by The Prisoner
She sighed. “We have to do this, don’t we? God, if I’d thought when I began my life of sin, that I’d be spending an evening like this some day, hearing the whole thing played back at the wrong speed, I’d have stayed at the University and taught courses in Pound and Eliot. Well, if we must we must, but do try and act more like the bewitched, bewildered lover you claim to be and bring me another drink, that’s a mercy.”
He described, for Lorna, the Liora he remembered: her flat on Chandos Place, and its furnishings; the names and characters of maids she had employed; her preferences in art and music. He recounted the day, years before, that he had accompenied her to the V & A to have a teapot identified: she’d been told it was New Hall and quite valuable.
“Thatcouldn’t be me,” she protested. “I know nothing about porcelain and care less.”
“And cathedrals? You were always driving off to the cathedral towns.”
She shrugged. “I go into any great pile of masonry when it’s put in my path, but I wouldn’t drive ten miles out of my way for St. Peter’s itself.”
“You don’t know Salisbury? Or Winchester? Or Wells?”
“I know Americans used to be hot for such cultural plums, but that was acentury ago. This Liora of yours sounds like a heroine in Henry James.”
“Liora couldn’t read James. She said he was antiquated.”
“And I’ve readall of him. Also, I gather from your account of the dinner that she fancied herself a gourmet.While my friends have been known to say behind my back thatI have a wooden palate. But continue with your portrait: eventually you’ll have to see it doesn’t represent me.”
He inventoried, as best he could, clothes he’d seen Liora wearing, and Lorna contradicted each blouse, slip, and scarf on his list.
“And,” she added, “the most damning evidence, as I see it, is that you say you’re familiar with everything I’m wearingnow . I’m reminded of the way ducklings learn to know their mother. There’s a crucial moment just after they hatch when their brains areprinted with the image of any large moving thing about them, and that thing, whatever it may be, becomes ‘Mother.’ I’m beginning to believe that there was a Liora, once, somewhere. Your description is too circumstantial to be entirely fanciful. Whatthey’ve done is to erase the face in the portrait; then, when I arrived, they triggered theprinting mechanism, so that my face, the physical me including the mannerisms and tricks of speech you say are hers, became your new definition of ‘Liora.’ They might have selected me on account of some point of resemblance, or, as I’d prefer to think, they rummaged in your past for the woman who most resembledme . I have enough vanity to want to be the focus of their scheming, rather than a convenient rack to hang your memories on.”
“I’ll admit that the evidence, as it piles up—”
“As it doesn’t,” she corrected.
“I’ll admit it looks damning,” he went on. “But who does it damn?I don’t know.”
“You really do want to find a way out for both of us, don’t you? You don’twant to think ill of me.”
“Yes, I’m that big a fool. I like you too much, even—” Heturned away from her angrily, though his anger was not with her.
She caught hold of his hand. “Even as Lorna?”
The hands tightened about each other.
“So. You like me too much. And love … does that come into it? No, don’t answer, just let me see your eyes.”
Once more they stared at each other in the incandescent glare, and this time each of them supposed he saw, behind the masks, a kind of truthfulness, the real face of the other person.
“Yes,” she said, lowering her eyes, “somethingregisters. Not a memory, though. Only a kind of sadness. I wish, I really do, that Icould remember you. I wish … if we could justignore the past. No, I see we can’t.”
“Isn’tthis a kind of proof?” he insisted. “You don’t strike me, even doubly divorced, as someone who falls headlong in love.”
“A proof? Even if I let myself believe your story, Number 6, I’d have to doubt your intentions. Lovers can commit treason. Especially lovers.”
Her hand had grown slack in his. He placed it on the arm of her chair.
“They can,” he admitted. “I’ve seen it happen.”
“Though even then, a kind of love survives. Judas, for instance, might have felt a terrible tenderness at the moment of that kiss.”
“He might have. Though he forfeited, with the same kiss, any claim to have its sincerity believed.”
“Belief! All my life I’ve wanted tobelieve things. Knowledge always gets in the way. I want to believe you knew me, that we were in love. I want to believe I was theprincess you described, with my own–what kind of teapot was it?”
“New Hall. You found it on Portobello Road for just ten pounds.”
“How clever of the person I wish I’d been. I want to have had a posh flat just off the Strand, and a number that isn’t listed in the Directory. What was it, by the way? It’s details like that will make me really belive in your Liora.”
“COVentry-6121.”
The hands tensed; fingers knotted about the slender bowed mahogany. Her face froze into a sudden mask of disinterested curiosity; terror swirled beneath the brittle surface. “You called me at that number … often?”
“Often, off and on.”
“When was the last time you rang it?”
“When I was in London last Friday. It had been disconnected.”
“But you said, before, something about a wrong number. You talked to someone at a bookshop. What did they say to you?”
“Only that I had a wrong number.” The memory rested, invisible, on a high shelf: by streching, his fingertips could brush its edges.
“What bookshop? Who spoke to you?”
It tumbled off the shelf and shattered: a stain spread across the carpet. “A woman. And it wasn’t a wrong number, exactly. The first three letters of the exchange were the same, but I’d given it a different name. It was you?”
“It was me. I’d completely forgotten that. I only remember how you made me go to some sort of trouble. You said you were calling from out of town.”
“From here. It was the day I arrived. But–why did you pretend to be a bookclerk?”
“Iwas at Better Books. Look in the directory–that’s it’s number.”
“But you’renot a bookclerk!”
“A friend of mine was to give a reading there that evening, a poet. He’d gone into the basement with the manager and left me to look after the counter. The shop was empty. That’s how Ihappened to answer the phone. My God, I can remember almost every word of it now! I thought it was some tedious practical joke. You made me look down the list of exchanges to make certain there wasn’t a COVentry exchange somewhere in the suburbs.”
“How long were you in the shop, altogether?”
“Not five minutes. That was the only call I answered. How did you pick just that moment to call?”
“It was completely spontaneous. Completely, Liora. I’d been sitting at the—”
“Damn it, don’t call me Liora!”
“But this means you are Liora. It’s the link we were looking for. It’s the one crack they forgot to putty.”
“It’s nothing of the sort. My presence in the shop was just as unpremeditated. We’d been up and down Charing Cross all that afternoon, and we only stopped in to pick up posters for the reading. I didn’t even return that evening. Only someone who’d followed me would have known I was there.When you called .”
“It’s not possible. We couldn’t both justhappen to—”
“No, we couldn’t. It’s certain that one of us is lying. It’s certain.”
“But why would either of us tell such a foolish lie? Whywould I have mentioned making the call, if I’m lying? Just to be proven a liar?”
“No, Iwon’t go through all this again. I refuse to. I’m very tired. I was told that you’d show me where I’m supposed to stay. Needless to say, I can’t accep
t the offer of yourprivate hospitality.”
“Liora, or Lorna if you prefer–Ibelieve you now. That is—”
“That is, you believe I’m sincere in my delusions. And you want to help me become my old self again. And when you’ve restored me to my former glory, what then, eh? How do you intend touse me?”
“Believe me, I—”
“Believe you? I understand that if you torture a person long enough, you can make them believe anything. We don’t call it torture now, though. What is the pleasanter term they’ve adopted? Behavior therapy. I suggest you try that.”
“I want to help you. I’ll do anything I can help you. I can’t be plainer than that.”
“There’s one thing you can do to help me, Number 6–set me free.”
“I’m not your jailer, Liora. I am … a prisoner.”
He had refused, before, to say this in just so many words. Now, the proposition seemed inarguable: hewas a prisoner. He could not set another free when he was not free himself.
And he was not free.
“Then,” she said scornfully, “if you’re determined to keep up your role of ‘prisoner,’ help me to escape. You say you’ve managed one escape for yourself. Manage one for me.”
“Yes, I’ll do that. We can’t discuss it, here, for the reasonI explained. But I have another notion, and we should be able to bring it off. With a little help.”
“Notwe , my would-be-darling–me. You’ll help me escape, all by myself. If I left here with you, how would I ever know I’d escaped?”
“I’ll go that far too. I’ll help you escape by yourself.”
“And, if you do, and you succeed, I might even come to believe you. Eventually.”
“When, later on, I get out of here myself …”
She shook her head sadly. “A rendezvous?” As she spoke it, the word took on an almost tangible quality, as though what he’d offered her as a diamond she’d handed back to him in an envelope, a powder of paste.
“Not immediately,” he assured her. “We could let a year go by.”
“An entire year? And where should we celebrate the anniversary of my escape? At the terrace restaurant? In the hospital? Then we might invite the pretty white-haired doctor.”
“All right, we’ll make no plans. It may come about by chance.”
“I don’t know, after this evening, if I’ll ever believe in chance again. Enough! Take me to my hotel now. I’m sure the warden is beginning to worry about me.”
She rose from the chair. They stood beside each other, close enough to embrace, without embracing, yet without moving apart.
“I’ll have to call one of their taxis,” he said. “We aren’t permitted to walk the streets after curfew. The patrols are not friendly.”
But he did not go toward the telephone, nor did she seem to expect him to.
“You’ll have your memories, at least,” she said, in a softer voice. “I’ll have nothing. Not even my own identity, if what you say is true.”
“You’ll have your freedom. You want it, don’t you?”
“Yes.” She smiled bittersweetly, touching the emerald pendant on her throat. “And at any price.”
He remembered, after she had left, her words that evening at the Connaught:If you can’t trust me, you’ll never be able to trust anyone . It summed up the situation nicely.
Had she, that long ago, meant it to?
Chapter Fourteen
Number 14
“Come in, Number 6,” the doctor said, snapping shut her compact, “and take off your clothes. Thank you for being so punctual.”
“Thank the guards who brought me.”
“You’relooking very well,” she said, handing him a hanger for his trousers.
“Shouldn’t I? Was I infected with something the last time I was here?”
“So far as I know this hospital has never had a single case of staph infection, if that’s what you mean. This is only a routine examination. Let me see your tongue.”
He stuck out his tongue. She wrote something on the card clipped to her board.
“What did you write on the card?” he asked, once his tongue was back in his mouth.
“That it’s pink. You show nosymptoms of any kind?”
“None.”
“Palpitations? Giddiness? Shortness of breath?Tension? ”
“Not a trace.”
“Your dreams?”
“Exhibit neither sex nor violence. The entire family could be allowed to see them.”
She tossed back waves of white hair to plug a stethoscope in her ears for auscultation. He breathed slowly or rapidly as she required.
“I hear so much from my brother,” she chattered, as though his internal processes were of interest to her only as background music, “about the lively process you’ve set in motion. I’ve never seen him work so hard at anything before. And not only my brother–everyone seems to be catching fever from it. Now breathe quickly. Yes, like that. What I couldn’t understand is whyyou should have become, all of a sudden, so civic-minded. When I last saw you, at your cottage, you showed something bordering on contempt for the greatness we were thrusting on you. Now, cough.”
He coughed.
“And again. Good. You can talk now.” She scribbled numbers on the card.
“Can I get dressed?”
“No, there are still your reflexes to be tested. Sit up there where your feet can dangle, and tell me about your change of heart.”
“It’s no change of heart. I’m doing this for myself, not for the Village. Ever since college, where I did a bit of acting, I’ve wanted to direct this play. There was seldom opportunity and never time. Here, there is plenty of time, and your brother, by arranging all the business of permits, rehearsal space and the rest of that, has provided the opportunity. It was his idea more than mine.”
“Not to hear him speak of it. I must say you’ve rewarded him handsomely enough: thetwo best parts in the play.”
“Your brother is a born actor.”
“The cast is complete now?”
“Very nearly. I had to take the Duke’s part myself. No one else would audition for it.”
“My brother says it’s an awful role–hundreds of lines and every one pure lead. The Duke, by his account, just goes around during the whole play, dressed up like a monk, doing nice things andsaying nice things. Whereas Angelo is amonster of wickedness and hypocrisy.”
“Is that your interpretation or your brother’s?”
“Not mine–I never interpret anything but dreams. Is it a wrong interpretation? I read Shakespeare so long ago that all the plays are muddled together, the comedies especially. I remember that everyone sings a lot and runs around disguised as someone of the opposite sex, and that in the last act they’re all obliged to get married.Measure for Measure –isn’t that the one in the Forest of Arden?”
“No, Vienna. Half the action is set in the city prison. It’s the darkest of the comedies. In fact, the chief thing that makes it a comedy is that everyoneis obliged to get married in the last act.”
“In a prison! Then it’s meant to beedifying! A kind of protest, in fact?” She tapped his kneecap with a ballpeen hammer. His foot jerked reflexively.
“There are correspondences to the world we know. In Shakespeare there always are. But I won’t underline them. The play speaks for itself.”
“The people in this prison,ought they to be there? That will be crucial, if it’s to be effective propaganda. In myown experience, I’ve never found anyone in prison who doesn’t really belong there. Sometimes, as in your case, they must go to the most extraordinary lengths to get in, but once they’ve made it you can see they were always meant to be prisoners. Would Shakespeare agree?”
“On anything concerned with the problem of authority, Shakespeare has two opinions. In this case, everyone in the prison has done something to deserve to be there, but—”
“Then I’m surprised you’ve chosen this play. The way you keep harping on this matter ofyour inno
cence andour injustice—”
“—butits central theme is the gross injustice of the person in charge of the prison.”
“My brother?”
“Angelo, yes. There is, as well, a heroine of unimpeachable innocence, whom this Angelo abuses in the worst way.”
“Don’t tell me–he seduces her.”
“He tries his damnedest. She has come to him, from the convent where she’s a novitiate, to plead for her brother’s life. Angelo has condemned him to death.”
“That’s the other part my brother’s playing, the condemned brother?”
“Yes, Claudio and Angelo are never on the stage together until the very end of the last act, when neither of them has much to say. I thought there was a certain fitness in having the same actor play both the judge and the condemned man, particularly as Claudio’s crime is the same as Angelo’s.”
“Claudio was … concupiscent?”
“That, and carelessness.”
“Playwrights always take these matters so much moreseriously than the rest of us.” Meditatively, she tapped his other knee with her hammer. The foot jounced. “Well, perhaps they have to, if they’re to go on writing plays. Surely, the sensible thing for Claudio and his girlfriend to have done, even in Shakespeare’s day, was to get married.”
“Claudio offers to, the girl is more than willing, and Isabella also tries to convince Angelo of this, when she pleads her brother’s case.”
“Andthat’s when Angelo tries to seduce her. Oh, he is wicked! The story seems to be coming back to me now. Angelo promises to spare Claudio’s life on condition that Isabella surrenders her virtue to him, and when she goes to the dungeon to tell her brother about it,he tries to persuade her todo it. But does she? I remember it both ways–she does and she doesn’t.”
“You’ll have to come and see the play.”
“I suppose your new friend–or your old friend, whichever turns out to be the case–the lady with the black hair, has been handed the plum of Isabella.”
“She read for the part, but she doesn’t have the voice for the grand Shakespearean manner. She’ll be Mariana, and even in that role she’ll be straining.”