PART II
London, Friday 21 December 2007
Early Morning
7
I MISS HER. That’s the long and the short of it.
I missed her before I took my trip to Oxford to visit Harry, and I missed her on my return, and this last week or so since I’ve been back, trying to work out what to do with myself, I have felt her absence more keenly still. And it is because I can’t be with her that I’ve decided to leave London, and to start again elsewhere.
I have booked a car to the airport and I have a few hours to pass until it is due to arrive. I’ve done everything there is to be done, or at least, everything that I can think of. Until it is time, I shall stand out here on the balcony, wrapped up against the cold, looking out across the city I’m leaving behind.
It wasn’t difficult to arrange in the end: my senior partner spoke with the New York office and Richard pulled all of the strings he’d been promising to pull since he and Lucinda had relocated there at the beginning of December. They’d started trying to talk me into joining them almost as soon as they’d arrived, saying it wasn’t going to be the same without me around, it just wasn’t, for either of them. Lucinda has taken the credit for having won me over in the end, and she did put her all into the task. She told me first that neither of them wanted one of their as yet unborn sons’ godfathers on the wrong side of the Atlantic, and then, when that didn’t work, she asked what Rachel would have said if she’d known I was hanging around in London pretending she might come back at any minute. Until he’s finished the New York Bar exams Richard’s own work will be in an advisory capacity, and so many of the projects he is working on involve clients I’ve been instructed by in London that his wanting me on board made perfect sense to everyone involved. Once he’d garnered enough support for my transfer, things happened very quickly.
I had some work to do initially, convincing people I’d moved on sufficiently to take the step I was proposing. And I won’t be able to start work until the end of January, having managed to negotiate only a partial reduction in the agreed term of my sabbatical. I had to visit the man in Exeter Square again, and when he reported back to the partnership that he was satisfied with the progress I’d made, and that my visit to Oxford seemed to have brought about the necessary shift in my behaviour and in my thinking, I was relieved, assuming the worst was over. But then the New Yorkers had their own requirements, insisting I take part in an hour-long conference call with a psychologist. The woman fired question after question at me, working her way through a list of what she called ‘depression indicators’ and ticking boxes until she realised she had nothing more to ask and said she’d file a report in a couple of days. And of course I’ve had to agree to a short-term contract, renewable only on my meeting certain performance targets; anything more permanent is a distant prospect until the Americans are quite content I’m no longer what they refer to as a loose cannon. I have a sense also that my exposure to clients will be restricted, to a certain extent, for some time, and that I’ll start off working only with the ones that already know me. I don’t think I’ll mind a great deal though, being kept back from the front line proper in this way. I am perhaps better suited to the role they’ve put together for me, it being more in my nature to remain almost behind the scenes and to be only listening, advising, correcting and suggesting, rather than performing and touting for business in the way that Richard seems to relish.
When I had packed the last of my things this morning and booked my car, I sat at Rachel’s desk and wrote a note to the tenant who will take over my apartment tomorrow. Afterwards, I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and as I did I saw that Rachel was there also, standing in front of me and leaning towards the glass. ‘You can come in if you like,’ she’d said, hearing me waiting on the other side of the bathroom door, not sure whether she was inside or not, not wanting to disturb her if she was. It was in the early days, before we knew each other’s boundaries, or at least before our curiosity in one another had subsided enough for us to be able to see them clearly and abide by them.
‘I’m cleaning them. It’s so dull. Can you believe it’s taken me this long to get them pierced! I should’ve done it when I was a teenager. God knows why Evie wouldn’t let me.’ I was barely listening to what she said, I was just watching. And then she stopped talking and I put my arms around her and held myself to her as she cleaned first one earring and then the other before twisting them and turning them and snapping them back into place and I pressed my face into her neck and she wriggled away from me for a moment and back again.
I miss the way her neck smelt that day, and I miss the ease of our silence, and I miss the fact that she wanted me to be with her.
8
I TRAVELLED TO Oxford by train when I went to visit Harry earlier this month, and it was as we pulled out of Paddington that the snow began to fall. I had intended to drive but when it came to it I doubted my ability to concentrate for long enough. It struck me though, as I pulled my case across the station concourse, that it was somehow right that I was doing as I had at the start of every term all those years ago, especially since it was in answer to Harry’s summons that I was making my winter journey. And I found myself doing the same as I’d always done, standing in front of the announcement boards waiting to find out my platform and looking around for a face that was familiar. Feeling the same slight sense of disappointment that I had each time on realising there was nobody I knew, I was reminded of the occasion at the start of my second term when, having resigned myself to that fact, I’d gone to the platform and boarded the train only to see Rachel sitting partway down the carriage I’d chosen. She was wrapped in an enormous scarf and half buried in a book and the place opposite her was empty and for one ridiculous moment I considered tapping her on the shoulder and asking her if I might take it but instead I walked straight past, pretending I hadn’t seen her, assuming that this would be precisely what she was doing in return.
The train this time was only half full, and I managed to find two places to myself. I took the seat by the window and put my bags on the other. As London fell away the sun sat almost at eye level, so I closed my eyes and felt its warmth on my face and I slept for a while. When I woke it was still just as bright, slanting across meadows that spread into the far distance, wide and rimed like salt flats. For much of that part of the journey a plane flew just ahead of us, marking out our course, but as the landscape opened out and the light began to flash from patches of water round about, it veered off and left us to find our way alone and I closed my eyes and slept again.
When I woke we had gone past Reading and the view was bosky and deep and a mist lingered in the hollows of the fields and everything was spiked with frost. The landscape was utterly blank, every branch of every tree looking as though it had been coated by hand with thick white paint. And then suddenly we were dipping down into a hollow and the air became white also, as though we had flown into a cloud, as though we were lost, as though, almost, we had stopped existing. We skimmed along, passing in and out of that cloud of frozen mist. A figure loomed out of the whiteness alongside the train, close enough for me to have thought we might hit him at any moment. He was surrounded by dogs and he skirted the edge of the field as if floating through the air until he was gone again, as suddenly as he had appeared. All at once there was a church spire, conjured by the mist a moment later into rugby posts rising from a playing field and clad in red wraps as though they were horses’ legs, and then they were hidden from us, and we from them, and there was nothing to see except the whiteness and we were hurtling once more through time without leaving so much as the ghost of an impression of ourselves.
Shortly before the end of our journey an inspector came through the carriage and I reached into my jacket pocket for my ticket. What I pulled out with it meant that I almost missed my stop, so absorbed was I in what I’d found. I thought at first, before the inspector went and I looked at it again more closely, that it was nothing more noteworthy than the parking ticket I’d come across just minutes before leaving my apartment earlier that day. I had been closing all of the blinds when the one behind Rachel’s desk, the one that had always been a little difficult to operate, fell too quickly and shot down behind the radiator instead of in front of it, getting stuck there. I moved the desk forwards and knelt on the floor and tried as carefully as I could to release the blind and as I did so, the parking ticket was dislodged and fell to the floor beside me. I picked it up and read the car registration number printed on it and saw that it was one of Rachel’s and I smiled as I knelt there, thinking it was exactly like her to have put it at the back of her desk and let it fall without noticing, and, when it had disappeared from view, to have forgotten about it entirely. I stopped smiling when I saw the date, working out that she must have received it about five weeks before she was killed, and feeling suddenly, bleakly alone. And then I realised I would be late if I lingered any longer, so I stuffed it in my jacket pocket and finished closing the blinds and locked up the apartment and left for the station.
When the inspector had gone I looked down again at the parking ticket and noticed for the first time that it was folded in two. I unfolded it to find a reproduction of an image that had been taken by a traffic camera. And there was Rachel, photographed for what must have been the last time before she died. It was a shock to see her face. I had started to find myself unable to recall what she looked like in any precise way. It had happened only occasionally, but it upset me, distressed me even. I was still perfectly able to hear her voice in my mind, particularly her laugh, but her face had begun to slip away from my memory and I had taken to looking more frequently at the photographs that I had of her, determined to learn it again more carefully, so that I wouldn’t be able to forget it. But this photograph had taken me by surprise, and I think it was that more than anything else which caused the jolt that went through my body when I saw her looking back at me.
She was sitting behind the wheel of her car and caught in close up, her face as clearly depicted as one might wish it to be were one looking to identify her. In the passenger seat beside her was a man who looked strangely familiar, though I couldn’t immediately place him. Printed beneath the photograph was an address, as well as a record of the time and a note of the particular offence for which Rachel had been fined. It seemed to have been taken early one morning in the middle of May, on the red route at the eastern end of the Euston Road, and from the tiny thumbnail of a map that was printed beside the address, I worked out that the precise location was just outside the entrance to the British Library, where she sometimes used to work.
I looked back at the photograph, gazing first at her face and then at the man again. Just as I was wondering whether perhaps he was a colleague of hers I’d met at one of her department drinks, or at some sort of a university function, I realised I knew who he was, and as his name came into my mind, I felt as though someone had hit me, hard, right in the stomach.
He had come up in conversation that day in the summer, when Rachel and I sat in the sun of the late afternoon and she read Browning to me. I asked her at one point about those poetry tutorials. Which of the poems had they studied with Harry, the three of them? What had they actually talked about? And she said she couldn’t really remember, it was so long ago. When I asked her what it had been like to study with Cissy and Anthony, and whether she had preferred it to the final year when she had been all on her own with Harry, all she would say was that it hadn’t made a great deal of difference really and why was I so interested anyway? Then I asked what they were doing now, the two of them, and Rachel told me that she had a vague notion that Cissy had gone professional with her rowing, or with some other sport, or that maybe she had become a coach at one of the big American universities, but that she couldn’t be sure and nor did she really care anyway. As for Anthony, she said she had no idea whatsoever what had happened to him, and that she had lost touch with him almost as soon as he’d been sent down at the end of our second year and that she hoped it would remain like that. I think I asked whether it wasn’t perhaps a little extreme to have broken off contact with him altogether, but she started to say something about the fact that, while she didn’t see that it was any of my business who she was or wasn’t in touch with, that was perhaps the essential difference between us. I asked her what she meant and she said she was referring to my tendency to put up with someone whatever they might have done. I stopped listening then, thinking only of Richard, and of how I was glad that we had managed to keep our friendship ticking over in the way that we had. And then I think I asked her to read another poem and she did.
I looked more closely at the photograph and at Anthony sitting beside her in the passenger seat, and I felt only confused, rather than shocked, realising that of course there would be some sort of an explanation, something innocuous, and rational. I resolved that as soon as I got back to London I’d look him up somehow and ask him what they were doing there, the two of them.
Of the fact that it was Anthony I had no doubt, although he looked to have dyed his hair since our student days. Thinking back and trying to recall when I’d last seen him, I remembered having caught sight of him, or of someone who looked very like him, at the memorial service I held for Rachel in the college chapel. Harry had offered to assist with anything he could, anything at all. In the end, as well as liaising on my behalf with the chaplain and the kitchens, and writing a piece about Rachel for the college magazine, he had volunteered his services for the particular task of contacting all of the students from the time that we had studied there, saying that the college secretary would be more than happy to help with that sort of thing. So I had accepted his offer and simply sent him a stack of invitations. Harry, assiduous as ever, sent me a list of people he’d invited on my behalf, noting who had RSVP’d and who hadn’t. Anthony appeared on the list as one of the latter, as did Cissy. When I’d asked Harry about it he said that he was half expecting Cissy to come, despite the length of the journey, and that it was always possible she’d never received the invitation, not having kept the college up to date with her address. She didn’t though, and nor did she ever respond.
As for Anthony, he said that the RSVP had probably just gone missing, or that he’d forgotten to send one, and that he was bound to be there when it came to it. I can’t say with any certainty whether Harry was proved right in his assumption in the end, but I think he might have been. The person I’d seen, the person I’d thought at the time was Anthony, arrived late that day, stepping in alone through the chapel door just after the start of the service. I didn’t get a chance to approach him then, and when later on I looked around the room that the drinks and food were being served in, he was nowhere to be seen. Somehow, the fact that I thought I’d seen him slipped my mind and I forgot to ask Harry about it when it was all over; there were so many people to talk to that day, or rather to listen to, it seeming in the end to be an occasion that was more about other people, and about their own experience of loss, than one about Rachel, or about me. He had been no friend of mine, and, Rachel having told me she wasn’t in touch with him, I suppose there would have been no particular reason for me to have followed it up.
The train began to slow and I saw that we were pulling into Oxford. Just as I was about to fold the photograph back up again I noticed something I hadn’t registered before. Caught in the upper corner of the image was an arm reaching in towards the back door of the car, either just about to open it, or just having closed it. I looked more closely and saw that the arm, along with the upper part of the torso to which it was attached, was clad in the unmistakable red silk of what had to be one of Evie’s jackets, so similar was the shape of the sleeve, and so wiry was the tiny wrist emerging from it. And then we arrived and I put the ticket back in my jacket pocket and grabbed my bags and ran to get off before it was too late. I looked at my watch and saw that if I hurried, I would be in time for tea, just as Harry had asked me to be.
I had no dealings with Harry at Worcester apart from once, when I think he may have done me a very great favour. I was never certain whether he did what he did out of a particular desire to show kindness towards me, or merely in the course of the ordinary discharge of his duties. In any event, there was a problem over the settling of my college bill at the end of my second year. My father had become unwell. Or he had become of unsound mind. Or perhaps it was nothing more complicated than drink. Whatever it was, he had neglected to sign the necessary forms and the local authority had withheld my grant cheque. The Bursar took a dim view of my explanation and told me I had two weeks to pay or he’d have no choice but to send me down. When still I didn’t pay up he referred the matter to Harry who, as Senior Tutor, summoned me to see him immediately. It was the only time I had cause to go into his rooms while I was a student at Worcester. I had been once before to his staircase and seen his name painted on the board there, but having gone up to the second floor and stood for a while outside his door, I had walked away without having knocked.
That earlier occasion took place in the first few weeks of the summer term of my first year. Richard and I had finished a stint in the Old Library one Friday afternoon and were packing up our things when he’d said, looking out of the window to the quad, ‘Here she comes, Jordan Baker, late as ever.’
‘Jordan who?’ I said, and I looked down to see Cissy strolling along the bottom of the quad towards Rachel and Anthony, who were sitting waiting for her on the steps leading up to the north terrace. ‘Why did you call her that?’
‘Oh come on Alex. I know you haven’t read much but surely there are limits even to your literary ignorance.’
‘Shut up, Richard. How far have you got anyway? What century are you up to?’ I asked, wondering if there was a chance I could work it out that way.
‘Sort of gave up on the chronological approach actually. Doing it geographically now. I’m in America at the moment, the jazz age. I’m perfectly prepared to accept in principle that Jordan Baker is beyond you, but I have to say I’m surprised—’
‘Richard, I’ve seen the film,’ I said as the penny dropped. ‘I know who you’re talking about so you can stop showing off. I don’t quite see the link though, apart from her being American. And a bit sporty.’
‘And her tan? Come on. All that golden skin everywhere. Haven’t you seen her legs?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘You and everyone else,’ he replied, and he was right. From as long ago as March, Cissy had gone back to wearing the same sort of shorts she’d arrived in in Freshers’ Week, and she’d stuck to them as spring went on, however cold it got, sometimes adding an extra jersey beneath the little cropped jackets she wore on top, with a thick scarf piled onto her shoulders and wrapped around her neck. But always the shorts, and her legs had attracted as much attention as might be expected, since her thighs appeared to be as firm as wood, and the same deep shade of brown that her face always was. The tan came from the summers she’d spent sailing with her father, year on year since she was a girl. She talked about them all the time in the Buttery bar, these trips they would go on, her father taking time off work and the two of them staying out on the ocean for weeks. I told Richard about them when he started to make sarcastic comments about her footwear, and to ask why did she wear those stupid sailor shoes all the time, such an affectation? He seemed quite disappointed when I’d explained, saying, ‘She’s not on a bloody boat now though, is she? Attractive enough woman, I’ll give you that,’ and he began to walk out of the library. ‘Shame about that bloody ugly scar though, don’t you think?’
It was an ugly scar, he was right about that as well. Gouged into her forehead, it was about an inch long and ran straight down from her hairline so that it was usually covered up by her fringe. But it wasn’t so much of a shame, I used to think. It made her almost more beautiful, rather than less, by its contrast with the softness of her features, her dark eyes fringed with lashes so long as to be slightly comic, her golden cheeks almost babyish in their fullness. I supposed that was why she kept her hair cropped short in the way that it was, dark and tousled on her forehead so that most of the time it tended to half fall across that scar and hide it. And although I’d seen it clearly only once, I was able to tell Richard how she’d got it.
My sighting took place in the bar one night. I was wandering around the room, clearing glasses and listening in to conversations, when Towneley suddenly left the group he was drinking with and walked over to the table where Cissy was sitting with Rachel and Anthony. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Cissy, swaying slightly, and because I could tell that he was drunk, I prepared myself for an altercation. But when Cissy looked up at him he simply reached forward and prodded her once, sharply, in her thigh, before turning around and walking away again.
‘What the f*ck?’ Cissy said, standing from her stool and following him and yanking his arm so he turned back round. ‘What the f*ck?’
He had reached his table again and his friends were patting him on the back, laughing.
‘Oh jesus I’m sorry. Please don’t be offended.’
‘Of course I f*cking am. Weirdo.’
‘Sorry, sorry. It was a bet.’
‘A bet? About what?’
‘About your legs.’
‘And? What about them?’
‘Oh god. It’s quite embarrassing really,’ Towneley said, taking a step towards her. ‘Sorry, can I just buy you a drink to apologise? It’s not worth explaining, honestly.’
‘Shoot. I’m not going anywhere till you do. And right now I can’t make up my mind whether to laugh at you or report you.’
‘OK, OK, sorry. Well, I think it’s more of a laughing thing than a reporting thing, actually. In fact, you should take it as a compliment. The guys said your legs couldn’t be as hard as they looked. You know, your muscles. And I said I thought they probably were. So we had a bet.’
‘And?’
‘So I had to find out.’
‘And were they?’ she said, and she was grinning at him now.
‘They were,’ he said, smiling back at her. ‘Rock hard, as a matter of fact.’
‘So what d’you win anyway, you jerk?’
‘Um. A pint.’
‘A f*cking pint? You walked over there and did that to me and all you won was a goddam drink?’
‘Look, I said I’m sorry. It was stupid OK? I’ve been drinking. We all have. Sorry. I’ll buy you a drink, I’ll buy you a drink. Please don’t report me.’
Cissy laughed then, shaking her head and saying, ‘You’re on. But you’re a jerk. You know that don’t you?’ and she turned and walked over to the bar. Towneley followed her, glancing back at his group, raising his eyebrows and grinning again, and Rachel and Anthony got up abruptly and left. Cissy saw neither of these things; she was already sitting on a stool, drumming on the bar with her fingernails, so I came back over and poured them their drinks and within an hour or so, when the two of them were as drunk as one another, Towneley felt comfortable enough to reach over and sweep back her fringe and say, ‘So how’d’you get the famous scar then?’
And that was how I discovered it had happened out at sea, with her father, on one of their sailing holidays. They were a week or so off finishing the trip, she said, when, one stormy afternoon, she’d forgotten to duck as the boom swung round. It hit her so hard she passed out. She came round to find that her father had patched her up as best he could and put her to bed down below with a bandage tight around her head. She slept it off and when later that night she came back up on deck, he took the view it was hardly worth calling sea rescue over something like that, so it wasn’t until she got back to shore that she went to hospital and had it stitched. It had been open for so long an infection had set in and it didn’t heal well, not for a while. And still, years later, it sat a bright white patch against the brownness of her face. I saw it properly that night in the Buttery bar, and it looked as though it had been scraped from her forehead with a spoon, so marked was the hollow in her skin. And then Towneley let her hair back down again and it was hidden.
We left the library then, Richard and I, after I’d told him this story, and when he suggested a stroll around the lake before our tutorial I said no thanks, and let him go alone. Instead I walked around the quad a few times, keeping half an eye on Rachel, who was still sitting on the steps with Cissy and Anthony, waiting, I supposed, for their tutorial with Harry. When the half-past bell rang out, a minute or two later, the three of them stood and turned to walk on up to the terrace. A piece of paper slipped from the pile Rachel was carrying. It floated back down the steps behind her and landed on the grass. She didn’t notice, so I called out, but none of them heard me. I jogged round the quad and picked up the piece of paper and followed them. I stood for a moment at the bottom of the steps and read the page I was holding. I was surprised, not having seen Rachel’s handwriting before. I don’t know what I had expected. Something grandiose, perhaps, or striking, and in purple ink rather than black maybe. What I saw instead was written in a tiny crabbed hand, perfectly even and readable but tiny nonetheless, and all in pencil. There seemed to be no paragraphing, as such, just one long stream of prose answering the question written across the top line. I’d read only the first few sentences of Rachel’s essay when a couple of students came out of Harry’s staircase talking about the tutorial they’d just had, so I let them pass and rushed up, taking the steps two at a time. And that was how I came to stand outside his door for the first time, and how I came to be too late to enter. The outer of the two doors was open, indicating Harry’s presence, but the inner door was closed on the tutorial that had already begun. The wooden panels in front of me were covered in postcards, political cartoons cut from newspapers, poems and songs and posters advertising London exhibitions. There were black and white photographs of the lake, and snatches of what looked like medieval English but could have been in any language, it was so strange to me.
As I stood there looking at the door I had a very great longing to be inside the room with the others. I thought of the door to Haddon’s study, the wood bare apart from lecture lists, or photocopies of the most recent amendments he had made to the ‘Dean’s Rules and Regulations as Currently Enacted’, a document he kept always posted there. I was about to knock on Harry’s door, to interrupt and hand over Rachel’s work and explain about having seen her drop it, when I heard the sound of laughter from inside, Rachel’s laughter, and then the others joining her, uncontrollably it seemed. Harry’s laugh rang louder than the rest, and I went back down the stairs and walked round to the porter’s lodge and put the piece of paper in Rachel’s pigeonhole.
Towards the end of the summer term of my second year though, I did knock on the door and go inside, in answer to Harry’s summons. It was early June, late on a Friday afternoon. He didn’t have long, he apologised, taking from his jacket pocket a gold watch on a chain and raising his glasses for a moment to look at it before gesturing to me that I should sit in the armchair facing the window. However far I went into the chair, which sat so low on the ground that I had half stumbled as I sat down, I couldn’t seem to reach the back. I panicked slightly until I felt the cushion behind me, and then I panicked again as I sensed that, in reaching it, my feet had lifted from the ground and were hovering in mid-air. I pulled myself up and perched on the edge, hunching forward so as to avoid starting the inexorable slide back again. And then I realised that because the sun was falling directly in my eyes I was unable to make out Harry’s expression, being able to see only his silhouette against the window.
‘I wonder if I might ask you to shut the curtain a little,’ I asked. He moved into the shadows on the other side of the room and said, with a half-smile that I could see clearly now he was out of the light, ‘I tend not to when I am with a student. I hope you don’t mind.’ And so we sat, the sun streaming through the glass and me holding up my hand to shield my eyes, Harry standing partly in the shadows and looking down at me, while I told him, in the most abstract terms I could think of, about my difficulties. I was acutely embarrassed. He said barely anything until I finished, when he asked me what it was like at home, in the holidays, living with my father. Was I able to work in the house with him in that state? Humiliated now to the point of positive discomfort, I said that it was something of a challenge and that, on occasions, I had felt the strain of it more than I would have wished to. He nodded, and pulled out his watch again and raised his glasses for a moment to look at it, before disappearing into a side room. He came back holding his gown and started to put it on, signalling the end of our interview. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
I heard nothing for three days, and I never found out exactly what it was that had shaken my father from his torpor, but by the end of the week my grant cheque had arrived and I was able to pay my bill. And then, on the last day of term, I received another letter in my pigeonhole addressing me with the ‘Esq.’ that Harry had used before, informing me that the college had considered my request for vacation accommodation and decided I was a suitable candidate. I could keep my room on through the summer, without charge. I was amazed, not having made such a request, and not having admitted to myself how much I was dreading having to spend two months in Hampshire with my father, and his drink, and his rages.
A couple of days after he’d sent me the letter, Harry put an identical one in Rachel’s pigeonhole. Because there were only a few of us staying up in College that summer, no more than a handful, Rachel and I became aware of one another’s presence almost immediately. On the very first morning she interrupted my solitary breakfast by walking into Hall and, to my surprise, sitting down beside me. ‘Hello,’ she said. When I said nothing in response, she smiled and carried on. ‘Looks like you’ll have to make do with me if you want any company this summer.’
I said hardly anything that day, being uncertain what to make of her approach. On the second morning I assumed she’d think better of it and go for breakfast at another time, or that perhaps she’d make a point of sitting on the other side of Hall and ignoring me. But she did the same thing again, and the next day, and the day after that, and eventually I grew comfortable in her presence, and realised they would carry on happening, these breakfast conversations, and that Rachel was enjoying them as much as I was. At that stage, I knew nothing of the circumstances which had led to her needing accommodation over the vacation, and despite the amount of time we ended up spending together that summer, and the intimacy that grew up between us, the opportunity somehow never arose for me to ask her why she was there, and why she hadn’t gone home to Evie instead.
And that was a question I never did put to her. At the very beginning of October, as soon as the Michaelmas term began, Rachel dropped me just as suddenly as she had picked me up. I was shocked of course, and hurt. Devastated, even. Richard only laughed when I told him, asking me why I had thought she would treat me any differently from the way she treated everyone else, and going on to make sure that as many people as possible knew that I had been ‘Cardanined’. I took my consolation, such as it was, not from his rather brutal attempts to align me with what he described as most of the male population of the college, but from the fact that Rachel, from that point on, seemed to lead an almost entirely solitary life. Cissy had gone back to America at the end of what had apparently only ever been a two-year exchange programme, although I was sure I had heard her in the Buttery bar talking about which authors she’d chosen to study for her Finals at the end of the third year. And Anthony, to everyone’s amazement, had been sent down, never to return and never to take his degree. The story went round that he had failed his college exams, or that he hadn’t met some sort of a minimum performance standard that Harry was said to have imposed on him during that summer term in response to a generally poor work record. We were surprised though, all of us, given the amount of time he had always spent in the library, and the reputation he enjoyed for being obsessively intellectual. Still, he was gone, and Rachel took her tutorials with Harry on her own after that. She seemed to spend most of her time working, or away from College altogether, staying, or so we all presumed, in Chelsea with Godmother Evie.
Of course I know now that that wasn’t the case, and that Evie, having cut Rachel off on account of what happened at the end of that summer term, refused to have her in the Chelsea house, thus beginning an estrangement that would last for several years. That was one of a number of mysteries that Harry solved for me earlier this month when I visited him in Oxford. His invitation had, as it turned out, been almost entirely disingenuous, its only accuracy being with regard to the presence of a hoar frost around the lake. The motivation that lay behind it was not, as he had written, to give me some things of Rachel’s that he thought I might like to have, but instead to reveal to me the circumstances of her death. And he wanted to seek to persuade me, even as he revealed it, that there was no purpose to be served by the story’s wider disclosure. I stayed for only a few days in the end, our business together being concluded more quickly than he had anticipated. In the series of meetings that we had during my visit, as we sat together in his rooms with the fire crackling in the grate and a cold wind blowing outside, he told me two tales. The first concerned the sequence of events that had led to Rachel’s long estrangement from her godmother; to Anthony’s disgrace and Cissy’s return to America; to Rachel and me spending our summer together before she so abruptly ended our relationship; and, a long time later, to her death and my great sadness. The second story he told me was that of the weeks that had led up to her murder, and of what had happened beside the lake on Midsummer Night as I sat on the library steps waiting for her to come back.
It is because of those stories that I am standing here now on my balcony, in the dark of a December morning. There is nothing left for me here, and no one who needs me to stay. Richard and Lucinda had no trouble persuading me in the end to relocate as they have done, and I didn’t mind letting Lucinda think she was right about the swiftness of my decision being entirely due to their having asked me to be godfather to one of the twins born to them this week. She wrote in her email that she hoped the baby’s arrival might give me some sense of a future which would hold meaning for me. There was a kindness in her sentiment, and I felt no need to contradict her, nor to tell her that I am going only because I have a need for new surroundings, and a longing to be away from the places Rachel and I shared. It is for the want of her that I am going, and in the hope that that want may fade a little, eventually, by reason of my being elsewhere.
The air about me is harsh and I have grown cold as I wait for the car, cold in a way that I don’t remember feeling in Oxford, despite the snow that fell then. There is a pain in the tips of my fingers, and I wonder about whether to put a brazier out here, but as soon as I do, I remember that I am leaving. I stop thinking about the cold and I wonder instead whether the tenant who will come tomorrow to live in my apartment will think, as Rachel did that first morning, that the heron sitting beside me is a sculpture, because it is so still.