24
I AM STANDING here on my balcony watching the tail lights of the planes coming into London and I am thinking about the moment when I will start to come in to land this evening. At that point in a flight, just as the pitch of the engine’s hum is altered and there are the beginnings of a pull towards earth, I feel an intense awareness of the fact that I am neither in one place nor another, of my being neither here nor there. I suspect that is how I shall always feel now that Rachel has gone: forever suspended, forever now.
I have received the call to tell me my taxi is ten minutes away. I have run through all the things I had to do before leaving and I can’t think of anything I might have missed. Preparing to live elsewhere has been a fairly simple process in some ways, although at the last there was a not entirely unexpected hold-up with my immigration, which meant that an entire morning this week was given over to a slightly tense last minute stand-off in the US Embassy. ‘The open ended nature of the investigation’, as they called it, meant they took some persuading that I should be allowed on to American soil.
Quite possibly the biggest hurdle to my feeling able to go ahead and book my flight, though, which I did only last night in the end, was the question of how I should deal with the information Harry gave me. Of course, with hindsight, I could say that there was never any doubt in my mind about whether I would choose, in his words, to condemn or to forgive; that even as we stood beside the lake saying our last goodbyes I knew it was just a matter of time before I took the train back to Oxford and went to the police station on St Aldates, which is exactly what I did yesterday. But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. In the first place, there was the need, as I perceived it, for me to sort the facts into some sort of order in my own mind before I could even so much as consider passing them on to someone else. Being unsure of how exactly I would narrate the whole thing if I were to decide that that was what I was going to do, I was reluctant to proceed until I felt certain I would be able to in a way that left nothing, or as little as possible, to chance. I turned my attention to it then, trying as hard as I could to set aside my own feelings about the events that were being described, and to treat the facts as though somebody else entirely had instructed me to marshal them into an argument. And, after a time, things started to take shape, following the process to which I had become accustomed in my work, whereby a charcoal sketch would transform, gradually, into a line drawing of such razor sharp precision that it could not have been done by any human hand.
But despite all my efforts in this regard, and despite the tenacity I brought to my task, my impression that there was something incomplete about the story grew, so that however many times I rehearsed the events for myself, I had a sense that things were not quite right, and that there was something I should have realised but hadn’t. At a certain point, however, it became clear there was nothing further I could do with the information I’d been given, and there were no more connections to be made. I had picked the tale apart and put it together again in as many different ways as I was able to, but still I could identify no possible conclusion other than the one that had, in essence, already been written.
I’d made a fairly careful note of what Harry had told me, spending the evenings that followed my return from Oxford sitting at Rachel’s desk and writing it all out alongside tables and timelines, charts and diagrams. And when I’d done this, I opened the boxes the police had delivered back to me, the ones with all of Rachel’s things in, and I went through their contents again, slowly, in case anything seemed different in the light of the information that Harry had provided.
When I went to bed the day before yesterday I was no further on than when I started my task, being both reluctant to erase from my mind the doubt about whether Harry himself might have been involved in Rachel’s death, as well as having the persistent sense that there was something staring me in the face that I was still unable to see, despite all my looking.
It’s often the way of things that one’s problems are solved at a time when one is not making any kind of effort to address one’s mind to them, focusing one’s attention instead on something else entirely, and then, almost without one realising it something falls into place: a square peg becomes round and fits into its slot, or a balloon is released from its mooring and drifts into an empty sky. Nevertheless, as I stand here on the balcony waiting to go, it strikes me as a little ironic that after all my hard work, my discovery, if I can call it that, was made not by the application of my own intellect to the material before me, nor because there was anything particularly brilliant about my powers of assimilation and analysis, but instead, because of something that Richard, without having any idea of its significance, let slip in the postscript to an email I received when I woke up yesterday morning.
And it was only when I read it that the story which seemed to have petered out came back to life again, so that I left my apartment and caught the train to Oxford, taking with me my notes of Harry’s narrative, and the charts and timelines and diagrams I had prepared, as well as certain items from the boxes of Rachel’s things. All of these together will, I think, give the police a head start on the investigation they will begin today. And because it took me such a long time to tell them everything, it wasn’t until after midnight that I got home, exhausted by the experience of finally handing everything over to somebody else.
What Richard had written was, he said, something he’d been meaning to tell me but had kept forgetting to mention. The brevity with which he expressed himself made it clear he’d only just remembered to include it at the last moment before pressing the send button, and meant that I had to speak with him before I could really believe he was telling me what I thought he was. What he confirmed for me then turned the narrative Harry had put together, and the equation he had set out as lying behind the choice I had to make between condemnation and forgiveness, completely on its head. It would be fair to say that by that point, at the same time as continually weighing the question of what Harry’s own role had really been on the night Rachel died, and whether to believe a word of what he’d said, I was still, on some level, considering his idea of keeping it to ourselves. The statistics I’d dug up on the likelihood of ever finding a missing person gone as long as Anthony, and on the hundreds of young men being lifted every year from railway tracks, made for a persuasive case in favour of Harry’s theory that Anthony’s name would, at some point, appear in an unobtrusive death notice in the Manchester newspapers. I supposed that Harry would write a piece on him for the college records, and his mother would mourn, and I would write to Evie in Tokyo and tell her, and that would be that. Or, if nothing so dramatic had happened, there was still the question of how Anthony might ever be found. When what that search would entail, in terms of the exposure of the stories that lay behind it, was weighed against the trauma and upset that would be caused should it be a fruitless endeavour, the equation I was left looking at was not in any way attractive.
In the end, the question of whether I should trust Harry or not had no real bearing on my decision to pass his story on. I am quite sure he took no active part in Rachel’s murder. Whilst there are some unanswered questions in terms of his version of events, and whilst perhaps there always will be, it is clear to me that the basic instinct by which he operates is one of kindness, and I have concluded that it is not in his nature to be anything other than good, in an essential kind of a way. If Harry is guilty of anything beyond his perjury, it is only of having tried too hard to influence the lives of others. He perhaps cared too much for Rachel, and so became blind to reason, feeling too keenly a desire for reconciliation, and a need for resolution. He is not someone who is capable of doing harm to another, not intentionally. I am quite certain that any involvement he had in Rachel’s death could almost be called tangential; whilst it might be said that he stage-managed the performance, there was nothing knowing in the way he went about it.
Or at least, that was what I felt on the train back to London after my visit, having heard his long apology. And I suppose that is how he hoped I would feel, and why he went about telling me things in the way that he did. And it is, on balance, what I would like to be able to conclude. But there are other ways of looking at the decisions that he took, or failed to take. Harry presented his behaviour to me as that of a man seeking resolution, and trying only to be fair, and good, and I believe that is also what he told himself. I am no doctor of the mind, but the day before yesterday, as I was thinking about Harry, and the way he had attempted to justify what he described as a series of errors of judgement, I remembered a newspaper article I read two or three years ago, written by a psychoanalyst, about an experiment. A man was hypnotised and placed in a room full of chairs. He was told the room was empty, and on his being instructed to move from one corner of it to another he was seen to thread his way through the chairs before being led from the room again. When he was questioned about why he had chosen such a circuitous route, his explanations were many and various: he’d seen a nice picture on the wall he wanted to look at; he’d been distracted by a noise outside. Anything but the real reason, the existence of the chairs.
I don’t blame Harry for offering me a falsified rationale for his actions: he is a man, as I am. In all likelihood he had no idea that he was doing it, and he is not unusual in having had to rewrite his history in order to be able to live with himself. That other way of looking at the situation, at his having spoken to Rachel the way he did that day on the South Bank, exacting her agreement to his project, as he called it, would be one that cast his actions as those of someone driven not by fairness, or goodness, or a desire for resolution, but instead by anger, and jealousy, and guilt. Lacking the courage to confront his own mistakes and make his own apology to Anthony, he used Rachel to do it for him. Such a view would render his behaviour irredeemable, on the application of the principle that a man who allows a situation to develop whereby a crime may be committed, who fails to act to prevent it when he might have done, and who afterwards is silent when he could have spoken, is no less culpable than the one who wields the blow: fault may arise by omission, and is not obviated by the absence of intention.
I do not yet know what I think of Harry Gardner. I only know that I am not sorry that my move to New York means I am unlikely ever to see him again. Whatever else might be said of him, he made a game of Rachel’s safety, and for that I cannot forgive him.
And then there was Evie. It did not seem to me, in the end, that my visit to the police would give rise to any risk of her being implicated in the crime, despite Harry’s suppositions as to her complicity. I didn’t tell Harry about the conversation she and I had last week, and nor do I think there is any need for me to do so, not now. What I discovered when I spoke to her made it unlikely she’d be in danger of serious condemnation. I’d emailed her in Tokyo with the briefest of messages to the effect that I’d returned from my visit to Oxford, and I had just a few remaining questions, particularly in relation to her fund-raising activities at the Ashmolean in the summer. She began her call to me by saying straight away, and before I could really ask any questions, that when she arrived in my cell on the Friday evening with my holdall of clothes, she’d already made a statement about what she was doing on the night of Rachel’s murder. She said the reason Harry hadn’t told me about it was that he didn’t know, and she didn’t really see why I had to either, but that if I insisted, she had been at the fund-raiser as planned, but only for the first twenty minutes, at which point she had renewed an acquaintance with an old student of hers who had become rather a success in the banking world. He’d flown over from Tokyo for a long weekend and had come back to Oxford to make a donation to the museum. They had hit it off rather well and given up on the party, going straight back to his hotel room and spending the rest of the evening and the night together. He’d been more than happy to assist the police with their enquiries, as had the staff at his hotel, and her alibi was as sound as they came.
And the note? I asked. Had she really never got Harry’s note, the one that he’d taken over to her office before dinner? Had she really been ignorant of Anthony’s plan to meet Rachel beside the lake at midnight? No, she said, she hadn’t got it, and nor had she known. She’d assumed, when he’d told her about it later on, that he’d put it in the wrong place and it had been mislaid, or that the cleaners had found it on the floor and, thinking it was rubbish, thrown it away. Either that, she said, or he’d been making the whole thing up about having left it there. In any case, she carried on, she’d been so irritated with the whole situation by then that she almost deliberately hadn’t gone up to her office before the function, half suspecting that he might do something of the sort. Having had all she could take of Anthony and his childish needs, and of Rachel and her selfish melodramatics, she’d decided they could all look after themselves.
‘But why?’ I asked her then. Why hadn’t she told the police about any of it, about Anthony and Rachel, and Harry and his plan? How could she just have walked away from the whole situation as though it was nothing to do with her, when surely she must have realised what Anthony had done? She’d stopped me and said it wasn’t so simple, really it wasn’t. And then, in a calmer, tireder voice, all stridency gone, she explained that when it came to giving her statement, she had panicked. She’d thought only of herself, and of her alibi, and it wasn’t until she came through to my cell and saw me sitting across from her on the bed looking, she said, just like a little boy, that she realised she’d made the wrong choice, and that she should have told the police everything.
In the days that followed, Harry had told her the precise details of the plan he said Anthony had kept from her, and she had reached her own conclusions about what must have happened. Having done so, she found herself unable to go back on her decision: nothing would change the fact that Rachel was dead, and however many times she thought about giving another statement, and from whichever angle she considered the idea of telling the truth, she could see only what she stood to lose. She was aware that Anthony was more than capable of turning the story around to frame her, and that was what she described as her sticking point. Of course, she had always suspected what kind of a man he was, but even though she’d known throughout their relationship that to prolong her association with him was at best foolish, and at worst idiotic, at no point had she imagined him to be in any way dangerous, or violent. As I heard her say this, I did consider telling her what Harry said Anthony had done at the Casablanca Ball; about him forging Towneley’s signature and about him assaulting Cissy, but I decided instead to see what she had to say, wondering whether she’d known about it all along. It seemed so amazing to me that she could have been involved with Anthony over such a long period of time, and in such an intimate way, without his having disclosed it all to her, or without her having wheedled it out of him. On the other hand, I could see that it was entirely in line with Harry’s portrayal of Anthony’s character that he could have withheld it, and I could see also that someone as self-serving as Evie would have been able to remain almost wilfully ignorant. In the end it was apparent from what she said that she really had never known and so I held my silence, being unable to see any purpose that could be served by breaking it.
In any case, Evie had realised eventually that she’d been very wrong in her assessment of what Anthony could be capable of. She saw how easy it would be for him to say that she had manipulated and pressurised him from the moment he’d been sent down from Oxford and she’d begun to intervene in his life. She thought it quite possible that he would have had little, if any, hesitation in going so far as to portray her as having controlled him even to the point of murdering Rachel, and so she had held back, saying nothing further to anyone.
She couldn’t claim to be happy with the way she’d behaved, but as she saw it, happiness didn’t come into it. She’d been uncertain about her decision for some time, and was still considering the possibility of rethinking it, of trying to overcome her fear, but then the post in Tokyo had come up. She told me a little more then about the summer that Rachel’s mother had died, saying there had been nothing in the coroner’s report to suggest that she had not taken her own life that September afternoon on Oxford Street, and that it was her belief that she’d done so. When she read the letter she’d left asking Evie to take care of Rachel, she knew she had no choice but to pull out of the Junior Research Fellowship she’d just been given at Oxford and to put her career on hold for at least a year or two until Rachel was settled, and until they had established a closer rapport. And so, never having wanted children of her own but finding herself suddenly in sole charge of an eight-year-old orphan, she’d gone ahead and given it up, having no idea whatsoever how difficult it would prove to be for her to rebuild the professional relationships she’d abandoned for the sake of the emotional well-being of a child not even her own.
‘When Anthony telephoned me that day in June,’ she said, ‘crying his eyes out because he’d been sent down, and when he told me what she’d done that summer term at Oxford, how carelessly she’d behaved with regard to her own place there, something she’d been lucky enough to have access to only because I’d made those sacrifices for her, I was furious, Alex, I won’t pretend otherwise.’ And that wasn’t even to begin to take into account what Rachel had done to the other two, to Anthony and Cissy, by walking away and leaving them to their fate without owning up to the fact that it had been her idea to write the letters in the first place. When a post as prestigious as the one in Tokyo came up, Evie had no intention of letting Rachel hold her career back in the way she’d done as a child, and so, having been offered the chance of a new life she’d taken it, making pragmatism her virtue and trying to have as few regrets as possible.
I wasn’t surprised by what Evie told me; not about her decision to back out of Harry’s plan on the night of the murder, nor about her having remained silent when she could have spoken. Those were exactly the sort of things I would have expected of her. Nor was I surprised to discover she had apparently taken no active part in Rachel’s death. There was something sinister about her, in that she had at her core a kind of a steeliness which I distrusted instinctively, but I had seen her face at the police station when she came to my cell with my holdall, and I had seen her eyes when she’d taken off her sunglasses, and I recognised what I saw there as grief, having known it myself before then. At the same time as knowing she was looking across the room at me with suspicion, I knew there was something else there also: there was compassion for me in my sadness, and some kind of a desire to communicate to me the fact that she knew what it was that I had lost in losing Rachel.
Until the moment I read Richard’s email yesterday morning and realised I had no choice but to go forward, it was Rachel herself who was causing me the most difficulty in my deliberations about what to do. I could see only that the damage that would be done to her memory would be immense, and given the likelihood that so little, if anything, would be gained by going to the police, the trail having grown so cold, I didn’t feel at all sure I could bear the responsibility of making public the things I had discovered about her, things that would otherwise remain entirely private. Whilst the regard in which I held her had altered not, I was very aware that there were those who, unlike me, were they to hear of the events that lay behind her death, would be unable to resist the urge to allow their good opinion of her to be undermined, and that by making these events known to them, I would be tarnishing the image she had chosen to present to the world.
There are no two ways about it: I am simply unable to articulate how devastated I am by the things Harry told me, and by the fact she hid them from me. I am so very sorry that when it came to it, and she found herself pushed from all sides into such an intolerable situation by Evie, and by Harry, and by Anthony, she seemed to have been so overwhelmed by her fear of what my response would be if I found out, that she doubted her own belief in me and questioned the constancy of my love for her.
My regret that she kept her silence is something I feel only in the sense that I am quite sure I could have helped her to resolve things, and offered her my protection, if only she had told me what was happening. I have not come to judge her yet, and I don’t suppose I ever shall. Although it is quite another Rachel who has emerged from Harry’s story, I am, if anything, more certain, rather than less, of how deeply she loved me. And that is more important than anything Harry might have told me.
It was not only the depth of her love of which I became more aware as he told me his tale, but also some idea of what had lain behind the intensity with which she had felt it. This is something which, if I forget it even for an instant, I have only to read again the letter that Evie gave me at the police station to be reminded. I took that letter with me to Oxford on my winter visit, and I read it more than once in the pauses that arose between the chapters of Harry’s tale. It will come with me to New York also, despite my having the words by heart, and I suppose it will be something I keep with me always, in this way. Dear Evie, she wrote, and I picture her sitting at her desk and I wonder what I was doing as she picked up her pen to begin; whether I was there in the room with her, having no idea that it was me she was writing about, or whether instead I was out here on the balcony, cutting some herbs for supper, so that if she had glanced up she would have seen me here before she lowered her head and continued with her letter.
There is a point, in loving, where want becomes need. Where to have possessed that which one desires is no longer enough, and when one realises that one will never have one’s fill of this person, however much one is given.
This is what has happened to me, Evie, and, in response to your question last week, this is why I am marrying Alex Petersen. It is because we have come to need one another, he and I, and it is my belief that we always shall. I don’t expect you to understand this, knowing that you don’t concern yourself with the idea of love, or with the notion that such a thing as a constancy of affection between two people might be possible.
You taught me nothing of these things; what I know of them I have learned entirely from Alex, and from the kindness he shows me. At the same time as freeing me from the person I was before I knew him, he has allowed me to become entirely myself, and because of that I am amazed by this new life I am living.
Alex is gentle, and quiet, and strong, and steady. He is to me all of the things that no one else has ever been, and his love for me is unconditional. He doesn’t question me, and he doesn’t doubt me, and there is a certainty in the way he behaves towards me which I have come to think of as devotion.
I’m not trying to change your mind about my choice. When I tell you that we love one another, Alex and I, I do so only because that is how it is with us, and how it always will be.