The Infinite Moment (13 page)

The other leaned across, and patted her hand.

"There, there now. Calm down. I know it's terribly bewildering at first, but it comes all right. I remember."

"Yyou remember?" stammered Frances.

"Yes. From when it happened to me, of course. From when I was where you are now."

Frances stared at her, with a sensation of slowly and helplessly drowning.

"Look," said the other. "I think I'd better get you a drink. Yes, I know you don't take it, but this is rather exceptional. I remember how much better I felt for it. Just a minute." She got up, and went indoors.

Frances leaned back, holding hard to both arms of her chair for reassurance. She felt as if she were falling over and over, a long way down.

The other came back holding a glass, and gave it to her. She drank, spluttering a little over the strange taste of it. But the other had been right: she did immediately begin to feel somewhat better.

"Of course, it's a bit of a shock," said the other. "And I fancy you're right about one person not being in two placesup to a point. But the way I think it must happen is that you just seem to yourself to go on being the same person. But you never can be, not really. I mean, as the cells that make you are always gradually being replaced, you can't really be all the same person at any two times, can you?"

Frances tried to follow that, without success, but: "Wellwell, I suppose not quite," she conceded, doubtfully.

The other went on talking, giving her time to recover herself.

"Well, then when all the cells have been replaced by new ones, over seven years or so, then you can't any of you be the same person any longer, although you still think you are. So that means that the cells that make up you and me are two quite different sets of cellsso they aren't really having to be in two different places at once, although it does look like it, don't you see?"

"Ierperhaps," said Frances, on a slightly hysterical note.

"So that sets a sort of natural limit," the other went on. "There obviously has to be a kind of minimum gap of seven years or so in which it is quite impossible for this to happen at alluntil all your present cells have been replaced by others, you see."

"II suppose so," said Frances, faintly.

"Just take another drink of that. It'll do you good," the other advised.

Frances did, and leaned back again in the chair. She wished her head would stop whirling. She did not understand a word that the womanher other selfwhoever it washad said. All she knew was that none of it could possibly make sense. She kept on hanging on to the arms of the chair until, presently, she began to feel herself growing a little calmer.

"Better? You've more colour now," the other said.

Frances nodded. She could feel the tears of a reaction not far away. The other came over and put an arm round her.

"Poor dear! What a time you're having! All this confusion, and then falling in love on top of itas if that weren't confusing enough by itself."

"Falling in love?" said Frances.

"Why, yes. He kissed you, and patted your behindand you fell in love. I remember so well."

"Oh, dearis it like that? I didn't" Frances broke off. "But how did you know about? Oh, I see, of course"

"And he's a dear. You'll adore him. And little Betty's a love, too, bless her," the other told her. She paused, and added: "I'm afraid you've rather a lot to go through first, but it's worth it. You'll remember it's worth it all?"

"Yesss," Frances told her vaguely.

She thought for a moment of the man who had come out of the house and gone off in the car. He would be "Yes," she said, more stoutly. She pondered for some seconds and then turned to look at the other.

"I suppose one does have to grow older, older, I mean," she amended. "Somehow, I've never thought"

The other laughed. "Of course you haven't. But it's really very nice, I assure you. Such a much less anxious state than being youngthough, naturally, you" won't believe that."

Frances let her eyes wander round the porch and across the garden. They came to rest on the teddybears and the delinquent golliwog. She smiled.

"I think I do," she said.

The other smiled, too; her eyes a little shiny.

"I really was rather a sweet thing," she said.

She got up abruptly.

"Time you were going, my dear: You've got to get back to that horrid old woman."

Frances got up obediently, too. The other seemed to have an idea of what she was talking about, and what was necessary. Frances herself had little enough.

"Back to the Seora?" she asked.

The other nodded without speaking. She put her arms round Frances, and held her close to her. She kissed her gently. "Oh, my dear!" she said, unsteadily, and turned her head away.

Frances walked down the short drive. At the gate she turned and looked back, taking it all in.

The other, on the porch, kissed her hand to her. Then she put it over her eyes, and ran into the house.

Frances turned to the right and walked back by the way she had come, towards the town, and the Seora...

The cloudiness cleared. The crystal became just a glassball again. Beyond it sat Seora Rosa, with her comb awry. Her left hand held Frances" wrist. Frances stared at her for some moments, then: "You are a cheat," she burst out. "And you've been telling lies, too. You described Edward, but the man you showed me wasn't Edwardhe wasn't even a bit like Edward." She pulled her arm free with a sudden wrench. "Cheat!" she repeated. "You told me Edward, and you showed me somebody else. It's all cruel, silly lies and cheating. All of it."

Her vehemence was enough to take the Seora a little aback.

"There was jus" a little mistake," she admitted. "By "n'unfortunate"

"Mistake!" shouted Frances. "The mistake was my ever coming here at all. You've just made a fool of me, and I hate you! I hate you!"

The Seora recoiled, and then rallied slightly. With a touch of dignity, she said: "Th'xplanation's really quite simple. It was"

"No!" Frances shouted. "I don't want to hear any more about it."

She pushed the table with all her force. The far edge of it took the Seora in the middle. Her chair teetered backwards, then she, table, crystal, and lamp, went down all in a heap. Frances sprang for the door.

The Seora grunted, and rolled over. She struggled stertorously to her feet, leaving comb and mantilla in the debris. She made determinedly through the door in Frances" wake. On the landing, she leaned over the bannisters.

"You damned little duffer," she shouted. "That was your shecond marriagean" I say the hell with both of "em."

But Frances was already out in the street, beyond earshot.

"A very unpleasant experiencehumiliating, too," thought Frances, as she pegged along, with the jolting step of the incensed. Humiliating because she had nearly no, she'd be honest; for a time she had fallen for it. It had all seemed so convincingly, so really real. Even now she could scarcely believe that she hadn't walked up that drive, sat on that porch, talked to... but what a ridiculous thing to think... As if it could possibly be..

All the same, to find oneself facing that horrible Seora again, and realise that it had all been some kind of trick If she were not in the public street, she could have kicked herself, and wept with mortification...

Presently, however, as the first flush of her anger began to cool, she became more aware of her surroundings. It was borne in upon her attention that a number of the people she met were looking at her with curiositynot quite the right kind of curiosity...

She glanced down at her frock, and stopped dead. Instead of her familiar blueandwhite striped cotton, she was wearing an affair covered with an absurd, niggly pattern of palmtrees and pineapples. She raised her eyes again, and looked round. Every other cotton frock in sight was inches longer and far fuller than hers.

Frances blushed. She walked on, trying to look as if she were not blushing; trying, too, to pretend that the skimpy frock did not make her feel as if she had come out dressed in a rather inadequate bathtowel.

Clearly, there was one thing to be done about that; and done at once...

She made haste towards Weilberg's Modes.

On the sheltered side 0f the house the sun was hot. Just inside the open french windows Mrs Dolderson moved her chair a few inches, so that her head would remain in the shade while the warmth could comfort the rest of her. Then she leant her head back on the cushion, looking out.

The scene was, for her, timeless.

Across the smooth lawn the cedar stood as it had always stood. Its flat spread boughs must, she supposed, reach a little further now than they had when she was a child, but it was hard to tell; the tree had seemed huge then, it seemed huge now. Further on, the boundary hedge was just as trim and neat as it had always been. The gate into the spinney was still flanked by the two unidentifiable topiary birds, Cocky and Oilywonderful that they should still be there, even though Oily's tail feathers had become a bit twiggy with age.

The flowerbed on the left, in front of the shrubbery, was as full of colour as everwell, perhaps a little brighter; one had a feeling that flowers had become a trifle more strident than they used to be, but delightful nevertheless. The spinney beyond the hedge, however, had changed a little; more young trees, some of the larger ones gone. Between the branches were glimpses of pink roof where there had been no neighbours in the old days. Except for that, one could almost, for a moment, forget a whole lifetime.

The afternoon drowsing while the birds rested, the bees humming, the leaves gently stirring, the bonkbonk from the tennis court round the corner, with an occasional voice giving the score. It might have been any sunny afternoon out of fifty or sixty summers.

Mrs Dolderson smiled upon it, and loved it all; she had loved it when she was a girl, she loved it even more now.

In this house she had been born; she had grown up in it, married from it, come back to it after her father died, brought up her own two children in it, grown old in it... Some years after the second war she had come very near to losing itbut not quite; and here she still was It was Harold who had made it possible. A clever boy, and a wonderful son... When it had become quite clear that she could no longer afford to keep the house up, that it would have to be sold, it was Harold who had persuaded his firm to buy it. Their interest, he had told her, lay not in the house, but in the siteas would any buyer's. The house itself was almost without value now, but the position was convenient. As a condition of sale, four rooms on the south side had been converted into a flat which was to be hers for life. The rest of the house had become a hostel housing some twenty young people who worked in the laboratories and offices which now stood on the north side, on the site of the stables and part of the paddock. One day, she knew, the old house would come down, she had seen the plans, but for the present, for her time, both it and the garden to the south and west could remain unspoilt. Harold had assured her that they would not be required for fifteen or twenty years yetmuch longer than she would know the need of them Nor, Mrs Dolderson thought calmly, would she be really sorry to go. One became useless, and, now that she must have a wheelchair, a burden to others. There was the feeling, too, that she no longer belongedthat she had become a stranger in another people's world. It had all altered so much; first changing into a place that it was difficult to understand, then growing so much more complex that one gave up trying to understand. No wonder, she thought, that the old become possessive about things; cling to objects which link them with the world that they could understand...

Harold was a dear boy, and for his sake she did her best not to appear too stupidbut, often, it was difficult Today, at lunch, for instance, he had been so excited about some experiment that was to take place this afternoon. He had had to talk about it, even though he must know that practically nothing of what he said was comprehensible to her. Something about dimensions againshe had grasped that much, but she had only nodded, and not attempted to go further. Last time the subject had cropped up, she had observed that in her youth there had been only three, and she did not see how even all this progress in the world could have added more. This had set him off on a dissertation about the mathematician's view of the world through which it was, apparently, possible to perceive the existence of a series of dimensions. Even the moment of existence in relation to time was it, seemed some kind of dimension. Philosophically, Harold had begun to explainbut there, and at once, she had lost him. He led straight into confusion. She felt sure that when she was young philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics had all been quite separate studiesnowadays they seemed to have quite incomprehensibly run together. So this time she had listened quietly, making small, encouraging sounds now and then, until at the end he had smiled ruefully, and told her she was a dear to be so patient with him. Then he had come round the table and kissed her cheek gently as he put his hand over hers, and she had wished him the best of luck with the afternoon's mysterious experiment. Then jenny had come in to clear the table, and wheel her closer to the window...

The warmth of the slumbrous afternoon carried her into a halfdream, took her back fifty years to just such an afternoon when she had sat here in this very windowthough certainly with no thought of a wheelchair in those dayswaiting for Arthur.. wanting with an ache in her heart for Arthur... and Arthur had never come Strange, it was, the way things fell out. If Arthur had come that day she would almost certainly have married him. And then Harold and Cynthia would never have existed. She would have had children, of course, but they would not have been Harold and Cynthia... What a curious, haphazard thing one's existence was... Just by saying "no" to one man, and "yes" to another, a woman might bring into existence a potential archbishop, or a potential murderer... How foolish they all were nowadaystrying to tidy everything up, make life secure, while behind, back in everyone's past, stretched the chancestudded line of women who had said "yes" or "no," as the fancy took them...