“The majority of women were found to be immune; and of the ten per cent or so whom it attacked over eighty per cent recovered. Among men, however, there was almost no immunity, and the few recoveries were only partial. A few men were preserved by the most elaborate precautions, but they could not be kept confined for ever, and in the end the virus, which had a remarkable capacity for dormancy, got them, too.”
Inevitably several questions of professional interest occurred to me, but for an answer she shook her head.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there. Possibly the medical people will be willing to explain,” she said, but her expression was doubtful.
I maneuvred myself into a sitting position on the side of the couch.
“I see,” I said. “Just an accident, yes, I suppose one could scarcely think of it happening any other way.”
“Unless,” she remarked, “unless one were to look upon it as divine intervention.”
“Isn’t that a little impious?”
“I was thinking of the Death of the Firstborn,” she said, reflectively.
There did not seem to be an immediate answer to that. Instead, I asked: “Can you honestly tell me that you never have the feeling that you are living in a dreary kind of nightmare?”
“Never,” she said. “There was a nightmare, but it’s over now. Listen!”
The voices of the choir, reinforced now by an orchestra, reached us distantly out of the darkened garden. No, they were not dreary: they even sounded almost exultant, but then, poor things, how were they to understand…?
My attendants arrived and helped me to my feet. I thanked the old lady for her patience with me and her kindness. But she shook her head.
“My dear, it is I who am indebted to you. In a short time I have learnt more about the conditioning of women in a mixed society than all my books were able to tell me in the rest of my long life. I hope, my dear, that the doctors will find some way of enabling you to forget it, and live happily here with us.”
At the door I paused and turned, still helpfully shored up by my attendants.
“Laura,” I said, using her name for the first time. “So many of your arguments are right yet, over all, you’re, oh, so wrong. Did you never read of lovers? Did you never, as a girl, sigh for a Romeo who would say: “It is the east, and Laura is the sun!”?”
“I think not. Though I have read the play. A pretty, idealised tale. I wonder how much heartbreak it has given to how many would be Juliets? But I would set a question against yours, my dear Jane. Did you ever see Goya’s cycle of pictures called “The Horrors of War”?”
The pink car did not return me to the “Home.” Our destination turned out to be a more austere and hospital-like building where I was fussed into bed in a room alone. In the morning, after my massive breakfast, three new doctors visited me. Their manner was more social than professional, and we chatted amiably for half an hour. They had evidently been fully informed on my conversation with the old lady, and they were not averse to answering my questions. Indeed, they found some amusement in many of them, though I found none, for there was nothing consolingly vague in what they told me it all sounded too disturbingly practicable, once the technique had been worked out. At the end of that time, however, their mood changed. One of them, with an air of getting down to business, said: “You will understand that you present us with a problem. Your fellow Mothers, of course, are scarcely susceptible to Reactioist disaffection, though you have in quite a short time managed to disgust and bewilder them considerably, but on others less stable your influence might be more serious. It is not just a matter of what you may say; your difference from the rest is implicit in your whole attitude. You cannot help that, and, frankly, we do not see how you, as a woman of education, could possibly adapt yourself to the placid, unthinking acceptance that is expected of a Mother. You would quickly feel frustrated beyond endurance. Furthermore, it is clear that the conditioning you have had under your system prevents you from feeling any goodwill towards ours.”
I took that straight; simply as a judgment without bias. Moreover, I could not dispute it. The prospect of spending the rest of my life in pink, scented, soft-musicked illiteracy, interrupted, one gathered, only by the production of quadruplet daughters at regular intervals, would certainly have me violently unhinged in a very short time.
“And so what?” I asked. “Can you reduce this great carcass to normal shape and size?”
She shook her head. “I imagine not, though I don’t know that it, has ever been attempted. But even if it were possible, you would be just as much of a misfit in the Doctorate and far more of a liability as a Reactionist influence.”
I could understand that, too.
“What, then?” I enquired.
She hesitated, then she said gently: “The only practicable proposal we can make is that you should agree to a hypnotic treatment which will remove your memory.”
As the meaning of that came home to me I had to fight off a rush of panic. After all, I told myself, they were being reasonable with me. I must do my best to respond sensibly. Nevertheless, some minutes must have passed before I answered, unsteadily: “You are asking me to commit suicide. My mind is my memories: they are me. If I lose them I shall die, just as surely as if you were to kill my this body.”
They did not dispute that. How could they?
There is just one thing that makes my life worth living knowing that you moved me, my sweet, sweet Donald. It is only in my memory that you live now. If you ever leave there you will die again and for ever.
“No!” I told them. “No! No!”
At intervals during the day small servitors staggered in under the weight of my meals. Between their visits I had only my thoughts to occupy me, and they were not good company.
“Frankly,” one of the doctors had put it to me, not unsympathetically, “we can see no alternative. For years after it happened the annual figures of mental breakdowns were our greatest worry, even though the women then could keep themselves fully occupied with the tremendous amount of work that had to be done, so many of them could not adjust. And we can’t even offer you work.”
I knew that it was a fair warning she was giving me and I knew that, unless the hallucination which seemed to grow more real all the time could soon be induced to dissolve, I was trapped.
During the long day and the following night I tried my hardest to get back to the objectivity I had managed earlier, but I failed. The whole dialectic was too strong for me now; my senses too consciously aware of my surroundings; the air of consequence and coherence too convincingly persistent.
When they had let me have twenty-four hours to think it over, the same trio visited me again.
“I think,” I told them, “that I understand better now. What you are offering me is painless oblivion, in place of a breakdown followed by oblivion and you see no other choice.”
“We don’t,” admitted the spokeswoman, and the other two nodded. “But, of course, for the hypnosis we shall need your cooperation.”
“I realise that,” I told her, “and I also see now that in the circumstances it would be obstinately futile to withhold it. So, yes, I’m willing to give it, but on one condition.”
They looked at me questioningly.
“It is this,” I explained, “that you will try one other course first. I want you to give me an injection of chum juatin. I want it in precisely the same strength as I had it before. I can tell you the dose.”