An Absence of Natural Light

by F. G. Cottam

  He wondered how he would react if she knocked softly on the other side of the basement door now and lured him to her in that husky, seductive voice of hers. Would he be indignant? Or would he just be overwhelmed by lust the way it seemed everyone else had been on coming into contact with Rachel. She’d flick her bobbed hair and lick her lips with a wanton look in her eyes and he’d be fumbling at his flies on raw instinct. Would it even seem like betrayal, given that she and Rebecca, physically, were so close to being one and the same?

  Except that they weren’t the same. Rebecca had fallen victim to drug addiction and sexual promiscuity for a period. Rachel had never fallen victim to anything except her own wilful desires. Rebecca had been remorseful and ashamed and Rachel had been a brazen stranger to morality.

  It was an odd coin if they were the two sides of it. Rebecca was as good as Rachel had been bad. He thought about the doppelgänger, which he remembered was a German thing, like all the best fairytales. For want of books at home, he’d read them greedily in the library at school. Wickedness often prevailed in those stories. He didn’t have much doubt, between Rebecca and Rachel, who would prove the stronger if it came down to a struggle.

  He looked at his watch. It wasn’t the model he endorsed. It was a Bremont Boeing and he’d bought it a couple of days earlier because he got a kick out of wearing a watch made by an English company that said London on the face. He’d liked the look of it in the jewellers’ window. It was a very handsome timepiece. Buying himself anything was still a bit of a novelty. It was only just 12.30. He didn’t need more than an hour to get to where he needed to be at three. He didn’t feel spooked in the flat, not in the daytime, at least. He could hear or feel nothing unusual and there were no phantom odours. He decided that he would go down to the basement, just out of curiosity. It was his property after all.

  He couldn’t honestly remember whether the hook had always been there or had been put there recently, specifically for the task in which it was currently employed. Hooks weren’t noticeable items unless you were actually looking for one. This one was brass and carelessly brushed with the same white emulsion as the wall and might have been there since the building’s construction. To Tom, there was no way of telling.

  The hanger depending from the hook, though, was definitely a recent addition. It was made of curved sloping shoulders of polished wood screwed to a crossbeam lathed smooth and it looked expensive under its coating of dark varnish and carefully buffed beeswax. The blue dress hung on the hanger didn’t look at all as he’d imagined it would when the professor had described Rachel’s death scene. He’d mentioned summer balls and so Tom had pictured something floaty and lace-frilled and possibly embellished by ribbons and mother-of-pearl. He should have known she was too stridently sexual for that sort of confection.

  The dress was just a satin sheath with a slashed neck and a split up the thigh. It had been cut to hug the curves of the woman who wore it. He lifted the hanger off the hook by its handle and turned the dress around and the fabric danced before his eyes blackly in its slick satin contours and he saw that it buttoned all the way up the back, closely secured, from the neckline to the hem. He whistled. He knew enough about couture clothing from the ever-changing wardrobe he’d bought Melody to know that the dress he held was a designer item that even in the early 1960s must have cost a fortune. He looked at the label and saw that the house that had created it was Schiaparelli.

  He gripped the fabric itself and it slithered through his fist, smooth and slick and cool against his skin. He sniffed its shoulder, just above where the cloth was cut and stitched to shape the swell of her breasts and smelled the recently familiar scent of Shalimar perfume. There was, too, just the faintest, liquorice hint of Gauloises tobacco. He noticed a hair, then, caught in the hook and eye that closed the dress invisibly just beneath the nape of her neck. It was shorter than one of Rebecca’s and while her hair was a darkish brown, this was raven black.

  Martens and Degrue, who were actually the Jericho Society, must have thought very highly of their orphan, Tom thought. He couldn’t imagine how they would have reacted to her suicide. For whatever reason, they’d invested a lot in her and it had come to nothing, except, of course, that it seemed to be coming to something now. He put the dress on its hanger back on the hook and looked at his Bremont watch. It told him that the time was just before one.

  He was aware of the swell of arousal in his groin. It was heavy and hard with desire. It bulged and throbbed in the confinement of his jeans, slightly hampering his progress climbing the basement steps. He’d take a shower, though he’d had one earlier after his run. He didn’t feel contaminated or even sullied by his contact with the dress. He felt he needed a shower, though, as someone might feel the need to cleanse themselves after some intimacy, spontaneous and therefore unprotected, naked with a stranger.

  The strangeness of it all was something he was aware of, he thought as he soaped himself down. But it had receded, really, the way he was used to pain receding after a couple of codeine tablets or a cortisone injection administered to treat a chronic injury. The strangeness wasn’t the priority and he wasn’t the sort of person to speculate pointlessly. He had his growing intuition about what it all meant and would act on that in dealing with it. In confronting it, he thought. It had to be confronted and overcome. He had never been a man comfortable with losing.

  The hipster archivist mounted the cine film expertly on a projector reel and pulled down a rolled screen and shut the blinds in a ritual he could have carried out before arrival, Tom thought, and imagined he hadn’t only because he wanted to demonstrate his dexterity at one of the practical aspects of his job.

  ‘Do you mind if I watch it with you?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen it already?’

  ‘Only for verification, to see if it corresponded to what it said it was on the can. It was shot at St. Moritz in the late March of 1963. I saw snow, skis, chalets and big skies. I didn’t really take in the narrative detail.’

  ‘I don’t mind at all,’ Tom said.

  The man was staring at him, though Tom thought the archivist by far the more entertaining of the two of them, with his outlandish wardrobe and ridiculous beard.

  ‘Are you an actor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve got a familiar look. I get the feeling you might be someone quite famous.’

  Not a football fan, obviously, which on this occasion was a bit of a relief. ‘I’m not remotely famous,’ Tom said.

  The archivist sat down beside him and began to roll the film.

  Tom Harper had seen more than his share of films. He had his high-res Kate Rusby and Seth Lakeman and Cara Dillon music files and he’d listened to them often on his iPod and more recently on his phone. But he didn’t enjoy computer games like a lot of the lads did and more often than listening to music travelling to and from away fixtures and games staged abroad, he’d watch a movie, which passed the time quicker if it was any good.

  He’d watched films at home, too. Old movies were Melody’s passion. He thought that if he’d ever been asked to do a quiz show appearance for charity on the TV, film would have to be his specialist subject. He hadn’t been, but would have been confident of doing himself justice on the Millionaire stool or in the Mastermind chair.

  Rachel Gaunt first appeared about two minutes in, after some establishing shots of the Swiss location and a group shot of four grinning male students Tom knew didn’t have long to live. The scene opened on an alpine landscape and some camera wobble and then the camera panned to a figure crouched and fastening ski boots dressed entirely in black, a cigarette couched in the corner of her mouth, winking when the lens found her, standing and shaking back her hair and dusting snow from tight ski pants before finally taking a long pull on her cigarette and plucking it from her mouth and blowing smoke at the vacant sky.

  She smiled, the precise bob black and silky framing her features, teeth even and impossibly white in the light reflected off the snow, a
youthful crinkle of amusement at the corners of her eyes, her figure pert and slender and pretty much perfect, really.

  It was impossible to take your eyes away from her. Other people intruded, walking into shot and mugging for the camera, but their antics didn’t distract at all. She owned every frame she featured in. There wasn’t what the archivist had pompously referred to as a narrative. The film was just a collection of random moments picturing a group of young people enjoying what was still then a pretty exotic pastime in a beautiful location that attracted a privileged crowd.

  She did look like Rebecca. But she had something else that Tom had only rarely seen and only ever seen before on celluloid. She had the glamour that film stars such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich had been gifted with. Tom couldn’t think of anyone starring in films with quite that languor and allure in the present day.

  ‘Alaskan eyes,’ the archivist said.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘She’s got paler eyes than I’ve ever seen on a human being. I’ve only seen that eye colour among the dogs that pull sleds in places like Alaska. And they’re related to wolves.’

  ‘I don’t think Rachel Gaunt would be pulling anybody’s sled.’

  ‘It’s just the eyes. What she’s actually like, is the cat that got the cream.’

  ‘She had a cat,’ Tom said. ‘It didn’t get the cream.’

  ‘They all died, didn’t they? I remember reading the cuttings about this event. It was one of the greatest tragedies in the school’s peacetime history.’

  ‘They didn’t all die,’ Tom said.

  The two men watched the film for a while in silence. They watched Rachel Gaunt dance nimbly on her skis through a mogul field.

  ‘She could ski.’

  ‘She wasn’t the best in the group,’ Tom said. But she was the one who got away from the avalanche, he thought.

  They watched her sip a cocktail with her snow goggles pushed up into her fringe. They watched her reading a book in a chair in the mountain sunshine and she held the cover up for the camera. It was a paperback of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. She was pictured spooning stew or casserole into her mouth outside a café on the slopes and she swallowed a spoonful and then pouted gorgeously, narrowing those pale eyes which slanted upwards slightly towards their outer edge, as Rebecca’s did, giving nothing away despite their transparency.

  ‘I think she knew,’ the archivist said.

  ‘She couldn’t have known.’

  ‘I know it sounds insane to say it, but I think she did. It’s just a hunch, an intuition. I mean, look at her.’

  You couldn’t but look at her, Tom thought. Then the film finished. They sat in the darkness for a moment. The archivist said, ‘Fucking hell. I’ve just realized who you are. Can I get an autograph, for my niece? You’re a poster on her bedroom wall.’

  ‘You’re welcome to an autograph, mate. Or you could nip down the road to Argos and pick up a ball and I’ll sign it. But only after we find out what you’ve got on a student named Archie Simmonds. He was an Ethics postgrad from Stafford and he was here at the same time as Rachel Gaunt. And if you have the information, I also want the location of Rachel’s grave.’

  Archie Simmonds must have recovered pretty well from his student breakdown. He’d become Standards and Compliance Officer working in the City for an internationally renowned merchant bank. He’d been generous to his alma mater with a couple of substantial endowments back in the twentieth century. Those were the days when bankers took their bonuses home without making indignant headlines. He had retired to an address in Hampstead Village and there was a landline phone number. As soon as he got outside the main LSE building, Tom rang it.

  ‘You’re pulling my leg. You have to be winding me up. Come on, who is this really?’

  ‘It really is Tom Harper, Mr Simmonds. I’ve recently moved into a flat at Absalom Court.’

  ‘God, mention of that takes me back. You’ve hit hard times?’

  ‘It’s changed a bit since you were last there. Rachel Gaunt lived in what’s now my basement. I’d like to talk to you about her.’

  There was a silence. Then Archie Simmonds said, ‘I’ve been waiting for this call for fifty years, I suppose. I knew it would come, one day. I just didn’t expect it to come from Tom bloody Harper.’

  ‘Since we’ve never actually met, I’ve done nothing to upset you, Mr Simmonds.’

  ‘That’s not true. I’m a life-long Arsenal supporter.’

  ‘Aah.’

  ‘The misery you’ve inflicted on me over the years has been nothing short of extraordinary.’

  ‘Can you meet me?’

  ‘Not in public, no. I can’t risk being seen with you by someone who knows me. I’d never hear the end of it, frankly. You’ll have to come here. Come tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t expect much in the way of hospitality.’

  Tom looked at his watch, which he thought was earning its keep. It told him that the time was a quarter to five and he hailed a cab and took out the little map the archivist had helpfully drawn for him once Tom had signed the replica shirt and ball he’d nipped out and bought and posed smiling with a friendly arm around the bloke for the inevitable selfie.

  His phone rang and it was Rebecca.

  ‘Just wanted to hear the sound of your voice,’ she said.

  ‘You got that from me.’

  ‘You’ve got me brushing up on an obsolete skill. I used to be quite good at real-time communication with people I care about.’

  Tom smiled to himself, flattered. He could still barely believe his good fortune, where she was concerned. ‘It’s a lost art,’ he said. Then, ‘Did you know that a cemetery is also known as a necropolis, which means city of the dead?’

  ‘You’re in a cab,’ she said, ‘I can tell by the acoustics. Our hipster friend told you where she’s buried. You’re on your way to see Rachel Gaunt’s grave.’

  ‘It’s in this massive cemetery in Stoke Newington. It’s a huge burial ground, mostly Victorian, quite a sight, apparently.’

  ‘A necropolis,’ she said. ‘How was the film?’

  ‘Your hipster thought she knew that it was going to happen. The avalanche, I mean. Said she looked like the cat that got the cream.’

  ‘God, that’s dark.’

  ‘We don’t need to go there,’ Tom said. ‘There’s no point, really, nothing conclusive to find one way or the other after fifty years.’

  ‘Will I see you tonight?’

  He thought about the appearance of the dress in the basement, poised and slithery to the touch on its hanger, waiting to clothe its elegant wearer. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m talking to Archie Simmonds in the morning. The bloke she drove nuts?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Let’s get together tomorrow evening.’

  ‘You think by then you’ll have all the pieces of the puzzle?’

  ‘I’ll have enough. I don’t think I’ll ever have all the pieces of the puzzle. I wouldn’t want the full picture. There are some things best left undiscovered.’

  They said their goodbyes. It was a fair way through the early evening spring traffic to Stoke Newington. The remainder of the journey was spent learning from the cabbie precisely where he’d gone wrong in games that to the best of his recollection, his team had actually won.

  The sun was pallid in the sky by the time he got to Stoke Newington Church Street and his destination. The cemetery was vast. So were some of the graves; pillared extravagances canted at crazy angles by time and subsidence, gigantic granite angels and marble-clad tombs secured like old bank vaults by the spiked iron railings surrounding them. Death was celebrated here, given a heroic status; brave and futile and redolent of an age when it was all too common and too few people saw out their three score years and ten.

  It took him about half an hour to find Rachel’s grave. It was in an area set apart from the mad spree of commemorative masonry surrounding it. The headstones here were mo
dest. There were no crosses. There was no religious symbolism at all, nothing whatsoever to signify individual faith or creed. The graves were uniform, almost like war graves in a military cemetery, though the plot was much smaller than those tended to be and not quite so immaculately cared for.

  Rachel’s headstone bore only her name, the years of her birth and death and a splotch of lichen, pale green on the edge of the dark grey granite on its right side as he stood in front of it. He felt no urge to pray for the spirit of the dead girl or to cross himself or anything else. His own faith had lapsed to nothing beyond a vague belief, bolstered by his own good fortune in life, that a God was likelier on balance than not. And he had no sense whatsoever that Rachel was any longer here. The grave had a vacant look, an absence about it, the headstone the bogus character of a movie prop.

  Someone was watching him. Tom sensed the scrutiny and turned. There was a tallish figure on one of the path intersections in the middle distance. The man was unseasonably attired in a raincoat, buttoned and belted. He was entirely motionless. He was a few hundred yards away but to Tom’s sharp eyes he seemed too well dressed to be a casualty of what was ironically called care in the community. Five weeks of London life had taught Tom that the place had more than its share of people who shouldn’t have been on its streets unchaperoned. This bloke wasn’t one of them. He watched. And then he moved abruptly, wheeling away, striding rapidly, shrinking in the distance and disappearing altogether from sight.

  He didn’t go down to the basement again when he got home. It had been a long and eventful day giving him much to think about. He didn’t have the resilience to endure another of her tricks. They weren’t tricks really, he knew that, they were accelerations in something set in motion beyond his understanding, but he didn’t have the stamina or the nerve, after the discovery of the dress, to see at just what speed the events were continuing to occur.