BY FIVE O’CLOCK ON THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON she had only one more job – and that a mere formality – before she could walk out of the school, satisfied that everything was in order. The one remaining task was to tidy her own desk, and as she was, by nature, a neat, somewhat pernicketty person, this meant little save the removal of her few pieces of personal property.
The desk stood high and was the only old-fashioned piece of furniture in the whole school. It had a sloping lid which could be propped open by the adjustment of a wooden wedge. Miss Mayfield seated herself on the high chair, lifted the desk lid, swung the wedge into position and removed her own copies of The Oxford Book of Verse, Trevelyan’s Social History of England and Jane Eyre. Two Biros, one red and one bright blue, which she used for marking, she decided to leave to her successor, but the half-empty box of Kleenex she would take away and also the bottle of aspirin. She had the bottle in her hand and was bringing her head out from under the slope of the desk lid when the little wedge either slipped or collapsed, and the lid came down and struck her an incredibly painful blow across the bridge of her hose. Quite dazed with pain, she sat for a second watching the blood spatter down on her hands, on the edge of the desk and on the things she held in her lap. Then the room darkened and tilted sideways.
She recognized the hospital smell. They’d built it well away from the other buildings, but as Rose had often said, the hospital odour was more powerful even than that of Africa itself. She lay for a moment breathing it in, and then tried to open her eyes. The effort hurt and resulted in a mere slit of a view, just enough to inform her that she had wakened to daylight.
I’ve never known my eyes to be affected before! I’ve caught something from another patient! She thought, with a physical revulsion, of the variety of eye diseases prevalent in Entuba.
‘Rose,’ she said sharply. ‘Rose.’
A crisp, professionally cheerful voice said:
‘Ah, so you’re back with us. And you’re quite all right. Not a thing in the world to worry about.’
A new voice. Surely this last bout of illness hadn’t been so long and so troublesome that they’d been obliged to bring in an extra nurse.
Aloud she said peevishly:
‘Oh, isn’t there? Then why can’t I open my eyes?’
‘They’re slightly swollen. They’ll be quite all right in a day or two.’
Ah, she knew what had happened; they’d neglected her mosquito netting.
‘I’d like to see Miss Tilbury. Now. At once.’
‘I’m afraid you won’t be allowed a visitor today. You must be very quiet, just for a day or two.’
‘Miss Tilbury isn’t a visitor.’ Or, wait . . . had they moved her? Rose had said something about having to leave Entuba, something about sending her home by plane. Last night, was it? A doctor had come up all the way from Nairobi and said she’d never fully recover in Entuba. She’d cried. Perhaps that was what had made her eyes so swollen and sore. If that were all, of course she could open them.
There was the narrow strip of daylight, some white bars – hospital bed, of course – and a glimpse of some complicated tubing and metal bars.
‘Is this England?’
‘Why, yes. This is Wandford Hospital. Don’t worry. You’re bound to be a little confused. You’ve had a slight concussion.’
‘The plane,’ she said knowingly. That was it. Rose had kept her promise to put her on a plane, and it had crashed.
Injuries? She lay without speaking, moving one limb after another, turning a little this way and that upon the bed. One arm felt odd – constricted and in a curious position, in some way connected with the contraption of rubber tubing and metal rods – and her forehead and face as well as her eyes were very painful. That was all. A wonderful escape – cuts and bruises, an arm broken and a slight concussion.
‘Were many other people hurt, or killed?’
‘Nobody but you.’
That was really miraculous. Something to thank God for.
To begin with, she was content to allow the things which puzzled her to remain unexplained. Concussion naturally left you a little muddled in your mind. But through the comfortable fog of not knowing much about anything, every now and then she’d catch a glimpse, as though the fog had lifted and she had found herself in a place where nothing, no landmark, was familiar.
She discovered that her real injury was not where she had imagined it to be, over her eyes and forehead. She had a scalp wound which even the cheerful nurse described as ‘quite nasty’; all her hair on the left side of her head was shorn away, and sixteen stitches had been put in.
Then she discovered that she was more ‘confused’ than she had realized. Waking, she was conscious of the scent of roses, and there indeed, near her bed, was a great sheaf of them, dark crimson, white and apricot-coloured. When the nurse entered next time, Miss Mayfield asked:
‘Did someone send me those lovely roses?’
‘Indeed they did.’
‘Who?’
There was a card propped against the vase. The nurse lifted it and read:
‘Get well soon. H.T.’ She turned it over. ‘Canon Thorby. The Rectory, Walwyk.’
‘Well, that is very kind of him,’ said Miss Mayfield, visualizing an old gentleman whose private charity was sending flowers to patients in hospitals where they were unknown. ‘Very kind indeed.’
‘Oh, he’s always most attentive when we have a patient from his village.’
‘That’s understandable. But to send flowers to someone he has never seen . . .’
The nurse looked as though she were about to say something, thought better of it and merely replaced the card. But when, later in that same day, there arrived a bed jacket, pale blue and pink, pretty enough for a bride, with a scribbled note, ‘Best wishes for a speedy recovery and lots of love, Sally Benson,’ Miss Mayfield began to worry.
‘It can’t be for me. There must be some mistake. I don’t know anyone of that name.’
‘There’s no mistake. It’s plainly addressed to you, at this Private Ward number. Put it on; it’ll cheer you up.’
‘But it isn’t mine. Unless there’s a society or something for providing pretty bed wear for people in hospital. I never heard of Sally Benson, and I can’t see how she can have heard of me. Unless . . .’ Light dawned. Rose, of course. Rose still maintained contact with an astonishing number of friends and relatives, most of them both generous and well to do. The moment she heard that Deb was in hospital, she’d press them into service. On the other hand, it was odd that she had had no word from Rose herself.
‘Yes, I’ll wear it. I think I know how I came by it.’ She allowed herself to be helped into the pretty thing and then asked, diffidently and off-handedly because she was ashamed of the amount of ‘confusion’ the question betrayed:
‘By the way, how long is it that I’ve been here now?’
‘Ten days.’
‘It can’t be as long as that, surely.’
‘Yes. You came in on the twenty-fifth of June, and this is the fifth of July.’
She had something of the feeling that a swiftly descending lift can inflict.
‘Would you mind saying that again?’
The nurse repeated her words.
‘Then where in the world have I been for five months? I left Africa in January.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the nurse said, ‘number seven is ringing his bell.’
As a rule, the Matron came round once a day and asked brightly if everything was all right, nodded and smiled, and vanished. Sometimes she made a remark about the weather and said, ‘I hope you’ll soon be out on the terrace.’ But that evening she came in and sat down; she spoke about the weather – which was thundery – and said she hoped there wouldn’t be a storm, because it would ruin the delphiniums; and then she said:
‘Miss Mayfield, nurses and doctors are all concerned with patients’ physical well-being, and the Almoner is all tied up with their financial problems, so this falls to me. I understand that you are still slightly confused about the immediate past, the time just before your accident.’
‘Was it before? That is what bothers me. You see, I perfectly well remember falling ill in Entuba. I kept on having attacks of fever which, in the end, resulted in what they called a nervous breakdown – I used to cry a great deal; but really that was only because I felt so useless. Everybody there was so busy that to be useless . . . the very worst thing. So I was to come home, by air. About that, I admit, I remember absolutely nothing. The last thing that I am clear about is my friend Rose Tilbury sitting on the side of my bed and holding my hand and telling me what the doctor from Nairobi had said and saying that I must come back to England, and I began to cry. And then I’m here. And the dates don’t fit. This is July, and I’ve only been here ten days; but I left Africa . . . at least Rose told me I was to leave at once, in January. So there’s a gap, isn’t there?’
‘You haven’t any recollection of Walwyk at all?’
‘Walwyk. Somebody there, Canon Thorby, sent me those roses.’
‘You’ve been living in Walwyk, teaching in the school there.’ She leaned forward in her chair with the air of one who has pressed a switch and expects it to set a machine in motion. They had told her ‘temporary lapse of memory’ and said things like ‘put her in the picture.’
Miss Mayfield stared with a blank astonished face.
‘You remember nothing of that? Or of your accident?’
‘Accident? My accident? I thought the plane had come down.’
‘No. You were in the school, Walwyk school, after all the children had gone, and the lid of your desk fell. It must have knocked you senseless, and you fell and hit the side of your head against the edge of the little platform upon which the desk stood. But for the fact that the piano-tuner came in and found you, and ran straight to the telephone and called Dr Macdonald, you could very easily have bled to death.’
She looked back, and there she was, lying in bed, with Rose holding her hand and telling her she must return to England, and she began to cry.
‘I haven’t any memory of Walwyk at all. What year is this?’
‘Nineteen fifty-nine.’
‘And July. I left Entuba – at least, so I suppose – in January, 1956. I’ve lost three years.’
‘Not lost,’ the Matron ‘said consolingly. ‘Mislaid for the moment.’ She rose and opened the door, and stooped and lifted something. ‘Look, this came this afternoon, but after Nurse had told Sister about your slight . . . confusion over the bed jacket, we thought we’d hold it back until I’d had a little talk with you and put you in the picture.’
She held out a little blue-and-white wireless set, neat and pretty as a jewel box.
‘It’s from your pupils, Miss Mayfield. One of them must have written the message. It says “To dear Miss Mayfield, the nicest teacher we ever had.” Those years weren’t lost, were they? I’m quite sure that when that knock on the head has healed, it’ll all come back.’
You never realized until you lost part of it, as few people ever did, how much the past was entwined with the present. The whole of life was, indeed, a building up of a structure, solid, unchangeable, at the summit of which you stood. One thing led to another; cause led to result; the structure mounted with you. To have three years cut out of it – lost, mislaid, forgotten, call it what you would – gave you a fearful sense of insecurity and made all that you could remember seem unreal. Even Rose, though so clearly remembered, was part of the unreality. A friendship of such long standing, based upon mutual respect and affection, could not have been ended by their parting; so presumably from this place called Walwyk she had written to Rose, and Rose had replied to her. But what had they said to one another? Could she now write to Rose in such a fashion that she would not worry her?
She made several attempts, brooding with halted pen for a long time and producing sentences like ‘I have had a very slight accident, only a fall in the school, but it has left me rather weak and shaky and disinclined to write a long letter. This is just to let you know and assure you that I think of you often.’ Because she knew she was writing cautiously and evasively, the words, when she read them through, sounded false, and she was afraid that Rose would leap to the conclusion that her accident was more serious than she implied. So she wrote an alternative, an imaginative description of her accident, embellished with light-hearted details. And that didn’t have the right ring either.
One day, when the Matron made her visit, Miss Mayfield said:
‘I should like some of my clothes. For when I am allowed up. And I wonder if whoever sends the clothes could bring in any letters that belong to me – old letters. I think they might prod my memory and help me to fill in the background.’
The Matron said she considered that a very sensible idea and she would attend to it. The clothes arrived, and with them three or four envelopes, all unsealed and bearing twopenny stamps; a list of newly published educational books; a coupon worth fourpence if you bought a certain detergent; an appeal for funds to take old people to the seaside for the day. Nothing personal at all. It was a bitter disappointment, and Miss Mayfield wept over it. She began again to write to Rose, and a very horrible thought struck her; during this lost interval of three years, Rose might even have died! She wept again, and the nurse said, with patience obviously forced:
‘You’ve really nothing to cry about, you know. Now, if you were the poor woman in number seven . . .’
Miss Mayfield endeavoured to explain her predicament about writing to Rose; the nurse said:
‘Yes, I can see that is a bit awkward. But in any case I think you should write. A nice chatty little letter can’t do any harm.’
A nice chatty little letter!
In the end that was what she did write, however, and she sealed and addressed and stamped it, and sent it off into the void.
Everybody told her that worry was the worst thing; and she tried not to worry. Everybody said that one morning she would wake up and find her memory restored. Every morning she woke up and was aware of having two lives, one which ended in a hospital bed in Entuba and one which began in a hospital bed in Wandford. Out of the gap which divided them there came echoes of another life: flowers and fruit from some people called Frisby, eggs and cream from some people called Maverick.
One day she had another inspiration.
‘If anyone else from Walwyk comes to the hospital, will you ask that they should come and visit me, please? I am allowed visitors now, am I not? I think that if I saw somebody, my memory might begin to work again.’
Two days later a sheaf of gladioli arrived, with the Canon’s card attached to it.
‘Oh, you forgot to ask about my having a visitor,’ said Miss Mayfield, on the verge of tears once more.
‘I did not! I left the message at the porter’s lodge. I’ll see what happened. He may have forgotten, but I didn’t.’
She reported that the flowers had been delivered from a Wandford shop. During her next visit Matron mentioned casually that she believed Canon Thorby had gone abroad; he’d been absent from the hospital managers’ meeting.
Time passed. They took away the bandages. Then the stitches were removed. Her cut hair began to grow in little wispy curls like a child’s.
‘There’s a hairdresser who will come in,’ Matron said cheerfully. ‘Would you like an appointment? You could have it cut short all over. I think it would suit you.’
Really, they couldn’t have been kinder; and every kindness evoked tears, which were unwelcome in hospital.
Physically, she was well again. She could look after herself, spent a great deal of time on the terrace overlooking the garden in which Matron took such pride, ate moderately well and, with the aid of a small pink pill, slept through the night. One day she was taken to a room on the other side of the building, and a brain specialist, with a specialist’s apt double-barrelled name, spent a long time testing all her reflexes, asking questions and fixing a thing called an encephalograph to her head. He reported that he was completely satisfied that no injury had been done to her brain at all. But he did mention ‘a hysterical block’. And that resulted in some sessions with a psychiatrist who started off on the assumption that the past three years held some experience which she wished to forget.
That called up such appalling possibilities that she refuted it with all her might.
‘One cannot forget at will. Everybody has seen or heard or lived through hundreds of things which they would forget most willingly, but they can’t.’
‘These things are not so simple. It is very difficult to explain to the layman. Things such as you are thinking of are the concern of the superficial, conscious mind. It is when the deeper, subconscious mind comes up against something that it cannot accept that the obliterative process begins.’
He asked her many very personal, even embarrassing questions. He invited her to tell him about her sex life.
‘I have none,’ she said simply. He said that was nonsense; everyone did. He said it was impossible for him to help her unless she was willing to help him.
‘But I am doing my best. So far as I know – that is, as far as I remember, the only time . . . Oh, it was very childish. At my first school. There was a little boy named Alan; I thought he was extremely handsome. I think he was, and popular. I was very flattered if he spoke to me and one day he did tell me about his dog. He went on to his prep school and I never saw him again. But I always thought that if I did get married and had a son, I would name him Alan. But nobody ever thought of marrying me, so nothing came of that.’
‘You had a dog at Walwyk?’
‘I shouldn’t think it very likely. You see, I taught in a school. You couldn’t leave a dog alone all day.’
‘You enjoyed your work?’
‘My twenty years in Africa I most certainly did. About more recent times, I can’t, of course, speak. I like children. The Walwyk children seem to have liked me.’ She told him about the little wireless set, and blushing because it seemed rather an immodest thing to do, repeated the message which the children had sent with it. ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘everybody has been very kind – up to a point. What does rather worry me is that nobody at all has come to see me.’
‘Is that one of the things you cry about?’
‘Not directly. I cry because I can’t remember. You know how it is when you forget a name, or a book title. It’s like having an itch that you can’t scratch. And I have that feeling about a whole section of my life. It’s enough to make anyone cry.’
She was completely rational, and, from his point of view, completely unrewarding.
‘You’ll have noticed,’ he said, ‘that in the cases of a temporary lapse, such as you have mentioned, trying to remember does more harm than good. At some moment when you have ceased to try to remember, what you want flashes back into your mind. I think that if you can just be patient and divert your thoughts from yourself and your condition, you have every chance of recovering your memory.’
He made some vague resolve – never fulfilled – to go to this place Walwyk and see if the clue to the puzzle could be found there. Before his next visit to Wandford, however, Miss Mayfield had gone.
It all happened very suddenly: One evening the hospital Almoner visited Miss Mayfield and said that Canon Thorby had been in touch with her.
‘But I understood that Canon Thorby was abroad.’
‘I didn’t go into the matter of where he was, Miss Mayfield. I merely listened to his suggestion regarding you. A very sensible and kindly one, in my opinion.’
Most of her work was concerned with the problems of the poor; mothers of new babies going home to take up, prematurely, the burden of family life; old people living alone; disabled victims of accidents, uncertain of the immediate future.
‘Canon Thorby,’ she said, ‘has a friend – a widow, Mrs Mott-Tyler, in rather straitened circumstances, I gather – who takes paying guests in her house near Hove. Miss Thorby has stayed there, he says, on one or two occasions and been very comfortable indeed. His suggestion is that you should go there and have a good rest and a holiday.’
‘And that,’ said Miss Mayfield, ‘is extremely kind of him. The question is, can I afford it? I know that when I left Africa, I had no resources; it is unlikely that I have saved much. . . .’ She remembered, but did not mention, her determination to send Rose every penny she could spare once she was earning again. Had she done, so? ‘I suppose I shall have my salary up to the time of my accident, and perhaps for the month following. . . . But then how do I know that I shall ever be able to teach again? Who would want a teacher who couldn’t remember? I don’t think I’m justified taking a holiday.’
‘You worry unnecessarily,’ said the Almoner. ‘I don’t think you fully realize how fortunate you are. Canon Thorby has made himself responsible for your stay in this Private Ward, and professes himself eager to pay for your stay in Hove.’
‘But can he afford it? All the clergymen I have known have seemed to be so poor.’
‘Canon Thorby is extremely well to do. And he delights to use his money to help people.’
‘Have you ever seen him?’ Miss Mayfield asked abruptly.
‘Of course I have. Dozens of times.’
‘What is he like? To look at, I mean.’
The Almoner’s rather weary face took on the baffled look which such a question evokes in all but the very articulate.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘He’s tall. Rather nice-looking. Reddish hair, just going grey.’
‘You see. It calls nothing to my mind. Yet it seems I must accept his charity.’
‘There’s no must about it, Miss Mayfield. The facts are that you are no longer in need of medical attention, and we are short of beds and nurses. Perhaps you have some plan of your own; some friends . . . ?’
‘My only friend – if she is still alive – lives in Africa.’
‘Then don’t you think you would be wise to consider Canon Thorby’s offer?’
And aren’t you lucky to have it to consider?
‘There seems to be no choice,’ Miss Mayfield said; and despite herself, the words emerged querulously.
‘The arrangement was that I should telephone to Mrs Mott-Tyler and she would come and fetch you by car. You could leave tomorrow, couldn’t you? We really do need the room.’
For somebody with some definite, cure-or-kill condition. Loss of memory, like deafness, did not evoke sympathy.
‘I suppose that Canon Thorby has explained my state to Mrs Mott-Tyler?’
‘Oh yes. You see, Miss Mayfield, everybody thinks that to get back to normal life . . . Canon Thorby said that there would be various little jobs which you could do to help Mrs Mott-Tyler, and that if you were occupied you would be . . . happier.’
In short, they suspect me of self-pitying egoism, only just short of malingering. She felt her face go hot.
‘Naturally, I should be glad to do anything I could. And tomorrow will suit me very well.’
The Almoner rose with a look of relief. ‘I’ll go and telephone, then. Hove, just now, must be very nice.’
She thought of her own ‘holiday’, spent in Birmingham, looking after her ageing father and mother while the sister who lived with them had the break which enabled her to carry on from year to year.
‘Yes. I’m very fortunate,’ Miss Mayfield said; and managed not to start crying until she was alone.