You’re both going to be all right.’
No answer there, either. Much longer ago, much farther away, than the badly-engineered curve by the brickworks. Somewhere, at some time, she had done something terrible to someone, something that destroyed him. Oh God, what was it? How could she know she had done it, and not know what it was? The silence that had covered it could only be her silence. She must have known at some time, and held her tongue in the hope of universal silence. And gradually drawn breath easily again, because there’d been no sound, nobody to rise up and accuse her, nobody to dig up what was dead, nobody she need fear, after all. Only herself, lulled, bemused, bribed, persuaded, subdued into acquiescence, but never convinced. Only herself and this roused ghost clawing at her shoulder, and this now constant and inconsolable ache inside her of a debt unpaid and unpayable.
‘Well, how are you feeling this morning?’ asked the ward sister, coming in on her daily round.
‘Much better, thank you.’ The patient was pale, lucid and astonished among her pillows, staring great-eyed at a recovered world in which she seemed to find nothing familiar. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been causing you all a great deal of trouble.’
‘You haven’t done so badly, considering. You did give them rather a run for their money in the theatre—very naughty reactions to the anaesthetic. But that’s all over now. Your temperature’s been down to normal since last night, and Nurse tells me you’re eating well this morning. Keep it up, and we’ll be getting you out of bed in a couple of days.’
‘I seem to have been lucky,’ said Maggie, flexing her legs experimentally under the bedclothes. ‘Everything works. What exactly did I do to myself?’
‘It wasn’t half as bad as it looked when they brought you in. A lot of blood, but no breakages. But you were pretty badly cut about, down below, you’re going to look like a Victorian sampler when you get all that plaster off. Never mind, the scars won’t be where they show, and if you usually heal well you may not have much to show for it in a year or so. There’ve been any amount of callers enquiring after you. Your sister telephoned, and your brother… your agent… In a few days we’ll let you have a telephone in here, but not just yet. But I think we could allow you visitors this afternoon. Mr. Lowell sent you the roses, and said he’d be in to see you the minute we let him.’
‘Wasn’t I in a ward? I thought… I seem to remember more beds… a big room and a lot of people sleeping…’
‘Your agent asked us to move you into a private room, as soon as he knew what had happened.’
‘Oh,’ said Maggie, ‘I see!’ He would, of course, to him it would be a matter of first importance. ‘It sounds silly, but I don’t even know what hospital this is. I’d never driven that road before.’
‘You’re in the Royal, in Comerbourne. We’re the nearest general to that nasty bend where you crashed. You’re not the first we’ve had brought in from there, and I doubt you’ll be the last. Take things easily, and don’t worry about anything now, you’re doing very nicely.’
‘Everybody’s being very kind. I’m sorry to be a nuisance.’
‘It’s what we’re here for.’ The ward sister looked back from the doorway, and saw the dilated blue-black eyes following her steadily from the pillow, but without any real awareness of her. They gave her the curious impression that they were staring inward rather than outward. ‘There isn’t anything troubling you, is there? If there’s anything you want, anything we can do for you, you’ve got a bell there by your bed.’
‘Thank you, really there’s nothing more you can do for me.’
There was nothing more any of them could do for her. Not the ward sister, not the wiry little staff nurse with a bibful of pins, not the tall, splay-footed Jamaican beginner from Port Royal, who herring-boned up the ward like a skier climbing back up a slope, and warmed the air with her split-lemon smile and huge, gay, innocent eyes; not the young houseman who made the daily rounds, nor the consultant surgeon who had sewn her torn thighs back into shape, not the anaesthetist who had kept her breathing on the table when it seemed she had been set on giving up the struggle. Nor her visitors, who came with flowers and chocolates as soon as they were allowed in: Tom Lowell, tongue-tied with unwary joy at seeing her on her way back to life, and half-inclined to blame himself, though heaven knew why, for what had happened; her agent, swooping in from London laden with roses and reassurances; a young conductor passing through Comerbourne on his way to an engagement in Chester; a famous tenor who had recorded with her a few months ago; a concert violinist, and others who had shared platforms with her. They sat by her bed for an hour or so, happy and relieved to find her recognisable for the same Maggie, with a steady pulse, a satisfactory blood pressure, and a voice unimpaired. They went away with the comfortable feeling of having visited and consoled the not-too-sick. There was nothing more she could do for them, or they for her.
The unidentified visitor, the one without a face, did not so much return after their going as sit with her silently throughout their stay, patient and apart, and move in to her heart’s centre when they went away. Often, then, she turned her whole attention upon him suddenly, in the effort to startle him into revealing some feature by which he could be recognised, before the concealing mists swirled over him and hid everything; but he was always too quick for her. She would not give up the search, and he would not be found.
But the visitors went away content, finding her as they had always known her, even though she would never be the same again. True, she had survived, physically she was intact, now that she was over the unexpected hazard of the anaesthetic. We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed, she thought, left alone in the relaxed hour before supper. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. About as long as it takes for a somersaulting car to smash itself against a tree-stump, and spill you out among the broken glass and twisted metal on to the grass. And probably about as long as it takes to launch the decisive word or act that looks almost excusable at the moment, and only afterwards, long, long afterwards, turns out to have been your damnation.
She awoke from an uneasy sleep in mid-afternoon, to find a small, elderly, shaggy man in a white coat sitting beside her bed. She had seen him making his official rounds twice since her admission, and she knew he was the consultant surgeon who had perseveringly stitched Humpty-Dumpty together again; but until this moment she had never seen him still, and never without his retinue.
‘Good!’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for the chance to talk to you. You worry me.’
‘Do I? I’m sorry!’ she said, startled, and her memory fitted one detail, at least, into its true place. ‘I know you now,’ she said obscurely, ‘you’re the one who said I had a chance to begin again.’
‘Did I? I don’t remember that. But you have, that’s true enough. What are you going to do with it?’
‘Use it, I hope.’
‘I hope so, too, but I’m not so sure of it as I was three days ago. You’re my investment, I want to see you thriving. After a tricky start you got over your physical troubles marvellously, and believe me, you can think yourself lucky to have a constitution like yours. Your pulse is steady, your blood pressure’s satisfactory, and your body’s functioning like a first-class machine. But Sister tells me you’ve lost some weight and are losing your appetite. Why?
