Every Contact Leaves A Trace (29 page)

All of these things together had made it possible for him to take quite some time to notice that Haddon and he were not alone in the drawing room. Partway through the argument they were having about the merits or otherwise of his having done what Haddon described as ‘involved the security chaps in the whole thing’, he looked across to the other side of the room and saw Anthony sitting on the floor in front of the bookcases, one eye blackened and blood smeared across his chin. He was staring wide-eyed and angry at something behind Harry, and when Harry turned and followed his gaze he saw Cissy sitting there, her face also smeared with blood. As far as he could see, she didn’t appear to be quite as badly hurt as Anthony. She was sitting on a chair, rather than on the floor, and instead of being hunched over in the way that Anthony was, she was bolt upright, staring back at him defiantly. He was thinking to himself that there was something else about her that didn’t look quite right, something he couldn’t place, beyond the blood on her face, and then he realised suddenly that it was just that he’d never seen her wearing
a
dress before, that was all. And that made him think about Rachel, and he was just beginning to look around the room for her when Haddon said, ‘She’s in the John Radcliffe, Harry. It may surprise you to know that at this precise point in time, a decision is being taken about whether it is necessary for your star student to have her stomach pumped, or whether she’s vomited enough of the alcohol out of her system for it to be safe to leave her as she is.’ Anthony laughed suddenly as Haddon said this, and looked as though he was about to speak, but Cissy shook her head at him and he said nothing.

‘On the advice of her friends I have telephoned her godmother. Although,’ he said, looking over at Anthony and back again at Cissy, ‘the term “friends” would seem, at this stage, to be something of a misnomer. Our business is not with her, Harry. Not tonight anyway.’ And then he turned to Cissy and Anthony. ‘You two. You know the form. There’s a reasonable chance we can keep this as college business if you stay where you are for the next ten minutes.’ And then he ran over and charged down the narrow staircase and Harry heard him locking the front door to his cottage. He emerged back into the room again and said, putting the key in his pocket, ‘There are windows without locks on this floor but I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s quite a drop. Just bear this in mind, the pair of you: I haven’t worked out what happened yet but I’m almost there, and the police would have no hesitation in arresting both of you on the strength of what I’ve got so far. To leave the university without a degree is one thing, but to do so with a criminal record would make life more than a little difficult. It’s your call, but I’m sure as hell I know what I’d do in your position. Ten minutes. We’ll be back. Harry, come this way.’ And he went over and opened the French doors and led Harry out into the secret garden, walking over to the low wall on the other side.

Standing there in the dark with the sound of fireworks going off on the playing fields, and the noise of a big band starting up beneath them on the lawns that led down to the lake, Haddon told Harry what had happened. About an hour or so previously, he and Towneley, who he’d appointed as his adjutant officer for the night,
had
been standing in exactly the same spot as he and Harry were now. They’d been carrying out their hourly check-in on their walkie-talkies with each of us gendarmes when they’d seen a woman emerge from the bushes into the light thrown by the fire pit on the southern edge of the lake and reel in an uncertain fashion towards the water. They had both instinctively made as if to run towards the steps down from the garden but had drawn back as she’d righted herself and carried on walking. They’d laughed to one another and, their checking-in completed, Towneley had lit for them each a slim cigar, ‘in character’, so he said, and they’d leaned on the wall and watched the Ball unfold beneath them. The woman they’d seen a moment or two beforehand had drifted into view again, much closer to them now, seemingly no longer able to keep herself upright. She fell onto the lawn in front of the plane tree and the whole of her body started to convulse, as though she was vomiting, or crying, or both. Towneley laughed at first, but when she’d carried on convulsing, over and over, eventually collapsing to the ground and becoming entirely still, Haddon gave his command and Towneley ran, climbing over the old iron gate in the wall and slipping and sliding down the steps that were built into it and going over to where she lay. He sat her up on the grass and gave her some water from a flask he was carrying, and Haddon said that from where he stood he could see Towneley stroking her back and wiping her face with a handkerchief. They talked to one another, Towneley and the woman, and Haddon assumed everything was under control and was going back inside when he heard his walkie-talkie crackling and he answered it.

‘She’s in a mess,’ Towneley told him. ‘I can handle it. Think I’m going to get her to the JR, the amount she says she’s drunk. Not exaggerating as far as I can tell, and she says she’s been vomiting constantly for the last half an hour or so. But that’s not why I’m calling you. She says there’s something going on behind the Pavilion. She specifically said you, Haddon. Said there was something you’d be interested in. I think you’d better get down there.’ And so Haddon, wondering who the woman was and what she was talking about,
went
inside and ran downstairs and let himself out of the front door of his cottage, walking back under the passageway beneath the secret garden and out across the lawns. It was only when he passed Towneley on the way that he was able to take a close enough look to see that the woman he was by now carrying in his arms was Rachel. He knew then that Anthony had made his way back into College somehow, and that it was him Rachel had seen behind the Pavilion. But what he hadn’t anticipated, he said, was quite what he’d discover when he got there.

In the course of packing up my apartment last week for my move to New York I came across a collection of things I had kept from my time at Worcester: old play programmes and invitations; concert tickets and receipts for dinners; even the occasional essay with which I suppose I must have been pleased at the time. And there, at the bottom of this pile of mementos, was a little packet of matches. Not a box, but rather one of those packets fashioned from a fold-over piece of cardboard with a strip on the back for striking a light. It was completely unused, the whole thing made up in a glossy black and still pristine. On the front was the college crest, embossed in silver, with the words ‘WORCESTER BALL 1994’ beneath, and on the back, a quotation in italics: ‘…
This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship
’. I dug through the rest of my box of things, hoping to find a ball programme, or some photos or something, but there was nothing, so I pulled off a match and struck it, and as I watched it burn down almost to my fingers the little flame grew until it became not itself but one of the towering flames of the fire pit that had been dug beside the lake that Midsummer Night, and I was there all over again.

My recollection of the early part of the Ball was fairly clear. Richard and I had received orders to report, dressed in our gendarme costumes, outside the front door of Haddon’s cottage at the south corner of the quad, at what he’d referred to in his memo to us all as ‘1800 hours’. ‘Jesus,’ Richard said as we walked across the quad, him trying unsuccessfully to make his hat stay on his head and me
attempting
, with equal ineptitude, to make my plastic rifle swing behind me rather than in front. ‘Haddon’s dream this, isn’t it, Petersen? I propose we’re on the case for an hour, tops, and then we knock off for the night. Not sure I can take much more of it than that. Won’t be missed anyway. Talk about overstaffing,’ he said, pointing his rifle at the crowd of gendarmes that awaited us. He gave up on his hat and tucked it beneath his arm. We both agreed we’d take a fairly relaxed approach to the night that lay ahead. That was the day I’d received Harry’s letter telling me I could stay up in College for the vacation, and I think it was because of that that I felt a certain freedom from things, knowing I wouldn’t be going home to my father after all.

Richard was right about our being surplus to requirements. There were at least twenty gendarmes standing outside Haddon’s cottage when we got there, which Richard and I agreed was about ten too many, each of us attributing the numbers to Haddon’s tendency towards megalomania rather than any real need. I’d looked at the circulation list at the top of Haddon’s memo earlier that afternoon and realised I knew most of the team. The only one who didn’t show in the end, as was revealed when Haddon went through the roll call, sounding just like a schoolteacher, was Anthony. ‘Trelissick,’ Haddon said, rushing down the list. When he was met with silence he shook his head as if annoyed, muttering to himself, ‘Of course not. My mistake,’ before carrying on to the end of the list and starting to bark out his orders. I think he was actually striding up and down on the grass in front of us as he spoke, if I remember correctly, stopping every now and again to click his heels together, and Richard leaned across to me and pointed out that hadn’t he got the wrong end of the stick and had he actually seen the film and didn’t he know Renault was a Frenchie not a Kraut? And then we were off, and the hog roast was smoking, and the quad was suddenly full of people taking photos of one another and drinking champagne.

We went through the passageway under Haddon’s secret garden and strolled across the lawns towards the lake. Richard, even though
he
was walking right next to me, took to radioing me on my walkie-talkie every time he saw a woman he liked the look of, reporting their location by reference to the hands of a clock. Exactly an hour later, and with a military precision of which even Haddon would have been proud, he announced that he had picked up and disposed of no fewer than three empty beer cans and that we had, therefore, done enough to pay our way. It was then that we started to drink in a serious fashion, depositing our hats and rifles in the cloakroom and sketching out a quick calculation to work out precisely how much we’d have to get through to make our tickets worth what they would have been had we paid for them. After standing in the Heineken tent and doing what Richard referred to as starting gently, with no more than a couple of pints, we stopped outside the fortune teller’s tent and said alright, why not, at least it would be amusing. I chose not to discover my future, standing instead at the back and watching Richard being told by the woman who sat opposite him, holding his hand and stroking his palm, that he’d become a wealthy man, but not a happy one. ‘Good good,’ he said to the laughter that broke out around him. ‘That’s the way I like it.’ The lights were low in that little tent and it was overcrowded, and the clouds of some kind of incense that the woman was burning made it even more difficult to see properly, but I was fairly sure I spotted Anthony standing in the shadows at the back of the crowd on the other side of the table. I raised a hand in greeting, but I never found out whether it was actually him or not; whoever it was failed to acknowledge me, only pulling their gendarme’s hat lower on their head and slipping suddenly out of the tent.

I hauled Richard out eventually and we wandered around for a bit before going to the Buttery bar, converted for the night into Rick’s Bar. ‘Oh good,’ he said, once we were on to our third martini. ‘Some titty action at last,’ and I looked up at the stage to see what he was talking about. I recognised Rachel immediately; I had seen her at black tie events before, and although she wore more make-up than usual, and her hair was set in a style that was new to me, the transition she had undergone was not so very startling. But when
I
saw Cissy I did a double-take, and my recognition of her was delayed, just for a second or two. I think it was largely because I’d never seen her wearing a dress before. It wasn’t that there was anything awkward about the way she did it; on the contrary, it was a look that seemed effortless, at the same time as being very strange. Richard and I compared notes later on and agreed that the only other time we’d seen her out of her customary shorts and deck shoes, jacket and scarf on top, was the week earlier in the term when her father had visited from the US. She’d appeared with him in Hall on the Monday morning and Richard had choked on his cereal when we saw her standing there in little fitted trousers, patent leather ballet pumps and a much smarter version of one of her jackets, all buttoned up and piped around the edges, just like the tiny blazer I’d worn when I was sent away to school. Her hair was smarter that day too, the fringe swept back into a quiff and standing slightly proud, so that her scar was clearly visible. And her nails, as I noticed when I stood next to her at the tea urn, were bright red and shiny. She’d taken him everywhere with her that week; to Hall for breakfast, to the Buttery bar for lunch, and even to lectures, or so we heard from Towneley. They didn’t show up at dinner though, and it was said that he’d taken her out every night to meet people he had connections with in Oxford, and that on the last night of his visit he’d driven her to Le Manoir to stay with him in his suite before he flew home again. And then, as soon as he had gone, her shorts came out once more, her hair flopped back down over her scar, and her nails were no longer red.

‘Bit sad that, don’t you think,’ Richard had observed at the time. ‘Like taking your daddy to school with you.’ I disagreed and said so, wondering to myself what it would be like to have a father who was capable of taking such a ready pride in my achievements in the way that hers was, or even to be aware of them, which would have been a start.

That night in Rick’s Bar her transformation was on another scale entirely. The scar was hidden again, her hair slicked down on her head in waves, and her face, as Rachel’s, was painted like a wartime
glamour
girl’s. Their dresses were worn so close and cut so low they were barely there; covered in sequins and catching the light, Rachel’s clung black to the whiteness of her skin and Cissy’s was a coating of silver, daubed across her tan. They stood face to face, so near to one another they were almost touching. They shared a single microphone and as the piano player began to play they turned and said hello to their audience and then they faced each other again and started to sing.