Every Contact Leaves A Trace (28 page)

Harry came clean with Haddon that evening. He told him everything about the letters, and about the change in the dynamic between the three of them. He also made the suggestion that, in his opinion, the letters had been the work of all three of them acting together. He hadn’t managed a particularly convincing rationale for the tardiness with which he’d informed Haddon, finding himself unable to explain the particular bond that had arisen in those tutorials, and Haddon was generous to a fault in his avoidance of any kind of comment on the reluctance Harry had shown to punish the three of them earlier in the term.

After he and Harry had talked it through, Haddon announced that his intention was that they should each interview one of the three, simultaneously, in separate rooms, and then swap and do the same again before moving on to the other. ‘We shall find them out, Harry, you’ll see. It won’t be difficult,’ he said the next morning, walking with Harry back to his rooms after breakfast and setting up a desk and a chair in a side room off the drawing room. Harry’s suggestion that such tactics were hardly necessary was met with derision by Haddon, though in the end he was proved to be right about this, if nothing else. His protest having been dismissed, Harry went through with the exercise as Haddon had dictated he should, taking Cissy into the side room while Rachel waited in the corridor and Haddon set to work on Anthony in the drawing room. Harry realised fairly quickly that he wasn’t up to the task. All that Cissy would say was that first, because the actual sending of the letters had been nothing to do with her, she didn’t need to go into any more detail; that second, if necessary, she would contact her father, who, she reminded him, was a federal attorney in Washington DC, and who would be more than happy to fly over and represent her should Haddon wish to pursue the ridiculous line he was taking; and that third, she also wanted it noted for the record that since she regarded Haddon’s behaviour in Hall the night before as threatening, she would be taking that up with the Provost as a separate matter.
Harry
found himself apologising to her on Haddon’s behalf, and was at a loss as to how to progress when Haddon knocked on the door and called them both through to the drawing room. He was standing there with Anthony beside him, and when Rachel came in from the corridor where she had been waiting, he spoke to them all together.

Anthony had, it seemed, confessed to sending the letters entirely of his own volition. He took complete responsibility for the situation as a whole, and, Haddon went on, he had accepted that this meant he would be sent down from the university, given the warning he’d received earlier in the term. As Haddon spoke, Anthony looked at the floor, and although Harry couldn’t be sure, he appeared to be crying. He noticed Rachel and Cissy looking at one another a couple of times, and although he wasn’t quite able to interpret their gaze, they seemed shocked by the turn of events that was occurring. Shocked, he said, but also relieved. And then he drew things to a close and sent them on their way, telling Rachel and Cissy as they left that he didn’t feel it necessary to remind them that they should still consider themselves to be on notice of the strongest possible disciplinary action should he hear of any further misdemeanours on their part before they left for the vacation, suggesting at the last that they might like to keep a particularly low profile that night at the Ball if they valued their places at the university. Rachel didn’t react in the slightest when he said this, but Harry saw Cissy shaking her head as she left, and, although he couldn’t quite be sure, he thought he heard her utter the word ‘jerk’ under her breath as she did so. Haddon missed this, having started to discuss with Anthony the arrangements for his departure, telling him he had to be out of College by two o’clock that afternoon, that there was no reason for him to linger beyond that time, and that all of his university identity cards and keys and passes should be returned to the lodge in an envelope marked for Haddon’s attention. ‘We certainly do not want to see you here tonight, Mr Trelissick. I will, of course, notify security that you are not to be admitted to the Ball under any circumstances, so I shouldn’t try to come back if I were you.’ Anthony raised his eyes from the floor only after Haddon stopped speaking,
and
when he did it was to look at Harry rather than Haddon. As Harry met his gaze he saw that he had been right, and that Anthony was crying, and when Harry put out a hand to shake his, Anthony kept his arms folded across his chest, smiling through his tears and saying nothing before turning and walking from the room.

Harry couldn’t leave it at that. Not after the time he’d spent with Anthony, and not without at least trying to articulate how sorry he was that it had come to this, and to acknowledge the strength of his admiration for Anthony’s ability, despite what had happened. And so, after he and Haddon had had what Haddon insisted on calling a ‘debrief’, he’d gone and fetched a book of poetry from his shelves that he thought he might give to Anthony as a parting gesture, and he’d walked over to see if he was still in his rooms.

Anthony had almost finished packing when Harry arrived, and when he opened his door in response to Harry’s knock, he seemed surprised to see him. He let him in but didn’t stop what he was doing, carrying on shoving things into bags and emptying file after file of papers into a bin liner. ‘There’s nothing to say, Harry, is there?’ he said. ‘Only that I’m sorry. Of course I am. I’m really really sorry. I can’t explain. I think you may as well go.’ Harry didn’t know how to respond. He felt sure there was more to it than the version of events that Anthony had presented to Haddon. Instead of answering any of Haddon’s carefully prepared questions, he’d apparently given a brief statement to the effect that he had become jealous of Harry’s complacency, of the life that he had, and at the same time he’d become convinced of his own mediocrity in those tutorials, feeling more beaten down by Rachel and Cissy each time they met, and more and more certain that he would only fail where they would succeed. And this had become a kind of a madness for him, spiralling into something approaching hatred for the girls, and for Harry. He had felt angry, and he hadn’t known how to channel that anger. ‘Look at me,’ he said to Harry that afternoon in his room, brushing away more tears. ‘What was I thinking, turning up here, trying to fit in? Trying to make my way with people like them? With people like you?’ Harry tried to interrupt, and to contradict his line of
reasoning
, but Anthony carried on, his speech quickening and his voice sounding almost strangulated as he described how everything had got completely out of hand and, without really knowing what he was doing, he’d sent the first letter. He had wanted to hurt Harry, and it seemed clear to him that the memory of his wife was the easiest way to do it. After that, Anthony said, there had been no turning back. He’d set a course that would lead only to self-destruction, he’d known that at the time, and there had been nothing he could do to stop himself.

Harry was puzzled, feeling certain there was something about Anthony’s explanation that didn’t ring true. Realising he wouldn’t be able to communicate with him properly, not that afternoon at any rate, he’d handed him the book of poetry and said that he wished him the best and would like him to understand that he was forgiven. And then he left him there, still throwing things into bags and tearing down posters from the walls. As he walked away down the corridor he felt that he had failed Anthony somehow, more than he had ever failed anyone in his whole life. The only thing he could compare it with, that sense of failure in relation to another human being, was the way he’d felt on the day his wife had died, when he’d walked away from the hospice thinking that if he’d only done something, anything, differently, she would perhaps have been able to pull through.

He went back to his rooms and sat beside the window in the afternoon sun. He drank some tea, looking down on the quad below and watching the preparations taking place for the Ball that night. Some students dragged a table to the bottom corner of the quad and rigged up a film projector, and the chefs from the kitchen positioned a hog roast on the terrace outside Hall. As he watched, he thought about the fact that, had his wife still been alive, he would have brought her to the Ball. He sat and read for a couple of hours, not really taking anything in, and then he packed up his things and closed the curtains and locked up his rooms and left. He made his way to the Provost’s rose garden, feeling obliged, despite the events of the afternoon, to make a brief appearance at the drinks party that was
being
thrown there before the Ball proper, though he did wonder, as he walked along the terrace, about abandoning the thing altogether and going straight home.

He did his duty at the party in a kind of a haze so that he wasn’t entirely aware of what was going on around him, or whom he was talking to, or who it was that was taking so many photographs. When he did finally leave for the evening, he stopped in at the lodge and saw that a bulky envelope with Haddon’s name on it had been placed on the side ready for collection, and he realised that Anthony had gone. And then he looked in his own pigeonhole and saw that Anthony had also left behind the book of poetry Harry had given him. There was no note with it, nothing, just the book, so he took it and put it in his briefcase and walked out of College along the red carpet that had been laid there.

That, then, was how things stood at about six o’clock in the evening on the 21 June 1994, an hour or so before the gates were due to open on the Casablanca Ball.

16

THE FIRST HARRY
knew of there being anything amiss at the Ball was when he received a telephone call from Haddon shortly before two o’clock in the morning. He’d been fast asleep for hours in his house on the Woodstock Road. Although he’d taken to sleeping in his college rooms more frequently since his wife’s death, he had stayed away that night because of the Ball. Haddon told him it was urgent, and that he should come straight to his cottage when he arrived. He would say no more on the telephone, other than that on no account should Harry mention it to anybody he might bump into on his way.

When he got to the college gates, Harry had some difficulty persuading the team of Moroccan security guards who had been hired for the night to let him in without a ticket, and in the end he had to ask them to call through to Haddon. The first thing that struck Harry about Haddon when he arrived to meet him was that he had undergone an almost total transformation, so that he looked not at all like himself. As Dean, Haddon’s role that night was what it always was at a college ball: that of superintendent of a team of students who spent the night working as stewards, their recompense taking the form of a free ticket. This was a job I had done myself in my first year without too much trouble, and I’d actually quite enjoyed the opportunity it gave me to experience the event without having properly to engage in it. Being unable to afford a ticket once more, and remembering how little effort it had required, I’d volunteered again and managed to persuade Richard to join me. Our job was to keep the gardens as clear of rubbish as possible throughout the night, and to watch for any kind of trouble, intervening where sensible or, if a situation looked as though it would escalate,
contacting
Haddon on one of the walkie-talkies he’d given us so that he could co-ordinate an appropriate response and bring in the outside security team if necessary.

That night differed from my previous experience in one regard only. The Ball Committee had written to Haddon to explain that an entire cast for the film had been assembled, each of its members picked either from the Senior Common Room, or from among the students themselves, and that the only part they hadn’t managed to fill was that of Captain Louis Renault. All that this notional cast had to do was look the part, the letter said; to meet and greet and be generally charming or villainous as the script dictated, in the broadest possible sense. Their letter was obsequious enough to have persuaded Haddon that he should allow the committee to hire costumes for him and his team so that we could carry out our work dressed as gendarmerie, with Haddon being fully made up to play the role of our leader, Renault. Haddon told Harry he’d accepted their invitation with some reluctance, though Harry said to me that as the night went on, Haddon seemed to be entering into his role with an enthusiasm that suggested otherwise.

And so Harry was met at the gates not by Haddon dressed in his customary three-piece tweed, brown brogues below and a deerstalker on top if the occasion so demanded it, but instead as a captain of the French military police, circa 1942, and one whose knee-high leather boots were a little too tight for him, whose pillbox hat was a little too small, and whose hands, clad in tiny white gloves, held a whistle that was a little on the shiny side. So transfixed was Harry by the false moustache that was plastered across Haddon’s face, it took him a moment or two to realise the man was furious with him for having ‘given the game away, dammit’. He told me that Haddon had muttered expletives under his breath all the way back across the quad, the two of them dodging groups of drunken students and saying no thank you to cigarette girls and palm readers, and the thought had occurred to Harry that they could have drawn considerably less attention to themselves by walking, rather than running, and by looking as if they were enjoying themselves rather than
making
for the scene of a crime. And he was right, they could have done, for of course that was when Richard and I had seen him and had our argument about what he was wearing, and whether, as a Yorkshireman, he was a tight-wad.

When they got inside the cottage Haddon let rip, calling Harry an idiot and asking him why he couldn’t just have let himself in through a back gate. By that stage, Harry said, he was completely disorientated. Not only had he been woken suddenly from a deep sleep, he’d also just walked though some extraordinary scenes with Haddon waving an imitation pistol in his face every now and again. The college had become another place entirely and its transformation was bewildering. He hadn’t been able to get to sleep after supper that evening, having been quite unsettled by what had happened with the letters, and feeling desperately sad about Anthony and how he had failed him. When he’d finally managed it, the sleep he fell into was so deep that the telephone had already gone to answerphone by the time he heard it, so that he was woken in the end by Haddon’s voice shouting at him to get up and answer the bloody phone.