10
WHEN I WOKE the next morning I pulled back the curtains and looked out on the lawns. I saw that a new snow had fallen and that if I was quick enough I would be the first to break a path across it. I breakfasted alone in Hall and wrapped myself back up again before heading straight out around the quad towards the orchard. A couple of gardeners were clearing paths and scattering grit in front of the cottages and because the sound was muffled by the snow it was as though they worked in silence. As far as I could tell I was the only person about apart from them. I walked across the orchard and cut through the Sainsbury Building, opening the tiny gate that led down to the lake and striking out along the path skirting its north-west side.
The snow lay almost a foot deep, and the hoar frost that Harry had written about held fast to the trunks of the trees. There was no sound apart from the occasional easy sweep of wind past my ear as I walked and I moved awkwardly, sinking my feet one after the other into the snow and having to pull them back out again before carrying on. The branches that sat just at eye level were coated in a blanket of spikes and coarse hair-like growth, and because I was focusing on them so intently it was only when I felt my body shift suddenly, almost as though I had tripped, that I looked down and realised I had stepped into a footprint. I looked up and saw a whole path of them strung out in the snow before me and I abandoned my notion of trailblazing, stepping instead from one to another of these hollows. Before long it became too difficult to do so, the walker obviously having picked up his pace so that his stride had become far longer than my own. I paused and stood for a while at the side of the lake. The playing fields were spread out behind me undisturbed in their whiteness and I looked across to the south-east side, towards the tree that Rachel had died beside, and I wondered whose route I was tracking. The water had frozen hard and deep so that the low-hanging branches had been caught at their mid points beneath the ice. They emerged again above its surface as if struggling, as though their entrapment had happened all at once, without warning. A few of the college geese skated about, pecking here and there before huddling together and swaying slightly for warmth.
I walked on around the lake and as I reached the place where I had found Rachel’s body I remembered the time the two of us had met there on another summer night, the one that fell partway through the long summer vacation we spent in College at the end of our second year. We had taken a pair of seats at the top of the stand that had been placed there, Rachel having asked me to see The Tempest with her. I’d seen it once already, earlier in the week, and would far rather have spent the time lying on the lawns listening to Rachel talk about nothing in particular, which was what I’d done every other evening so far. Because of that, I didn’t complain when, twenty minutes or so into the first half, she tugged at my sleeve and whispered in my ear that it was quite hopeless wasn’t it, and why didn’t we abandon ship now rather than later and do something more interesting. I remember cringing slightly as we climbed down from the top of the stands, Rachel apologising profusely all the way, her mock whisper audible to all of the audience and all of the cast.
Her next suggestion was tennis, but she kept calling out the score as loudly as she could even though the courts were just the other side of the lake, so that the actors would have been able to hear her words ringing out across the water as clearly as we could theirs, and eventually I said I’d rather do something else. She called me a coward but she agreed to stop, and we strolled fairly aimlessly around the gardens instead, Rachel trailing her racquet on the grass and complaining from time to time that she was bored.
‘I know. Let’s stay out all night,’ she said eventually, just as I was wondering whether this was the moment for me to summon up the courage to ask her back to my room. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she carried on, ‘we have to see the sunrise.’ So we crossed over to Gloucester Green and fetched a takeaway and some bottles of wine and sat in the middle of the playing fields, not talking much, just eating and drinking and looking at the sky. At midnight she stood and said she’d thought of a plan, but that I had to agree to it before she would tell me what it was. I’d drunk enough to say yes straight away, and what was it? But then she said she wouldn’t tell me until we got there, so I followed her back around the lake and across the lawns and I remember thinking how strange it was that the play had finished without our noticing; I was sure I hadn’t heard any applause. Even stranger was the fact that because it was the last night of the run, the stage and the seating and the lighting towers had been taken away and not a trace of them remained: it was as though it had never happened.
We were halfway up the lawns when I turned back towards the plane tree again. I stood there for a minute or two, swaying slightly in my drunkenness and wondering whether in fact we had imagined it all. But then a breeze disturbed the lake and I caught a glimpse of the duckboards lying just beneath its surface, laid there so that Ariel, happy in his release at last, could appear each night to be running sprite-like on the water, and I knew it had been for real. By the time I turned back round again, Rachel had disappeared.
‘Rachel,’ I called out. ‘Rachel, where are you? Wait for me,’ and I started to jog up the path, thinking she had run on ahead and left me there. And then suddenly, I hear her voice from right beside me in the flower bed, speaking in a half-whisper.
‘Shut up you idiot. This is it. This is the plan.’
I am so disorientated by now, and so drunk, that for one wild moment I think she is propositioning me, but when I have clambered through the plants to where she is crouching she says straight away, ‘Follow me. And be quiet for goodness’ sake.’ She pushes on ahead and I realise what she is intending to do. Immediately in front of her are some tiny steps set into the wall that rises up from the back of the flower bed. They lead to an old gate that is suspended halfway up and opens into the secret garden, the one that Haddon’s drawing room looks out on. Before I have time to speak, or at least before I have time to say anything at the kind of volume that won’t risk waking Haddon up, Rachel has reached the top of the steps and is attempting, unsuccessfully, to pull open the gate. I grab hold of her foot, meaning to try to persuade her to come back down. ‘Don’t be a wimp Alex,’ she whispers, and the gate opens and she pulls herself up and into the garden. What else can I do but follow her, so that a moment later we are both there, sitting on the tiny lawn right outside Haddon’s drawing room. There is no light coming from the French doors, which means, or so I assume, he is already asleep in the room above. I look up at the bedroom window and see with relief that the curtains are closed and the window is shut, and then finally I relax, laughing at the absurdity of the situation.
Standing there this time in the early morning snow and playing the scene back for myself, I have a sudden urge to climb the steps again. I scan the lawns and see that I am still alone; whoever provided my path of footprints has disappeared altogether. I know from what Harry said over tea that Haddon is in Australia for the Christmas vacation, so I step into the flower bed and walk up to the base of the wall. It had been difficult enough that summer night with Rachel to gain any purchase on the steps and I assume the snow will make it even trickier. But as it turns out, the soft cushion that has fallen and set on each of them provides a kind of support as I climb, and before long I am at the top, standing on the tips of my toes and peering in through the iron gate.
As I do so, it seems as though I am looking in on the two of us and what we did that night, watching our summer trespass unfold again before my eyes. The scene I am observing is exactly as it was, apart from the curious fact that we are all in snow the two of us, so that our movements are slower, and the sound of our voices is dampened slightly. I feel faint as I watch, and a little dizzy, and I wonder whether I am experiencing some kind of half-hallucination. I realise I should perhaps have eaten my breakfast more slowly, and more of it, and I decide then that I have been out in the cold for long enough and should probably go back in. But I am transfixed, and I stay, and the two of us grow clearer in front of me. We are dressed for a summer night but I see that the lawn we are sitting on has become a strip of white leading up to Haddon’s French doors and the boughs of the trees are bending over above us under the weight of the snow that has fallen. A soft clump of it slips down and drops silently on to Rachel’s head, and she laughs and brushes it off and says to me, ‘What are they Alex? What are all these plants? That’s just the sort of thing you’d know. I have no idea whatsoever about plants. Tell me tell me tell me, right this minute, or I’ll never speak to you again.’ And I feel once more the foolish relief that I’d felt then, knowing that I was able to do what she’d asked.
I see myself get up from the grass, a little unsteadily, and I pull her up with me. I lead her about the garden brushing snow from one plant after another to reveal its leaves or its flowers, pleased to find that so many of them are the ones my mother grew in the years after Robbie’s accident, when my father had gone and I had been sent away to school. And because they are the same, I am able to do for Rachel what my mother always used to do on my first night home at the beginning of my summer holidays. After we had unpacked my trunk and eaten our supper and I was all ready for bed, she would wrap me in my dressing gown and open up the French doors and lead me out into the half-light and hold my hand and walk me round and round and breathe to me all of the names of all of the plants. She would listen to me naming them back to her, and she would tell me how they had fared in my absence. There was snowy woodrush, and bleeding heart, and solomon’s seal and lamium, and if they were ready she would pick wild strawberries for me and crush them into my mouth and kiss away the juice that ran sticky down my chin. There were goat’s rue and phlox and night-scented stocks, and gillyflowers and marigolds, and then we would get to the top of the lawns and find ourselves at the herb garden. We would walk right into the middle of it and kneel on the ground side by side and she would reach in and cup both her hands around a great clump of lavender and rub her palms together again and again and hold them straight up to my face. And I would breathe in deep and know that I was home, and safe.
Rachel laughs when I find the herbs at the top of Haddon’s garden and say that I want to do this for her, but she follows my instructions and kneels beside me and I hold my hands up to her face. She breathes in and I can feel her skin against my palms, and I can smell the scent of the lavender, and I want her then more than I have ever wanted anything. But she takes my hands from her face, telling me that I am hurting her, and she gets up from the ground and walks away into the shadows. She goes once around the garden and then over to the wall again, and looks across to the plane tree that stands beside the lake, and the tone with which she speaks has changed and it as though what has just happened has never happened. ‘The perfect viewpoint,’ she says. ‘Best seat in the house. I wonder whether he saw the play tonight? What do you think Alex? Does he like his Shakespeare, your man Haddon? Or is he just a boring old lawyer?’
I stand on my tiptoes on the step looking in, remembering the sense of disappointment I felt then. I realise suddenly how uncomfortable I am, clinging to the iron railings with both hands, my hat pulled so low on my head that I am barely able to see through the snow that has begun to fall again, and I consider once more whether I have been there long enough, whether it is time to go back to my room. But then I remember what happened next that night, and so I stay, wanting to experience again the sense of surprise that I felt when it did. As I stand there, my calves beginning to go numb with the awkwardness of my position, the whiteness that is in front of me melts and the garden becomes green and soft, and it is June rather than December, and I am watching myself lying on grass not on snow, and Rachel has come back from the wall and is lying right beside me and she says we are going to play a game. The sky has retained a kind of a brightness long into the night and we can see clouds floating past and she says we have to take it in turns to tell each other what they are. First, I see a shark, and then the hull of an enormous boat looms vast against the night and then no, Rachel says, it is not the hull of a boat it is the tail of an aeroplane, and then it is a whale turning in the ocean, a great jet of spray spouting above it, and then it disappears and a newborn lamb skips past, chased by a whole cloud of butterflies which, Rachel says straight away, isn’t a cloud of butterflies but a herd of wildebeest stampeding, can’t I see it? Look, there!
And then we grow tired of the game and Rachel turns away from me and lies not on her back but on her side, so I turn also, and I place my arm across her body and hold her against myself. And because she doesn’t resist me, I move my hands up and put them on her head and feel the warmth of her beneath her hair, and I am amazed that she is allowing me to do this. ‘Your head is so small,’ I say, my face almost touching the nape of her neck. ‘So small.’ And I find that because I am somehow unable to make a proper sound, I have sighed the words rather than spoken them.
‘Not like yours,’ she says, reaching her hands up behind herself and placing them on my head and moving them back and forth through my hair a few times before letting them rest where they are and saying, ‘You are like a lion.’ And then she moves her hands again and trails her fingers across my face, barely touching me, until I can’t stand it any more and I catch them in my own and she turns to me and suddenly we are kissing and my heart is thudding inside me, really thudding, at a pace that actually alarms me a little, and I hold Rachel into me and we turn and turn in the grass as we kiss, and then we come to rest. There is nothing then, no more movement, and no sound apart from the soft murmur of my voice, and I am watching us and craning my neck to try to hear what I am saying, knowing very well what it is but longing to hear the actual words again, when all of a sudden I hear a shout that seems to come from in front of me and behind me both at once, and the snow reappears around us and I am no longer lying there, I am only standing outside the garden and looking in, clinging to the gate and watching the two bodies that lie buried again in whiteness, and the shouting carries on and two things happen at once.
The first is that the French doors burst open and there is Haddon, holding what looks like a cricket bat and roaring at us to get out, get out immediately, what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing and don’t you know it’s trespass and I know who you are Petersen and I’ll see you in my study first thing in the morning get out and take her with you. And I see us jump up from the ground and run and Haddon disappears back into his drawing room and closes the French doors but the shouting carries on and the second thing that happens is that I turn to see a man at the foot of the steps beneath me, a man who seems from this angle to be improbably tall. He is shouting at me to get down sir, the steps aren’t safe sir, you’d better come down, you shouldn’t be up there, and as I look at him, wondering who he is and trying to see his face but not being able to because he is so well wrapped up against the snow, I slip from the step I am on and I am falling, fast, and he half catches me and we both crash to the ground together and everything starts to become dark and I realise I can’t move so I stop trying and I lie there in this man’s arms and the thought occurs to me that I still cannot say with any certainty, no matter how many times I have thought on it, which of us it was, Rachel or me, that began that kiss. It was a kiss that had not begun, and then suddenly it had, and it was soft, and gentle, and huge and small all at once, and from time to time we were kissing necks instead of lips, and we turned and turned in the grass and then we were still, not kissing any more, just holding one another.
And then someone is shaking me and slapping my cheeks, gently, and I am being pulled up from the ground and a plastic cup of hot sweet tea is being put into my hands. When I have drunk from it, and when the porter has screwed it back on the flask he’d been carrying with him on his morning rounds, I look up and notice that the wall has started to bulge out in its middle, and that it is held in place by great iron bars fixed across it, and that the steps are crumbling away in places, and it becomes apparent that what I did by climbing them was perhaps more foolhardy than I’d realised.
The whole escapade is one I come to regret even more when, longing for a bath and some dry clothes, I arrive back at my room only to find I have lost my key. I check all of my pockets again and again but it isn’t there, and I make my way to the porter’s lodge to ask him for another. ‘We’d prefer to try to find the original, sir, if it’s all the same to you. Cleaners’ll be in tomorrow and they’ll need the spare. Costs money you know, cutting a new one. Round about where you fell, I imagine. I’ll help you; got a little time on my hands as it happens.’ I am slightly irritated that I can’t at least borrow one so that I can change first, and am about to suggest this when I think better of it, relieved that he seems to have calmed down since shouting at me earlier on. I follow him down the steps into the quad and we take the route I took on the night of Rachel’s murder, when I ran down to the lake and found her body. As we walk across the lawns I sense the porter quickening his pace and see from the prints he is leaving in the snow that it must have been him whose route I’d been following that morning. We reach the spot where I fell from the steps and we dig around a bit in between the plants but our search is as fruitless as I’d expected it to be. He steps back out of the flower bed and looks down at the snow around his feet. ‘Wouldn’t have made much of a sound in snow like this would it.’ Seeing my frown, he explains himself further. ‘When it dropped, sir, from your pocket. Nobody would have heard it, would they? It’ll turn up, when everything melts. Can’t be helped.’
He seems positively friendly now, and he starts to talk about the things he has found on the lawns over the years, things that people drop, or forget, things you’d never imagine would get left behind, he says. And so I ask him about his work, and about whether he had walked around the lake that morning, and when he says yes, he had, I asked him whether he did that every morning.
‘And every night, sir. Got to keep an eye on things.’ And he tells me then that his father did the same before him, and that for a time, when he started in the job, they shared the rounds together. He knew the college already though, he says to me, after a fashion. He’d been at St Barnabas School as a boy, in Jericho, and they had been allowed in to use the playing fields. He’d never forget the first time, he said. ‘It was like entering another world. Our very own Narnia. One minute we were outside, all of us, holding our football boots in our hands, and then the gate was opened and we were in, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was so big, that was the thing,’ he carried on. ‘I remember the gate opening and all of us filing in and seeing only the green of the playing fields, stretching on and on ahead of us.’
I was confused by his description and said so, suggesting that surely the view they’d have seen first on coming into College would have been of the quad, rather than the one he’d described. And then I apologised for my pedantry, explaining it away as an occupational hazard of my profession. He only nodded, and carried on, so lost in his childhood reverie that it was almost as though he’d forgotten I was there. It seemed from what he said that they had come in through a back gate, directly from the Jericho street St Barnabas stood on. I didn’t know you could get out that way, I said, puzzled, and he said no, nobody goes that way any more, haven’t done for years and years, not since the paths were rerouted and the old gate at the bottom was forgotten. ‘I’d forgotten it myself until now. It’ll still be there,’ he said. ‘It’s just not used any more, that’s all. It will have been overgrown long ago. Completely hidden from view. You wouldn’t have any idea it was there unless somebody told you about it. Or unless you already knew about it. Which I don’t suppose anybody does, apart from me, and some of the older tutors,’ he carried on. And then he looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘now that I’ve told you.’
I didn’t know what to say then, so I thanked him for his help and apologised again about the key. I asked if I might trouble him for a spare, and after we’d gone to the lodge and found one, I went straight back to my rooms to change.