Every Contact Leaves A Trace (14 page)

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 fuck?’ Cissy said, standing from her stool and following him and yanking his arm so he turned back round. ‘What the fuck?’

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 fucking 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 fucking 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.’