'Slight bruising on the neck, nothing more,' he said. 'It may look a bit blue tomorrow, but it won't show if she wears a scarf.'
'Did she tell you what happened?'
'Supposing you tell me?'
'I'd rather hear her version first,' I said.
He took a cigarette out of a packet and lighted it. 'Well,' he said, 'I gather you didn't want any dinner, for reasons known best to yourself, and she spent the evening in here with the boys, while you were in the library. Then they decided to go to bed, and she found you had gone to the kitchen and switched on the lights. There was bacon on the stove burnt to a frazzle, the stove still on, but nobody there. So she went down to the basement. It seems you were standing there, near the old kitchen, so she said, waiting for her to come downstairs, and as soon as you saw her you went straight across to the foot of the stairs and began swearing at her, and then you put your hands round her throat and tried to throttle her.'
'That's right,' I said.
He looked at me sharply. Perhaps he thought I would deny it. 'She insists you were fighting drunk and didn't know what you were doing,' he said, 'but it was a pretty grim experience for all of them, and she and those boys were scared out of their wits. More so, as I gather you're not a drinking type.'
'No,' I said, 'I'm not. And I wasn't drunk.'
He did not answer for a moment. Then he came and stood in front of me, and taking some sort of flash thing from the bag he had with him he examined my eyes. Afterwards he felt my pulse.
'What are you on?' he asked abruptly.
'On?'
'Yes, what drug. Tell me straight, and I'll know how to treat you.'
'That's just it,' I said. 'I don't know.'
'Was it something Professor Lane gave you?'
'Yes,' I replied.
He sat down on the arm of the sofa beside my chair. 'By mouth or by injection?'
'By mouth.'
'Was he treating you for something specific?'
'He wasn't treating me for anything. It was an experiment. Something I volunteered to do for him. I've never taken drugs in my life before I came down here.'
He went on looking at me with his shrewd eyes, and I knew there was nothing for it but to tell him everything.
'Was Professor Lane on the same drug when he walked into that goods-train?' he asked.
'Yes.'
He got off the sofa and began walking up and down the room, fiddling with things on tables, picking them up and putting them down again, as Magnus himself used to do when coming to a decision.
'I ought to get you into hospital for observation,' he said.
'No, I said, for God's sake…' I got up from my chair. 'Look,' I said, 'I've got the stuff in a bottle upstairs. It's all there is left. One bottle. He told me to destroy everything I found here in his lab, and I did — it's all buried in the wood above the garden. I only kept the one bottle, and I used some of it today. It must be different in some way — stronger, I don't know — but you take it away, have it analysed, anything. Surely you realise, after what has happened tonight, I couldn't touch the stuff again? Christ! I might have killed my wife.'
'I know,' he said. 'That's why you ought to be in hospital.' He did not know. He did not understand. How could he understand?
'Look,' I said, 'I never saw Vita, my wife, standing at the foot of the stairs. It wasn't her I tried to strangle. It was another woman.'
'What woman?' he asked.
'A woman called Joanna,' I said. 'She lived six hundred years ago. She was down there, in the old farmhouse kitchen, and the others were with her too. Isolda Carminowe, and the monk Jean de Meral, and the man the farm belonged to, who used to be her steward, Roger Kylmerth.'
He put out his hand and held my arm. 'All right,' he said, 'steady on, I follow you. You took the drug, and then you went downstairs and saw these people in the basement?'
'Yes,' I said, 'but not only here. I've seen them in Tywardreath as well, at the old manor house below the Gratten, and at the Priory too. That's what the drug does. It takes you back into the past, straight into an older world.' I could hear my voice rising in excitement, and he kept a firm grip on my arm. 'You don't believe me?' I persisted. 'How can you possibly believe me? But I swear to you I've seen them, heard them talking, watched them moving, I've even seen a man, Isolda's lover Otto Bodrugan, murdered down in Treesmill creek.'
'I believe you all right,' he said. 'Now supposing we go together and you hand over that remaining bottle?'
I led him upstairs to the dressing-room, and took the bottle out of the locked suitcase. He did not examine it, he just put it in his bag.
'Now I'll tell you what I'm going to do,' he said. 'I'm going to give you a pretty hefty sedative that will put you out until tomorrow morning. Is there some other room than this where you can sleep?'
'Yes,' I said. 'There's the spare-room along the landing here.'
'Right,' he said. 'Collect a pair of pyjamas and let's go.'
We went together into the spare-room, and I undressed and got into bed, feeling suddenly humble and subdued, like a child without responsibility.
'I'll do anything you say,' I told the doctor. 'Put me right out, if you like, so that I never wake again.'
'I shan't do that,' he answered, and for the first time smiled. 'When you open your eyes tomorrow I shall probably be the first object you see.'
'Then you won't pack me off to hospital?'
'Probably not. We'll talk about it in the morning.' He was getting a syringe out of his bag. 'I don't mind what you tell my wife,' I said, 'as long as you don't tell her about the drug. Let her go on thinking I was crazy drunk. Whatever happens she mustn't know about the drug. She disliked Magnus — Professor Lane — and if she knew about this she'd dislike his memory even more.'
'I dare say she would,' he answered, wiping my arm with spirit before plunging his needle in, 'and you could hardly blame her.'
'The thing was,' I said, 'she was jealous. We'd known one another for so many years, he and I; we were at Cambridge together. I used to come and stay here in the old days, and Magnus seemed to take charge. We were always together, the same things intrigued us, the same things made us laugh, Magnus and I… Magnus and I…'
The depth of an abyss or the long sweet sleep of death, I did not mind. Five hours, five months, five years… in point of fact, so I learnt later, it was five days. The doctor always seemed to be there, when I opened my eyes, giving me another jab, or else sitting at the end of the bed swinging his legs, listening while I talked. Sometimes Vita looked in at the door with an uncertain smile, then disappeared. She and Mrs. Collins between them must have made my bed, washed me, fed me — though I have no recollection of eating anything at all. Memory of those days is blotted out. I could have cursed, raved, torn the bedding, or merely slept. I understand I slept, and also talked. Not to Vita, not to Mrs. Collins, but to the doctor. However many sessions it took between jabs I have no idea, nor do I know just what I said, but I gather I spilt, as the saying goes, the beans from start to finish, with the consequence that in the middle of the following week, when I was more or less back to normal and sitting around in a chair upstairs instead of lying in bed, body and mind felt not only rested but completely purged. I told him so, over coffee which Vita had brought and left with us, and he laughed, saying a thorough clear-out never did any harm, and it was amazing the amount of stuff people locked away in attics and cellars they had forgotten about, which would be all the better if the light got through to it.
'Mind you,' he added, 'purging the soul comes easier to you than to others, because of your Catholic background.'
I stared. 'How did you know I was a Catholic?' I asked.
'It all came out in the wash,' he said.
