Psyche knew that she would have felt this even more strongly if she had been able to enter amongst white tombstones and black clipped cedar and yew. Yet she clung to the gates without the strength or will to tear herself away.
“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”
Faint, suddenly dizzy, she stared down dark aisles where white marble and black foliage were now diffused and blurred as if by the shadow of death itself. And it was several minutes before she realized that her vision was being tricked by sheets of rain.
I must find some shelter, she thought confusedly.
Her hands still held out in front of her, she turned away from the cemetery gates, afraid that at any moment she would actually faint.
She saw the sign on the opposite side of the street when she was a little less than half a block from the locked iron gates. Lit by a yellow light, bold black letters offered her the sanctuary she so badly needed—“Strangers Welcomed”.
As she stepped off the curb on to the road, the wet slur of her shoes sounded as she imagined a tide must sound, running out fast, sucking futilely at the insecurity of constantly shifting sands. She never saw the heavy truck, even when it loomed above her, when its brakes screamed a warning too late for her to hear.
Nick’s wife, Alice, opening her own front door, recognized Sharon at once, although she had never seen her before.
“He has come back, hasn’t he?” Sharon asked, and she had difficulty in keeping her voice even. “He isn’t still away?”
Alice, in full possession of the Story in so far as Sharon herself knew it, and knowing also as much as Nick had seen fit to tell her, said gently, “Yes, he’s back.”
“Can I see him now?” Now—this minute—sooner. I have waited a week, a week in which I have scarcely slept. Don’t, for the love of God, keep me waiting any longer!
Alice, looking at the face so like the one she had seen in Nick’s paintings, recognizing the desperate anxiety in blue eyes oddly familiar, was suddenly really angry with Nick for having refused to wait at the house, for having gone to the studio.
“I’m sorry,” she said, even more gently. “He is at the studio. Come in while I sketch out the route for you. It isn’t easy to find.”
Sharon managed a travesty of a smile. “Thank you. He didn’t say anything?”
“I think you had better wait and talk to him.”
Less than an hour later Sharon was walking rapidly across a daisy-strewn field toward a red-roofed barn.
Still later that day she slammed behind her, with uncharacteristic fury, a door bearing a false door-knocker beneath a faded legend that read “Community Shelter”. “Bitch!” she murmured, sick and white with anger and frustration.
The following morning, Dwight at her side, her hand close held in his, she descended a tarnished, treeless slope toward a weatherbeaten tar-paper shack.
8 THE DOCTOR AND HIS WIFE
1
THE eyes, dark, brilliant, compelling, seemed to hang disembodied against a grey mist that surged without dissipating. eyes like twin lancets, sharp as the keenest scalpel, that probed mercilessly into herbare and unprotected brain.
Psyche, twisting her head to and fro on the pillow, could hear her own voice answering questions, but the questions themselves were inaudible to her conscious mind. It was as if those hypnotic eyes were capable of making their own demands without recourse to words, of dragging forth things she did not even know about herself.
My head hurts, she thought. Why should my head hurt? A name—a name—you are asking me for a name now, but this time I will be too clever for you. A name—you want Bel’s name. Bel said never to give her name to anybody—ever—ever—ever.
“Ever—ever—ever,” she whispered.
Didn’t you hear me? I gave you your answer. Now leave me alone.
But the question was repeated, and repeated again, until she knew that the response she had made was not adequate, that she would have to find a more acceptable one. A name, she must give a name. Not Bel’s name. Not the name of anyone she had ever known—a name belonging to nobody.
“Sharon!” she cried out in anguish, and slipped back into the unconsciousness that had claimed her off and on for over five weeks.
The doctor, his eyes still fixed on her face, continued to lean across the end of the high hospital bed for some time. Then, taking a gold pencil and a note-book from the pocket of his suit, he wrote steadily, filling three pages with small precise handwriting. Not until this was done did he move around to the side of the bed to lay his hand first on Psyche’s forehead and then on her wrist. Satisfied, he rang for a nurse, and, while waiting for one to come, whistled softly under his breath as he looked with clinical detachment at a patient who was of extraordinary interest to him.
He was a handsome man, but a cold one, the brilliance of his intellect shedding no warmth over his manner or his long, ascetic face. Tall and spare, at forty-five he stood securely on the summit of his own particular mountain peak, from which vantage point he looked down, not without contempt, on the mental, emotional, and nervous aberrations he made it his business to dissect. His success pleased but in no way surprised him. Ambitious, unhampered by sympathy, he had climbed to the top of his profession with a minimum of waste effort, combining brain surgery, for its greater material gains, with the psycho-physiology that was his ruling passion. Seeing his own mind as a perfectly equipped operating table on which to take apart lesser minds, he expected to leave a lasting mark on research in the fields of memory and heredity.
“You rang. Doctor?” The nurse sounded breathless, for she was more than a little afraid of this man whose large, deep-set eyes could impale one like a butterfly on a pin.
“Your patient will regain normal consciousness within the next twenty-four hours. When this happens, you are to advise me at once. Please see that the nurse on night duty is given the same instructions.”
“Yes, Doctor,” she said, and found that she was speaking to a distinguished back that was already halfway across the room.
She closed the door after him, something that he did not expect to have to do for himself, and went over to the bed. Looking down at a strained white face and tangled blonde hair, she thought rebelliously, “Why can’t he leave her alone until she’s feeling better. It’s a wonder he hasn’t killed her instead of curing her.” But even as she thought this, she knew that no other man on the continent could have lifted the depressed area at the back of Psyche’s skull with the same delicate skill and precision.
Going to the bathroom for a wash-cloth, absently pausing before the mirror to straighten a white cap on thick auburn curls, she considered the story that, in bits and pieces, had emerged from a long delirium, and was forced to admit that she herself was intensely curious to know the whole of it. Her curiosity, however, was offset by sympathy that caused her to align herself, in this case, with patient rather than doctor. To study, and attempt to question, someone who did not know this was being done, seemed to her utterly unfair, if not actually dishonest, and she was secretly pleased that so far, to the best of her knowledge, the doctor had been unable to unearth anything as factual as names and places. He had discovered the girl’s own name, now written on her chart, and that was all. Odd, how she had guarded these things, almost as if she had prepared herself in advance for an inquisition before which they must under no circumstances be disclosed. She might have dropped from Mars for all they knew about her that could be put to any practical use. She had been brought in without a purse, without identification of any kind, and every Moran in the telephone book had denied all knowledge of her. Lucky for her that there had been witnesses to her accident, that the trucking company, because the truck had been running without lights, had been made to accept full responsibility. Otherwise she would have landed in a public ward, rather than in Private Patients with a private nurse who—she grinned at herself in the mirror—should be getting back to her job.
Very gently wiping perspirat
ion from a damp white forehead, she allowed her glance to wander to the chart on the table beside the bed, and small teeth bit the underlip of a pretty mouth. It just doesn’t seem right, she thought. It was not, however, the chart itself, with its temperature graph descending to normal, that bothered her, but the name at the top. Maggie Moran. I suppose I’m silly about names, she thought, but they usually do fit somehow, and this one doesn’t. She isn’t one bit like a Maggie Moran. I wonder if there can be some mistake about it.
Psyche’s wide-open eyes, fastened on her face in steady inquiry, startled her so much that she jumped visibly. She had seen the blue eyes open before, but not like this, not with depths in them.
“I’vebeen sick?”
The young nurse had herself in hand again. Professional, competent, she said quietly, “Yes. Quite sick. You are almost better. Now don’t talk. Just lie there without talking, and I’ll call the doctor.”
I must have been partly conscious before this. Psyche thought rapidly, because I know I am in a hospital and I am not surprised. When did I come here? Yesterday, or the day before?
“Don’t call him yet—not for a minute.”
Her hand hovering just above the bell, the nurse hesitated. “Ihave orders”
The perspiration was breaking out on Psyche’s forehead again. “Give me just a moment first.”
The nurse looked at the open window, at a patch of sky reflecting late afternoon light, and then at her watch. Nearly six o’clock. In three minutes she would be going off duty. “All right,” she said, “but don’t ever tell anyone. If Svengali finds out that someone even said boo to you before he did, it will be the end.”
“Svengali?”
The nurse’s cheeks were pink. “That slipped out. Forget it. You’re sure you feel strong enough to talk now. Miss Moran?”
Psyche’s flicker of surprise at being addressed by name, and by that name, was so slight that the nurse, if she had not been expecting it, would have missed it. I was right, she thought triumphantly, it isn’t her name. She isn’t sufficiently oriented yet to have been surprised simply because we knew her name.
“I seem to have rather a headache,” Psyche said, “but otherwise I feel all right. Tell me, how long have I been here? What happened?”
“You were in a traffic accident, and you’ve been here just over five weeks.”
“Five weeks!”
“I know. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? You were hit by a truck, and you’ve been more or less unconscious ever since. But don’t worry. You’re perfectly all right now. A few weeks’ convalescence and you’ll be as good as new.”
Lifting her hand to her head, Psyche thought, it doesn’t look like my hand; it’s too thin, too colourless. “Does—does anyone know I’m here?”
“You mean your family?”
Again there was a flicker in the blue eyes, but this time the nurse could not interpret it. “No. My friends.”
“I’m afraid not. You had no purse. No address.”
Thank God for that, anyway, Psyche said to herself. At least I haven’t involved Bel in anything. But five weeks—she must be wild with anxiety.
“How did it happen?”
“You walked in front of a truck that had no lights. It was at night, just after ten o’clock, and it was raining.”
“Do you know where I was?”
The young nurse did know, and, with a quick glance at her watch, told her.
“But I don’t live” Psyche began, and stopped abruptly. A long way from Bel’s—she must have been walking as she usually did. No slightest memory of her pilgrimage to the cemetery returned to dispel this conviction.
“Where do you live?” the nurse asked gently.
“Do I have to live anywhere?” Psyche asked, and there was both confusion and a hint of desperation in her face.
The nurse bent to straighten the sheets and smooth out the pillow. “No,” she said, in a voice little more than a whisper, “there’s no law that says you must. Do what you want. Tell the doctor that you can’t remember, but be careful, he’s not easy to fool.”
Mists that had parted were gathering again. It was difficult to see through them, to think through them. “Thank you” she murmured. “Thank you. I won’t forget. I won’t let him know that you—that you”
The nurse, a quick hand searching for the pulse in a blue-veined wrist, thought, she’s asleep this time. I shouldn’t have done it. I don’t know whatever possessed me. But I’m glad, just the same. In the morning, after a normal sleep, she won’t be so defenceless.
Pressing the bell for her relief, her rounded chin was both very stubborn and very young.
The night nurse came in with a rustle of starched skirts. Her starched manner was soundless. “No change?”
“No change.”
2
WHEN Psyche woke, early morning sunlight was tracing bars of gold on a pale green wall, and she knew, even before she looked around the small, bare room, that she was alone.
Her watch, the watch Joe had given her, lay on the table by the bed. Reaching for it, acutely conscious of her own weakness, she saw that it was not quite seven. Her eyes moving on to the telephone, she thought, they will all be asleep, but the extension in Bel’s room will wake her, and this may be my only chance. Five weeks—I have lost five whole weeks out of my life. What have they been thinking all this time? That I ran away from them without even a good-bye? Would Bel think that of me?
To lift the receiver was a real effort, and when she had accomplished it, she cradled it on the pillow beside her head.
“Number please?”
She gave Bel’s number, and waited, her heart beating so heavily she wondered if the operator on the hospital switchboard could hear it. For what seemed a long time she listened to the evenly spaced ringing of a bell that brought no response.
“The party does not answer.”
“Try it again, will you, please.” Bel—wake up! It’s me. Psyche. You must wake up I
“Hello!” The man’s voice, angry, thick with sleep, was so unexpected that for a moment Psyche could not reply.
“Hello, who is it? What do you want?”
“I want to speak to Bel. At once, please.”
“She don’t live here no more.”
“Wait! Don’t go! Where can I reach her?”
“I don’t know, lady. She didn’t leave no address.”
Slowly, automatically. Psyche replaced a receiver that now conducted nothing but the singing silence of an abruptly broken connection. She knew well enough what must have happened, if not in detail, at least in its rough outlines. The geraniums were gone for good this time. For a reason she might never know, Bel had been forced to move out, to fold her tents and disappear. As Bel might have put it herself, she had taken a powder, and heaven only knew where she might be, she and her girls. They would not be together, but scattered to the four winds.
It must have been something to do with one of the boys, Psyche thought dully. That would be the one avenue that Joe might not have been able to barricade. Joe would stand by Bel. In a way she would still be all right, but she would no longer be independent, and Bel, to be truly Bel, had to be her own mistress before she was anyone else’s.
The door opened quietly, and the nurse, seeing that she was awake, came at once to her bedside. “Good morning. Miss Moran. How are you feeling?”
“Fine, thank you.” I have just lost all my friends. I own one set of clothing which may or may not be wearable, and one wrist-watch, and one name. I feel like the devil, thank you.
“I will call the doctor at once.”
This was not a nurse Psyche was aware of having seen before, and she remembered her obligation to the smiling young redhead of the previous evening. “Where am I?” she asked mechanically. “What happened?”
“Don’t try to talk yet. The doctor doesn’t want you to talk until he comes. Just lie quietly. You are doing very well.”
A heavy apathy settling on her, Psyche ha
d no desire to do anything other than lie quietly. To stay where she was forever would be easy, so much easier than resuming a struggle that never seemed to lead anywhere, that finished up in one blind alley after another.
I just don’t care any more about anything, she thought bitterly. I am doing very well.
The doctor, called from his bed, was shaved, dressed and ready to leave for the hospital in twenty minutes. He was a vain man, but his vanity did not reach to externals when he was in a hurry.
He left a message for his wife, who would in all probability sleep until noon, and drank a cup of coffee, standing, in the front hall. His glance roved over waxed oak panelling, polished Jacobean furniture, and an Aubusson carpet rich in subdued colour. Nora had extremely good taste. In some respects, he thought acidly, she had made him an excellent wife.
He put his empty cup down on a narrow refectory table, took his bag, hat, and gloves from the maid who had stood, holding these things, waiting to open the door for him, and went out to his car.
The door of his car was opened and shut by a chauffeur who, liking neither his employers nor the uncertainty of his hours, stayed with the job because he was unlikely to find another that paid him so well. Wooden-faced, he got in behind the wheel. Bought, that’s what I am, he thought. Bought, just like this ruddy big limousine. The bastard. Never a “good morning” or a “good night”. Doesn’t even call a guy by his name. Just orders, like he was the Almighty’s right-hand man.
“Where to, sir?”
“The hospital.”
Some day I’ll paste him one and teach him some manners, “Very good, sir.”
Psyche Page 29