by F. G. Cottam
The man in charge of the alumni archive had a hipster beard with waxed points at the ends of his moustache. He wore bespoke jeans and pointy brogued boots and a brown cardigan so coarsely textured it looked like it was woven out of horse hair. Rebecca was fairly certain the glass in his horn-rims was non-prescription. They were a prop, an affectation. He wasn’t so much dressed, as costumed. Observing him and his contrived appearance reminded her with a pang of anxiety just how devastating Tom Harper looked simply in a suit.
The basement of number 7 Absalom Court had been 21a in the period when it had been used as accommodation by the LSE. Rebecca found who she thought she was looking for almost straight away. She’d moved in when she’d enrolled in October of 1963. The name was a clue, because it provided those initials. She was Rachel Gaunt, her degree course was Politics and Philosophy, and when Rebecca saw the photocopied admissions photo paper-clipped to her tenancy agreement, she almost recoiled in shock.
‘She looks like you,’ the hipster archivist said, having stolen up behind her, peering over her shoulder. ‘She could be your sister. Blimey, she could even be your twin.’
That wasn’t true. Rachel Gaunt had been 18 when the picture had been taken and Rebecca was almost a full decade older. The hair was different. Rebecca wore hers carelessly long and loose and Rachel’s was cut in a chic and precise geometric bob. With her heavy lipstick and the kohl around her eyes and in her black crew-neck sweater, she had a Left-Bank Parisian look about her. It was the Paris beatnik style first personified in the model-actress Juliette Gréco, all smoky and existential, except that Rachel didn’t resemble Juliette Gréco, she resembled Rebecca Green. Their features were similar and their dimensions looked it too. People would have said they were out of the same mould. Rebecca couldn’t but acknowledge that.
‘I wonder what happened to her.’
‘There’s nothing on the database,’ the hipster said. ‘I’ve already looked. She hasn’t kept in contact or attended reunions or contributed to any of our fundraisers.’ He stroked the length of his beard with his right hand and tweaked the waxed moustache points between finger and thumb. ‘If you’re really interested, I suppose you could ask Professor Fleetwood.’
Fleetwood was a name recently familiar to Rebecca. Before she made the mental connection, the hipster provided it.
‘When he first became a Professor here, he’d just signed the lease on a flat at Absalom Court. I think he was the one who suggested we buy or rent the vacant properties there and convert them into student accommodation. In those days accommodation blocks had to be supervised at night and he would have got a modest stipend for the supervisory role. As far as I’m aware, he still lives there. He was an extremely clever chap, back in the day. Might still have all his marbles and, since they were neighbours for three years, he might very well remember her.’
‘He doesn’t still live there,’ Rebecca said, still staring at monochrome features, smudged and faded and uncannily similar to her own. ‘He was moved into a home for the elderly when he became too frail to live independently.’ But she thought he might still remember Rachel Gaunt. He might even remember the name of Rachel’s indolent pet cat.
‘That has to be her,’ she said to Tom, seated outside a riverside pub, eating an early dinner three hours after leaving the LSE alumni archive to its picturesque custodian. ‘Professor Fleetwood brokered some kind of deal between the college and the freeholders of the block over the summer of 1963. By the autumn, the conversion work had been completed and the rooms were ready for student occupation by the start of the term in October. Rachel was a fresher and the first tenant. Curiously she was also the last. 21a remained vacant after her departure.’
‘Which was when?’
‘I don’t yet know. She wasn’t awarded a degree, so I’m assuming she didn’t complete her course. The drop-out rate was proportionally higher in the Sixties and Seventies than it is today. But then the course work was much more demanding and the finals much harder than they are now.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘A university education was something you earned academically, not a right contrived by politicians honouring a manifesto pledge. You had to be clever to get in and even cleverer to stay. Few people got a university education back then and all of them earned it.’
He was staring at the picture of Rachel taken by Rebecca using her phone. Some digital alchemy had made it clearer and sharper than the original photocopy. The greater clarity and increased contrast only enhanced the likeness. He hadn’t mentioned this. She was sure he had noticed it, though. It was eerily strong in the shadow she cast over their table, on the screen he studied in the spring sunshine outside the pub.
She looked at Tom, looking at the picture. He looked beautiful in this light, with his iridescent grey-green eyes and his tousled hair and the glow of good health on his skin. He was wearing a pale blue suit and a soft-collared shirt. A cherry tree was in full pink bloom in the pub garden. The ground under their table was tiled and strewn with fallen blossom. A bit of verse came into her head and she spoke it aloud; ‘He was as fresh as is the month of May.’
‘What did you say?’
‘It’s a line from Chaucer, from the Canterbury tales. It describes the knight’s squire, sums him up precisely in a line. You reminded me of it just now. I love this time of the year. May’s my favourite month.’
He sipped beer. Neither of them was driving. The walk back to his flat was less than a mile. He said, ‘I could read forever, and I’d never catch up with you. But I do know what you mean about the spring. It’s a time of birth and growth.’
‘Rebirth,’ she said.
‘An optimistic time,’ he said. ‘The light feels warm after the winter.’ He blushed, listening to himself. His old team-mates would slaughter him for this sort of talk.
‘Were there no books in your house, growing up?’
‘Not one. My dad might have had the Rothman’s Yearbook in the glove compartment of his car. That’s a kind of football almanac. But I never saw it, if he did.’
‘Videos?’
He nodded. ‘Games. Shelves and shelves of old football matches, they covered an entire wall of the living room. And then when DVD players first came out my dad spent a grand on one. It might even have been a prototype. A grand was a lot for a postie to shell out on a piece of kit like that back then. I’d have been about twelve.’
‘He must have been very dedicated to you, to your dreams and ambition to play.’
Tom smiled, but it was more like a wince than an expression of humour. ‘He was dedicated to his pension plan.’
‘That’s not very charitable.’
‘I’ve been very charitable to him in life, Rebecca. My dad lives in a grand house in Southport overlooking the Royal Birkdale golf links. He’s got no mortgage to pay and I threw in a life membership to the club.’
‘Do you still speak to him?’
‘Not much. We’ve nothing in common anymore.’
It was quite a contrast to her own life. Tom had rare talent and the hunger and discipline to exploit it. She’d had none of those things. She wouldn’t volunteer the information, though. She’d tell him the truth about herself, but only if he asked. She knew he wouldn’t, because famous people were always so incurious about the common herd.
And then he did.
She took a deep breath. ‘My dad was totally self-made. Started off labouring on the docks at Tilbury and then took up as a rent collector when that work became too scarce. He trained on the job as an estate agent, surviving on commission because there was no salary through his six-month probationary period. He was good at the work and prospered. Eventually they made him a partner.’
‘They didn’t want him leaving and setting up and competing with them,’ Tom said.
‘I think that’s exactly right. My mum died and he sent me away to boarding school because he wanted me to have a decent start. And it worked; I was the perfect daughter until Brighton and university.’
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‘What happened there?’
‘Sex and drugs.’
He sipped beer. She sensed he was avoiding looking at her. He said, ‘And rock and roll? I’m thinking Lars Ulrich here more than Buddy Holly.’
‘Unfortunately it wasn’t funny, Tom.’
‘How bad did it get?’
She couldn’t believe she was telling him this. ‘Rehab and a well-earned reputation as a tramp,’ she said. ‘My dad rescued me, six months before he died. That’s why I’m in this job. By then, of course, I’d broken his heart.’
The screen on her phone had gone dark. He stroked it back into life with a forefinger. She said, ‘What do you think of that?’
He was looking at Rachel Gaunt. He lifted his head and looked at Rebecca. His eyes were clear, paled to translucence with the sun at this early evening angle, shining almost directly into them from behind her head. She could feel it warming her shoulders through her jacket, her scalp through her hair. She couldn’t guess what Tom was thinking at all.
‘Life would be very boring,’ he said, ‘if everyone was the same.’
She said, ‘How far do you want to take this thing?’
‘As far as we can go, Rebecca, if you feel the same way I do.’
She smiled and reached for his hand and squeezed it and said, ‘I meant with Rachel Gaunt.’
‘Ah,’ he smiled back, blushing. He said, ‘I suppose it depends on whether anything else happens. If it does, if things get worse, I think we should try to talk to Professor Fleetwood.’
‘I’m frightened, Tom. She smoked the same cigarettes as me and she wore the same perfume I did and I’d bet money her favourite cocktail was a negroni. What are the odds?’
‘Did you ever own a cat, or a Miles Davis record?’
‘No. And I’m not much good at drawing, but you can’t tell me you haven’t noticed the physical resemblance.’
‘So you don’t want to come back with me tonight?’
‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘But I will come back with you because of what you said about us, just now. I think we both feel the same way about that.’
Tom laughed to himself.
‘What?’
‘Our first-choice ’keeper, Terry Pool, he’s probably the best shot-stopper I’ve ever played with. Off the pitch, he’s also a real glass-half-empty sort of a character. He’s got this saying, this doom and gloom warning. I can hear him now. Terry always says, “Every silver lining has a cloud.”’
‘Then he’s a wise man,’ Rebecca said, before draining the dregs at the bottom of her glass.
They got back to the flat when it was still light, the west-facing windows embellishing the rooms they served with a slight pink flush. There was no sense of impending menace or of being observed that Rebecca was aware of. Tom put on some music and opened a bottle of wine. She kicked off her shoes and sat back in an armchair and inventoried the stuff he’d bought. He’d furnished sparingly and with good, if masculine, taste. She thought that taste instinctive. She couldn’t picture him leafing through design catalogues. He’d just gone to John Lewis and pointed.
‘Did you never want kids?’
‘It wasn’t me that couldn’t have them, it was Melody. I do think they make you vulnerable. What happened to my nephew broke my brother completely.’
‘So you wouldn’t have them?’
He was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘I think I’d make a better father than my own dad was. I also think I’ve got too much not to want to share it. I’m only twenty-eight.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not going to predict the future. I don’t own a crystal ball.’
‘Where are your trophies? There’s nothing on display.’
‘Storage,’ he said. ‘It would be too painful to live with them at the moment. They’d just be a constant reminder that it’s over.’
‘I thought you were philosophical.’
‘I’m not a masochist. I have to live in the present, not the past.’
‘But with a past like yours, that’s hard.’
‘There’s a temptation to dwell on it,’ he said.
‘Have you read The Great Gatsby?’
‘Of course I haven’t.’
‘You’ve got something in common with its hero. I think you’d enjoy it.’
‘What happens to him?’
‘He gets shot and killed at the end.’
‘Cheers.’
She took a cushion from behind where she sat and threw it at him. He caught it and came across and stooped and kissed her, bunching the hair at the back of her head in his fist, half-kneeling, pulling her head towards his.
‘You have a thing for my hair.’
‘For all of you,’ he said, lowering both their bodies down to the rug beneath them.
Eventually, they climbed the stairs to his bed.
Whatever prompted her to seek an interview with Professor Fleetwood must have happened as they slept. They got up together and went down to the kitchen and Tom brewed coffee and made toast and then said he was going to check the weather forecast because if it was going to be fine, he fancied a long run along the Thames riverbank more than he did a visit to the gym.
It had been a cloudless night and, for May, quite chilly. Rebecca was content to stay in the kitchen where it was warm beside the range and snug in Tom’s dressing gown, until she heard him say, ‘You need to come and look at this.’
He had switched on his computer and the screensaver was showing. And the cat they assumed had belonged to Rachel Gaunt had stirred and woken and stalked prey as cats by their nature will. It had a mouse between its paws. It had a cute, playful expression on its face. Innards streaked in a glistening trail from the torn stomach of the little rodent, still alive, at this stage of its final ordeal. The artist’s initials were described, tiny and familiar, in the bottom right corner of the image.
‘She could really draw,’ Rebecca said. She shivered. ‘She was a bit wasted on Politics and Philosophy, if you want my opinion.’ For a reason she couldn’t have put easily into words, she was loath to say Rachel’s name.
‘I think there’s a bit more to your opinion than that. You’re shaking.’
‘I’ve got my brave face on,’ she said, smiling brightly. She nodded at it without actually glancing back towards the desk and the laptop. ‘If I look at it again I’ll scream.’
‘I’m miles out of my depth here,’ Tom said.
‘I’ll go and see Professor Fleetwood today,’ Rebecca said. ‘People in care homes don’t have prior appointments and the elderly wake up early. I’ll go this morning, right away.’
‘We should both go,’ he said.
‘I think I’ll get more out of him if I go on my own. I have a duty of care. Even if I didn’t care about you, which I do, it’s my obligation. Professionally, I mean. I sold you this flat.’
The care home had once been a large Victorian house on what had probably then been a quiet road in Hammersmith. Now it was festooned with bollards and painted with double yellow lines and the humped tarmac of small hills meant to calm traffic erupted every few metres along its length. Cars undulated over them in the ceaseless convoy like rat-runs all over the city.
The professor was polite and courteous, alert and attentive, until Rebecca mentioned the name of Rachel Gaunt. When she did, sitting upright in his wheelchair, he clenched and unclenched his fists.
‘I will not discuss that person,’ he said. ‘I have no wish to recollect that period, or that particular character. I prefer to live in peace and so must insist you leave.’
‘This is important,’ she said.
‘Not to me,’ he said. ‘To me it’s merely prurient. I insist you leave immediately.’
‘Please,’ she said.
He wheeled to face her. Drool glistened on his chin and one of his eyes had a rheumy infection, unless it was a cataract. He was seeing her only out of the other one. ‘You’re harassing an elderly man,’ he said, seated because he was crippled, standing metaphorically on what dignity r
emained to him. Rebecca felt ashamed, but she persisted because she didn’t have a choice.
‘Absalom Court has been refurbished. Where she lived is now the basement of a luxury flat. I sold that flat to a good man called Tom Harper just over a month ago and she won’t leave him alone and I’m begging you to help me.’
‘The person to whom you refer died in 1965. What you’re saying can’t possibly be true. In her own phrase, she checked out early. Now I’d be grateful if you’d leave me alone.’
Rebecca bit her lip. She was no good at this. A skilled interlocutor might be able take another tack, employ charm and tease out the information. She didn’t know how and was too fuelled by anxiety to find the necessary patience in herself.
‘I’m desperate, Professor Fleetwood,’ she said.
He was frowning. The expression in his good eye had changed. He said, ‘Your resident wouldn’t be Tom Harper the footballer, would he?’
‘Yes, he would.’
‘My God,’ he said. ‘I’ve supported that team for over seventy years.’
‘You speak with the same accent he does. I’ve only just noticed.’
‘Different generations, but I think we were born about three streets apart. I saw his home debut, when he came on as a sixteen-year-old in the second-half of a cup game against Chelsea. I remember he scored. I was a season ticket holder, back then.’
Thank the Lord for football, Rebecca thought. ‘Will you help him?’
‘Bring him here. If you’re telling the truth, I’ll tell you both as much as I can. But do it today. I want to remember Rachel Gaunt for as short a time as possible and to forget her entirely again just as soon as I possibly can.’
She went outside and phoned Tom from the care home drive but got no response. She looked at the sky, which was clear, and assumed he was running along the river. She had no idea how far he’d run, how long it might take him to cover the mileage. He was so formidably fit he could be jogging along for bloody hours.
Her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered it anyway.