“Then perhaps I’d better ask her who you are,” I suggested.
“Oh, you must be tight as an owl. Go and sleep it off,” she snapped, and the phone went dead.
I put the receiver back in the rest. The young woman was looking at me with an expression of genuine bewilderment. In the quietness of the hail she must have been able to hear the other voice almost as clearly as I had. She turned away, and busied herself with taking her coat off and putting it on a hanger in the closet. When she’d carefully done that she turned back.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You aren’t tight, are you? What’s it all about? What has dear Dickie done?”
“Dickie?” I enquired. The slight furrow between her brows deepened.
“Oh, really, Cohn. If you think I don’t know Dickie’s voice on the telephone by this time… “
“Oh,” I said. A bloomer of a peculiarly cardinal kind, that. In fact, it is hard to think of a more unlikely mistake than that a man should confuse the gender of his friends. Unless I wanted to be thought quite potty, I must take steps to clarify the situation.
“Look, can’t we go into the sitting-room. There’s something I want to tell you,” I suggested.
I took the chair opposite, and wondered how to begin. Even if I had been clear in my own mind about what had happened, it would have been difficult enough. But how to convey that though the physical form was Cohn Trafford’s, and I myself was Cohn Trafford, yet I was not that Cohn Trafford; not the one who wrote books and was married to her, but a kind of alternative Cohn Trafford astray from an alternative world? What seemed to be wanted was some kind of approach which would not immediately suggest a call for an alienist and it wasn’t easy to perceive.
“Well?” she repeated.
“It’s difficult to explain,” I temporised, but truthfully enough.
“I’m sure it is,” she replied, without encouragement, and added: “Would it perhaps be easier if you didn’t look at me like that? I’d prefer it, too.”
“Something very odd has happened to me,” I told her.
“Oh, dear, again?” she said. “Do you want my sympathy, or something?”
I was taken aback, and a little confused.
“Do you mean it’s happened to him before?” I asked.
She looked at me hard.
“Him? Who’s him? I thought you were talking about you. And what I mean is last time it happened it was Dickie, and the time before that it was Frances, and before that it was Lucy… And now you’ve given Dickie a most peculiar kind of brushoff… Am I supposed to be surprised…?”
I was learning about my alter ego quite fast, but we were off the track. I tried: “No, you don’t understand. This is something quite different.”
“Of course not. Wives never do, do they? And it’s always different. Well, if that’s all that’s so important..
She began to get up.
“No, please…” I said anxiously.
She checked herself, looking very carefully at me again. The half-frown came back.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t think I do understand. At least, II hope not…” And she went on examining me, with something like growing uncertainty, I thought.
When you plead for understanding you can scarcely keep it on an impersonal basis, but when you don’t know whether the best address would be “my dear,” or “darling,” or some more intimate variant, nor whether it should be prefaced by first name, nickname, or pet name, the way ahead becomes thorny indeed. Besides, there was this persistent misunderstanding on the wrong level.
“Ottilie, darling,” I tried and that was clearly no usual form, for, momentarily, her eyes almost goggled, but I ploughed on: “It isn’t at all what you’re thinking nothing a bit like that. It’s well, it’s that in a way I’m not the same person…”
She was back in charge of herself.
“Oddly enough, I’ve been aware of that for some time,” she said. “And I could remind you that you’ve said something like that before, more than once. All right then, let me go on for you; so you’re not the same person I married, so you’d like a divorce or is it that you’re afraid Dickie’s husband is going to cite you this time? Oh, God! How sick I am of all this..
“No, no,” I protested desperately. “It’s not that sort of thing at all. Do please be patient. It’s a thing that’s terribly difficult to explain…” I paused, looking at her. That did not make it any easier. Indeed, it was far from help in the rational processes. She sat looking back at me, still with that half-frown, but now it was little more uneasy than displeased.
“Something has happened to you…” she said.
That’s what I’m trying to tell you about,” I told her, but I doubt whether she heard it. Her eyes grew wider as she looked. Suddenly they avoided mine.
“No!” she said. “Oh, no!” She looked as if she were about to cry, and wound her fingers tightly together in her lap. She half-whispered: “Oh, no!… Oh, please God, no!
Not again… Haven’t I been hurt enough?… I won’t…
I won’t… Then she jumped up, and, before I was halfway out of my chair, she was out of the room.
Cohn Trafford paused to light a fresh cigarette, and took his time before going on. At length he pulled his thoughts back.
“Well,” he went on, “obviously you will have realised by now that that Mrs Trafford was born Ottilie Harshom. It happened in 1928, and she married that Cohn Trafford in 1949. Her father was killed in a plane crash in 1938. I don’t remember her ever mentioning his first name. That’s unfortunate there are a lot of things that are unfortunate: had I had any idea that I might be jerked back here I’d have taken more notice of a lot of things. But I hadn’t… Something exceedingly odd had happened, but that was no reason to suppose that an equally odd thing would happen, in reverse “I did do my best, out of my own curiosity, to discover when the schism had taken place. There must, as I saw it, have been some point where, perhaps by chance, some pivotal thing had happened, or failed to happen, and finding it could bring one closer to knowing the moment, the atom of time, that had been split by some random neutron to give two atoms of time diverging into different futures. Once that had taken place, consequences gradually accumulating would make the conditions on one plane progressively different from those on the other.
“Perhaps that is always happening. Perhaps chance is continually causing two different outcomes so that in a dimension we cannot perceive there are infinite numbers of planes, some so close to our own and so recently split off that they vary only in minor details, others vastly different. Planes on which some misadventure caused Alexander to be beaten by the Persians, Scipio to fall before Hannibal, Caesar to stay beyond the Rubicon; infinite, infinite planes of the random split and resplit by the random. Who can tell? But, now that we know the Universe for a random place, why not?
“But I couldn’t come near fixing the moment. It was, I think, somewhere in late 1926, or early 1927. Further than that one seemed unable to go without the impossible data of quantities of records from both planes for comparison. Something happening, or not happening, about then had brought about results which prevented, among other things, the rise of Hitler, and thus the second world war and consequently postponed the achievement of nuclear fission on this plane of our dichotomy if that is a good word for it.
“Anyway, it was for me, and as I said, simply a matter of incidental curiosity. My active concerns were more immediate. And the really important one was Ottilie…
“I have, as you know, been married and I was fond of my wife. It was, as people say, a successful marriage, and it never occurred to me to doubt that until this thing happened to me. I don’t want to be disloyal to Della now, and I don’t think she was unhappy but I am immensely thankful for one thing: that this did not happen while she was alive; she never knew, because I didn’t know then, that I had married the wrong woman and I hope she never thought it…