21
WHEN HARRY TOLD me about the conversation he and Rachel had had that day on the riverbank, I knew then that whatever else I might come to discover about her didn’t matter, and that none of the things I’d learned so far mattered either. I was sure that she had loved me, and I had come to a better understanding of the ways in which she’d done so. As I stared into the fire thinking about her, and how desperately she had wanted to keep these things from me so that I wouldn’t be hurt by them, Harry made an observation about how, to his mind, mourning the absence of a person was a little like falling in love with them again. I realised he was talking about himself, rather than me, and of his own wife, rather than of Rachel. What he said next though made me think he might have been reading my thoughts, so strangely aligned was it with them.
‘I think what I mean is this, Alex,’ he said, interpreting my silence for a lack of understanding. ‘If you were to ask me to tell you about the ways in which we loved one another, I am not sure I would be able to, not really.’ And then he was silent, and I thought that was all he was going to say, but instead he continued, insistently, as though I had asked him a question he was determined to answer, however difficult it might be. ‘I think I would have to say, rather, that it was in the quiet unfolding of our lives that we did so, she and I. It was more, perhaps, a question of being understood.’ He was looking away from me then, speaking so quietly it was almost as if I wasn’t there in the room with him, and I realised he’d been asking himself this question and considering his answer to it for some time, and that he was going to tell me something of his deliberations whether I wanted him to or not.
‘She would let me board the train to London before her, whenever we took it together,’ he said, sighing. ‘She wouldn’t get on until she knew that I was settled. I always had to sit facing the direction we were travelling in, you see, regardless of how busy the carriages might be, or how long it might take me to find a place. Regardless of how many people I might annoy. She would hover on the platform, moving along the outside of the train as I moved along its inside, until she was sure I had taken my seat, and then she would come and find a place as near to me as possible. It didn’t much matter if we couldn’t sit exactly side by side, you see. It mattered more to her that I was not out of sorts at the beginning of a journey. I asked her once if she minded the whole rigmarole and she said that she didn’t. I wasn’t sure whether to believe her,’ he said, smiling at the thought. ‘And then one day I saw her through the window of the train. Just when I’d found my place, and had asked someone to move all of their bags even though there were two seats opposite that were free where I could quite easily have sat. I looked through the window to wave to her that she could come in and I saw her standing there on the platform. I saw her before she could see me, that was the thing. Because her lips were moving I thought perhaps she was engaged in a conversation but I could see no one near her, and then I realised she was talking to herself. And when she raised her eyebrows and put her hands on her hips and heaved out a great sigh I realised she was fuming, Alex, do you see, quite literally fuming with frustration.’ And then he paused again, as though he was waiting for me to respond, but I could think of nothing to say. ‘I suppose,’ he carried on, eventually, ‘that was one of the ways in which I knew that she loved me. The fact that she lied to me like that, and pretended it didn’t bother her in the slightest, that ridiculous little habit of mine. She never said, not once. And now there is no one to do that for me, when I take the train to London. There is nobody there to pretend they do not mind my absurdities, great and small.’
We both of us sat quietly then, looking into the fire. I thought Harry might ask me to tell him something in return of the ways in which Rachel and I had loved one another but he didn’t, and I’m not sure I would have done even if he’d asked. But I did think to myself that I might have described for him how I would wake sometimes in the mornings to find her looking at me. She would smile, and I would see in her eyes something like relief, and she would say, ‘Where were you, Alex? Where have you been in your dreaming?’ And then, when I folded her into me and closed my eyes again she would say ‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. You’re back you’re back wherever you’ve been,’ and she would fall asleep again herself, tight in my arms, sometimes for so long I would have to wake her and when I did she would say, as though it had been me that had been keeping us there, ‘Let’s get up, let’s do something. Now, this minute before the day is gone,’ and so we would.
Sometimes though she would change her mind and we would stay where we were and make love, sleepily, and I would bring breakfast back to bed and draw the panels across, both the ones in the bedroom wall and the outer glass itself, so that there was no distinction between the outside and the in, and we would sit, and eat, and talk about all the things we might do together later on. Afterwards we would put the breakfast things on the floor and lie back down again and talk some more, sometimes for hours, the duvet pulled up under our chins and the two of us resting back on piles of pillows, nestling against one another. ‘Like a couple of stowaways huddling together for warmth,’ she’d said one Saturday in late October as she lay with her head resting in the crook of my arm and the length of her stretched out alongside me, and the air was cold and there was a breeze so strong it lifted things from surfaces and rattled at the lampshades so that the whole of the room was moving and we seemed to be the only still things in it.
On some of those mornings we talked of serious things and secret hopes, and on other mornings we talked of nothing very important at all, simply sharing some of the thousands of inconsequential fleeting thoughts that go to make up what might be called a consciousness. She spoke rarely of the past, not in any lingering fashion, and she volunteered nothing of what Harry had told me, nor anything about her childhood. ‘Had we but world enough, and time,’ was all she would say when I asked her once about what it had been like to grow up with Evie, and why there was so much tension between them. And nor would she tell me that morning what she meant by the phrase she had used, or where it came from, just turning away and lying on her side. Eventually I turned and lay that way also and said I was sorry for asking and she turned back and smiled at me and I no more understood that smile than I understood what she’d said; it was a smile that shut me out, one that invited no further questions.
I had learned something of the language of smiles from my mother. She’d sat me down at the beginning of one of my first holidays home from school and told me that she’d made up names for all of her smiles, in the way that one might have names for tempests out at sea or for winds across a desert. She taught me these names, one after another, showing me the smiles that went with them and waiting until I understood each one, and what it would mean about the way she was feeling were I to see it on her face. She said she was teaching me them so that when I came home from school in the holidays I would be able to read her more easily. Like a book, she said, so that our absences from one another would hardly matter. She told me that if I tried ever so hard to remember, we would be able to rub along together like stones on a river bed, she and I, despite those separations we’d had to endure. And when it came to the end for her, years later, I remembered them still, so that it didn’t matter when she had no energy to speak at the last: I sat by her bedside holding her hand and when she smiled at me, I knew what she was trying to tell me and I told her the same thing back.
I came to learn Rachel’s smiles also. The one I loved the most, or at least, the one that it made me happiest to see, was one that she smiled more often than the one I’d come to think of as her ‘cease and desist’ smile, but still no more than occasionally, and even then it was only ever by accident that she did so. There was a sweetness in it that sometimes stayed for days, and when I saw it there I knew it meant that she had, for a time, decided to believe me when I said I loved her. ‘Despite everything, Alex?’ she would say, frowning. ‘Despite absolutely everything?’
‘Despite what?’ I would reply, completely at a loss to know what she was talking about. ‘Despite everything what?’ and I would laugh, and she would smile that smile and come forward and kiss me and say, ‘It doesn’t matter, Alex. It doesn’t matter what. I know you do really. I know that you really do.’
I suppose it came to be a way we had between us, Rachel and I, of talking so rarely of the past. She intruded infrequently upon my own, although I think I would have become happier, in time, to speak of it, if she had lived. I did try to tell her about Robbie once, on one of the weekend mornings when we lingered in bed, but I’m not sure I was very successful in my attempt. We’d eaten some fruit, and drunk some coffee, and then we lay back down again, and she reached over and took my hand, placing it on her chest and closing her eyes. I watched her chest gently rise and gently fall, and watched my hand move with it, and neither of us said anything for a while until she moved again, wriggling around a bit and making herself comfortable, curling her head against my neck once, and then into my shoulder and away again, pulling my arm out from underneath her back and resting my hand on her chest again, like it had been before. And then she said, ‘Tell me something,’ and I said, ‘What?’ and she said, ‘Anything. Anything at all.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Really, Alex, anything,’ she said. ‘Just something. Tell me a story. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me something you’ve never told me before.’
And that was when, without intending to, and without knowing quite why I was doing so, I found myself starting to tell her about Robbie and me, and about our accident and about what had happened afterwards. I told her everything, slowly and particularly, and in a way that I had never told anyone before, not even when I was away at school and we all swapped stories about our fathers after lights out. That morning, as I talked on and on in our bed, Rachel said nothing, not a word, and I think I had a sense that the fact she was listening so carefully meant she didn’t mind me telling her, and that she wasn’t going to judge me. And so I carried on, and on, and told her everything there was to tell.
After I’d finished, still she said nothing, and I saw that my hand was rising and falling on her chest with a regularity that meant her breathing had settled into the rhythm of sleep. I don’t think I minded terribly at first. In fact I don’t think I minded at all until later on that afternoon, when she had gone out and I was standing in the kitchen making some tea, alone, and the thought occurred to me that she had in all probability fallen asleep as soon as I’d started to speak, and that this momentous occasion, the occasion on which I had finally told somebody the biggest secret I had ever kept, had gone entirely unwitnessed, so that my story remained unknown by anyone but me.
But Harry asked me about none of these things, and so I stayed silent until, soon enough, he carried on from where he’d left off. Soon after his meeting with Rachel on the South Bank Anthony had called briefly to say that he’d got Rachel’s letter and everything had been arranged, but when Harry asked him what exactly the plan was, he’d been cagey at first, and then suddenly said he had to go. He told Harry not to worry, it’d all be fine, and he thanked him again for his help and the line went dead and he was gone. Rachel had been just as reluctant to tell Harry what was actually going to happen, and this vagueness as to the precise arrangements for their meeting had concerned Harry on three counts. He was slightly uncertain as to whether to trust her to go through with her promise to meet Anthony. And he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of Anthony coming into contact with Rachel again, in that he still had some lingering doubts about what he referred to as Anthony’s ‘hold on reality’, and his tendency, on occasions, to resort to violence as a way of expressing his feelings. And third, he said, there was Anthony’s own indecision and general unreliability. Despite all they’d done to bring about the meeting, it had failed once before, and might fail again, and Anthony himself might be the cause of that if he decided at the last minute not to show up, rendering the whole exercise redundant and leaving Rachel exposed still to the threat of whatever he might choose to do in the future in terms of embarrassing her professionally.
He had woken one morning in a panic, remembering Rachel’s outburst on the South Bank about Anthony and wondering whether she really had been overreacting, as he’d thought she was, or whether he should have taken her more seriously. In an attempt to allay his concerns on all of the points that were worrying him, and having no one else to turn to, he telephoned Evie a day or so later and they met to talk things through. He told me that although the meeting had been fine, he’d come away with a sense that he’d failed, somehow, to communicate to her the precise nature of his reservations. She’d been pretty savage with him when he attempted it, calling him a fool and saying that he always had been a little precious about Rachel, and a little unbalanced in his assessment of her abilities, which were, when it came down to it, no more remarkable than anyone else’s in her field, and didn’t he know that she was married to a Worcester lawyer now and wasn’t it time he stopped following her around like a puppy? Anthony just wanted Rachel to say sorry, Evie said, that was all. He’d got over his crush on her years ago, it wasn’t about that any more, there was nothing malign in his fascination. He was a perfectly normal human being, she said. ‘I mean, Harry, he works in IT for goodness’ sake!’ she said. ‘How much more normal can you get?’ He was just aggrieved, she said, and whilst she had to agree that he had, in the past, occasionally let that sense of grievance get the better of him, it was all over now, couldn’t Harry see that? Harry tried to explain to Evie that his concerns lacked the specificity with which she was imputing them, and that it was just that there had been something about the way Anthony was that day in Judd Street, something slightly peculiar in the light behind his eyes. But when it became apparent that Evie would give him no quarter, he’d let it drop.
And then he raised the question of whether one of them might lose heart at the last and falter in their resolve, leaving them no further on than they were already, and he suggested that his and Evie’s presence might, on that score, be no bad thing. Evie told him he was being over the top, but she caved in in the end, looking in her diary and saying that she was due to take a visit to the collection at the Ashmolean, and she might as well do it that weekend as any other, and there would be bound to be some kind of fund-raiser on the Thursday she could get involved in as a cover story so Rachel didn’t get uptight about her being there. She couldn’t promise anything, not in any definite way, but she’d do her best. Harry thanked her, and suggested they kept in fairly close contact over the weekend, and could he have her mobile number?
In the end, he found that he was able to set his reservations on one side. In addition to Evie’s opinion, there was his own assessment of Anthony, whose story he had, after all, heard first hand, and there was also the fact that he was in a position to be able to maintain a greater degree of objectivity about the situation than Rachel was, being less caught up in it than her. And so it was that the plan had been laid, and Rachel and I had driven to Oxford on the afternoon of Thursday 21 June at about the same time that Anthony and Evie would have been making an identical journey. And so it was also that I was the only one of our number who was entirely ignorant of what lay ahead.
Harry said that it was at about two o’clock on that Thursday afternoon that Anthony had telephoned him again. He was in his rooms when the call came, sorting through some examination papers. It sounded from the background noise as though Anthony was calling on his mobile, but when Harry heard a series of beeps and the line went dead, he realised he was using a payphone. When Anthony called back a moment later, he told Harry straight away that he was due to meet Rachel at midnight, down by the side of the lake.
‘She said I had no choice. Take it or leave it. So I took it.’
‘But why there? And why then?’
‘She doesn’t want Petersen to know, that’s why. Stick to each other like limpets, those two. She’s just going to run down and see me and yeah, I mean that’s fine with me. I mean, it’s happening isn’t it. That’s what matters. He won’t know anything if we do it like this, she can just leave him for five minutes or something and we can talk.’
‘By the lake?’ Harry said. ‘Can you not meet in town tomorrow or something? Isn’t that a slightly unorthodox way—’
‘That’s Rachel for you, Harry. Anyhow, it’s fine. Actually I quite like it. Just like old times eh?’
‘And what about Evie?’ Harry asked. ‘Have you told Evie what you’re doing?’
‘No I haven’t. And no I’m not going to. Why should I?’
‘Why shouldn’t you?
‘She’s given me so much grief about the whole thing, Harry. She’s already fed me a pile of bullshit about some fund-raiser she’s going to at the museum so she’s just coincidentally going to be in Oxford. I mean, I know she hates those things. She’s always complaining about them. It’s such a lame excuse. She just wants to be hanging around finding out what’s going on. She’s giving me a lift, that’s alright, but that’s as far as it goes. She’ll just have to live with it, I’m not getting into that. I wasn’t going to tell you either but I thought Rachel would have told you anyway and, well, you know, I’m grateful. I mean, thank you. I’m glad it’s happening.’
‘Of course,’ Harry said. ‘Of course. You are welcome. I just hope it will bring about a resolution to things, I really do.’
And Anthony laughed and said he was sure it would work out, one way or another, and then suddenly he said he had to go. Just before he did, Harry said he’d appreciate a chat in the next day or so, just so he knew how it had gone, and they agreed to meet in his college rooms the following morning for coffee.
Harry carried on with his story, reminding me that he had invited Rachel and me to his rooms for 6.15 so that we could leave our things there and borrow a spare gown or two if we hadn’t brought our own, and have a glass of wine with him before going over to drinks in the Old Bursary. I remembered as he spoke that neither of us had had coats that summer night, and there was only Rachel’s bag in the end, and that she’d insisted on taking it to dinner with her, and had still had it with her when she’d gone down to the lake, and the police had never been able to find it.
At about five o’clock, Harry said, just as he was getting out some wine glasses and checking the Chablis was in the fridge, he decided he ought to let Evie know what was going on, having told her that he would. He didn’t see why Anthony’s reluctance to communicate with her should prevent him from doing so, and he felt at that moment that he needed her support. He tried her mobile but it went straight to voicemail, and looking at the clock he realised that there was just enough time for him to walk over to the Ashmolean and see if he could find her in her department. He sat at his desk and wrote her a note, passing on exactly what Anthony had told him, intending to leave it with her secretary if she wasn’t in her office when he got there.
He added a bit more to the note, writing that he hoped Evie would be able to slip away from the fund-raiser before it was over, and why didn’t she come into College and wander down in the direction of the lake at about that time, just to keep an eye on them. He’d written a postscript giving her directions for the secret garden and telling her that Haddon was definitely coming to dine on High Table and wouldn’t be in his cottage, and why didn’t she slip into the secret garden for about half past eleven? Haddon never locked his door when he was at dinner, Harry wrote, and he always stayed late at coffee afterwards, so she could easily hide herself away to watch from there and slip back out of College again without anyone knowing. He told her he intended to pop up to the Old Library after dinner and watch the events unfold from up there, so he’d give her a quick call on her mobile once he’d seen Rachel setting off towards the lake. He walked over to the Ashmolean but he hadn’t been able to find Evie, so he’d pushed the note under her door, almost certain she’d leave her things in there before the fund-raiser.
By about ten past six he was waiting in his rooms for us to arrive when he had a last-minute panic about whether she would actually get the note, and he tried her mobile again. It was switched on this time but it rang and rang and he heard us coming up the staircase and there we were, trying on gowns for size, and he was pouring us our Chablis and the evening had begun. There wasn’t the opportunity for him to talk to Rachel in private, and he didn’t dare raise the subject in my hearing after what she’d made him promise on the South Bank. It was odd that evening over dinner, he said, picking up little signs in her behaviour that might have given her away had Anthony not already told him what had been arranged. She was excited somehow, even a little nervous, and Harry saw her looking at her watch again and again and checking her mobile under the table on more than one occasion. He noticed also her insistence that she had to take her bag with her to dinner, rather than leave it in his rooms, and he could only think that this had something to do with what was inside, something he’d discovered by accident when we’d arrived and he’d taken it through to his side room only to drop it and see the little book of Browning fall out.
Everything went as planned, he said, when he managed after dinner to go up to the Old Library without our realising. We’d said our goodbyes and he told us he had to go back to his rooms for something. As soon as our backs were turned, he slipped up the spiral staircase. He was half sure at that point that Rachel would waver, it having seemed that we’d been about to let ourselves out of College, but a few minutes later, standing by the window, he saw her walking down the side of the quad. He pulled his phone from his pocket to call Evie only to find that there wasn’t a signal in the Old Library. He knew it wasn’t essential, but all the same, he was annoyed at finding himself confronted by this little problem, and so he did the first thing that came into his head and picked up the lamp from the table in front of him and switched it on and off a couple of times, thinking that Evie might be looking up towards the library windows. There was no way someone that far away would actually have been able to see him flashing the lamp, but he did it anyway, for his own satisfaction.
He was amazed when he saw a light flashing in response from somewhere in the direction of the secret garden, although it looked to be coming from slightly beyond that point and further towards the lake. And he was even more amazed a moment or two later to see a second light, closer this time, flashing in what he thought must be the secret garden. He was confused then, and a little scared, until he realised that the first light must have been some kind of trick played on him by his own eyes, caused by nothing other than a reflection of his own lamp in the glass he stood in front of, and that the second light must have been Evie after all.
Just after the lights stopped flashing, Harry saw the porter emerge from the alcove beneath the library. He watched him stand on the quad’s north terrace looking about himself for a moment or two and glancing up at the clock before carrying on along the terrace, disappearing into staircase number 6 and embarking on his night-time rounds. Everything seemed now to be going ahead in the way Harry had hoped it would and it was with a slight sense of relief that he walked back down the spiral staircase, thinking that it would all be over and done with before too long. Having passed me sitting in the shadows where I had dozed off while waiting for Rachel, he’d walked out on to the terrace and headed towards his rooms to fetch his things, intending to watch from his window for Rachel coming back up from the lake. And that, of course, was the moment that he heard her scream and he knew that something had gone wrong after all and that she and Anthony must be having some kind of a fight. He found himself frozen to the spot with the shock of it, absolutely unable to move, or even to think, and then he saw me running and stumbling down the steps and he turned his head slightly to see the figure, who he realised must be Evie, running up the quad and passing me on the steps and disappearing towards the entrance to the college, the whole thing taking no more than a minute at most.
When Harry felt the sensation of strength coming back into his legs, he stumbled back along the terrace and went straight to the lodge to report what he’d seen and to tell the porter that there was something going on down by the lake. But when he got there he found the place empty. Then he remembered seeing the porter setting off on his rounds and realised that he would have heard the scream as well and would have run to see what was going on. He felt certain that between the two of us, the porter and I would have been able to break up the fight, or whatever it was that was happening. He thought of what Haddon had told him about Anthony attacking Cissy on the night of the Ball and he was concerned, not being at all confident that Rachel would share Cissy’s aptitude for self-defence. But at no stage did he actually think that anything serious could have happened, given that I would have reached her so quickly and would have been able to intervene.
At that point, Harry told me, he realised he had a number of options. He could either go down to the lake and see what he could do to help, or he could go back to his rooms and watch from his window, or he could simply go home and wait. He was annoyed with Evie for having run off like that, since she must have known he’d want to talk to her and find out what she’d seen. And he was rueful about the fact that things seemed to have gone wrong, feeling for Rachel and knowing she’d have had an awful lot of explaining to do when I’d got there and broken up whatever was happening. In the end, concluding that he would be of no use to anybody if he stayed, he decided to go home, so exhausted that he was barely able to put one foot in front of the other as he walked over to Gloucester Green to find a taxi, trying Evie’s phone one more time only to hear it ring and ring again.
That was his understanding of events when finally he managed to drift off to sleep that night, hoping he’d be able to make more sense of things in the morning. He felt so tired that he set his alarm a little later than usual, but he’d only been asleep for a few hours when he was woken by the sound of a loud and repeated banging and his bell being rung over and over. He fell from his bed and wrapped his dressing gown around him and staggered across to his bedroom window and when he looked out and saw the police car that was parked in his drive he knew that Rachel had been hurt. There was a pain behind his eyes suddenly, as though the brightest of lights was being shone in them, and his stomach felt as though it was dropping to the floor, all in a piece. As he walked slowly from his bedroom and made his way down the stairs he realised that he had to make up his mind what he would and wouldn’t say in the statement he was about to give, and that in so deciding, he would be formulating a version of events that he would have to stick to for good, whatever happened.
He couldn’t understand why the officers wouldn’t tell him exactly what had happened to Rachel. When he asked, they would say only that she’d been involved in an incident, and when he asked again, they said nothing. And so he began, resolving as he answered the first of their questions that he’d give them only the barest of facts as they might have presented themselves to him had he actually known nothing of Rachel’s plan to meet Anthony beside the lake, or of Evie’s presence in the secret garden, or any of the details of the histories the four of them shared. He closed his eyes slightly against the brightness of the lights in his kitchen and tried to imagine it was me he was talking to, rather than the tape recorder the police had brought with them, and that he was choosing his words as carefully as he was only in order to keep the promise he’d made to Rachel that I should know nothing of what had passed between her and Anthony, rather than through any desire to mislead. And he said that of course, at that stage, he had no reason to think that Rachel had come to any serious harm, supposing instead that she and Anthony had had, at the worst, some sort of a fight.
It is difficult to portray with any accuracy how I felt as Harry described the little ways in which he’d attempted to justify his decisions. It was revulsion, I think, that I sensed most strongly in myself; a revulsion born of anger, and shock, and dismay, and sadness. And those things seared through me almost physically, so that once or twice the room seemed to swim about us and there was a moment when Harry’s words became distorted, as though I was listening to him underwater, his voice booming and warped and looping in my head before everything settled again and his speech returned to normal and I heard him saying he’d had little difficulty in giving his statement, in that the police were just asking a series of straightforward questions, and it struck me then that he had no idea at all of the impact that his words were having on me, so wrapped up was he in this narrative he had constructed, and so intent was he on the telling of it, having found at last a listener.
He continued to describe, coldly and calmly, the night he’d spent sitting in his kitchen committing perjury, and he finished by telling me that because they’d accepted his answers so readily, he’d become quite comfortable by the end of it and offered them a cup of tea, saying they must be even more exhausted than he was. They said no thank you though, and when he saw one of them making a note of the fact he’d offered, it occurred to him he probably shouldn’t have done.
Where the giving of that initial statement had been easy enough, he said, the interview he’d been required to attend later that morning had been a more difficult affair altogether. A couple of officers had called at his house at about eight o’clock and asked him to come down to the station, saying it wouldn’t take long, they just had a few routine questions. And it was on the way there that they had announced, almost in passing, that Rachel had been murdered.