Nell Alone Page 8

  ‘I hate the way you talk of me as if I was a pet, a cat or a dog.’

  ‘I assure you I do not think of you as a pet,’ said Nell calmly. ‘No, I think of you as a serious and interesting project.’

  He leaned back in his chair. A line line of white appeared round his lips. ‘I feel sick,’ he muttered.

  Nell felt his pulse. ‘Yes, this is telling on you. Put your head down … That’s better.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’

  ‘I won’t drink it.’

  ‘Only water. Do you think I mean to murder you,’ asked Nell. ‘Because that would be so simple. The truth is much much more complex than that.’

  ‘I wish I knew what you were talking about.’

  ‘I’ll explain. You don’t remember much about coming here to me?’

  He shook his head. ‘ Flashes, things come and go.’

  ‘And you remember even less, if anything, of your life before that?’

  Life before Nell? Had there been a life before her?

  ‘I am timeless, I am motionless and weightless. I don’t exist.’ He spread out his hands in despair.

  ‘We’ll soon remedy that,’ said Nell briskly. ‘ I will give you an existence.’ She put out a hand and tethered his chair. ‘No, don’t do that. I can see you would move away if you could. Perhaps you don’t really want to have a life of your own, that wouldn’t surprise me.’

  ‘How cruel you are.’

  ‘Why do you think your legs are paralysed? Why do you sit here? Is it my doing? Ask yourself that?’ cried Nell. ‘There is nothing wrong with you. I tell you that now. Nothing wrong with your body.’

  ‘What do you mean? You told me I was ill.’

  ‘You are suffering from hysteria. The cause was probably a shock.’

  ‘I don’t remember a shock.’

  ‘You do not wish to remember,’ said Nell coldly. ‘But I shall help you.’

  He looked at her in deep alarm as if she offered him menaces rather than help.

  ‘Where do your memories begin?’ she demanded.

  ‘I remember you helping me up the stairs.’

  ‘Yes. You could still walk a little then.’

  ‘I’d forgotten that until this minute,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Staying here doesn’t seem to have done me much good, does it?’ he added with a show of spirit.

  Nell merely smiled at him. ‘Yes, your condition has deteriorated in some respects.’

  ‘With your help!’

  ‘No. You must take my word for it: I have not aggravated your paralysis,’

  ‘You say!’

  ‘Because it was hardly necessary,’ she added, using her calm gentle manner. ‘You were laming yourself as fast as you could go.’

  He began rocking backwards and forwards in his chair, rather as a baby rocks its crib.

  ‘And in fact I have prevented the process going too far,’ went on Nell. ‘I’ve kept up the tone of your muscles with my treatment. I don’t want you on my hands for ever, you know. That’s not my purpose at all.’

  Nell went over to her desk and took a cigarette from a box on it. She did not light the cigarette but walked up and down holding it, as if she meant to light it any minute. She walked just behind his chair so that he had to turn his head if he wanted to see her. By his chair was the walking stick which Nell had given him with the suggestion he might try to walk with it. She knew he never would. Nell picked it up and looked at it, then replaced it, just beyond his reach.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t hear anything.’

  ‘It sounded like tapping.’

  He shook his head. ‘ No, there’s nothing. Honestly.’

  ‘It must have been my imagination,’ said Nell. She sat down beside him again. ‘ I will tell you how we met.’

  ‘I suppose I was working?’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Why do you ask that?’ answered Nell in surprise.

  ‘I take it I did do something,’ he cried. ‘I didn’t just sit around waiting for you to discover me?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what you did,’ said Nell. ‘I don’t think you did anything too much, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘I suppose I did exist!’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t invent you. You have a past and a history all your own. You may have a future.’ She was silent for a minute, then she said: ‘We met in a hospital.’

  ‘I was sick?’ – There was no hope that Nell was sick and she was the patient.

  Nell shrugged. ‘It depends. You were in the Outpatients’ Clinic at the City Hospital. You were complaining of lameness in your legs.’

  They both looked at his legs, stretched out there before them.

  ‘They told you there was nothing they could find wrong with you. I heard them say this. But they told you to come and see them again and they asked for your address.’

  She was watching him very carefully but there was not much to be read from his expression.

  ‘And you gave them your address. Number Five, Acres Road, you said, and I thought to myself: but that’s my address!’

  ‘There must be hundreds of Number Five, Acres Roads,’ he said loudly. ‘I live in one of the others.’

  ‘If so then you’ve had bad luck,’ observed Nell in an amiable voice.

  ‘It’s getting dark,’ he said uneasily. ‘I don’t like to talk in the dark. Won’t you put on the light?’

  ‘Presently.’ But she went across and drew the curtains as if soon she would put on the light. As it was the room darkened. A little light still came through a gap in the curtains.

  ‘But let me continue about Five Acres Road. When I came back home that evening I found you wandering about outside. You seemed surprised to see me. You said that you’d heard there would be a flat vacant here soon.’

  His face was very white and still; his eyes were fixed on her intently, almost eagerly.

  ‘Is this true? Did I really say that?’

  ‘Oh yes, quite true. But wasn’t it a strange thing for you to say? I think you must have been lying at one point or the other, if not all the way through.’

  ‘But why should I lie?’ he cried. ‘Why should I not be telling the truth?’

  ‘You were very lame, too,’ observed Nell in a dulcet voice, as if she was remembering that moment when they had met outside. ‘Your lameness seemed to increase with every minute. This interested me. So therefore I asked you in.’

  ‘Because I was lame?’

  ‘And because of one other thing. Because I thought I knew your face.’ She took his wrist and felt his pulse.

  ‘Yes, your pulse is faster. Are you beginning to remember something? Do you remember who you are?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your name is almost certainly not Black Douglas. You knew that?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘Ah, I see I shall have to help you remember,’ said Nell, getting up and going towards the door. ‘Fortunately I have the means to do so.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ he called after her.

  ‘Just to get the means,’ said Nell, pausing at the doorway. ‘And after that the answer and the answer and the answer.’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘The trouble with this stuff,’ said Nell conversationally, as she laid out her hypodermic syringe on the table beside Black Douglas, ‘ is that you have to know the right questions to put. I can get anything out of you that I want, provided that I ask the right questions. You can only tell me the truth, but you won’t volunteer it.’ She laid a small bottle beside the syringe. It was full of a colourless liquid. ‘Don’t worry, it won’t harm you. Anyway, your heart’s as strong as a bull’s. I might break it. I hope I do, frankly, but I won’t stop it.’

  ‘Do you think I’m going to sit here and let you stick that into me?’ said Black.

  ‘You haven’t got much choice.’

  She took his arm, rolled up the shirt sleeve and cleaned a small area of skin with spirit. He did not struggle.

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sp; ‘I thought I loved you,’ he said, staring her in the face. ‘I didn’t understand you, but I thought of you as good.’

  ‘Goodness has so many faces,’ said Nell sadly. ‘Perhaps I am wearing one now, although you do not recognise it.’

  She stood there for a moment, a tall, pretty woman with a gentle, kind expression and behind the kindness a single-minded determination which made her look at once harder and nobler. No doubt Charlotte Corday looked much the same.

  She pressed the needle firmly into his arm and then rubbed the skin to take the pain away. She put the syringe away and then went off into the kitchen. Presently she re-appeared with a cup of tea.

  ‘Drink this,’ she said. ‘I’ll have one myself.’

  They both drank thirstily. Doctor and patient, hostess and guest, inquisitor and interrogated, whatever their relationship was, it bound them closely together. In a sense, deep down, they were enjoying it. What Black had on his conscience he was really longing to be free of; and the confession Nell sought she was fearing to hear. Between them they had got explanation and expiation thoroughly muddled up.

  ‘I was puzzled at first by your condition,’ began Nell. ‘I wondered if you were drugged.’

  She took his cup and placed it on the table. ‘But I soon saw that this was not the case,’ she went on. ‘Your relative indifference to your lameness gave me the clue.’ She studied his face, turned half in profile away from her. ‘ Hasn’t it struck you yourself that you are not nearly as disturbed by it as you might be?’

  ‘How do you know what my feelings are?’

  Nell laughed. ‘ You are not exceptional, you know. There have been plenty of cases like you. I knew what to look for.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You are suffering from hysteria. Hysterics often suffer from what seem to be organic troubles; loss of sensation, paralysis, loss of memory. You show two symptoms: amnesia and the loss of power in the legs.’

  ‘And what could cause this?’ he asked. He did not wish to ask the question, but he knew Nell was going to tell him anyway, and he felt it necessary to keep up his part in the dialogue. It was the last exercise of free will left to him. Or was it even this? Perhaps the drug was already operating.

  ‘A shock could cause it. You have converted some terror into a physical symptom. You prefer your incapacity to your memories. This is why you are able to show such “ belle indifference”.’

  She picked up his left wrist and felt for his pulse. The gentle professional touch felt oddly comforting to him. It was as if, in his heart, he knew that Nell could not, would not harm him.

  ‘I don’t feel any different yet,’ he said defiantly.

  ‘Give it time.’ The pulse beneath her fingers was slow and regular. Soon his whole body would be engaged in an artificial calm.

  He had been thinking. ‘ If I can remember this shock I will be able to use my legs again?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Then it would be worth it.’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘Depends?’ He felt very stupid.

  ‘On what you have to remember.’

  ‘It’s coming now, I suppose,’ he said in a dull voice, hardly even making a question of it.

  Without taking her eyes off his face, Nell reached behind her and produced a photograph.

  ‘Do you recognise who this is?’

  He blinked. ‘No. I can’t get it into focus properly.’ Then he said suddenly: ‘It looks like a face.’

  ‘It is a face.’

  ‘It’s a young girl.’

  ‘Not so very young. Try again.’

  ‘It looks like you.’

  Nell shook her head. ‘ It’s not me. Do you know who it is?’

  This time there was very little hesitation in his reply. He spoke softly but confidently, as if a long chain of deductive reasoning had at last allowed him to arrive at an answer.

  ‘I suppose it must be my wife.’

  On the floor below, the arrival home of Nell, early, had not gone unnoticed. Mrs Richier always observed Nell’s comings and goings accurately. She had done so for a long time, but more assiduously of late. She was not unaware that Nell had someone lodging with her upstairs. Nell made this oddly easy by her apparent assumption that Mrs Richier was blind and deaf as well as lame. So she had pretty fair ideas of the position upstairs. The full subtlety of it was, of course, lost to her, but she could make some pretty sharp guesses.

  Nell’s early arrival home and the darkness and silence which had ensued convinced her that a crisis of some sort was on hand.

  Upstairs was a quiet fortress. But she knew, what Nell did not, that inside was a Trojan horse.

  ‘Hurrah,’ said Nell. ‘We’ve got there. Yes, she was your wife. And my sister. Hello, brother-in-law.’

  He started to shiver, covering his face with his hands. ‘Take it away. Don’t let her stare at me.’

  ‘Oh, you’re starting to remember, are you? Good, let’s have it then. You were married. You left this city. What came after?’

  ‘There was always a great deal of trouble about money,’ he began.

  ‘I know that. Go on.’

  ‘I – I don’t remember any more.’

  ‘Have courage. Face it. It will be better in the end,’ said Nell.

  He tried to struggle to his feet, and craned across and snatched at the lamp and switched it on.

  ‘No.’ Gently Nell pushed him back into his chair and turned off the light which for one moment had blinked out into the night where Amabel had seen it.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘So you’re on your legs again,’ said Nell. ‘ I told you your legs would recover strength once you started to remember.’

  ‘I don’t feel strong,’ muttered Black.

  ‘You must remember more,’ said Nell.

  More memories, more strength. At the thought of this hideous form of vampirism, Black gave a shudder.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘But nothing can stop the process now,’ Nell said. ‘ You are not in control.’

  ‘I have no wish to remember.’

  ‘No conscious wish,’ corrected Nell. ‘Underneath you’re exploding with it. I have only to ask.’

  She turned on one small reading lamp by the wall so that they could at least see each other. ‘You and Louise quarrelled about money. Well, it wasn’t too difficult to quarrel with Louise about money. I quarrelled myself.’

  ‘It’s easier for a sister.’

  ‘It’s different,’ corrected Nell. ‘ Not easier. Just different. Are you an only child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought so. You were fated to marry Louise.’ She adjusted the lamp so that it shone on his face and not hers, and moved the telephone so that it was within her reach and out of his. Precautions must be taken. An interrogation is like a love affair, and is better conducted with due circumspection and the scales heavily loaded in favour of one party.

  ‘And so you quarrelled. But that wasn’t here? Not in this city?’

  ‘No, we never left the city. We lived across the river. We never planned to leave.’

  ‘Well.’ Nell studied him. ‘As you can’t be lying, Louise must have been.’

  ‘She could lie in five languages,’ he said drearily.

  ‘No, Louise didn’t lie.’

  ‘We knew two different people,’ he said.

  Nell was momentarily silenced.

  ‘And you’re the same,’ he continued. ‘If you really are her sister.’

  ‘You know I am. Why did you marry her?’

  ‘My mother told me to,’ he said, quite simply. ‘That is, she told me Louise would make me a good wife.’

  ‘I imagine in reality the situation was more wrapped up than that,’ observed Nell ironically, ‘but thank you for giving me the bare bones of it.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t mean to put it like that,’ he said angrily. ‘I’m drugged. I’ve always been very much under the influence of my mother. She’s Greek, you know.�
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  ‘I didn’t know.’ Nell shook her head, thinking that this accounted for his melodramatic dark beauty.

  ‘She’s had a hard life. So have I, of course.’

  ‘It’s going to get even harder,’ observed Nell. She thought that he was talking very much more than the simple preparations she had given him warranted. Her hand went to his pulse: it was galloping. ‘Tell me more about the quarrel.’

  ‘It was all entirely an accident she got killed.’

  ‘I don’t believe in that kind of accident,’ cried Nell, tears rushing to her eyes.

  ‘It was the news about the baby coming on top of the quarrels about money. I thought: why, you’ll never have any time for me at all now. It isn’t fair.’ He looked like a great baby himself as he spoke.

  ‘I had my hands on her neck and I suppose I squeezed too hard.’ He covered his face. ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’

  ‘So that’s how you killed her.’ Nell wrenched his hands away from his face.

  He did not answer, but turned his head sideways and stared past her.

  ‘I suppose that’s how it was,’ he said finally, taking a great sighing breath. Then he looked down at his legs. ‘Shall I be able to walk now?’ he asked.

  ‘Did you think you were going to get a reward?’ cried Nell.

  ‘But you said—,’ he began; he looked at her bewildered and did not go on.

  ‘From the moment Louise disappeared I knew harm had come to her. I knew it. And from the moment I saw you on my doorstep in a state of shock I knew the harm had come to her through you.’

  ‘Perhaps harm had come to me too,’ he said unhappily. ‘Have you considered that?’

  ‘So I kept you here to find out what you had done. It wasn’t difficult. In some ways you’ve been an easy patient.’ Her voice was full of rage. Black cringed a little, but still the marvellous composure he’d often demonstrated did not fail him. Within him, despite all Nell had said and done, survived a little hard knot of personality which she could not touch. You might almost call it pride.

  ‘My mother,’ he began.

  ‘Forget your mother,’ replied Nell promptly. ‘Forget the police. Yes, I saw that thought register in your mind. Forget the outside world. You’re never going back to it.’