House of Green Turf

to ask. If you’d had any clue to time and place you would have included it. But I gather we can’t limit the possibilities at all, apart from ruling out the last few years. Forgetting is mortally easy, easier than remembering, but it does take a little time. Assuming this haunting has a foundation in fact, if it had been recent it would have surfaced more completely, with more detail.’

‘But is it genuinely possible,’ she asked opening her eyes wide, ‘to forget something so important? Even after years?’

‘It’s possible, all right. What we retain over a lifetime is only an infinitesimally small proportion of the whole. Think how many impressions are run through in an hour, and how many brief acquaintances in a year. The most phenomenal memory can’t contain a tenth of the total.’

‘But something like that… a matter of life and death… that would surely be retained, whatever was thrown out.’

‘We don’t know that it was a matter of life and death, or that it seemed so important then. Maybe this is hindsight. I don’t suggest your condition conjured up a totally illusory bogy, but I do think it possible that it magnified and distorted a comparatively innocuous incident. Wait,’ he said reasonably, ‘until you know.’

‘You forget,’ said Maggie mildly, ‘that I’d just slipped through death’s fingers. When you find yourself staring at close range into judgment day, you get your values right.’

‘Not necessarily. Not unless you believe fear to be the best introduction to truth. Even the just aren’t going to feel too sure of themselves on judgment day.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Maggie oddly, ‘I wasn’t afraid. You go clean through that, you know. It doesn’t apply any more. Even now it isn’t like being afraid, it’s just that it’s impossible to live without knowing. Like Oedipus. There isn’t any possibility of turning back and letting well alone. There wouldn’t be any solid ground to stand on. And you can’t sing without truth!’

No, she couldn’t, he quite saw that. It took a bit of believing, in such a bogus world, but this woman had never severed her infant relationship with reality, and while she felt truth to be impaired everything would be devalued for her, even her art. He knew then that he was committed, not simply to accepting her commission, but to bringing it to a successful conclusion.

‘We still have half an hour. If you’re not too tired, I should like you to begin talking to me about yourself. Right from the beginning, your family, your childhood, things you remember. Names you remember. Don’t worry about looking for the seeds of this present trouble. Forget about it now. It may come to light of itself, it won’t if you try to trace it. Tell me who played with you, who were your friends, your fellow-students…’ Though the name that mattered she might not even recognise; she was almost sure by now that she had excised it from her memory for good reason, and eternally, unless some act of God or of Francis Killian raised it again to confront her. Between the conflicting needs and wants of the divided halves of her, what was a man in her employ supposed to do?

But she couldn’t sing without truth; she had said it, not he. And she couldn’t live without singing.

‘Just talk to yourself,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be quiet.’

And she talked, and he was very quiet. Her lips moved slowly and thoughtfully, unrolling before him a cartoon of that ordinary family of hers, odd little vignettes of her schooldays, without sentimentality, without nostalgia, almost without interest. She had had to leave her kin to find her kind, like many another. Not a matter of class at all, but of quality, which is a different and a mysterious thing. She mentioned names faithfully. Most he did not bother to note down, but some were still quick in her memory. He was sensitive to the intonations now. And then her first singing days, the little local successes, the audition that took her into Doctor Paul Fredericks’ classes, the serious study beginning. No doubt of the urgency now, his pen was busy writing down names that mattered to her almost as gravely as her own.

She was still twelve years back in time when the bell rang for the end of visiting-hour. She opened dazed eyes. Her forehead was moist, but the lines of her face were relaxed and tranquil.

‘I’ll come the day after to-morrow,’ he said, putting away his notebook, ‘in the evening, if you can manage to deflect all your other visitors. I’ve tired you out too much…I’m sorry!’

‘Oh, no!’ she said quickly. ‘I’m glad! Just to be doing something about it is worth anything. I feel happier now. I trust you.’

Now that, he thought bitterly, winding his way across the car park to his third-hand Riley, is about the most unfair and terrifying thing one human being can say to another. She trusts me! To come up with miracles, to get her out of her little private hell. What sort of spot does that put me in? But of course, she’ll be paying my daily rate and all expenses… even the paperbacks! That puts it on quite a different footing for her, all she’s asking is fair work for fair pay. But what does it do for me? It may take more than a little patient research, more than leg work, more than you can buy for any daily retainer, to turn up X for her and get the thorn out of her flesh.

Still, he reflected, driving home to his flat in Market Street, bare as a hermitage, he had got one positive thing out of this first session. All the female names he had written down were recorded only as possible sources of information; apart from that he might as well cross them off at once. Maggie Tressider was quite certainly honest in claiming that she could not recapture a single limiting fact about the identity of X. But every time she spoke of her victim and persecutor she said ‘he.’

He went to the trouble to check on her family, though he felt and found that they were of no interest. Her parents were dead, the father long ago, while Maggie was still at school, the mother four years ago of heart disease. There remained a sister and a brother, Alec, both older than Maggie. The brother played the horn in a Midland orchestra, well enough to hold his place but not well enough ever to get any farther. A little probing produced a picture not at all unexpected; he had been trading on his sister’s reputation and his relationship to her ever since she emerged into celebrity. He had made one flying visit to see her in the hospital, since it wasn’t far out of his way. Rice was of the opinion that he had come for money, and hadn’t gone away empty-handed, but he did at least make himself pleasant, affectionate and cheerful while he was there.

The married sister, eldest of the three, lived in Hertfordshire with an insurance-agent husband and two children. She hadn’t visited. There was a record of telephone enquiries from her, beginning with an agitated lament on the first evening, before Maggie was up from the theatre, expressing endless devotion and the fixed intention of leaving everything and rushing to her bedside; but the tone had cooled off after it became clear that the bed was not going to be a death-bed. Mrs. Chalmers still called in with loving messages but she didn’t suggest coming. These details Francis also gleaned from Rice, who had them from the ward sister, through whom all those earlier phone calls had been channelled.

It began to seem as if all those who professed affection for her also harboured in secret a corrosive resentment. Yet everything went to show that she had remained loyal and generous to her family and early associates. Maybe that was her really unforgivable virtue. If she had shaken them off and gone her own way unimpeded, they could at least have felt that she was down on their human level, and taken pleasure in her flaws