The Girl In The Cellar Read Online Free PDF

case.
    Looking back on it, he really didn’t see why he had got himself into the mess. It had all been so hurried. Borrowdale gasping his life away after the rock had fallen, and the girl shaking with fright. A feeling of revulsion swept over him. What had it got to do with him after all? Marriage? Nonsense! It wouldn’t hold water—not in England. He’d have to see a lawyer about it when he got home. The plane wouldn’t have taken her if she hadn’t sworn she was his wife.
    He switched his mind to Leamington. What was he going to say to Leamington?
    CHAPTER 8
    Life went on for Anne. She had been for a week at Chantreys. Her memory had not come back. It began in the cellar of that house. It began with the murdered girl. For murdered she had been, of that she was quite sure. It was on the second day that the dreadful thought came to her. ‘Who murdered her? Was it I?’ She didn’t know the answer to that.
    She went out and walked in the garden up and down the untidy autumn flower-beds, not seeing the Michaelmas daisies so nearly over, or the dahlias with their leaves crisped and blackened by the frost but the heads of them still shaggy and decorative, pink and yellow, crimson and white. She walked up and down, her hands clasped together as if they held something which if she let it go would be gone for ever, her thoughts trying to break through the curtain of fog which hung across the path. She tried it every way. She was Anne. She didn’t know her surname. She didn’t know what she had been doing, or why she was in town, or who the dead girl was. She didn’t know what she had been doing all her life until now. She didn’t know who she was. It always came round to that.
    She tried again. She was Anne. That was the only thing she felt sure about. She wasn’t sure about being Anne Fancourt. But she was Anne, she did know that. She didn’t know who the dead girl was. She didn’t know whom the bag belonged to—was it hers, or was it the dead girl’s? She didn’t know whose it was. If it was hers, she was Anne Fancourt—she was Mrs James Fancourt. Could you be married and have no recollection, not the slightest, faintest gleam? You wouldn’t think so. You wouldn’t think it would be possible to forget being married. Coldly and deliberately her own mind answered her. It had happened again, and again, and again. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did know it. A shock—she must have had a shock. That was what made you lose your memory—a shock, or a blow on the head. She didn’t think she had had a blow. But a shock—anyone can have a shock. You read about people in the papers who had some kind of shock and who forgot who they were.
    She stood quite still, and the clasp of her hands tightened. Had she left father and mother, a family, brothers, sisters, to become—she didn’t know what or who? No, she mustn’t think that way. Could you forget a family as easily as that? She didn’t think so—she wouldn’t think so. Deep down in her, almost unknown, was something very strong. If she had had father, mother, brothers, sisters, she wouldn’t have forgotten them. She couldn’t have had them. It was like brushing against something incalculable, uncertain. Gone in a moment of time, but even as it went, it left her strengthened, though she didn’t know why.
    She began to walk again, and the thoughts went on and on. They beat against the fog and came back to her. Who was she? She was Anne. Anne who? She didn’t know. The more she thought of it, the less she knew. She stopped thinking then.
    But if you stop thinking, you are really dead. She turned round. She wasn’t dead, she was alive. She had got to think this thing out. She started again. She was Anne—that was the one thing to be sure of. According to the evidence of the handbag she was Anne Fancourt, and she was married to Jim Fancourt. She hadn’t the slightest recollection of being married. But she had no recollection of the past at all.