Consider Her Ways Read Online Free PDF Page A

feeling that something was trying to break through the blankness in my mind; but I did not know what it was, only that it made me feel intensely miserable.
    ‘Oh, this is cruel, cruel! Why can’t I stop it? Why won’t it go away and leave me?’ I pleaded. ‘There’s a horrible cruel mockery here – but I don’t understand it. What’s wrong with me? I’m not obsessional – I’m not – I – oh, can’t somebody help me …?’
    I kept my eyes tight shut for a time, willing with all my mind that the whole hallucination should fade and disappear.
    But it did not. When I looked again they were still there, their silly, pretty faces gaping stupidly at me across the revolting mounds of pink satin.
    ‘I’m going to get out of this,’ I said.
    It was a tremendous effort to raise myself to a sitting position. I was aware of the rest watching me, wide-eyed, while I made it. I struggled to get my feet round and over the side of the bed, but they were all tangled in the satin coverlet and I could not reach to free them. It was the true, desperate frustration of a dream. I heard my voice pleading: ‘Help me! Oh, Donald, darling, please help me …’
    And suddenly, as if the word ‘Donald’ had released a spring, something seemed to click in my head. The shutter in my mind opened, not entirely, but enough to let me know who I was. I understood, suddenly, where the cruelty had lain.
    I looked at the others again. They were still staring half-bewildered, half-alarmed. I gave up the attempt to move, and lay back on my pillow again.
    ‘You can’t fool me any more,’ I told them. ‘I know who I am now.’
    ‘But,
Mother Orchis –’ one began.
    ‘Stop that,’ I snapped at her. I seemed to have swung suddenly out of self-pity into a kind of masochistic callousness. ‘I am
not
a mother,’ I said harshly. ‘I am just a woman who, for a short time, had a husband, and who hoped – but only hoped – that she would have babies by him.’
    A pause followed that; a rather odd pause, where there should have been at least a murmur. What I had said did not seem to have registered. The faces showed no understanding; they were as uncomprehending as dolls.
    Presently, the most friendly one seemed to feel an obligation to break up the silence. With a little vertical crease between her brows: ‘What,’ she inquired tentatively, ‘what is a husband?’
    I looked hard from one face to another. There was no trace of guile in any of them; nothing but puzzled speculation such as one sometimes sees in a child’s eyes. I felt close to hysteria for a moment; then I took a grip of myself. Very well, then, since the hallucination would not leave me alone, I would play it at its own game, and see what came of that. I began to explain with a kind of deadpan, simple-word seriousness:
    ‘A husband is a man whom a woman takes …’
    Evidently, from their expressions I was not very enlightening. However, they let me go on for three or four sentences without interruption. Then, when I paused for breath, the kindly one chipped in with a point which she evidently felt needed clearing up:
    ‘But what,’ she asked, in evident perplexity, ‘what is a man?’
    A cool silence hung over the room after my exposition. I had an impression I had been sent to Coventry, or semi-Coventry, by them, but I did not bother to test it. I was too much occupied trying to force the door of my memory further open, and finding that beyond a certain point it would not budge.
    I knew now that I was Jane. I had been Jane Summers, and had become Jane Waterleigh when I had married Donald.
    I
was – had been – twenty-four when we were married: just twenty-five when Donald was killed, six months later. And there it stopped. It seemed like yesterday, but I couldn’t tell …
    Before that, everything was perfectly clear. My parents and friends, my home, my school, my training, my job, as Dr Summers, at the Wraychester Hospital. I could remember my first sight of