6
WHEN I WOKE this morning and came through from the bedroom the sun was already slanting in and the whole of my apartment was filled with a filtering light. I sat at Rachel’s desk and looked down at the canal. There were streams of cyclists making their way to work: the nine a.m. towpath rush hour Rachel used to talk about. As I watched, the heron rose up from the water and flew straight towards me. It positioned itself on my balcony wall, side on to where I sat, a perfect silhouette. That first morning she was here with me, the morning after Richard’s wedding, Rachel had thought it was a sculpture. ‘It’s so still,’ she said when I told her. ‘It can’t be! I don’t believe you.’
I had walked through from the kitchen and found her naked, standing with her back towards me. I wasn’t sure if she knew I was there until she said ‘I like your pretend heron’ and she leaned forward and placed her hands flat on the glass, one either side of her face. After I told her it was real and she said it couldn’t be she made a fist and knocked with it and the bird rose up startled and heavy in the morning light and Rachel gasped and turned to face me. ‘That’s amazing! It’s just amazing I thought it wasn’t real!’ And then she said ‘I’m sorry for making it fly away’ and she covered her mouth with her hands and because she looked as if she might start to cry I walked over and folded her into me and held her there.
There had been no hesitancy in her desire that first night. None. She had stared and stared at my body, reaching out to me almost like a child might, greedy, hungry, touching me and rubbing my chest and my back and licking me until I was so hard I asked if I could be inside her and she said yes, and pressed me into her, and no, I wasn’t being too rough, and she bit into my neck as I came. And later on, when I tasted her, she pushed herself against my mouth and lifted her hips up from the bed and moved as I moved and then she said I can’t I can’t wait and she turned me onto my back and she was there looking down at me and moving so quick and saying jesus f*ck and then it was over and she was in my arms and we slept. When I woke and buried my face in between her legs the scent was of oranges and something sharper and she opened her eyes. Later on she took me in her mouth again, all the way in, holding me there and moving her tongue around the tip of me and drawing me back out and back in and I pressed both my hands onto the back of her head and afterwards she sat up and stared at me again, licking my slick from her lips.
She liked it here. That first morning she said she would have preferred one of the outside walls to be made of something other than glass, but when the evening came and it went dark we sat in the middle of the living room looking out across London and she saw how beautiful it is.
The apartment covers the whole of the top of the building and has at its core a cluster of three central rooms: my bedroom, my bathroom and my study. Each of these rooms has a window hung with a slatted blind and a sliding panel in the wall so that they can either be made entirely open to the views beyond them, or instead, completely private. The little cluster they form is surrounded by a series of open spaces that flow from one another to make up the rest of the apartment. These spaces are loosely divided so that the kitchen and the living room look out to the south-west while the north-east end is much emptier, holding only a piano and a table and chairs for reading.
When she had been living here for a few months Rachel persuaded me to have the pictures removed from the outer walls so that nothing interrupted her view. I held out for some time but I could see what it was that she wanted, and in any case, she could do a lot of her work at home and would come to spend more time here than I did. She told me that she loved the apartment most of all when it was warm enough to push the panels in the outer walls right across as far as they would go, and that when we did it felt as though we were living outside rather than in. One summer night as we sat holding one another in the half-light, she said that we were a pair of travellers making camp in a desert of sky: our very own airborne oasis.
The balcony walls are made of a kind of Perspex. I had a line of apple trees espaliered low against the south-west end. Honeysuckle climbs among their branches and lavender runs along beneath them. Jasmine grows on a trellised arch that straddles the balcony and a series of troughs is strung out between the apple trees and the kitchen, raised up from the ground and filled with the herbs and flowers that my mother and I used to grow in the garden in Hampshire, so that in the summer months, when the panels are left open, the scent of all these things sweeps in with the breeze.
I told the architect that I envisaged a glass box placed over a series of rooms and open spaces, so that I could walk unimpeded around its periphery and look out at the city on one side and the greener reaches of north London on the other. And that is what Rachel used to do sometimes, walking round and round reciting the landmarks she could see and watching the planes passing. She told me that on nights when I was due back from one of my trips abroad, if she knew the time of my flight, she would sit on the sofa at the south-west end watching for me and checking the clock and staring and staring to see if she could guess which plane I was on. I remember calling from the airport one evening to say that I had landed and she said she was quite sure she’d worked it out, so sure that she’d actually jumped up and run to the glass and pulled the panel across and stood on the balcony and leaned out into the night and stared and stared to see if she could see my face at one of the windows of the plane, knowing all the time that such a thing would have been impossible. When I arrived back at the apartment she was standing just inside the door smiling and she said I saw you I saw you I’m sure I did and I had hardly put my bags down on the floor before she was tugging at my coat and kissing me and taking my hand and walking me through to the bedroom saying f*ck me f*ck me right this minute and don’t ever go away again I hate it when you’re gone.
I have a very clear memory of the first night I ever spent here. I didn’t sleep at all. It was only a week after it had been finished and the smell of paint was fresh in the air. I slid the panels in my bedroom wall right back so I could see out to the space beyond and on through the glass, right across the night. I lay with my head propped up on the pillows and I thought about the fact that there was nothing above me apart from endless sky. And as I lay I had a sense that there was nothing beneath me either. It was as though I was floating in mid-air, my bed a Zeppelin cut loose from its mooring. The feeling I had then, that the whole apartment might take off at any moment and drift wherever the breeze sent it, is one that has never quite left me in all the time I have lived here.
Now that Rachel has gone and it is only me again, I will sometimes spend a night sitting on the sofa at the south-west end, wrapped in my duvet and looking out at the lights of the planes passing. I will follow the paths they trace across the blackness of the sky and I will wonder where they are going, or where they have been, and I will imagine the people sitting up there full of the anticipation of homecoming.
A few weeks after that first morning, when Rachel moved her things in and came to live with me, she asked if she could put her desk up against the glass where she’d seen the heron. I offered to share my study with her, or even to have it partitioned so she could have a room of her own, somewhere she could be alone, but she said she wanted to be closer to the outside, and to sit and watch the heron when it came. And this is where I am sitting now at the close of the day while the evening settles outside and everything becomes still. There is no sound apart from the occasional wail of the buses as they pass along the New North Road, like dinosaurs roaring, Rachel used to say, or whales turning in the ocean.
When she wasn’t in the library, or teaching at the university, she would work here at her desk most days, looking out at the canal with her books on the shelves behind her. She slotted them into the spaces that she found amongst my own so that now, when I am searching for an old textbook or browsing for one of my mother’s gardening books to read in the silence of my weekday breakfasts, I am from time to time surprised by a volume of Shelley, or Keats, or by a run of novels. And sometimes I will open one of those instead and see an inscription, ‘To Rachel, My Love’, without a signature, and I will begin to read and find myself rushing through an open weir, carried away by a current that is strange to me and new. And when I am halfway through and utterly lost to myself, no longer in London but far away in Italy, a fifth person in an abandoned hillside villa lit only by candlelight and now and then the light from a storm, I will turn a page and come across a postcard covered in a script too faded to read, or a photograph of Rachel with someone I do not recognise, and I will remember what she used to say about the sort of person who went to the trouble of using an actual bookmark to keep their place.
‘Are you really sure you don’t want a space for yourself?’ I asked her one evening as I lay on the sofa marking up a contract and she sat typing, and she said no thank you, honestly, she’d already told me it was fine. It was enough that she could lock the drawers of her desk and know that I’d never be able to look in them. Sometimes when she was out, or asleep, I would walk past her desk and look at the drawers and wonder whether she’d been joking when she’d said that, or whether they were actually locked, and if they were, where she kept the key. I never thought of trying them, not until the Tuesday after she died when I got home from Oxford to find a message on the machine from Evie. She wanted me to look for a document wallet of Rachel’s and courier it to her at her house in Chelsea the next morning. It was black, she said, black leather, zipped up around its sides. And if I didn’t find it straight away, she said, I should carry on looking until I did because she absolutely had to have it. I couldn’t see it immediately and I noticed that the desk drawers were probably big enough for it to be in one of them. They were locked after all, every single one, but then I looked on the shelves again and found it so there was no need to force them. That was something the police did when they came the following afternoon. The search they had done on the night of Rachel’s murder was only a brief one; they had come back again, they said, to look more thoroughly, and to take some things away with them.
After they had finished, and a couple of officers had bagged up Rachel’s things and carried them downstairs, the detective came and sat with me on the balcony. He explained that they’d found very little of interest when going through the emails in her Hotmail account, and none to speak of in her university account. There didn’t seem to be much that was particularly personal, hardly anything at all in fact; the only emails she’d kept were ones relating to research, or holiday or theatre bookings. They weren’t particularly surprised by the lack of personal correspondence in her university account, but when it came to her Hotmail they had to assume one of two explanations: either she was someone who deleted almost everything she received, and everything she sent, as a matter of course, or someone else had hacked into her account and done it for her, knowing that the content would be incriminatory. I told him she would never have been so fastidious, describing the state of her desk in her department office the few times I’d visited her there, and her tendency to leave her post unopened for days. In that case, the detective said, did I think she might have printed off her correspondence and kept it somewhere, and could I think of anywhere they hadn’t looked yet, since nothing much seemed to have emerged from their search that afternoon? No, I said. No I couldn’t. And I explained then that although we’d been careful with our boundaries, Rachel and I, and that I’d respected hers to the extent that there may well have been personal correspondences she’d kept from me, I was sure she would have said if anything had been troubling her. He asked one or two more questions about my relationship with Rachel then and I told him I’d had that conversation already, in the police station, and that we’d been very much in love, and if he was suggesting that there might have been someone else he was mistaken. He made a note of our conversation and said they’d carry on looking, and that something would be bound to show up, it usually did. If anything occurred to me, though, I must let them know immediately, and I should expect another visit in the next week or so, once they’d looked through everything properly.
They took several of Rachel’s things away with them that day, including the contents of her desk, and it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that it all arrived back, packed into two cardboard boxes labelled ‘CARDANINE – DEC’D. DESK DRAWERS’. They were delivered in person by the woman who has been appointed as what is called my Family Liaison Officer, a woman I have met no more than a few times. Because I can never remember her name, I have come to think of her as Flo, reverting to the lawyerly habit I have of thinking of things in acronyms wherever possible. Flo seemed extremely upset when she came to the apartment this time. I made her a cup of tea and she sat on the sofa at the south-west end and recited pretty much the same script as she had the first time I’d met her, all about Rachel, and about how sorry she was. When I didn’t respond she raised her eyebrows and grimaced and said, ‘Let’s get down to business then Mr Petersen.’ She turned to the boxes I’d helped her bring in from her car. The first thing she handed me was a smaller box marked ‘CARDANINE – DEC’D. PERSONAL EFFECTS’. She explained that it really only contained Rachel’s wedding ring and her engagement ring, and the necklace she had been wearing that night. She carried on, biting her lip and closing her eyes in between each sentence for longer than was really necessary, telling me they’d never been able to find the bag I’d told them Rachel was carrying when she went down to the lake, and nor did they think they’d be able to trace it now. She told me that certain things would have to be kept, and then she gave me a letter explaining what had and hadn’t been returned and informing me that the reason the two larger boxes contained a number of photocopies was because the originals of Rachel’s papers and documents had to be retained for the remainder of the investigation. When I asked her how long she thought that might be, she made quite a lengthy attempt to answer me until she realised my question had been sarcastic. After that she got up to leave, saying, ‘I’m very sorry for you but I’m only doing my job, surely you can see that.’
It was several days before I felt able to open them, those larger boxes. I was hesitant about discovering what it was that Rachel had wanted to keep from me, and I felt that it would constitute such a very great intrusion on her privacy, even in her absence. When eventually I did, one evening last week, it was almost too much to bear, looking through the things that I found there. There was no one thing in particular that was worse than any other for the way it made me feel, and nor was there anything of any great significance, or at least, not that I could fathom; it was, instead, by way of their accumulation that they made their assault upon me and left a pain across my chest that was so real I thought I should have to gouge at it with something sharp to make it go away. I had pulled the boxes through to the north-east end of the apartment and I sat beside them on the floor in front of the piano and emptied the things out, one by one. I didn’t look at any of them until everything was sitting in little piles like tiny sandcastles springing up across the floorboards, spreading out towards the glass and the night sky beyond. And only then did I kneel and crawl among them, lifting them and holding them, reading them and looking, slowly, at everything I found there, before placing them all in turn back in the boxes they had come from.
How does one describe a life?
Hers was there that night, in bits across my floor: in swimming pool membership cards bearing images of her face; in letters from libraries fining her for overdue books; in examination certificates and ancient school reports; in scribbled phone numbers and postcards from friends of hers I’d never met or even knew existed; in loyalty cards from coffee shops; in dry-cleaning tickets and bank statements and insurance policies and ISA printouts and booklets listing her vaccinations and in a letter summoning her for cervical surgery she’d never so much as mentioned.
And then there were the photographs. One of them showed her and Lucinda holding hockey sticks and standing in a line with their teammates, so young as to be almost boyish. There were other photographs also, and some of them were of me, gardening on the balcony, or walking on the Heath, or sitting reading at the other end of the apartment, caught in an evening sun. The first thing that struck me about the next few I came to, the ones of Rachel as a child, was how like her adult self she looked in all of them. And the second was the fact that not a single one of them showed her smiling. There were other photos in which she was smiling, though she was older in all of those. They must have been taken at around the time we were students together, she looked so similar in them to the way I remembered her looking then.
Most of the ones of her smiling had been taken on a holiday, somewhere sunny. Evie is there too in some of them, standing next to Rachel on a tiny jetty, and I wonder who took them, these shots of the two of them together. The boat they are standing in front of looks similar to some Rachel had shown me once on the internet. It was in the early spring of this year, when we were talking about where we might go in her summer vacation, and she’d shown me the website and told me about a holiday she’d taken a long time ago in Turkey, when she’d spent a fortnight on a boat she called a gulet, and she’d said that she would like the two of us to do the same.
I carry on through the pile, finding more pictures of Rachel at school jumbled in with a sheet of passport photos and one she’d asked me to take for her profile on the department website. The last few are of the boat again and I see that they weren’t alone on this holiday that they took, Rachel and Evie. Some of their group seem familiar to me. I look more closely and I think I recognise them as people from Worcester, people who Rachel had known but I had not, but because they are either slightly out of focus or have been taken from so far away that their faces are too small for me to make out clearly, I can’t be entirely sure. I linger over the last of them. The photographer must have been right in front of Rachel and the woman who stands beside her. They are caught from the waist up. Each of them is wearing a bikini and Rachel is smiling, though less broadly than her companion, who has her arms wrapped around Rachel’s waist. This woman is wearing a sunhat, and because of the way she is resting her head on Rachel’s shoulder, the brim of it covers part of her face. My attention is drawn to this photograph not by the image itself, as such, but rather because of the fact that it has been cut in two down the middle, separating the women from one another. It has been taped back together again, and I am curious as to why Rachel would have done such a thing.
As well as all of these things, there was the letter the police had already spoken to me about. Twice in the fortnight after Rachel’s death they had brought it to me, when I had stayed at home falling apart as I waited to return to Oxford to discover whether I was going to be released from bail or not. They had found it buried among the documents they’d taken from her desk drawers, and they said, both times, how important they thought it was, almost begging me to tell them something about it, anything at all, but I couldn’t help them. And as I sat on the floor of my apartment I read it through over and over, thinking that when they’d shown it to me previously I must simply have been so distracted that something had passed me by, something I would be able to spot this time, if I looked more closely. I remembered that the original had been written on airmail paper, in a hand I was quite sure I had never seen before, and nor did I recognise it when I read it this time.
We spoke of love once, you and I, when we fell on the grass and held each other. And I really thought you meant it when you told me that you cared for me.
I found out last night just how wrong I was.
Like I said, I’ll never forget you, whatever happens, and I don’t think you’ll forget me either, not for a long time anyway. You might think now that you will one day, but this much I know for sure: you won’t be able to, however hard you try.
So long then. I’m going this afternoon and I won’t be coming back. I guess that’s the way you wanted it.
And because it meant no more to me that night than it had done before, I put it away again and moved on to the next thing. The detectives had seemed disappointed when I’d been unable to tell them anything about it, but they’d agreed with me that they had perhaps been optimistic in their expectations of my being able to do so, given the absence of either a date, or a signature, or even so much as an envelope bearing a postmark. That it was a love letter was clear enough, but when they realised I could tell them nothing else, they had taken it away again and added it to the rest of the contents of her desk to be photocopied and returned to me, eventually, in those boxes.
I sit quite often at her desk, now that she does not use it. I find that it has become one of the ways in which I am able to be near her in her absence. I have developed other methods besides this, such as sleeping on her side of our bed instead of mine. Or occasionally, when I am out, phoning the apartment and hearing her voice telling me that we are busy and can’t take my call right now and that I can leave a message after the tone but not a long one. The strange thing is that Rachel used to do this too when she was alive. Sit at my desk instead of hers, I mean. Despite her protestations that she had no need for a room of her own, I would find signs sometimes that she had been using my study. Little signs, the sort of things that a less observant man might perhaps have missed, but unmistakable ones nevertheless. There would be an impression in the cushion on my chair, as though a cat had curled itself up and slept there all afternoon. Or I might notice that a stack of papers had been moved to one side and not replaced. Once or twice I found an apple core in the bin, or biscuit crumbs and a half-drunk mug of tea on the bookcase. And my desk drawers, which it wouldn’t have occurred to me to lock, were sometimes left ajar. I never said anything to her about these things, and she never once mentioned that she used my room. It was no trouble to me, and there was something endearing about the way she made so little effort to cover the tracks she left on my desk at the same time as insisting that she worked every day at her own. They never felt like any kind of intrusion, these incursions into my territory that she made and pretended not to. I find I miss them very much.
I look up from Rachel’s desk now and I see through the darkness that the heron has come back to the balcony. It is difficult to be completely sure from this angle, but I think it might be asleep. The lights are coming on across London and it is the time of the evening when Rachel and I would normally have started to think about going to bed. I know I ought to do the same, but it feels odd to think of sleep after a day in which I have done precisely nothing. The desk in front of me is covered in things I could have seen to but didn’t. There are the photographs Evie gave me at the police station, still sealed tight in their envelope. And there is also the letter that she gave to me then, the one that Rachel wrote to her after our wedding. I have developed a habit of allowing myself to read this letter once, and then to let a few weeks pass until I read it again. This method is starting to work less successfully now that I have it by heart, but there is still that sense of surprise every time, that happiness on reading the things Rachel said about me, and about us. Beside that is the bundle of correspondence from Rachel’s friends and colleagues and students that I keep meaning to reply to, and of course there are the boxes of things from her desk that I know I should have gone through again, more closely this time, to see if I might have missed anything, anything that could trigger some memory that would assist the police in their investigation.
I haven’t even managed to dress myself, having had no good reason to do so. I have, in fact, done nothing more than wander aimlessly from one part of the apartment to the other, making cups of tea and failing to drink them, finding them cold and abandoned on a bookcase before washing them up and starting all over again. I took blankets and a woollen hat and ate my lunch on the balcony, sitting like a tramp beside the raised beds, looking at them and imagining my mother pausing in her digging and sitting back on her heels and saying to me, ‘Now really come on Alex this is silly isn’t it? What would your father say if he was here, hmmm lovey? Come on, chop chop, get dressed and we’ll think of something fun to do together, just you and me eh?’
In any case, I know I won’t sleep until I make up my mind about Harry’s invitation. He has written often since her death, but until yesterday, and apart from the letter offering his condolences, he has sent me only postcards, or occasionally the briefest of notes enclosing a cutting from the Oxford Times about Rachel, or about the investigation. The postcards arrive in a steady stream, the message always linked in a careful way to the image. Some describe exhibitions he has seen and thinks I might like to know about, others carry quotations he has come across and considers pertinent. Once or twice a card has come without any message at all, bearing instead a pasted-on clip from Private Eye of his most recent contribution to Pseuds Corner. They are all, though inconsequential in their way, strangely comforting. Before her death it was Rachel he sent them to, these postcards of his. I assume that he sends them to me not for my own sake but for the sake of her absence, in a kind of continuing acknowledgement of it, and of my sorrow.
Harry’s letter of condolence arrived in early October, almost four months after she died. I remember him describing its timing as intentional, rather than negligent. He explained that the correspondence he had received in the immediate aftermath of the death of his own wife, an event he had grieved bitterly, made no impact on him, numbed as he was to sensation of any kind. As I read his letter, I remembered coming back from the Christmas vacation of my second year at Worcester and seeing the notice that had gone up outside the porter’s lodge, and how it carried the most perfunctory of announcements about her death, stating the request that nobody should speak to him of it directly. It was not until much later on, he wrote, that he was able to reread those letters and have any sense of what it was that people had intended to convey with their clichés and their expressions of sympathy, always clumsy, always inept. Because of this, he said, he had developed a custom of delaying the sending of such letters until the initial period of numbness, as he referred to it, might have passed, or might at least have begun to lessen. He wrote further that he hoped to avoid the risk of cliché himself by allowing another to speak for him, and he set out a quotation from Tennyson, something about wheat and chaff, something that meant little to me.
When I opened Harry’s parcel last night I found that he had sent me poetry again: a whole volume of Browning this time. It was the poetry that had accounted for the weight of the thing when I’d picked it up from outside my door. I’d stood looking at the label, noting the fact that he still gave me the Esq. after my surname and feeling happy that he’d written. The letter itself, which I’d expected to be pages and pages long given the weight of the parcel, was, as it turned out, no more than a single side of paper.
Worc. Coll.
27.xi.MMVII
Dear Alex,
There was a hoar frost around the lake this morning. Ordinarily there would be nothing noteworthy in its presence; this year’s winter is far colder than last, and we are late in November. I write of it only because I have never known it to be so beautiful, nor so thick as this.
You said when last we met that you would like to visit again at some point, and I wondered whether this might be as good a time as any, now that the frost is here? The students go down next week and there will be rooms at your disposal in College. You may stay for as long as you like; there are Christmas concerts, and there will doubtless be fine weather for walking.
I have begun the great task of preparing the contents of my own rooms for the embarkation I must face in the summer and, in so doing, I have come across some things of Rachel’s that I thought you might like to see, or even have. They are not the sort of things I felt it necessary to give to the police, despite the fact that their work remains undone, but nor would I want to dispose of them without at least letting you look at them first.
If you find that what I suggest is amenable to you, do please telephone to let me know whether you will be able to arrive next Friday afternoon in time for tea. The enclosed was among the things I found; you could perhaps read it before you come.
Yrs. ever,
Harry
It is a smallish sort of a book, and it has sat on the desk all day inviting me to open it. I think I will take it to bed with me tonight. I feel certain there is something familiar about the volume. Its cover is a faded pink, part of the front of it darker than the rest as though someone has left it in the sun for months, half-hidden by another book. And the heft of it sitting in my hand: it is a book I am sure I have held before.
And then, all of a sudden, as I bring it to my face and inhale its scent, holding the cloth cover right against my nose and breathing in deep, I turn and see Rachel lying on the sofa behind me. It is early June and the setting sun has made the room pink and everything in it. Rachel glows with it, the light finding orange and golden swathes in her hair, and she closes her eyes, not so much to avoid its brightness as to bask in it more deeply. A few moments later I look up again from where I am sitting and I see that she is asleep. Her mouth is slightly open and one of her legs has fallen to one side so that I can see she is wearing nothing beneath her skirt. I stand up and walk over to her and I kneel in front of her. Her arms slip away and the book she is holding starts to drop from her hands. I catch it as it falls and I sit back on my heels and decide not to touch her. Instead I hold the book to my face and breathe it in to myself and as I watch her I know what it is to be content.
I remember her waking a few moments later and saying ‘What are you doing? Why are you sitting there? What time is it?’ and I told her she had been asleep and she smiled and said ‘Let me read to you. Go and sit down again and stop staring at me like that.’ I handed it to her, the book with part of its pink cloth cover faded by the sun, the book that I am holding now, and as the sky grew darker she read one and then another of the poems and it was I who closed my eyes. The evening had fallen and the first scent of jasmine was drifting in from the balcony when she said, ‘One more then I have to eat. What do you want? Something spooky?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘something spooky,’ thinking to myself that I didn’t much mind what she read as long as she carried on.
And now as I sit at her desk in the darkness without her, it falls open at the poem she read me then, the last poem, and I hear her voice again.
The rain set in early tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me – she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good—
She broke off there I think, right in the middle of the line.
‘God Alex I’m so sorry did you hear my tummy rumbling? I’m ravenous.’
‘Rachel you can’t!’
‘Can’t what?’
‘You can’t stop there! You can’t start the last one and not finish it! I can’t believe it!’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. I wasn’t even sure if you were listening. I mean you looked like you were asleep.’
‘Of course I wasn’t asleep. I just had my eyes shut. I was concentrating.’
‘You fibber!’
‘I’m not. I was really listening!’
‘Oh. Well, I’m sorry. But if I don’t eat something right this minute I think I might die of starvation. Anyway, it’s not such a great ending.’
‘Rachel! That’s so unfair.’
‘Alright. Alright, I’ll finish it after we’ve eaten. You must be hungry too, it’s so late. Come on.’
We had supper outside and stayed up for hours and hours. She didn’t finish the poem in the end, but she did tell me more about poetry and how it worked and said I should read some for myself and it wouldn’t hurt me and what was I scared of? I said I wasn’t scared of it, I’d just rather she carried on reading to me, that was all, and she said alright, she would, another time. And it was then that she said, ‘I think we should go back.’
‘Where?’ I said. ‘Go back where?’
‘To Oxford, silly,’ she said. ‘Where do you think? I’ll write and ask Harry. He’s always going on about it, especially now I’ve married a Worcester man. It’ll be fun. We’ll get to wear our gowns and drink sherry and sit on High Table and pretend we’re Fellows. Come on, I’m sleepy,’ and she stood and carried the things through to the kitchen.
I stayed on the balcony and looked across the night for a time and when I came in she was in bed already and fast asleep. The book lay on her chest where it had fallen. In the days that followed she seemed to read nothing other than this little pink book, and I realise now that she must have taken it with her when we went to Oxford later that month, and somehow ended up leaving it with Harry, who has sent it back to me without any explanation of how he came to have it.
And that is the question that is troubling me as I stand up from the desk and pull my dressing gown tighter around me, clasping the book to my chest. While there is nothing of any certainty about the half-formed answers that begin to occur to me, beyond the fact that each of them is accompanied by a similarly undefined sense of disquiet, I realise as I go through to my bedroom that I have decided what to do. I’d normally prefer to take a more considered approach to this kind of question, and certainly a lengthier and a more systematic one. I suspect this may well be the first time in my life that I have resolved to do something purely because of the absence of a good enough reason not to. In any case, I have made up my mind: I will go to Oxford, and I will see what it is that Harry has to show me, and I will ask him if there is anything he can tell me about Rachel, anything I don’t already know.