Cold, Lone and Still

Way, but steering well clear of our visit to the ruins, when she said, looking at me in a commiserating sort of way which was rather galling:

‘ “I dimly heard the master’s voice

And boys far-off at play,

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Had stolen me away.” ’

‘I am not a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, and what I saw and touched had nothing to do with the mountains of Ecuador,’ I said, ‘still less with the Grampians of Scotland.’

‘Knows his geography, too!’ she said, with the simulated admiration she might have extended to a bright child of five. I grinned, determined not to allow her to see that she had irritated me.

‘If you let out a crack like that when we’re married, I’ll clout you,’ I said.

‘Another infantile reaction,’ she retorted, so, as usual, she had the last word. We had dinner in Soho, then I took her by taxi to her flat and walked back to my own. I had nothing but my rucksack to carry. She had invited me in, but I knew that, if I accepted the invitation, we should either quarrel or make love, or perhaps the one would follow the other, and who knew in which order?

‘You’re angry with me,’ she said, when I would not go in.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I’d like to murder you, but I’m never angry with you.’

‘Sometimes? Never? Do those come under the heading of lies, damned lies, or statistics? And perhaps we had better not mention murder for a bit. I might begin to think you are obsessed by it.’

So, like the chap in A Shropshire Lad, I walked home alone ‘amidst the moonlight pale’, and while I walked and long after I had let myself into my flat and had gone to bed, I turned over in my mind all that had happened since I had been in London the last time. It did not make for comforting thoughts. I reviewed everything that I remembered about the mist, the realisation that we had lost our way, the unexpected discovery of the stone wall, its entrance arch, the glassless window through which we had climbed and my subsequent discovery of the body. It was of no use to tell myself that only some of this had happened. Either all of it, or none of it, I told myself, had fallen within my experience. I was worried and fearful.

‘Well, how did your holiday go?’ asked my partner when I turned up at our offices a couple of days later. ‘You’re back early, aren’t you? Anything go wrong?’

‘Sandy,’ I said, ‘I am going to describe to you all the objects which I imagine I can see in this room and you will check with me whether I am really seeing them or not. Or — no!’ I went on. ‘I might only think you were agreeing with me. In fact, for all I know, you may not be here at all, and neither may I, come to that. There’s no proof, is there?’

He looked at me with eyes which were both sceptical and concerned.

‘I suppose you didn’t roll down a mountain and hit your head while you were in Scotland, did you?’ he asked.

‘No, of course not. At least — well, no.’

‘Then what’s all this about?’

So I told him everything. After all, we had been at school and college together and there had always been a strong bond between us, and I hoped I could at least trust him not to laugh at me.

‘All I can say,’ he said, when he had told the girl in the outer office to fob off all callers, whether personal or by telephone, until he gave the all clear, ‘is that you only thought the fellow was dead. He must have come back to consciousness a bit later on, rejoined his party and gone on to Fort William, while you were lazing the time away at the Kingshouse hotel.’

‘I don’t think that’s possible. I know there was a corpse. Hera thinks I ought to see a psychiatrist. She’s hedging about our marriage, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, obviously the poor girl doesn’t fancy yoking herself with a fellow for whom the wagon may come trundling round at any minute.’

‘It’s not funny, Sandy. I shone my torch on the chap as well as touching him, you see. Either I’m potty or something very strange has happened.’

‘Well, look, to ease your mind, why don’t you fall in with Hera’s idea? She’s been phoning me. Why don’t you consult a psychiatrist? They’re not all cranks, you know.’

‘She only mentioned it once. I don’t think she was all that serious. Surely she couldn’t have been. I had no idea, though, that she had been talking to you. What else did she say?’

‘Look, if she’s got any doubts in her mind, the best thing is to set them at rest as soon as you can.’

‘I don’t know any psychiatrists.’

‘That is where I have the advantage of you. I know the best one in the country. She isn’t a quack; she won’t feed you a lot of hot air all ballooned up in the jargon some of these people use, and she’s fully qualified in medicine as well as in psychiatry.’

‘She?’

‘Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley. You’ll like her. I’ll ring up and make the appointment, if you like. She only takes cases which interest her, and I think she’ll fall for yours. Besides, we’ve got her granddaughter on our list.’

‘We have?’

‘Sally Lestrange, the occasional novelist and a ghostwriter for the non-literary bods who have a life story to tell. Dame Beatrice will sort you out.’

‘Why should you think so? You’re as bad as Hera. You both think I’m bats just because I identified a dead body