by Simon Mawer
Where was she?
When was she?
Again she opened the door but this time she summoned enough courage to peer out into the corridor. ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’
Her words fell on deaf walls.
Her head still ached, her mouth was still dry and now she felt the familiar gnaw of hunger. She drank more water, then sat on the bed and went back to her memories, more calmly now, trying to unpick the clues from the dross. Tony Bright in a pub. Her parents looking at her with concern. Alan there as well at times. But also Clément and Benoît and Véronique, which was impossible. And then the whole jumble of words and images, faces she knew and faces she didn’t, as in a dream. She peeled off the plaster in the crook of her elbow and examined the smudged bruise beneath the skin and the bleak red point at its centre. There was another puncture point on her left thigh, which brought back a memory of the inside of a taxi and Tony Bright pulling at her skirt and petticoat and telling her that it would be all right, just to relax, that she would be all right.
Tony Bright.
Quietly, not wanting to awaken the ghosts of the building, she took her clothes from the wardrobe and laid them out on the bed. Then she removed the surgical gown and dressed. Lipstick from her handbag brought some colour to her deadened lips and pallid cheeks. Powder from the silver compact Alan had given her made it something like the face of Marian Walcott that she wanted the world to see.
It was ten to twelve.
One of the instructors spoke to her from a decade ago. Always try and improvise a weapon of some kind. A gun gives you advantage over someone with a knife; a knife gives you an advantage over someone with a stick; a stick gives you an advantage over someone unarmed. She felt an absurd, childish snatch of excitement as she took the wooden coat hanger from the wardrobe, broke out the cross piece, pulled off the hook and created a weapon of a kind.
You get inside someone’s guard and you can kill him with a stick, the voice said. Even you lovely ladies.
She slung her handbag over her shoulder and opened the door. There was no one. Cautiously, she went down the corridor. At the far end was a window framing the brilliant green of trees. Stairs went down to a hallway. There was no stair carpet, just the bare, unpainted wood where a carpet might once have been. Holding the banister and treading softly she went down. No carpet downstairs, no furniture even, just the bleak look of emptiness. No pictures on the walls, bare light bulbs from the ceiling, a few panes of stained glass in the front door creating the only decoration – some kind of fleur-de-lis design throwing splashes of red and blue and green across the walls.
She peered into empty rooms and smelled dust and paint. A kitchen at the back gave some evidence of recent occupation, the vague hint of food on the air, like an imperfect memory. She went back to the hall and tried the front door. It was unlocked. She sat on the bottom stair while fear wormed its way into her bowels like a parasite. Here was safe. Crouching here inside, was safe. Outside the demons waited.
She breathed deeply as Dr Morgan had told her. But Dr Morgan had helped her against irrational fear – the fear she had now was entirely rational. Were they waiting for her outside?
At half past twelve she opened the front door and looked out onto a gravel driveway. It curved away from the house between ill-kempt, herbaceous borders towards a gate.
She was somewhere in the country, but where was she?
It was half past twelve, but when was she?
Softly she stepped out onto the gravel. It was impossible to keep her footsteps quiet but no one seemed to notice as she ran across to the bushes at the side of the drive. Behind her the house – a mock Tudor mansion – looked out on the world with blank eyes. Keeping to the shadows, she made her way down the drive towards the gate and the road beyond. There were fields and trees and birdsong all around her. There were cows in a meadow across the road and a distant view of a wooded hill and a church tower.
Turn left or right?
She dropped her improvised weapon and turned left. A ten-minute walk brought her to a village – a small collection of houses round a green; a pub called the Chancellor’s Arms; a church dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel. There was a village shop with a telephone kiosk beside it. Covenham, the name sign said.
She remembered her first outing in France immediately after the parachute drop, how she’d walked into the town of Lussac trying to look as though she belonged while feeling every eye on her. Now she felt the same, walking into an unknown village somewhere in England, attempting to look as if she knew where she was and what day it was.
A bell tinkled as she opened the door into the village shop. A man came out from the back and looked suspiciously at her, sucking his teeth as though he had just put them in. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she said. ‘I just wanted a paper.’
‘Which one?’
‘The Guardian?’
‘We don’t have the Guardian.’
‘The Daily Mail, then.’
He handed over the paper. There was the date across the top. Monday. Three days. And there, at the bottom left of the front page, was her photograph. It was an old image, the one used for her identity card during the war. Her hair was permed and made a halo round her face, and the face had that look of unsmiling insouciance that she remembered. ‘War Heroine Vanishes’, was the headline.
She kept her head down as she searched for change in her purse. ‘Can you tell me exactly where I am? I’ve been walking and I’m rather lost. Well, walking – my car had a puncture, actually.’
He sniffed and manoeuvred his teeth. Was he recognising her? ‘Centre of the universe, we are. Covenham.’
‘Yes, I saw the sign …’
No further information seemed to be forthcoming. She found the right coins and handed them over. ‘I’ll have to phone. Is the phone outside all right?’
‘Right enough. Push button B when you’re done. Phone works but something’s broke inside and you’ll get your money back even after the call.’
She paused at the door, trying to keep her face turned away from him. ‘The house along the road. I passed it a while back. Mock Tudor.’
‘The Vale? Been unoccupied for a year or more. There was a bit of coming and going there over the weekend. Estate agents, probably, with clients. Why d’you ask?’
‘I just wondered. Thought it looked nice.’
She rang Alan’s work number and waited while a secretary put her through. There was a silence on the other end of the line when she spoke her name. She had to imagine his expression and discovered that she couldn’t. Was he angry, was he relieved, was he bewildered? She just couldn’t tell. All he said, after a long pause, was, ‘Jesus Christ, Marian, where the hell have you been?’ And now she could sense fear even over the telephone line. He’d contacted her parents and Ned, of course. He’d been ringing round the hospitals and then he’d called the police out. It had even been in some of the papers.
‘I’ve just seen,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know if it was another turn, you know. That fugue business again. Or whether you might have walked out on me, or had an accident. I had no idea.’ And she couldn’t explain to him, not over the phone, perhaps not even face to face. A kidnap, some kind of clinic, visions, hallucinations, dreams, unconsciousness, and waking to an empty house. The whole story seemed ridiculous. ‘Please come and get me, Alan,’ was most of what she said.
‘Where are you?’
‘A place called Covenham.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘I’ve no idea. I can’t ask them what county I’m in, can I? I’ll sound mad.’
But maybe she was mad. Maybe this whole affair was somehow her fault, a product of her own, deranged mind. A fugue state. Frantically she looked round the telephone booth. ‘Wait. There’s the directory. It’s Surrey. I must be in Surrey.’
‘I’ll find it on the map,’ he said. ‘Give me the number of the telephone, stay right there and I’ll ring you back.’
So s
he waited in the confines of the telephone booth, feeling vulnerable, feeling trapped, feeling the rough tides of panic ebbing and flowing inside her. Five minutes later the phone rang and it was Alan’s voice telling her that if the traffic was all right, he’d be with her in an hour.
She replaced the receiver and thought for a moment. Then she picked up the phone once more, dialled directory enquiries and got the number for University College London.
The university switchboard knew no one by the name of Tony Bright, and certainly not in the German department. Nor Anthony Bright. There was an Andrew Briggs in Zoology, did she mean him?
She didn’t.
She left the phone booth and took refuge in the saloon bar of the pub, beneath the lowering black beams and the horse brasses and the sulphurous smell of yesterday’s fire. The place was almost deserted. A couple of farm labourers were in the public bar next door laughing over something or other but the saloon bar was empty. ‘We can run you up some sandwiches,’ the man behind the bar told her. ‘Cheese and pickle all right?’
‘Cheese and pickle would be lovely. And I’d like a beer, please.’
‘Would that be bitter or mild?’
Mild, she decided. Mild sounded wonderful. Lenitive and soothing.
‘You been in before?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘’Cos I thought I recognised you.’
She smiled and averted her head and took her pint of mild over to a dark corner. After a while two young men came in. They glanced at her crouching in the corner but all they saw was a rather ill-kempt woman with evasive eyes. More interesting were sports cars and tractors and government subsidies.
Bright, she thought. Tony Bright, the lecturer who didn’t exist.
Fifty minutes later she saw Alan’s Riley draw up beside the phone booth and she went out to meet him.
Home
‘I just don’t know,’ she said shaking her head and fighting tears. ‘I just don’t know.’ They were closed in the car, on the way back home. She felt violated, as though she had been tied down ankle and wrist and they had queued up to abuse her.
‘How could you not know?’ Alan protested. ‘For God’s sake, you’ve spent two days out of contact with anyone and you don’t know?’
‘I’m sorry, darling, I just don’t.’ She so rarely called him darling. Darling seemed like a confession of something she hadn’t previously been able to own up to. Here she was, in the passenger’s seat beside him, trying not to cry and calling him darling. Was it that which convinced him? He remembered her strange fugue, those few hours out of touch with the world. He wasn’t a fool. He knew it was easy enough to throw accusations around, but he was intelligent enough to see there was once again something disturbing in her manner – a sense of distraction, a bewilderment about the missing days. ‘My mind’s a blank. Like that other time. You remember – the Old Oak Roadhouse, wasn’t it?’
He glanced across at her, seeing her vulnerable and distraught as she had been when they’d first met. Someone struggling with demons. ‘Another of your turns? We must get you to hospital.’
‘I want to go home.’
‘You’re ill.’
‘I feel all right. Tired but all right. A bit headachy.’
‘And I’ve got to deal with the police and the newspapers—’
‘Why were the newspapers involved?’
‘Because I wanted to find you, for Christ’s sake. How else was I going to get your face seen all over the country?’
They reached the flat in sullen silence. Were there people watching? As they turned in at the entrance and went down into the basement car park she tried to see. Was there anyone waiting for her return? She glimpsed the occasional pedestrian walking past, a customer coming out of the furniture shop across the road, a parked car with a man sitting in the driver’s seat. It could be anything.
Down in the basement was only bare concrete and the smell of oil.
Hospital
They admitted her to hospital for observation, that euphemism for medical ignorance. Once again, X-rays and electroencephalographs told them nothing. Physical examination told them nothing. A doctor made her touch her nose and walk in straight lines, one foot in front of the other, and stand with her arms out straight in front, and that told them nothing. The doctor talked with her in that oblique, evasive manner characteristic of his kind, asking her questions a young child might struggle with – what was the date? what was her date of birth? what was the Prime Minister’s name? where, in all the possibilities in the world, did she live? – and receiving the correct answers with something like disappointment. There was an awkward moment as he examined her when he took hold of her left arm and held it straight to display the needle mark in the crook of the elbow. ‘What’s this?’
She shrugged. ‘I gave blood last week.’
He palpated the puncture with its little halo of inflamed flesh. ‘It looks recent.’
‘I bruise easily.’
He considered the wound for a moment and then moved on to other things, tapping, peering, prodding, finding nothing wrong, nothing to account for the fact that of the last three days she remembered almost nothing. It seemed, he decided, she had suffered a fugue, something deep inside the brain where the subjective elements of experience and personality merge intangibly with the physical world of neurones and synapses. He leafed through her papers. ‘I see that this has happened before,’ he said, as though that explained everything.
The next day her parents came to visit, bringing flowers and biscuits and grapes. Arrangements had been made for Dr Morgan to see her once she had been discharged. That was the best thing, wasn’t it? And she could stay with them when she came to see him.
Couched in the world of nursing and doctors, of people making decisions on her behalf, she felt lulled by a spurious security. But she knew she was not secure. Outside they were waiting for her to make a move.
Convalescence
I heard about Marian’s disappearance through a phone call to my digs from my mother.
‘Have you seen?’ her voice asked, in that particular pitch which told me that even if I had, she was going to tell me all over again. But I hadn’t, I really hadn’t.
‘Well, apparently she’s vanished. It’s all over the papers. The police are dealing with it but I think she may have run off. You saw her not long ago, didn’t you? How did she seem?’
‘It was a couple of months.’ It was also a delicate matter and I was relieved that we were speaking on the phone so my mother couldn’t see my blushes. ‘She seemed fine. Fun, funny, you know how she can be.’
‘She’s deeply disturbed, Sam. She might seem fine but she’s deeply disturbed.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘I know, darling, I know. Look, I must dash now but I’ll keep you posted.’
Two days later she phoned again to report that Marian had been found safe and sound. ‘What on earth happened?’ she wondered aloud.
I had no idea.
‘I think I’ll give her a ring and find out.’
‘It’s none of your business,’ I told her.
‘What use is a friend if not in a moment of crisis?’ But moments of crisis had nothing to do with it – Mother was just desperate to get the inside story. A few days later another call brought the news that Marian had had some kind of nervous breakdown, wandered off on her own with no idea where she was or even who she was. ‘You know, like Agatha Christie,’ mother said.
‘What the hell’s Agatha Christie got to do with it?’
‘It happened to her. I remember it in the papers, years ago before the war. My parents were agog but I thought it sounded quite good fun. Becoming someone else for a few days, taking a new name. Anyway, now it’s happened to Marian, poor thing. And apparently it’s not the first time.’
‘How do you know all this? Have you been talking to Hercule Poirot?’
‘Don’t be facetious. I spoke to Marian herself yesterday. I must say sh
e sounded pretty good, said it was all over and she was none the worse. Incidentally, she sent her love. She’s very fond of you, you know that?’
‘She’s felt guilty ever since she broke my collarbone.’
‘That’s being unfair. Look, why not give her a ring? She’d love to hear from you.’
But I didn’t, for a long time I didn’t. I contemplated the idea but my courage failed. Had things been different, had there not been that single occasion when the barriers between us had come down, I might have dared. But I could only see her through the distorting prism of that night, and the subsequent bathos of the morning after. And courage failed me.
Acrostic
Marian Sutro travelling to Oxford for her weekly appointment with the psychiatrist. She watches for watchers and knows she is jumping at shadows, yet still she jumps. At her parents’ house she indulges in those little internecine skirmishes that go on within families. They fuss over her as though she is an invalid; she protests that she is an adult and does not need their tiresome attentions. ‘We’re only trying to help, Squirrel,’ her father says. But it was only when she asked him directly that he admitted he had received a second envelope, just like the first, addressed to her.
‘You were going to keep it from me!’
‘Of course I wasn’t, Squirrel. I just think, perhaps—’
She demanded that he give it to her – ‘It’s outrageous to keep something from me like that. Anyone would have thought I was a stupid teenager’ – and reluctantly he handed it over.
It was a full letter this time, sealed in an envelope with only her name on the outside – Mrs Marian Walcott – but this time her father had kept the outer envelope as well. It bore Swiss stamps and a Basel postmark.
‘What is this all about, Squirrel? This sort of thing can’t help your state of mind.’
‘My state of mind is fine.’