• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2251 0

the utmost importance which was about to vanish from my mind. I had to record this important thing, to catch it and hold it before it disappeared. I got up on my knees and reached a pen and paper from the table where I sometimes worked, and I wrote down what it was that I absolutely had to remember. What I wrote covered perhaps half a page or less. I wrote quickly but even then was not sure that I had remembered everything. I carefully folded up the paper and hid it somewhere in the room. All this, that I had written something and hidden it, I recalled rather dreamily upon the following morning. But—I could not remember what the thing was which I had thought so important or what I had written about it, and I could not, though I searched the room minutely, find the writing. An atmosphere of extreme and crucial emotion surrounded ‘the thing’; but although I constantly peered at it in my mind I could not discern what it was. And of the paper there was no trace. Possibly I had dreamt the whole episode. I had, of course, little doubt what the writing, if it existed, must concern: it concerned the identity of my would-be assassin.

‘But how on earth did I get out?’ I asked Lizzie. I was sitting up in an armchair in the little red room drinking tea and eating anchovy toast.

A rather exasperated doctor had arrived about two o’clock in the morning and woken me up and pulled me about and pronounced me sound. He said I had no broken bones and was suffering concussion and shock. I was to rest, keep warm and in future not wander about the rocks at night when I had had too much to drink. This was the first point at which it entered my confused mind that of course no one, except the assassin and me, knew that it was not an accident.

It was now about ten o’clock in the morning. It was very hot again with sounds of thunder, louder, nearer. The lightning flashes came like scarcely visible shocks. I had been visited, asked how I was, congratulated on my narrow escape. There was a slightly brusque air about these felicitations, perhaps because my friends felt they had been quite emotional enough about me last night and now felt more curt, or because they shared the doctor’s view of the matter. There was in fact a slight feeling that I had caused a lot of trouble by my stupidity. An instinct which I had not yet had time to examine advised me not, or not yet, to reveal that my fall was not accidental.

In a little while I would have to decide what to do. I was sorry I could not find my precious piece of paper. But of course I had no doubt about the identity of the murderer.

‘James thinks a freak wave lifted you up,’ said Lizzie.

Lizzie was looking radiant, her long frizzy hair tangled and bushy, growing like a healthy plant. She was wearing a striped shirt and lineny pants roughly cut off at the knee. Even after slimming she was a little too plump for this gear, but I did not object. Her skin shone with health. Only the tiny tight wrinkles round her eyes would have enabled one to guess her age. She shared none of the vague annoyance of the male contingent at my exploit. She was prepared to enjoy the drama in retrospect, since it had had a happy ending, and my survival had in some way increased her sense of owning me.

‘It can’t have done,’ I said, ‘the hole is too deep. Who actually pulled me out?’

‘Oh everybody did. When we heard you shout we all converged, only I got there last. By then Titus and James were pulling you off the bridge towards that flat rock, and Gilbert and Peregrine were helping.’

‘I can imagine how helpful they were. Funny, I can’t remember shouting.’

‘The doctor said you might not remember things which happened just before and just after the accident. It’s an effect of concussion. The brain doesn’t process it or something.’

‘Will the memory come back?’

‘I don’t know, he didn’t say.’

‘I remember being carried back to the house. I think I got as many bruises then as in the water. God, I’m bruised!’

‘Yes, that was awful, you were like a great dark dripping sack, so heavy, and we nearly dropped you down a crevasse.