9
I TOOK A taxi from the station when I arrived in Oxford to visit Harry earlier this month. By the time we pulled up at the gates on Worcester Street it was snowing even more heavily than it had been all day, so heavily in fact that I could barely make out the shape of the facade that lay behind those gates, looming out at me from the whiteness before disappearing again almost immediately. In the moments in which it was visible it triggered in me the same feelings that it had at the beginning of each new term when, as a student, I had stood there and sensed something like fear, or anticipation, I was never quite sure which.
It was precisely the sensation I remember feeling for the first time on the September afternoon when, shortly after Robbie and I had our accident, I was sent away to school. I had come in from the garden one Sunday morning to find my mother in tears, kneeling on my bedroom floor and packing all my things into a trunk. When she had finished I helped her to carry it down the stairs. I stood in the driveway and watched, amazed, as she loaded it into the back of our car and turned to me and announced that later that day she would be taking me away from our home, and away from her. The feeling came back every year after that, presaged by the first cooling of the air and the rain feeling cold rather than warm, and by spiky globes appearing in amongst the leaves of the horse chestnut trees.
The intensity of the sensation always increased on the actual journey. As soon as we set off my stomach would start a leaping motion, jumping almost into my chest and falling again. On nearing the town itself the pace of that movement would accelerate, so that by the time we pulled into the avenue of beech trees forming the approach to the school, it had become almost unbearable.
The first time she took me there, just as we had stopped outside the boarding house and she was reaching to turn off the ignition, the housemaster appeared on the steps leading down from his front door. He was dressed in a pinstriped suit, somewhat inappropriately it seemed to me at the time, and even more so now I come to think of it. He had his hands behind his back and his chin was lifted slightly and there was something that looked like a grimace on his face, as if he was saying to me, ‘Come on, buck up old boy, this is no fun for either of us so we may as well make the best of it.’ I remember closing my eyes and slowing my breathing, planning to stay like that until I felt calm enough to get out of the car. But when I did feel ready, I opened them again to find that there were tears pouring down my cheeks, literally pouring, like little waterfalls hot against my skin and so far beyond my control it was as though it was somebody else entirely who was crying, somebody utterly unknown to me.
I realised I had to say something to my mother, to explain that I was alright really and she mustn’t worry. I started to try to speak but she just held me then and kissed my eyelids and began to cry herself and said, ‘I know I know but we have to lovey, we have to’ and the man had come down from the steps and was standing beside our car, bending over and tapping on the window. Suddenly, so suddenly that I flinched, he opened the car door and looked in at us and laughed before uttering some platitude or other which I couldn’t hear properly because my mother had her mouth to my ear and was saying, ‘I love you I love you my little one.’ I couldn’t stop crying then, not until the man had got me out of the car and told my mother to wait outside while he took me into the house. ‘We find it’s better that way, Mrs Petersen,’ he said, and she obeyed him and some boys had carried my trunk into the house and it was all over and I realised I wasn’t crying any more and suddenly I felt nothing, absolutely nothing, as if my stomach was no longer there and I was not a physical body but only a part of the air.
It started all over again though, as soon as the matron told me that my mother, instead of waiting outside in the car to say a final goodbye as I thought she must have done, had driven away. The woman told me to stay where I was, sitting on a bench in an empty corridor, while she went to sort through my things. Because there was nobody looking I cried properly then, and bit into my hand. The thought occurred to me that I hadn’t asked my mother when she’d be coming back, and that I had no idea when I’d see her again, and an emptiness opened up inside me and I stopped thinking about her. And that was an emptiness that would remain until the months that Rachel and I spent together before she died, when she held me at night and sometimes slept with her hand curled against my neck, and sometimes woke and breathed into my closed eyes that she loved me.
I never told my mother about the way my stomach turned each time she drove me to school. Eventually, after the first year or so, the crying stopped, and I was able to smile and wave as she drove away, as though I was perfectly happy with the whole situation and hadn’t noticed the fact that she herself had been weeping since the moment we’d set off from home.
On the October afternoon that I arrived in Oxford to begin my degree, I stood outside the college gates with my old school trunk beside me, my initials painted in black capitals across its face, and the feeling began again. I thought of my mother then, and how if she’d still been alive, I would perhaps have telephoned her that night and found a way to tell her about it, and we would have laughed together and agreed how silly it was really that it was still happening, even after all this time. I remember looking up at the darkness of the stone rising above me and feeling certain there would be no place for me there, that I would be unwelcome. And then I looked up at the huge wooden doors that formed the main entrance to the college and was wondering how on earth I would open them, or who would do it for me, when a small wicket door that was cut into the bottom half of one of them swung inwards and the person standing just inside stood back and held it ajar for me so I had no choice but to lift the handle of the trunk and pull it towards them. They helped me in with it and suddenly I was inside, and the porters were giving me a key to my room and pointing it out on a map of the college and showing me my pigeonhole with my name on it and there was Harry’s letter about the matriculation photograph waiting for me.
When I found myself there this time, standing in the snow and glancing at my watch and hoping I wouldn’t be late for tea with Harry, I looked up and saw a window in the wall of the spiral staircase that ran down from the Old Library. Because of the effect of the flakes swirling about in little clouds and half-clouds, the window itself seemed somehow isolated from the building, as if floating in mid-air. As I looked more closely, and as the window appeared and disappeared and reappeared above me, I could just make out a figure standing there and it looked as though it was raising a hand in greeting. I turned to see who they were waving at but the path behind me was empty. When I looked back, the window had been obscured once more by a flurry of snow and the figure was no longer there.
I let myself in through the little doorway and went through to the porter’s lodge, half expecting to find there the person who had been standing at the spiral staircase window, but there was only the porter, leaning on his counter. I introduced myself, realising from the way he stared that there had been no need for me to do so. He said nothing in response, only handing me my key, and with it, an envelope. I opened the envelope and took out the piece of paper that was inside and saw that it was just a note of when breakfast would be served each day, and of the times at which College would be locked up at night and opened again in the morning. Then the porter pushed an open book towards me and handed me a pen, pointing to where I should sign. I think I was growing impatient by this point, so I asked whether it was really necessary, but he nodded and, having looked at the front cover and seen the words ‘Old Members’ Visitors Book’ embossed in gold letters, I did as I’d been told, noticing that mine was the first entry for several days. I looked back at the man, who was still staring. ‘Could you phone through to Mr Gardner please, and let him know I’m here?’ I said. ‘He’s expecting me for tea so I’ll go straight over to his rooms.’
Still the porter didn’t speak, but he reached forward and picked up the telephone, and as I turned to walk from the lodge I heard him say the words, ‘He’s here, Mr Gardner. Says he’s coming to you now.’
Looking back to that first meeting I can see that Harry knew enough then to have told me the whole of the story, and that the essentials of the narrative had been in his possession even when he invited me to Oxford, when he sent me Rachel’s little book of Browning and suggested it was something I might like to read. I realise now that when I walked into his rooms and took off my jacket and sank into his armchair, he could simply have placed it before me then, barring a few minor details, for my consideration. And had he done so, I could have got up and gone straight to the police with what he had told me. And that is why he chose instead to hold his fire, and to let me find things out little by little and to infer things hint by hint. I suppose it was his hope that once he had begun, I would be so transfixed I could not choose but stay and hear him out, and that by the end of my visit, when I had heard the stories he had told me, I would be able to see things as he did, and to agree to his suggestion that we should keep them to ourselves.
On arriving at his staircase that afternoon I’d felt nervous, horribly so in fact, but when he opened the door and welcomed me in and asked me if I had my tea with milk, the feeling dissolved immediately. It was warm inside those rooms of his; he had a fire burning low in the grate and there was a soft glow from a standard lamp behind the sofa, and he took my hand in his and said, ‘Welcome, Alex. I am so glad you felt able to come.’ And then I remembered Rachel telling me, after we were married, about Harry welcoming her into his rooms like this, with a handshake and the offer of a cup of tea, on the December day she’d travelled from London to be interviewed for her place at Worcester. She said that as she’d stood outside the door waiting to be called in, she’d cried a little with nerves, and with the exhaustion brought on by having spent every night of the previous week reading novels and learning quotes and rehearsing answers to the questions she thought she’d be asked. And then the door opened and there was Harry, smiling at her, and he said her name and she said ‘Yes, that is who I am,’ and he stood back to let her pass. As she stepped across his threshold she felt as though she was entering another world and escaping from the one in which she’d been living, and that, having done so, she was changed forever. In the end she needed none of the answers she’d rehearsed. It was just a conversation, she said, between her and Harry and the other two tutors she found inside, the youngest one sitting cross-legged on the floor by the fire and buttering himself a crumpet. It was just a conversation about stories and how to tell them.
In return, I had to tell Rachel that there was nothing interesting to say about my interview and that, were I to describe it, the trade would only short-change her. There were no logs burning in the grate and no buttered crumpets, nor anything approaching the warmth of Harry’s welcome. Come to think of it, I’m not sure Haddon even shook my hand. The conversation I had with him strayed beyond an athletic working through of the hard facts of my history and politics A levels only once. It was, I suppose, utterly predictable that he should want to test my ability to construct an argument off the top of my head and, moreover, that he should need to ascertain whether I was able to withstand his opposition to it. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by the question itself. Up until that point in the interview Haddon had said very little, leaving the bulk of the work to his junior colleague. Haddon sat side on to me, taking a note of almost everything I said. He seemed once or twice to lose interest altogether, gazing out of the French doors into the garden I’d caught a glimpse of on coming in. But at a certain point I looked over and saw that he was continuing to take his notes even as he did this, his hand moving steadily across the page and back again to start another line.
When his colleague reached the end of her questions he closed the file that had been on his lap throughout and I relaxed my shoulders, thinking we had finished, and it was then that he chose to stand from his chair and walk over to where I was sitting. He looked down at me and fixed me with a gaze that seemed entirely hostile and then he said, ‘Define for me, if you will, Mr Petersen, a white lie. Quick as you like.’
‘A what?’ I said, wishing immediately that I hadn’t, realising that he would see straight through my prevarication and discount me out of hand as a no-hoper. But he repeated himself, humouring me in my gaucheness.
‘A white lie, Mr Petersen. A. White. Lie. You have heard the expression, I presume?’
I nodded and, as he turned and glanced at the clock behind him, I began. We argued back and forth for a time, and eventually I settled on my preferred definition. Haddon, having asked me whether it was my best offer, sat in his chair and opened his file and wrote down what I had said. He shook his head as he did so and I thought it was all over, but at the last he looked up and asked me if I could come up with an example that would prove my case. I think it was only because I assumed I had failed utterly that I did what I did next, and offered up for him the anecdote of a mother telling her son that she and the boy’s father, who was a doctor, had fallen out of love, and decided to live apart, and that she had told the boy this in order to spare him the emotional anguish that would surely have been occasioned by the truth of the matter: that because of a game gone wrong, a game the boy and his friend had played without thinking one summer afternoon, in the way that boys do, the father had been barred from his profession, and, this having ruined him, had lost his mind for a time, so that until he had recovered, it had been necessary for him to live elsewhere.
When I had finished, Haddon got up from his seat and walked over to the French doors and looked out on the garden. And then, without turning back to face me, he said, ‘Thank you very much, Mr Petersen. We shall be pleased to see you in October. And now Miss Templeton will show you out. Tempus fugit.’
Rachel had told me about Harry’s rooms after we were married, and about what I would have seen as I’d sat there talking about my father, had I not been blinded by the sun. And of course, I had seen them once again when Harry had invited us there for a drink before we dined with him on Midsummer Night, but still, I was surprised when I came in from the cold and looked around me. There seemed not to be a single inch of wall that wasn’t covered by a picture, or a postcard. A long thin map of the world, large swathes of it coloured red, had along its base the line ‘How Did We Get Away With It?’ and cartoons of Ronald Reagan hung beside a photograph of Harry as a young man kneeling with a pack of beagles somewhere in a wild English countryside. Coffee mugs carrying US election slogans stood amongst tins of Turkish Delight, and to the right of the bookcases holding row upon row of dictionaries was a poster, a few feet high, of an American footballer. Half turning round on himself with a ball held in both his hands, up and away from his body, he wore a red shirt with MONTANA written in large white capitals across his back, and the number 16 below.
‘The man of many moments,’ Harry said, noticing me looking at it. And he stood and looked at it himself, taking off his glasses and folding his arms across his chest.
‘It was as if he was running around in a playground,’ he said, ‘simply having fun. They called him a surgeon, though. A surgeon on the football field. I always thought of it more as a kind of poetry, what he did out there. It would be the very last second of the whole thing, all hope gone, and then, right then, there would be one wonderful pass and the game would be turned on its head. He said he only did it for the love of it. And because every down was different. There we are,’ he finished, smiling at me and putting his glasses back on. When he’d walked over and taken his seat on the sofa, I smiled back at him, unable not to share something of his enthusiasm for this man I knew nothing of, but because I could think of nothing to say, I kept silent and carried on looking around.
Perhaps strangest of all the things I saw in those rooms of his were the red squirrels. Everywhere I looked there were paintings of them, postcards of them, and even, as I saw when turning to put my tea down on the side table next to me, a stuffed one in a glass case, its see-through eyes staring out at me where I sat. Other than that, the stretches of wall in between all of these things were lined with books, and those that couldn’t fit on the shelves were stacked on every remaining inch of the floor. Up against one wall was a blackboard, words in a language I didn’t recognise written across it in a careful script inscribed in fading chalk. In amongst everything was an old record player, half hidden behind a stack of cushions, and when I saw it I remembered Rachel telling me about how Harry had played recordings sometimes, of Tolkien reciting medieval poetry, or of someone proclaiming verse in Anglo-Saxon, or of long-dead actors hollering out Shakespeare’s soliloquies.
I am not sure I focused at all well on the conversation that afternoon, there being so many things to look at. There was one photograph in particular that distracted me again and again from the thread of whatever it was that Harry was saying. Its location was in part responsible, in that it hung just to the left of where he sat on the sofa, so that every time I looked at him, I looked also at the black and white image next to him. It sat so directly in my line of vision, in fact, that it could almost have been placed there deliberately, had my reaction to it been something he’d wanted to observe. It was of a group of students who were gathered together with Harry at their centre. They all seemed to be holding glasses of champagne, and they were positioned on what looked to be the steps down from the Provost’s drawing room, the ones that led directly into his rose garden, a private space ordinarily out of bounds to students.
There was something slightly haphazard about the group, as though they had none of them been quite ready for the photographer. Harry was standing in the middle, more as if by accident than by design, his arms half folded in front of him and his head slightly bowed so that I couldn’t quite read the look on his face; if it was a grin, it was a sardonic one, though it could just as well have been a grimace. The other reason for my being drawn to the picture provided a much more obvious explanation for my fascination with it: standing beside Harry, with her hair falling slightly across her face and a half-smile just beginning to break out across it, was Rachel, and because she had been caught at precisely the moment at which she had turned her head towards the photographer, it was, from where I sat in Harry’s armchair, as though she was looking right at me.
Apart from Harry, they are all either wearing evening dress, or some form of costume, as though they are characters in a play. And as is sometimes the way of black and white photographs, every one of them appears to be more beautiful than they might otherwise be. As Harry talks on I think to myself that their dress, and the austerity of the lines of the building that provides the backdrop to the image, combined with the fact that it is clearly an evening sunlight that falls on them, lends the whole thing something of an aristocratic air, something of a peculiarly English kind of romance. I try to work out the occasion on which it would have been taken. Because Cissy is in it, standing on the other side of Rachel from Harry, with one of her arms draped across Rachel’s shoulders in a lazy kind of a way, I know that it must have been before my third year, when she was no longer there. And because there are other students there as well as Rachel and Cissy, I know it was a college event rather than one just for the English students, and one of some significance for them all to have been dressed as they were and allowed into the Provost’s rose garden. I had wondered at first why I wasn’t there also, but only for a moment, knowing that I would have been somewhere behind the scenes, as I always was when those people were gathered together.
As I sit and try to remember, at the same time as attempting to appear interested in Harry’s conversation, I hear him say my name, and then I hear him say it again, and I am suddenly aware that he has asked me a question I haven’t heard. Unable to hide my embarrassment, I feel my face flush red and I apologise.
‘It was the photograph,’ I say, hoping this will be enough of an explanation for my having completely ignored whatever it was that he’d asked me. He turns his head to look at it and seems surprised, somehow, to see it hanging so close to him. And then he turns back and stares at me again, as though waiting for me to say something. When I don’t, he starts to tell me about the former student who took it, and how she had gone on to become quite a successful photographer. I sip my tea again, only half listening to what he is saying. My gaze has wandered back again to the photograph, and I realise suddenly what it is that I am looking at.
I suppose I must have known all along that it had been taken at the Commemoration Ball that had been held on Midsummer Night at the end of our second year, when the whole place became Casablanca and a fire pit was dug beside the lake, and next to it a snake charmer writhed about partly in darkness and partly in the flickering brightness thrown on him by the flames he sat beside, and the Buttery bar became Rick’s Bar, serving martinis and cosmopolitans instead of pints of lager, and there seemed to be jazz everywhere you went. The huge wooden doors of College, opened only rarely, had been drawn right back on their hinges and a red carpet appeared on the flagstones and the green grass of the quad, usually out of bounds, became strewn with men clutching programmes and women looking uncomfortable in the newness of their shoes. Somebody had the idea at the last moment of rigging up a projector at the bottom of the quad and playing a reel of the film itself up onto the Old Library, all night long and magnified a hundred times, so that shortly after Rachel and Harry had been photographed toasting one another with champagne on the steps down from the Provost’s drawing room, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart appeared, spread up across the whole of the old stone building, their silent twenty-foot-high heads entwined in a black and white kiss that seemed as though it would never end. Of course it did end, eventually, but only when the dawn broke and the Survivors’ Photograph was taken and breakfast was served beside the lake and, with an uncertain sunlight filtering through the trees round about, the cleaning staff appeared, strung out across the lawns like a line of beaters crossing a moor, bags at their waists for the litter.
‘It was an extraordinary night, wasn’t it, Harry?’ I ask. I turn to look at him again only to see that he is frowning at me, and I realise that he was in the middle of saying something and I have interrupted him. He doesn’t answer my question, and so I try again. ‘You didn’t think so? Don’t you remember everyone talking about it afterwards? Wasn’t it the most expensive college Ball ever held?’
Harry, still frowning, looks away. ‘I couldn’t say, Alex. I remember little of such talk, if indeed there was any.’
There is something peculiar in the way that he says this, and I am puzzled by it until he tells me that he would doubtless have attended, had his wife still been alive, it being exactly the sort of thing she would have enjoyed, but that it was not the sort of thing to go to on one’s own. I remember then, too late, that the year the Ball had been held was also the year in which Harry’s wife had died, and I realise that my clumsy questions have offended him.
‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ I say. ‘I— Of course. I mean, I hadn’t realised. I thought—’, and I look back at the photograph, feeling confused by what I am seeing, ‘I thought you were there also.’
‘There is no need to apologise, Alex,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘It was a long time ago.’ He explains that he’d been given no choice about making an appearance at the Provost’s drinks beforehand, and that that was where the photograph had been taken. ‘Three-line whip, you know how these things are. It was fairly brief, as his parties go. But the Ball proper was, by all accounts, as you say, an extraordinary night,’ and he pauses, looking at the photograph again before looking back at me and asking, ‘You remember it well, I take it?’
‘Yes,’ I say, and I tell him that I remember a certain amount, but that because I had Richard as my companion throughout and kept pace with him on the alcohol front, those memories are perhaps more fragmented than they might otherwise be. Harry holds my gaze for a moment, saying nothing, before putting his cup back on its saucer and pulling out his pocket watch. He flips it open for a moment and stands then from the sofa, and it is apparent that we have reached the end of our conversation.
I stand also, and we arrange what time I should arrive in the Old Bursary for drinks before dinner. Harry runs through the sort of people I can expect to meet on High Table over the next few days, and when I ask after Haddon and whether he will be among them, I’m not at all disappointed to discover that he’s undertaken his annual pilgrimage to visit his aunt in New South Wales. Harry says he’s fairly sure there won’t be anyone at all who I know, as a matter of fact, and that if I find the assorted company of visiting academics and elderly Emeritus Fellows too much at any point, he can arrange for me to have some food sent up to my room instead. ‘It might be just the thing though Alex,’ he says. ‘For both of us, I mean. To take us a little out of ourselves at the close of a day?’ I weigh the thought of my empty room against the potential comfort of strangers and say yes, why not, and he asks me to wait a moment while he fetches a gown for me to try, saying as he goes through to his other room that he presumes I haven’t brought my own. No, I say, no, I haven’t, remembering that he’d put exactly the same question to Rachel and me as we’d stood there on the Midsummer Night of her death. He comes back and holds one out and I am a little slower than I might be in taking it from him, stuck as I am with this memory that has surfaced. Mistaking what he sees as hesitation, he begins to help me on with the gown, standing behind me and holding out first one sleeve and then the other. I put my arms in in turn, but the second one becomes stuck so that he has to reach his hand in and search for my own and there is a moment then when we touch one another that makes me feel somehow uncomfortable.
After a certain amount of struggling, it becomes apparent that the only way I will secure my release from the gown is to relax my arm completely and let him guide me out of it from where he stands behind me, and as I do so we both laugh, and finally I emerge and take it from him and my feeling of discomfort has passed. We’ve exchanged what I think are our goodbyes when Harry says suddenly, catching me unawares after the awkwardness of the gown, ‘And the Browning? How did you find it?’
I don’t know what to say. I’ve been intending to read it since he sent it to me, but somehow I haven’t found the time. In fact, I haven’t so much as looked at it again since the day I opened his parcel and held the book up to my face and relived the memory of Rachel reading to me from it so soon before she died. I look at him standing there frowning and it occurs to me that I could simply come out with it and ask him how he came to have it in his possession, and tell him I know that Rachel took it with her to Oxford that weekend, and that I know that what he’d written in his letter about having come across it in the course of sorting through the contents of his rooms simply wasn’t true.
And then, suddenly, realising how much I want to say these things but being unable to think of a way of doing so, something like anger rushes over me, irrational anger towards Harry for having thought that I would have had the time to sit about reading poetry. I wonder to myself whether he has any idea of the impact of Rachel’s death, and of the difficulties I have begun to experience in carrying out what would once have been the simplest of tasks. And so instead of asking him why he had the book, which is what I want to do, I tell him that I haven’t had time to look at it on account of the fact that I’ve spent most of the previous week engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to locate the original of her death certificate, it having gone missing in the post. He says nothing in response, so I go on to describe for him in detail, aware that my tone is growing more acerbic with every word, precisely how difficult it has been to convince either the register office or the post office of its importance to me. I tell him then how it felt to make phone call after phone call to one nameless administrator after another trying to explain that a copy would not satisfy the insurers, who were refusing to pay out on her life policy without it. And when still he says nothing, I infer from his silence that he is wondering why I need the money, so I go on to explain that it is not for me, but for the charities that Rachel listed in her will. ‘Do you see?’ I say. ‘It is my duty. Can you see that? Can you imagine?’
And then all at once, even before he lays his hand on my arm again and says the words, ‘I do see, Alex, I do. Remember that I too know what it is to grieve,’ I recall the letter he wrote to me after Rachel died, and the things he said in it about his wife. But before I can begin to apologise for my outburst, he is holding open the door for me. ‘Six forty-five,’ he says. ‘That should give you plenty of time to change.’
I arrived in the Old Bursary for drinks that evening to discover that Harry was busy arranging a seating plan and introducing people to one another. He didn’t so much as allow me to catch his eye until we were filing into Hall, and even then, when I made an attempt to express how very sorry I was for what I had said, he only nodded at me. I tried again over coffee but he was busy once more, and when I looked around towards the end of the evening and found he wasn’t there, I was told by one of the staff that he had left quite some time ago. On my way back to my room I walked a couple of times around the quad, wondering whether he had gone back to his own rooms and whether perhaps I should go to him there and apologise properly. When I reached the bottom corner for the second time I stood beside the passageway that ran beneath the secret garden and I looked up and saw the windows of the Old Library, each one more than twenty feet high and lit from their base with lamps that glowed red against the night. And there was Harry, standing at the middle window.
I didn’t think he’d be able to see me in the shadows so I stood and watched him for a while until eventually he turned and walked away. As he did so, I remembered that that was where he’d stood on the night of Rachel’s murder, and the thought occurred to me then that if someone had known Rachel was going to be walking down to the lake at the time that she did, and if they had wanted to observe her as she walked, they couldn’t have chosen a better place to do it.
When I got back to my room I undressed straight away, too tired even to have a bath. My bed was raised up as though on a tomb, mattress after mattress stacked beneath me and long drawers forming a kind of a plinth underneath them. ‘Like the princess and the pea,’ I heard Rachel whisper in my ear as I climbed into it, and then she laughed, and then her laugh faded. I reached over and took the little book of Browning from the bedside table, wondering why it was that Harry had been so insistent I should read it. I looked at a couple of the shorter poems and then I flicked through the book again until I found the final one that Rachel had read that summer night in London, and I read up to where I had got to the last time I had looked at it. As I read I saw the man, lonely in his cottage. I heard the storm that he had heard, howling loud enough to tear down the trees and vex the lake. As his lover came through the door I saw her make the fire rise in the grate and I saw the room lighting up around them as she took off her wet things and sat beside him. I felt her take his head in her hands and place it on her shoulder and I listened to her murmur that she loved him. And then, turning onto my front and pulling the covers up around my shoulders, I read on.
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: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad that it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
I closed the book and got out of bed again and walked across to the window. The view was the one I’d enjoyed as an undergraduate from my room up in the eaves of the Nuffield Building, but from sideways on and slightly lower down. I looked across to the plane tree we’d all been photographed beside that October morning, and then I wrapped my dressing gown more tightly around myself and leaned further out. Gnarled branches of some kind of creeper climbed down from the window and I could see as far as the lake. I could just make out in the pale moonlight the trees rising up around it, and as I stared out across the blankness of the lawns that lay clad deep in the snow that had fallen throughout my journey from London, I heard the busy hooting of an owl.