The Girl in the Cellar

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. Her life began, her conscious life began, when she stood on the cellar steps and looked down on a girl’s dead body. She had not then any idea who the girl might be. She only knew that she must get away from her. And then the second thought that had come-‘You can’t go away like that. Oh, no, you can’t!’ and she had taken the torch out of the bag and gone down and looked. There was the wound in the head. At the memory of it she turned cold and sick. No one with a wound like that could be alive-but she had stooped to the ungloved hand-and the hand was cold. She could not control the violent shudder that shook her as she remembered the cold and clammy feeling of that dead hand.

She remembered everything from there-how she had put out the light and listened, and how there had been no sound, and how she had come up the steps into the dark entrance hall, and so out into the street, and along it until she had come to the bus. Miss Silver wasn’t on the bus when she got on to it. She could see the bus quite clearly. It had stopped and she had got on to it, and then it had gone on again. She had shut her eyes, and when she opened them Miss Silver was there, sitting opposite to her in a neat shabby black coat and a much newer hat with a half-wreath of red roses on one side and an odd trimming of black chiffon rosettes on the other. The rosettes and the flowers grew smaller as they drew together in front of the hat.

She pulled herself up sharply. What was the good of thinking about Miss Silver’s hat? She was never likely to see it or her again. If she was to think, let her for goodness’ sake think about something or someone useful.

She must think about Jim Fancourt. She must think about the man who might be her husband. If she was Anne Fancourt, that was what he was. It lay between her and the dead girl at the foot of the stairs. The bag with the letter to Anne Fancourt in it had been on a level with her, and she had been some steps up. She had had to open the bag to get out the torch by which she had seen the dead girl. How did she know there was a torch there if it wasn’t her bag? The letter from Lilian was in her bag. If the bag was hers, she was Anne Fancourt, Jim Fancourt’s wife, and a niece of Lilian and Harriet. If it wasn’t hers, but the dead girl’s, then it was the dead girl who was Anne Fancourt.

Up and down, to and fro, endlessly, timelessly. The light changed, deepened, turned to grey. A little shudder went over her. It was no good going on thinking.

She turned and went back to the house.