Every Contact Leaves A Trace (33 page)

He scanned the room about him feeling suddenly uncomfortable and not knowing why and then he saw him out of the corner of his eye. He stared, and then he stared some more, trying to make sure it really was Anthony who was standing there watching Rachel. He looked over at Rachel and back at Anthony, checking it was definitely Rachel who was the object of Anthony’s gaze and becoming certain also as he did so that she was entirely unaware of her observer. And then she looked up and mouthed the word ‘coffee’ to him, a smile on her face and her eyebrows raised in expectation. Harry stood from his seat, feeling sure that Rachel must also have seen Anthony by now, but when he turned around to point him out, he’d completely disappeared.

Harry didn’t raise the issue with Rachel over coffee that day. The opportunity simply didn’t arise, and he decided afterwards that if she’d known Anthony was in the library she’d have said something to him about it, and if she wasn’t aware of his presence, he didn’t see that it was necessary to alert her to it, telling himself it must be a one-off, a coincidence, or that it hadn’t been Anthony after all, just someone who looked like him. But when exactly the same thing happened the following week, and the week after that, and still Rachel said nothing, he decided, reluctantly, to approach Anthony and initiate a conversation in order to find out what was going on.

In the end it was done for him. It happened one day in early June, as he stood queuing in the main café of the British Library, the one that sits up behind the King’s Library in the atrium as you come in from the Euston Road. Rachel had cancelled on him at the last minute and he was all alone, thinking about Anthony, and about how strange the situation was. Even though he wasn’t absolutely sure whether Anthony had been aware of his own presence in the reading room at any stage, he’d somehow known from the first moment he’d caught sight of him that an actual meeting was inevitable. Despite this, when finally it occurred, it took him entirely by surprise.

The first thing he heard as he stood there in the queue was a laugh. It reminded him of the way Anthony had laughed in his tutorials with Cissy and Rachel, and he decided straight away he must be daydreaming, so intently had he been thinking about Anthony and what he would say to him if they spoke. It was a soft low laugh that he heard, and one that seemed to come from right behind him, almost as though the person whose laugh he had summoned up was so close they could have been leaning their head on his shoulder. And then he slowly became aware that the laugh was real rather than daydreamed, and he turned to see Anthony standing there smiling his old lopsided smile, his eyebrows creased together slightly to give his face its familiar air of puzzlement. And then Anthony said something that had never occurred to Harry as a possibility in any of the conversations he had imagined them having.

‘Come round to mine for coffee instead. I’m just across the road, won’t take us five minutes.’

‘I’m sorry? I’m not sure I— Ah! Anthony, isn’t it? Anthony Trelissick?’ and he knew as soon as he’d spoken that Anthony would see right through his feint.

‘Give me a break, Harry. I know you’ve been watching me. I need to talk to you that’s all. And I don’t want to do it here. Come on, I’ve thought it all through. Trust me.’

And when he turned and made for the door Harry followed him, just as Anthony seemed to have known he would. As they left the library and walked across the courtyard, Anthony jumping up the steps two by two ahead of him, Harry paused for just a moment to consider what it was that he was doing, so that he had to jog slightly to catch Anthony up as he went out on to the street. When he reached the street himself, he found Anthony had disappeared amongst the crowd. Harry thought he’d lost him altogether but suddenly he was there again, standing on the other side of the road and holding one hand in the air, waving.

He crossed over to join him and it began suddenly to rain. It was the kind of rain that falls only in summer, heavy and driving and warm, and the air was full of it before Harry realised he’d left his umbrella, along with the rest of his belongings, on the counter in the café. There was nothing he could do, he decided, except to carry on jogging after Anthony, who by now was dodging taxis and buses and slipping quickly down an alleyway that took them south from the main road and brought them out at the back of a redbrick mansion block. Anthony stopped and stood there, looking back at Harry as he caught up and reached him. ‘Blue plaque,’ he called out through the rain, turning and pointing up at the wall of the block they stood beside. ‘You’ll like this, Harry. Paul Nash no less. Paul flipping Nash. On my flipping wall. What do you reckon to that?’ and he jumped up the steps in front of where they stood. They passed through a door and down a narrow staircase and crossed some sort of a courtyard, but because they were moving so fast, and because it was raining so hard, Harry saw little other than that
it
was filled with ferns, and trees of a tropical nature, these last trembling under the weight of the water falling on their branches. Then they were standing in front of a low green door and shaking the rain from their clothes, and Anthony was fumbling with his keys and they were inside.

Harry told me that the only word he could think of as the two of them stood there looking at one another, the only word that seemed halfway suitable to describe Anthony’s kitchen, was ‘forlorn’.

‘This always happens in the summertime. Can’t be helped,’ Anthony said, wafting ineffectually at the pair of flies that floated in a drugged and hazy fashion in the centre of the room. ‘And it gets damp, you know, being the lower ground floor and that. Can’t be helped either.’ He handed Harry a tea towel, telling him to dry his hair with it, and he took off his shoes and stuffed them with newspaper. He did the same for Harry, lining both pairs up side by side in the hall and telling Harry to take a seat at the kitchen table. It wasn’t so much the flies circling above them as they sat that morning, and nor was it the damp that he could almost feel on his face as he looked about at the papers curling on the table and the pictures creasing in their frames. It wasn’t those things that made the word forlorn come into Harry’s mind, so much as the fact that nothing in the room looked to have been moved for several months, or perhaps longer. It was as though it was all in aspic, Harry thought to himself. Aspic, or something harder.

I know the café Harry was referring to, the one in the British Library where Anthony made his approach that day. I went there once, after Rachel died. It was one of the weekends that fell between my return from Oxford and the start of my sabbatical. During that time, from the Monday to the Friday of every week that passed, I was hardly aware of the memory of her, or of the two of us, finding it possible to lose myself in my work. She had a habit of creeping back into my mind at the weekends though. She was there as soon as I woke on a Saturday morning and when eventually I opened my eyes I
would
be surprised to find myself alone in the bed, having felt such a strong sense of her presence.

Not having anything better to do, and wanting to know more about the life she’d led while I was at work, I started to seek out the places she’d talked about. I sat on the benches in Bloomsbury squares where she said she had eaten her lunch, and I swam in the open-air pool at the top of Endell Street. There was a café in a bookshop on Bury Place where I began to read the weekend papers, and I even went to a recitation one Saturday evening at the Poetry Library on the South Bank.

And then there was the British Library. One Saturday morning, a few months after she was killed, instead of lying in bed having one of our imaginary conversations, I walked down the canal to where the towpath stopped just north of King’s Cross and I strolled along the Euston Road to have a look at it. I think I had intended even to go so far as registering for a reader’s card, meaning to make it a regular trip in the hope I might find a project to embark on, something to research. When it came to it I had only to go as far as the atrium, and to sit in the café for a while, to realise it wouldn’t help me. I’d stood first and gazed at the King’s Library stacked up against acres of glass and then I’d wandered through to look at the exhibition of maps. After that, I went and found a postcard to send to Harry before walking up a few flights of stairs to buy myself a coffee. I sat down and watched people eating, and talking, and laughing, and I started to feel the kind of anger that I felt quite often at that stage, in those situations. I sat for a while longer, until I became aware that I was staring at someone without meaning to, and that they were staring back at me, and I realised I ought to leave. And as I walked back down the stairs I wished I had accepted one of Rachel’s invitations to meet her there for lunch, instead of always saying that I hadn’t the time, not during the working week; that I had my hourly targets to meet, and that lunchtimes, if they were for anyone, were for clients. ‘Always your work,’ she said once. ‘It wouldn’t kill you you know, to slack off a bit from time to time. See the real world for a change.’ I think I pointed out then that the
British
Library was hardly the best place to do it, and she hadn’t asked me again.

When I asked her one day why she went there rather than the library at UCL, she said she just preferred it sometimes. It wasn’t only that she needed to look things up; it was also the being there, in amongst strangers. A change of scene, she explained, that was all. She’d never said much about meeting Harry there. I knew from the steady stream of postcards that arrived that they were in touch, and I knew they saw one another from time to time. But as with so many things about Rachel, the degree of intimacy they shared and the level of involvement he’d had in her life, as well as the responsibility he’d taken for her well-being at Oxford, were things she didn’t talk of, and consequently, things I only found out about after her death. And although Evie has come to be someone I think of as a woman so much mistaken about so many things, she’d been correct when she’d written in her email from Tokyo that her god-daughter had a tendency to keep things to herself. I knew already that Rachel was someone who was capable of small deceits, having closed the drawers she would leave ajar after working at my desk in my absence, never saying a word to me about the fact that she’d looked in them. And if any of what Harry has told me is true, I see now that she was capable of larger ones also. I have not, however, seen fit to judge her for that tendency she had, given the fact she grew up with someone like Evie in charge of her.

Sitting in Harry’s room that afternoon and looking at him spreading a piece of bread with butter and taking another slice of cheese for himself from the plate he’d prepared for us both, I wondered if he had any idea that I’d been the other half of what he’d surmised to have been no more than a student fling, the one he’d encouraged Rachel to break off at the end of the summer vacation we’d spent together in College. As I watched him chewing on his food and dabbing occasionally at his mouth with his napkin, I pictured him sitting in his kitchen and setting out the terms and conditions of her
gratis
occupancy of his attic flat and I hated him then. I hated him for having imposed his embargo on our relationship. I hated him for what he had done to her, and for what he had done to me.

She told me once, when I asked her to, why she had dropped me so suddenly at the start of that Michaelmas term, and I realised as I thought about what Harry had said that her account fitted almost exactly with his own.

We had talked of it, she and I, on the morning after Richard and Lucinda’s wedding when we’d woken together in my apartment. I brought the subject up, after we’d eaten our breakfast and had gone back to bed again. We were talking about that summer vacation we’d spent together in College, recreating for one another our memories of the conversations we’d had each evening on our strolls around the lake. We’d compared our recollection of that first time we kissed, lying on the grass in the middle of the night in Haddon’s secret garden, and I told her then that that was the moment at which I’d fallen in love with her, properly. She laughed at me a little when I said that, and I put my hand over her mouth to stop her and I told her I was being quite serious, and that, as a matter of fact, I’d been in love with her ever since.

‘How could you have been?’ she said. ‘How could you have been in love with me all that time? We didn’t even see each other, Alex. And you’d never really known me anyway, not properly. What, you mean you remained chaste for me always? Pining away in Islington with only your heron for company?’

And I laughed too then, saying that of course there had been other women, on and off. And yes, I had walked with them on Highbury Fields and there had been moonlight in the trees and my hands in their hair while I kissed them and I had taken them home sometimes and listened as they told me about themselves after we’d slept together, and I would offer them breakfast before they went, promising to call them again sometime. And when she asked me whether I’d called them like I’d said I would, these other women, I told her I’d done so only rarely, and I described for her the emptiness I would feel as they talked, these women, and how each time
it
had happened I would have a sense of wanting to be elsewhere, and that it was almost as though the person whose body was moving against mine wasn’t really there, so entirely were my thoughts turned in another direction. And then I asked her about her why she had dropped me at the end of the summer.

‘What happened?’ I said, taking her face in my hands as we lay entwined together in the sheets. And then I said it again, ‘What happened?’ and I looked her right in the eyes and brought my head closer to hers. ‘You never said, not really.’ She drew away from me then, lying back on the pillow and placing her hands over her mouth and closing her eyes as I carried on. ‘It was horrible, you know, what you did to me. I couldn’t understand it. Not after the way we’d been together, not after that summer.’