“Shall I open it now?” he said.
“Yes. It isn’t much, I’m afraid.”
He broke the seal with his thumb and pulled out what was inside. There were about two dozen postcards of assorted sizes and kinds. They were all very old, and most of them were black and white or sepia-tinted. Some of them were views of English seaside resorts, some were expanses of countryside, some were from the European continent: German spas, French cathedrals, Alpine scenery.
“I saw them in an antique shop in Kingsbridge this morning.”
“Thanks … they’re very nice.”
“I suppose you might have some of them already. In your collection.”
“My collection?”
She laughed then, a short sound, oddly loud. “You don’t even remember that, do you?”
“You mean I collect old postcards?” He grinned at her. “How much more am I going to learn from you?”
“Actually, there is something. You never used to call me Susan. It was always Sue.”
She kissed him again, then left, walking quickly across the terrace and vanishing into the building. He waited, and a short time later he heard a car door slam, then the sound of an engine starting. Soon he saw the windows and roof of her car as it drove slowly down toward the lane.
VI
Dr. Hurdis visited Middlecombe that weekend, and spent a large part of Saturday afternoon with Grey. Hurdis adopted a sympathetic approach, listening more than speaking, never leading his patient with sudden or surprising questions. He treated Grey as a participant in a problem rather than as a recipient of treatment, and often their sessions together were more like conversations than analysis, although Grey realized this was probably not the case.
He was in a communicative mood that day, because at last he felt he had something to talk about, and had an interest in himself that was lacking before.
Not that the two short meetings with Sue had solved anything; his amnesia remained as profound as ever, a fact which Hurdis quickly elicited from him. The principal knowledge she had brought him was the reassurance that he had actually existed in the lost period. Until now, he had not truly believed in himself; the sense of absence behind him seemed to exclude him. But Sue was a witness to the fact of himself. She remembered him, when he did not.
He had of course thought of almost nothing but her since she left. His mind and life were filled with her. He wanted her company, the touch of her hand, her kisses. Most of all he wanted to see her, to look properly at her, but in a strange miniature of his larger problem he found it difficult to remember what she was like. He could visualize peripheral details about her: the canvas bag, the stockinged ankles, the flowered skirt, her coat, her masking hair. He knew she had looked him straight in the face, as if allowing him a secret sight of her, but afterward he found he could not see her face in his mind’s eye. He remembered her plainness, the regularity of her features, but these too acted like a mask to her appearance.
“I think Sue is my best chance of recovering my memory,” he said. “She obviously knows me well, and she was there during the weeks I’ve lost. I keep thinking that if she only tells me one thing that jogs my memory, it could be enough.”
“You might well be right,” Hurdis said. They were in the office he used on weekends, a comfortable place with big leather chairs and a bookcase. “But a word of caution. You mustn’t be too anxious to remember. There’s a condition known as paramnesia, hysterical paramnesia.”
“I don’t think I’m hysterical, Dr. Hurdis.”
“Clearly not, in the usual sense. But occasionally someone who has lost his memory will grasp at any straw, any hint of a memory, and without knowing how accurate it might be let it lead to a whole sequence of invented memories.”
“I’m sure that couldn’t happen with Sue. She would put me right.”
“As you say. But if you started confabulating, you might not be able to tell the difference. What does Mr. Woodbridge think about this?”
“I think he’s against my talking to her.”
“Yes, I see.”
Grey’s preoccupation, since Sue had left, had been in trying to pry loose any memories she might have touched on. Fired by his new interest in her, the few things she had said became enormously important, and he examined them in his mind from every angle. He talked them out with Dr. Hurdis, glad to have an uncritical listener, someone who contributed by encouraging him to talk on and on.
In actual fact she had said remarkably little about their past together. It was symptomatic, according to Hurdis, that he should seize on such fragments and try to find relevance in them.
He had solved one minor mystery on his Own: the matter of the postcards. At first he thought he had stumbled on something from his lost weeks, something hitherto forgotten, but then, surfacing from the old past, the memory came to him.
He had been working in Bradford, in the north of England. During an afternoon off he went wandering by himself through the back streets, and came across a junk shop. He had a small collection of antique film equipment, and was always on the lookout for more. This particular shop had nothing of this sort, but on the counter he came across a battered shoe box crammed with postcards. He looked through them for a while, mildly interested. The woman who ran the shop told him the price of each card was marked on the back, and on an impulse he asked her how much she would want for the lot. A few seconds later the deal was closed for ten pounds.
When he got home a few days later, Grey went through the several hundred old postcards he now owned. Some of them had obviously been bought and collected by someone in the past, because they were unused; many of them, though, had messages on the back. He read all the ones he could decipher, scrawled in fountain pen or indelible pencil. Almost all of them were prosaic dispatches from holidays: a lovely time being had, the weather improving, visited Aunt Sissy yesterday, the scenery is beautiful, raining all week but we’re bearing up, Teddy doesn’t like the food, weather glorious, the gardens are so peaceful, the sun brings out the mosquitoes, we’ve all been swimming, weather, weather, weather.
Many of the cards went back to the Great War and before, their halfpenny stamps mute tokens of how prices had changed. At least a third of the cards had been sent from abroad: grand tours through Europe, rides on cable cars, visits to casinos, insufferable heat. They were messages from a leisured class now irretrievably vanished: travelers in an age before tourism.
The actual photographs were even more interesting to him. He saw them as stills from some long-lost travelogue of the past, glimpses of towns and scenes that in one sense no longer existed. Several pictures were of places he knew or had visited: Edwardian gentlemen and ladies strolling on seafront esplanades which now were littered with high-rise hotels, amusement arcades and parking meters; country vales where now broad motorways had been driven; French and Italian shrines now cluttered with souvenir stalls; peaceful market towns now jammed with traffic and chain stores. These too were memories of a vanished past, alien but recognizable, unattainable in every real sense.
He sorted the cards into groups by country, then returned them to the box. Whenever friends sent him cards after that he added them to the stack, thinking that they too would one day come to represent a certain past.
Sue’s reminder of this had surprised him, but the cards did not come from his amnesiac period. He had been in Bradford while still working for the agency, predating by at least a year any possible first meeting with her.
However, the fact that she knew about the postcards meant she must have seen them, or they had talked about them.