Every Contact Leaves A Trace (17 page)

‘The man of many moments,’ Harry said, noticing me looking at it. And he stood and looked at it himself, taking off his glasses and folding his arms across his chest.

‘It was as if he was running around in a playground,’ he said, ‘simply having fun. They called him a surgeon, though. A surgeon on the football field. I always thought of it more as a kind of poetry, what he did out there. It would be the very last second of the whole thing, all hope gone, and then, right then, there would be one wonderful pass and the game would be turned on its head. He said he only did it for the love of it. And because every down was different. There we are,’ he finished, smiling at me and putting his glasses back on. When he’d walked over and taken his seat on the sofa, I smiled back at him, unable not to share something of his enthusiasm for this man I knew nothing of, but because I could think of nothing to say, I kept silent and carried on looking around.

Perhaps strangest of all the things I saw in those rooms of his were the red squirrels. Everywhere I looked there were paintings of them, postcards of them, and even, as I saw when turning to put my tea down on the side table next to me, a stuffed one in a glass
case
, its see-through eyes staring out at me where I sat. Other than that, the stretches of wall in between all of these things were lined with books, and those that couldn’t fit on the shelves were stacked on every remaining inch of the floor. Up against one wall was a blackboard, words in a language I didn’t recognise written across it in a careful script inscribed in fading chalk. In amongst everything was an old record player, half hidden behind a stack of cushions, and when I saw it I remembered Rachel telling me about how Harry had played recordings sometimes, of Tolkien reciting medieval poetry, or of someone proclaiming verse in Anglo-Saxon, or of long-dead actors hollering out Shakespeare’s soliloquies.

I am not sure I focused at all well on the conversation that afternoon, there being so many things to look at. There was one photograph in particular that distracted me again and again from the thread of whatever it was that Harry was saying. Its location was in part responsible, in that it hung just to the left of where he sat on the sofa, so that every time I looked at him, I looked also at the black and white image next to him. It sat so directly in my line of vision, in fact, that it could almost have been placed there deliberately, had my reaction to it been something he’d wanted to observe. It was of a group of students who were gathered together with Harry at their centre. They all seemed to be holding glasses of champagne, and they were positioned on what looked to be the steps down from the Provost’s drawing room, the ones that led directly into his rose garden, a private space ordinarily out of bounds to students.

There was something slightly haphazard about the group, as though they had none of them been quite ready for the photographer. Harry was standing in the middle, more as if by accident than by design, his arms half folded in front of him and his head slightly bowed so that I couldn’t quite read the look on his face; if it was a grin, it was a sardonic one, though it could just as well have been a grimace. The other reason for my being drawn to the picture provided a much more obvious explanation for my fascination with it: standing beside Harry, with her hair falling slightly across her face and a half-smile just beginning to break out across it, was Rachel, and because
she
had been caught at precisely the moment at which she had turned her head towards the photographer, it was, from where I sat in Harry’s armchair, as though she was looking right at me.

Apart from Harry, they are all either wearing evening dress, or some form of costume, as though they are characters in a play. And as is sometimes the way of black and white photographs, every one of them appears to be more beautiful than they might otherwise be. As Harry talks on I think to myself that their dress, and the austerity of the lines of the building that provides the backdrop to the image, combined with the fact that it is clearly an evening sunlight that falls on them, lends the whole thing something of an aristocratic air, something of a peculiarly English kind of romance. I try to work out the occasion on which it would have been taken. Because Cissy is in it, standing on the other side of Rachel from Harry, with one of her arms draped across Rachel’s shoulders in a lazy kind of a way, I know that it must have been before my third year, when she was no longer there. And because there are other students there as well as Rachel and Cissy, I know it was a college event rather than one just for the English students, and one of some significance for them all to have been dressed as they were and allowed into the Provost’s rose garden. I had wondered at first why I wasn’t there also, but only for a moment, knowing that I would have been somewhere behind the scenes, as I always was when those people were gathered together.

As I sit and try to remember, at the same time as attempting to appear interested in Harry’s conversation, I hear him say my name, and then I hear him say it again, and I am suddenly aware that he has asked me a question I haven’t heard. Unable to hide my embarrassment, I feel my face flush red and I apologise.

‘It was the photograph,’ I say, hoping this will be enough of an explanation for my having completely ignored whatever it was that he’d asked me. He turns his head to look at it and seems surprised, somehow, to see it hanging so close to him. And then he turns back and stares at me again, as though waiting for me to say something. When I don’t, he starts to tell me about the former student who took it, and how she had gone on to become quite a successful
photographer
. I sip my tea again, only half listening to what he is saying. My gaze has wandered back again to the photograph, and I realise suddenly what it is that I am looking at.

I suppose I must have known all along that it had been taken at the Commemoration Ball that had been held on Midsummer Night at the end of our second year, when the whole place became Casablanca and a fire pit was dug beside the lake, and next to it a snake charmer writhed about partly in darkness and partly in the flickering brightness thrown on him by the flames he sat beside, and the Buttery bar became Rick’s Bar, serving martinis and cosmopolitans instead of pints of lager, and there seemed to be jazz everywhere you went. The huge wooden doors of College, opened only rarely, had been drawn right back on their hinges and a red carpet appeared on the flagstones and the green grass of the quad, usually out of bounds, became strewn with men clutching programmes and women looking uncomfortable in the newness of their shoes. Somebody had the idea at the last moment of rigging up a projector at the bottom of the quad and playing a reel of the film itself up onto the Old Library, all night long and magnified a hundred times, so that shortly after Rachel and Harry had been photographed toasting one another with champagne on the steps down from the Provost’s drawing room, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart appeared, spread up across the whole of the old stone building, their silent twenty-foot-high heads entwined in a black and white kiss that seemed as though it would never end. Of course it did end, eventually, but only when the dawn broke and the Survivors’ Photograph was taken and breakfast was served beside the lake and, with an uncertain sunlight filtering through the trees round about, the cleaning staff appeared, strung out across the lawns like a line of beaters crossing a moor, bags at their waists for the litter.

‘It was an extraordinary night, wasn’t it, Harry?’ I ask. I turn to look at him again only to see that he is frowning at me, and I realise that he was in the middle of saying something and I have interrupted him. He doesn’t answer my question, and so I try again. ‘You didn’t think so? Don’t you remember everyone talking about it afterwards? Wasn’t it the most expensive college Ball ever held?’

Harry, still frowning, looks away. ‘I couldn’t say, Alex. I remember little of such talk, if indeed there was any.’

There is something peculiar in the way that he says this, and I am puzzled by it until he tells me that he would doubtless have attended, had his wife still been alive, it being exactly the sort of thing she would have enjoyed, but that it was not the sort of thing to go to on one’s own. I remember then, too late, that the year the Ball had been held was also the year in which Harry’s wife had died, and I realise that my clumsy questions have offended him.

‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ I say. ‘I— Of course. I mean, I hadn’t realised. I thought—’, and I look back at the photograph, feeling confused by what I am seeing, ‘I thought you were there also.’

‘There is no need to apologise, Alex,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘It was a long time ago.’ He explains that he’d been given no choice about making an appearance at the Provost’s drinks beforehand, and that that was where the photograph had been taken. ‘Three-line whip, you know how these things are. It was fairly brief, as his parties go. But the Ball proper was, by all accounts, as you say, an extraordinary night,’ and he pauses, looking at the photograph again before looking back at me and asking, ‘You remember it well, I take it?’

‘Yes,’ I say, and I tell him that I remember a certain amount, but that because I had Richard as my companion throughout and kept pace with him on the alcohol front, those memories are perhaps more fragmented than they might otherwise be. Harry holds my gaze for a moment, saying nothing, before putting his cup back on its saucer and pulling out his pocket watch. He flips it open for a moment and stands then from the sofa, and it is apparent that we have reached the end of our conversation.

I stand also, and we arrange what time I should arrive in the Old Bursary for drinks before dinner. Harry runs through the sort of people I can expect to meet on High Table over the next few days, and when I ask after Haddon and whether he will be among them, I’m not at all disappointed to discover that he’s undertaken his annual pilgrimage to visit his aunt in New South Wales. Harry says he’s fairly sure there won’t be anyone at all who I know, as a matter of fact, and that if I
find
the assorted company of visiting academics and elderly Emeritus Fellows too much at any point, he can arrange for me to have some food sent up to my room instead. ‘It might be just the thing though Alex,’ he says. ‘For both of us, I mean. To take us a little out of ourselves at the close of a day?’ I weigh the thought of my empty room against the potential comfort of strangers and say yes, why not, and he asks me to wait a moment while he fetches a gown for me to try, saying as he goes through to his other room that he presumes I haven’t brought my own. No, I say, no, I haven’t, remembering that he’d put exactly the same question to Rachel and me as we’d stood there on the Midsummer Night of her death. He comes back and holds one out and I am a little slower than I might be in taking it from him, stuck as I am with this memory that has surfaced. Mistaking what he sees as hesitation, he begins to help me on with the gown, standing behind me and holding out first one sleeve and then the other. I put my arms in in turn, but the second one becomes stuck so that he has to reach his hand in and search for my own and there is a moment then when we touch one another that makes me feel somehow uncomfortable.

After a certain amount of struggling, it becomes apparent that the only way I will secure my release from the gown is to relax my arm completely and let him guide me out of it from where he stands behind me, and as I do so we both laugh, and finally I emerge and take it from him and my feeling of discomfort has passed. We’ve exchanged what I think are our goodbyes when Harry says suddenly, catching me unawares after the awkwardness of the gown, ‘And the Browning? How did you find it?’

I don’t know what to say. I’ve been intending to read it since he sent it to me, but somehow I haven’t found the time. In fact, I haven’t so much as looked at it again since the day I opened his parcel and held the book up to my face and relived the memory of Rachel reading to me from it so soon before she died. I look at him standing there frowning and it occurs to me that I could simply come out with it and ask him how he came to have it in his possession, and tell him I know that Rachel took it with her to Oxford that weekend, and that I know that what he’d written in his letter about having
come
across it in the course of sorting through the contents of his rooms simply wasn’t true.

And then, suddenly, realising how much I want to say these things but being unable to think of a way of doing so, something like anger rushes over me, irrational anger towards Harry for having thought that I would have had the time to sit about reading poetry. I wonder to myself whether he has any idea of the impact of Rachel’s death, and of the difficulties I have begun to experience in carrying out what would once have been the simplest of tasks. And so instead of asking him why he had the book, which is what I want to do, I tell him that I haven’t had time to look at it on account of the fact that I’ve spent most of the previous week engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to locate the original of her death certificate, it having gone missing in the post. He says nothing in response, so I go on to describe for him in detail, aware that my tone is growing more acerbic with every word, precisely how difficult it has been to convince either the register office or the post office of its importance to me. I tell him then how it felt to make phone call after phone call to one nameless administrator after another trying to explain that a copy would not satisfy the insurers, who were refusing to pay out on her life policy without it. And when still he says nothing, I infer from his silence that he is wondering why I need the money, so I go on to explain that it is not for me, but for the charities that Rachel listed in her will. ‘Do you see?’ I say. ‘It is my duty. Can you see that? Can you imagine?’

And then all at once, even before he lays his hand on my arm again and says the words, ‘I do see, Alex, I do. Remember that I too know what it is to grieve,’ I recall the letter he wrote to me after Rachel died, and the things he said in it about his wife. But before I can begin to apologise for my outburst, he is holding open the door for me. ‘Six forty-five,’ he says. ‘That should give you plenty of time to change.’