James Hilton: Collected Novels (46 page)

“I know—that was part of the illusion. I remember Sheldon taking me on a trip to London when I was six or seven years old … the first place I asked to see was Baker Street, and being a sympathetic fellow he didn’t tell me that the stories were just stories. We walked gravely along the pavement one afternoon early in the century—a small boy and his father’s butler—looking up at the tall houses with respectful hero worship. Distant thrones might totter, anarchists might throw bombs, a few lesser breeds might behave provokingly in odd corners of the world, but when all was said and done, there was nothing to fear while the stately Holmes of England, doped and dressing-gowned for action, readied his wits for the final count with Moriarty! And who the deuce
was
this Moriarty? Why, just a big-shot crook whom the honest idiot romanticized in order to build up his hero’s reputation! Nothing but a middle-aged stoop-shouldered Raffles! And that, mind you, was the worst our fathers’ world could imagine when it talked about Underground Forces and Powers of Evil! … Ah well, happy days. You’d better keep the cab to go home in. Good night!”

I hadn’t taken Rainier’s problem very seriously till then. For one thing, loss of memory is normal. We all forget things, and are equally likely to be reminded of them long after we think they have been forgotten for good. Often, too, the reminder is faint enough to be no more than a clue which we fail to follow up because the matter does not seem important. The unusual part of Rainier’s experience was that he
did
think it important, so that from something merely puzzling it was already on the way to becoming an obsession.

Some part of his story could doubtless be verified, and I already felt enough curiosity to make the attempt. I said nothing to him, but the next time the chance occurred I led Miss Hobbs to talk in a general way about her employer’s early life and career. She was more than willing—except for a continual tendency to drift into later and somewhat disparaging gossip about Mrs. Rainier. “Wasn’t he in the war?” I began, putting the leading question that anyone might have asked.

“Oh yes. He got a medal—didn’t you know that? And the strange thing was—they thought he was dead. So it was given post—post—”

“Posthumously.”

“Yes, that’s it. But you couldn’t blame them, because after the attack he was reported missing and nothing was heard about him till—oh, it was years later when he suddenly arrived home without any warning. And then it turned out he’d lost his memory.”

“Seems to me the sort of story for headlines.”

“You mean in the papers? Oh no, it was kept out—the family didn’t want any publicity.”

“That wouldn’t have been enough reason for most of the journalists I know.”

“Ah, but Sheldon arranged it.”

“Sheldon?”

“He’s the butler at Stourton. You haven’t been to Stourton yet, have you?”

“No.”

“It’s really a marvelous place.”

“Sheldon sounds a marvelous butler if he knows how to stop journalists from getting a good story and editors from printing it.”

“Well, he
is
rather marvelous, and I don’t suppose there’s much he doesn’t know—not about the family, anyhow. He really rules Stourton—lives there all the year round, even during the winter when the family never go out of town. I really owe him a good deal—I was only just a local girl in those days, I used to do bookkeeping and secretarial work at the house, and that brought me into contact with Sheldon constantly.” She added, rather coyly: “You know—perhaps you don’t know—how difficult it can be for a girl employed in a big house if the butler isn’t all he should be.”

I said I could imagine it.

“Sheldon was always a gentleman. Never a word—or a gesture—that anyone could object to.”

I said nothing.

“And later, when Mr. Charles took over Stourton, Sheldon personally asked him if he could do anything for me, otherwise I don’t suppose I’d be here.”

“I see. … But coming back to the time when Mr. Rainier—
our
Mr. Rainier, I mean—suddenly returned to Stourton. Were you working there then?”

“Not
just
then. It was Christmas and as old Mr. Rainier was ill they canceled the usual parties and gave me a holiday. It was parties that always kept me busy—writing out invitations and place cards and things.”

“What was Mr. Rainier like when he returned?”

“I didn’t see him till a good while afterwards, but I do know there was a lot of trouble about it, one way and another—Sheldon would never tell us half that went on.”

So there the trail ended; she didn’t know much of what had actually happened; and since then a great many years had passed, old Mr. Rainier was dead, and probably the same fate had overtaken most of the personnel from whom any elucidating inquiries might have been made at the time. Perhaps there were traces somewhere, a dossier preserved in forgotten files, memoranda hidden away in official archives; but there seemed small chance of unearthing them, or even of finding if they existed at all.

“Quite a mystery,” I commented. “Didn’t Mr. Rainier himself ever try to solve it?”

“You mean, did he try to remember things?”

“Well, more than that—didn’t he ever consult anybody—specialists, psychoanalysts, or anyone?”

“You don’t know him, or you wouldn’t ask that. The last thing he’d ever do is to go to anybody and tell them things about himself. The only person he ever did talk to was someone he’d known at Cambridge, some professor—Freeman, I think his name was.”

“You mean
Dr.
Freeman—
the
Dr. Freeman?”

“Maybe he was a doctor.”

“A tall white-haired man with a stoop?”

“Yes, that was him—he used to visit Charles a good deal before the marriage. You know him?”

“Slightly. Why not since the marriage?”

“He didn’t like parties, and I don’t think he liked Mrs. Rainier for beginning all that sort of life for Charles. She’s very ambitious, you know. People say she’ll make him Prime Minister before she’s finished.”

I laughed—having heard similar remarks myself, followed at a rule by some ribald comment on her party-giving technique. Miss Hobbs added: “Not that she isn’t a good hostess—that I say.”

Since the point was raised, it seemed to me that Mrs. Rainier was
too
good, and that for this reason she might miss the secret English bull’s-eye that can only be hit by guns sighted to a 97 or 98 per cent degree of accuracy. Anything more than that, even if achievable, is dangerous in England, because English people mistrust perfection, regarding it in manners as the stigma of foreigners, just as they suspect it in teeth to be the product of dentistry. All this, of course, I did not discuss with Miss Hobbs.

I saw Freeman a few days later. He had been a rather impressive figure at Cambridge, in my time as well as Rainier’s, but had recently retired to live at Richmond with an unmarried sister. It was probably a lonely life, and he seemed glad to hear my voice on the telephone and to accept an invitation to dinner. I had known him fairly well, since he had long been president of the Philosophical Society and I in my last year its vice president, and though he had written several standard works on psychology he was not psychologist enough to suspect an ulterior motive behind my apparent eagerness to look him up and talk over old times.

We met at Boulestin’s that same evening.

After waiting patiently till the inevitable question as to what I was doing with myself nowadays, I said that I had become Rainier’s secretary.

“Ah, Rainier—yes,” he muttered, as if raking over memories. And he added, with a thin cackle: “Well, history won’t repeat itself.”

“How do you mean?”

“He married one of them.”

“You mean
Mrs.
Rainier? You mean she was his secretary before Miss Hobbs?”

“Oh, the Hobbs woman was with him all the time—a family heirloom. Must be forty now, if she’s a day. What did she do at last—retire?”

“She’s leaving to get married.”

“Heavens—I never thought her turn would come. Who’s the lucky man? … But I can answer that myself—Rainier is, to get rid of her.”

“You know her then?”

“Hardly at all, I’m glad to say. But she used to write me the most ridiculous notes whenever Rainier made an appointment to see me. They were supposed to be from him, but I found out quite casually afterwards that she forged his name to ’em. …
Absurd
notes—it interested me, as a psychologist, that she should have thought them appropriate.”

“But to come back to Mrs. Rainier—”

“Oh, she worked in his
City
office, I think. A different dynasty. These great magnates have platoons of secretaries.”

“Queer Miss Hobbs never mentioned it. I should have thought it was something she’d have liked to drive home.”

“On a point of psychology I think you’re wrong. She’d prefer to conceal the fact though they were both, so to say, equal at the starting post, the other woman won.”

“Maybe. I gather you know Rainier rather well?”

“I used to. You see, I began with the initial advantage of meeting him anonymously.”

“I’m not quite clear what you mean.”

He expanded over a further glass of brandy. “Rainier’s a peculiar fellow. He has a curious fear of his own identity. He lets you get to know him best when he doesn’t think you know who he is. … It’s an interesting kink, psychologically. I first met him through Werneth, who was his tutor at St. Swithin’s. Apparently he told Werneth about—er—well, perhaps I ought not to discuss it, but it was something interesting to me—as a psychologist—but not particularly to Werneth, who was a mere historian.” Again the cackle. “Anyhow, Werneth could only get his permission to pass it on to me by promising not to divulge his name, and on hearing what it was all about I was so interested that we actually arranged a meeting—again anonymously—I wasn’t supposed to know who he was. … But I’ll let you into a secret—Werneth
had
told me, privately, beforehand—unscrupulous fellow, Werneth. And then one morning several months later I couldn’t find my bicycle outside the college gate after a lecture, but in its place was a similar model with the name ‘Charles Rainier’ on it. I made his mistake an excuse to call on him—and I must say—after the opening embarrassment—we very soon became friends.” He added: “And now, of course, I know what you’re going to ask me, but being less unscrupulous than Werneth I can’t tell you.”

“I don’t think you need, because I already know about Rainier’s—er—peculiarity. I suppose it
was
that.”

“Suppose you tell me first of all what
that
is.”

“The blank patch in his life that he can’t remember.”

“A rather inexact description.”

“No doubt, and that’s why I’d very much like to hear your own.”

He smiled. “It was an unusual case—but I’ve heard of several similar ones. They’re recorded, you know, in technical journals. Rainier had—if one might so put it—certain threads of recollection about the blank period, though they were so faint as to be almost nonexistent at first. After he left Cambridge we didn’t meet again for ten years—by that time the threads had become a little less faint. It was my aim, when I came to know Rainier again after the ten-year interval, to sort out those threads, to disentangle them—to expand them, as it were, into a complete corpus of memory.”

“I understand. But you didn’t succeed.”

“Are you asking me that or telling me?”

“Both, in a way.”

He said, smiling: “My expectation all along had been that his full memory would eventually return—a little bit here, a little bit there—till finally, like a key turning in a lock, or like the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the whole thing would slip into position. But I gather that it hasn’t yet happened?”

“The bits are still being assembled, but nowhere near to completion.”

“Tell me, Harrison, if I may ask the question—why are you taking such a keen interest in this matter? Hardly within the scope of secretarial duties. … Or
is
it?”

“I like him and I hate to see him bothered by it as he still is. That’s the only reason.”

“A good one.”

“Now
you
tell
me
something—have you any theories about the blank patch?”

“Theories? I can only guess it was a pretty bad time. He was injured, if I remember rightly, just above the left parietal bone of the …” He went off into a medical survey that conveyed nothing to me. “It was an injury that would require operative treatment—perhaps a series of operations. That’s why it’s perhaps a pity that he still bothers, as you say he does. Even if complete recollection were to return to him now, it would probably be only of pain, unhappiness, boredom.”

“On the other hand, even such memories might be better than an increasing obsession about the loss of them?”

“Possibly.”

We were silent for a time after that. Presently I said: “You know he was taken prisoner by the Germans?”

“Oh yes. But German or English—all hospitals are unhappy places, especially for a man who can’t tell anyone who he is. I imagine the Germans treated him namelessly or by error under someone else’s name, and eventually returned him to England under the same condition. Then there would be other hospitals in England, full of experiences nobody would wish to remember. There were a great many shell-shock and loss-of-memory cases that took years—some of them are still taking years, God help them. The whole thing happened so long ago I don’t see how we can ever expect to know all the details. Tell me
your
theory, if you have one.”

“That’s the trouble, I haven’t.”

“The real trouble, of course, is Mrs. Rainier.”

Curious, the way people sooner or later led the talk to her. Freeman, reticent at first about a former friend, saw no reason now to conceal his opinion of a former friend’s wife. “She’s an unusual sort of woman, Harrison.”

“Well, he’s not so usual, either.”

“They get on well together? Is that your impression?”

I answered guardedly: “I think she makes a good politician’s wife.”

“And I suppose, by the same token, you think he makes a good politician?”

“He has some of the attributes. Clever speaker and a good way with people.”