Every Contact Leaves A Trace (18 page)

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.

10

WHEN I WOKE
the next morning I pulled back the curtains and looked out on the lawns. I saw that a new snow had fallen and that if I was quick enough I would be the first to break a path across it. I breakfasted alone in Hall and wrapped myself back up again before heading straight out around the quad towards the orchard. A couple of gardeners were clearing paths and scattering grit in front of the cottages and because the sound was muffled by the snow it was as though they worked in silence. As far as I could tell I was the only person about apart from them. I walked across the orchard and cut through the Sainsbury Building, opening the tiny gate that led down to the lake and striking out along the path skirting its north-west side.

The snow lay almost a foot deep, and the hoar frost that Harry had written about held fast to the trunks of the trees. There was no sound apart from the occasional easy sweep of wind past my ear as I walked and I moved awkwardly, sinking my feet one after the other into the snow and having to pull them back out again before carrying on. The branches that sat just at eye level were coated in a blanket of spikes and coarse hair-like growth, and because I was focusing on them so intently it was only when I felt my body shift suddenly, almost as though I had tripped, that I looked down and realised I had stepped into a footprint. I looked up and saw a whole path of them strung out in the snow before me and I abandoned my notion of trailblazing, stepping instead from one to another of these hollows. Before long it became too difficult to do so, the walker obviously having picked up his pace so that his stride had become far longer than my own. I paused and stood for a while at the side of the lake. The playing fields were spread out behind me undisturbed in their
whiteness
and I looked across to the south-east side, towards the tree that Rachel had died beside, and I wondered whose route I was tracking. The water had frozen hard and deep so that the low-hanging branches had been caught at their mid points beneath the ice. They emerged again above its surface as if struggling, as though their entrapment had happened all at once, without warning. A few of the college geese skated about, pecking here and there before huddling together and swaying slightly for warmth.

I walked on around the lake and as I reached the place where I had found Rachel’s body I remembered the time the two of us had met there on another summer night, the one that fell partway through the long summer vacation we spent in College at the end of our second year. We had taken a pair of seats at the top of the stand that had been placed there, Rachel having asked me to see
The Tempest
with her. I’d seen it once already, earlier in the week, and would far rather have spent the time lying on the lawns listening to Rachel talk about nothing in particular, which was what I’d done every other evening so far. Because of that, I didn’t complain when, twenty minutes or so into the first half, she tugged at my sleeve and whispered in my ear that it was quite hopeless wasn’t it, and why didn’t we abandon ship now rather than later and do something more interesting. I remember cringing slightly as we climbed down from the top of the stands, Rachel apologising profusely all the way, her mock whisper audible to all of the audience and all of the cast.

Her next suggestion was tennis, but she kept calling out the score as loudly as she could even though the courts were just the other side of the lake, so that the actors would have been able to hear her words ringing out across the water as clearly as we could theirs, and eventually I said I’d rather do something else. She called me a coward but she agreed to stop, and we strolled fairly aimlessly around the gardens instead, Rachel trailing her racquet on the grass and complaining from time to time that she was bored.

‘I know. Let’s stay out all night,’ she said eventually, just as I was wondering whether this was the moment for me to summon up the courage to ask her back to my room. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she carried on,
‘we
have to see the sunrise.’ So we crossed over to Gloucester Green and fetched a takeaway and some bottles of wine and sat in the middle of the playing fields, not talking much, just eating and drinking and looking at the sky. At midnight she stood and said she’d thought of a plan, but that I had to agree to it before she would tell me what it was. I’d drunk enough to say yes straight away, and what was it? But then she said she wouldn’t tell me until we got there, so I followed her back around the lake and across the lawns and I remember thinking how strange it was that the play had finished without our noticing; I was sure I hadn’t heard any applause. Even stranger was the fact that because it was the last night of the run, the stage and the seating and the lighting towers had been taken away and not a trace of them remained: it was as though it had never happened.

We were halfway up the lawns when I turned back towards the plane tree again. I stood there for a minute or two, swaying slightly in my drunkenness and wondering whether in fact we had imagined it all. But then a breeze disturbed the lake and I caught a glimpse of the duckboards lying just beneath its surface, laid there so that Ariel, happy in his release at last, could appear each night to be running sprite-like on the water, and I knew it had been for real. By the time I turned back round again, Rachel had disappeared.

‘Rachel,’ I called out. ‘Rachel, where are you? Wait for me,’ and I started to jog up the path, thinking she had run on ahead and left me there. And then suddenly, I hear her voice from right beside me in the flower bed, speaking in a half-whisper.

‘Shut up you idiot. This is it. This is the plan.’

I am so disorientated by now, and so drunk, that for one wild moment I think she is propositioning me, but when I have clambered through the plants to where she is crouching she says straight away, ‘Follow me. And be quiet for goodness’ sake.’ She pushes on ahead and I realise what she is intending to do. Immediately in front of her are some tiny steps set into the wall that rises up from the back of the flower bed. They lead to an old gate that is suspended halfway up and opens into the secret garden, the one that Haddon’s drawing
room
looks out on. Before I have time to speak, or at least before I have time to say anything at the kind of volume that won’t risk waking Haddon up, Rachel has reached the top of the steps and is attempting, unsuccessfully, to pull open the gate. I grab hold of her foot, meaning to try to persuade her to come back down. ‘Don’t be a wimp Alex,’ she whispers, and the gate opens and she pulls herself up and into the garden. What else can I do but follow her, so that a moment later we are both there, sitting on the tiny lawn right outside Haddon’s drawing room. There is no light coming from the French doors, which means, or so I assume, he is already asleep in the room above. I look up at the bedroom window and see with relief that the curtains are closed and the window is shut, and then finally I relax, laughing at the absurdity of the situation.

Standing there this time in the early morning snow and playing the scene back for myself, I have a sudden urge to climb the steps again. I scan the lawns and see that I am still alone; whoever provided my path of footprints has disappeared altogether. I know from what Harry said over tea that Haddon is in Australia for the Christmas vacation, so I step into the flower bed and walk up to the base of the wall. It had been difficult enough that summer night with Rachel to gain any purchase on the steps and I assume the snow will make it even trickier. But as it turns out, the soft cushion that has fallen and set on each of them provides a kind of support as I climb, and before long I am at the top, standing on the tips of my toes and peering in through the iron gate.