20
AS I SAT by the fire during dessert on what turned out to be the last night of my winter visit, watching Harry direct his fellow hosts again and again, I replayed these scenes for myself, as well as the lost afternoons that Rachel had spent with Cissy and Anthony. When the evening was finally over and I stood to go, I became aware that I had drunk more frequently than I should have done from the decanters that had been passed to me. Harry seemed to notice also, so that when I reached the top of the stairs and stood on the terrace, swaying slightly, I found that he was by my side placing a hand under my right elbow and gently holding me steady and saying he thought it best that we carried on our conversation in the morning. When I nodded, realising that any kind of concentration was entirely beyond me, he offered to accompany me back to my room, saying he was sure that the guests would be very well looked after by the staff in the Upper Senior Common Room when they got there for their coffee and their Armagnac, and that there was really no need for him to go with them. And once we’d gone down the steps from the terrace and had started to walk around the quad, nor did I object when he held my elbow a little more firmly, righting me once or twice when I slipped in the ice that had started to form on the path. The fresh air helped, and because I was already feeling much better by the time we reached the other side and went through into the Pump Quad, when he asked if I’d mind waiting while he let himself into the Buttery to fetch some milk for his tea in the morning I said no, of course not, go ahead.
In an attempt to sober up I decided to read everything on the notice-board in that little courtyard. Having performed this exercise once, and then once more just to make sure, I thought I must have managed it, but I found when I turned to look at what was written across the wall behind me that it hadn’t really made a great deal of difference. Harry was taking his time to get his milk, so I tried to focus with particular attention on what it was that I was looking at, narrowing my eyes and staring intently at the Boat Club results that were sprawled in a chalked graffiti, everywhere it seemed. There appeared to be more of them than I remembered there having been when I was a student, and looking more closely I saw that, in fact, hardly any of the old ones had ever been erased. As far as I could tell in my slightly drunken state, and in the semi-darkness of the Pump Quad, the more recent results had simply been chalked over the top with every year that had passed, so that I was looking at a kind of kaleidoscope of letters and numbers and lists of names strung out beneath sketches of pastel-coloured flags, weaving one amongst the other. Where the records from earlier years had faded with time, the later ones stood out more clearly, but still, my attempt to focus on them in order to steady myself turned out to be a hopeless one and by the time Harry came back I felt more, rather than less drunk, and I had even started to think that one of the flags I was staring at was actually fluttering in the breeze.
I told Harry I was quite alright to go back on my own, and that I didn’t know what had come over me and that it must just have been the heat of the fire, and the length of the day, and the things we had been talking of. Noticing a flush in his cheeks and a strange brightness playing in his eyes I wondered if he also had drunk too much, but as he strode off around the quad with his gown billowing out behind him, his face tilted slightly upwards as though sniffing for a scent, he looked to be doing so in a perfectly sober fashion, and having watched him take the steps on the other side two at a time, I went back to my staircase feeling quite ashamed of myself.
I slept fitfully that night, waking every now and again from strange dreams that I could remember nothing of, not specifically, having the sense only that I had been distressed by them. When I got up I had a dull pain behind my eyes and it was with a heavy head that I walked into Harry’s room and sat down in his armchair for what was to be the last time that I did so before I returned to London. I was grateful for the mug of coffee he handed me, and despite the urgency of my desire to hear the rest of his story, it would be dishonest of me to say that I had not wished, slightly, that he could have begun with a little less alacrity than he did.
But he’d clearly slept better than me, and he launched with renewed vigour straight in from where he’d left off, saying that he’d thought about it while he was waiting for me to arrive and was fairly sure that he would be able to get through the remainder of what he’d decided to tell me by the end of the day, and that he’d be likely to have done so by somewhere around lunchtime, or at the latest, by the early afternoon. And all at once we had begun again, and Harry was talking about the fact that Anthony had told him that, all things considered, he’d got over the whole thing quite quickly at first. On the day he’d been sent down, after he’d packed up his room and Harry had been to visit him, he’d left College for what he really thought would be the last time, and he’d made the telephone call to Evie which led to her checking him into the Randolph for the night.
When he went to leave the following morning, he found that she’d paid his bill in advance, just as she’d said she would, and she’d left him a letter as well. Or at least, that was what he assumed it was until his train pulled out of Euston later on and he opened it and found a bundle of fifty-pound notes inside. There were ten of them in all, and he told Harry it had made him feel a little sordid in a way, as though he’d been paid off somehow, for something. He’d even thought about how he could get it back to her, imagining that if he’d opened it while he was still with her he might have thrown it down on the ground and told her he was worth more than that. But he’d kept it, giving it to his mum at the end of the summer for putting him up and for asking him no questions and for loving him in the way that she did.
It was, he said, probably the hardest summer of his life, and he’d sunk into what he called a fairly dangerous depression. But eventually he’d found a job working for his mum’s boyfriend’s company and he spent the evenings in town with his old school-friends, drinking beer rather than vodka and keeping all his clothes on while he did it, or instead, just staying at home with his mum, doing nothing in particular and liking it. When in the following September her boyfriend offered him a traineeship with his company he took it, absorbing himself in his work. He became an IT geek, he told Harry, finding that his mum’s boyfriend had been right about what he had called Anthony’s ‘aptitude’ for programming. There was something satisfying in writing scripts and eradicating flaws and seeing something follow his commands so obediently, and he found a strange kind of beauty in this new language he was learning to parse. By the time he finished his training he’d achieved a kind of stability in his life, and when he found himself in need of a change of scene and with no real ties to speak of, he’d taken up the offer of a programming job in Tucson, Arizona. It was an escape of a kind, and the relocation package he’d negotiated was almost ridiculous. He’d gone there with no real plans for his future beyond an intention of working hard and saving as much as possible. The experience of moving there and discovering an entirely new world was so absorbing that it wasn’t until he’d been there for just over a year that he found himself beginning to dwell again on what had happened.
It started with a woman in a bar, on a night when he was lonely. She asked him what part of England he came from and when he said Manchester, she asked him if he’d ever lived anywhere else and he said yes, he’d lived in Oxford once. There was something about this woman, and the conversation they had, which brought it all back to him, and vividly, so that over the next few days he’d thought of little other than Rachel and Cissy, and about what he had lost on the day he’d been sent down from Oxford.
He told Harry that when he started to look online he’d been able to find virtually nothing on Cissy, whereas when it came to Rachel, the internet was heaving with her. Her photo on the English department website came up straight away and when he looked at his computer screen and saw her looking back at him, one eye half covered by the strand of hair that fell across it and the beginnings of a smile on her face, it was the start, he said, of what quite quickly became an obsession. He was perfectly aware he could probably have ended up becoming fixated with either of them; it was just that Rachel was everywhere he looked, and Cissy wasn’t.
Initially he’d been jealous, of course he had. It wasn’t as though Rachel had done what she’d always said she would and made it at Oxford, but she’d got her post at UCL, and from the pages of entries that followed, it was clear she was already developing a strong profile in her field. ‘It could have been me,’ he said to Harry. ‘In fact it probably would have been, wouldn’t it?’ It was easy to start ordering back copies of her articles, and sending for details of the conferences she’d be speaking at, or the lecture programmes she was running, and the more he did of that kind of thing, the more he had a sense almost that they were getting to know one another again, having simply lost touch for a while. In the end any jealousy that he’d felt was transformed into a straightforward admiration for what she had achieved. He told Harry that he’d come to feel fond of her again, in the way that he’d done before.
It was inevitable that he would try at some point to resume contact with her. He was aware that she might at first be reluctant to rekindle any kind of friendship, and that he would have to take it slowly. But he hadn’t anticipated quite how bluntly she would respond. The first letter he sent was returned, unopened. He looked in the envelope she’d put it in to see if she’d given some sort of explanation, or justification, but there was nothing other than a compliments slip on which were written the words, ‘Please don’t write again, Anthony.’ ‘She hadn’t even bothered to sign it,’ he told Harry. ‘That was bad enough. But what really got to me was the fact that it was one of those compliments slips with all her details set out at the top, all her qualifications, everything.’ It was seeing the ‘Dr’ that was printed before her name, he said, that had made him jealous all over again, and angry.
He took the English department number from the slip and telephoned with a story about being a friend who had lost her email address, saying he needed to send through something personal so he couldn’t use the department one. At first the woman laughed at him and said of course she couldn’t give out a personal address, but then he said he had a flight to catch, and he’d try again another time, and he chatted to her for five minutes or so, dropping enough little details about Rachel’s life into the conversation for the woman to think that he was sufficiently bona fide to be given the email address after all. He took the precaution of setting up an internet identity that couldn’t be traced, and he sent his first email the next day, signing himself off as BEN VOLIO, knowing she’d recognise that as the name they’d argued about using for the letters they’d written to Harry. He asked her to give him a chance, and he attached a PDF of the letter she’d returned, telling her that reading it was the least she could do if their friendship had ever meant anything to her.
He waited a few days, but eventually he realised that he should interpret her silence as a further rebuke. He’d installed some monitoring software on his laptop before sending the email, and he knew she’d opened it, and knew how many times she’d looked at it, and for how long she’d done so each time. He got over his upset after a week or so, he said, and decided to give her one final chance, taking a fairly soft approach so as not to scare her off. He forwarded the previous email to her and wrote at the top that he wasn’t sure whether she’d got it the last time, but just in case she had and was ignoring him, he thought it was only fair to point out that he didn’t think it was really on just to blank him in that way, after all they’d shared, and he’d be grateful if she’d at least reply, just once. He finished by saying he’d completely understand if she didn’t want to, and if he’d heard nothing within a week he’d back off and wouldn’t write again.
That hadn’t worked either, but he knew he’d drawn her in more successfully this time: he could see that she’d looked at the email a few times a day over the following week, for a good quarter of an hour or more each time. And so he wrote again, abandoning his former restraint and telling her she was being a bitch and she should grow up and snap out of it and just pick up the phone and call him. Again she hadn’t responded, and again the frequency with which she’d looked at the email increased, as did the length of time she’d spent doing so on each occasion.
He realised as soon as he sent the next email that he’d crossed a line, but he’d been drinking and hadn’t been able to help himself. He told Harry that he’d been sitting in his office one night after an evening spent cruising the bars of Tucson with very little success, and he looked at the clock on his laptop and realised she’d probably just be walking to work in London. He pictured her strolling through Bloomsbury with her bag of books and he closed his eyes and imagined her giving her lectures, and going to the canteen for her lunch. He wondered who she’d have sat with, and then he started to think about what she’d do when she got home that night, and who she’d be doing it with. And that was why, he said, he’d ended up writing a few things he probably shouldn’t have, and finished by telling her that if she didn’t start replying to his emails he’d have to write to her department head instead and tell him that she’d copied his Browning essays that summer term. He was pretty sure this would do the trick, this little threat, innocuous though it might seem at first. He was almost certain she’d have used the content of those essays for her dissertation that summer, and that it would have been a pretty big part of her having got a First in the end, which in turn would have secured her funding for her MPhil and led ultimately to her PhD and her departmental post. He said that she would realise, as he had, that he was therefore in a position to expose her as a fraud.
He received a reply straight away. He told Harry she’d completely overreacted, telling him she regarded his communications as harassment, and that she’d go straight to the police if she ever heard from him again. She said she trusted he’d agree that they stood in positions of equal strength in regard to the damage they could do to one another’s lives by any such revelation of their shared histories. She would, she said, take his silence as an indication that he’d seen sense. And so, he told Harry, he had.
It wasn’t just the content of her email that had snapped him out of what he called his ‘brief spell of insanity’. Just after the email had come, and at the precise moment at which he was reading it for a third time and trying to decide what to do, his mum’s boyfriend had called from Manchester with the news that she was ill, properly ill, and that Anthony should come home if he could, that night if possible. He’d suddenly realised how very stupid he’d been, and how close he had come to making the same kind of mistake he’d made in Oxford. And because he’d decided there and then that he didn’t want to throw his life away a second time just because of Rachel Cardanine, he’d done as she asked and resolved not to contact her again, deleting all trace of their correspondence from his laptop and leaving for the UK the following day.
His mum had been pretty much fine in the end. Her recovery had been made against the odds though, and he was glad he’d been there to nurse her through it. By never having taken more than a couple of days off in all the time he’d been in Tucson, he’d built up enough leave to be able to stay for the whole of the month that followed. When it came to going back, he decided against it. He told Harry he’d been scared by how strange his behaviour had become, attributing the whole episode to the soullessness of the life he’d been living, and the lack of any real connections in Tucson. So he’d based himself back in Manchester, not far from his mum, and started to work alongside her boyfriend again, settling fairly soon into some kind of normality.
Things had continued in much the same vein for some time, and he was fairly sure they would have continued to do so were it not for the fact that that he’d bumped into Evie the following September. He’d been seconded to Edinburgh on a short-term contract, just for a fortnight, and he’d gone out one evening to while away a few hours before he went to sleep. Intending to see a film, or perhaps a play, he’d dropped into a bar first for a drink. He was standing waiting to be served when he caught a scent in the air that was familiar to him and had looked at the back of the head of the woman in front of him and thought suddenly that it was Rachel. He was about to tap her on the shoulder when she’d turned and looked him in the eye and said, ‘Anthony. Oh my god,’ and he’d seen Evie staring back at him, looking just as surprised as he was.
They’d had a drink together, and, both of them being in the same position, with time to spare and an expense account to burn, one drink had turned into another, and another, and they arranged to meet again the following evening. On that first evening, Anthony said, they’d run through the events of that summer and Evie told him she’d pretty much patched everything up with Rachel, and he told her in return that he’d lost touch with her god-daughter and he was fine with that, things having moved on in the way that they had. They’d briefly compared notes on how well Rachel was doing at UCL, and how it had all worked out for Anthony in the end, and how the whole thing was in the dim and distant past now and there was no need to rake over it endlessly, was there? By the following evening, each of them seemed to be in agreement that they’d avoid that topic of conversation and stick to the present instead, and they found that the time passed quickly enough without either of them having to stray much further than the trials of travelling with their work, and the projects by which their lives were being consumed at the time, or the films they had seen, or the holidays they’d have liked to have taken had they only been able to find the space in their diaries.
On the third night, when she asked him if he’d like to have dinner with her and suggested trying the dining room of her hotel, Anthony wasn’t at all surprised to hear her asking him up to her room afterwards, saying it didn’t have to be complicated: she was lonely, she wanted sex; he was there, and she thought he probably did too. Of course, Anthony had said to her, why not. And he told Harry it had been easy enough to do what she’d asked, and that he found that with the lights off, and his eyes half closed, he was able to imagine it was someone else, so that when she’d invited him back the next night, and the next, he hadn’t been able to see any reason to turn her down.
Their affair had continued in a desultory kind of a way over the following few years; they had, in a slightly non-committal fashion, and invariably at Evie’s behest, started to co-ordinate their travel plans where possible, spending the occasional fortnight sharing a hotel room at the expense of either one of their employers. Once they’d started, it seemed simple enough to carry on. Evie professed not to mind in the slightest about the fact he had a girlfriend, and the arrangement suited him, providing a welcome distraction from his more than ordinary home life. When in the spring of 2006 the opportunity came for him to take up a post in London he’d accepted it, wanting an excuse to make the break from the woman he was by then living with in Manchester. Evie had tried to persuade him to live nearer to her in Chelsea and he’d been tempted, liking that part of town. But then at the last moment he was offered the long loan of a flat on Judd Street that belonged to someone he knew through his work. He’d taken it straight away, telling Evie it made more sense for him to do that and be based around Euston rather than living in west London as she’d suggested, since he’d be going back up and down to Manchester to visit his mum and it would save him hours of travelling time.
It was only in the spring of 2007, once he had settled fairly comfortably into his London life, he said, seeing a little less of Evie with every month that passed and finding satisfaction instead in the beds of other, much younger, women, that Evie had broached the subject of Rachel again. He’d agreed to stay over one weekend in Chelsea and she’d said over breakfast, with what Anthony told Harry was more than a hint of bitterness in her voice, that he may as well pop into the British Library to see if he could find her, given that he lived so close to where she worked these days, and that he ought to really, if only to offer his congratulations.
‘What for?’ he said, amused by Evie’s woefully unsuccessful attempt to cover up her jealousy of her god-daughter even after all this time, and genuinely puzzled as to what it was that he should be congratulating her for.
‘Oh, Anthony, my love, my dove,’ Evie said, smiling. ‘Surely you’ve heard? It was last December for goodness’ sake. Rachel is married.’
‘Christ,’ Anthony replied. ‘Who the f*ck to?’
‘You mean you really don’t know? Why, to Alex Petersen of course.’
He hadn’t heard, he told Harry, and nor had he managed to hide his shock, agreeing with Evie’s observation that, whilst it was odd that someone like Rachel had chosen to marry a lawyer, it was no surprise that she should have engineered a situation that would place so few demands on her at the same time as providing the material comforts she’d never be able to obtain for herself as an academic.
Harry had apologised when he’d told me this, saying that he didn’t for one moment want to cause me any offence but that it was his intention to give me as full a picture as possible of the story that Anthony had told him, and of the way in which he had told it, and I said of course, there was no need to apologise, I’d been perfectly aware at the time that there would be few people who understood the relationship that Rachel and I had enjoyed, and that at times I had even found myself wondering why she loved me quite as much as she seemed to.
Harry continued, telling me that Anthony had apparently done nothing about what Evie had told him until just after Easter. When he got off the train back from Manchester after the holiday weekend he walked back towards Judd Street and found himself stopping in front of the British Library. He stood outside its gates and gazed at its entrance, wondering where Rachel and I would have spent our Easter holiday, and when she’d be coming back, and it was when he’d unpacked his things that he did it, for the first time in such a long time, tapping her name out on the keyboard and seeing entry after entry come up, just like they had so long ago in Tucson. It was so easy, he said, to catch up on everything she’d been doing, and so strange to think he was living so close to where she worked. It was some time still before he went into the library to see if she was there, having to travel to Edinburgh again on business, and he found in the meantime that it was enough just to look at her pictures on the internet and think about what he’d say if he did see her, and to wonder how he might approach her. When Evie asked him a few days later, jokingly, whether he’d been to the library yet, he laughed it off and told her to grow up and act her age and that it was all behind him, she knew it was, and she’d believed him.
And then one day in early May he’d made what he described as a terrible mistake. He’d been staying in the Chelsea house for the Bank Holiday weekend and had taken his chance on the Sunday morning, when Evie had gone to the gym. He’d spent an hour or so flicking through a few of the pictures of Rachel he’d been able to find online, and then he’d scanned the pages of some online journals and other people’s Facebook sites for more before reading a few of her internet articles and catching up on the various blogs she posted. When he’d finished he switched off Evie’s computer and went for a run to try to clear his mind. So successfully had he done so that he’d forgotten about it by the time he got back, and it wasn’t until later on, when he heard her key in the lock, that he remembered what he’d done and realised he’d forgotten to clear his browsing history. He didn’t have a chance to cover his tracks before he left that evening but there was nothing he could do about it. He told himself it would be fine, she’d never check anyway, and he didn’t know what he was worrying about. But of course she did check, and she telephoned him a couple of hours after he’d gone to bed, saying he’d better get back over there and damn quick and explain himself.
He did as she asked and they had a furious row. Evie called him a stalker, saying he should make up his mind whether he loved her or her god-daughter, and couldn’t he at least have kept his nasty habits to his own bloody computer. He shouted back at her that she was insane, what did she mean, love her, he’d never said he loved her, he’d just given her what she wanted and it had only ever been about sex. She cried when he said that, and then, to his amazement, so did he. They opened a bottle of wine, and then another, and he told her almost everything then, about the emails he’d sent from Tucson, and about how Rachel had responded. Evie grilled him at first, asking him if he was sure he’d told her everything and what had he actually written to make her react like that? Anthony said he couldn’t remember exactly, it seemed like a long time ago now, but it definitely wasn’t as bad as Rachel had made out, and when he started to cry again Evie accepted what he’d said and consoled him, saying he shouldn’t take it so much to heart. She told him Rachel always had been a bit melodramatic, coming home from school in the holidays with pathetic little stories about being bullied, or teachers being unkind to her, that were clearly invented just to get some attention. Evie held him and let him cry some more, saying she knew he was growing away from her, and she knew it had only ever been about sex, and that it was coming to the point where their paths would stop crossing in the way that they had, and she understood that. But she said that he was her concern whether he liked it or not, and that she was worried about him, and that he had to find a way to sort himself out and work out why it was still happening. She said he should look at his life and see what a success he’d made of it, and he should just forget what had happened in Oxford, and that he’d achieved just as much as Rachel had but in different ways, and in different places, and he should let it go and make his own way in the world.
And when he tried to say it wasn’t really anything serious she told him she knew he’d browsed online for Rachel for more than two hours that morning and that someone would have to be properly insane to want to look at pictures of her god-daughter for that long and they laughed, the two of them, and he came out with it then, saying that he was jealous, and a little bit angry still. He told Evie that all he really wanted from Rachel was an apology for what had happened, and that that was all he’d ever really wanted when he was doing the same thing in Tucson. He simply wanted Rachel to tell him, face to face, that she understood what it meant to him to have lost the chances that she’d taken instead of him, and to agree that she was just as much to blame as he was for the events of that summer term. And he told Evie that he knew he’d never get them back, the opportunities he’d lost, and that he’d probably never be able to completely overcome the sense of shame he felt about it all, but if Rachel would only talk to him, and recognise the part she had played in him being sent down, it would somehow release himself from the hold that she had on him still.
Evie said then that she completely understood, and that she’d help him. By the following weekend she’d asked Rachel out for lunch and put it to her. She’d gone back to Anthony and said it had been an unmitigated disaster, that Rachel had stormed out of the restaurant having asked Evie whether she had any idea that it was a psychopath she was talking about, and did she have any idea what a fool she was making of herself hanging around with someone like Anthony Trelissick, and having told her that she’d go to the police about both of them if Evie brought it up again since she clearly didn’t realise what he was capable of. Evie asked him then whether he was absolutely sure he’d told her everything about the emails he’d sent, and when he said yes, and reminded her that she herself had called Rachel ‘melodramatic’, she said alright, of course, and she promised Anthony she’d try again, saying she’d had an idea about how to bring Rachel round. And though he never quite got to the bottom of what it was that Evie had done to persuade her, a day or so later she reported that Rachel was considering the idea, and that she’d agreed to come up with some terms and conditions for a meeting.
And so it was that Anthony found himself standing outside the British Library at eight o’clock one morning in mid-May, waiting with Evie for Rachel’s car to appear. She’d said that she would only meet Anthony if Evie was there as well, and that she’d pick them both up at that exact spot and take them somewhere of her choosing, and that they mustn’t be late since it was a red route. In the end it was Rachel who was late, by more than twenty minutes, so that by the time she’d arrived Evie had grown impatient and was at the espresso bar just along the road. She told Anthony later on that when she’d heard her mobile phone ring and had seen Rachel’s name come up at exactly the same time as she’d also heard the frantic hooting of a car horn, she’d known it wasn’t going to work. And she was right, leaving her coffee on the bar and running back along the road to find that Anthony was already sitting in the front seat and Rachel was very, very angry. She was so angry, in fact, about Evie not being there and about Anthony getting in the car and sitting right beside her, that as soon as Evie opened the back door and started to get in herself, she’d told them both to get straight out again and forget it. They did as she said and stood by the side of the road and watched as she pushed her way into the line of rush-hour traffic, jabbing at the horn in anger.
As Harry told me this part of Anthony’s story, sitting across the room from me on the last day of my visit, I’d reached into my jacket pocket and felt for the parking ticket that had been stuffed down the back of Rachel’s desk. It was still there where I’d put it when I rushed from my apartment to catch the train to Oxford, and as I heard Harry telling me about the events depicted in the photograph, I left it where it was, rubbing it between my fingers once or twice before taking my hand back out again and thinking to myself, not for the first time, that if only Rachel had been able to tell me any of it, I could have protected her.
By later on that evening, Anthony told Harry, Rachel had apologised to Evie and agreed to consider another meeting, but over the next few days she’d started to become evasive about the whole thing and Anthony had gone off the idea, telling Evie it was all a bit ridiculously cloak and dagger and they should just leave it. But having seen her in her car that morning, and for such a brief moment, he wanted to see her again, so he went to the library the very next day and looked out for her, and when she arrived he melted into the queue behind her and followed her to the reading room, standing back in the shadows and gazing at her while she worked. It had only been for about ten minutes, he said, the first time, and when she hadn’t so much as noticed him, he’d convinced himself it wouldn’t hurt to do it again a couple of days later, and then just once more after that. And of course it had become a habit, and one that was no trouble to him, finding it quite easy to convince his boss that he could just as well work from home in the mornings for the rest of the month, his diary being almost entirely empty of client meetings.
He said to Harry that by going to the library each day and watching her, he was simply building up the courage to speak to her, and he was comfortable there was nothing odd about his behaviour. He decided that he’d relied on Evie for long enough, and that he was perfectly capable of sorting it all out on his own, and that in any case he didn’t see that it was for Rachel to dictate the terms of their meeting. He had made what he described as a completely straightforward plan to approach her one day and just ask her to have coffee with him, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Catch her unawares, he said to Harry. Take her off guard, you know. And in a public place, where she couldn’t very well cause a scene. But then one morning, standing with his back against the furthest wall of the Rare Books and Music Room wondering if he should make his move, he’d scanned the room once or twice and back again and had found himself, to his amazement, looking at Harry. As he watched, almost unable to believe his eyes, he saw Rachel raise her head and smile at Harry, and he saw the two of them gather up their books and leave the reading room together.
He’d said nothing to Evie by that stage about having been to the library and it had been his intention to keep it that way, but when the following week he’d seen Harry sitting there again watching Rachel, he hadn’t been able to help himself and it had somehow slipped out over dinner that night, such was his fascination with the situation. ‘Harry bloody Gardner,’ he began, ‘would you believe it!’ and then he realised what he’d said, and of course he had to explain what he’d been doing in the library, and Evie and he had the same awful argument all over again.
‘And what did you decide to do this time,’ Harry asked him, ‘you and Evie?’
‘We decided we had to try again,’ Anthony said. ‘Of course we did. But however much we talked it through, and however many ways we found of looking at the situation, we kept coming up against the same problem.’
‘And which problem was that?’ Harry asked, sensing what was coming and hoping he was mistaken.
‘The problem we kept coming up against, Harry, the problem we couldn’t find a way round, no matter how hard we tried, was what we could do about Rachel.’
‘What do you mean, what you could do about Rachel?’
‘How we could bring her round, that’s what. How we could make her agree to meet me, and how we could get her to apologise.’
‘I see. And what did you decide, in the end?’
‘Ah,’ Anthony said, leaning across the kitchen table towards Harry, his face crinkling into its familiar half-smile, half-frown. ‘That, Harry, is where you come in. Or at least, I very much hope it is.’
And when Harry sat back in his chair and raised his glasses onto his forehead and crossed his arms Anthony stood and said, looking down at him, ‘You see, Harry, this is the thing. Evie and I need your help,’ and then he smiled his old lopsided smile. ‘We need you to make Rachel see things as we see them. We need you to make her change her mind.’
Harry was reluctant to get involved at first. Anthony said he’d completely understand if he turned them down, and that he more than anyone was aware that the whole thing was a little absurd, but he and Evie had decided it was worth a try, thinking it likely that Harry would be able to talk Rachel into some kind of meeting where they had failed. He spoke with a wheedling tone that morning in Judd Street, and Harry was bewildered by the constant switching from the fragile pleas of a man desperate for resolution, to an excessive and almost self-indulgent openness about matters that were extremely distasteful. It was obvious Anthony had suffered unduly for something that had not been entirely his fault and that, for whatever reason, his life was still being affected by it, but Harry knew that he couldn’t right a wrong, not at this stage, and that nobody could really help Anthony except himself.
It was thinking once more of Rachel that made him agree in the end. Thinking of Rachel, and of what she might stand to lose if he didn’t intervene. Despite Anthony’s assurances that he was over it, and that it was only because he’d seen Harry in the British Library that he’d thought it was worth one last try, Harry was disturbed by the things Anthony had told him, and deeply so. While he couldn’t see Anthony going through with his threats to expose Rachel’s plagiarism, and while no real damage would be done even if he did, not now, it was clearly desirable that such an outcome should be avoided. If a way could be found of helping him to move on sufficiently for him to fade once more from their lives, Harry could see no harm in trying to make it happen. Indeed, he considered himself duty-bound to do so, feeling an enormous degree of responsibility for how things had ended up: Anthony was right that Rachel’s career had not been disadvantaged by her long association with Harry, and he knew that if he and Haddon had only managed to get to the nub of the matter at the end of that summer term, everything might have turned out very differently for Anthony.
He decided in the end it was just a conversation that needed to take place between two adults about events that had happened a very long time ago, and it struck him on the train back to Oxford that it didn’t have to be any more complicated than that. The plan he devised was straightforward. He settled on the idea of a dinner in Oxford to which everyone could be invited and over which he would preside. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that this was, in fact, the only sensible solution. Sitting in a taxi up to his house on the Woodstock Road, he resolved to discuss things with Rachel when he was next in London. When he got into College the following morning he sent the briefest of notes to Anthony to that effect and a postcard to Rachel saying he’d be back in town on Monday, sooner than he’d expected, and if the weather was fine and she had the time, why didn’t they go for a stroll on the river? Unless he heard otherwise, he would wait for her in the British Library courtyard at noon.
‘Let’s see the Dalí,’ she said the minute they met, tugging at the sleeve of his jacket like a child, so that he felt the cruelty of what he was going to do. ‘It’s on at Tate Modern,’ she carried on, pulling at his sleeve again. ‘You’ll love it, I promise,’ and she started to walk away, only stopping when she realised he wasn’t following her.
‘What?’ she said, puzzled. ‘What is it? Come on. We’ll wander down to the river like you said. Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, Waterloo Bridge. It’ll be lovely. Come on Harry don’t be grumpy, it’s a completely gorgeous day,’ and she was pulling him across the courtyard and they were walking and because he couldn’t think how to begin he didn’t, letting her turn the conversation whichever way she wanted until they were on the bridge and had stopped to look at the views on either side.
‘I can never make up my mind which one I prefer,’ she said, turning first one way and then the other. ‘Never never never.’
‘St Paul’s,’ he said. ‘Surely.’ And then, realising he couldn’t leave it any longer, he began. ‘Rachel—’
‘But there are so many cranes always,’ she said, looking back that way. ‘I’m not sure they need as many as that, not all the time. Imagine if there weren’t any. It would be so beautiful wouldn’t it?’
‘Rachel—’
‘You’re right,’ she said, looking west again before saying, reluctantly, ‘I always think I ought to prefer this one. But isn’t it just too obvious? Big Ben. Isn’t it Harry?’ and she turned back to look at him. She swept her hair back from her face with both hands, squinting at him in the sunlight. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes, I’m alright, but there’s something I have to tell you, I’m afraid.’
‘What do you mean you’re afraid?’ she said. ‘Afraid of what?’ and she laughed. ‘Has someone died, Harry?’ and when he shook his head she laughed again. ‘Can’t be that awful then can it? Out with it, and stop looking so gloomy for goodness’ sake.’
‘I mean I’m afraid you might not want to hear it, that’s all,’ he said. ‘But there we are,’ and he took her arm in his and steered them both around to face the South Bank and started to walk with her across the rest of the bridge, not wanting to look her in the eye.
‘I have spoken with Anthony Trelissick,’ he said. She stopped walking immediately and he turned and saw her face set against the clouds that blocked out the sun towards Westminster and for a moment, he wished he hadn’t said anything after all.
‘Anthony Trelissick?’ she said, looking as though Harry had actually struck her. ‘Are you insane Harry? What the hell right do you think you have—’
‘Rachel. Please don’t be angry until you have heard what I have to say.’
‘Of course I’m bloody well angry, Harry. What’s going on? What’s bloody well going on?’
She stood there with her arms folded, staring wildly at him, and she was on the point of speaking again when he said, ‘Rachel. Reserve your judgement, please. At least until you’ve listened to me. I think you owe me that much, if nothing else.’
She looked amazed, but didn’t say a word, so he pressed on in the face of her silence. They started to walk again and he described how he had gone to Anthony’s flat. He said that he was only speaking to her about it because Anthony had asked him to, and then he began to tell her everything he’d learned while he was there.
She said nothing while he told his tale. It wasn’t until some time after he had finished that she spoke again, and even then she did it so quietly she was almost whispering. They’d reached the other side of the bridge and had walked down the steps and were standing by the railings in front of the National Theatre, looking out at the river. ‘Oh, Harry,’ she said, staring blankly at the water. Her eyes were open slightly wider than before, as though she were a sleepwalker, or had seen a ghost. ‘I am so sorry.’ And she half stumbled over to one of the benches behind them and sat down, wrapping her arms around herself and leaning forwards. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said again, and then she was silent, so he stood beside her and waited for her to carry on.
Eventually she sat back up. ‘I’m not sure you’ll ever know how grateful I am for the things you’ve done for me,’ and she shivered slightly, despite the sun that fell on her. ‘All of them. And I’m not sure you could ever imagine what it meant, to have your help when I did.’
She was crying now, choosing her words slowly and speaking so quietly that Harry had to sit down beside her on the bench and lean in towards her to hear properly. ‘And I don’t think I can even begin to explain myself, for the things I did. And for the way I was. I wouldn’t be able to. I’d have no idea how.’
‘Please, Rachel,’ he said, but she shook her head and carried on.
‘Will you forgive me, Harry? I mean, can you?’
‘Of course I can forgive you.’ She sighed and wiped her eyes, and he reached in his jacket pocket for his handkerchief. ‘But Rachel, really, it’s more important that we have what we do, the two of us. What we’ve built up, over the years. It was a long time ago, all of this. I do think you need to think about Anthony though,’ he said, holding out his handkerchief to her. ‘For fairness’s sake, if nothing else,’ and then he saw again a flash of the anger Anthony had described.
She pushed his outstretched hand away and stood from the bench. ‘Fairness! What has this got to do with fairness? He’s a psychopath, Harry. You think he told you everything? You really think he told you all the disgusting things he wrote in those emails? Do you?’ and people started to look at her and look away again, embarrassed.
‘Rachel. Come on. You’re upset. You’re not thinking clearly. Please sit down,’ and when she did, he carried on. ‘Anthony is a damaged man. And you had no small part to play in—’
‘Harry for god’s sake,’ she said, standing again. ‘We’re all damaged aren’t we? Even just a little bit? Christ. But we don’t all go around the place sending filthy stalker letters and behaving like some kind of nutter. Why didn’t you tell me you’d seen him watching me in the bloody library? Why?’
‘I didn’t think,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know. I couldn’t be sure it was him.’
But he could see that she wasn’t listening, and he watched her walk back over to the railings and lean against them, putting her head in her hands. When he went and stood beside her and placed a hand on her back, she shrugged it off straight away.
‘The past is the past, Rachel. And neither of us can rewrite it. But what we can do is try to make amends. That’s all he wants and that’s all I’m suggesting.’
‘An apology? Jesus. You really think that’s all he wants?’
‘I do, yes. And I think you’ll find that an apology can be a very powerful thing, in actual fact, for the person who has been wronged.’
Rachel laughed and shook her head and sighed, pushing herself away from the railings as he continued. ‘I’m sorry if you think I’ve gone too far already but, really, I’d be grateful if you’d look at things from my perspective. When he took me there that day and told me those things I had my entire understanding of a past turned upside down and inside out. So you will have to forgive me, Rachel, if you think that by listening to him I have betrayed some kind of trust. We are all capable of such errors of judgement, I think, as a betrayal of trust, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Fine. Emotional blackmail. I get it.’
‘Rachel. I’m not doing that. I am simply saying that I think we can find a way to resolve things, and I also happen to think it’s in your interest that we do so.’
She sighed again and they stood for a time in silence, looking out at the water. When a river taxi went past he tried to defuse things by asking her if she’d ever taken one and she said no, she preferred to walk. He said he hadn’t either, and when she asked him why not, he took advantage of the ground he seemed to have made and explained that he’d always suffered from terrible seasickness. He told her then about a day trip he’d taken once, as a child, with his parents and his cousins. The sea had been flat, he said. As flat as a saucer of milk. And still he’d been sick, which meant they’d all had to come back early. He hadn’t been on a boat again for years after that, he told her, and even then it was only one that was moored on the Thames for a party and it had happened all over again.
‘Dirty British coaster,’ Rachel said, suddenly, and he was puzzled until he looked and saw the tug that was shuddering past in front of them.
‘With a salt-caked smoke stack,’ he replied, finishing the line for her, glad that something seemed to have shifted, and that everything might be alright after all.
‘OK then, Harry,’ she said. ‘What exactly did you have in mind?’
‘Shall we walk again?’
‘Oh. Well if that’s all you’re after, no problem,’ she said, and he laughed a little at her joke, and as they made their way underneath the trees it was with the sound of seagulls wheeling that he set out his plan. She’d become distressed again once she’d heard it, almost immediately, and they’d argued quite heatedly as they walked, until he realised he wouldn’t be able to persuade her otherwise and they had come to a compromise.
She said that the conversation that had to happen was to be, as she understood it, between her and Anthony, and nobody else. Not Harry, and certainly not Evie. On this she was intractable: it was Anthony who was demanding the whole thing, and she’d already made her amends with Evie, some time ago now, and if Harry meant what he said about forgiving her, then she’d made them with him also. Evie and Harry were only involved because she and Anthony hadn’t managed to sort it out, and while she recognised it was very kind of them to help and that each of them had her and Anthony’s best interests at heart, there really was no need for them to listen to the actual conversation. He gave in to her arguments but insisted on retaining some of his original idea, saying why didn’t she and Alex finally come to dine on High Table, and why didn’t they do it on Midsummer Night? That way they could stay on and make a weekend of it, and she’d be able to fit in a meeting with Anthony while she was there.
She seemed reluctant at first, and when finally she agreed, it was almost as though she was doing so only because she’d used up all her energy in fighting her way out of a group reconciliation. ‘Alright,’ she said, ‘why not,’ and as they walked on further Harry asked her what she thought she would do about arranging the actual meeting, where it might take place and when. But she’d been evasive in her response, saying it didn’t really matter to him did it? She seemed to have accepted at face value his assurances that she was forgiven, and she told him, with her former self-confidence restored, ‘This is what will happen, Harry. Give me Anthony’s address and I’ll write to him and sort it out directly. Alex and I will come to dinner with you on the Thursday evening and we’ll all have a perfectly nice time. It will be good for Alex to meet you properly now we’re married, and then Anthony and I will meet at some point over the weekend. And that,’ she carried on, ‘will be that. But Harry,’ and she stopped walking and put her hand on his arm and looked at him and he saw there were tears forming in her eyes once more. ‘There’s absolutely no need for Alex to know about any of this. You must be quite clear about that, all of you. You see I love him, and he loves me, and none of this is relevant to him, and it would only hurt him if he found out. I haven’t had to tell him yet. And I don’t want to.’
By now the tears were running fast down her face; again he held out his handkerchief to her, and again she pushed it away.
‘He’s given me something I thought I’d never have, Harry. Never. He’s given me something uncomplicated, and loving, and he’s made me happy in a way I didn’t know was possible. So if you really are doing this for my benefit, I’d be grateful if you could leave him out of it. I’m not asking you for anything else, Harry. Not any more. Just this. Just do this one thing for me, Harry, please.’