No Way to Say Goodbye Read online

  Our meetings were at first hesitant, and one lover or another would hold us for a while, but we settled over the years to usually meeting in school term times. We developed a cryptic way of contacting each other. She would send me a postcard from abroad, usually Bonn or Stuttgart where her father’s family lived or even from places that she must have visited with Layton. It would carry a cheerful, laconic message which was a signal for me to ring her at work a week or so later.

  I grew to love those assignations, something in me enjoying the clandestine and the forbidden. We would meet like spies, almost always at her place, usually agreeing to meet at lunchtime or early afternoon. My feeling of expectancy would mount through the morning and I would enjoy the contrast of my erotic tension with the office routines that trudged on around me. I would invent external appointments, sometimes even a mythical research committee, taking the bleeper if I was on call, and would leave the office, feigning nonchalance, then drive the short journey from the psychiatric unit to the street in a nearby residential quarter where she continued to live until the day she disappeared. I would park a little way down from her address, continuing an instinctively discreet way of being, and would arrive at her door just bringing myself like a business call with no presents or flowers.

  I would press the bell push bearing her name, hearing it trill inside her flat and would pause, shifting my weight, glancing around sometimes to take in her quiet street with the parked cars waiting for their owners, perhaps noticing beads of moisture on the grooved lilac leaves by her door. Then her steps would sound, click, clack in her hallway then clonk as she stepped down on to a wooden step to the door. Then there she was, opening the door to me with an amused expression on her face, offering a cheek to kiss. It was sometimes a shock to see her after a while, for I carried a template image of her in my head as she was when we first met. She would seem unfamiliar for a moment, my eye confused by a new hairdo, by different clothing or an unfamiliar angle to her face as she grew older, then the image would readjust. She also felt this, I guess, and sometimes on first meeting after three months or so we would be cautious, barely touching each other at first. She would usually hand me a glass of white wine when I arrived, her amethyst bracelet still there on her wrist and she would say, “Look, I’ve poured you one already.”

  We would often sit and talk for a while politely, even formally. My eyes would rove over her flat, tuning in to her life again, noticing the same waxy-leaved monstera plant that got slowly bigger each year, the large blue-spined German dictionary always there somewhere on her bookshelves; my gaze running over the modest curve of the oak table leg below the heavy white lace table cover, which she spread in a continental fashion over her dining table. As the wine warmed us she would pull me unspeaking towards the bedroom. And so we would lie embracing, sometimes with the sunlight falling across us from the uncurtained windows. Sometimes she would fall asleep in my arms for a while, breathing softly, and I would lie there, my gaze moving over the Schiele print on her wall, and the view of red rooftops and the upper plumes of a large poplar seen through her open window. In time she would rouse herself and pad away in bare feet to return ceremoniously bringing food to the bedroom on a tray: crusty white bread and dark rye, cream cheese and pink ham and more chilled wine. We would clink glasses and I liked to watch her supple pale back as she leaned over the edge of the bed to fetch out the bottle to fill our glasses again. We would spill wine and breadcrumbs, and I remember her spluttering an unladylike “Oh shit!” then laughing when she bit into a tomato sending a jet of juice and pips to spatter the bedding.

  There was a photo portrait of a man by her bed about whom I never asked — perhaps it was Layton or a predecessor — and she never bothered to turn the picture aside. Sometimes the phone would ring, and she would take the call naked, caressing me with a smile, for we both knew that we would betray others each for each. Sometimes she would tell me of other lovers and erotic films she had seen or fantasies that she had indulged. I would lie there silently, listening, feeling privileged and at peace. We would rarely reminisce. It was as if our lives concentrated on that vivid, present moment. Then, it would be time to go, signalled by the afternoon light failing outside or by a change of mood or an unbidden sigh, and it would be time to re-enter our external lives. We would gaze at each other for a moment, and then I would gather my things, she handing me my tie, my bleeper, my jacket, and I would leave a little drunk, dishevelled, with no words or expressed sentiment. She, closing the door, not following me out, just giving a smile, a look, and there was the ending as it was the last time I saw her. I used to say to myself as I brushed back past her lilac shrub on the front path, “Until the next time”, yet there was to be no next time. Thus we had lived in our strange alliance, not together, liking it that way, holding to a pact which had been set to last.

  * * *

  My psychiatric textbooks spoke of the urge to search for a departed one as the first stage of grief. Back home from work, I drove slowly down the boulevard looking down her road, although I did not then know about her last visit to the Paradise Stores, and, as darkness fell that first night, I began to search, haunting the road outside her flat, walking her neighbourhood and trying to listen to what the place told me. I even stepped into the small garden at her front door, pressing up past the lilac to listen at her darkened windows. Once there I heard the faint warbling of her trimphone above the sound of evening traffic and a distant train shunting in the goods yards. Perhaps it was another lover ringing just to hear her voice saying “Leave a message”, as I also rang many times until three weeks later her phone line was cut off. “Leave a message” — how I longed to do that, and what message would I have given her? I would have told her how much I loved her, although I never said so when she was with me. After listening at her window I stepped up her path to lay my hand on her front door, the image of my hand remaining for a moment, displacing the thin condensate of early autumn chill, then gradually vanishing although her name continued to glow, illuminated by the bell push button, “R. HAUSER” in her familiar handwritten capitals.

  I had to be careful, as the neighbours were alert and, once, all the lights were on in her flat with people moving about. Later, in that first week, someone must have reported me, for a patrol car came cruising down her road shining a light into the shadows. I spent the first days at work hoping that she would ring or leave me a message. As the nights progressed I would give excuses to Louie then wander the city looking in all the places that I could think of — clubs, doorways, lonely bus stations of the sparkling city, driving out to the river to an assignation place where we used to meet once long ago when we sat watching the lights on the cooling towers of the great upstream power station. The following nights I would stumble home late to my flat. Inside, the TV would still be throbbing. Sometimes I would crouch down and stare into the fish tank where the blue tetras continued to dart unconcernedly, and the TV news spoke of the world getting on with things, a fire in Puerto Rico, a bomb in a synagogue in Istanbul, people tumbling, choking, dying, but most of us here secure, watching it all on the screen, and I would lie sleepless in bed thinking: Where are you?

  “What’s the matter, babe?” asked Louie eventually, stroking my sweat-soaked hair one night, aware that I had fallen away from our nightly clubbing, making excuses and showing no appetite for our previous sensual nights. She had begun to go out on her own after a week or so, and sometimes she would ring late at night to ask if she could come over and after a while a taxi would deposit her. I would be roused by the clump of car door closing, or a burst of radio traffic and the clattering sound of a diesel engine, then she would stumble in, illuminated for a moment in the doorway, her hair outlined like a golden halo in the headlamps as the taxi reversed down my drive. She would always be drunk, smelling of smoke and alcohol, her eyes blurry.

  Sometimes she would put on a little girl’s voice, lolling pouting on my sofa, her handbag open, its contents spilling, calling me to screw her. �
�Come on, come on. Fuck me now,” her voice slurring, subsiding into sleep, then she would open her eyes again when I covered her with a coat and she would murmur, “Jack, you’re weird. What you doin’? Don’t you want me?” Her voice would trail off, and I would tuck her into bed like a grim and sober parent, and she would be asleep, sometimes allowing me to unbutton her clothes and slip them off. I would roll her chastely under the covers and she would turn on her side, still murmuring, while I sat up in the night smoking, looking into the gas fire in my front room as it burned blue and orange.

  She would often wake again an hour or two later, quite sober and lucid. It was on one of those nights that she uncharacteristically called to me as I lay beside her, my eyes open in the dark, and she asked what was troubling me. I told her what had happened or a version of it, spoke of an old friend, an old girl friend who had gone missing. I could not tell her more, although I felt ashamed for it, sitting up in my cold room. I could just see her outline in the dark and her glowing cigarette end and heard the intake hiss when she took a drag. She was sympathetic, more sympathetic than I thought she would be, although she preferred to live in the present. Louie understood suffering instinctively, yet there was a cooling afterwards, and as I declined her offers to accompany her clubbing she began to go out more often without me. Sometimes she would ring me to say, “Tonight I’ll stay at mine”; at other times I heard nothing. Once or twice the phone would ring a few times and I guessed it was Louie signalling in some call box in the night. More often she would ring from inside a club. I would hear music thudding and voices.

  “What are you doing?” she would say.

  There would be a long pause with music hammering in the background, then I would ask, “Where are you?” But she would not answer or perhaps did not hear me.

  “Do you love me?” she would ask, and I would say “Yes I do,” and then sometimes I would hear other voices, men’s voices, her speaking to someone else, then “Staying with friends tonight, darlin’. OK?”

  Rachel’s going had somehow collapsed my world. I could not hold together that which once had seemed comprehensible, although despite wallowing in the pain of not knowing about Rachel I could not give Louie up entirely, for we had a strangely obstinate love.

  * * *

  As the time passed I would wake in the mornings with a groan, thinking immediately about Rachel in an unknown dungeon of the lost. I continued to drive slowly past her neighbourhood. At work I would park up in the Fiat, and gaze out on the old cans, the discarded plastic bags and other debris in the brambly scrub of the old asylum grounds. A person could be lying in there for months, even years I thought. I continued to see my patients, watching their hurt mouths and their bruised eyes in the therapy room, yet with my mind turned to my own losses. I avoided my concerned colleagues as best I could, for I knew their gaze.They had noticed the changes in me and tried to draw me out, as when in the staff coffee room my softly spoken supervisor said, “You look preoccupied, Jack,” but I could not accept their help; made excuses and sped away. It was as if Rachel and I preserved our secret life to the last, which I could not admit to anyone else. Each day I followed the progress of the investigation; the national papers had got hold of it and there were articles about Rachel’s pupils and colleagues. Once, Catherine made another appeal on a local TV news programme.

  I could not think of her dead; no, it somehow could not be. I thought of her as a prisoner or as having somehow taken a wrong turning. I visualised her face more intensely than I ever had when we were together and thought how often when we had sex in the early days she would weep. I would gaze down at her, perplexed, not understanding. How those tears would well, washing down her cheeks, wetting her temples and tasting salty on her lips. She would sit up saying, “I’m sorry,” wiping her reddened nose upwards with her hand, laughing unconvincingly, saying, “Drippy Piscean.” She was a tall girl, oval-faced, with a long nose tipping up slightly at the end, a smiling wide mouth with monkeyish expression lines. Her teeth were slightly uneven with a faint, calcareous lightening on the central and lateral incisors. She was smooth-skinned with pale, almost boneless hands and bitten nails which flew to her mouth when she was unsure of anything; there was a mole on her left shoulder which was always pressed down by her bra strap. A tall, narrow-hipped, stumbly young woman who sometimes seemed absent-minded with an other-worldly air, yet at other times showing a surprising sensuality.

  Once, on a raw autumn day, she stood with me at a bus stop wearing her thick black fur coat. I complained of the cold and she opened her coat, wearing just a red cotton mini dress beneath and pulled me to her, wrapping me around with the heavy folds. The heat of her body was so intense that day. Whatever images I conjured up to remind me though, I still felt that Rachel escaped my vision of her. She was always somehow moving ahead of me.

  * * *

  Three weeks passed, the national papers continued to circulate the story speculating and linking Rachel’s disappearance with that of Jayney Kirkman and other girls going missing in the West Country. Each visit to the newsagent became an ordeal. Then there was a sighting, mentioned on local news radio which I heard driving back from work. Rachel had been noticed the weekend after she had disappeared by a woman who had seen the photographs and who had reported that she was certain that she had spotted Rachel walking, deep in conversation with a man on Lincoln railway station, forty miles away, the day after her disappearance. There was a moment of brief hope and an overwhelming desire to drive there at once. The police switched their inquiries, searches went on, and there was a flurry of activity.

  Then the story died and nothing further came of it. She had gone as if by some sleight of hand. Her face confronted me on posters pinned up in her neighbourhood, in bus-station waiting areas and in police-station foyers. There were new searches in nearby gardens and in a public park that she had skirted on the way to work. Police teams combed the nearby railway yards, with their pallet piles, burnt-out wagons and scrubland of buddleia. The canal was again gone over by divers, and boats were checked. I searched too, walking the city, looking everywhere, seeing her in a shop queue, among a gaggle of laughing girls, or huddled in a doorway with a man. Once I chased a bus, running after it, thinking that I had glimpsed her profile among the passengers.

  The local paper reported that the police were seeking a white van seen on the night of Thursday the 4th swerving about on the boulevard near Rachel’s home. A man walking home in the drizzle from the chip shop two hundred yards up from the Paradise Stores had seen a male figure in a white T-shirt, yelling, snarling at someone or something in the back of the vehicle. This piece of news filled me with fear, and with it came anger, forming from my guilt that I had not been there to protect Rachel from the unknown and the terrible. I began to think that in a way I had made her walk alone that September night.

  I joined Louie again after that — seeking distraction — visiting pubs and clubs in the city, drinking, glaring at the men who fringed the bars and bristling in the urinals as I stood there shoulder to shoulder with them. Louie would greet the bouncers flirtatiously, and they would in turn look knowingly at me over her shoulder. She often disappeared into the heaving throng; sometimes I would glimpse her in conversations, doing her deals with her club associates. They could be from any of the many tribes of the time: stocky bouncers in short leather jackets, other men with wedge haircuts and Big Country lumberjack shirts, or punks with studded jackets. Later she would return, gesturing to me to come with her to a shadowy booth beyond the lights of the dance floor, unfolding the paper wrap, swiping off the wet slick of lager from the table top with a drinks mat, snorting up the grey-white powder with a crisp rolled note and feeling the bitter rime trickling into the sinus cavities. Fear would vanish to be replaced by bone-hard will, a chill intent and energy. I would stand on the crowded edges of the dance floors as the music pulsed, watching Louie dancing on her own, frenetic and absorbed, while I swayed in the shadowy margins ringing the dance floors, lookin
g at the faces of the men.

  We would come out eventually, clattering down the stairs on to the street when the club closed; Louie coming home with me, as the revellers streamed out, rolling against me when the taxi pulled away and we sped to the suburbs, the radio calling in rides across the city. She would always be drunk, exhausted by her dancing, the sulphate ebbing from her bloodstream, and sometimes I would drag her into my house, either straight to bed or to loll on my sofa while I watched TV with the lights off. Once, inexplicably and savagely, I took some kitchen scissors and as she lay, seemingly passed out on the sofa and lit by the flickering light of the TV. I cut the buttons off her blouse until her breasts popped out in their soft purple bra cups and then cut the bra straps and sides, releasing her breasts entirely. Still she slept on, face hidden in a tumble of fair hair. I pulled at her black slacks and tugged them down to look at her mounded belly then slid them right off, guiding her bare feet through them. She stirred and sighed, and I paused. I waited until she settled again, cut at her silky dark pants on the narrow part at each side as it stretched around the hip bone and pulled them away, then sat staring at her sex as she lay splayed and still. Later that night I guiltily hid her shredded undergarments, and in the morning she had risen and gone to work before I woke from a dreamless sleep, never mentioning what had happened to her clothes, perhaps lying awake all that time, allowing me to enact that thing.

  A month on I decided to take a risk. I looked up Catherine’s married name in the phone directory of the town where she lived. I rang from a phone box, out of an instinct to hide, and was disconcerted when a child’s voice answered.

  “Hello... Who are you?”