Every Contact Leaves A Trace (30 page)

You must remember this,

A kiss is just a kiss,

A sigh is just a sigh …

They swayed slightly from side to side, placing their hands on each other’s bodies.

The fundamental things apply

As time goes by …

The room began collectively to whistle, and to clap, and as they sang on, Rachel drew Cissy into her.

Moonlight and love songs

Never out of date.

Hearts full of passion,

Jealousy and hate …

One of the waiters walked over then and passed a note up to Cissy and she broke away and left Rachel to sing on alone, glancing at it briefly before turning to the front and looking out amongst the tables, frowning and shielding her eyes against the light. Then she folded it in two and tucked it in the top of her dress and took Rachel’s hand in hers.

It’s still the same old story,

A fight for love and glory,

A case of do or die …

By the end of the song they had put the microphone to one side and were kissing and someone was whistling and the piano player played on without them. I was surprised, I suppose, at the same time as not being surprised at all, having heard the rumours that I’d heard about Rachel’s parties. And then, as people called out for more, Haddon was at the door and marching up to the front and saying something to Rachel and Cissy and they were laughing at him, and at one another, and then he said something else and they stopped laughing and left the stage and went over to the bar, the room booing and hissing as Haddon marched out again.

We wandered fairly aimlessly after that, Richard and I, taking a turn on the Ferris wheel before sitting down beside the fire pit and pulling on a hookah together by the light of the flames. We had quite a good conversation as we sat there, the two of us, and for the first time he actually told me about his childhood, and we compared notes on what it was like being brought up as an only child, in the countryside, and how it had been for the both of us, being sent away to school. I’d drunk so much by then that I was almost on the point of telling him about Robbie, and I think I probably would have done were it not for the fact that Towneley had appeared suddenly and thrown himself down on the rug beside us and asked whether either of us had pulled yet.

After he’d gone again, and we’d found ourselves some food and spent a bit of time in the comedy tent, Richard said we ought to check on the seamstress’s room, and so it was that when the first of Haddon’s emergency calls came crackling though my walkie-talkie, we were perched together on a single chair in the corridor at the back of the ladies’ cloakroom, craning our necks to see through the tiny window that had been left open and watching one woman after another strip to their underwear whilst repair jobs were carried out on dresses torn by dancing, or falling from dodgem cars, or, as
Richard
put it, ‘overenthusiastic shagging in the bushes’. Because Richard told me not to be an idiot, and didn’t I realise we were about to get our first actual full-frontal, and because I was drunk enough by then to do whatever he told me to, I ignored Haddon’s call and turned the volume on my walkie-talkie right down, despite the fact that Haddon’s request for urgent assistance was being directed specifically to me rather than as a general Mayday, and was being broadcast only on my channel. As I leaned forward to see through the window more clearly, I heard the faint crackle start up again and could just make out Haddon’s voice. His speech was broken by his own panting and by the sound of him stumbling, or running, and he said something that sounded like, ‘Petersen where the bloody hell are you? Come in. Come in. Pavilion. Now. Urgent.’ And then I lost my footing and because Richard and I were actually on the floor when the next call came through, to Richard’s walkie-talkie this time, and because we had fallen so awkwardly on top of one another that neither of us could move, and because suddenly there was a woman standing over us calling us perverts and saddos and losers and telling us to fuck off, we ignored that call as well, even though by now Haddon was swearing into his walkie-talkie and demanding that Richard find me and that both of us make our way to the Pavilion as quickly as we could. Richard stood then, pulling me up from the ground and saying, ‘Martinis. Titty bar. Tout de fucking suite,’ before heading back along the terrace, stopping only to throw his walkie-talkie into the nearest bin.

I did the same, of course, and so it was that instead of running to Haddon’s side we fell into a corner of Rick’s Bar and spent most of the rest of the night in there, drinking ourselves not quite into oblivion, stepping outside every now and again for some air and a stroll across the quad to see if anything interesting was happening. Had we done as Haddon had commanded us to, and gone instead to the Pavilion and made our way round to the back as Harry told me that Haddon himself had done, our view would have been partly obscured by the bushes and partly by the darkness, but we would nevertheless just have been able to see Anthony, his gendarme’s
trousers
pulled down as far as the top of his gendarme’s boots and his hat and rifle thrown to one side, lying on top of Cissy with one hand across her mouth and the other trying again and again to pull her knickers far enough away from her body to be able to rape her.

Haddon told Harry that he’d chosen the wrong side of the Pavilion at first, so that he couldn’t get through the bushes to where they were lying and he’d had to run back out to the front and all the way round again to the other side. This, I realised as I sat listening to the tale unfold in Harry’s room earlier this month, was almost certainly the point at which Haddon had tried to use his walkie-talkie to get through to me, and then to Richard, shortly before we’d thrown ours in the bin and gone to Rick’s Bar. Having failed to raise either of us, he’d reached the other side of the Pavilion and pushed his way frantically through the bushes, but by the time he got to them it was Cissy who was on top of Anthony and she was punching him, hard, again and again, right in his face. Anthony was barely moving, just lying there and seemingly allowing himself to be thrashed. Cissy was going about her work quietly, he told Harry, and that surprised him. He would have expected a woman finding herself in such a situation to be screaming, and loudly. Instead, she was speaking in a low voice as she punched him, and although he couldn’t quite be sure, it sounded as though she might even have been laughing as well.

‘I think that’s enough, don’t you?’ Haddon said, and she stopped and looked round at him and he could see that she had been punched in the face also, and that there was blood running from her mouth and down her chin. She stared at Haddon for a moment or two, saying nothing, and then Anthony began to moan beneath her and shake his head and Haddon realised it was quite possible that his passivity in the face of Cissy’s assault had been due to unconsciousness, rather than acquiescence. He went towards them and Cissy climbed from Anthony and helped Haddon get him up. She stood and watched as Haddon retrieved Anthony’s hat from the bushes,
holding
him steady while Haddon put it on and made sure it was pushed right down on his forehead, and, once Anthony had pulled his trousers up, the three of them walked slowly back across the lawns.

‘No no, we’re quite alright thank you,’ Haddon said, smiling, each time someone offered assistance or enquired after the gendarme they were supporting between them, whose head was drooping forward and whose face was entirely hidden by his hat. ‘Drunk and disorderly while on duty, that’s all. Utter insubordination. Off to confine him to barracks I think, bread and water for a few days. I daresay that’ll do the trick. No no, absolutely no problem at all. We’re quite alright. Good night, good night. Thank you. Good night.’

Haddon told Harry as they stood in the secret garden that he’d been able to get nothing out of Anthony or Cissy since they’d reached his cottage, despite having questioned them for almost half an hour. He asked Harry if he wouldn’t mind having a go himself, suggesting that a different approach might be enough to get them talking. Harry went back inside and did his best, but it was clear that neither of them had anything to say, and, not having Haddon’s zeal for interrogation, he gave up fairly quickly and asked them instead whether they had any views on how things might be dealt with. Again, they didn’t say a great deal, and the only thing Harry could be certain of was that neither of them seemed to have any desire to press charges against the other. He went back outside and told Haddon he’d made no progress beyond that which Haddon had already achieved. Haddon thanked him and said that although he was completely baffled by the impasse they had reached, it lent itself very much to his preferred course of action, which was to keep the whole matter between the four of them. He told Harry how he’d tried without success to call for backup from his team of stewards and was relieved about his failure, given the need to keep the situation under wraps. Rachel would be too drunk to remember encountering Towneley, and Haddon could very easily tell Towneley, who he described as being hardly the sharpest tool in the box, that he’d found no one behind the Pavilion. Anthony had agreed to go, this time for good,
and
seemed to understand that any further return to College would lead to criminal charges. At the very least, he said, they’d be able to get him for breaking and entering, if they could only find out how he’d got in. Cissy seemed to be minded to return to the US as soon as possible and to remain there, and apart from the balance of the fees that were payable for the rest of her course, her absence would represent no great loss in any quarter but for the Boat Club.

Harry tried to disagree at this point, telling Haddon that Cissy had shown considerable promise, particularly in recent months, and that her departure would not be seen as insignificant when it came to the college publishing its Finals results a year down the line, but Haddon brushed this off, telling Harry that he really had lost the ability to be in any way objective about his students. It was then that Harry remembered Rachel, and he told Haddon that he thought he ought to go to the hospital to check up on her. Haddon said he didn’t see that this was necessary, and that her godmother would be there by now and that Rachel wasn’t really involved in the situation anyway, not properly. Harry said that he would go all the same, and Haddon responded that that was all very well, but if she should recall having asked Towneley to send Haddon to the Pavilion, it was essential that Harry keep as closely as possible to the story they’d agreed and tell her only that Haddon had gone, as requested, but that he’d found nothing of any particular interest when he got there.

When they came back inside from the secret garden Cissy was pacing up and down the room, looking at her watch and shaking her head, her face set hard and sullen and the blood drying on it. They asked her one more time if she intended to press charges of any description against Anthony. She looked at them both, and then back at Anthony, and she laughed. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘He’s not worth it. None of you are.’ Haddon asked her then if she’d be prepared to sign something to that effect before she left, at which point she simply held her hand out to him and said, ‘You’re a jerk, Haddon. Give me your keys. Unless you want my dad to file for false imprisonment.’ He did as she asked, but only after he’d said
that
the story must go no further than the four of them, and that meant that neither of them were to tell Rachel about what had happened, otherwise he’d have no choice but to invoke the most draconian of disciplinary proceedings against them. Harry thought he saw Cissy’s face change when Haddon said Rachel’s name but she hung her head before he could read the look properly, and when she raised it again to speak, whatever it was had gone. ‘You really have no idea about Rachel Cardanine do you Haddon. No fucking idea at all. Like I said,’ she carried on, ‘you’re a jerk,’ and she took the keys and looked at them all in turn before saying to Anthony, ‘So long then,’ and walking down the stairs to let herself out of the cottage.

By the following morning she’d gone, and as the letter she left in Haddon’s pigeonhole said, she had no intention of coming back. As for Anthony, he’d got up and made as if to follow her, but Haddon had said ‘I don’t think so, Mr Trelissick, not on your own,’ and he’d asked Harry to join him in escorting Anthony from the premises. After Anthony had refused medical attention, and declined to answer Haddon’s question about how he’d managed to break through the security cordon, they’d walked him out of college.

Anthony thus dealt with, Harry shook hands with Haddon and took a taxi to the John Radcliffe. When he arrived in Rachel’s room he was surprised to find her sitting up in bed quite happily reading a magazine. ‘For god’s sake, Harry, Towneley totally overreacted and quite frankly I was too tired to argue with him by that point. They’ve been terribly nice to me here, really, considering there was nothing actually wrong with me,’ she said, putting the magazine down on the bedside table. ‘I just wanted a rest. I can go now that you’re here. Somebody has to take me home that’s all. I told them you’d probably show up at some stage. You’ll just have to pretend for the moment that you’re my dad if you don’t mind. It’s only the nurse, she’ll never know. Just sign the forms they give you and we can get the hell out of here. Alright?’ Through a combination of his own exhaustion and the fact that there seemed to be nothing obviously the matter with her, Harry agreed to do what she’d asked. ‘But what about Evie?’ he
said
, puzzled, as she pulled the screen across in front of her and started to get dressed. ‘Has she been here?’