Every Contact Leaves a Trace

5



IT’S QUITE POSSIBLE that I have attributed an undue significance to the realisation that occurred to me last night, and to my wakefulness. It was unrealistic of me to have expected to sleep at all. I’d been aware when I went to work in the morning that the day would not be uneventful, but even so, I was surprised by how things turned out.

I could very well be said to have brought the situation on myself, in that it was the decision I made two days ago that led to my having to take a taxi home yesterday, burdened as I was with the box of things I’d cleared from my office. Even as I made it, I knew it was the sort of decision Haddon would have described as one unlikely to be without consequences: I was, for the first time in my career, acting against the wishes of my partners at the firm.

In the months after Rachel died I found in my job a kind of a refuge; a forum in which I was required not to think, but simply to function. I didn’t go back straight away of course, although on the first morning after I got home I did try to. I’d rung and cleared it with my senior partner before setting off from Oxford on the Tuesday lunchtime. He insisted that there should be no client contact initially, and certainly not while I was still on bail. I agreed to this eventually, saying I was content to work only with my colleagues for a period of time, at least until the press interest had died down. There was no question in my mind: I needed to be there, to be doing something, in whatever capacity they would have me. I needed to be busy.

I remember getting ready that Wednesday morning. I put on my suit and tie, picked up my keys and my wallet and my phone, and I went to open the front door of the apartment. As I let myself out I felt suddenly sick. My legs became completely hollow, and I sat on the floor and lowered my head into my hands and stayed like that for some time until I realised the feeling wasn’t going to pass and I couldn’t face seeing anyone.

For the rest of the following fortnight I stayed at home, waiting out the days until I could go back to Oxford for my third interview, the one in which I found out I was being released from bail without charge. There was the occasional visit from a detective, coming with queries about Rachel, or bringing letters to see if I could shed any light on them, or photos, to see if I could identify faces, and situations. But apart from that, nobody came to the apartment; I had told everyone who asked that I would rather, for the time being, keep myself to myself. I tried to go out once or twice but I found it difficult. It wasn’t just the lack of any sense of purpose or structure to my day, but also that I felt a strange and horrible sense of vulnerability. My grief at that time was a very violent one, so that, for example, when I walked along the canal on the first afternoon, I could feel an almost real physical sensation that someone was kicking and beating me as I walked. On the second day I tried again, and while the precise sensation of being beaten was no longer there, it had been replaced by a fear of being attacked, so that when I reached the point where the towpath passed underneath the first bridge I had to turn back, feeling sure there was someone waiting at the other end ready to assault me.

On abandoning my walk I went back and spent hours on the balcony, digging furiously and repotting plants, weeding the raised beds, tying back the jasmine and sweeping the boards clean of the mess I had created. When there was nothing left to do, I crawled into bed and gave in to an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. In the days that followed I did little more than sleep. In the evenings, when I woke, I wrapped myself in my duvet and crept out on to the balcony and sat watching the sky and thinking of Rachel and the times that we’d spent out there, until it grew too cold, or too dark, and I had to get back into bed. I lay awake most nights thinking of her, and of how the police would be taking her life to pieces, and mine, and lining up what they found and examining it, and how it was very likely that by the end of it, they would know far more about Rachel than I had ever done, or ever would. I longed for her to be there those nights, so that she could lie beside me and listen while I told her these things as they occurred to me, and so that she could hold me as I cried myself back to sleep.

Returning to work was an escape, of a sort. The tension and suspense of managing the kind of deals we were doing then, the value of which ran to sums so excessive as to be almost absurd, was sufficient to shut me off from what had been so difficult in the fortnight I’d spent in the apartment. I had let it be known beforehand that I didn’t want to talk to anyone about what had happened. I was grateful for the cards and letters that I’d found when I arrived back from Oxford, I said, but I didn’t feel able to discuss it in person. And, of course, my colleagues were more than happy to respect this wish, their relief being almost palpable from the minute I’d walked into the office on the first morning. Their silence on the subject made it possible, almost, to forget that anything unusual had happened while I’d been away. I hadn’t watched the news or read a paper whilst I’d been at home, and the information I needed to know in order to keep up with the commercial world was, as it always had been, filtered for me each day by my secretary and lay waiting on my desk when I got in. Those small things that did seep through were so slight, and so remote, as to make me feel rather like an Arctic explorer, striding across an icy wilderness hundreds of thousands of miles away from the newspapers that were reporting on my journey. For the hours I was at work I functioned almost as a machine, feeling very little in the way of emotion, apart from anger or frustration if things went wrong or if people fell short of my expectations.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that thoughts of her death would eventually start to encroach upon that territory, and that I would come to operate less successfully as they did so. I was surprised though by the sort of mistakes I began to make. There were enough people around me whose desire to create a good impression meant that not only did they pick up on what became a series of little omissions, but also that they were able to reclassify these episodes of inattentiveness as nothing more than calculated tests of their own competence.

And then one day in August, in the week following Rachel’s funeral, I made a mistake that couldn’t be disguised in such a way. When it was drawn to my attention, I was more than a little sceptical that I would have missed such a thing as that. But there, in the client file, was the copy of the letter that had gone out, printed on green paper with my signature in the top left-hand corner, and there was the relief on the face of the lawyer presenting me with this evidence of my approval of her work. The comparatively minor scale of the transaction concerned, combined with the relative slimness of the client’s contribution to the previous year’s turnover, meant that I was able to convince myself that what had occurred demanded no more than a letter of apology and a waiving of my fee on the file for the foreseeable future. Until a month ago, that is, when I was asked, as I am every year, to fill in a form for the purposes of notifying our insurers of potential liabilities arising by way of third parties seeking redress against the firm. The letter accompanying the form invites me to declare any errors or omissions that I have made, or that I think I might have made, or that I suspect might have been made by others, and it was as I sat at my desk staring at the line on which I was about to write my signature that I realised I had to make a confession. The error itself was a small one, but I could no longer pretend that the potential ramifications were anything other than enormous.

My partners, on considering the issue, found themselves able to allow me a certain latitude, given, as they put it in their letter to me, the delicacy of my situation. The compromise that was negotiated with our insurers that week permitted me to retain my partnership on the condition that I agreed to be referred to a psychotherapist. My grief, though entirely understandable, was having a not insignificant effect on my performance and it had been decided, as was usual in cases such as this, that I should undergo a course of treatment designed to bring about a resolution to my situation in such a way as to avoid the risk of further negligence on my part.

I have little doubt that my partners had no choice but to ask this of me, but after the session I attended on Wednesday I made up my mind not to see him again, the man deemed capable of resolving my situation. And having made my decision, the prediction I’d imagined Haddon making turned out to be even more accurate than I had anticipated.

I met with my senior partner first thing yesterday morning to tell him face to face. The fact that a letter arrived at my desk within two hours of our meeting suggested to me that it was a development that had not been unforeseen. Of course, the letter said, my feelings about the appropriateness or otherwise of the idea that a complete stranger might be able to bring about a resolution to my grief were feelings that the partnership, as a whole, respected, and this was something they did unreservedly and with one voice. But equally, I must appreciate his position. Whilst he acknowledged that only five months had passed since the occurrence of that undoubtedly tragic event, he hoped I would not find him insensitive in making the observation that it was felt by the partnership that it was not unreasonable to expect me to have progressed somewhat further than I appeared to have done with what they referred to as my mourning process. It was noted that it had been my own choice to return to work so promptly, and it was noted further that I had done so rather sooner than might have been wise. In recent weeks, feedback received in relation to my pitches to prospective clients had made it apparent that it was no longer simply the matter of my one-off act of negligence that had to be considered. I must understand that it was no single event in particular that was being relied on by the partnership in justification of the decision they had reached, but rather, the combination of factors they found themselves facing. As it was, they were able to offer me a compromise: I could retain my equity stake for the time being on the condition that I agreed to take a sabbatical, the duration of which was negotiable but would not be less than three months. During that time I would take whatever measures I thought appropriate to recover sufficiently in order to return to work, and I would come back only when I felt able to fulfil my partnership duties and maintain the same standards of professionalism that I had demonstrated prior to the unfortunate death of my wife.

And that is why I have spent much of today looking down on the canal from Rachel’s desk, rather than looking out from my office at the dome of St Paul’s. As the evening falls, I realise with some unhappiness that I don’t know how I will spend the next three months, this being the first time in my adult life that I have faced the prospect of having to endure more than a week or so with time on my hands and the absence of any immediately obvious way to spend it. I may take the tube to Hampstead and walk on the Heath, though I am not sure I want to do this without Rachel, having so often been there with her. There are exhibitions to be seen and museums to be visited. I don’t remember the last time I went to the cinema. I might leave London altogether and visit the coast, or go further than that and travel properly in the way that people do who want to forget their past, or to bury it, by changing their environment for a time. I suppose I could just start with a weekend, having lost count of the number of times Richard and Lucinda have invited me away.

Or I may do none of these things and accept instead the invitation that awaited me on my return from the City yesterday. It was a strange coincidence that Harry should have sent it when he did; it must have crossed in the post with the card I wrote to him on Tuesday night telling him about the colour of the leaves that are gathering in the square where my psychotherapist lives. I sometimes find myself at a loss for what to write to Harry about, in much the same way that I could never think of what to say in my letters to my father after he left us at the end of that summer, even though I wanted so much to tell him every detail of my life since I had seen him last, and about how it felt to walk around the house longing for him to come back and announce that everything was forgiven, everything could be forgotten. It was, then, almost for the want of anything else to write that I had told Harry about the square. After what happened there on Wednesday morning as I sat waiting for what turned out to be my final appointment, and having seen what I saw on the wall of one of the houses as I left, I shall have to write again and correct the errors in my description.

I’d arrived a little early so I wandered through the square and sat on a bench to wait. After a moment or two a boy ran past me, carrying a balloon. He moved awkwardly, holding the balloon low down in front of him, and I realised it was full of water. I know this boy, I think to myself, and then I remember that I saw him last week as I sat on the same bench waiting. He can be no more than twelve years old and he has an unusual face, his eyes set wide apart and slanting slightly downwards. His hair is long, but in an artful rather than a neglectful sort of a way, and there is a brightness and a cleverness in his gaze when it rests on me. When he disappears with his balloon I close my eyes. He is there again when I open them, running past me at full pelt. His hair and his T-shirt are soaking wet and he is shaking water from his hands and his arms. A fight, I think. He is engaged in a water fight somewhere around the square. He reappears with a friend, a boy smaller than himself and smarter in his appearance, and they are laughing and excited. The balloon he is carrying this time is bigger and fuller than the one before, and he turns his head from side to side as he walks, looking at the people sitting on the benches smoking cigarettes, or making phone calls, or, like me, just watching.

Everyone has begun to notice them now, the boys and their water bomb. A few people laugh at what they see, but others frown and put their things away in bags and start to leave the square. At this point I also become uncomfortable, and it occurs to me that it would be inconvenient to find myself soaking wet minutes before I am due to knock on my psychotherapist’s door and take my seat in his hallway underneath the coat rack and opposite the children’s buggy that is propped against the stairs and festooned with tiny cardigans and picture books on strings.

The boys are standing on the path in front of me. They face away from one another, their backs together, as if in preparation for a duel. Then, walking in opposite directions, they count out five or six paces before they stop and turn to face each other. The smarter friend, I think to myself, has volunteered himself as some sort of a practice target. But then he shouts out, ‘Do it!’ and the long-haired boy bends his knees and lowers the balloon almost to the ground and hurls it up in the air and positions himself underneath it so that when it falls it bursts open on his own head and soaks him utterly. His friend is laughing, bending over and laughing and holding his sides and clapping and they are both laughing and they run towards me and disappear. As they go, shouting out words that are indistinguishable, I realise suddenly that the thing they have disappeared behind, the thing that the long-haired boy must also have been running around the first time I saw him, the thing looming white and wooden and enormous from the centre of the square in front of me, is a bandstand.

I thought to myself, as I sat there looking at the bandstand and reflecting on how extraordinary it was that it should be there, that I might begin my session by talking about what I had seen. And that if I was asked why I found it so extraordinary, the bandstand at the centre of the square, I would begin by saying that it was only the night before that I had sat at Rachel’s desk after dinner, watching the heron that sometimes visits my balcony. And then I would say that after I had seen it drift down the canal into the setting of the sun, I wrote a postcard to Harry Gardner about the leaves gathering in the square, and about how it seemed to me to be exactly the sort of square one would expect to see a bandstand in and how strange I found it that there wasn’t one. And then I would have told him that I’d realised as I waited on the bench that I must have seen this bandstand every time I had walked through the square, but that until that morning, I had never so much as noticed it.

That was not how the session began after all. I found, as I had done every time I’d visited him, that I didn’t know what to say after he had asked me to come through from his hallway and had closed the door and sat on the chair in front of the desk and wheeled himself across the room to where I sat, my back up against his bookcase. ‘So,’ he says, as he does each time we begin. And my mind becomes a perfect blank. That is to say, it becomes a perfect blank after an intense flurry of thoughts and images and things I want to say have launched themselves momentarily across it, each one more important than the other, so that in the end I short-circuit and find myself unable to speak. We smile at one another, him raising his eyebrows in expectation, me desperately hoping he will ask me a question, any question, thus restoring to me the power of speech. Eventually he does, but only after I have admitted defeat and told him I don’t know where to start.

‘Tell me about your family history,’ he says.

‘How far back do you want me to go? Where do you want me to begin?’ I ask, feeling only panic, sensing the impossibility of meeting his request with any kind of order, or helpful information, thinking it unlikely I will be able to tell him what it is he wants to know, and wanting instead to talk to him about my grief now, about how I wake in the mornings sometimes and forget that Rachel has died and about how I feel when I remember. He only shrugs in response, so I speak to him of the old vicarage I grew up in in Hampshire, the front half of the downstairs converted into a doctor’s surgery for my father’s patients, the key to the medicine cabinet kept on a string about my mother’s neck, and I go on to tell him in answer to his questions that no, I have no siblings, and nor did I ever have, but that for a time I had Robbie, my friend Robbie, and that I was eight years old at the time of the accident.

But I talk without talking, because I am thinking only of Rachel, on whom I have been allowed to dwell for the duration of each of my sessions thus far, piecing together how we’d first met, the night of her murder, the way I felt when I was with her, and I am thinking about the fact that although I sometimes feel I hardly knew her, it seems at times as if she was the only person ever to have loved me.

After the man had closed his door behind me I heaved out a sigh and turned and walked away. And it was at that moment, knowing I was incapable of having such a conversation again, that I decided never to return. As I reached the other side of the square I looked up and saw its name, Exeter Square, embossed on a white sign tacked to the front of one of the houses. I realised then that when I’d written to Harry the previous evening, I’d told him it was called something quite different, and the name I had given it by mistake was my own inadvertent fabrication, an amalgamation of other street names I must have seen nearby. So that if he were ever to look for it, say, on a map of London, he would never be able to find it. It would be, for him, as though it did not exist, this square with a bandstand at its centre.



Sitting here this evening with Harry’s invitation on the desk in front of me, it strikes me that apart from the day of Rachel’s memorial, I haven’t seen him since the morning after I was released, the morning he came and drank coffee with me in my hotel room. I saw a lot of people in the few days that passed between her murder and my returning to London, but I’m not sure I’d be able to say exactly who, if someone were to ask me. Friends of Rachel’s seemed suddenly to appear, asking if they could help, almost demanding to know if there was anything they could do, as if by going to the supermarket for me, or speaking to the funeral directors on my behalf, they could make things more bearable. I see now that it was not for me that they offered to do these things, but for themselves; for the assuaging of their own private grief at what had happened, or at other things that had happened to them at other times in quite unrelated ways.

Some of them surprised me by their visits, being people I’d barely met, so that I became confused, I think, about who I knew and who I didn’t. On the Saturday afternoon, the day after I was released, I had a fairly long conversation with a woman who showed up in the hotel, only to discover partway through that she was a reporter, rather than a friend of Rachel’s. Richard and Lucinda checked into the hotel just after this and they took it upon themselves from that point on to be my representatives, taking charge of me utterly and telling me to speak to nobody but them. Richard, whose anger on my behalf seemed a little disproportionate, and somehow misplaced, stayed downstairs in the lobby to discuss with the hotel manager the security arrangements he said would be necessary for the remainder of my stay, and Lucinda came with me to my room. She apologised for Richard’s temper. ‘He was really very fond of her you know, whatever he might have said about her.’ She carried on talking for a while, saying something about Richard having found out that he hadn’t made Silk again and it really bothering him even though it would have been unheard of at his age, and that he’d even been talking of doing a rush job on the New York Bar exams and ‘getting the hell out of here’ for a couple of years. And then she realised I wasn’t really listening and she came and sat by me on the bed and held me for a time, and she cried and said that I would too, eventually.

When Richard reappeared and announced he was taking me out for a walk Lucinda went to lie down, having told me not to worry, I wouldn’t be on my own for a single second now that they were there. That evening, after the three of us had finished our room-service dinner and they’d left me to myself, I saw that Richard had forgotten his newspaper. I picked it up intending to go after them and give it back to him but then I noticed there was a book underneath it, On Death and Dying, or On Grief and Grieving, or something like that, and I realised they’d done it deliberately. They stayed in the hotel with me until I went back to London the following Tuesday and I was glad of it, although I have yet to read their book.

And then there was Evie. Not having managed to get hold of her on the Thursday night when I’d called her from the police station, I’d been allowed to try her again as soon as I’d woken the following morning. When she answered her mobile it turned out she was in Oxford already. ‘Just for the weekend,’ she said. ‘Fundraiser at the Ashmolean. Terrible bore. Godawful guests. Godawful wine. There we are.’ And then she surprised me by saying that Rachel had known this. They’d talked on Thursday morning and discovered the coincidence. She’d even invited us for cocktails at Browns before our dinner at Worcester that evening, but Rachel had left a message saying she’d checked with me and I didn’t want to. ‘How is she anyway? She sounded in an awful mood when she rang yesterday. Will you have tea with me today do you think? Is that why you’re calling? You don’t both have to come you know.’

And then I told her. She said nothing, nothing at all. I listened to her silence for a time and then I said that when it came to my release I would need her to bring me some clothes and some shoes, and I listed for her all of the things she would have to do. She still hadn’t spoken by the time I said goodbye, and I put down the phone without being entirely sure whether she was still there. She had appeared at the police station later on though, almost as soon as I’d been told I was to be released on bail. I hadn’t expected her to do as other people might have, to come forward and embrace me or even to take my hand in hers, but I suppose I had thought she would at least look at me. Instead, when the door was closed behind her she stayed where she was and fumbled for something in her handbag before checking, two or three times, the contents of the holdall she had placed on the floor. It wasn’t until after all of this, and after she’d taken her phone from her jacket pocket and put it back again, that she looked across at me sitting on the other side of the room watching her. At first I could detect nothing in her face that could tell me what she might be feeling, nothing at all. But then she took off her sunglasses and I could see the redness around her eyes and I noticed the muscles in her cheeks moving as she clenched and unclenched her jaw. She pushed the holdall across the floor towards me. ‘The clothes you asked for.’ I opened my mouth to speak but she raised her hands up in front of her chest, palms outward. ‘I’m not sure we should talk at this stage, Alex. It’s just too complicated isn’t it? You can be in touch by email, I think that’s best for now,’ and she walked away and left me there.

I put on the clothes she’d brought me and I signed the forms I had to sign before leaving the station by a back entrance and being driven back to the hotel in an unmarked car. When I let myself into our room I could see straight away that it had been searched by the police; the wardrobe door was wide open and some of our things were missing, just as they had warned me they would be. I sat down on the bed. The card that would have been put there while we were having dinner with Harry lay still on one of the pillows, telling us that the forecast was for sun and reminding us the hotel could provide bicycles and a picnic, or book us a punt if we wanted one. I picked it up and put it in my jacket pocket. Then I took the holdall Evie had given me and held it upside down to see if she had put anything else in it apart from the clothes. A single A4 envelope fell on to the bed beside me. Inside was a note from Evie and some photographs and a smaller envelope, addressed in Rachel’s writing to her godmother. I put the photographs on one side and picked up the note.



Alex, I’m writing this because I know we shan’t really talk when we meet. You’ll be tired and I don’t suppose I shall feel like it anyway. You know I’ve never liked you – didn’t think Rachel should have married you, couldn’t believe it that night when I found out she was going to. And I know you don’t care for me either. But Rachel loved you, and I want you to be in no doubt about that. She loved you very much, in fact, and I’m giving you the letter she sent me last year after your wedding in case you should ever come to question her. And I thought you might like to have the photos. Sorry I never got round to giving you them before now. There will be plenty to arrange between the two of us but I’d rather we kept to email for now. I’m sure we’ll speak before too long but I simply can’t face it at the moment.

Evie.



I put all the things she had given me away in my case and I drew a bath and lay in it for hours. I ran it a little too hot so that it hurt when I got in, and I lowered my head under the water and up again. I felt my face burning and I shut my eyes and pretended I was dreaming everything that had happened; that none of it was real. I lay there until I realised I had fallen asleep and the water was completely cold. I don’t think I did anything else that night other than phone Richard and ask him to speak to my senior partner for me. And then I ordered room service and climbed afterwards into bed.

The next few days merged into one; Richard took me on walks and Lucinda sat with me in my room, each of them taking it in turns to go with me to see the people I had to see and Lucinda starting a file of all the things I would have to deal with, collecting phone numbers and addresses and making lists. I overheard her saying to Richard at breakfast on the Tuesday morning, when she thought I was still at the bar ordering more coffee, ‘Do you know darling I haven’t done anything like this since the wedding, isn’t that amazing! I think I’m quite good at it really, don’t you?’ And she was right, she was good at it, so good in fact that by lunchtime that day it had become apparent I could achieve nothing by staying in Oxford any longer, and I said goodbye and left.

I thought about Evie as I drove. Until the moment when she had taken off her sunglasses and I had seen her eyes, she had looked that day as she always did. As far as I could recall, I had seen her without those glasses only once or twice in all the time that I had known her. They always struck me as being a little too large for her face, which is small and clipped somehow; her hair cropped short at the back, her chin pointed and much of her forehead hidden by a fringe cut in a sharp diagonal so that it covers the upper part of her right cheek as well. That she had chosen to wear red that day seemed almost inappropriate at the time, given the reason for our meeting, but that also was something she always did.

I asked Rachel about this once, Evie’s choice of colour, and about whether it was the same jacket each time or whether she’d had several made to an identical design: cut from a blooded silk that looked thick and quilted and was traced about with some kind of an oriental pattern, they hung stiffly from her shoulders and almost hovered about her body so that I was never quite sure of the size of her torso; of whether she was squat or slight above her waist and tiny legs. This was something I could have ascertained were I ever to have held her in any kind of embrace, even for a moment. The sleeves of the jackets were shaped so that they were far wider at the bottom than they were at the shoulder, the material folded back to form oversized cuffs sitting only a couple of inches below her elbows and allowing for her wrists and forearms to emerge bird-like and wiry. These little arms of hers suggest to me each time I see them that the frame lying beneath her jackets is a diminutive one, but I cannot be certain of this.

Rachel ignored my question about Evie’s jackets. She laughed at me and said she didn’t know why I was so interested and then she changed the subject. Talking about her godmother was something she did only when I pushed her to, and even then reluctantly. ‘I suppose you’d better meet her at some point,’ she’d said to me in bed one morning when we were talking about who to invite to our wedding. In the end we both agreed we’d rather not invite anyone at all, but that since we had to have witnesses, Richard and Lucinda would do as well as anyone else. And then I said, at the same time as running my hand up and down her back again and again so softly that I wasn’t sure whether I was actually touching her, ‘Don’t you think Evie should come?’ ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘Can you do it a bit harder? And a bit lower down?’ ‘Answer my question,’ I said. ‘You’re not going to distract me from the fact that you haven’t.’ ‘What question?’ she said, taking my hand and pulling it across herself and putting it between her legs. ‘Evie. Shoot. Tell me why on earth you wouldn’t want her to come to your own wedding.’ But then she did distract me and it wasn’t until later on that she said, ‘I suppose you’d better meet her,’ by which time I’d forgotten who she was talking about and said so. ‘Evie,’ she said. ‘Evie bloody Evie. Dinner or something. But can we invite Richard and Lucinda as well? That should lessen the impact a little.’

And so we did. Our engagement celebration, such as it was, took place a couple of weeks later. It was left to me to make the call to invite Evie, Rachel finding a seemingly endless list of reasons not to do it herself. The phone rang and rang, so that by the time it was finally answered I had become mesmerised by the sound of it and had to remind myself who I’d wanted to speak to. Just as soon as it had been picked up, the connection was cut and I was left listening to the dialling tone. I rang back straight away and this time I got through immediately. A woman’s voice said only ‘Yes,’ without even so much as an inflection suggesting that a response might be welcomed. I told Rachel about this when I got in that evening and she said it was nothing to do with the fact that I had let it ring and ring the time before; it was just the way Evie answered the phone.

‘I suppose so,’ she’d said when I told her we wanted to take her out for a meal. ‘I mean yes, of course Alex, of course. You could have given me a little more notice, that’s all. I’m so sorry I really have to go now I’m working. If you ring again and I don’t pick up, don’t ring back will you? It either means I’m out or I don’t want to talk to anyone. Alright?’ ‘Alright,’ I said. ‘Goodbye, Evie. I look forward to meeting you.’ ‘Yes,’ she said again, as bluntly as before, and then she hung up before I could tell her where or when, or even why it was that we were meeting, so I asked Rachel that evening if she could email her.

As it turned out, Rachel made no mention to Evie of what it was that we were celebrating. She said to me some time later on, after the dinner was over, that it was something she hadn’t wanted to put in an email, and when she’d called to try to talk about it, Evie had said she was busy, couldn’t it wait, whatever it was, and did it really matter why we were meeting she’d said she’d be there and she would. She was the last to arrive at the restaurant. By the time she walked in, half an hour or more after everyone else, Rachel had become quite agitated, checking her phone for messages every few minutes and looking over to the door whenever someone arrived. When I asked her what was the matter she spoke to me quite unkindly, the first time she’d ever done so. ‘We should never have invited her should we? It’s just so bloody rude, don’t you think? And don’t tell me she’s been held up.’ ‘Rachel,’ I said, but she carried on. ‘You always make excuses for people don’t you? Always want to see their good side. Well you know what Alex, some people just don’t have a good side.’ ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s OK,’ and I put my hands over hers. She pulled away from me and turned to speak to Lucinda so I went to look for Richard, who’d got up and left as soon as Rachel had started to snap at me. I found him standing on the balcony smoking a cigar, and felt suddenly that the evening was beginning to unravel before it had even begun. ‘Still a bit of a crazy tern, eh?’ he said to me, clapping me on the back. ‘Rachel Cardanine,’ he carried on, nodding his head and turning his mouth into the upside down ‘U’ shape he used when he wanted to look serious. I thought he was about to say something else, but instead he only held his breath for a moment, and then he laughed and clapped me on the back again, and we started to talk about the wine list and what we should move on to after the champagne. As we went back to our table a woman walked into the restaurant. The instant I saw her I knew it was Evie. Rachel, to my surprise, got up from her seat and almost ran towards her and embraced her. The strange thing was that as they held one another, which they did for slightly longer than one might have expected them to, I had a sense for an instant that the woman I was looking at could have been Rachel, twenty years on. And then Evie detached herself and made a fuss about her coat and whether it would be hung properly, in a closet, and didn’t they have such a thing as a coat hanger, and the idea seemed suddenly ridiculous. Apart from the slightness of their build, and the colour of their hair, they were entirely unalike.

The evening was, for the most part, uneventful. Lucinda and Richard spoke of the house they were hoping to buy, and of their honeymoon and how the other couples in the safari lodge had been awful, really dreadful, but that there was no other way to have done it really, and that at least they’d had their own beach on Zanzibar so they’d been able to have some time to themselves. Lucinda and Rachel exchanged news of old school friends, Rachel masking her indifference, I thought, with considerable skill and Richard going outside again at that point, saying he had to join a conference call from the US.

Evie said hardly a word, as I recollect, until right at the end of the dinner. We had finished our dessert and I was beginning to feel a little drunk and quite relieved about the way the whole thing had turned out when someone, Lucinda I think it was, asked her a question about her work. She started to talk about a project she’d been asked to advise on in Oxford, something to do with some kind of chest that had been purchased by the Ashmolean and needed to be restored. There had been terrible delays already, she said, some sort of row going on with the Japanese government about the materials that were going to be used for the restoration. I couldn’t follow what she was talking about, or rather, I didn’t want to, so instead I asked her to tell us more about the chest. It was a wedding casket, she said, a tiny thing really, but terribly significant in its context and a great mystery in terms of how it had come to be owned by the family who’d sold it to the museum. ‘Some Italians had it originally. Phenomenally wealthy of course. Merchants at some point, travelling salesmen really. Wanted it for a gift, as it happens,’ she said. ‘A wedding present, or perhaps a form of payment, something to seal a betrothal.’

I had stopped listening to Evie altogether and was wondering whether I should say a few words, something about Rachel, and about our engagement, when Lucinda stood up and said ‘Of course of course I almost forgot! We’ve all been having such an incredibly lovely time just chatting but we absolutely have to play a game before we go.’

‘Oh for god’s sake,’ Evie said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll go if you do.’

‘Oh come on!’ Lucinda said, clapping her hands together. ‘We have to.’

‘No we don’t Lucinda,’ Evie said. ‘I don’t do games. And I think I shall go now anyhow. It’s late, and I’m lecturing in Oxford tomorrow.’

Lucinda sat down again and said ‘Oh come on everyone, it’s the engagement game! Richard and I had to at our dinner and there were horribly loads of people there so I don’t see why you two should get away without doing it. Don’t be a bore Evie, really. Anyway you absolutely have to stay, you know more about Rachel than the rest of us put together I should think. Come on. Me first. Right. What shall I ask?’

Evie had put on her sunglasses and was already standing up but then she sat back down and took them off and said, ‘What do you mean the engagement game?’ And then she said it again, exactly the same thing, ‘What do you mean the engagement game?’ ‘Well,’ Lucinda said. ‘We take it in turns to ask Alex and Rachel questions. About themselves. About each other. They both have to answer the same questions and we get to compare the answers. It’s a kind of cross-examination. Richard’s always brilliant at it as I am sure you can imagine! You know, wheedling out people’s secret thoughts. Fantasies. Should they really be marrying one another. That sort of thing.’ Rachel had turned away from the table and was gripping my hand in hers and Evie was staring at her. And then Evie spoke, so quietly I could hardly hear her. ‘You might have told me Rachel. You might have told me. Don’t you think?’

Rachel said nothing. Eventually she turned to look at Evie. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and offered it to her and I saw that there were tears running down Evie’s cheeks. Evie shook her head and turned and stared at me instead. There was something angry in her gaze and I didn’t know what to say. Neither, it seemed, did she, until at the last she turned back to Rachel, her face composed again, and said, ‘There’s still time to change your mind darling. You always were a little impulsive.’ She reached out and took the tissue. ‘Grasping even, I used to think.’ She was smiling now, but I noticed that her hands were playing in her lap and she was tearing at the skin around her fingernails. ‘I remember when you were very small, if there was something you wanted, something you were told you couldn’t have, you used to—’ ‘Evie,’ Rachel interrupted. ‘Don’t you think you ought to go now?’ And Evie stood, quite suddenly, and did exactly that. Richard leaned over and whispered something to Lucinda and then they said they ought to go as well, and we were left alone, Rachel and I, waiting for the bill and not speaking to one another.



At the halfway point on the drive back to London on the Tuesday after Rachel died, I found myself starting to cry, just as Lucinda had said I would. I stopped being able to see the road ahead so I pulled over on the hard shoulder and got out. I was sick, kneeling on the grass verge and wishing Rachel was there, knowing she would have stroked my back as I knelt. She would have laughed at me a little, but she’d have said it would be alright and given me some water and she would have offered to drive the rest of the way home and when we got there she would have carried our things in and put me to bed and told me I’d be better in the morning.

I sat on the ground for a while longer until someone pulled over and stopped. They wound down their window and asked if I was alright and did I need help? ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I just felt unwell. It’s passed now.’ I picked myself up and brushed myself down and got back in the car and set off for home again, going more slowly than I had been before. But when I got into London and reached the turning for my road I panicked, feeling unable to face the apartment alone, and instead I carried on, driving all the way down through Moorgate and the City and swinging west towards Strand, thinking I would go to see the river.

Waterloo Bridge was heaving with people fresh from the West End. Walking in pairs, they held hands and moved with a certainty that seemed somehow misguided. I parked when I reached the halfway point and got out, walking a little further across the bridge and leaning against the wall looking down into the water, disappointed to have found the place so busy, wondering at the same time why I should have expected otherwise. When I was tapped on the shoulder and asked to take a photograph of a couple against the backdrop of Big Ben, I realised I’d had enough. I found my car and drove off again, looping once around the IMAX and back over the bridge, and as I started to head east the crowds thinned out. Instead of couples there were groups of men in suits, their ties undone, leaving the City behind. An old man with a beard and a briefcase, his cagoule stretched over his suit, struggled along hurrying to make his train, and a woman sat opposite St Clement Danes waiting for a bus. I found myself slowing down and looking back over my shoulder at her, trying to see her face more clearly, and I became aware then that I’d been doing this all evening: looking for Rachel without realising it, hoping she might emerge from among the bodies and run towards me and shout out my name and say it’s alright Alex, it’s alright. I’m here. For goodness’ sake don’t be such a cry-baby.

As I drove home that night I remembered doing the same thing pretty much constantly throughout the years that fell between our graduating and our meeting again at Richard’s wedding, this looking for Rachel and hoping she might emerge from among a crowd of strangers. And in all that time I never saw her, not once. At every street corner, in every underground station, I thought there might be a chance. On every park bench I walked past, at every neighbouring table in every restaurant I ever ate in. Occasionally I would hear from mutual acquaintances how she spent her time, and I knew where in town she was working, so I thought it was possible, theoretically at least, that we might meet. And I saw plenty of other people from Oxford in this way. It was the sort of thing that would happen in an interval at the Wigmore Hall, or in the queue for an exhibition, and would lead inevitably to the exchange of news and telephone numbers and insincere promises to meet on purpose the next time. There was a time, a few years after I moved to London, when it seemed to happen with an uncanny frequency, so much so that I started to see these meetings as precursors of a greater event to come. But I never saw Rachel. Of course, I didn’t actually try to find her as such, but if I happened to be in a part of London that I knew or thought she might frequent, particularly if I came to be walking along the street where she worked, I suppose I did look more closely than I might have done at passers-by, or at women in cafés, in case she was among them.

Every now and again I wondered if this behaviour was a little absurd. While I lived with a constant hope that we might meet by accident and start to talk, there was also something slightly comforting in the improbability of it actually happening. And perhaps it was that improbability that allowed me to indulge in this speculative keeping an eye out for her. I never seriously thought anything would come of it, and at no time did I plan for what I would do if we met. Well, not seriously plan. Fantasise maybe, but never strategise.

To have spent so many years looking at women as they approached me, hoping to see only the particular set of her shoulders, only the precise rhythm of her walk, only the way she smiled or turned her head, was a wearing sort of a business. I imagine it would be no trouble then, for someone to guess the effect it had on me when I looked across the table at Richard’s wedding to see her standing there, smiling. It was a kind of a physical shock, like the jolt of the body when one is dropping off to sleep and dreams of suddenly falling.

That night, after looking back at the bus stop and realising it wasn’t Rachel sitting there, I picked up speed again, but only briefly. The lights at the bottom of Ludgate Hill were broken and the traffic moved slowly, edging on to the crossroads with no guidance as to who should go first and who should wait. I hung back, gazing out through the rain that had started to fall and feeling the slow thud and suck of the windscreen wipers’ lull. I sat for an age without moving until I realised everyone else had gone, and then I drove on up towards the dome of St Paul’s, white against the night.