23
I HAD WALKED halfway down the stairs when I felt suddenly dizzy. I fell forwards, grabbing on to the rail and sitting down as quickly as I could, thinking I was about to faint. I felt none of the things one might have expected me to feel on leaving Harry’s room that day. I remember wanting to weep as I sat there, or at least thinking that was what I ought to be doing, and that perhaps I should even be crying in the way I did from time to time as a boy, heaving out sobs so great that I’d often wondered in my childish way whether it was possible to drown myself with my own tears.
Instead I felt only a kind of numbness, and when I realised after a while that my dizziness had passed, I stood and walked back to my room and climbed fully clothed under the covers of my bed. A few hours later I woke suddenly from a dream. My shirt was soaked with sweat and my skin was running with it, and I was hot and cold at the same time and the room was swimming around me. I got up, and undressed, rubbing myself dry with a towel before taking the last of the clean things that were left in my bag and putting them on.
I had been dreaming of my mother, and it struck me as I stood beside the window, looking out across the lawns, that it was the first time I had dreamed of someone other than Rachel since the night of her murder. The dream was one that recurred frequently after my mother died and I went to Oxford and had only my father to stay with during the holidays. In the dream I am floating in the air, completely enclosed in a bubble. The bubble is somehow flimsy, and soft, and not quite transparent but clear enough for me to be able to see through it. And I notice that there is another bubble floating next to my own, made of the same material but slightly bigger than mine. I become aware that there is someone inside it, and as I press my face against the fabric I see that it is my mother, and at that moment she sees me also, and we reach out our hands towards one another as we float, but we cannot touch one another, and although we try again and again, it isn’t possible and we drift away from one another and I call out to her but then she is gone and I am alone and it is as though she was never there.
I put all of my things in my bag and look around the room to make sure I have left nothing and I go straight over to Harry’s rooms for half past three. I stand and wait for some time before I see the note that is tucked between the door and the frame. It is addressed to me, from Harry, and it says that he has gone for a walk and why don’t I meet him beside the lake instead; there is something he would like to show me. I walk back down his staircase and I stop at the spot on the terrace where he said he’d stood and watched me stumbling down the steps on the night of Rachel’s murder. I look up towards the Old Library windows, and back at the quad, and I see that the snow has begun to melt much faster now and that large swathes of green are beginning to show through where the sun has fallen on it, and I wonder why Harry wants to meet me by the lake rather than in his rooms. And at about that moment, a thought that has been formulating itself in a tentative kind of a way throughout the whole of my visit, the seed of which was perhaps planted when Harry sent me the little book of Browning, crystallises into something firmer, and I feel as though someone has shaken me, hard, on the shoulder, or clapped me on the back.
Of course, the fact that Harry himself is the only authority for any of the information that he has given to me was something of which I was aware from the start of his tale, when he sat by the fire and told me that what he was about to relate was a version of events, and nothing more. But such was my absorption, and such was my desire to hear an ending, that I think I paid less attention than I might have done to the fact that so many of the things he said were based on untruths, or on fabrications of his own or others’ making. As Harry said to me himself, there was always a reason for the lies that he told. He had to say that he was going to London for the day to make sure I wasn’t around to find him searching in vain for the old gate I had reminded him of, but as I stand there I remember the ease with which he had glossed over exactly what he’d done with himself that day, diverting my attention by showing me the photograph of his boyhood self in Trafalgar Square. And then I recall him saying how simple it had been, really, to lie his way through his police interviews and to continue to do so in the months that followed Rachel’s death, and I remember also the seeming glibness with which he confessed his dishonesty to me at the close of his story, and I wonder, just for the briefest of moments, whether it is entirely wise of me to go in the growing gloom of a winter’s afternoon, at a time when the college has become almost entirely empty, to meet Harry at the place where Rachel was killed. He put to me his theory that Anthony and Evie were in College that night, but the fact remains that if they weren’t, then the only other person who could have killed Rachel is Harry himself. He told me he had forgiven Rachel, and that he had come to understand her behaviour, but he told me also how angry he’d felt when he found out the extent to which she had manipulated him. And although he said his anger had passed, it can’t have done completely; there must also have been bitterness in him still, even just a little, knowing that she’d kept so much from him that was known to others, and that she had done so despite the constancy of his kindness.
I begin my walk across the quad towards the passageway beneath the secret garden, making my way towards the lake, and I think about the insistence with which he had presented himself as forever the fable’s innocent bystander: gazing at Rachel as she worked in the British Library; watching from the library windows; standing on the terrace; loitering on the pavement outside Anthony’s flat hoping for a glimpse of him, and following the reconstructions of the night of the murder from where he sat in his college rooms above the quad. And I reflect on how much at odds this is with what seems actually to be the case: not only did Harry take a leading role in the drama he has produced for me, but he also stood beside the camera from time to time with his megaphone, directing the spectacle we were all of us taking part in.
And then I emerge from the passageway, onto the lawns, and I see him. He is waiting beside the lake with his back towards me, looking out across the water. I walk over to where he is and I stand behind him for a while, keeping as still as I am able to, until finally he becomes aware that I am there and he turns and I am staring at him and he is staring at me and I realise we are both thinking exactly the same thing: each of us is wondering whether the other is a man capable of murder.
I smile at him, and shake my head, and he smiles at me, and neither of us says a word.
A minute or two passes with us standing there like this, each in a silent way, and then he shifts his posture slightly, pointing at the stump of the tree we are next to. I look at it, puzzled, and then I remember that it was once a gently spreading holm oak, and that Richard and I would sit beneath it sometimes at the weekends to read the paper together and skim stones across the lake. Harry leans into it, patting its trunk with his hand and rubbing it as though it were the flank of a horse, and he tells me that it had to be felled last year, when it was found to be rotten at its core.
The light is fading, and there is the soft sound of a woodpigeon in the trees on the other side of the lake, and Harry bends down towards the ground as if to pick something up and I am once more suddenly, foolishly, afraid, but then I realise he is pointing at something in particular, gesturing to me to bend over also and look at the base of the stump. It seems easier, clad as I am in my winter coat and boots, to kneel on the ground, and so I do and with Harry standing over me, I try to work out what it is that he wants me to see. There appears to be nothing to look at other than snow, until Harry steps forward and brushes some of it away to reveal a tiny plaque with something engraved on it and I read the words, ‘Rachel’s Worcester’, and I shiver slightly against the cold. As I stand back up I notice that a rose has been planted at the base of this broken holm oak, and that it has sent three shoots up around the trunk, trailing itself about. I turn to Harry and he smiles again, and I see that there is a tear running slowly down his cheek. He tells me then that it is an old rose, and that it was found the previous summer in the Provost’s garden. He did some research and discovered that it was a variety that had not yet been named, and so it was that the Provost had asked him to choose one. That, he said, was how he came to name it after Rachel, and that was why it was planted beside the lake, so that in the summer months this silent piece of tree will become busy with bees, and clad about with flowers also.
We are both quiet then, and when it seems there is nothing else to be said, I take his hand in mine and I thank him, telling him I will think about the things he has spoken of and I will write to him. I walk back across the lawns to collect my things and start my journey home. I look back only once, just as I reach the top of the lawns, and I see that he is standing exactly where I left him, his hands in his pockets and his hat pulled low on his head, looking out across the water into the evening that is falling all about him.