I felt strangely shocked. I had imagined that I had told him everything from start to finish about the experiment with the drug, and had described to him, in detail, the happenings of the other world. The fact that I had been born and bred a Catholic had no bearing on this at all.
'I'm a very bad Catholic,' I said. 'I couldn't wait to get away from Stonyhurst, and I haven't been to Mass for years. As to Confession—'
'I know,' he said, 'all in the attic or underground. Along with your dislike of monks, stepfathers, widows who remarry, and other little things along the same line.'
I poured myself another cup of coffee, and one for him as well, throwing in too much sugar and stirring furiously.
'Look here,' I said, 'you're talking nonsense. I never give a thought to monks, widows or stepfathers — with the exception of myself — in my ordinary present-day life. The fact that these people existed in the fourteenth century, and I was able to see them, was entirely due to the drug.'
'Yes,' he said, 'entirely due to the drug.' He did his abrupt thing of getting up and walking round the room. 'That bottle you gave me, I did what you ought to have done after the inquest. I sent it up to Lane's chief assistant, John Willis, with a brief word that you had been in trouble with it, and could I have a report as soon as possible? He was good enough to ring me up on the telephone as soon as he had my letter.'
'Well?' I asked.
'Well, you're a very lucky man to be alive, and not only alive but here in this house and not in a loony-bin. The stuff in that bottle contained probably the most potent hallucinogen that has ever been discovered, and other substances as well which he isn't even sure of yet. Professor Lane was apparently working on this alone: he never took Willis fully into his confidence.'
A lucky man to be alive, possibly. Lucky not to be in a loony-bin, agreed. But much of this I had told myself already, when I first started the experiment.
'Are you trying to tell me', I asked, 'that everything I've seen has been hallucination, dug up from the murky waste of my own unconscious?'
'No, I'm not,' he said. 'I think Professor Lane was on to something that might have proved extraordinarily significant about the workings of the brain, and he chose you as guinea-pig because he knew you would do whatever he told you, and that you were a highly suggestible subject into the bargain.' He wandered over to the table and finished his cup of coffee. 'Incidentally, everything you've told me is just as secret as if you had spilt it into the Confessional. I had an initial struggle with your wife to keep you here, instead of sending you in an ambulance to some top chap in Harley Street who would have bunged you straight into a psychiatric home for six months. I think she trusts me now.'
'What did you tell her?' I asked.
'I said you had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and suffering from strain and delayed shock owing to the sudden death of Professor Lane. Which, you may agree, is perfectly true.'
I got up rather gingerly from my chair and walked over to the window. The campers had gone from the field across the way, and the cattle were grazing once again. I could hear our own boys playing cricket by the orchard.
'You may say what you like,' I said slowly, 'suggestibility, breakdown, Catholic conscience, the lot, but the fact remains that I've been in that other world, seen it, known it. It was cruel, hard, and very often bloody, and so were the people in it, except Isolda, and latterly Roger, but, my God, it held a fascination for me which is lacking in my own world of today.'
He came and stood beside me at the window. He gave me a cigarette, and we both smoked awhile in silence.
'The other world,' he said at last. 'I suppose we all carry one inside us, in our various ways. You, Professor Lane, your wife, myself and we'd see it differently if we all made the experiment together — which God forbid! He smiled, and flicked his cigarette out of the window. I have a feeling my own wife might take a dim view of an Isolda if I took to wandering about the Treesmill valley looking for her. Which is not to say I haven't done so through the years, but I'm too down to earth to go back six centuries on the off-chance that I might meet her.'
'My Isolda lived,' I said stubbornly. 'I've seen actual pedigrees and historical documents to prove it. They all lived. I've got papers downstairs in the library that don't lie.'
'Of course she lived,' he agreed, 'and what is more had two small girls called Joanna and Margaret, you told me about them. Little girls are more fascinating sometimes than small boys, and you have a couple of stepsons.'
'And what the hell is that supposed to mean?'
'Nothing,' he said, 'just an observation. The world we carry inside us produces answers, sometimes. A way of escape. A flight from reality. You didn't want to live either in London or in New York. The fourteenth century made an exciting, if somewhat gruesome, antidote to both. The trouble is that day-dreams, like hallucinogenic drugs, become addictive; the more we indulge, the deeper, we plunge, and then, as I said before, we end in the loony-bin.'
I had the impression that everything he said was leading up to something else, to some practical proposition that I must take a grip on myself, get a job, sit in an office, sleep with Vita, breed daughters, look forward contentedly to middle-age, when I might grow cacti in a greenhouse.
'What do you want me to do?' I asked. 'Come on, out with it.'
He turned round from the window and looked me straight in the face.
'Frankly, I don't mind what you do,' he said. 'It's not my problem. As your medical adviser and father confessor for less than a week, I'd be glad to see you around for several years to come. And I'll be delighted to prescribe the usual antibiotics when you catch the flu. But for the immediate future I suggest that you get out of this house pretty quick before you have another urge to visit the basement.'
I drew a deep breath. 'I thought so,' I said. 'You've been talking to Vita.'
'Naturally I've talked to your wife,' he agreed, 'and apart from a few feminine quirks she's a very sensible woman. When I say get out of the house I don't mean for ever. But for the next few weeks at least you'd be better away from it. You must see the force of that.' I did see it, but like a cornered rat I struggled for survival, and played for time.
'All right,' I said. 'Where do you suggest we go? We've got those boys on our hands.'
'Well, they don't worry you, do they?'
'No… No, I'm very fond of them.'
'It doesn't matter where, providing it's out of the pull of Roger Kylmerth.'
'My alter ego?' I queried. 'He and I are not a scrap alike, you know.'
'Alter egos never are,' he said. 'Mine is a long-haired poet who faints at the sight of blood. He's dogged me ever since I left medical school.'
I laughed, in spite of myself. He made everything seem so simple. 'I wish you had known Magnus,' I said. 'You remind me of him in an odd sort of way.'
'I wish I had. Seriously, though, I mean what I say about your getting away. Your wife suggested Ireland. Good walking country, fishing, crocks of gold buried under the hills…'
'Yes,' I said, 'and two of her compatriots who are touring around in the best hotels.'
'She mentioned them,' he said, 'but I gather they've gone — got fed up with the weather and flown to sunny Spain instead. So that needn't worry you. I thought Ireland a good idea because it only means a three-hour drive from here to Exeter, and then you can fly direct. Hire a car the other side, and you're away.'
He and Vita had the whole thing taped. I was trapped; there was no way out. I must put a brave face on it and admit defeat.
'Supposing I refuse?' I asked. 'Get back into bed and pull the sheet over my head?'
'I'd send for an ambulance and cart you off to hospital. I thought Ireland was a better idea, but it's up to you.'
Five minutes later he had gone, and I heard his car roaring up the drive. The sense of anti-climax was absolute: the purge had been very thorough. And I still did not know how much I had told him. Doubtless a hotch- potch of everything I had ever thought or done since the age of three, and, like all doctors with leanings towards psychoanalysis, he had put it together and summed me up as the usual sort of misfit with homosexual leanings who had suffered from birth with a mother complex, a stepfather complex, an aversion to copulation with my widowed
