“It can happen.”
“Well, what did I say?”
Alexandra Gowers had her notebook open. She said, “At one point we heard you say encore du yin, s’il vous plait, as if you were in a restaurant.”
Grey smiled; it was more than three years since he had been in France. Then he had traveled to Paris with a crew to cover the French presidential elections. They had taken a research assistant to interpret for them, and during the whole trip he had hardly uttered a word of French. What he most remembered of the trip was that one night he had slept with the assistant.
“I can’t explain that,” he said.
“Maybe,” Hurdis said. “But you must not discount it either.”
“But what am I supposed to assume? That I was in France last summer?”
“It’s not safe to make assumptions. But there’s one more thing I think you should see.” He passed Grey a sheet of paper, apparently torn from a notebook. “Do you recognize this handwriting?”
Grey glanced at it, then in surprise looked more closely. “It’s mine!”
“Do you know what it means?”
“Where did you get it? I don’t remember writing this.” He read the words quickly: they were a description of what appeared to be a passenger lounge in an airport, with crowds of people, P.A. announcements, airline desks. “It looks like part of a letter… . When did I write this?”
“About twenty minutes ago.”
“Oh no, that can’t be true!”
“You asked for some paper, and Miss Gowers gave you her notebook. You said nothing while you were writing, and you only stopped when I took the pen away.”
Grey read the page again, but nothing about it struck any chord of memory. The passage had a familiar ring to it, but only in the sense that it conveyed the sense of bustle, boredom and nervous anticipation of airports. Grey had flown many times in the course of his job, but somehow that last hour before actually boarding was always a minor ordeal. To say he was scared of flying would be an overstatement, but he was nervous and unrelaxed, wanting to get the journey over and done with. This might then be something he would conceivably write or describe, but nothing could have been farther from his mind that morning.
“What could this be?” he said to Hurdis.
“You’ve no idea yourself?”
“No.”
“It could be part of a letter, as you suggest. It could be an unconscious memory, released by the hypnosis. It could even be an extract from a book, or something else you might have read in the past.”
“What if it’s an unconscious memory? Couldn’t this be the answer?”
“Of all the possibilities, that’s the one I believe you should be most cautious about.” Hurdis had glanced at the clock on the wall.
“But surely that’s what I’m trying to find!”
“Yes, but you must be very careful. We have a long way to go. Perhaps we should meet again next week?”
Grey felt a stirring of discontent. “I’m hoping to be out of here soon.”
“But not by next week?”
“Well, no … but soon I hope.”
“Very good.” Hurdis was clearly on the point of leaving. Alexandra Gowers had also stood up.
Still in the armchair, Grey said, “But where does this leave me? Have I made any progress?”
“At our next meeting I’ll implant the suggestion that you retain what happens in deep trance. Then we might have a better chance of interpretation.”
“What about this?” Grey said, meaning the page of handwriting. “Should I keep it?”
“If you wish. No, on second thought I think I’ll keep it with my case notes. I’d like to study it properly, and next week we might use it as the basis for regression.”
Hurdis took the paper from his unresisting fingers. Grey was curious about it, but in itself it did not seem important.
Before she left, Alexandra came over to him.
“I’m grateful to you for letting me stay,” she said. She extended her hand, and they shook as formally as they had at the beginning.
“When I was trying to see you,” Grey said, “were you here, in this room?”
“I never moved from the chair.”
“Then how could I not see you?”
“At one point you looked straight into my eyes. It’s a common test of suggestibility, called induced negative hallucination. You knew I was there, you knew how to see me, but your mind would not register me. Stage hypnotists work a similar effect, but they usually make their subjects see people without their clothes on.” She said this seriously, clasping her notebook to her side. She pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose.
“Yes,” said Grey. “Well, it was a pleasure to look for you, anyway.”
“I do hope you regain your memory,” she said. “I shall be fascinated to know what happens.”
“So will I,” Grey said, and they both smiled.
IX
That evening, alone in his room, Richard Grey levered himself out of his wheelchair and walked to and fro across the room, using his sticks. Later, feeling like a non-swimmer casting off from the side, he walked the length of the corridor and returned. It was a major effort. After a short rest he did it a second time, taking much longer, pausing for rests whenever he could. At the end of it his hip felt as if it had been hammered and bruised, and when he went to bed he could not sleep for the pain. He lay awake determined that his long convalescence must end as soon as possible, sensing that his mind and body would heal in unison, that he would remember only as soon as he could walk, and vice versa. Before, he had been passively content for time to take its course, but now his life was different.
The following day he had a session with James Woodbridge, but said nothing about what had happened under hypnosis. He wanted no more interpretations, no more technical terms. He was convinced that his forgotten past now had to be remembered, that it was in some way symbolic of overall recovery, that it opened the way to his personal future. Somehow those weeks leading up to the car bomb had been significant and relevant. Perhaps it was nothing more than a love affair with Sue, but it was important to remember even that. There too, the silent gap in his life gave promise of the future.
Thursday passed slowly, or seemed to, but then it was Friday. He tidied his room, obtained clean clothes from the hospital laundry, exercised his body, and concentrated all over again on trying to remember. The staff knew he was expecting Sue, and he took their teasing with good grace. Nothing could deflate his mood now. Everything was heightened by her, given form and meaning. The day went slowly, the evening came, and hope was modified by apprehension. Late, far later than he had expected, she called him from a pay phone. She had arrived at Totnes station, and was about to hire a taxi. She was with him half an hour later.
Part III
I
The departures board showed that my flight was delayed, but I had already gone through passport control and there was no escape from the passenger lounge. Although it was a huge area, lined all along one side with plate-glass windows looking out across the apron, it was noisy, hot and oppressive. The lounge was crowded with people, many of whom were in package-tour groups headed for Benidorm, Faro, Athens and Palma. Babies cried, children ran in energetic games, and flight announcements came through the loudspeakers at regular intervals.
Already I was regretting that I had not taken the train and boat to France, but it was high season and once before I had traveled on a cross-Channel ferry at this time of year. Air travel always had the temptation of speed, even for a short journey like mine, yet since leaving home that morning I had been subjected to one delay after another: crossing London on the Underground, with two changes of train, the slow journey to Gatwick Airport with the railway carriage crowded to the doors, and now the wait for the plane.