Every Contact Leaves A Trace (16 page)

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.