House of Green Turf

and almost broadsided it short of the hedge, but its own impetus rolled it against the weight and sent it hurtling over in a slow somersault. The door flapped, like a wing trying to lift them clear, but as helpless as she was to save them. Then the seat beside her was empty, and the spiky shapes of the hedge surged upwards one moment, downward the next, to spear her, and the squat, solid, moss-grown stump of a tree launched itself from the sky to stamp her into the ground.

The world exploded in her face, and a fragmentation bomb in her lap. And then there was darkness, aeon upon aeon of darkness, and the last thing she knew, extended diminuendo long after everything else was gone, was her own voice, or perhaps only the silent phantom of her own voice, lamenting inconsolably: My God, what have I done! I’ve killed poor Tom! My God, what have I done, I’ve killed Tom, I’ve killed him… killed him… killed him…

Two voices were discussing her over her head. They didn’t know that dead people can hear. Quite dispassionate voices, cool, leisurely, and low. Either they had no bodies, or dead people can’t see. She was dangling just below the level of consciousness, clinging to the surface like the air-breathing nymph of some water creature.

‘Beautiful, too!’ said the first voice critically.

‘Nobody’s beautiful on the operating table,’ said the second voice cynically.

‘Beautiful, gifted and famous. It seems some people can have everything.’

‘Except immortality.’

‘What are her chances?’

‘Oh, pretty good now. Nothing’s ever certain, but… pretty good. She had us on the run, though! Set on dying, you’d have said.’

‘Scale tipped the right way in the end. Pity if she’d slipped through our fingers. Maggie Tressider… what a loss!’

‘ “Maggie is dead. And music dies!” ’

‘Pardon?’ said the first voice blankly, not recognising Byrd’s despairing tribute to Tallis, his master and idol. But Maggie recognised it, and was enchanted, disarmed, humbled.

‘Never mind,’ said the second voice. ‘She’ll do now. That’s one of us with the chance to begin again. I could almost envy her.’

Something pricked her thigh. She went down again gratefully, fathoms deep into the dark.

Faces loomed, receded and vanished like puffs of smoke. Voices, some of them real and some illusory, whispered, barked, shouted, fired themselves like pistol shots from every corner of unreality, in the crazy round- dance of disorientation. Hands lifted her, trickles of water fed themselves into her mouth. There were periods of light and sense, but she always lost them again before she could orientate herself or make anyone understand her. Pain, never acute but never absent, ebbed and flowed in a capricious tide. Through a shadowy underworld spiky with quickset hedges and shattering glass she pursued and was pursued, at every lucid moment reaching out feverishly after whoever was nearest: ‘Tom… please, find Tom! Never mind me, look for Tom…he’s hurt…’ And all the while the dead man pressed hard on her heels, tapping at her shoulder; but the voice that panted in her ear was always her own voice, thinly wailing: My God, what have I done? I’ve killed him… killed him…

Later she hurt all over, and that meant that there were senses there, nerves that were working, muscles that didn’t want to work; and she tried to move, and did move, and that hurt more, but nevertheless was not discouraging.

A face hovered, impressed: ‘My, you’re mobile!’

‘Tom…’ she said urgently. ‘Please, I’ve got to know about Tom…’

‘Tom? Who’s Tom?’

‘Tom Lowell. He was with me in the car…’

‘Oh, he’s all right. Don’t worry about him. He was the lucky one, he got off with only a few bramble scratches and mild concussion. He was discharged yesterday.’

She couldn’t believe it. ‘You mean he isn’t dead? Really he isn’t? You’re not just trying to keep me quiet by telling me that?’

‘Not a bit of it! He’s far from dead. If you’re fit for visits to-morrow he’s coming in, so you can see for yourself. Got his face scratched, but that’s all the damage you’ll see. He was thrown out just short of the hedge. You’re the one who took the brunt, and you’re going to be all right, too. Drink?’

‘We were going to Liverpool,’ said Maggie, groping after departed urgencies that might have validity again any moment. ‘We should have been at a concert…’

‘Mr. Lowell fixed that as soon as he came round. We telephoned them, and they got somebody else. Everything’s taken care of.’

So there seemed nothing more to ask about, and nothing more to say. She sank back into a chaos now less frightening because almost meaningless. Everything was taken care of. Tom wasn’t dead. After all, she would never have to face his wife and try to excuse herself for the crash that killed him. He was alive, not even badly hurt.

Then if it wasn’t Tom, who was it, tapping her on the shoulder, treading on her heels, dunning her for his life?

It wasn’t any delusion, he was still there; even in the instant of absolute relief over Tom he had still been there, close and faceless, making use of her voice because he had no voice of his own, being dead: My God, what have I done? He’s dead, and I killed him! My God, what have you done to me? Killed me… killed me… killed me…

How could she have mistaken him for Tom? Only out of the remote past, where so much was forgotten, could something so ominous and shapeless surface again to haunt and accuse. When the waters are troubled, dead people rise. But all her dead were decently buried, and she had never done them any wrong.

‘Nurse! There wasn’t anyone else, was there? We didn’t hit somebody else, when we crashed…?’

‘There was nobody else around. Just the two of you, as if that wasn’t enough! What are you worrying about?