After a struggle with his distaste and distrust, Gilbert Rice surprised him. ‘Yes,’ he said flatly,‘ there is something. Almost certainly something. I’ll be quite open with you, Mr. Killian. In my judgment Miss Tressider is a person of quite exceptional generosity and integrity, who has fared rather badly in her personal relationships. She comes from a very ordinary lower-middle-class family—you understand, I am using current terms simply because they are useful in establishing a picture—whose other members have sponged on her from the beginning of her celebrity without shame and without gratitude, and privately resent her pre-eminence as much as they publicly rejoice in it. I believe she has behaved towards all her relatives and associates with great loyalty, which in her heart she knows very well is cast on stony ground. I think it is entirely possible that once, just once, she rebelled and recoiled, that just once she turned and tore somebody, in a protest which was overdue. I suppose it’s even possible that there was a disastrous result, for someone who surely deserves little sympathy. She is incapable of real malice or meanness. But her standards are high. I think from her point of view there may well be something to regret. I believe it would be better if she knew what it was, and could be forced to accept it. You need not be afraid of the result, if you do run the thing to earth. She has a sense of responsibility to the rest of us too. Whatever you find, you won’t destroy her, you can only liberate her. She knows of what a marvel she is the custodian.’
Fantastic, Francis thought, shaken clean out of his objectivity. This antique pillar of society, thirty years established, father and grandfather, suddenly wrenching his heart open over a neurotic young woman he never saw before, because some accident of nature gave her the voice of an archangel. And how if he’s right? How if she really needs to be rid of an incubus that might kill her? No more immortal Orpheus, only that lament on a gramophone record, slowly paling for want of new, living breath. Stiff little, grey little stuffed shirt as he might be, Maggie Tressider’s surgeon had the courage of his convictions.
‘I take it,’ said Francis carefully, drawing the classic profile of Orpheus on the half-filled page of notes before him, ‘that the best thing I can do is come and talk to Miss Tressider during ordinary visiting hours… This evening?’
He went home and played the Gluck records. She was better even than he remembered her. It was not a dark, weighty, velvet contralto, but agile, thrilling and true, a quality in it that sheared through the heart like pure pain, like love itself, excising everything of lesser urgency. It was the voice the old man was in love with, of course. No face could live up to it, much less the heart and the being that went with the face.
She had a crooked mouth in photographs, and a wide, defensive glance, like a child’s, and a more than usually asymmetrical face, larger on the right side.
Well, there was the voice to be saved.
She was sitting up in bed when he came, looking exactly like all those other women in the long ward next door, polished and brushed and neatly tucked in for visiting-time. She had even the same half-apprehensive, half-expectant look as they had, and her eyes like theirs enlarged in a face blanched and honed to transparency by the experience of suffering, turned towards the doorway of her room as soon as his hand touched the handle, and transfixed him as he entered with their blue intensity. She looked glad, and eager, and afraid; exactly as if he had really been a personal visitor, and one to whom she had long looked forward.
‘Miss Tressider? My name is Killian.’
‘It’s very good of you,’ she said, ‘to come so promptly.’ Her speaking voice was low-pitched, warm and vibrant. ‘Please sit down. I believe Mr. Rice has explained to you what’s worrying me?… what I want you to find out for me?’
It seemed that everything was to be conducted with despatch, practically, as between business associates, without any suggestion of anguish. Unless, he thought a moment later, you looked too closely at the fine-drawn lines of her face, which had still something of the chill of shock about them, the faint, reflected image of death as it missed its hold on her, or deeply enough into the wide, wild stare of the eyes to discover the fixed, silvery gleam of panic behind their honest, well-mannered blueness. She shopped for the commodity she needed with the directness of a child, but there was nothing childish about her need.
It was illuminating, too, that the paperbacks he had brought with him came as a shock to her, and an embarrassment. When he laid them on the bed convenient to her hand she touched them blankly, and didn’t know what to do or say. The thanks came mechanically, and what was really on her mind couldn’t find words. How right he had been to pass up roses! Unless, of course, he wanted her to withdraw the offer of this job? He still wasn’t clear about that, but if he had wanted it, roses would have been as good a way as any of making sure. He wasn’t here to have any personal relationship with her, she mustn’t be touched. All that he must inevitably discover about her she would countenance and assist as case-notes necessary to the job, but never as the impalpable web of a man’s understanding. This would have to be strictly clinical. So much the better; that suited Francis.
‘It seemed advisable to be as convincing a visitor as possible,’ he said dryly, ‘and you’ll have observed that they never come empty-handed. The women in the ward might not notice. The staff certainly would. I take it I’m right in thinking that only Mr. Rice is in your confidence?’
‘Oh,’ she said, flushing, ‘I see! Yes of course, that was thoughtful of you. I thought… I was rather afraid that you might be too well known to pass unnoticed, in any case.’
‘I’m hardly the celebrity type of detective,’ he assured her, amused and disarmed. ‘Few of us are, if the truth be told. Nobody here is likely to know who I am or what I do, and your privacy needn’t be compromised.’
‘That’s what I should prefer, if it’s possible. But of course you must include the books and everything in your expenses.’
The tone was perhaps a little arrogant, but so, in all probability, had his been.
‘We can come to an agreement about all that later,’ he said. ‘Since our time’s limited, what I think you should be doing now is lying back and relaxing, while you tell me yourself about this experience that made you send for me. By this time I take it you’ve found a way of surrendering yourself into the hands of doctors when you have to? Consider me one more in the same category. Close your eyes and shut me out if it makes it any easier. Most of us do that with doctors, when the handling begins.’
‘And dentists,’ said Maggie unexpectedly, and smiled.
‘And dentists.’ It might, he conceded ruefully, be a better analogy. ‘I shall have to take notes. You won’t mind that? They’ll all be destroyed, afterwards.’
‘Yes, I understand.’ She let her head fall back on the pillow. ‘I want to do everything that may help you to find out… what it is that’s haunting me. You understand, I must know. There’ll be no peace for me, no possibility of living normally, unless I know. He wanted me to put it out of my mind, but I can’t do that. If I’ve done somebody a terrible wrong, and now for the first time I feel what I’ve done, how can I just push it away and pretend I know nothing about it? Then he wanted me to put myself in the hands of a psychiatrist. Why should I do that? I don’t want it rationalised out of existence, if it really does exist, I want it put right! I’m sorry,’ she said, suddenly fixing those disturbing eyes upon his attentive face, ‘if you find all this a little unbalanced. All that got through to me was the fact of my guilt. It’s because I can’t give a rational account of the thing that I need you. Do you think I’m out of my wits?’