Every Contact Leaves A Trace (36 page)

Every evening thus far, when we have come through to this little room after dinner, I have seen only the surface of things, so involved have I been each time, albeit reluctantly, in the conversations forced upon me. Tonight though I am able to observe things more closely and I notice there is more of a system than I have been aware of hitherto. When I arrived Harry had still been checking the seating plan he’d drawn up on the back of an envelope during dinner, making sure everyone was in the right place and talking to the people they were supposed to be talking to. And now we are all settled, he stands every once in a while and nods to one of the other Fellows. His chosen assistant, thus selected, rises as soon as he is able to extricate himself without offence from the conversation in which he has been engaged. He steps forward to the large table and takes, according to the way in which he has interpreted Harry’s nod, either a decanter, or a bowl of fruit. He carries it over to one of the little groups of three and offers them its contents before replacing it on the table and returning to his seat, easing seamlessly back into the conversation. Before too long, Harry is on his feet again, nodding and signalling once more, so that none of the guests have to trouble themselves for an instant and neither are their plates ever empty nor their glasses unfilled. They are, in this way, almost continually waited on by one or other of their hosts, disturbed only when it is necessary to encourage them with the politest of reminders that they might like to pass a decanter to their left or to their right, should they have forgotten to do so.

This is a rhythm that is disturbed only once on this particular evening, when a man appears from a door cut so unobtrusively from the panelling that until he opens it I haven’t even realised it is there. He nods at Harry before moving briskly across to the table and setting down a plate of papaya with quarters of lime. After this, he circles the room once, replacing a candle that has burned too far
down
, and picking up a stray grape from the floor where it has fallen. And then he is gone and we are become once more an orrery suspended, this little circle of guests, with Harry a dark star somewhere at our outer reaches ensuring we are always static, that our glasses are turned from gold to purple and back again, and watching us wipe juices sticky from our chins as he observes the liaisons he has engendered taking place all around him.

This is the scene that surrounds me in this little room, the darkness only held off by the fire and the occasional glint of a candle’s flame flashing back from a piece of silver as I sink further into my chair and allow the wine to settle in my veins. And this is the point at which I summon for myself once more the pieces of tracing paper that are Harry and Evie’s stories, drawing them out from the back of my mind where they have continued unaided in the task of aligning themselves so that I might see for myself the scenes they depict. And with the lull of conversation ebbing and flowing round about, the events that they describe start to materialise before me, faintly at first and then more clearly, and I watch, mesmerised, as Anthony and Rachel and Cissy between them dream up the idea of writing Harry a series of anonymous letters accusing him of murder.

It started as a joke. Just the sort of thing the three of them were always coming up with on the afternoons they spent hidden away together in the set of rooms Rachel and Cissy shared. They would schedule them in, these lost afternoons, as they came to call them, maybe once a week or so. They’d take it in turns to buy in provisions, bottles of vodka and packets of multicoloured gold-tipped cocktail cigarettes from the tobacconist on The High, each of them having purchased an ivory cigarette holder on Rachel’s instructions. And so it was that they would close the outer door of the set and strip naked and begin to drink, and to smoke, and to talk. It was very pretentious, Anthony said, and he, perhaps more than any of them, was aware at the time that it was just one big Oxford cliché.
But
that was why he liked it so much, in a way. He felt he finally belonged, on those afternoons they spent together behaving like Oxford students. That he had at last been accepted into that world.

It would depend on what day of the week it was, and on how much vodka they’d been able to afford from the kitty they’d built up, but quite often the afternoon would stretch into the evening, and on into the night, and if Rachel and Cissy had nothing in the fridge Anthony would be sent out under cover of darkness for a takeaway, and if they got too cold finally, in the middle of the night, they would take baths and wrap themselves up in duvets and carry on drinking.

There were very few rules in that commune of theirs. The first was with regard to its membership which, they agreed right at the start, would be forever restricted just to the three of them. ‘Whatever happens,’ Anthony recalled Rachel saying as they toasted their union on the first day of its formation. And they must never tell anyone what they did on their lost afternoons, Rachel saying once more, ‘Whatever happens,’ and Cissy saying it back again, making the other two repeat it with her as though they were boy scouts sitting around a campfire swearing a secret pact, so that he’d half expected one of the girls to bring out a penknife and demand he draw a drop of blood and mingle it with theirs.

Beyond that there was only the sex to be legislated on, and that was something Rachel and Cissy seemed to have worked out between themselves in advance, announcing to Anthony in that first meeting that he could look all he liked but he couldn’t touch, whatever happened. He could touch himself, of course, and they seemed quite keen that he should do that, but he was never to touch either of them, and he would never be invited to join in. So he stuck to the rules and only watched, bringing himself off again and again as he sat in Rachel’s armchair and gazed at the two of them making love to one another, always in the manner of a performance rather than an act of real intimacy. He found it fairly unbearable most of the time, having to stay just away from the bed they lay on, or to sit just apart from them on the floor, but when he’d tried to raise the
issue
with them and suggest it might be time to revise their agreement, they’d told him he could take it or leave it, and that if he couldn’t handle it he could just walk away there and then. And so he’d stayed, and carried on watching, and in a strange kind of a way he’d come to find it more manageable each time, once he’d accepted he was only ever to be an observer.

And then, one day in late May, half an hour or so into one of their lost afternoons when the sex was yet to come and they had only just started to drink, they all three of them went through to Rachel’s bedroom and he and Cissy were watching her undress when she said, ‘Why do you think he’s so obsessed with Browning anyway?’ and that was how it started.

They talked about Harry all afternoon, in an idle kind of a way. They came around again to the poems eventually, and Cissy said something about Harry’s wife, and brought up the rumours that had been circulating about how it couldn’t have been cancer, it must have been a lover, or suicide, or something.

‘What d’you mean, “or something”?’ Rachel said. ‘D’you mean murder? You think he murdered her?’

‘Oh for god’s sake, Rach, why don’t you shut up,’ Cissy replied. ‘Of course he didn’t.’

‘But why not? It happens doesn’t it? People do do that sort of thing you know. And that,’ Rachel carried on, running one hand lazily over Cissy’s breasts and back again, and then trailing her fingers over her stomach and letting them rest there for a minute before moving her hand further down, so that Anthony began to listen less carefully to their conversation, ‘would explain the Browning.’

They’d talked about it again the next time they met, and Rachel seemed to have become quite enthralled by the idea. And when one afternoon they had all three of them agreed in their drunkenness that it was quite possible, if not probable even, that Harry had murdered his wife, she’d said it: ‘I think we should send him a letter. Test him out, you know. See if we can get a rise. It’d be fun, don’t you think?’ And they had laughed about the idea and flicked through some poems and read them to one another, hideously drunk, and
when
they had found poem after poem suited to their task, Anthony fetched a piece of paper from Rachel’s desk and sketched the letters out there and then.

They’d struggled over how to sign them off, choosing and rejecting first one name and then another from the poems. ‘We’ll find something perfect in
The Ring and the Book
, I know we will,’ Anthony said, picking up Rachel’s copy.

‘Fuck off, Anthony. You’re trying to be cleverer than you actually are, as usual,’ Cissy said. ‘Forget it. It’s fucking boring and fucking long and I’m the only one of us who’s ever going to read it. Let’s just make something up.’

And that was when one of them had come up with ‘A Well-Wisher’. They’d all toyed with the idea of translating it, preferably into something with a literary twist. ‘How about Ben Volio?’ Anthony suggested. ‘You know, Shakespeare, but make it into two names.’ Cissy had objected though, telling him not to be an idiot, they wanted a baddie not a goodie, someone really evil, not some kind of Mr Nice Guy. ‘Don’t be so simplistic, Cissy,’ he’d responded. ‘People can be both, you know. They can be bad and good at the same time. I mean, it could be argued, for example, in R and J—’

‘No,’ Rachel said then. ‘No they can’t. Most people are only one or the other. I mean it. Some people are all bad, whichever way you look at them. However many times you give them another chance, they’ll fuck you over. Even if they say they love you.’

He’d argued it out with her for a while, but when Cissy joined in he’d backed off and left them to it. Until, that was, they’d started to say some really ridiculous things to one another, and the whole thing had descended into an actual fight, and he’d had no choice but to step in and break it up and tell Rachel to stop crying, neither of them were trying to fuck her over. They were her friends, he told her. And they were having fun, that was all. She’d calmed down then, all of them had, and they’d decided to stick with ‘A Well-Wisher’ and leave it at that.

‘Three weeks left till the end of term,’ he’d said. ‘We’ll send the first one at the end of this week, after we’ve had our tute with him
on
Friday, and we’ll see what happens. If he doesn’t take the bait we’ll carry on sending them, one a week, until he does.’

‘Alright,’ Rachel said. ‘We’ll crack him, you’ll see,’ and she lay back on her bed and Cissy climbed on top of her.

‘Who’s going to actually send them though?’ Cissy asked, later on. ‘I’m sure as hell not going to. My dad would kill me if we got found out.’

‘Oh come on,’ Rachel said. ‘Don’t be a chicken Ciss.’ And that was when Anthony had put his proposition to them. He would type up the letters in the computer room so they couldn’t be traced, and he’d send them, but only if they agreed to give him something in return. ‘Oh my god Anthony you sleaze!’ Rachel said. ‘I can’t believe you think we’d actually fall for that!’

‘Why not?’ Anthony replied. ‘What’s so unappealing about the idea of actually letting me fuck one of you anyway? It’s not like you don’t know me well enough by now is it?’

Rachel and Cissy began to laugh at him then. ‘Know you well enough?’ Rachel said, gasping for breath. ‘Ciss, he thinks it’s because we don’t know him well enough! Can you believe that?’ And Cissy joined in, telling Anthony to take a long look at himself in a mirror next time he found himself in front of one, and the two of them carried on laughing until, he said, they were actually almost screeching with it. He hated them both at that moment, really hated them. But then suddenly Cissy stopped laughing and said, ‘OK. Let’s do it. It’s only a fuck, after all.’

‘No it’s not, Ciss,’ Rachel said, half laughing, half horrified. ‘God, you’re so—’ and she broke off there, getting up from the bed and walking over to the other side of the room.

‘What? Rachel, what? I’m so what?’

‘So. I don’t know. So immoral,’ Rachel said, and she wasn’t laughing any more.

‘Rachel,’ Cissy said, sitting up in the bed, mock-passion on her face and her hands clasped in front of her chest. ‘I never knew you cared, darling heart!’ and she got up and ran over to Rachel and kissed her for a while before stopping suddenly and saying, ‘Cut!’
She
pushed her away and walked back to the bed and lay down before carrying on. ‘You know what, honey, who cares,’ and she turned her head and announced to Anthony, ‘You’re on, kiddo. But the letters were your idea if anyone ever finds out about them, right? Not my problem, OK?’

‘OK,’ Anthony said, and he got up from his chair and started to walk towards her.

‘Oh for god’s sake not now you funny little northerner!’ Rachel said, walking back to the bed and climbing into it. She lifted the covers over her and Cissy, placing her hands on Cissy’s face and looking her right in the eyes. ‘When shall we let him, Ciss? When?’

And that was when they agreed that if, and only if, Anthony sent all three of the letters, and if, and only if, he got away with it, they’d meet him behind the Pavilion at midnight on the night of the Casablanca Ball and give him his reward. ‘Outside?’ Anthony said, desperately wanting to get into bed with the two of them there and then. ‘Why outside?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ Rachel said. ‘Have you never had sex en plein air Anthony?’ she carried on. ‘You’re so boring. He’s so boring isn’t he Ciss. So fucking boring,’ and she turned to Cissy and pulled her down under the covers and with the sound of the supper bell ringing out across the quad, Anthony sat back down in his chair and watched the shapes of their bodies moving under the duvet and that was when he decided that he would send the letters after all, whatever happened.