Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie [60]
They were walking together after dinner near the splashing fountains of the roof garden. With the illusion of darkness and the starlit sky they might have been in the private gardens of some sultan’s palace. The functional concrete buildings were veiled from the sight.
‘No,’ said Peters; ‘it won’t be easy, but nothing’s impossible.’
‘I like to hear you say that,’ said Hilary. ‘Oh, how I like to hear you say that!’
He looked at her sympathetically.
‘Been getting you down?’ he asked.
‘Very much so. But that’s not what I’m really afraid of.’
‘No? What then?’
‘I’m afraid of getting used to it,’ said Hilary.
‘Yes.’ He spoke thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I know what you mean. There’s a kind of mass-suggestion going on here. I think perhaps you’re right about that.’
‘It would seem to me much more natural for people to rebel,’ said Hilary.
‘Yes. Yes, I’ve thought the same. In fact I’ve wondered once or twice whether there’s not a little hocuspocus going on.’
‘Hocuspocus? What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, to put it frankly, dope.’
‘Do you mean a drug of some kind?’
‘Yes. It might be possible, you know. Something in the food or drink, something that induces–what shall I say–docility?’
‘But is there such a drug?’
‘Well, that’s not really my line of country. There are things that are given to people to soothe them down, to make them acquiescent before operations and that. Whether there is anything that can be administered steadily over a long period of time–and which at the same time does not impair efficiency–that I don’t know. I’m more inclined to think now that the effect is produced mentally. I mean that I think some of these organizers and administrators here are well versed in hypnosis and psychology and that, without our being aware of it, we are continually being offered suggestions of our well-being, of our attaining our ultimate aim (whatever it is), and that all this does produce a definite effect. A lot can be done that way, you know, if it’s done by people who know their stuff.’
‘But we mustn’t acquiesce,’ cried Hilary, hotly. ‘We mustn’t feel for one moment that it’s a good thing to be here.’
‘What does your husband feel?’
‘Tom? I–oh, I don’t know. It’s so difficult. I–’ she lapsed into silence.
The whole fantasy of her life as she lived it she could hardly communicate to the man who was listening to her. For ten days now she had lived in an apartment with a man who was a stranger to her. They shared a bedroom and when she lay awake at night she could hear him breathing in the other bed. Both of them accepted the arrangement as inevitable. She was an impostor, a spy, ready to play any part and assume any personality. Tom Betterton she quite frankly did not understand. He seemed to her a terrible example of what could happen to a brilliant young man who had lived for some months in the enervating atmosphere of the Unit. At any rate there was in him no calm acceptance of his destiny. Far from taking pleasure in his work, he was, she thought, increasingly worried by his inability to concentrate on it. Once or twice he had reiterated what he had said on that first evening.
‘I can’t think. It’s just as though everything in me has dried up.’
Yes, she thought. Tom Betterton, being a real genius, needed liberty more than most. Suggestion had failed to compensate him for the loss of freedom. Only in perfect liberty was he able to produce creative work.
He was a man, she thought, very close to a serious nervous breakdown. Hilary herself he treated with curious inattention. She was not a woman to him, not even a friend. She even doubted whether he realized and suffered from the death of his wife. The thing that preoccupied him incessantly was the problem of confinement. Again and again he had said:
‘I must get away from here. I must, I must.’ And sometimes, ‘I didn’t know. I’d no idea what it was going to be like. How am I going to get out of here? How? I’ve got to. I’ve simply got to.’
It was in essence very much what Peters had said. But it was said with a great deal of difference.