Every Contact Leaves A Trace (27 page)

The second incident had some overlap, in that it was the porter again who had reported it to Haddon one morning, but this time the man had been quite distressed by his experience, rather than simply annoyed. It had happened later in that same week when, once more on his night rounds, he’d been tracking the edge of the playing fields and heard music coming from the direction of the Pavilion. Only faintly though, so he wasn’t completely sure he hadn’t imagined it. There were no lights on, as far as he could see, and when he reached the building and stepped up into the porch, everything seemed to be normal. But as he turned to step back down to the grass, he noticed something draped over the railing. He shone his torch on it and saw that it was a stocking, and then he trod on something soft and reached down and picked up another. And then he heard the very definite sound of a laugh coming from inside, just one, followed by a sudden burst of music and a woman’s voice saying, ‘Oh for god’s sake, Anthony, shut up,’ and he knew it was them again.

He went straight in and held up his torch and there they were, Rachel and Cissy, both undressed and lying on the floor beside one another, covering their eyes with their hands and telling him to switch that bloody thing off you’re blinding us. There was a crash from behind them, and a thud outside, and he stepped back out again and went to the side of the building to see Anthony running away across the playing fields. ‘Loser,’ Cissy shouted from inside. ‘You’re a loser Trelissick, you know that. Face the fucking music.’ Having gone back inside and told the girls to get dressed and clear everything
up
and go back to their rooms, he’d left them to it and returned to the lodge, disgusted by their behaviour. Seeing them like that had been one thing, he’d told Haddon, but it was what he found the next morning that really upset him. When he’d gone back to the Pavilion at about six a.m. he wasn’t expecting it to be perfect, but nor did he think he’d find it strewn with cigarette stubs, empty bottles, candles melted directly onto the floorboards, chocolate wrappers and tissues everywhere across the room. Not only that, he said, but they hadn’t even bothered to take their CD player with them, just leaving it there with a stack of CDs beside it. When Haddon heard what they’d done, he ordered the three of them to report to him at six o’clock every morning for a fortnight and barred them from drinking in the Buttery bar for the same period.

On those first two occasions Harry had argued their corner, framing their antics as the exuberance of youth rather than anything more sinister or alarming, and it was because he had pleaded for a softer line to be taken that they’d received only the punishments that they had. But where Haddon backed down both those times, he hadn’t even consulted Harry the third time, simply writing him a letter after the event and attaching a copy of the memo the three of them had been sent about their punishment: each of them had received a hefty fine and a warning that a repeat of any such behaviour would lead to a suspension from College for a period of such significance it would threaten their academic performance in the long term. Harry told Haddon he thought he’d gone completely over the top, given what had actually been complained about this time, but Haddon said he was treating all of the incidents cumulatively; since Harry’s softly-softly tactics clearly weren’t getting the message across, he had decided it was time to draw a line. It seemed that a student who lived on the same staircase as Rachel and Cissy had complained to Haddon that he’d been kept awake for four nights in a row by music coming from the set of rooms that the two women shared. The first time, apparently, when the man had asked them to, they’d turned it down, but after that, they had stopped even answering their door when he knocked, Anthony and Cissy calling
out
from inside that he should leave them alone, they were busy, and hadn’t he ever heard of having fun and why didn’t he act his age for a change. By the end of the week he was too tired to concentrate, and with only a fortnight left until his exams, he’d approached Haddon and demanded that he do something.

His complaint, innocuous though it might have seemed, had been made in a manner that Haddon said he couldn’t ignore if he was to maintain credibility in his role as Dean. The student in question was clearly in some distress, and he’d told Haddon he didn’t want to go into details, but that if something wasn’t done about the noise there were plenty of other things he could start complaining about. When Haddon asked him what he meant by that, the man said it didn’t matter, he didn’t want to get any more involved than he had to and it was a free country and Rachel and Cissy could do what they liked with whoever they liked whenever they liked. None of that bothered him; it was just the noise. It was keeping him awake, and after almost a week without sleep he felt like he was cracking up. He assured Haddon he wasn’t suggesting anything illegal was happening, but there were things he had seen that he wished he hadn’t. He’d made what Haddon had interpreted to be oblique references to their behaviour having some sexually threatening elements to it, and that was enough for Haddon: something of the same offensiveness had characterised all of their escapades, and the situation had to be nipped in the bud if the college was to avoid the sort of publicity that would be attracted if a firm line wasn’t taken.

Harry himself didn’t raise the topic with them, and nor did he mention the matter of the fine, preferring not to disturb the equilibrium that had grown up between what he had come to think of as their little group of four. As far as he knew, they were entirely unaware of his involvement in any decisions that had or had not been made regarding their punishments. And he was relieved when things inside the tutorial room continued much as they had done before, if in a slightly more subdued fashion. After a couple of weeks he noticed that the edge seemed to have gone from their wildness, and he interpreted this to mean that some kind of balance was being restored.
He
found himself thinking that by not having spoken to them of their misdemeanours he had been kind, and that they probably felt some degree of gratitude towards him for the lightness of touch he had shown by not referring to the affair.

But then, on the Friday of Sixth Week, he’d come out of Evensong and dropped into the porter’s lodge as he always did, wanting to check his pigeonhole before going for sherry with the Provost. He marked the way he’d been addressed on the envelope as unusual straight away, noticing that his name had been typed in the bold capitals of some kind of faculty communication, but with the Esq. placed after his surname that only his students, and particular colleagues, bothered to use. His curiosity making him impatient, he opened it as he stood there, but on seeing what it contained he went straight back to his rooms to look at it again in privacy. In the end he missed sherry altogether, only just getting to Hall in time to eat, and then, when he got there, finding that he was unable to do so, such was his shock, and his upset.

He knew, of course, that the letter had to have come either from Cissy, or Rachel, or Anthony, but there was nothing about it that suggested it was from more than one person, and he couldn’t decide which one of them to suspect. He told himself he had a week in which to think about what to do, given that their next tutorial wasn’t due to take place until the following Friday afternoon. By the end of the weekend, he’d convinced himself that he wasn’t completely certain after all that it had come from one of them. The particular choice of Browning poem was so crushingly obvious as to be almost entirely lacking in imagination, and he could hardly believe that students of their ability would have made it. Any number of people would have known that they were studying Browning, and anyone could have written the letters, knowing that the three of them would have been the first to be suspected.

That, in the end, was Harry’s undoing. He had thought too much of them, and not enough of himself. He had been blinded by his desire to think well of them and, if he was entirely honest, by his admiration for their youthfulness. At any rate, by the time their
next
tutorial came round the following Friday, he had done precisely nothing about it, only biding his time and telling himself that the most sensible course of action was to wait and see whether it was a one-off before approaching Haddon about it, a course of action he knew would lead inevitably to some sort of a confrontation with one or all of them.

He realised almost as soon as the tutorial began that he’d made a serious mistake. The atmosphere that afternoon was almost unbearable in its half-repressed hostility, in the barely restrained ferocity with which they spoke to one another, and to him. Something between the three of them had changed. He was baffled by it, and frightened. A link had been broken, a connection destroyed, and he didn’t see that it was within his power to restore it, being quite certain that such mediation was beyond him. The three of them seemed suddenly to have gone outside his sphere of influence. Some kind of schism had occurred, and one that had nothing to do with him. That much was obvious, but what he couldn’t work out was which way the dividing lines had been drawn. There was an anger circulating between them, he could think of no other way of describing it, and when it came to the end of the tutorial, he was, for the first time, relieved to close the door behind them.

When he reached the porter’s lodge after Evensong he wasn’t surprised, somehow, to find a second letter waiting for him. He noticed that although it was still signed off as if it had been written by only one of them, ‘I AM A WELL-WISHER’, the rest of it suggested that the signatory wasn’t working alone. Again, he was surprised by what he described as the laziness of the choice of text, the excerpt having been taken from slightly further on in the same poem, and by the cheapness of the language of the threat. There was something almost careless in the turn of its phrases, and he found that puzzling from three of the brightest students he’d ever taught. Again, he had managed to convince himself by the end of the weekend that there would be no sense in going to Haddon. It was almost the end of term, they were clearly struggling with some sort of difficulty between themselves, and he couldn’t see any real risk
in
giving the situation a chance to settle of its own accord. He knew also that as soon as he reported the matter it would in all probability be the final straw for them, for the rest of term at least.

‘I could see clearly what that would mean. And I simply wasn’t prepared to do that to them. They would have lost so much more than they even knew they were risking, the three of them. Of course they did come to lose so much more than that in the end, all of them. We all did, I know that now, Alex. So much more than I could have imagined. At the same time though, I somehow thought that if I let things lie, they would come to realise the error of their ways. That they would be able to approach me, and to apologise, if I only gave them the space.’ But he also knew that there was more to his reluctance than this. ‘To tell you the truth, Alex,’ he said to me, ‘I suppose I was scared. I was afraid of what it was that they were trying to do to me.’

By the end of that weekend he’d resolved to think of a way of confronting them himself, and of negotiating some kind of a truce. He considered for a day or two how he might bring it up at the next tutorial, deciding that he would simply present them with the letters and set out for them precisely what the consequences would be were they unable to explain themselves satisfactorily.

The tutorial the following Friday was the final one of the summer term, which meant that it would be the last time he would be seeing them before they went off for the vacation to write up their dissertations. Their titles had been chosen weeks ago, and they all knew what they were doing by then. In the ordinary course of events, this last session wouldn’t have been one in which any new ground would be broken; rather, it was an opportunity to recapitulate, to consolidate, and to make sure of the way that lay ahead. But he was amazed when, ten minutes into their allotted hour, only Anthony had turned up. Neither of them had spoken a word, only sitting and waiting for the others to arrive, when Anthony suddenly laughed and looked at him as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, his eyebrows creasing together in his customary frown as he said, ‘They’re not coming, Harry, you know that, don’t you?’

Without knowing why, but being aware that he was feeling suddenly angry with Anthony, and with all of them, Harry said, ‘There is no need for you to stay, Mr Trelissick. You may see yourself out. I think you will agree it is better that way.’

Anthony laughed once more, smiling his lopsided smile and saying, ‘Mr Trelissick? Not that again, Harry. Come on, don’t be a spoiler. I’ve got questions for you, loads of them.’

But Harry insisted, finding himself barely able to look Anthony in the eye, and when he had gone, he spent what remained of the afternoon in his armchair, the outer door closed and the rest of his teaching for the afternoon cancelled, trying to think through what to do next, but knowing deep down that he would do nothing until after Evensong, when he would go to the lodge to fetch the letter that he was almost certain would be waiting in his pigeonhole.

When he opened it and saw the extract that had been chosen, sensing the new note of violence that had crept into the correspondence, he walked back to his rooms to collect the other two letters and then he went straight across the quad and started knocking on Haddon’s door, not stopping until he got a response.

Within minutes of Harry handing him the letters and telling him who he thought had sent them, Haddon went over to Hall, where dinner had already started, and he called Rachel, Anthony and Cissy out to the front and told them they were to report to him at nine the following morning. He wouldn’t ordinarily have given them any notice of the interviews but for the fact that the following day was a Saturday, and it fell technically after the end of term. Even though the three of them were likely to be staying up for the Commemoration Ball that was to be held that night, it would be difficult to track them down if they left early for the summer vacation. Haddon decided against calling them in straight away, since he wanted some time to talk with Harry in order to make a plan. He took the precaution, though, of issuing the three of them with the sternest of threats and making it clear that their attendance at his rooms the following
morning
was compulsory, and that a failure to present themselves would lead to their immediate and permanent exclusion from College.