Incarnate (51 page)

They let her go. She staggered onto the first floor, which Rosie shared with Sage now, and clung to the banisters as she heaved herself up and up. She could barely see the floors or the stairs; her exertion was blinding her, her brain had no energy to spare for seeing. It seemed hours before she reached her landing.

She tottered the few steps to her door and then to the bed. She slumped onto Doreen’s patchwork quilt and drew into herself, shivering from head to foot, trying to catch her breath. Then Sage and the women came into the room.

When Doreen stooped and tried to touch her comfortingly, Freda writhed away to the far side of the bed. “Freddy, I’m sorry,” Doreen said. The worst of it was her expression, that look of knowing how Freda felt.

Joyce and Rosie were carrying in chairs from the other rooms on the floor. Freda wanted to demand what they thought they were doing, but Doreen was speaking. “I blame myself for being so selfish. You’ve done so much for me and Rosie and yet we’ve never tried to help you in return. Just close your eyes now. Sage says it’ll be all right. Close your eyes.”

They were drawing the chairs close to the bed, so close that two of them could grab her if she tried to slip away. They were bringing the séance into her room. She threw herself toward the foot of the bed. Sage watched.

Perhaps he knew he needn’t take hold of her, that it was his gaze that had drained her of so much strength that she collapsed head first over the end of the bed, her forehead thumping the floor. Rosie and Doreen helped her up, ignoring her attempts to struggle, and laid her gently on the quilt. “It’s all right, I’m here,” Doreen murmured.

Freda lay on the bed and glared fiercely at the faces that surrounded her. The women’s eyes were comforting, encouraging, almost prayerful; Sage’s were unreadably calm. She could still fight them, prevent the séance from happening. “No, no, no,” she began to scream.

“It’s all right.” Not only Doreen but all the women were murmuring now, a kind of litany of concern, unbearably monotonous, almost hypnotic. Freda tried to scream louder; she closed her eyes as if that might help, but her voice seemed to be receding. Each scream felt as if it would have to be the last, they exhausted her so much. Soon her throat felt as distant as her voice, and then she was asleep.

She dreamed she was running away from the house, running between two buildings whose walls would never end, whose ranks of identical windows climbed until they were lost in the clouds. She couldn’t bear that, she had to see light somehow. At once the identical windows were the identical leaves of the forest through which she was running. She hadn’t escaped the dream; by manipulating it she had made it more real. Suddenly she knew that was part of the answer: by coming true for people the dream gained strength, and Joyce had made it stronger. She must have gasped aloud, for the sound woke her.

She had to tell Joyce now, before the insight faded like a dream. Joyce would know what she meant, and help her think it out. She blinked and opened her eyes wide, but the séance was over, and she was alone. Sage must have given up. She’d beaten him.

She must conserve her strength to talk to Joyce. She must lie still and hold on to what she’d realized about the dream. She blinked at the dark one last time and raised her head to make sure the door was shut; and then she stared, though her neck began to ache. There was something in the chair at the foot of the bed.

Perhaps it was clothes. She must have left her suit there last night, it must be the buttons of the jacket that looked like eyes, glinting at her from the dark—and then she realized she was wearing her suit. She’d put it on when she had thought she was going to visit Joyce.

She grabbed the dark in search of the light cord, praying desperately there would be nothing to fear because she couldn’t imagine what she would be able to do, all the way up here, if there were. She had the cord now and pulled.

The sudden light made her close her eyes and fear kept them closed, fear that would paralyze her if she didn’t look. She forced them open and raised her head on its throbbing neck, and then she shrank back against the wall under the crucifix, a sound filling her throat until she thought it would choke her. Something was watching her from the chair.

It looked unfinished. Its clothes and its flesh seemed to be composed of the same substance, for they were of the same indeterminate color. The hands and face looked not so much plump as puffy. Yet there was no mistaking the face, the high forehead, the jutting chin, above all the deep brown eyes, gentle but strong. They were watching her from a face that looked as if it were in the process of being shaped from putty: Timothy’s face.

She couldn’t move until the figure nodded toward her on the chair, until the mouth began to smile uncertainly as if the lips were stuck together, hadn’t yet been separated, and then she lurched off the bed and stumbled choking toward the door. Before she reached it she lost her balance, plunged forward with nothing to hold on to, smashed her forehead against the door. Then there was only dark. . She came out of the dark and wished she could go back. Someone was stroking her forehead, so gently that the touch of the hand soothed the bruise. At last she opened her eyes a slit. Timothy was sitting beside her, stroking her forehead.

It couldn’t be Timothy. She knew that much, though trying to remember why made her head throb horribly. She wished it were, as she had never wished for anything. She lay on the bed and would have been happy for this dream never to end, this dream of his loving touch, and then he gazed into her eyes and smiled his smile that was like no other, a smile that recalled everything they had done together, everything they had been to each other. The flood of emotion was so great she thought it would shake her to pieces. “Oh, Timothy,” she cried in a pale voice she hardly recognized, “it
is
you.”

“Of course it is, old girl. Who were you expecting? Friend Adolf? That’s all done with. There’s nothing to keep us apart now.” He sat back, almost imperceptibly but she felt as if he were suddenly miles away. “That is,” he said shyly, “if you still want me.”

“Oh, Timothy, if you only knew how much …” She reached out her shaky arms to him, and all at once he picked her up, even more effortlessly than he had used to. She’d loved to be held over streams, even once over the edge of a cliff; she’d loved the girlish excitement, the security of knowing he would never let her fall. She wanted him to kiss her, she raised her face to his as best she could, and it was a long time before their faces parted. His lips were so soft, it was like a dream.

He carried her onto the landing as if she weighed nothing at all. “I’ll take you down,” he said. “He’ll see to your head.” As they descended she felt she was flying. It no longer mattered that there were so many floors, not when she was in Timothy’s arms. She was flying like an angel, and if this wasn’t heaven, she was glad there was no such place.

53

B
Y THE TIME
the train left Norwich, night was falling. Bare trees cracked the sunset, pools and streams glowed like lava among the fields; on both sides of the line there was nothing higher than a hedge between the train and the horizon. Stuart gazed out until his reflection was clearer than the landscape and was tempted to make faces at himself to while the dawdling journey away.

He hadn’t been able to get through to the hospital from Norwich to arrange to meet Guilda somewhere away from where she worked. He hoped he wouldn’t have to encounter any of her patients. Insanity dismayed him; just the thought of that loss of mental control did. He could only admire Guilda and anyone else who tried to help.

The train was emptying. By the time-Stuart got out at his stop, there was only the ticket collector on the platform. “How do I get to the hospital?” Stuart said.

“Afraid you haven’t much choice. You walk.” The ticket collector frowned at the swaying metal shades of the lamps as they clattered with the first large drops of rain. “Wait though, he’s going that way.” He went to the fence between the platform and the car park. “Can you drop our friend here at the hospital?”

“Why not,” a man said cheerfully. “Jump in before you get wet,” he told Stuart as the fields began to hiss.

It was only when he realized the country house that glimmered through the rain was in fact the hospital that he deduced the last few hundred tree-lined yards must have been an avenue leading into the grounds. “Thank you very much,” he shouted as he dodged under the wide stone porch, but the car was already speeding away.

Dripping urns and stone lions stood among the frantic trees and bushes. Soon a balding young male nurse opened the oak doors. “I’d like to speak to Guilda Kent,” Stuart said.

The nurse let him in before answering. “Have you an appointment?”

“I couldn’t get through on the phone. It’s pretty urgent. I assisted Dr. Kent on a research project some years back, and now there’s been a new development.”

The nurse stared at him. “You’ll have to speak to Dr. Lovell.”

“Isn’t Dr. Kent here?”

The nurse’s face went blank. “Dr. Lovell will explain,” he said, and having ascertained Stuart’s name, went away.

The rain that had caught Stuart in the porch began to trickle down his neck and into his shoes. When he peeled off his coat and stood with it over his arm, rain seeped through the sleeve of his jacket. By the time the nurse came back, Stuart was in no mood to be hindered. “Dr. Lovell will see you,” the nurse said.

Couldn’t he just say Guilda wasn’t here? It was all this protocol that irritated Stuart. He marched after the nurse into Dr. Lovell’s office, a high-ceilinged white room with French windows. A large painting of a darker room hung on the wall. The painting was signed Lovell, whom he took to be the doctor, a thin middle-aged woman with gray hair clipped close to her head. She gazed at him over her steel-rimmed spectacles, whose lenses were scarcely larger than her eyes. “What can I do for you?”

He restrained himself from saying “Not much.” “I asked to see Dr. Kent,” he said.

After a pause she said patiently, “Why?”

“About a project we were both involved in.”

She pursed her lips. “Look, you’ll have to tell me more than that.”

He was losing the little patience he’d had to begin with. “It dates from before she came here, you know.”

“I should hope it does.”

Something in her tone disturbed him. “So why should you need to know about it?”

“Perhaps you aren’t familiar with our procedures, though I should have thought they were obvious enough. You are going to have to show me good reason to let you see her at all.”

She couldn’t mean what she seemed to mean. “You’re in charge here, aren’t you? You mean she’s been taken ill?”

“I’m in charge if you want to put it that way, yes. I’m the RMO.”

“The responsible medical officer?” He was still trying to believe he’d misunderstood. “Responsible for—”

“For Guilda Kent, of course. Every patient has an RMO.” She stared at him and said more gently, “You didn’t think she
worked
here, did you?”

His face must have said it all. “Dear me,” she said. “In that case I’m sorry. I thought you were trying to bluff your way in to her. She’s been a patient here for years.”

Stuart turned away toward the windows, but the shifting dark was no relief. “What’s wrong with her?” he said, having swallowed twice.

“Acute paranoid schizophrenia.”

“But she was never like that. She was absolutely rational. Are you sure it’s the same Guilda Kent?

“Is your Guilda Kent the one who conducted research into dreaming? Then I’m afraid this is she. It seems to have been her research that affected her mind or at least worked on some dormant tendency in it.”

He didn’t want to hear any more, yet he had to know. “But she seemed all right afterward,” he protested, then remembered Guilda wandering the deserted corridors of the Foundation as if she was looking for something.

“You assisted her in Oxford?”

“That’s right.” Admitting it made him feel almost guilty, and so did saying, “When she left Oxford we lost touch.”

“She worked for a while on the effects of stress on factory workers. Hardly the best line of work for her to choose under the circumstances. Meanwhile she was reading everything she could get her hands on about dreams. A lew months later she went into a rest home.”

Each question was harder to ask. “Was she paranoid then?”

“Very much so. If she hadn’t gone in voluntarily, I think her colleagues would have taken steps. She’d developed a habit of looking round her, as if she were trying to lake something unawares, I gather. Sometimes she’d refuse to go through doorways, sometimes she’d insist they led somewhere other than where they did. Mind you, that wasn’t why she went into the rest home.”

“Why did she?”

“Apparently because she was convinced some people might try to find her. She gave instructions that they had to be turned away if they came looking for her, she wanted them to be told she wasn’t there. She wouldn’t give their names in case that somehow brought them to her. Well, that kind of delusory system isn’t uncommon, and neither was the outcome, unfortunately. Eventually she forgot their names herself, and then became obsessed with the idea that they were somewhere in the building with her. When she started turning violent and the rest home couldn’t cope with her, she came here.”

Stuart wondered if he was one of the people Guilda had been hiding from. “Why did you want to see her?” Dr. Lovell said.

“About her research. I’ve been wondering about the way it may still be affecting her subjects.” Reluctantly he added, “One of them is insane.”

“Really. Do you find that more significant now?”

“I don’t know,” Stuart said resentfully.

“You’re right, we should be cautious in our thinking. I take it you wanted to find out if Kent had any further thoughts about her research. Well, would you like to see her?”

“Can I?” Stuart said, but it felt like, “Do I have to?”|

“It might be helpful. You might pick up allusions she makes that I’ve overlooked. Don’t expect too much. She’s sedated, you realize,” Dr. Lovell said, and opened the door.