Why have you less energy than you had two or three days ago? Why do you have nothing to say to anyone unless you’re obliged by politeness? And never use that telephone we gave you?’
Her eyes, which were the darkest, deepest blue he had ever seen, and in any but this lofty light might have seemed black, widened in alarm, astonishment and compunction. ‘I didn’t realise that,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry!’
‘And for all this, let me tell you, there isn’t the slightest physiological reason. Your body’s doing its job. Doing everything it can to get well. So since there has to be a reason why you’ve come to a halt, and even begun to lose ground, the reason must be in your mind. Now probably you’ll tell me that what’s in your mind is no concern of mine,’ he said dryly, ‘but at least don’t tell me there’s nothing damaging there, because I shan’t believe you.’
‘No,’ said Maggie, and raised herself strenuously on her pillow to be eye to eye with him. ‘No, I do realise… It was you who put me together again.’ He understood what she meant; it gave him rights in her. Every artist, every craftsman, has the right to demand that his work shall not be wasted by somebody else’s wanton irresponsibility. ‘I do want to get well,’ she said. ‘I want to go on singing—what’s the good of me, otherwise? And I want to do you credit, too. It’s a priority bill that I must pay before I can get any peace. But, my God, don’t you think I’ve been trying?’
‘I know you have. Even successfully, until something else distracted your attention. Something with a higher priority?’
She let her head fall back on the pillow. Her eyes closed for a moment, but opened unwaveringly to hold him off. There were defences there only an old man with privileges could hope to breach, and even he only when the wind and the hour and the mood were favourable. She was a strong, fit woman, thirty-one years old and one of the treasures of the world, even if she herself didn’t know it, and he was disposed to believe that she did; and unless somebody managed to goad her back into living, she would draw in upon herself and die of absent-mindedness. Literally absent-mindedness, for all her energy and will-power and passion were engaged elsewhere, and her body, however robust and heroic, could not survive unaided.
‘No, don’t say anything yet. Listen to me. I know you love what you do. I know you realise what you possess, a voice in a million. You couldn’t use it as you do, if you didn’t know its value. I’m your surgeon, it’s in my own interests to ensure that what I do isn’t erased by some other force, whether outside or inside my own province. But I’m a man, too, dependent upon music to a degree you maybe don’t suspect. Would you be surprised to hear that I have every recording Maggie Tressider has ever made? You live by my grace, I live by yours. And I need you, I need you whole and effective, I need you because you excel, and your excellence belongs to me, as it does to everyone who feels and understands it. If you can use me, use me. I’m here to be used. It may not be surgery, but it comes somewhere within the bounds of healing, and that’s my business. And this is a kind of confessional, too. I’m here to forget and be forgotten, afterwards.’
She lay silent and motionless for a long time, her blue, unblinking stare wide and wary upon his face.
‘You’d have to have faith in me, too,’ she said warningly, ‘or you’ll take the easy way out and think I’m a mental case.’ Her voice, used now like a weapon, had recovered much of its resplendent viola tone; he had never heard anyone sound saner.
‘
The dark-blue gaze speared him suddenly, and found him appalled and pitying, exactly as she had suspected.
‘I told you you’d think I was mad. It’s all right, I quite understand. Sometimes I think so, too. That’s when I lose ground. But if you really want me,’ she said, ‘you’d better believe me sane and go on listening. You did say this was a confessional, remember?’
‘I remember. What you say now remains unsaid. Absolutely and eternally. And I believe it.’
‘I’ve done something terrible,’ said Maggie. ‘I don’t even know what it is, or when it happened, but I drove somebody to his death. I knew it when I came round in the night, after the accident. He was there breathing down my neck, whispering to me that I’d killed him. Not at all vague or distant, absolutely real and present, but when I turn round to look for the details there’s nothing to be found. Just this sense of guilt. What I feel is that somewhere, at some time, I failed somebody, or betrayed somebody… something unforgivable… Criminal? I don’t know, I think it may have been, if only in keeping silent about something I knew. Somebody relied on me, and I turned my back and let him fall. What matters,’ she said, her eyes straining upwards into the quivering blue and white radiance of reflected light on the ceiling over her head, ‘is that he’s dead, and I killed him.’
She waited, almost disdainfully prepared for the soft, humouring tones that medical men keep for the mentally unstable.
‘And have you managed,’ he asked, very soberly and thoughtfully,‘ to find anything in your memory that lends colour to this belief?’
‘No. I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t trace any such incident. But it’s still there. He never stops treading on my heels.’
‘But there’s no known ground for this obsession. Don’t forget, you’ve been through fairly drastic surgery, and a considerable degree of shock. It isn’t at all unusual for the kind of experience you’ve lived through to leave a nightmare residue, that may surface at the least expected moment. Details submerge, and a sense of horror remains, something you can’t pin down. Something that passes gradually, if you concentrate on the live world and let it pass.’
‘No,’ she said instantly and chillingly. ‘You forget, it’s almost a week now, and I’ve waited and held my breath, and it doesn’t pass. Because it’s real, not a dream at all, not a floating residue left to surface by chance.
‘You do realise, don’t you, that even if there is some factual basis for it, it may turn out to be in some incident grotesquely out of proportion to the feeling you have about it?’
‘It may,’ she agreed; but he knew by the set of her face that she did not believe in that possibility.
‘But even so, if it does exist in your past, however inadequately, then it must be possible to run it to earth.’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to do for days. I’ve been forwards and backwards through my life poking under all
