But it did not. When I looked again they were still there, their silly, pretty faces gaping stupidly at me across the revolting mounds of pink satin.
“I’m going to get out of this,” I said.
It was a tremendous effort to raise myself to a sitting position. I was aware of the rest watching me, wide-eyed, while I made it. I struggled to get my feet round and over the side of the bed, but they were all tangled in the satin coverlet and I could not reach to free them. It was the true, desperate frustration of a dream. I heard my voice pleading: “Help me! Oh, Donald, darling, please help me…”
And suddenly, as if the word “Donald” had released a spring, something seemed to click in my head. The shutter in my mind opened, not entirely, but enough to let me know who I was. I understood, suddenly, where the cruelty had lain.
I looked at the others again. They were still staring half bewildered, half alarmed. I gave up the attempt to move, and lay back on my pillow again.
“You can’t fool me any more,” I told them. “I know who I am now.”
“But, Mother Orchis” one began.
“Stop that,” I snapped at her. I seemed to have swung suddenly out of selfpity into a kind of masochistic callousness. “I am not a mother,” I said harshly. “I am just a woman who, for a short time, had a husband, and who hoped but only hoped that she would have babies by him.”
A pause followed that; a rather odd pause, where there should have been at least a murmur. What I had said did not seem to have registered. The faces showed no understanding; they were as uncomprehending as dolls.
Presently, the most friendly one seemed to feel an obligation to break up the silence. With a little vertical crease between her brows: “What,” she enquired tentatively, “what is a husband?”
I looked hard from one face to another. There was no trace of guile in any of them; nothing but puzzled speculation such as one sometimes sees in a child’s eyes. I felt close to hysteria for a moment; then I took a grip of myself. Very well, then, since the hallucination would not leave me alone, I would play it at its own game, and see what came of that. I began to explain with a kind of deadpan, simple word seriousness: “A husband is a man whom a woman takes...”
Evidently, from their expressions I was not very enlightening. However, they let me go on for three or four sentences without interruption. Then, when I paused for breath, the kindly one chipped in with a point which she evidently felt needed clearing up: “But what,” she asked, in evident perplexity, “what is a man?”
A cool silence hung over the room after my exposition. I had an impression I had been sent to Coventry, or semi-Coventry, by them, but I did not bother to test it. I was too much occupied. trying to force the door of my memory further open, and finding that beyond a certain point it would not budge.
I knew now that I was Jane. I had been Jane Summers, and had become Jane Waterleigh when I had married Donald.
I was had been twenty-four when we were married: just twenty-five when Donald was killed, six months later. And there it stopped. It seemed like yesterday, but I couldn’t tell Before that, everything was perfectly clear. My parents and friends, my home, my school, my training, my job, as Dr Summers, at the Wraychester Hospital. I could remember my first sight of Donald when they brought him in one evening with a broken leg and all that followed I could remember now the face that I ought to see in a looking-glass and it was certainly nothing like that I had seen in the corridor outside it should be more oval, with a complexion looking faintly suntanned; with a smaller, neater mouth; surrounded by chestnut hair that curled naturally; with brown eyes rather wide apart and perhaps a little grave as a rule.
I knew, too, how the rest of me should look slender, long legged, with small, firm breasts, a nice body, but one that I had simply taken for granted until Donald gave me pride in it by loving it I looked down at the repulsive mound of pink satin, and shuddered. A sense of outrage came welling up. I longed for Donald to comfort and pet me and love me and tell me it would be all right; that I wasn’t as I was seeing myself at all, and that it really was a dream. At the same time I was stricken with horror at the thought that he should ever see me gross and obese like this. And then I remembered that Donald would never see me again at all never any more and I was wretched and miserable, and the tears trickled down my cheeks again.
The five others just went on looking at me, wide-eyed and wondering. Half an hour passed, still in silence, then the door opened to admit a whole troop of the little women, all in white suits. I saw Hazel look at me, and then at the leader. She seemed about to speak, and then to change her mind. The little women split up, two to a couch. Standing one on each other, they stripped away the coverlet, rolled up their sleeves, and set to work at massage.
At first it was not unpleasant, and quite soothing. One lay back and relaxed. Presently, however, I liked it less: soon I found it offensive.
“Stop that!” I told the one on the right, sharply.
She paused, smiled at me amiably, though a trifle uncertainly, and then continued.
“I said stop it,” I told her, pushing her away.
Her eyes met mine. They were troubled and hurt, although a professional smile still curved her mouth.
“I mean it,” I added, curtly.
She continued to hesitate, and glanced across at her partner on the further side of the bed.
“You, too,” I told the other. “That’ll do.”
She did not even pause in her rhythm. The one on the right plucked a decision and returned. She restarted just what I had stopped. I reached out and pushed her, harder this time. There must have been a lot more muscle in that bolster of an arm than one would have supposed. The shove carried her half across the room, and she tripped and fell.
All movement in the room suddenly ceased. Everybody stared, first at her, and then at me. The pause was brief. They all set to work again. I pushed away the girl on the left, too, though more gently. The other one picked herself up. She was crying and she looked frightened, but she set her jaw doggedly and started to come back.
“You keep away from me, you little horrors,” I told them threateningly.
That checked them. They stood off, and looked miserably at one another. The one with the badge of seniority fussed up.
“What’s the trouble, Mother Orchis?” she enquired.
I told her. She looked puzzled.
“But that’s quite right,” she expostulated.
“Not for me. I don’t like it, and I won’t have it,” I replied.
She stood awkwardly, at a loss.
Hazel’s voice came from the other side of the room: “Orchis is off her head. She’s been telling us the most disgusting things. She’s quite mad.”
The little woman turned to regard her, and then looked inquiringly at one of the others. When the girl confirmed with a nod and an expression of distaste she turned back to me, giving me a searching inspection.
“You two go and report,” she told my discomfited masseuses.
They were both crying now, and they went wretchedly down the room together. The one in charge gave me another long thoughtful look, and then followed them.
A few minutes later all the rest had packed up and gone.
The six of us were alone again. It was Hazel who broke the ensuing silence.
“That was a bitchy piece of work. The poor little devils were only doing their job,” she observed.
“If that’s their job, I don’t like it,” I told her.
“So you just get them a beating, poor things. But I suppose that’s the lost memory again. You wouldn’t remember that a Servitor who upsets a Mother is beaten would you?” she added sarcastically.
“Beaten?” I repeated, uneasily.
“Yes, beaten,” she mimicked. “But you don’t care what becomes of them, do you? I don’t know what’s happened to you while you were away, but whatever it was it seems to have produced a thoroughly nasty result. I never did care for you, Orchis, though the others thought I was wrong. Well, now we all know.”