An Absence of Natural Light (6 page)

‘We should both go,' he said.

‘I think I'll get more out of him if I go on my own. I have a duty of care. Even if I didn't care about you, which I do, it's my obligation. Professionally, I mean. I sold you this flat.'

The care home had once been a large Victorian house on what had probably then been a quiet road in Hammersmith. Now it was festooned with bollards and painted with double yellow lines and the humped tarmac of small hills meant to calm traffic erupted every few metres along its length. Cars undulated over them in the ceaseless convoy like rat-runs all over the city.

The professor was polite and courteous, alert and attentive, until Rebecca mentioned the name of Rachel Gaunt. When she did, sitting upright in his wheelchair, he clenched and unclenched his fists.

‘I will not discuss that person,' he said. ‘I have no wish to recollect that period, or that particular character. I prefer to live in peace and so must insist you leave.'

‘This is important,' she said.

‘Not to me,' he said. ‘To me it's merely prurient. I insist you leave immediately.'

‘Please,' she said.

He wheeled to face her. Drool glistened on his chin and one of his eyes had a rheumy infection, unless it was a cataract. He was seeing her only out of the other one. ‘You're harassing an elderly man,' he said, seated because he was crippled, standing metaphorically on what dignity remained to him. Rebecca felt ashamed, but she persisted because she didn't have a choice.

‘Absalom Court has been refurbished. Where she lived is now the basement of a luxury flat. I sold that flat to a good man called Tom Harper just over a month ago and she won't leave him alone and I'm begging you to help me.'

‘The person to whom you refer died in 1965. What you're saying can't possibly be true. In her own phrase, she checked out early. Now I'd be grateful if you'd leave me alone.'

Rebecca bit her lip. She was no good at this. A skilled interlocutor might be able take another tack, employ charm and tease out the information. She didn't know how and was too fuelled by anxiety to find the necessary patience in herself.

‘I'm desperate, Professor Fleetwood,' she said.

He was frowning. The expression in his good eye had changed. He said, ‘Your resident wouldn't be Tom Harper the footballer, would he?'

‘Yes, he would.'

‘My God,' he said. ‘I've supported that team for over seventy years.'

‘You speak with the same accent he does. I've only just noticed.'

‘Different generations, but I think we were born about three streets apart. I saw his home debut, when he came on as a sixteen-year-old in the second-half of a cup game against Chelsea. I remember he scored. I was a season ticket holder, back then.'

Thank the Lord for football, Rebecca thought. ‘Will you help him?'

‘Bring him here. If you're telling the truth, I'll tell you both as much as I can. But do it today. I want to remember Rachel Gaunt for as short a time as possible and to forget her entirely again just as soon as I possibly can.'

She went outside and phoned Tom from the care home drive but got no response. She looked at the sky, which was clear, and assumed he was running along the river. She had no idea how far he'd run, how long it might take him to cover the mileage. He was so formidably fit he could be jogging along for bloody hours.

Her phone rang. She didn't recognize the number, but she answered it anyway.

‘Simon Swarbrick.'

‘Who?'

‘Simon Swarbrick?'

‘Your voice sounds familiar, but you're going to have to give me a clue.'

‘I'm in charge of the alumni archive at the LSE. We met yesterday.'

‘Of course we did,' she said, ‘and of course I remember, very clearly. You were most helpful.'

‘Thank you. I'm calling you now because of your interest in Rachel Gaunt. Is that still ongoing?'

‘Very much so,' Rebecca said.

‘I've found some cine film you might be interested in seeing. In viewing, I mean. She features quite prominently. There's no sound, but the footage is Super 8 and the camera must have been a Braun or something of a similar standard lens-wise because the quality is excellent. You could come and look at it this afternoon.'

Except that she couldn't, Rebecca thought, looking at her watch. She'd had the previous afternoon and this morning off and the clients were stacking up and it wasn't like she'd taken a sabbatical or even any holiday time owed. She was supposed to be at work, or at least working while she was out of the office. She was doing neither.

‘I can't make it,' she said.

‘That's a shame.'

‘But I can ask the owner of the property she lived in to come to you. It's on his behalf I've been doing the research.'

‘I was rather hoping you'd come yourself,' the hipster said. There was now a slight wheedling note to his tone. Rebecca rolled her eyes and then saw she had a call holding. She said, ‘He's a very wealthy man with a deep appreciation of the importance of higher education and a proven tendency to put his money where he thinks it might be most beneficial, both to society and culturally. Bluntly, he's someone worth keeping in with.'

‘He will need to bring his credentials,' Simon said. ‘I'll expect him at 3 p.m.'

‘Thank you, Mr Swarbrick.'

‘Simon,' he said.

‘Thank you, Simon.'

‘Anything to oblige you,' he said, with the stress on the ‘
you
'.

She terminated the call and picked up the one waiting, which was Tom. She told him about her encounter with Professor Fleetwood. He told her he'd be there in thirty minutes. She spent ten of them finding a coffee shop, ten slowly drinking a coffee and the remainder walking back to the care home to an elderly man with all his mental faculties and a body betrayed cruelly by time.

She hardly had the nerve for the ordeal she thought they might be about to put him through. Her stomach rebelled acidly against the assault of the double espresso she'd just inflicted on it. ‘I'm my own worst enemy,' she said out loud. But she had an inkling, now, an intuition, that where she particularly was concerned, this old saying no longer rang true.

There were armchairs in the reception room and Tom helped Professor Fleetwood out of the wheelchair and into one, where he looked more comfortable and composed than he had forty minutes earlier. He'd flushed with pleasure like a boy on seeing his celebrated visitor and tried and failed to struggle to his feet to greet him properly. In other circumstances, Rebecca might have felt nervous or uneasy about their encounter. She generally held with the view that you should never meet your heroes; it's always going to be an occasion at best anticlimactic and at worst disillusioning. Not today, though. Tom was a charismatic man in life, but that wasn't why she thought it would go okay. She thought it would go okay because he had the grace and generosity to make sure that it would.

The Professor sipped tea from a cup they'd scrounged from the kitchens, the saucer nursed in his lap. They sat in armchairs just like his, facing him. The door to the little room was firmly closed. He looked a good decade younger than he had earlier and he was composed and when he spoke his voice was firm. He'd used the interval to wipe the drool from his chin.

‘I don't believe in ghosts,' he said. ‘I need to establish that emphatically with both of you from the start. She used to talk about checking out early. She would follow the remark with a bark of laughter, made husky by her chain-smoking, which wasn't all that unusual in students back then. Cigarettes were cheap and the harm they did not yet widely understood. Everyone in those days smoked. She smoked the French Gauloises brand.

‘She must have meant what she said about checking out early, because less than two years after I first laid eyes on her she went and did it. Suicide, or the threat of it, was quite fashionable back in those days. It sounds sick to say that now. I think it had something to do with the Cold War and the way the constant threat of obliteration by the bomb had debased life. Life then seemed far more tenuous and contingent and insecure.

‘She used to say that she'd check out early and that one day she'd be back. She said she'd surprise everyone. I don't think I've ever met a more defiant creature in my life. And it's been a long life. It's my belief that no one cheats death, however, not even a Rachel Gaunt. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I should start really at the beginning.'

He was twenty-eight, had just been awarded his full professorship and his career at the LSE had launched with a property deal very profitable for both him and the school where he was to spend the rest of his academic life. He'd become one of only two tenants at Absalom Court, which by then had otherwise fallen into near-dereliction.

He'd moved in after his successful LSE job interview at the beginning of June and seen the potential of the block as student accommodation straight away. He'd inquired about securing a lease and asked half a dozen building firms to tender for the conversion work required. Then he'd drawn up a business proposal based on typical student rents for rooms in halls of residence, showing that costs would be covered and a profit start to show within a period of five years. He'd presented this to the school's vice-chancellor and, because wealthy alumni had made the LSE cash-rich, the scheme was approved and the work was begun immediately.

Rachel Gaunt was among the first intake the following autumn. She had a reputation even before she arrived there for beauty, rebelliousness and getting what she wanted. As a precocious sixth-former she'd written to Sartre and Che Guevara and whatever she'd said to them in her letters had earned her written replies. She'd corresponded regularly with Timothy Leary and Martha Gellhorn and Philip K. Dick. She was interested in the occult philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and had got Miles Davis to personally autograph her copy of
Kind of Blue
, the jazz album Britain's beatniks were all listening to at their parties and talking about and carrying around with them like some badge of credibility and cool.

She drove a red Triumph Herald convertible and seemed to have plenty of money. Her family background was obscure because she'd been raised an orphan. In the long holiday she did what was described as clerical work for a Brussels-based company called Martens & Degrue. It struck Fleetwood that the paper shuffling she did for them over the summer seemed improbably well paid.

A romance she had with a fellow student at the start of her second year ended abruptly at Christmas, when he'd suffered a nervous breakdown. Professor Fleetwood was charged, discreetly, with the mission of finding out more about the background and character of Rachel Gaunt. Her academic credentials were excellent and her coursework brilliant. But the mental state in which she'd left her suitor suggested some sort of moral corruption or malaise.

He discovered that Martens & Degrue were a subsidiary company wholly owned and maintained by an organization called the Jericho Society. They had run the orphanage which had cared for Rachel from birth. She had grown up there bilingual in English and French. When she was eleven, she'd gained a scholarship to the Surrey boarding school where she'd stayed until passing her A Levels.

Her summer job suggested she kept in close contact with the Jericho Society, which Fleetwood assumed was all she had in the way of kin. But they were an organization discreet to the point of secrecy and he could discover no more about them other than that they were obviously wealthy and completely independent.

‘I suspect that they were probably what today we'd call a cult,' he told Tom and Rebecca. ‘But Rachel never exhibited any signs of slavishness or manipulation, quite the opposite in fact. She was iconoclastic even by the standards of an age becoming by then quite militant in its defiance of convention.'

‘Beatlemania,' Tom said.

Fleetwood chuckled. ‘That was just around the corner, Tom.'

‘Ban the Bomb,' Rebecca said.

‘You look very like her,' Fleetwood said, turning serious. ‘The resemblance quite startled me when I first saw you earlier. But there was no bomb banning where Rachel Gaunt was concerned. My intuition was that she was completely apolitical. She was drawn to Che Guevara not by the cause, but by the glamour. Marches to Aldermaston wearing a duffle coat under a soggy banner in the rain weren't madam's scene at all.'

‘Do you remember the name of the boyfriend who had the breakdown?'

‘I do, Tom. He was an Ethics postgrad from Stafford, Archie Simmonds.'

Tragedy struck in the Easter holiday of Rachel's second year, he told them. She was among a mixed party of seven LSE students who went on a ski trip to St. Moritz in Switzerland. Wandering off-piste was apparently Peter Hendry's idea. Peter was studying Economics and Law. He was a boy from the Scottish Highlands who had learned to ski on barrel staves as little more than a toddler. He'd been selected for the British Winter Olympics Downhill Team. There had been heavy snowfalls for a week before their arrival.

‘There were probably avalanche warnings, but communicating them would have been a word-of-mouth task back in those days,' Fleetwood said. ‘Some pistes might have been closed as a precaution, but they weren't on groomed slopes in designated areas. They strayed and they paid a fatal price.'

‘What happened?' Rebecca asked.

‘Six of the group were overwhelmed by the avalanche. It was huge, hundreds of thousands of tons of unstable snow and they were probably killed instantly by the weight and velocity of what hit them. Rachel was the sole survivor, unscathed because she alone managed to ski out of its path. That was her story, anyway.'

Tom said, ‘You think she lied?'

‘I know she didn't cause the avalanche,' he said. ‘And it's become a cliché to say that the young are resilient because it's so often proven to be true. But she exhibited no signs of grief afterwards at all, not one shred of sorrow for her dead friends and the loss their deaths represented. I think what she witnessed would have traumatized most people. She didn't seem shocked by it, or even surprised.'