Stranger at the Wedding

by Jack G. Hills

  Patrick was intrigued by Rachel’s proposition, if not a little disturbed by the look of glee on her face and the glint of evil in her eyes, as she postulated one theory after another. There had always been a darker side to her and he’d often wondered if she hadn’t got rid of Tom somehow just to collect his life insurance. After all they’d never found a body and apart from the two letters no one had heard from the man since he’d so mysteriously disappeared the night after dining at Henri’s. That thought rather than alarming Patrick, aroused him more than the sight of Rachel lounging on the bed wearing nothing more than one of Helen’s negligees.

  “You know, I think you ought to introduce your Mr Dickens to Helen… or maybe it should be the other way round. Anyway, the form of initial introduction is irrelevant, it’s the outcome of their liaison that would be more important.” Rachel said tantalisingly. She pushed herself free from the bed and admired herself in the floor to ceiling mirror.

  “You know I’ve got to give it to Helen, she has fantastic taste in lingerie, don’t you think?” Rachel flaunted her body through the sheer Chemise and provocatively stroked herself in the hope that Patrick would forget his troubles.

  “Well what there is of it… and dare I say that’s still too much.”

  Suddenly, all thoughts of Clarence Dickens and their other problems fell to the floor together with the satin Chemise, as Rachel slipped the straps from her shoulders.

  “There is that any better?” Rachel asked demurely, running her hands over the contours of her nakedness.

  “Well it’s a start… but I hope you didn’t have too much for lunch. You know what they say about exercising on a full stomach.” Patrick replied, as he slowly and deliberately started to remove his belt.

  “Well that’s lucky…” Rachel said in her most alluring voice. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast and I’m famished.” She added seductively, playing provocatively with her bottom lip, and knelt on the floor in front of him.

  PART FOUR

  “The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired”

  William Shakespeare: Anthony and Cleopatra

  LOVE, MARRIAGE AND DEATHS

  Autumn 2009

  Dearest Martha,

  I hope my letter finds you and your father well. Please thank him for everything he has done for me so far and for the extra money, which you enclosed with your last letter.

  Sorry I haven’t written for a while, but since my last letter a lot has happened. Do you remember me telling you about Samantha… she was the girl that Dr Woodrow had partnered me with, as part of his Partnership Therapy… well I don’t want to worry you but she turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic with something that Dr Petrie calls delusional psychosis?

  Anyway, please assure your father that his friend, Dr Woodrow, is expected to make a full recovery and although his injuries were very severe, they don’t expect he’ll suffer any permanent disability but his colleagues don’t think he’ll be going back to the clinic anytime soon, which is a shame because before he was injured in the attack I’d like to think we were making some sort of progress.

  Now that reminds me… do you remember the card I found in my shirt pocket? Well I found another one at a place in Ambleside called the Lake View Hotel… It’s new and is part of Mr Fitzgerald’s chain of hotels. By all accounts it’s only been opened a few months… anyway they had cards just like mine, which sort of proves that I must have had some link to one of the other hotels, which as you know are scattered all over the country… hence it’s one of the reasons I’m in Oxford.

  The other is that Dr Woodrow’s colleague suggested I should come here to a place called Witney, to continue my Partnership Therapy sessions. The clinic is called the Wolvercote Clinic and it is an associated establishment to the one in Ambleside. It’s very similar in many ways and the doctors are really helpful and understanding. Like the other clinic, it’s residential but I’m still free to come and go as I please, and you’ll be pleased to know that my new partner isn’t mad… her name is Ingrid and she’s from Sweden they think, although as with myself, most of her history is either fictional or very recent.

  From what they tell me, she was found at the side of the A1 in Hertfordshire, where she’d been the victim of a hit and run accident whilst hitchhiking or that’s what the police think… as for Ingrid herself, she can remember parts of her childhood but nothing else… nothing that is until she woke up in the local Accident and Emergency department.

  She’s very nice but not as pretty as you are… I not sure now is the right time or the best way to tell you how much I miss you, but if the events at Ambleside taught me anything it was how much you mean to me… how much I love you.

  Donald XX

  Donald kissed the envelope and dropped the letter into the tray marked ‘Post’ that sat expectantly on the small demi-lune side table in the entrance hall of the Wolvercote Clinic. Once a day, just before afternoon tea was served, Barnes the clinic’s caretaker cum general factotum took all the post the two miles to the post office in Witney to ensure it made the five pm collection.

  Following the extraordinary goings on at the Ambleside Clinic, Donald had been a little sceptical at first that the post ever left the building. He had visions of it all being opened and read by the staff, as part of some subversive monitoring of their mental conditions, but he’d been quickly reassured by Ingrid, who had followed Barnes on more than one occasion and had watched him drop the letters into the bright red post box, which stood like a palace guard on the pavement outside the town’s post office.

  Donald was learning that paranoia was a fundamental part of any amnesiac’s recovery. Why would you trust any other stranger, when you couldn’t fully trust who you were yourself?

  The Wolvercote Clinic had formerly been the private estate of the Earls of Witney. A family with roots dating back to the Norman invasion and a lineage that had died out with the twenty third earl, who had outlived all his relatives but had subsequently died without a single heir to take on the family’s crumbling building and their noble immense debt.

  A Grade 1 pile of dust and debris, the mansion had finally been acquired by the current owners who had renovated it and converted the building into the Wolvercote Clinic. What grounds were left of the bankrupt estate, after the extensive farmlands had been sold off over the years to satisfy the various banks and the bailiffs, had been sold to a private developer as a prime piece of building land. Now the only grounds that the patients had to wander around were the remarkably well-preserved walled gardens with its parterre, fountain and flower beds… the rest of the Capability Brown gardens having been supplanted by a fine selection of very expensive executive homes.

  After Ambleside, Donald and the other patients who had been transferred to Oxford felt a little uneasy… as if they were not to be trusted… not so much by the staff… but by the Wolvercote Clinic’s existing guests. Trust, unlike paranoia, didn’t come easy to people with poor or no memories but once new partnerships had been established and everyone had been reassured that the person responsible for the knife attacks and subsequent fire had been sent to a secure institution, some degree of normality had returned.

  Ingrid, had soon established herself as a force to be reckoned with. In another life, Donald thought she could have been a Viking’s wife, with her pigtailed blond hair and rather forceful personality. She was pretty and had an insatiable appetite for sex, which had first manifested itself the day after Donald had been partnered with her.

  He’d walked back into his bedroom, after an initial consultation with his new consultant Dr Atkinson, and had found Ingrid sprawled naked on top of his unmade bed. Far from being fazed by her appearance, it had only served to confirm Donald’s first impression that where Ingrid was concerned, what you saw was what you got… it was only parts of her memory that were hidden and whilst Donald had declined her very kind offer to shag him senseless whenever and wherever he wanted… as part of their therapy, he’d so
on learnt that one small rejection didn’t dent Ingrid’s enthusiasm for practising every position in the Kama Sutra and others that she’d dreamt up herself.

  After a week at the Wolvercote Clinic, a week in which he’d taken to looking round corners and taking sneaky peaks into rooms before blindly running the risk of bumping into a rampant Ingrid, he’d been convinced that most of the patients, irrespective of their gender and all of the staff had followed his own cautious approach to her lustful appetite. He’d further concluded, in a completely non-medical or scientific way of course that before she’d lost her memory Ingrid must have either been a parentally repressed virgin or one of the most prolific and naturally gifted prostitutes in Stockholm… there was he decided, no other possible explanation for her insatiable sex drive.

  By the end of the second week Donald, who had managed to fend off all her playful advances and had avoided each one of Ingrid’s carefully laid compromising traps, had begun to dream that he was merely a mouse in a laboratory maze… every time he took a different turn to avoid Ingrid, it merely delayed the inevitable and rather than finding a piece of cheese at the centre of the puzzle, in Donald’s case it had always been a naked Ingrid, sprawled on his bed with her legs enticingly open, inviting him to sample his prize.

  But whatever her sexual foibles and Donald’s increasingly strange adolescent-type dreams, Ingrid was and remained the ideal person for him to partner, if for no other reason than she knew everyone’s secrets, which in a ‘Palace of Secrets’ was pure gold. In the end, trying to lure Donald into some sort of moral decline had become more of a game than any serious attempt to get him into bed. So whilst the others provided some relief for her over rampant libido, Donald provided support and understanding.

  “I’m not that sort of a man Ingrid, sorry. Anyway there is someone else I’m in love with and I couldn’t betray Martha.” He’d implored her for the hundredth time, as she’d playfully and seductively unbuttoned her jeans in the summer house.

  “Martha! Donald she’s hundreds of miles away and will never find out… I mean what harm will one shag do? …and we are supposed to be partners. You’re supposed to be helping me you know and Dr Atkinson says that I’m using sex as a means of trying to remember. By all accounts it’s very common side-effect and one that is completely understandable for people with our problem.” She’d lied in her most alluring voice, as she’d wrapped her arms around him, like an anaconda enveloping its mate.

  “Nice try Ingrid but I don’t believe that Dr Atkinson told you to shag everything in trousers or preferably out of trousers… did she? And probably Martha wouldn’t know if we slept together, but I would.” Donald had tried to explain from the wonderfully high moral ground where he had taken a final defensive stand.

  “Martha… Smartha! I guarantee you haven’t told her you love her, and I bet she’s not so much as offered you a kiss yet… whereas me, I’m offering you pure heaven Donald.” Ingrid teased and stroked the front of his trousers. Actions always spoke louder than words and when actions failed, Ingrid then reverted to her own version of amusing, emotional blackmail.

  “Look if you’re a virgin and don’t know what to do…” Ingrid threw down the gauntlet. “…that’s fine I can teach you. And let’s face it, when you do finally get ‘Martha the Martyr’ into the sack, you’re going to want to look as though you’ve done more with your dick than take a piss or have the occasional wank… won’t you?”

  After lovingly placing his letter on top of the other pile of letters, Donald had gone off for his two o’clock appointment with Dr Atkinson, completely unaware that his every move had been carefully monitored by Ingrid, from the safety of Barnes’s small cubbyhole that he proudly called his office.

  She’d stumbled across the spyhole completely by chance, as Barnes had been fumbling his way through her blouse and bra. In her heightened state of sexual gratification she’d pushed the bumbling man backwards across his desk causing him to knock the aerial photograph of the estate sideways, revealing the small glass window. The window, which was camouflaged in the hall by the large two way mirror, gave Ingrid a clear and unobstructed view of the clinic’s hallway. On that first occasion, Ingrid had been momentarily shocked by the one-way voyeurism, but each and every time thereafter, it only added to Ingrid’s sexual frisson and gratification. So whilst Donald had been posting his letter and then adjusting his clothes and hair in the large gilt mirror that hung over the demi-line table, Ingrid had been busy trying to keep herself and Barnes stimulated enough to reach their sexual climax. Then just as Donald had lent forward to try and find the annoying speck of dirt that had blown through the open front door and into his eye, Ingrid had pressed herself hard against the smoky glass window and on a wave of pleasure had groaned her way to a gratifying noisy climax, whilst Donald unwittingly had watched her from the other side… if she couldn’t get the man into bed, she told herself, then she’d use his avatar for the physical side and the rest would be down to her imagination.

  Watching Donald finally walk off to find the doctor, Ingrid’s interest in Barnes had instantly evaporated and whilst he had collapsed into his chair exhausted by his exertions, Ingrid had dressed, dropped his master key into her pocket, and slipped out of the room unnoticed.

  Sure that Donald had gone for his first session of hypnotherapy, Ingrid locked the door behind her and picked up Donald’s letter. It wasn’t malice that drove her to open it, read it and then write another version … one in which Donald was more forthcoming with his declarations of love and what he’d like to do to Martha given half the chance, no what Ingrid did was done out of friendship and the fact that she wanted to help Donald.

  No one had ever rejected her as much and as resolutely as he had, and that told her he must love Martha very much… the girl was very lucky and such love was crying out for her expert knowledge and help. Oh she didn’t take out anything Donald had written… that would have been tantamount to censorship, no she’d just added the more salacious sexual content. After all that’s what Partnership Therapy was all about… helping each other.

  Forty minutes later, after leaving Donald’s room exactly as she’d found it and with one final look round to make sure that everything appeared untouched, she’d locked the door and made her way back through the dormitory block to the entrance hallway, where she carefully slid Donald’s letter back into the unruly looking pack of post that had been left on the table. Standing back for a moment to admire her work and wish it bonne chance, Ingrid was sure that in the long run Donald and Martha would thank her… if she’d learnt anything from her time in the various clinics and institutions, it was that sometimes in life, if the chemistry between two people was going to work successfully… a catalyst was required to kick start the reaction.

  “Come in Donald.” Dr Atkinson beckoned invitingly from inside her consulting room upon hearing the faint rap of knuckles on her door. She’d already checked the time and noted that her patient was five minutes early… she didn’t apply too much significance to how early or late someone turned up for their appointments but it placed another piece into the vast complex jigsaw that was their lives.

  Donald walked into the room with an air of confidence tinged with a soupçon of trepidation. His only doubt was that of trust… trust in himself to make the right decision about whether he wanted to find out who he really was and trust that once found, the man would turn out to be a decent, honest person, who wouldn’t cruelly extinguish his hopes and aspirations of a wonderful future with Martha.

  The interior of the consulting room was dimmer than he’d expected but not in a threatening way and he immediately felt at ease, as he closed the door and was enveloped by the soft creamy light, the sweet pleasant smell of incense and the soulful sound of some electronic, non-descript music, which was floating around the room, relaxing everything it touched.

  But as he walked towards the doctor’s outstretched welcoming hand, the feeling of ease suddenly vanished and for no reason that he could
think of, Donald felt trapped. It was as if he was being lured onto the rocks of some grand confession by the comforting Sirens that were playing mischievously with his senses. The doctor, who had been watching his every move, like a barn owl watching a field mouse, spotted his slight hesitancy.

  “Come in Donald and please, take a seat on the couch. Now if we are going to gain any benefit from these hypnotherapy sessions, I need you to relax and feel completely at ease… so if there is anything troubling you, we should take time to talk about it.” Dr Atkinson explained, as she moved from behind the barrier that was her desk and sat down next to the couch. Everything in the room was designed to massage the mind… consciously or subconsciously and as Donald sat down, the ambience and Dr Atkinson started to work their magic.

  “In my experience if we eliminate anything that might jar your senses, we will both experience a more successful and fulfilling session… maybe you’d prefer some different music or the lights changing, I can very easily adapt them to your liking.”

  Like the music, the tone of Dr Atkinson’s voice was designed to comfort and reassure… like a mother’s word when her child has just cut their knee. In fact, the only words missing from the doctor’s soothing vocabulary were… ‘There, there, there.’

  “No…no it’s fine. I’m completely fine.” Donald felt a little silly, as he hesitantly sat himself down on the edge of the couch, unsure about what to expect next. He felt sure that Dr Atkinson, unlike Ingrid, wasn’t about to strip off in front of him and perform some sexual act, as part of his treatment. Although the more he pictured that image in his head the weirder he felt, especially considering that Dr Atkinson was a good twenty years older than himself… but sat in the chair, in the subdued lighting, she didn’t look like any doctor he’d previously met.