‘I remember. What you say now remains unsaid. Absolutely and eternally. And I believe it.’
‘I’ve done something terrible,’ said Maggie. ‘I don’t even know what it is, or when it happened, but I drove somebody to his death. I knew it when I came round in the night, after the accident. He was there breathing down my neck, whispering to me that I’d killed him. Not at all vague or distant, absolutely real and present, but when I turn round to look for the details there’s nothing to be found. Just this sense of guilt. What I feel is that somewhere, at some time, I failed somebody, or betrayed somebody… something unforgivable… Criminal? I don’t know, I think it may have been, if only in keeping silent about something I knew. Somebody relied on me, and I turned my back and let him fall. What matters,’ she said, her eyes straining upwards into the quivering blue and white radiance of reflected light on the ceiling over her head, ‘is that he’s dead, and I killed him.’
She waited, almost disdainfully prepared for the soft, humouring tones that medical men keep for the mentally unstable.
‘And have you managed,’ he asked, very soberly and thoughtfully,‘ to find anything in your memory that lends colour to this belief?’
‘No. I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t trace any such incident. But it’s still there. He never stops treading on my heels.’
‘But there’s no known ground for this obsession. Don’t forget, you’ve been through fairly drastic surgery, and a considerable degree of shock. It isn’t at all unusual for the kind of experience you’ve lived through to leave a nightmare residue, that may surface at the least expected moment. Details submerge, and a sense of horror remains, something you can’t pin down. Something that passes gradually, if you concentrate on the live world and let it pass.’
‘No,’ she said instantly and chillingly. ‘You forget, it’s almost a week now, and I’ve waited and held my breath, and it doesn’t pass. Because it’s real, not a dream at all, not a floating residue left to surface by chance. It’s there! In the corner of my eye always, and when I turn to look at it, it’s everywhere but where I’m looking. I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but it’s something I did, and I can’t get away from it.’
‘You do realise, don’t you, that even if there is some factual basis for it, it may turn out to be in some incident grotesquely out of proportion to the feeling you have about it?’
‘It may,’ she agreed; but he knew by the set of her face that she did not believe in that possibility.
‘But even so, if it does exist in your past, however inadequately, then it must be possible to run it to earth.’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to do for days. I’ve been forwards and backwards through my life poking under all the stones I can find. At first I took it for granted it was Tom, you see… that I’d killed him when I crashed the car. But they told me at once that he was safe. Then I thought that there might have been somebody else involved in the accident, but there wasn’t. It isn’t as simple as that, and it isn’t as recent. The knowledge seemed to come from very deep, as if an earthquake had split the ground and thrown up something from miles down. There are no levels any more, everything’s torn up and thrown about, and everything has to settle all over again afterwards, and make a new surface to walk on. The first steps are liable to be pretty shaky. And buried things may break out and meet you in the way.’
He saw the quickened breathing heaving her breast, and the hectic flush of exertion flicking her cheekbones. ‘I’m tiring you,’ he said.
‘No, don’t go! No, you’re helping me. After I’d dredged up every recollection I could, right back to school, I did try, you see, to put it out of my mind. I told myself it was one of those freaks, the shock and the fright and the pain choosing to hit me after the event in this way. Nothing behind it. But I couldn’t satisfy myself, and I’m afraid you won’t be able to satisfy me, either. I’m not running a temperature, I’m not in shock, I haven’t any worries, my career will wait for me the short time it has to wait, and all I have to do is lie around and enjoy myself while I get well. There simply is no reason at all—is there?—why this terrible conviction of guilt should stay with me still. Only one possible reason. That it’s true, that it’s justified.’
‘But if there existed any real source for it, you would have found it.’ It did not convince him, and he knew as soon as it was out that it would not convince her.
‘No, because I’m the wrong person to do the searching. Oh, I believe I want to find it, but how can I be sure? Isn’t it possible that there’s at least as much of me trying to stamp it back into the ground, quickly, before I ever get a good look at it? Isn’t that the most likely reason why I always see it out of the corner of my eye?’
‘But did you never stop to consider that you have relatives, associates, friends, people who have been intimately involved in your life for years, and none of them accuses you of anything? Do you really believe you’ve committed some mortal fault against another person, without a single one of your acquaintances knowing anything about it? Is there an empty place anywhere in your life where you even could have done this hypothetical thing, in absolute isolation from any witness? That would rule out anything but the cruder possibilities, like flat, planned murder, that has to be kept secret. And that would involve more complications, like skills I very much doubt if you possess.’ He span out his theme to its ultimate absurdity. ‘And a body. And there never was a body featuring in your affairs, I take it?’
‘No… no body.’ She shivered, and passed the heel of her hand over her eyelids. ‘It wouldn’t be like that. There are more oblique ways of killing. Even without meaning to. But you see, it’s just because I’ve been dead in a way myself that I must know. After coming back to life again as I have, I’ve got to make this a new beginning, otherwise it will be unbearable. If I have something shameful buried somewhere in my past, then I want to know what it is. I want to settle the account, if it can be settled. I want to be out of debt.’
‘And you’ve said nothing of all this to anyone else? To your agent, or your family?’
The look she gave him, beginning with blank incomprehension and burning up into horrified recoil, more than answered that question. Clearly it would have been unthinkable to confide in any one of those circling satellites. She had dealt openly with him only because of his reassuring distance from her, and because he was a professional with a legitimate and impersonal interest in her recovery. And only a moment ago he had come very close to touching her hand, by way of establishing a closer contact! If he had done it he would have lost her irrecoverably.
‘Well, supposing now,’ he said carefully, ‘that someone else, someone completely detached, took over this search for you?’
He grudged her to the psychiatrists, but they might well be the obvious answer, if she could be persuaded to co-operate. And Harlingford was a good man, and old enough to see her with a disenchanted eye. If, he hedged wryly, any man still living is old enough for that. To love her would be to be powerless to help her, that was clear, for at the first touch, no more than the meeting of eyes, she would draw back out of reach, retreat into the castle and bar the doors. Now I wonder, he thought, I really wonder why?
‘Supposing someone else, someone who makes a job of that kind of thing, took over the stone-turning for you? If he found some lost detail—most probably perfectly innocent—to account for the setting up of this cancer in your mind, would that satisfy you? You would have to have faith in your man, of course. But there are people, you know, who are trained in these techniques, highly skilled professionals who take this sort of thing as their special field.’