An Absence of Natural Light

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘Simon Swarbrick.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Simon Swarbrick?’

  ‘Your voice sounds familiar, but you’re going to have to give me a clue.’

  ‘I’m in charge of the alumni archive at the LSE. We met yesterday.’

  ‘Of course we did,’ she said, ‘and of course I remember, very clearly. You were most helpful.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m calling you now because of your interest in Rachel Gaunt. Is that still ongoing?’

  ‘Very much so,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘I’ve found some cine film you might be interested in seeing. In viewing, I mean. She features quite prominently. There’s no sound, but the footage is Super 8 and the camera must have been a Braun or something of a similar standard lens-wise because the quality is excellent. You could come and look at it this afternoon.’

  Except that she couldn’t, Rebecca thought, looking at her watch. She’d had the previous afternoon and this morning off and the clients were stacking up and it wasn’t like she’d taken a sabbatical or even any holiday time owed. She was supposed to be at work, or at least working while she was out of the office. She was doing neither.

  ‘I can’t make it,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘But I can ask the owner of the property she lived in to come to you. It’s on his behalf I’ve been doing the research.’

  ‘I was rather hoping you’d come yourself,’ the hipster said. There was now a slight wheedling note to his tone. Rebecca rolled her eyes and then saw she had a call holding. She said, ‘He’s a very wealthy man with a deep appreciation of the importance of higher education and a proven tendency to put his money where he thinks it might be most beneficial, both to society and culturally. Bluntly, he’s someone worth keeping in with.’

  ‘He will need to bring his credentials,’ Simon said. ‘I’ll expect him at 3 p.m.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Swarbrick.’

  ‘Simon,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, Simon.’

  ‘Anything to oblige you,’ he said, with the stress on the ‘you’.

  She terminated the call and picked up the one waiting, which was Tom. She told him about her encounter with Professor Fleetwood. He told her he’d be there in thirty minutes. She spent ten of them finding a coffee shop, ten slowly drinking a coffee and the remainder walking back to the care home to an elderly man with all his mental faculties and a body betrayed cruelly by time.

  She hardly had the nerve for the ordeal she thought they might be about to put him through. Her stomach rebelled acidly against the assault of the double espresso she’d just inflicted on it. ‘I’m my own worst enemy,’ she said out loud. But she had an inkling, now, an intuition, that where she particularly was concerned, this old saying no longer rang true.

  There were armchairs in the reception room and Tom helped Professor Fleetwood out of the wheelchair and into one, where he looked more comfortable and composed than he had forty minutes earlier. He’d flushed with pleasure like a boy on seeing his celebrated visitor and tried and failed to struggle to his feet to greet him properly. In other circumstances, Rebecca might have felt nervous or uneasy about their encounter. She generally held with the view that you should never meet your heroes; it’s always going to be an occasion at best anticlimactic and at worst disillusioning. Not today, though. Tom was a charismatic man in life, but that wasn’t why she thought it would go okay. She thought it would go okay because he had the grace and generosity to make sure that it would.

  The Professor sipped tea from a cup they’d scrounged from the kitchens, the saucer nursed in his lap. They sat in armchairs just like his, facing him. The door to the little room was firmly closed. He looked a good decade younger than he had earlier and he was composed and when he spoke his voice was firm. He’d used the interval to wipe the drool from his chin.

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he said. ‘I need to establish that emphatically with both of you from the start. She used to talk about checking out early. She would follow the remark with a bark of laughter, made husky by her chain-smoking, which wasn’t all that unusual in students back then. Cigarettes were cheap and the harm they did not yet widely understood. Everyone in those days smoked. She smoked the French Gauloises brand.

  ‘She must have meant what she said about checking out early, because less than two years after I first laid eyes on her she went and did it. Suicide, or the threat of it, was quite fashionable back in those days. It sounds sick to say that now. I think it had something to do with the Cold War and the way the constant threat of obliteration by the bomb had debased life. Life then seemed far more tenuous and contingent and insecure.

  ‘She used to say that she’d check out early and that one day she’d be back. She said she’d surprise everyone. I don’t think I’ve ever met a more defiant creature in my life. And it’s been a long life. It’s my belief that no one cheats death, however, not even a Rachel Gaunt. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should start really at the beginning.’

  He was twenty-eight, had just been awarded his full professorship and his career at the LSE had launched with a property deal very profitable for both him and the school where he was to spend the rest of his academic life. He’d become one of only two tenants at Absalom Court, which by then had otherwise fallen into near-dereliction.

  He’d moved in after his successful LSE job interview at the beginning of June and seen the potential of the block as student accommodation straight away. He’d inquired about securing a lease and asked half a dozen building firms to tender for the conversion work required. Then he’d drawn up a business proposal based on typical student rents for rooms in halls of residence, showing that costs would be covered and a profit start to show within a period of five years. He’d presented this to the school’s vice-chancellor and, because wealthy alumni had made the LSE cash-rich, the scheme was approved and the work was begun immediately.

  Rachel Gaunt was among the first intake the following autumn. She had a reputation even before she arrived there for beauty, rebelliousness and getting what she wanted. As a precocious sixth-former she’d written to Sartre and Che Guevara and whatever she’d said to them in her letters had earned her written replies. She’d corresponded regularly with Timothy Leary and Martha Gellhorn and Philip K. Dick. She was interested in the occult philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and had got Miles Davis to personally autograph her copy of Kind of Blue, the jazz album Britain’s beatniks were all listening to at their parties and talking about and carrying around with them like some badge of credibility and cool.

  She drove a red Triumph Herald convertible and seemed to have plenty of money. Her family background was obscure because she’d been raised an orphan. In the long holiday she did what was described as clerical work for a Brussels-based company called Martens & Degrue. It struck Fleetwood that the paper shuffling she did for them over the summer seemed improbably well paid.

  A romance she had with a fellow student at the start of her second year ended abruptly at Christmas, when he’d suffered a nervous breakdown. Professor Fleetwood was charged, discreetly, with the mission of finding out more about the background and character of Rachel Gaunt. Her academic credentials were excellent and her coursework brilliant. But the mental state in which she’d left her suitor suggested some sort of moral corruption or malaise.

  He discovered that Martens & Degrue were a subsidiary company wholly owned and maintained by an organization called the Jericho Society. They had run the orphanage which had cared for Rachel from birth. She had grown up there bilingual in English and French. When she was eleven, she’d gained a scholarship to the Surrey boarding school where she’d stayed until passing her A Levels.

  Her summer job suggested she kept in close contact with the Jericho Society, which Fleetwood assumed was all she had in the way of kin. But they were an organization discreet to the point of secrecy and he could discover no more about them other than that they were obviously wealthy and completely
independent.

  ‘I suspect that they were probably what today we’d call a cult,’ he told Tom and Rebecca. ‘But Rachel never exhibited any signs of slavishness or manipulation, quite the opposite in fact. She was iconoclastic even by the standards of an age becoming by then quite militant in its defiance of convention.’

  ‘Beatlemania,’ Tom said.

  Fleetwood chuckled. ‘That was just around the corner, Tom.’

  ‘Ban the Bomb,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘You look very like her,’ Fleetwood said, turning serious. ‘The resemblance quite startled me when I first saw you earlier. But there was no bomb banning where Rachel Gaunt was concerned. My intuition was that she was completely apolitical. She was drawn to Che Guevara not by the cause, but by the glamour. Marches to Aldermaston wearing a duffle coat under a soggy banner in the rain weren’t madam’s scene at all.’

  ‘Do you remember the name of the boyfriend who had the breakdown?’

  ‘I do, Tom. He was an Ethics postgrad from Stafford, Archie Simmonds.’

  Tragedy struck in the Easter holiday of Rachel’s second year, he told them. She was among a mixed party of seven LSE students who went on a ski trip to St. Moritz in Switzerland. Wandering off-piste was apparently Peter Hendry’s idea. Peter was studying Economics and Law. He was a boy from the Scottish Highlands who had learned to ski on barrel staves as little more than a toddler. He’d been selected for the British Winter Olympics Downhill Team. There had been heavy snowfalls for a week before their arrival.

  ‘There were probably avalanche warnings, but communicating them would have been a word-of-mouth task back in those days,’ Fleetwood said. ‘Some pistes might have been closed as a precaution, but they weren’t on groomed slopes in designated areas. They strayed and they paid a fatal price.’

  ‘What happened?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘Six of the group were overwhelmed by the avalanche. It was huge, hundreds of thousands of tons of unstable snow and they were probably killed instantly by the weight and velocity of what hit them. Rachel was the sole survivor, unscathed because she alone managed to ski out of its path. That was her story, anyway.’

  Tom said, ‘You think she lied?’

  ‘I know she didn’t cause the avalanche,’ he said. ‘And it’s become a cliché to say that the young are resilient because it’s so often proven to be true. But she exhibited no signs of grief afterwards at all, not one shred of sorrow for her dead friends and the loss their deaths represented. I think what she witnessed would have traumatized most people. She didn’t seem shocked by it, or even surprised.’

  ‘She didn’t value life,’ Tom said. ‘She didn’t value her own life. She proved that when she took it.’

  ‘That’s not right,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’d say she valued her own life very highly. She had sufficient self-regard to think she could defy nature by coming back. Can you tell us about the specifics of her death, Professor?’

  ‘That’s the last thing I can tell you,’ he said. ‘It’s the only remaining thing about Rachel Gaunt I really think I know.’

  She did it with whisky and sleeping pills on the last day of the summer term. She was discovered lying on her back with a serene expression on her fully made-up face wearing the same blue satin dress she’d worn to the summer balls. Side one of Kind of Blue was playing on auto-repeat on her Dansette record player at the time her body was discovered. She’d been one of only five student residents at Absalom Court who owned cars and hers was parked in its usual position to the rear of the block with the keys left in the ignition.

  ‘Could it have been accidental?’

  ‘No, Tom,’ Fleetwood said, ‘I don’t think it could.’

  ‘Whisky and pills can be a confusing combination.’

  ‘Rachel owned a small black cat,’ Fleetwood said. ‘Strictly speaking, students weren’t allowed pets in their rooms, but Rachel had a disarming gift for getting away with breaking rules. Somehow she made them seem absurd and petty and you by association absurd and petty if you attempted to enforce them.’

  ‘And you didn’t want her thinking that about you,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘No, I didn’t. I was twenty-nine years old by then, older than her by a decade, but despite her amorality she was vivacious and beautiful and my male vanity was still intact. Pathetic as it sounds, I wanted her approval.’

  ‘And the cat?’

  ‘Cute little creature, never looked like much more than a kitten, though it caught its share of mice. Some of the other students joked it was her familiar. There were rumours, only half in jest, that she might be a dabbler in the occult. I don’t think anyone seriously thought she was capable of witchcraft, though looks-wise she certainly contrived the right, vampy appearance. Anyway, she killed the cat. She laced its food with rat poison. Its last meal, as a consequence. The cat died with its owner.’

  Rebecca asked, ‘Did this Jericho Society make waves over their protégée’s death?’

  ‘No, they didn’t, not a word, which was curious. But the school was in no way culpable and as I’ve said already, suicide among students was far more common then than I believe it is today. They expected less of a world that expected more of them. It was a sometimes unhealthy equation.’

  Tom and Rebecca exchanged a look and rose to say their goodbyes. Professor Fleetwood looked at Tom and said, ‘I read about your retirement in the Telegraph. It saddened me beyond words. Is there no hope, no further surgical procedure you could try?’

  ‘None,’ Tom said.

  ‘It’s such a pity.’

  ‘Did you play yourself?’

  ‘Got my blue playing at Cambridge. I captained the Varsity Team. Had pro trials at Hartlepool and Chesterfield and a couple of other places. I wasn’t good enough.’

  ‘I’ll bet you grew up playing in a back alley with a bald tennis ball.’

  The Professor chuckled. ‘Hour after hour,’ he said. ‘Even the dark didn’t stop us.’

  ‘No Xboxes or Game Boys or tablets back then, eh? All the kids who could play, completely two-footed from all the constant practice.’

  The Professor grinned, showing his dentures. ‘My left peg wasn’t just for standing on, that’s for bloody sure.’

  ‘You’d have been good enough today, Professor. You’d have made the grade in today’s game, I’d bet on it.’

  Professor Fleetwood seemed to grow inside his old suit. Rebecca saw it happen. She watched Tom take something bright with the number seven sewn onto it from the bag she’d wondered why he’d brought.

  ‘Rebecca mentioned that you were a fan,’ he said. ‘I’ve signed it for you. It’s the shirt I wore for the game that clinched us the title last season.’

  ‘You scored, twice.’ He held out his hands to take the shirt.

  ‘I got the rub of the green,’ Tom said.

  ‘It was football from another planet. They couldn’t get near you,’ the Professor said, staring at his prize.

  They said their goodbyes and stood for a moment outside on the street, about to part because Rebecca had to go to work. She sniffed.

  ‘Why are you crying? Don’t cry, Rebecca.’

  He reached for her and held her in his arms and she said, ‘I’m crying because you’re in such an awful situation and you’re such a good man who deserves so much better.’

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ he said. ‘I’m not frightened of her at all. And you have to stop crying, if only so you can put an end to my misery by telling me what iconoclastic means.’

  She wrestled free of him. ‘Do you know what a doppelgänger is, Tom?’

  ‘I’m not completely ignorant. It’s your double and it’s a sign of bad luck to meet one.’

  ‘Not just a sign of bad luck,’ Rebecca said. ‘It’s a harbinger of death.’

  ‘Then maybe you’re the one in the awful situation. Maybe you’d be safer staying away from the flat.’

  She’d taken a tissue from her pocket and was dabbing at her eyes with it. She said, ‘No. I am frightene
d and don’t mind admitting it. But I’m damned if I’m giving Rachel Gaunt a free run at you.’

  ‘She isn’t coming back for that. If she is coming back, if she’s not back already.’

  Rebecca nodded in the direction of the building from which they’d just come. ‘Professor Fleetwood was smitten. I suspect all the men she encountered were, regardless of age, gay as well as straight, and some of the women too.’

  ‘She was seriously bad news,’ Tom said.

  ‘She was beautiful and beguiling bad news, Tom.’

  ‘Yeah, she was,’ he said, ‘pointless to deny it.’

  Three

  The flat was a fifteen-minute stroll from the care home housing the Professor. It was just after midday and he had his appointment with the LSE archivist at their Bloomsbury building at 3 p.m. Bloomsbury was somewhere he knew from his association with Great Ormond Street Hospital and a part of town he liked. He was curious about the cine film Rebecca had arranged for him to view. It would give him a chance to judge for himself the likeness between the two women the Professor had thought so strong.

  He was glad he had taken the shirt along. Unlike the trophies, the shirts – those of his own he’d kept and those he’d swapped with opponents at the end of major games – were in a bin bag where he’d put them, packing in a hurry to exit the tasteless hangar of a house he’d occupied with Melody. He’d been happy about the Professor’s apparent joy at receiving the shirt, but was slightly melancholy now thinking about what Fleetwood had said about him playing football from another planet the last time he’d worn it. It was true. No one had been able to get near him that night. It was a rare and wonderful sensation and he knew he’d experienced it for the last time.

  He got into the flat and switched on his laptop and thought about the hundreds of emails and texts from friends and former team-mates and his agent and journalists and the fans he’d accumulated, because he’d ignored them since this business began. He wondered, if he just deleted it all, would his life suffer even slightly as a consequence? He suspected not. What had dominated his thoughts and feelings, since meeting her, was Rebecca. Then the display on his laptop clarified and he saw the mouse-torture screensaver image and frowned. It was intrusive. It was somewhere between discovering you’d been squatted and having an itch you couldn’t scratch.