The Infinite Moment

The other leaned across, and patted her hand.

“There, there now. Calm down. I know it’s terribly bewildering at first, but it comes all right. I remember.”

“Yyou remember?” stammered Frances.

“Yes. From when it happened to me, of course. From when I was where you are now.”

Frances stared at her, with a sensation of slowly and helplessly drowning.

“Look,” said the other. “I think I’d better get you a drink. Yes, I know you don’t take it, but this is rather exceptional. I remember how much better I felt for it. Just a minute.” She got up, and went indoors.

Frances leaned back, holding hard to both arms of her chair for reassurance. She felt as if she were falling over and over, a long way down.

The other came back holding a glass, and gave it to her. She drank, spluttering a little over the strange taste of it. But the other had been right: she did immediately begin to feel somewhat better.

“Of course, it’s a bit of a shock,” said the other. “And I fancy you’re right about one person not being in two places up to a point. But the way I think it must happen is that you just seem to yourself to go on being the same person. But you never can be, not really. I mean, as the cells that make you are always gradually being replaced, you can’t really be all the same person at any two times, can you?”

Frances tried to follow that, without success, but: “Well, well, I suppose not quite,” she conceded, doubtfully.

The other went on talking, giving her time to recover herself.

“Well, then when all the cells have been replaced by new ones, over seven years or so, then you can’t any of you be the same person any longer, although you still think you are. So that means that the cells that make up you and me are two quite different sets of cellsso they aren’t really having to be in two different places at once, although it does look like it, don’t you see?”

“I... er... perhaps,” said Frances, on a slightly hysterical note.

“So that sets a sort of natural limit,” the other went on. “There obviously has to be a kind of minimum gap of seven years or so in which it is quite impossible for this to happen at all until all your present cells have been replaced by others, you see.”

“II suppose so,” said Frances, faintly.

“Just take another drink of that. It’ll do you good,” the other advised.

Frances did, and leaned back again in the chair. She wished her head would stop whirling. She did not understand a word that the woman her other self whoever it was had said. All she knew was that none of it could possibly make sense. She kept on hanging on to the arms of the chair until, presently, she began to feel herself growing a little calmer.

“Better? You’ve more colour now,” the other said.

Frances nodded. She could feel the tears of a reaction not far away. The other came over and put an arm round her.

“Poor dear! What a time you’re having! All this confusion, and then falling in love on top of it as if that weren’t confusing enough by itself.”

“Falling in love?” said Frances.

“Why, yes. He kissed you, and patted your behind and you fell in love. I remember so well.”

“Oh, dear, is it like that? I didn’t” Frances broke off. “But how did you know about? Oh, I see, of course”

“And he’s a dear. You’ll adore him. And little Betty’s a love, too, bless her,” the other told her. She paused, and added: “I’m afraid you’ve rather a lot to go through first, but it’s worth it. You’ll remember it’s worth it all?”

“Yesss,” Frances told her vaguely.

She thought for a moment of the man who had come out of the house and gone off in the car. He would be “Yes,” she said, more stoutly. She pondered for some seconds and then turned to look at the other.

“I suppose one does have to grow older, older, I mean,” she amended. “Somehow, I’ve never thought”

The other laughed. “Of course you haven’t. But it’s really very nice, I assure you. Such a much less anxious state than being young though, naturally, you” won’t believe that.”

Frances let her eyes wander round the porch and across the garden. They came to rest on the teddybears and the delinquent golliwog. She smiled.

“I think I do,” she said.

The other smiled, too; her eyes a little shiny.

“I really was rather a sweet thing,” she said.

She got up abruptly.

“Time you were going, my dear: You’ve got to get back to that horrid old woman.”

Frances got up obediently, too. The other seemed to have an idea of what she was talking about, and what was necessary. Frances herself had little enough.

“Back to the Se–ora?” she asked.

The other nodded without speaking. She put her arms round Frances, and held her close to her. She kissed her gently. “Oh, my dear!” she said, unsteadily, and turned her head away.

Frances walked down the short drive. At the gate she turned and looked back, taking it all in.

The other, on the porch, kissed her hand to her. Then she put it over her eyes, and ran into the house.

Frances turned to the right and walked back by the way she had come, towards the town, and the Se–ora…

The cloudiness cleared. The crystal became just a glassball again. Beyond it sat Se–ora Rosa, with her comb awry. Her left hand held Frances” wrist. Frances stared at her for some moments, then: “You are a cheat,” she burst out. “And you’ve been telling lies, too. You described Edward, but the man you showed me wasn’t Edward, he wasn’t even a bit like Edward.” She pulled her arm free with a sudden wrench. “Cheat!” she repeated. “You told me Edward, and you showed me somebody else. It’s all cruel, silly lies and cheating. All of it.”

Her vehemence was enough to take the Se–ora a little aback.

“There was jus” a little mistake,” she admitted. “By “n’unfortunate”

“Mistake!” shouted Frances. “The mistake was my ever coming here at all. You’ve just made a fool of me, and I hate you! I hate you!”

The Se–ora recoiled, and then rallied slightly. With a touch of dignity, she said: “Th’xplanation’s really quite simple. It was”

“No!” Frances shouted. “I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

She pushed the table with all her force. The far edge of it took the Se–ora in the middle. Her chair teetered backwards, then she, table, crystal, and lamp, went down all in a heap. Frances sprang for the door.

The Se–ora grunted, and rolled over. She struggled stertorously to her feet, leaving comb and mantilla in the debris. She made determinedly through the door in Frances” wake. On the landing, she leaned over the bannisters.

“You damned little duffer,” she shouted. “That was your shecond marriagean” I say the hell with both of “em.”

But Frances was already out in the street, beyond earshot.

“A very unpleasant experience, humiliating, too,” thought Frances, as she pegged along, with the jolting step of the incensed. Humiliating because she had nearly no, she’d be honest; for a time she had fallen for it. It had all seemed so convincingly, so really real. Even now she could scarcely believe that she hadn’t walked up that drive, sat on that porch, talked to… but what a ridiculous thing to think… As if it could possibly be..

All the same, to find oneself facing that horrible Se–ora again, and realise that it had all been some kind of trick If she were not in the public street, she could have kicked herself, and wept with mortification…

Presently, however, as the first flush of her anger began to cool, she became more aware of her surroundings. It was borne in upon her attention that a number of the people she met were looking at her with curiosity not quite the right kind of curiosity…