The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [261]
“Okay, what now?” I asked as we walked along the platform.
“Have a look at everyone. See if there is anyone you recognize.”
I stepped onto the shuttle and walked round the players in the fiasco, who were frozen like statues. The faces that were most distinct were the neanderthal driver-operator, the well-heeled woman, the woman with Pixie Frou-Frou and the woman with the crossword. The rest were vague shapes, generic female human forms and little else—no mnemonic tags to make them unique. I pointed them out.
“Good,” said Landen, “but what about her?”
And there she was, the young woman sitting on the bench in the station, doing her face in a makeup mirror. We walked closer and I looked intently at the nondescript face that loomed dimly out of my memory.
“I only glimpsed her for a moment, Land. Slightly built, mid-twenties, red shoes. So what?”
“She was here when you arrived, she’s on the southbound platform, all trains go to all stops—yet she didn’t get the Skyrail. Suspicious?”
“Not really.”
“No,” said Landen, sounding crestfallen, “not exactly a smoking gun, is it? Unless,” he smiled, “unless you look at this.”
The Skyrail station folded back to be replaced by the area near the Uffington white horse on the day of the picnic. I looked up nervously. The large Hispano-Suiza automobile was hanging motionless in the air not fifty feet up.
“Anything spring to mind?” asked Landen.
I looked around carefully. It was another bizarre frozen vignette. Everyone and everything was there—Major Fairwelle, Sue Long, my old croquet captain, the mammoths, the gingham tablecloth, even the bootleg cheese. I looked at Landen.
“Nothing, Land.”
“Are you sure? Look again.”
I sighed and scanned their faces. Sue Long, an old school friend whose boyfriend set his own trousers on fire for a bet; Sarah Nara, who lost her ear at Bilohirsk on a training accident and ended up marrying General Spottiswode; croquet pro Alf Widdershaine, who taught me how to “peg out” all the way from the forty-yard line. Even the previously unknown Bonnie Voige was there, and—
“Who’s this?” I asked, pointing at a shimmering memory in front of me.
“It’s the woman who called herself Violet De’ath,” answered Landen. “Does she seem familiar?”
I looked at her blank features. I hadn’t given her a second thought at the time, but something about her was familiar.
“Sort of,” I responded. “Have I seen her somewhere before?”
“You tell me, Thursday,” Landen said, shrugging. “It’s your memory. But if you want a clue, look at her shoes.”
And there they were. Bright red shoes that just might have been the same ones on the girl at the Skyrail platform.
“There’s more than one pair of red shoes in Wessex, Land.”
“You’re right,” he observed. “I did say it was a long shot.”
I had an idea, and before Landen could say another word we were in the square at Osaka with all the Nextian-logoed Japanese, the fortune-teller frozen in mid-beckon, the crowd around us an untidy splash of visual noise that is the way crowds appear to the mind’s eye, the logos I remembered jutting out in sharp contrast to the unremembered faces. I peered through the crowd as I anxiously searched for anything that might resemble a young European woman.
“See anything?” asked Landen, hands on hips and surveying the strange scene.
“No,” I replied. “Wait a minute, let’s come in a bit earlier.”
I took myself back a minute and there she was, getting up from the fortune-teller’s chair the moment I first saw him. I walked closer and looked at the vague shape. I squinted at her feet. There, in the haziest corner of my mind, was the memory I was looking for. The shoes were definitely red.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” asked Landen.
“Yes,” I murmured, staring at the wraithlike figure in front of me. “But it doesn’t help; none of these memories are strong enough for a positive ID.”
“Perhaps not on their own,” observed Landen. “But since I’ve been in here I’ve figured out a few things about how your memory works. Try and superimpose the images.”
I thought of the woman on the platform, placed her across the vague