might see for myself the scenes they depict. And with the lull of conversation ebbing and flowing round about, the events that they describe start to materialise before me, faintly at first and then more clearly, and I watch, mesmerised, as Anthony and Rachel and Cissy between them dream up the idea of writing Harry a series of anonymous letters accusing him of murder.



It started as a joke. Just the sort of thing the three of them were always coming up with on the afternoons they spent hidden away together in the set of rooms Rachel and Cissy shared. They would schedule them in, these lost afternoons, as they came to call them, maybe once a week or so. They’d take it in turns to buy in provisions, bottles of vodka and packets of multicoloured gold-tipped cocktail cigarettes from the tobacconist on The High, each of them having purchased an ivory cigarette holder on Rachel’s instructions. And so it was that they would close the outer door of the set and strip naked and begin to drink, and to smoke, and to talk. It was very pretentious, Anthony said, and he, perhaps more than any of them, was aware at the time that it was just one big Oxford cliché. But that was why he liked it so much, in a way. He felt he finally belonged, on those afternoons they spent together behaving like Oxford students. That he had at last been accepted into that world.

It would depend on what day of the week it was, and on how much vodka they’d been able to afford from the kitty they’d built up, but quite often the afternoon would stretch into the evening, and on into the night, and if Rachel and Cissy had nothing in the fridge Anthony would be sent out under cover of darkness for a takeaway, and if they got too cold finally, in the middle of the night, they would take baths and wrap themselves up in duvets and carry on drinking.

There were very few rules in that commune of theirs. The first was with regard to its membership which, they agreed right at the start, would be forever restricted just to the three of them. ‘Whatever happens,’ Anthony recalled Rachel saying as they toasted their union on the first day of its formation. And they must never tell anyone what they did on their lost afternoons, Rachel saying once more, ‘Whatever happens,’ and Cissy saying it back again, making the other two repeat it with her as though they were boy scouts sitting around a campfire swearing a secret pact, so that he’d half expected one of the girls to bring out a penknife and demand he draw a drop of blood and mingle it with theirs.

Beyond that there was only the sex to be legislated on, and that was something Rachel and Cissy seemed to have worked out between themselves in advance, announcing to Anthony in that first meeting that he could look all he liked but he couldn’t touch, whatever happened. He could touch himself, of course, and they seemed quite keen that he should do that, but he was never to touch either of them, and he would never be invited to join in. So he stuck to the rules and only watched, bringing himself off again and again as he sat in Rachel’s armchair and gazed at the two of them making love to one another, always in the manner of a performance rather than an act of real intimacy. He found it fairly unbearable most of the time, having to stay just away from the bed they lay on, or to sit just apart from them on the floor, but when he’d tried to raise the issue with them and suggest it might be time to revise their agreement, they’d told him he could take it or leave it, and that if he couldn’t handle it he could just walk away there and then. And so he’d stayed, and carried on watching, and in a strange kind of a way he’d come to find it more manageable each time, once he’d accepted he was only ever to be an observer.

And then, one day in late May, half an hour or so into one of their lost afternoons when the sex was yet to come and they had only just started to drink, they all three of them went through to Rachel’s bedroom and he and Cissy were watching her undress when she said, ‘Why do you think he’s so obsessed with Browning anyway?’ and that was how it started.

They talked about Harry all afternoon, in an idle kind of a way. They came around again to the poems eventually, and Cissy said something about Harry’s wife, and brought up the rumours that had been circulating about how it couldn’t have been cancer, it must have been a lover, or suicide, or something.

‘What d’you mean, “or something”?’ Rachel said. ‘D’you mean murder? You think he murdered her?’

‘Oh for god’s sake, Rach, why don’t you shut up,’ Cissy replied. ‘Of course he didn’t.’

‘But why not? It happens doesn’t it? People do do that sort of thing you know. And that,’ Rachel carried on, running one hand lazily over Cissy’s breasts and back again, and then trailing her fingers over her stomach and letting them rest there for a minute before moving her hand further down, so that Anthony began to listen less carefully to their conversation, ‘would explain the Browning.’

They’d talked about it again the next time they met, and Rachel seemed to have become quite enthralled by the idea. And when one afternoon they had all three of them agreed in their drunkenness that it was quite possible, if not probable even, that Harry had murdered his wife, she’d said it: ‘I think we should send him a letter. Test him out, you know. See if we can get a rise. It’d be fun, don’t you think?’ And they had laughed about the idea and flicked through some poems and read them to one another, hideously drunk, and when they had found poem after poem suited to their task, Anthony fetched a piece of paper from Rachel’s desk and sketched the letters out there and then.

They’d struggled over how to sign them off, choosing and rejecting first one name and then another from the poems. ‘We’ll find something perfect in The Ring and the Book, I know we will,’ Anthony said, picking up Rachel’s copy.

‘F*ck off, Anthony. You’re trying to be cleverer than you actually are, as usual,’ Cissy said. ‘Forget it. It’s f*cking boring and f*cking long and I’m the only one of us who’s ever going to read it. Let’s just make something up.’

And that was when one of them had come up with ‘A Well-Wisher’. They’d all toyed with the idea of translating it, preferably into something with a literary twist. ‘How about Ben Volio?’ Anthony suggested. ‘You know, Shakespeare, but make it into two names.’ Cissy had objected though, telling him not to be an idiot, they wanted a baddie not a goodie, someone really evil, not some kind of Mr Nice Guy. ‘Don’t be so simplistic, Cissy,’ he’d responded. ‘People can be both, you know. They can be bad and good at the same time. I mean, it could be argued, for example, in R and J—’

‘No,’ Rachel said then. ‘No they can’t. Most people are only one or the other. I mean it. Some people are all bad, whichever way you look at them. However many times you give them another chance, they’ll f*ck you over. Even if they say they love you.’

He’d argued it out with her for a while, but when Cissy joined in he’d backed off and left them to it. Until, that was, they’d started to say some really ridiculous things to one another, and the whole thing had descended into an actual fight, and he’d had no choice but to step in and break it up and tell Rachel to stop crying, neither of them were trying to f*ck her over. They were her friends, he told her. And they were having fun, that was all. She’d calmed down then, all of them had, and they’d decided to stick with ‘A Well-Wisher’ and leave it at that.

‘Three weeks left till the end of term,’ he’d said. ‘We’ll send the first one at the end of this week, after we’ve had our tute with him on Friday, and we’ll see what happens. If he doesn’t take the bait we’ll carry on sending them, one a week, until he does.’

‘Alright,’ Rachel said. ‘We’ll crack him, you’ll see,’ and she lay back on her bed and Cissy climbed on top of her.

‘Who’s going to actually send them though?’ Cissy asked, later on. ‘I’m sure as hell not going to. My dad would kill me if we got found out.’

‘Oh come on,’ Rachel said. ‘Don’t be a chicken Ciss.’ And that was when Anthony had put his proposition to them. He would type up the letters in the computer room so they couldn’t be traced, and he’d send them, but only if they agreed to give him something in return. ‘Oh my god Anthony you sleaze!’ Rachel said. ‘I can’t believe you think we’d actually fall for that!’

‘Why not?’ Anthony replied. ‘What’s so unappealing about the idea of actually letting me f*ck one of you anyway? It’s not like you don’t know me well enough by now is it?’

Rachel and Cissy began to laugh at him then. ‘Know you well enough?’ Rachel said, gasping for breath. ‘Ciss, he thinks it’s because we don’t know him well enough! Can you believe that?’ And Cissy joined in, telling Anthony to take a long look at himself in a mirror next time he found himself in front of one, and the two of them carried on laughing until, he said, they were actually almost screeching with it. He hated them both at that moment, really hated them. But then suddenly Cissy stopped laughing and said, ‘OK. Let’s do it. It’s only a f*ck, after all.’

‘No it’s not, Ciss,’ Rachel said, half laughing, half horrified. ‘God, you’re so—’ and she broke off there, getting up from the bed and walking over to the other side of the room.

‘What? Rachel, what? I’m so what?’

‘So. I don’t know. So immoral,’ Rachel said, and she wasn’t laughing any more.

‘Rachel,’ Cissy said, sitting up in the bed, mock-passion on her face and her hands clasped in front of her chest. ‘I never knew you cared, darling heart!’ and she got up and ran over to Rachel and kissed her for a while before stopping suddenly and saying, ‘Cut!’ She pushed her away and walked back to the bed and lay down before carrying on. ‘You know what, honey, who cares,’ and she turned her head and announced to Anthony, ‘You’re on, kiddo. But the letters were your idea if anyone ever finds out about them, right? Not my problem, OK?’

‘OK,’ Anthony said, and he got up from his chair and started to walk towards her.

‘Oh for god’s sake not now you funny little northerner!’ Rachel said, walking back to the bed and climbing into it. She lifted the covers over her and Cissy, placing her hands on Cissy’s face and looking her right in the eyes. ‘When shall we let him, Ciss? When?’

And that was when they agreed that if, and only if, Anthony sent all three of the letters, and if, and only if, he got away with it, they’d meet him behind the Pavilion at midnight on the night of the Casablanca Ball and give him his reward. ‘Outside?’ Anthony said, desperately wanting to get into bed with the two of them there and then. ‘Why outside?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ Rachel said. ‘Have you never had sex en plein air Anthony?’ she carried on. ‘You’re so boring. He’s so boring isn’t he Ciss. So f*cking boring,’ and she turned to Cissy and pulled her down under the covers and with the sound of the supper bell ringing out across the quad, Anthony sat back down in his chair and watched the shapes of their bodies moving under the duvet and that was when he decided that he would send the letters after all, whatever happened.



The girls had backed out pretty much straight away, just as he’d expected them to. So that when he told them he’d gone ahead and put the first of the letters into Harry’s pigeonhole they were furious. They swore they’d never speak to him again, and didn’t he realise how much shit they’d got themselves into already that term, and what had he been thinking and it was only ever a stupid joke and what the hell was he going to do about it now? He’d tried to calm them down, telling them it didn’t matter, it was only one, and Harry would never know who it was from, not for definite, and he was hardly the sort to confront them anyway, and they should just forget it.

They weren’t convinced, and the tutorial that Friday had been awful for him. He was amazed the two of them had even shown up. They’d refused to acknowledge him all week apart from one morning after breakfast when they’d waited for him outside Hall and marched him down to the lake and told him he had to go to Harry and confess and stop it all and make it alright. ‘OK,’ he’d said. ‘OK. How about you give me what you promised me first, and then I will?’ They’d looked at one another, he said, and then they’d laughed at him. ‘Grow up little boy,’ Cissy told him, and she’d started to walk away. Rachel had stayed for a minute or two longer, saying she was sorry about it all, but he should really get a grip now and sort it out, and she couldn’t help him if he wasn’t able to help himself.

Anthony said that she’d sounded just like his mother had when he was a child and he’d done something wrong to get her attention and she told him off and he hated her for it. And it was because of the way that he’d felt then that instead of going to make his amends with Harry, and putting a stop to the whole thing, he’d gone to the lodge on the way to dinner and put the second of the letters in Harry’s pigeonhole. Of course, when he told Cissy and Rachel, that was it. They froze him out completely and he’d spent the week alone, feeling as though he was going slightly insane. He was completely at a loss as to what to do with himself, and what to do about the letters. And then, when neither Cissy nor Rachel showed up for the last tutorial, and even Harry had rejected him and sent him away without so much as looking at him, he decided he may as well see it through to the end and send the final letter. After Haddon had called the three of them out of Hall and Rachel and Cissy found out that he’d sent that one as well, they’d stood with him on the terrace after Haddon had gone and told him he was on his own. They would deny everything, they said. There was no way of tracing their involvement, and if it came to it, it was their word against his. ‘Safety in numbers,’ Cissy said, and it was because Anthony knew that she was right that he’d owned up the next morning, almost before Haddon had started to speak.

He said to Harry that when he’d stood in Haddon’s study that morning and been told he was going to be sent down, he’d realised that his world as he knew it was over, and he’d found himself unable to shake the hand that Harry offered him. He’d lost everything, and he’d been too devastated at that point even to feel angry with Rachel and Cissy about what had happened. It was Harry’s visit to his rooms that’d been the final straw though, and that was when he’d decided to do what he did next. Harry’s forgiveness, he said, and his gift of the book of poetry, had somehow made him angry where he hadn’t been, and Harry’s kindness in the face of his own cruelty had shown him a clear and final glimpse of what he was about to lose. And so, as he stood on Gloucester Green waiting for the bus that would take him back to Manchester, he used up the last of his cash by making a telephone call to Evie, and, in his anger, telling her everything.

When I made my call to Evie in Tokyo and woke her from her sleep, she in her turn told me everything that Anthony had told her in the course of his call from Gloucester Green, and in the conversation the two of them had had later on that afternoon, when they’d met in her office at the Ashmolean and talked it all through once more. And when she had told it all to me, she reached the end of her contribution to my understanding of events. That was the moment when the lines that were scored on her tracing paper faded suddenly, when a man’s voice called out and interrupted our conversation, saying would she come back to bed now and hadn’t she been on the phone for long enough and she said yes, alright, I’m coming. She finished by saying that she didn’t see that we needed to speak again, repeating her previous admonishments with regard to my being in Oxford and telling me again to get back to London and get on with things and leave the police to it, saying that nothing Harry could tell me would bring Rachel back. She said at the last that she was leaving Tokyo the following day anyhow, and had no idea how long she’d be away, so there was no point in calling her again in the immediate future.

‘Don’t worry, Evie,’ I said. ‘I’ll find you if I have to, wherever you are,’ and she laughed and told me that there was really no need to threaten her, she had nothing to hide, and that I could carry on playing detectives with Harry if I wanted to but as far as she was concerned she could think of better ways to spend her time. And then the line went dead and I realised she’d hung up without my having asked her about the photograph on the parking ticket, and about what exactly she’d been doing with Anthony and Rachel that day outside the British Library. As I got ready to go and see if I was still in time to find Harry at dessert, I resolved to ask him about it before he got very much further in his tale.

Earlier on that afternoon, at about the point in the story where Evie’s rendition of the events in question had come to a halt, Harry’s own narration had come good again, so to speak. Having got through the sequence of events that he had found it so awkward to talk about, he’d become a better storyteller once more, so that instead of dots, he gave me images and dialogue and wove a fuller clearer picture in the way he’d done before. He reminded me that when Anthony had approached him in the British Library and taken him back to his Judd Street flat, he himself had still been of the understanding that Evie had disowned Rachel on the night of the Casablanca Ball as a direct result of Haddon’s phone call. However, when he sat in Anthony’s kitchen and Anthony began to tell him about standing in the phone box on Gloucester Green on the afternoon he’d been sent down, he realised that the conversation Anthony was about to describe was, in all probability, what had lain behind Evie’s rejection of Rachel, rather than Haddon’s phone call to her later that night.

Evie had persuaded Anthony to stay where he was until she got there, she was coming straight away, and when he’d pointed out that he was in a bus station and that there was really no need, he’d just wanted her to know, that was all, she’d given him directions to her office at the Ashmolean and said that she’d arrange for him to be let in, telling him to go there and wait until she arrived. So he did as she asked, and when she got there he gave her the document wallet he’d kept with the photocopies he’d made of the letters, and some other things he had wanted her to see.

‘What other things?’ Harry had asked him then.

‘Oh. Just the Browning essays, you know.’

‘The Browning essays?’ Harry replied. ‘What essays?’

‘You didn’t know about that, Harry? I thought you must have done.’

And when Harry said he had no idea what he was talking about, Anthony told him that he’d written every single one of Rachel’s Browning essays for her, week by week, in addition to the ones he’d written for himself, and that she’d copied them into her own hand before the tutorials began each time, so that there was no risk of Harry finding out about it.

Harry told me that this was perhaps the thing that had shocked him most that day in Anthony’s Judd Street kitchen, rather than anything Anthony had said about the sort of things the three of them had done together, or about Rachel and Cissy being lovers, or about the way they had been so cruel about him in their gossiping. ‘They were young,’ Harry said to me. ‘And she was very young. And her life, you know. What she’d grown up with. Or without, rather.’ But the cheating had saddened him. To think that she’d sat each week and read essays to him that were not her own, and that he’d never had so much as an inkling that it was happening. ‘Why did she do it?’ he said in his confusion to Anthony, remembering how her work had improved the following year, when she was working entirely alone. ‘There was no reason,’ Anthony explained. ‘She was just too lazy, that was all, and I was just too willing.’ And it was only then that Harry realised that every single thing Rachel had told him that night in the hospital, and throughout the summer that followed, had been founded on a series of untruths. He felt a bitter anger then but checked it straight away; he wasn’t entirely sure he’d understood Anthony correctly, and nor could he bring himself to really believe what he was hearing.

When Anthony had handed over the document wallet to Evie, and when he’d told her everything that had happened, and when she’d made him go over it again and again, so that she could have every last detail, she had been, he said to Harry, incandescent with rage. She’d asked Anthony to stay in her office and wait until she came back, and she’d gone straight over to College and found Rachel and told her she wasn’t welcome in Chelsea that summer, and nor would she ever be. And, she’d said, as far as money was concerned, Rachel was henceforth to make her own way in the world.

‘After all I’ve done for her,’ she said to Anthony when she got back. She’d been gone for almost an hour, and because he hadn’t known what else to do with himself he’d ended up idly rifling through the drawers of her desk and guessing her password before flicking through the emails in her inbox. He was wondering what he’d been thinking, agreeing to sit and wait for her like that, and he’d been on the point of giving up and leaving when suddenly she was there, slamming the door behind her and throwing her keys on the desk. He was surprised by the intensity of her reaction. If he’d thought for a moment that she would actually cut Rachel off in the way that she had, he would never have told her. He knew he’d made a colossal error of judgement, and one for which he was truly sorry. ‘I barely knew the woman at that stage,’ he said to Harry, as though in explanation. ‘I’d met her once or twice, that was all, at Rachel’s parties in Chelsea sometimes, the morning after, you know, over breakfast, when we were all on our best behaviour and Evie was grilling us about our work, demanding to know our plans for the future.’ What he hadn’t realised was that Evie was also on her best behaviour on those occasions, and that rather than the lovely maternal figure she had presented to them all, he described her as becoming, that day in Oxford, ‘a bitch from hell’. ‘When push came to shove, she just turned into a really nasty woman. I thought she was like, you know, Rachel’s kind of replacement mum or something. And I didn’t think someone’s mum would do something like that. My mum was always a bit of a nightmare but nothing like that. Took me straight back in when I got home to Manchester. No questions asked. And I’d been sent down from Oxford f*cking University for god’s sake.’

As Harry sat there listening to Anthony, he realised that by the time Rachel had gone to the Ball that night, Evie had already passed her judgement. He ran through the events in his mind, only half listening to Anthony, and he tried as best he could to piece it all together. Having done so, the thought occurred to him that it was quite possible that the whole episode of Rachel convincing Towneley she was so inebriated as to need hospitalisation was nothing more than a scheme, and that she’d thought far enough ahead to know that all she’d have to do, when it came to it, was to ask Harry to arrange for the college to help her in some way, thereby solving her problem. He was completely amazed by what Anthony had told him, and when he remembered the way she’d turned her back that night in the hospital, lifting up her hair and asking him to do up her dress, he felt like a fool. It was as though the floor had shifted beneath him that day in Judd Street, and as if the walls had moved from their place as Anthony spoke, repositioning his understanding of their history. Partway through their conversation he’d had another sudden memory of Rachel, in the weeks leading up to her Finals. He pictured her lying on her back in his garden reading a book and reaching out to take the glass of lemonade he’d poured for her, without so much as looking at him, and at that moment of recollection, the nonchalance he’d read at the time as being born from the ease of their companionship became something entirely different.

‘I am sorry to say this, Alex, but I did become angry with her then. I did. Very angry indeed. Not for long, not at all, but it would be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise,’ and he looked away, scratching the back of his neck and coughing once or twice before carrying on.

He said that his anger passed almost immediately, and he found himself only saddened by what he’d discovered, deeply so. And even then he’d forgiven her straight away. She had always struck him as embodying a strange combination of immense vulnerability and excessive resilience. There was about her, he said, a toughness. He told me then how he had come in from the library one day in the Michaelmas term of her third year. He’d been standing at the bottom of the stairs, taking off his coat and his hat, when he heard her voice and realised she’d left her door open by accident. She was speaking to herself loudly enough for him to be able to make out what it was that she was saying, over and over, ‘Rachel f*cking Cardanine you are such an idiot get a f*cking grip. Idiot. For god’s sake. Idiot, idiot f*cking idiot,’ and so on, so that he froze where he stood and waited until he heard her door close before he moved again, not wanting her to know that he’d been listening. And he often wondered, as he sat in his garden watching her revising, a book held up in the air above her face to protect her from the sun, or when he heard her singing in the bath or reciting a sonnet to herself when she thought he couldn’t hear, what it was that had made her so angry with herself. In the years that followed, observing the almost desperate competitiveness with which she built her academic career, he’d carried on wondering what had given her this need always to push herself. And he’d assumed it must have had something to do with the fact she’d lost her parents and had had to make do with Evie instead. That was how he’d explained her behaviour to himself that afternoon in Anthony’s kitchen: given the fact that she had been brought up by someone like that, and in the light of the parameters within which she’d been forced to operate for most of her life, he concluded that he should feel only compassion towards her, rather than any kind of anger. There was disappointment in his step as he’d made his way back to the library to collect his things and begin the journey home, of course there was. But none of the anger he’d felt at first, or, if any of it did remain, it was only slight, and already subsiding.

Sitting on the train to Oxford later that day, he’d thought through Anthony’s version of what had happened at the Ball. When Evie had come back from seeing Rachel, and when Anthony had answered all her questions, she’d told him it was too late in the day for him to set off for Manchester, he wouldn’t get there until the middle of the night. She’d insisted he let her put him up in a hotel, and he’d obeyed her once more. She’d taken him to the Randolph and checked him in, saying she’d collect him the next morning and drive him back to London, seeing as she would be going that way herself, and it would be no trouble for her to drop him off at Euston. It was, she said, the least she could do after what Rachel had done to him.

But that was where he’d drawn the line, telling her it was one thing to put him up for the night, and yes, he was so shattered he couldn’t face travelling back straight away, but he could make his own plans in the morning, he wasn’t a kid.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to patronise you, Anthony. Don’t take offence for goodness’ sake.’ And she left him then, telling him to stay in touch and to let her know how things went when he got home to his mum.

After she’d gone he left his things in his room and went straight out for a walk. Wandering aimlessly around town, he became more and more frustrated about what had happened, imagining Cissy and Rachel getting ready for the Ball in the set of rooms they shared, and he started to formulate a plan. He knew a way into College that would, in all probability, have been overlooked by the security team, and he still had his gendarme’s costume. He went back to the hotel at about seven o’clock and changed before making his way down to his chosen entry point. He got in without any trouble and experienced only a couple of moments when he thought someone might have recognised him. On both occasions he’d simply pulled his hat further down on his head and slipped into the shadows. Having managed to keep himself to himself for long enough, he went to Rick’s Bar at the time his ball programme told him Rachel and Cissy would be doing their cabaret. He stood by the door and gave one of the waiters a note, asking them to pass it up to the girls and pretending it was an invitation to let an admirer buy them a drink. And then he left the bar, hoping they’d fall for it.

It wasn’t the first time he’d forged Towneley’s handwriting. He’d lost his key one day and had had to go to the lodge to sign out a spare. Noticing Towneley’s signature above his own, he’d found himself copying it over and over, idly, while he stood waiting for the porter to find the right key. Immediately afterwards he’d gone to the Buttery to buy some bread and margarine, and when he got there, he’d realised two things simultaneously: one, he had no cash on him; and two, the person behind the counter was someone he’d never seen before. Without really thinking about what he was doing, he’d signed for his things on account, using Towneley’s signature instead of his own, and it had passed without comment. He didn’t do it that often, he said, and only ever for smallish items, but every now and again, if he was running out of money, he’d repeat the performance in reliance on the fact that Towneley was so wealthy himself he’d never check his Buttery accounts when they came through at the end of each term. And as for the likelihood of Cissy and Rachel allowing themselves to be lured to the Pavilion by Towneley on the night of the Ball, he knew it was a long shot, but he also knew they’d be fairly drunk by the time they got his note, and something Cissy had said on the last of the lost afternoons made him think she’d had a fling with Towneley fairly recently and liked it. He was pretty sure that if she took the bait, Rachel would probably follow. He was prepared for it not to work, he said, thinking they might see through the idea of Towneley asking them to come to the same spot they’d arranged for their own assignation, but it was the only plan he could come up with and so he’d given it a go, writing in Towneley’s hand that he’d be waiting for them behind the Pavilion and could ‘give them a taste of paradise’ if they chose to accept his invitation. An hour or so later on, having filled his pockets with food from the stands that had been set up everywhere, and having built up a stash of free cigarettes and miniatures from the women wandering around handing them out by the trayful, he walked down to the lake and round to the playing fields and hid himself behind the clapboard building that stood there, settling down to wait, finally able to relax now that there was no longer any risk of being seen. It was shortly after midnight that he heard the two of them pushing their way through the bushes.

‘He’s not here Ciss,’ he heard Rachel whispering.

‘Let’s wait for him though,’ Cissy replied. ‘I want to tell him what a little idiot he is before we go tell Haddon he’s back.’

And he’d known then that the game was up. He watched them standing there, picking twigs from one another’s hair and brushing themselves down, and he weighed up the choice between staying hidden, or revealing himself. He’d waited a little longer until they’d moved about a bit in the clearing and were standing close enough for him to be able to smell them, when Cissy suddenly said to Rachel, ‘What a stupid cock,’ and Rachel replied, ‘I know. But can you believe he’s actually stupid enough to think we’d fall for it?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Cissy said. ‘Anthony stupid Trelissick. Stupid stupid stupid,’ and she pulled Rachel towards her and they started to kiss, until she broke off and carried on, ‘You know what though?’

‘What?’

‘Would have been quite nice if it had been Towneley, don’t you think? En plein air and a threesome? Huh? Don’t you think?’

Rachel pulled away from her then, moving back towards the bushes they’d emerged from. ‘Jesus Ciss. No I don’t actually. Sometimes I just don’t get you.’

‘Come on honey. Lighten up! I’m joking,’ and Cissy went towards her and tried to kiss her again but Rachel pushed her away and Cissy said it once more. ‘I’m joking. Rach. You know how I feel about you, come on.’ They began to argue then, but because their voices had dropped just a little too low for Anthony to hear them properly, he gave up trying and came out from his hiding place. He’d meant to surprise them but he stepped on a twig and broke it and Cissy swung round and when she saw him she laughed and said, ‘At long last. You are such a little loser,’ and that was when he stood forward and punched her, hard, right in the face.

He hadn’t really known what he was doing, he said to Harry. He hadn’t even had a plan, as such, of what he would do if they actually came in answer to his note. He certainly hadn’t intended to attack them, and when it came to it he’d acted entirely on impulse, angered by what they’d said about him, and tipped over the edge by Cissy’s greeting.

It could have been either one of them, it just so happened that she was standing closest to him when he lashed out, knocking her to the ground and falling heavily on top of her and finding himself instantly aroused by the sensation of having injured her. Looking back later on he realised Rachel could very well have screamed for help, and that if she had, someone would undoubtedly have come running. Or she could probably have had a good chance of pulling him off Cissy, who, having been momentarily knocked out by the force of his blow, was by now putting up a fairly good fight from where she lay beneath him. But for a reason he’d never quite worked out, Rachel only stood and watched as he held Cissy down with a combination of the weight of his body on hers and the pressure of one of his hands covering her face and pushing her head into the ground, while he undid his trousers with the other. When Cissy bit him, so that he pulled his hand away from her mouth for just a second, she shouted Rachel’s name.

Anthony flipped his head up and looked at Rachel but she did nothing, just standing there with her arms folded and half a smile on her face. ‘Go for it Ciss,’ she said, quietly, and Anthony said she looked very much as though she might have been crying at the same time as smiling. ‘It’s only a f*ck after all, isn’t that what you said?’ and she turned and disappeared into the shadows, leaving them there in the clearing.

His memory of what happened next, he’d told Harry, wasn’t entirely clear. He was on top of Cissy, and then he wasn’t, and then he came round to see Haddon looking down at him where he lay, and then he was being walked back across the lawns by the two of them and Haddon was throwing cold water on his face and hauling him into a chair in his study and questioning him. And then Harry was there, and then he wasn’t, and then he was being told that it was all over for him, again, and Haddon and Harry were walking him to the college gates and leaving him to stand on his own on the flagstone path wishing very much that he was inside instead, and that things had turned out differently.