only suffered a few minor injuries.'
'So I observe, it must nevertheless have been a tremendous shock to your system. And it would seem your symptoms have appreciably worsened since that event.'
'Aren't you jumping the gun?' said Rye. 'You're talking as if everything you've asked about or I've mentioned is part of a single syndrome. Surely until you've examined the results of all the necessary tests, this is mere hypothesis?'
'I prefer to think of it as diagnosis,' he said with a quick flash of the charming smile. 'So far you've given me a history of severe headaches over many years increasing in frequency, occasional bouts of dizziness or disorientation also becoming more frequent, and mood swings if not violent enough to be called manic-depressive, certainly remarkable enough for you to feel they were worth a mention. These begin to form a pattern which may give a pointer to what I should be looking for in the test results.'
'So why don't we get down to the tests?'
He blinked again. Probably every blink means another hundred on his bill, thought Rye. Well, that's what the private patient paid for, the right to be ruder than the doctor.
She'd come as clean as she could in answering his questions, stopping short of telling him about her conversations with Serge, of course, and not getting within screaming distance of her involvement in the Wordman killings. She had told him about her sense of responsibility for the accident that had caused Serge's death, though without admitting that she was indeed responsible. And she'd gone on to describe how, after her recovery, lines she knew by heart had vanished the moment she set foot on a stage, thus bringing to an end her hope of an acting career. She'd been worried in advance that baring so much of herself to an impersonal expert might tempt her to go the whole confessional hog and let everything spill out. But in fact she was finding that the process was causing a distancing between herself and the self who'd done those dreadful things, turning that other into the killer you read about in the paper or see being taken into court on the telly, then you close the paper or switch off the set, and though you may retain a residual impression of the monster for a while, it isn't strong enough to spoil your dinner or trouble your sleep.
Only the sepulchral confinement of the brain scanner brought it all back to her, brought Sergius too, his flesh disintegrating as it strove to rid itself of all that fluff and dust, his eye accusing, as if all her efforts to contact him had only heaped purgatorial coals upon his spirit. As she rolled back into the by comparison cathedral vastness of the hospital room, she wondered how her turbulent mental activity had registered on the scan. Would it be possible for the expert eye to read a full confession in the message scrawled by all those electronic impulses on the wall of the brain?
After the initial consultation and examination, Mr Chakravarty had vanished, presumably to see another lucrative private client, or maybe glance at a dozen or so National Health patients, while she spent the rest of the morning undergoing tests, some of which she understood, others of which were impenetrably arcane.
Finished, she was told that she should present herself at the peacock throne again at four thirty, by which time Chakravarty, his busy schedule permitting, should have had time to make some preliminary assessments of the test results.
She had no desire to go back to her flat. Hat was working today, but that didn't mean he wouldn't bunk off at some point to visit her at the library. There he would be met by the story she'd fed her colleagues, that she was taking the day off to do the January sales in Leeds. Being a cop, and knowing her attitude to sex and shopping was that they were fine except for the shopping, he might be a little more sceptical than her colleagues and head straight round to Church View. To head him off from doing something stupid like kicking her door down, she'd confided in Myra Rogers who'd promised to listen out for any visitors and confirm that she'd seen her friend set off, hopes high, in search of bargains first thing that morning. Worried that she'd be keeping Myra stuck in Church View, she'd been reassured that her bookkeeping work could for the most part be as easily done at home as in her clients' often cramped offices.
It seemed a good idea too to avoid the chance of an accidental encounter in the town centre so when she got into her car, she drove out into the country. Whether directed by accident or by subconscious choice, she did not know, but she suddenly realized she was driving along the Little Bruton road, and there ahead was the tiny humpback bridge where she'd broken down and sat in despair till she saw the yellow AA van driving towards her like the answer to a prayer. Here it had all started, here the first of her victims had died – no, not a victim, not this one… his death had been an accident… an accident which she had interpreted as a sign…
She stopped on the bridge. Time had stopped for her on that occasion and all those subsequent occasions when deaths had occurred which by no stretch of the imagination could be called accidental. She'd told Chakravarty something about these timeless episodes, not with any detail, of course, but just in an effort to convey her feeling of separation from the chronology of everyday life, her sense of otherness. Now she longed for the experience again… time slowing… stopping… only this time when the flow started again, perhaps instead of the AA man lying dead in the water, he'd be climbing into his van and driving merrily on his way…
But nothing happened. She stood on the bridge and looked down over the shallow parapet. The stream flowed, and so did time. She got back into the car. The past was past and never changed. The dead were dead and the only way to see them again was to join them. Her eyes filled with blinding tears. She kept on driving, faster and faster, but when her eyes cleared, she was still alive, still bowling along this narrow bendy country road as if hands other than hers were turning the wheel.
At four twenty-nine she was back in Chakravarty's office. At four thirty prompt he appeared. So she'd taught him one lesson. But when he didn't make any charmingly humorous reference to his good timekeeping, she guessed he was not the bearer of glad tidings.
She said, 'Mr Chakravarty, before you begin, please understand there is no need to wrap things up. I require clear explanation. No jargon, no concealing technicalities and certainly no euphemism.'
A blink.
'Fine’ he said. 'Then I am sorry to tell you that you have a brain tumour. This is the cause of your recent headaches and of the convulsive episode you suffered at New Year.'
He went on talking, smoothly, eloquently. She registered the drift – that he was advising immediate hospitalization and the commencement of a vigorous combination of radiotherapy and chemotherapy – and she got the message – that the tumour was inoperable and treatment likely to be merely palliative. But she wasn't really listening. Out on the Little Bruton road she had longed for a return of that sense of timelessness, and now she had it. She felt as if she could stand up and take her clothes off and dance on the consultant's desk then get dressed and resume her seat, and all the time he would go on talking, unaware that she had escaped from the dimension that he was trapped in. Or perhaps, being a wise and experienced doctor who had spent too much of his life looking into the human brain and the human psyche to be easily deceived, he knew very well that she had left him and was elsewhere and elsewhen, and was merely talking on and on to fill the time until she, as she must do, rejoined him in the cage.
One thing she knew now for certain. She had to re-enter at the same point as she went out. There was no escape to the past.
She sighed and stepped back into the middle of one of his well-balanced sentences.
'How long will I live without treatment?'
A blink. Not an indicator this time of an increase in his fee, she gauged, but perhaps a mental bookmark to remind his secretary to make sure Ms Pomona's bill was placed in her hands immediately.
'At best months, but it could be much less. Tumours of this kind are very fast-growing and…'
'With treatment, how long?'
He looked at her, looked down, took a breath as if in preparation for a long speech, looked into her unblinking eyes again, and said, 'Longer.'
'Much longer?'
'Who knows?' he said. He sounded unhappy. Was it because of her future or his ignorance?
'Long enough to… do things.'
'Like what?'
'Like prepare yourself for… I mean, it might not happen… so quickly, I mean… and there are things, practical and personal.. . nowadays there's a whole raft of strategies… it's possible to be ready…'
Strange how her insistence on directness should in the end drive him to hesitant obliquities.
'Ready for death?'
