The Infinite Moment Read Online Free PDF Page A

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, wideeyed, 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 halfbewildered, halfalarmed. 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 selfpity 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 hopedbut only hopedthat 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 enquired 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, simpleword 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 semiCoventry, 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 Donald when they brought him in one evening with a broken legand all that followed I could remember now the face that I ought to see in a lookingglassand it was certainly nothing like that I had seen in the corridor outsideit should be more oval, with a complexion looking faintly suntanned; with a smaller, neater mouth; surrounded by chestnut hair that curled naturally; with brown eyes rather wide apart and perhaps a little grave as a rule.
    I knew, too, how the rest of me should lookslender, longlegged, with small, firm breastsa nice body, but one that I had simply taken for granted until Donald gave me pride in it by loving it I looked down at the repulsive mound of pink satin, and shuddered. A sense of outrage came welling up. I longed