No Way to Say Goodbye Read online

  They found a little black business diary with motivational sayings for each day and showed interest in a succession of inked crosses until Catherine pointed out that they were probably the days of her period. They also found a brown manila envelope under her jumpers in a clothes cupboard. The envelope contained my letters and cards written over the years and a few photographs of me. They matched this with a battered red-leather address book decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis. I had bought it for Rachel in Italy years ago, and in among all the other names was mine recorded in her strong, looping, generous hand under J for Jack, the addresses crossed out over time as I had moved, leaving only my work number and just the letter J scrawled next to it. CID showed the address-book entry and the contents of the envelope to Catherine on the Monday. It took a while for her to place me, for we had met only a few times over a decade before but she eventually came up with my name. Thus our secrets were displaced by events.

  * * *

  I imagined Rachel again and again over time; seeming to come closer and closer, letting the door to the Paradise Stores clatter behind her, her flats going slip-slap on the pavement, her jeans making a lisping sound as they rubbed. I would see her pausing for a moment. What had distracted her? I would make out the gleaming tarmac, shadows of vehicles moving. Something was up ahead of her, something moving, straining at the leash. I would try to make it out as again she came closer, scuffling under the glare of the street lights, passing the parked cars, the hooded bus stop. The image would then jerk back. I would rerun it again like an old film: Rachel always walking towards me, yet ever receding as if on an escalator. Slip-slap, her footsteps kept coming. I would shift my focus, try to get ahead of her, try to make out what was there moving under the shadows of the plane trees. Then the image would readjust and I would be back at the beginning with Hedgepeth and Canter leaning near my desk, those first emissaries to my world, announcing that everything was going to be different from now on.

  They came to see me where I held a training psychotherapy post in a Victorian building which had once been an annexe to the city asylum. The asylum had been built on a ridge line, so you could see the huddled city below. It was a Tuesday morning, and the September weather had flared up warmly; the cries of schoolchildren newly returned to school echoed around the car park. The police were waiting for me in reception and a secretary handed me a message sheet with their names written on it: DCs Hedgepeth and Canter.

  “What is it about?” I asked, but the secretary could not say, shrugging and glancing at the pair of them standing in the patients’ waiting area. They asked to speak to me in private, and we walked in silence down the corridor past the therapy suites. I brought them into my office which also served as a consulting-room. One of them was a square-faced blonde woman in her twenties, wearing a twin set with padded shoulders, with a Princess Diana sweep-over fringe and fading holiday tan. She had pushed up the sleeves of her dark jacket to show strong-looking forearms. She sat in an easy chair while her male colleague remained standing, and I drew up the chair behind my desk where I swivelled uncertainly facing them. I noticed for a moment the transparent hairs on her forearm outlined by the light from the window and a slim gold chain on her wrist. The male officer was a little older, jowly, with sleek black hair. He remained silent with a bored expression throughout. All I remember of him was the shuffling sound of his gleaming chestnut brogues as he roamed over my office, peered at my books and pictures and lightly tapped the buttons of the therapy-session tape recorder. They seemed in no hurry, so I asked, “How can I help you?”

  The woman detective did not immediately answer. She looked up and asked, “Do you know Rachel Hauser?”

  Both of them stared at me to measure my response, I suppose, and I looked back at them, unable to say anything. The female DC drew out a shiny black-and-white photograph from her bag and added, “This is the person we are talking about.”

  I looked down at it. Yes, it was Rachel, my Rachel, and yet a remote image, not like her at all. I knew something dreadful had happened. I held on to the picture and looked out of my office window at the blank sky for a moment and then back at the photo. My desk phone began to ring as if the normal world was trying to reassert itself then as suddenly it stopped.

  “Yes, I know Rachel,” I eventually replied.

  They had more questions.

  When did I last see her? What was the nature of our relation ship? Did I know why she might go missing? And, lastly, “What were you doing last Thursday night?”

  I found a form of words. I had last seen Rachel two months previously. We had taken lunch together. We were friends from university days. All this was true in its own way. My words blew about the room and a brief silence followed.

  “And on Thursday night?” repeated Canter.

  On that night, I thought, I came home, showered and slicked my hair back with gel, put on a silver Ciro Cetterio suit and waited for Louie to come in from work with her things in a bag. We stood in the kitchen under a bright light like children at a feast and sniffed amphetamine sulphate from a neat paper wrap. Louie licked all the edges of the wrap then fluffed out her golden hair with a blow-dryer and applied her makeup, squinting a little in the smoke from the cigarette burning in the ashtray by the mirror. Then we went out as we did most nights; alert and bright-eyed, enjoying the clash of sounds, running on sulphate in those whirling hours, accompanied by the stuttering tempo of New Wave in the city clubs, or reggae at the Hippo Club, or the blues dives in Radford and then tumbling home, drunk, wired and forgetful, screwing on the living-room carpet by the light of my fish tank.

  No, I could not tell them that. What I said was that I stayed home alone that night, not wanting Louie to be mixed up with this. They asked me if anyone could verify that I remained at home all evening. I could not, and Canter said that they might have to make checks, speak to neighbours. They asked again if I could think why Rachel would disappear. Did she have enemies? I could not think why Rachel would go. The thought was ridiculous. Perhaps she went because we could not love her enough, we were not fit for her, dear, sweet Rachel who could not think ill of anyone.

  The police seemed satisfied by my subdued responses. Canter wrote the inquiry telephone number down on a blank sheet of session notes on my desk. They took down my date of birth so they could make checks on me. Before leaving, Canter leaned forward over my desk and tugged Rachel’s picture from my hand where I had continued to grip it. I stumbled along behind them back to reception with the late September sunshine falling on to my face through the plate windows, my heart filled with panic at the thought of living in a world without Rachel.

  * * *

  I often think of her waiting for me in the night, sitting there on my empty bed. It happened in France three years after we had first met. I had wandered back through the streets of Alençon after a drinking party. It was lucky that I was on my own. My footsteps resounded on the cobbles of the narrow winding streets and the town hall clock was striking 2 a.m. I turned the corner under the Ricard sign by the bar across from my rooms and was surprised to see a light on in the windows. Rachel had arrived unannounced earlier that evening, having decided to see me one weekend on impulse, travelling all that way to see me from England for just a night. I had not seen her since Christmas. She had taken the rattling country bus from St Malo and had charmed the concierge into letting her in and had waited for me for hours, sitting on my bed in the lamplight. There was relief that I had come home alone and wonder at her naïve, loving gesture of travelling all that way. I will never forget her face in the lamplight, waiting for me like that. I could not resist taking her photo with my little Instamatic. Later in the faint, blue dawn light, unbelieving of her sudden presence, I had reached out from under the bedclothes to touch the heap of clothes that she had left on my bedside chair as she negotiated the unlit stairs in the chill air of the old house, making her way by torchlight up to the bathroom on the next floor.

  She had to return to England next morni
ng to catch a ferry home in time for work. After we had awoken I watched her sitting on the same rickety bedside chair, pinning up her long hair, still talking, mumbling about inconsequential things. The pins in her mouth moved as she spoke, as I gazed at her and listened to her harmless chatter. She sprayed a little Opium atomiser on to her neck from a yellow flask. That intense, spicy scent remained on my pillow for days. Next she came over to the bed and laid the side of her cool face on my hot naked belly, and I placed my hands on her head, feeling the coils of hair and the little pins catching at my fingers. “Your tummy — it’s rumbling. Time for breakfast,” she said, and we scrambled up and went across the road in the clamour of Saturday-morning market traffic to the zinc-topped tables of the corner bar. We sat as the coffee swirled in front of us, and I watched her fingers with their bitten nails tearing at sachets of sugar. My eyes were on her face, searching its expression lines, noticing the faint pits on her forehead from the measles she had caught when we were students and I had nursed her back to health a year before. Her clear grey-blue eyes with their large black pupils returned my gaze, and then she leaned forward and put up her hand to touch my face as if to remember it better.

  We walked back through a street market and stopped by the stalls. I bought her a silver bracelet with amethysts — her birth stone, with the clasp in the shape of two hearts joined together. The street seller had offered it to us as we paused by her stall saying, “L’améthyste, celle est une pierre sacrée, pour la protection.”

  Then we went back to my rooms, an hour left before she had to go. She quietly pulled up her red cotton shirt, one button pinging off to settle under my bed, lying back, giving herself to me as I pressed myself to her one last time. Before she left she clipped the bracelet on to her left wrist, turning it in the light from the window saying, “I’ll always wear it to remember this moment”, then we rushed down to the bus station, her hand burningly hot in mine. I felt a prickle of childish tears, yet I also felt a strange relief to see her go as I watched her make her way with her duffel bag slung over her shoulder, awkwardly climbing up the steps on to the bus, squeezing through the bustle of farmers’ wives and children in town for market. And when the bus left with a rattle and a cloud of diesel fumes I could just see her hand fluttering, waving goodbye to me out of one of the narrow side windows before the vehicle turned away on the road north.

  We had first met as students three years before on a December afternoon in England as we ran to lectures in a rattling, icy shower. We had both happened to pause for shelter under a laurel shrub by a path as she struggled to open her umbrella. I offered to help her and she had allowed it. That’s how I first remember her — a tall girl laughing with flakes of sleet clinging to her long hair. She had laughed as I also had difficulty opening the stumpy little brolly, and she had shared its shelter with me in her impulsive, informal way as we walked on awkwardly together with the flakes of ice rustling on the fabric. We spoke a little to each other, and I remember wind-driven strands of her hair flicking me lightly across the face as we went along. We rushed inside the lecture halls, and that afternoon we saw each other again as we came out and waved shyly to each other. We were both studying languages, both nineteen and in our first term at the university and new to the city. I could not stop thinking of her after our brief meeting, and I waited for her outside the lecture halls over the next few days and looked for her among the knots of long-haired students. I saw her walking with her girl friends a week later and joined her on the path, her companions falling discreetly back as we crossed the grass of the campus to the halls of residence. We talked as we strolled, clutching our folders, and by the end of that walk we had come to an unspoken understanding. I never really asked her out; we simply became attached.

  We were together for five years and were bound by our initial fierce attraction and by our painful immaturity. When I think of those days, I again see the line of her pants under a cotton floral dress as she walked in front of me to lectures. I remember the lingering musk smell of her on my fingers and the glowing image of her face in profile and the delicate scroll of her neck illuminated by candlelight in my student rooms. I can still hear her breathy voice and slightly odd English, for her first language was German. I remember men looking at her as she walked by my side, seemingly unconscious of her effect on them. I also think now of her tearfulness, her trustful nature, her serious eyes searching mine; her puzzlement at my evasions and her bouts of doubt and insecurity which soon blew over.

  Once, walking together in our early days, we came across a small sapling in grassland by the side of a road, loaded with dozens of young swallows which, for some reason, had chosen to cluster on the little tree, clinging to the branches in moving knots and bunches. We stopped to watch as more and more swallows arrived on the tree, bending and overpowering it until it went right over and the topmost branches touched the ground. As we stood there I noticed tears coursing down her cheeks and when I asked why she was crying she replied, “I know it’s silly, and I don’t know why, but that little tree just reminded me of us ... what will happen to us.”

  I could not tell what this scene meant to Rachel. Perhaps she sensed that we would overwhelm each other in the end and that we needed separation. We never lived together, nor do I recall us ever discussing the likelihood of it. We were both solitary in our own way, and maybe our separation was prefigured in all that passed between us.

  Three years passed with us together in a self-contained sort of way. I am sure at the time that we assumed that it would always be like that but I had to spend a further year in France as part of my degree. I was sent to Alençon in Basse-Normandie teaching English to bored teenagers in the last year of the baccalaureat, living in rented rooms high up in an old house in the Rue du Temple near the corn exchange. Meanwhile she had begun the first year of teacher training, staying on in the city that we had shared.

  We had parted in a matter-of-fact way as if leaving each other for a weekend. At first it was a sweet pain to be apart, and I half enjoyed the first lonely nights in Alençon with the drunks howling in the empty streets after the Toussaint’s holiday festival, listening to the rattly sound that Citröens used to make accelerating over the cobbles in the early hours; watching from the dirty windows of my flat on weekends as the rain drifted over the limes outside. I looked forward to her letters which arrived faithfully, saving them as I walked to the school to read them in the staffroom with a coffee and Disque Bleu before classes. They were sunny, chatty, hopeful letters that spoke of ordinary life at home. I arranged for occasional phone calls between us from a cubicle in the Bureau de Poste. It was strange and moving to hear her faint voice against the babble and noise of the reception area outside.

  I cured my restlessness by long walks in the surrounding maize and sorghum fields and with bicycle rides to the beech-covered uplands. But gradually I grew used to being apart from her, little by little I turned to other distractions and fell in with a new set of friends — mainly young teachers, some of them former soixante-huithards hiding out in the provinces. They were radical and passionate, and nights were spent drinking, debating and flirting. I think they were flattered to have a young foreigner with them, and I, in turn, was pleased to be in their company. I returned home at Christmas, and our separation seemed only to have sharpened our ardour. All seemed well between us, although I returned to France readily enough, and, as the months rolled round, although Rachel’s letters continued to arrive, my replies to them grew more delayed.

  Despite everything that she could do to keep our link alive that year in France, this was really the end of this phase of our being together. I had showed that I could live without her. I had become more wordly; looking at others, yearning for others, sleeping with others, and after that knowledge there could be no going back. When I returned to England her simple gifts seemed not enough and her embrace a constriction. I felt there was something unserious, childish even about our love, and I took our world apart piece by piece. She tolerat
ed my growing absences, although it grieved her, and I could not conceal my unresponsiveness and the fading of my belief in us. We still sometimes went away together; we took trips riding on my motorcycle and spent a holiday in Italy — once staying in rainy, autumnal Pisa for a few weeks. Eventually, however, there were longer periods apart and rows sometimes engineered by me. How ashamed I am about them now. And in the end I passed the virus of loneliness on to her.

  Within three years of my return from France I informed her one early winter that there was someone else in my life and that we should end our relationship. I told her this while we were on an old double-decker green corporation bus as it shuddered along the boulevards, and yet it was I who wept for what I had done as the bus rattled along and she who did the comforting with an arm around me while I sobbed in a selfish paroxysm of guilt and loss on that narrow, hard bus seat.

  Later Rachel sent my letters and photographs back to me in a gesture of hurt. I eventually returned them to her once the shock of parting had healed (they were to be found by the police searchers), for although this was a painful ending, a severing of the safe bonds of first love, we had merely passed to another stage of our relationship. In truth we never really left each other or gave each other up, although we both took lovers and allowed others to believe that they were special also. After a pause of a year or so there was an exchange of letters and a resumption of seeing each other. There was something arousing in the familiar prod of her belly against mine as we embraced again, and so began a slower rhythm of meeting, a process of not letting each other go. We began to meet, coming together especially on significant days of the year linked to our previous life together which Rachel commemorated and which I viewed with amused tolerance at the time, yet which later were to become secret anniversaries of the heart that I would celebrate when we were apart and she was quite gone from me.