“And Ottilie had married the wrong man… We found that out. Or perhaps one should put it that she had not married the man she thought she had. She had fallen in love with him; and, no doubt, he had loved her, to begin with but in less than a year she became torn between the part she loved, and the side she detested.
“Her Cohn Trafford looked like me right down to the left thumb which had got mixed up in an electric fan and never quite matched the other side indeed, up to a point, that point somewhere in 1926/27 he was me. We had, I gathered, some mannerisms in common, and voices that were similar though we differed in our emphases, and in our vocabularies, as I learnt from a tape, and in details: the moustache, the way we wore our hair, the scar on the left side of the forehead which was exclusively his, yet, in a sense, I was him and he was me. We had the same parents, the same genes, the same beginning, and if I was right about the time of the dichotomy we must have had the same memory of our life, for the first five years or so.
But, later on, things on our different planes must have run differently for us. Environment, or experiences, had developed qualities in him which, I have to think, lie latent in me and, I suppose, vice versa.
“I think that’s a reasonable assumption, don’t you? After all, one begins life with a kind of armature which has individual differences and tendencies, though a common general plan, but whatever is modelled on that armature later consists almost entirely of stuff from contacts and influences. What these had been for the other Cohn Trafford I don’t know, but I found the results somewhere painful rather like continually glimpsing oneself in unexpected distorting mirrors.
“There were certain cautions, restraints, and expectations in Ottihie that taught me a number of things about him, too. Moreover, in the next day or two I read his novels attentively. The earliest was not displeasing, but as the dates grew later, and the touch surer I cared less and less for the flavour; no doubt the widening streaks of brutality showed the calculated development of a sellingpoint, but there was something a little more than that besides, one has a choice of sellingpoints… With each book, I resented seeing my name on the title page a little more.
“I discovered the current “work in progress,” too. With the help of his notes I could, I believe, have produced a passable forgery, but I knew I would not. If I had to continue his literary career, it would be with my kind of books, not his. But, in any case, I had no need to worry over making a living: what with the war and. one thing and another, physics on my own plane was a generation ahead of theirs. Even if they had got as far as radar it was still someone’s military secret. I had enough knowledge to pass for a genius, and make my fortune if I cared to use it…”
He smiled, and shook his head. He went on: “You see, once the first shock was over and I had begun to perceive what must have happened, there was no cause for alarm, and, once I had met Ottilie, none for regret. The only problem was adjustment. It helped in general, I found, to try to get back to as much as I could remember of the prewar world. But details were not difficult: unrecognised friends, lapsed friends, all with unknown histories, some of them with wives, or husbands, I knew (though not necessarily the same ones); some with quite unexpected partners. There were queer moments, too an encounter with a burly cheerful man in the bar of the Hyde Park Hotel. He didn’t know me, but I knew him; the last time I had seen him he was lying by a road with a sniper’s bullet through his head. I saw Della, my wife, leaving a restaurant looking happy, with her arm through that of a tall legal-looking type; it was uncanny to have her glance at me as at a complete stranger, I felt as if both of us were ghosts but I was glad she had got past 1951 all right on that plane. The most awkward part was frequently running into people that it appeared I should know; the other Cohn’s acquaintanceship was evidently vast and curious. I began to favour the idea of proclaiming a breakdown from overwork, to tide me over for a bit.
“One thing that did not cross my mind was the possibility of what I took to be a unique shift of plane occuring again, this time in reverse.
“I am thankful it did not. It would have blighted the three most wonderful weeks in my life. I thought it was, as the engraving on the back of the watch said: “C. forever O.”
“I made a tentative attempt to explain to her what I thought had happened, but it wasn’t meaning anything to her, so I gave it up. I think she had it worked out for herself that somewhere about a year after we were married I had begun to suffer from overstrain, and that now I had got better and become again the kind of man she had thought I was… something like that… but theories about it did not interest her much it was the consequence that mattered…
“And how right she was for me too. After all, what else did matter? As far as I was concerned, nothing. I was in love. What did it matter how I had found the one unknown woman I had sought all my life. I was happy, as I had never expected to be… Oh, all the phrases are trite, but “on top of the world” was suddenly half ridiculously vivid. I was full of a confidence rather like that of the slightly drunk. I could take anything on. With her beside me I could keep on top of that, or any, world… I think she felt like that, too. I’m sure she did. She’d wiped out the bad years. Her faith was regrowing, stronger every day… If I’d only known but how could I know? What could I do… Again he stopped talking, and stared into the fire, this time for so long that at last the doctor fidgeted in his chair to recall him, and then added.
“What happened?”
Cohn Trafford still had a faraway look.
“Happened?” he repeated. “If I knew that I could perhaps but I don’t know… There’s nothing to know It’s random, too… One night I went to sleep with Ottilie beside me in the morning I woke up in a hospital bed back here again… That’s all there was to it. All there is Just random…”
In the long interval that followed, Dr. Harshom unhurriedly refilled his pipe, lit it with careful attention, assured himself it was burning evenly and drawing well, settled himself back comfortably, and then said, with intentional matter-of-factness: “It’s a pity you don’t believe that. If you did, you’d never have begun this search; if you’d come to believe it, you’d have dropped the search before now. No, you believe that there is a pattern, or rather, that there were two patterns, closely similar to begin with, but gradually, perhaps logically, becoming more variant and that you, your psyche, or whatever you like to call it, was the aberrant, the random factor.
“However, let’s not go into the philosophical, or metaphysical consideration of what you call the dichotomy now all that stuff will keep. Let us say that I accept the validity of your experience, for you, but reserve judgment on its nature. I accept it on account of several features not the least being as I have said, the astronomical odds against the conjunction of names, Ottilie and Harshom, occurring fortuitously. Of course, you could have seen the name somewhere and lodged it in your subconscious, but that, too, I find so immensely improbable that I put aside.
“Very well, then, let us go on from there. Now, you appear to me to have made a number of quite unwarrantable assumptions. You have assumed, for instance, that because an Ottilie Harshom exists on what you call that plane, she must have come into existence on this plane also. I cannot see that that is justified by anything you have told me. That she might have existed here, I admit, for the name Ottilie is in my branch of the family; but the chances of her having no existence at all are considerably greater did not you yourself mention that you recognised friends who in different circumstances were married to different wives is it not, therefore, highly probable that the circumstances which produced an Ottilie Harshom there failed to occur here, with the result that she could not come into existence at all? And, indeed, that must be so.