When Woodbridge had left, Tony Stuhr released the foot brake on the chair and pushed Grey to the table where they had been sitting. The young woman took the chair closest to him, but Stuhr sat by the window.
“I’ve nothing to talk to you about,” Grey said.
“I just wanted to see you,” she said.
“Well, here I am. I can’t run away from you.”
“Richard, don’t you remember me?”
“Should I?”
“Well, yes. I was hoping you would.”
“Are we friends?”
“I suppose you could say that. Just for a time.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t remember much about the past. How long ago was it?”
“Not long,” she said. She looked at him only infrequently when she spoke, glancing down into her lap, or at the table, or across to the reporter. Stuhr was staring through the window, obviously listening yet not participating. When he realized Grey was looking at him, he took the newspaper from his pocket and opened it to the football page.
“Would you like some coffee?” Grey said.
“You know I—” She checked herself. “No, I only drink tea.”
“I’ll get it.” Grey propelled himself away from her and went to the phone, asserting a sense of independence. When he had ordered the refreshments, he went back to the table. Stuhr picked up his newspaper again; obviously, words had been exchanged.
Looking at them both, Grey said, “I might as well say that you’re wasting your time. I’ve nothing to tell you.”
“Do you know what it’s costing my paper to keep you in this place?” Stuhr said.
“I didn’t ask for that.”
“Our readers are concerned about you, Richard. You’re a hero.”
“I’m no such thing. I just happened to be there.”
“You were almost killed.”
“And that makes me a hero?”
“Look, I’m not here to argue with you,” Stuhr said.
The tea arrived on a silver tray: pots and crockery, a tiny bowl of sugar, biscuits. While the steward arranged them on the table, Stuhr returned to his newspaper, and Grey took the opportunity to look properly at Susan Kewley. He remembered that Dave had described her as pretty, but that was hardly the right word. What Grey noticed most about her was that she lacked distinctive features. She was probably in her mid to late twenties. She was plain, but plain in a pleasant sense of the word; neutral was perhaps better. She had a regular face, hazel eyes, pale brown hair which grew straight, slender shoulders. She sat in a relaxed way, resting her narrow wrists and hands on the arms of the chair, her body erect and comfortable. She would not look at him, but stared at the crockery on the table as if avoiding not only his eyes but his opinion too. Yet he had no opinion, except that she was there, that she had arrived with Stuhr and therefore must be associated, directly or indirectly, with the newspaper.
How had he known her in the past? What kind of a friend? Someone he had worked with? A lover? But surely he would remember that, of all things?
For a moment it occurred to him that she might have been brought here by Stuhr as some kind of stunt, to provoke a response he could write about in the paper. MYSTERY WOMAN IN LOVE BID would be about par for the newspaper’s course, and as true to the facts as most of the stories it ran.
When the steward had left, Grey said to her, “Well, what is it we have to talk about?”
She said nothing, but reached forward and pulled a cup and saucer toward her. Still she did not look at him, and her hair was tipping forward, concealing her face from him.
“As far as I can remember, I’ve never seen you before in my life. You’ll have to give me more to go on than that.”
She was holding the saucer, pale veins visible beneath her translucent skin. She seemed to be shaking her head slightly.
“Or are you here because he brought you?” Grey said angrily. He looked at Stuhr, who did not react. “Miss Kewley, I don’t know what you want, but—”
Then she turned toward him, and for the first time he saw all of her face, slightly long, fine-boned, wintry in color. Her eyes were full of tears, and the corners of her mouth were twitching downward. She pushed back her chair quickly, toppling the saucer with its cup on the table, colliding with the wheelchair as she pushed past him. Pain jabbed down his back, and he heard a gulping inhalation of breath from her. She ran across the room and went into the corridor.
To stare after her would mean turning his head against the stiffness of his neck, so Grey did not try. It felt silent and cold in the room.
“What a bastard you can be.” Stuhr threw aside his newspaper. “I’ll call Woodbridge.”
“Wait a minute … what do you mean?”
“Couldn’t you see what you were doing to her?”
“No. Who is she?”
“She’s your girlfriend, Grey. She’s come all the way down here in the hope that if you saw her again it might trigger some memory.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.” But he felt again the helpless rage of his lost weeks. Just as he tried to avoid memories of the pain, so he shrank away from the weeks before the car bomb explosion. There was a profound blankness in his mind, one he never entered because he did not know how. “And if she is someone I know, what the hell is she doing here with you?”
“Look, it was an experiment.”
“Did Woodbridge cook this up?”
“No … listen, Richard. Susan approached us. She saw the stories in the paper, and she came forward. She said that you and she had once had an affair, that it was all over, but that seeing her might help you regain your memory.”
“Then it is a stunt.”
“I won’t deny that if you regained your memory I’d write about it. But really, this time I’m just here to drive the car.”
Grey shook his head, and stared angrily through the window at the sea. Once he had discovered he was suffering from retroactive amnesia because of the concussion, he had been trying to come to terms with it. At first he had probed the feeling of blankness, thinking that if he could somehow find a way he would penetrate it, but to do so made him profoundly depressed and introspective. What he was doing now was trying not to think about it, to accept that the weeks he had lost would stay lost.
“Where does Woodbridge come into this?”
“He didn’t set it up. He agreed to it, The idea was Susan’s.”
“It was a bad idea.”
Stuhr said, “That’s not her fault. Look at yourself— you’re totally unmoved by this! The only reservation Woodbridge had was that you might be traumatized. Yet you’re sitting here as if nothing has happened, and the girl’s in tears.”
“I can’t help that.”
“Just don’t blame her for it.” Stuhr stood up. He thrust his newspaper back into his pocket.
“What are you going to do now?” Grey said.
“There’s no point carrying on with this. I’ll call and see you in a month or so. You might be more receptive then.”
“What about the girl?”
“I’ll come back this afternoon.”
She was there, standing beside his wheelchair, a hand resting on the grip behind his left shoulder. At the sound of her voice, Grey started with surprise, jerking the stiffness in his neck, a completion of the movement he had failed to make when she left. How long had she been standing there, just beyond the periphery of his vision? Stuhr had given no indication she had returned.
Stuhr said to her, “I’ll wait for you in the car.”
He moved past them both, and again Grey felt that unpleasant sensation of everyone being taller than him. Susan sat down in the chair she had occupied before.
“I’m sorry about all that,” she said.