3
HAD I KNOWN that night beside the lake that I would never see Rachel again, I would have struggled more than I did. Fought, even, to break free of the man who was restraining me; to run to her and lie down beside her and hold her and burrow my face into her neck. These are some of the things I want to do now and can’t. It simply didn’t occur to me that we would not at some point be reunited. I don’t mean that I thought in any coherent or logical sense that we would be together again. I knew, to the extent I knew anything clearly that night, or in the weeks that followed, that she was dead. But I had no idea of the finality represented by the fence that was put up around her in the minutes before I was led across the lawns and driven away.
It was Godmother Evie who identified Rachel’s body the next morning, while I was in custody, and much later on, when the police had finished with her, I allowed myself in my grief to be persuaded that it wouldn’t help me to see her. They had tried to put her back together again, they said, but the injuries she had sustained and the work they had had to do on her head meant that she was no longer herself.
I looked back just once as we walked towards the college gates, the policeman and I. The whole area had been cordoned off with tape sweeping wide around the tree and forming a barrier across the path up from the lake. More people had arrived and yet more were walking down towards the cordon carrying bags, floodlights, ladders even. A line of figures dressed in white boiler suits was strung out across the lawns and moved as one, each of them waving a torch back and forth across the grass in front of them as they went so that they looked like some sort of alien landing craft newly come to earth. I could see the porter standing under the tree and talking to the policeman who had stayed behind with Rachel. He sat on the ground and put his head in his hands and the policeman sat down beside him. I know now the story that he started to tell. I have been told by my lawyer, and in some cases, by the authors themselves, all of the stories of all of the people who were there that night. I know something also of the tales told by the cameras at the college doors and across the road; by the blood on my clothes; by the stone that was found beside the lake with tiny pieces of Rachel’s skin still stuck to it. In some places they fit with one another, these stories, and with my own, but in other places they do not.
As for the porter’s tale, he’d been puzzled not to have seen us on his tiny TV screen leaving the college. He’d heard us standing outside his lodge saying our last goodbyes to Harry and thanking him for dinner and telling him we’d always wondered what it was like to dine on High Table and now we knew, and how kind he was and how good the food and the wine and the company and how glad we were to have been invited back. So he’d decided to go on his rounds a little early, just to make sure we hadn’t slipped in again.
I remember that when we’d arrived that evening for dinner and reported in at the lodge and signed the Old Members’ Visitors Book he’d asked us whether we’d be staying the night and when we told him we weren’t he said, ‘Well then, you’ll be gone by midnight please. No creeping around or I shall have to ask you to leave. Old members do that sometimes,’ he carried on. ‘They come over all nostalgic and think they can linger and no one will mind letting them out at three in the morning when they remember they have to go to work the next day and realise they’d rather be sleeping in a bed than on the grass.’ He told us he’d found them down by the lake more often than he’d like, reliving their student days. Had to get quite shirty with some of them once, throw them out more or less. ‘Of course,’ we promised, and we laughed, and I really believed that was a promise we would keep, Rachel and I.
He told the police that when it came to it he’d thought he ought to check, just to be sure, especially since he hadn’t actually seen us leave. And it seems that as he set off from his lodge and turned from the alcove before walking to the right, past the chapel doors and on towards the terrace forming the north face of the quad, he hadn’t seen me sitting in the shadows of the library staircase, waiting for Rachel to come back.
‘Actually, can you wait just a moment?’, she had said suddenly, placing her hand on my arm as I was about to duck out through the little wicket door on to Beaumont Street so that we could walk back to our hotel and I could take her to bed, which was what I’d been wanting to do all evening. ‘I’m going to run down to the lake before we leave. I want to see it in the moonlight. No, please don’t come. Wait here for me. I always used to love that, walking past it at night on my own.’ We discuss it for a few minutes, almost arguing I suppose. I say that she didn’t always do it on her own, that we walked there together once and doesn’t she remember, and why can’t we do it again, like we did that summer night, but of course she goes, and I’m left looking at the notice boards and remembering doing exactly this over a decade ago: standing around on my own after the Buttery bar had closed, wishing I was in bed with Rachel. When I have read all the notices, twice, I realise how tired I am. I turn around and see through the doorway immediately opposite the porter’s lodge the staircase spiralling up to the Old Library that overlooks the quad. I slip into the shadows and sit on the coldness of the stone, leaning against the banisters. I put my head in my hands and, having drunk too much over dinner, I doze off almost immediately.
It seems from the porter’s story that by the time I woke with a jolt and looked around me, feeling puzzled as to why Rachel hadn’t come back yet, and wondering why she wanted to do this thing alone, he had already trodden his path through the orchards, on past the student blocks that sit at the northern edge of the lake, and was starting to swing back round again, making for the lodge. I see myself standing up slowly and stretching my arms above my head, yawning, hoping she hasn’t walked straight past and gone back to the hotel on her own thinking I’ve given up waiting for her and done the same. And then, as I stand there, I realise that I am not only puzzled but also a little hurt that she hadn’t wanted me to be with her. Placing the porter’s story against my own, I can see him skirting the edge of the playing fields as I am on the stairs thinking these things. He checks for us beneath the trees and as he walks back up towards the point at which the path starts to follow the line of the canal, he stoops slightly under low-hanging branches, shooing away the geese he has woken.
And that is the point at which I hear it. Just as I am considering whether to leave my shadowy corner to find out where Rachel has got to. It is the sound of her screaming. I jump down the stairs two or three at a time and start to run and my mind becomes strangely calm. Sufficiently so for the thought to occur to me that it is a curious thing, my immediate and unquestioning knowledge that it is Rachel who is screaming. Rachel, who I have never heard scream in all the time that I have known her. I run faster than I am really able to and I stumble slightly on the steps that lead down into the quad so that my glasses fall from my face. As I reach to pick them up I manage instead to kick them further away and then to fall forward, landing hard and fumbling around for what seems an age until I find them. At the same time as being terribly afraid, I am somehow elated. There is in my recognition of Rachel’s scream something immensely reassuring, joyful even: it seems suddenly that the connection we share has become something elemental, overwhelming. I think all this as I stumble, fall forward, pick up my glasses and take a quicker route than the porter, running through the first of the passageways that cut through the cottages forming the south side of the quad.
All at once she is there in the distance, stretched out on the grass near the lake at the foot of one of the plane trees. I have scratched my glasses when I dropped them and I cannot see entirely clearly and it looks at first as though she is lying gazing up at the moon with her arms flung out on the ground behind her head. I slow my run to a jog. There is, it seems, nothing whatever the matter. Either I have imagined the scream altogether, or the powers of recognition that so excited me were not so accurate after all and I was simply mistaken. Had there been a scream it must have come from the street outside the college walls; it must have issued from the lips of a perfect stranger. I am afraid she will find me ridiculous in having run to her rescue. And then I become aware that I am a little angry with her for abandoning me like this in favour of some romantic notion of lying around on the college lawns looking up at the night sky, and that tomorrow, she will complain about having spoiled her dress.
But as I get closer I see that she is not on her back looking up at the moon. She is positioned with her face down and her knees tucked underneath her and her arms flung out before her as if she is praying but her head seems to be pressed right into the ground so I start to run again and when I reach her I see in the half-light that her hair is spread about her and it looks wet and I fall to her and touch it and say Rachel Rachel and she says nothing and I lift up my hands in front of my face and there is something on them and I look at her again and I see that there is blood everywhere and she is covered in it, the whole of her back is covered in it and it is seeping still from her head and I shake her and I can’t breathe and I can’t say her name any more but then I can and I shout it over and over and I lean forward and down onto her and I hold her and she is very still and then I sit back and I am shaking, my whole body is shaking, and I slide one of my hands under her forehead and I lift up her head and I press my other hand down onto the back of it and I try to stop the blood but I can’t and that is how the porter finds me: I am kneeling on the ground holding her head in my hands.