Outrageous Fortune (4 page)

“Who are you?”

“Oh, come!” said Nesta.

“Who are you?”

“Good Lord, Jimmy—you don't mean—”

“Who are you?”

“You don't mean to say—”

“For God's sake!”

She began to laugh.

“My dear Jimmy—”

He looked at her with something so grim in his expression that the laugh broke off.

“Will you kindly tell me who you are?”

The colour rose in her cheeks. She looked away from him. “I'm Nesta.”

“I'm afraid that tells me nothing.”

“Nesta Riddell.” She risked a sideways glance. That three days' beard gave him a savage look.… It wasn't only the beard.… She stayed where she was, but it needed an effort not to jump up and get nearer the door.

“And still that tells me nothing,” he said in a carefully controlled voice.

Nesta sprang to her feet and flung out her hands.

“I'm your wife. Jimmy—you
can't
have forgotten me!”

He had known what she was going to say; before she said it he had braced himself to take the shock. When it came, it actually steadied him. He felt as cold as ice and as quiet as if he were dead. He said just above his breath.

“My wife—
no—
”

She burst into angry tears. Take it whatever way you like, it was a slap in the face. Nesta did not take kindly to being slapped. She felt no impulse to turn the other cheek.

“Yes—your wife! What else did you think? How dare you think anything else—and in my own brother's house!”

“I beg your pardon—you misunderstand me. I simply have no recollection of you at all.” He should have left it at that, but he went on, his calm broken a little. “I can't—I can't—believe—”

“You can't believe—and you can't remember? Well, how much can you remember? How did you come here, if you're not my husband? Why, Tom and I went to the hospital and fetched you away!”

She dashed the angry tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. It was the gesture of a furious child. The tears were real, and so was the choke in her voice as she flung open the door and called,

“Min! Min! Come here!”

She stood aside as the girl in the blue overall ran in. Min came to a standstill about a yard inside the door, looking timidly from Nesta to the bed.

“Perhaps you'll believe Min, if you won't believe me.” Nesta wasn't crying now, but her colour was high and her eyes bright.

“What is it?” said Min in a bewildered voice.

“Tell him who he is!” said Nesta sharply.

“Jimmy? Why, Jimmy Riddell.”

“Tell him who I am.”

Min began to look frightened.

“Why, Nesta.”

“Nesta what?”

“Nesta Riddell.” She took a step towards the bed. “What's the matter? Don't you remember?” She spoke sweetly and pitifully.

He shook his head, watching them both, holding himself in.

“Oh dear! Don't you know Nesta? Oh
dear!
”

He spoke then, quite quietly.

“I've lost my memory. I don't know either of you. You say I'm Jim Riddell?”

“Oh yes.”

“And that is Nesta Riddell?”

“Oh dear, yes.”

“What is she to me?”

“Oh, she's your wife,” said Min, and burst out crying.

Something began to roar in his ears. He felt himself slipping and fell back against the pillows. The room went round. He heard the women's voices as you hear voices in the roar of heavy traffic. They came and went, and they meant nothing. Actually he had done no more than lean back and close his eyes.

Min Williams said, “Oh, he's fainted!”

Nesta took her by the shoulders with a quick, “Run along and don't talk nonsense!”

After that the door was shut. Nesta stood waiting with her back against it, and in a moment he was looking at her. His eyes were of so dark a grey as to seem black. His brows frowned above them, making the shadow deeper. He went on speaking as if there had been no interruption.

“When were we married?”

“On the twenty-fifth of July.”

“Of what year?”

“This year.”

“This is—what month?”

“August.”

“What date?”

“The thirteenth.”

“We were married—here?”

“No—in London.” She crossed the room, opened a drawer, and came to him with a paper in her hand. “There's the certificate.”

A voice in his mind said quickly, “She had it ready.” It was like what stage directions call a voice off. It didn't seem to have anything to do with him, but he remembered it afterwards. At the time, he was looking at the certificate, which set forth that James Riddell had married Nesta Williams at a registry office in Kensington on the 25th July 1931.

Nesta put out her hand to take the paper back. The hand shook, and all at once it came to him that, whether he liked her or not, it was hard lines on her. He didn't like her, but it was damned hard lines. Her hand shook. There was enough to make it shake.

He said in a constrained voice,

“I don't know what to say—I can't remember.”

V

There was no more talk that day. It was Min who brought him his meals, and Min was much too scared to talk. She left the door wide open, put down the tray, and was gone. He guessed she thought of a man who had forgotten his name and his wife as well over the border line of insanity. Presently she would come back with a quick glance over her shoulder, pick up the tray, and hurry from the room. He could almost hear her breath of relief as the door swung to. Nesta never came near him.

He lay in the darkened room and wrestled with the thing that had happened to him. Presently the sheer blank horror passed. He wasn't mad. His head ached, but he could order and control his thoughts in a perfectly normal manner. He could repeat the multiplication table and the capitals of all the countries in Europe. He knew that there was a Labour government in power, and that Ramsay Macdonald was Prime Minister. He knew all the ordinary things which don't need thinking about, but he didn't know anything at all about himself. The minute he began to think about himself the fog came up and choked his mind, and, with the fog, the horrible panic sense of being lost in empty space.

He forced thought back to the things he knew. He had had a knock on the head. His memory would come back all right if he would let it alone. That was it—he'd got to let it alone—keep himself quiet, eat, sleep, say the multiplication table, conjugate French verbs, count sheep jumping over a hedge.

The sun went behind a cloud, the room darkened. Presently he did sleep, and, sleeping, heard again that voice which he took to be his own. Echoing it, he muttered and cried out.

Min ran half way up the stairs and called to Nesta shut in her room.

“Nesta! He's talking to himself!”

There was no answer.

“Nesta! He does frighten me. He just keeps right on. Can't you come down?”

Nesta's door opened. Nesta stood there, harshly contemptuous.

“What a baby you are!”

“He keeps right on talking.”

“Well, you needn't take any notice, need you? Go into the kitchen and shut the door!”

With a frightened gasp Min took in the fact that Nesta was dressed for the street.

“You're not going out!”

“Why shouldn't I go out?”

“I can't stay alone here.”

“Why, what d'you think he'll do to you?”

“Oh, Nesta, please don't go.”

Nesta pushed past her.

“Don't be a fool, Min!” she said, and ran downstairs.

There were three rooms on the ground floor—kitchen, parlour, and bedroom. The two latter were at the back. Nesta stood for a moment at the foot of the stairs. The vague mutter of a man's voice came along the passage. After a moment's hesitation she walked to the bedroom door and stood there listening, with the handle turned and the mutter louder. Every now and then there were words.

“Green—beads—” said the muttering voice. “Finest in the world—no one knows but me—no one—green—like a kid's beads—” Then, with a change of tone, “They'll never find them—nobody'll ever find them—unless I show them how—Emily's dead.”

Nesta had pushed the door ajar. If she spoke to him, would he answer, or would he wake? Old Caroline Bussell used to say that if you could put a sleeping person's right hand into a basin of cold water without waking them, they would answer you anything in the world you liked to ask. People said she'd done it too, and that was why she had such a hold over Mr Entwhistle—she'd certainly got something more than a housekeeper's place at the hall.

“Isn't it awful?” said Min's voice at her elbow.

Nesta shut the door and whirled round in a fury.

“Get into the kitchen and stay there!” she said, and banged out of the house.

It was a little house in a street of little houses on the outskirts of Ledlington. She turned her back on the town and walked in the opposite direction until the rows of houses gave way to fields and hedges, with here and there a cottage or a farmstead. She was walking to walk the anger out of her. She didn't care where she went or how far. She was walking to get away from the look in Jim's eyes when he heard she was his wife. If she couldn't walk away from the anger which was tearing her, she might just as well throw in her hand.

What did it matter how he looked at her as long as she got the emeralds? This was the cool, calculating Nesta who bossed her brother and meant to boss Jim Riddell.

“I'm not poison, for him to look at me like that! What'd he do if I chucked him out to go on the parish?” This was a curious incalculable Nesta who had seen herself refused. This Nesta's hot fancy played with the thought of taking Jim Riddell twenty, thirty, forty miles into the country and leaving him nameless, penniless. She could do it easily enough—another sleeping draught, Tom's car, a quick run out to the marshes or Winborough Common. “Wouldn't mind if he died either. If there was another fog—” She pulled herself up with a jerk. And throw away the emeralds? Not much! He knew where they were, and he'd got to say.

She walked on, her mind very busy. Min had got to be kept away from him. Fortunately she was scared to death. “She
is
a fool. But then Tom
would
marry a fool. He wanted a change after me—someone to make him feel the real he-man.” She gave a laugh of affectionate contempt. “
Tom
! Anyhow he'll do as I tell him, or he'll know the reason why.”

She walked for an hour, and came home with her plans made. Tom was back from the garage, and Min was all smiles again.

They left Jim Riddell to himself and turned on the radio in the parlour.

VI

He woke in the morning to the sound of Tom Williams clattering down the stairs and being softly hushed by Min. He was out of bed in a minute and at the door.

“I say, lend me a razor—there's a good chap!”

He found Tom embarrassed but friendly. The razor was produced, and Min brought him hot water and asked him timidly if he felt better. When he said, “I don't feel better—I fell well,” she looked pleased; but when he added, “I expect I look like a cut-throat,” she coloured and ran away.

He shaved, dressed himself, and was relieved to find himself no more than just a little shaky. His clothes he discovered in a neat pile upon a shelf screened by a chintz curtain. The suit had been pressed, but it still had a smell of sea-water about it; one or two rents had been neatly mended. He frowned at the clothes. They fitted him, so he supposed that they were his; but he couldn't remember them—he couldn't remember anything.

When he was dressed, he sat down on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands. It was just as if a black gulf of nothingness were cutting him off from everything that had happened to him up till now. On this side of the gulf his mind was working in a perfectly normal manner. Yesterday, for instance, was on this side of the gulf, and he remembered all about yesterday; he could have repeated his conversation with Nesta
verbatim.
But as to what had happened to him on the other side of the gulf, he had only her statements to go by. He went over them with a sort of puzzled horror.

His name was Jim Riddell.

He was married.

He had married Nesta Williams at the Grove Road registry office on July 25th.

He had been on his way to Glasgow when the
Alice Arden
came to grief.

He had been going to Glasgow to “get off the map.”

He ran his hands through his hair and asked himself why—and why—and why?

Why had he married a woman who hadn't the faintest atom of attraction for him? You may marry a woman for her looks, or for money, or for ambition, or for purely animal reasons, or for pity, or because you happen to love her. Not a single one of these reasons applied to Nesta Riddell. She was not an object of pity; the Williams were certainly not well-to-do; and mentally and physically she repelled him. Over and above all this, he had a sense of her strangeness. He could not believe that he had held her in his arms, that they had kissed. She was stranger to him than someone whom he had never met—far more deeply strange than any of the forgotten people on the wrong side of the black gulf which cut him off from his past.

He left that.

Why had he been going to Glasgow?

Nesta had given him the answer—to “get off the map.”

Why had he got to “get off the map?”

The answer to that was somewhere on the other side of the gulf.

He went over everything that had happened yesterday down to the time when he had fallen asleep to the faint sound of Jack Payne's orchestra through the partition wall. He had slept without waking. He had slept without waking, but not without dreaming. He leaned his head on his hands, and knew that those sleeping hours had not been spent in unconsciousness. The shadows of swift clashing events moved in them. They were like the shadows of fierce darting fish seen through waters veiled by mist. Mist—fog. Fog came into it—fog, and a voice. His voice? Behind the fog, strange violent things, happening at an incredible speed, flashing through his mind too quickly to be grasped..… like beads of light, strung on a dark chain..… like a kid's green beads. For an instant he saw a small brightly lighted picture. The light came from above, and swinging to and fro beneath it was a string of square green stones. They swung from a man's hand. There were eight of them—big, square, green stones; a double chain of pearls between every two. He saw the man's hand, and the square green stones, and the light shining down on them. The voice said, “Like a kid's green beads,” and everything went dark.