Strange Recompense

by Catherine Airlie

  “Months, you said?” Ruth asked sharply. “Perhaps even years. Do you think that—”

  “I can’t afford to think,” he said almost as sharply. “Medicine is largely a process of elimination. We try this and that, rejecting where we have no success, trying some other way. Amnesia is quite often a shield behind which certain minds seek to avoid the unpleasant in life.”

  ‘Somehow I think this is different,” Ruth said, “and so do you. That girl in there isn’t an ordinary type. Her clothes are good and her hands and her hair are well cared for. She speaks nicely, too. There’s something behind all this, something deeply tragic, perhaps. I wish we could discover what.”

  The girl was sitting up on the settee, propped by cushions, her face slightly flushed, her eyes painfully questioning as they searched first Noel’s and then his sister’s.

  “The police?” she asked huskily. “Have they found anything?”

  Noel put down the tray and Ruth noticed that the handkerchief and powder compact were missing from the table. The purse was missing, too—all the girl’s pitiful little possessions. Noel seated himself on the edge of the settee and watched her eat.

  “Take your time,” he commanded. “We’re keeping you here with us for a day or two until we can establish your identity.”

  “Here?” There was relief in the blue eyes raised to his. “But I shouldn’t impose myself on you like this. You don’t know who I am. I don’t even know my own name!”

  “We are going to try to find that out,” Noel said gently, but with a firmness Ruth knew of old. “I’m wondering about this,” he added when she had finished the soup. “Will you need it? It belongs to you.”

  He produced the handkerchief and powder compact, and the girl put out her hand to take them, her brow still puckered as she examined the scrap of linen with the embroidered name uppermost.

  “Anna,” Noel said, and waited.

  There was no doubt that the name struck a chord somewhere, but it failed to bring the full response he had optimistically hoped for, and he left it for the present.

  “Anna will do as well as any other name just now,” he said. “It has been accepted as a matter of course,” he explained to Ruth as he stood up, “so that it quite possibly does belong to the past. It is not violent enough, however, to shock the senses completely and produce a stronger reaction. You might follow up the embroidery line, by the way. Tomorrow will do. See if she did that sort of thing, either as a hobby or as an actual means of earning a living.” He turned to his patient again, feeling her pulse and nodding his approval, and when he had gone from the room Ruth went forward to the settee.

  “You remember me?” she asked, and was relieved beyond measure when the girl smiled quite naturally.

  “Of course! You were the lady who helped me on the moor.”

  “My brother is doing all he can to help, too,” Ruth said. “He understands this thing so well.”

  “Yes,” the girl said, her eyes lowered to the tray she held across her knees, “he is very kind.”

  “We’re going to call you Anna,” Ruth said. “It’s the name worked on your handkerchief, so we feel that it must be yours.”

  “Yes, it is my name,” the girl said with a conviction which sounded helpful. “I feel that it is something I know, something I’ve been used to all my life.”

  “Every little thing helps, all those little details adding up to a whole,” Ruth encouraged cheerfully. “Do you think you can manage the remainder of your dinner alone, and I will go and help my brother to his?”

  She found Noel standing by the table in the dining-room with a pre-occupied look in his eyes.

  “She is quite prepared to accept the name Anna,” she said. “It must be her own, because she feels that she has lived with it all her life.”

  “She’s married, by the looks of things,” said Noel. “There’s a ring on the third finger of her left hand. I wonder,” he added suddenly, “if that might help.”

  “By the markings, you mean? I dare say it might.”

  “She seems so young,” she reflected aloud. “Too young to be married and have come to this because of it.”

  “That may not be the idea at all,” her brother pointed out restlessly. “We’re only surmising at present, and I hope to heaven we’re wrong in that respect. I’ve seen far too much of that sort of misery in my time.”

  His answer had been emphatic, and she knew that he could not find it in his heart to blame Anna beforehand for a marriage that had come unstuck.

  CHAPTER TWO

  EVEN IN THE corridors of the hospital, where accident and death walked hand-in-hand with every day, the story of the mysterious stranger held the attention of doctors and nursing staff alike. Anna’s past was still a mystery after twenty-four hours of country-wide investigation had passed.

  She sat up in bed, pressing her hands closely over her face.

  “If I could only think!” she said aloud. “But I can! I can think, and that’s the most dreadful part! The truth is that I can’t remember!”

  She turned at a slight sound near the door, to find Ruth standing there with a concerned look in her eyes.

  “If you feel well enough,” she said, “my brother thinks you might get up. It’s a lovely day, and we could go into the garden.”

  Anna slipped down between the sheets, drawing the bed-clothes up under her chin.

  “Does he want me to see the police?” she asked.

  Ruth crossed to the bed, sitting down on the edge of it.

  “Anna,” she said gently, “whatever my brother asks you to do will be for the best. Please try to believe that and trust him. He does not intend to hand you over to the police unless they insist. In a small place like Glynmareth we work very much together and you are still in need of a certain amount of medical attention. Even if the police had picked you up yesterday you would probably have been brought to the hospital for my brother’s verdict.”

  “But not here—to you.” There was deep gratitude in the girl’s voice now. “I should have been taken to the hospital and treated like any other patient instead of being cared for like this in your home. Don’t think I am not grateful for that, and for all your other kindnesses. I know that I shall never be able to repay you.”

  “That’s all right,” Ruth assured her, smiling down into her eyes.

  “If we can give you your memory back it will be sufficient reward for anything we might be doing now.”

  “People in your profession give a great deal to their work,” Anna remarked haltingly. “And you are all so kind. Nurse Craven, for instance, and your brother. They seem to understand so well how I feel, the emptiness, the terrible sense of frustration that all the concentration in the world can’t wipe out.”

  “You mustn’t worry too much about that side of it just now,” Ruth advised kindly. “There are apparently so many things to be done in a case like yours that there’s very little room for despair. My brother would like you to meet a colleague of his,” she went on carefully, introducing the subject almost casually and trying to control the sensitive flush which invariably rose to her twin cheeks whenever Dennis Tranby’s name was mentioned. “Dennis Tranby is his name and he’s our local G.P. Noel and he are very good friends and quite often they work out their cases together.”

  Half an hour later she came downstairs, her hair brushed to a shining red-gold mane, her face lightly dusted with powder. She looked so vastly different from the bedraggled creature of the day before that Ruth stared at her for a moment in surprise, and then she realized the tremendous effort the girl was making, the desperate striving for normality which produced a courage all its own.

  “I’m going to take our tray out on to the lawn,” she intimated. “There’s a nice sheltered spot over by the rose trellis where we can have a meal in comfort, and you can watch me pick the gooseberries afterwards!”

  A vivid smile lit the girl’s eyes.

  “I could help with the gooseberries, couldn’t I?” she
suggested. “I—I must have done that sort of thing before—”

  “I’ll make a tart with the first picking,” Ruth decided quickly. “There won’t be enough, just at first, to make jam.”

  “Yes,” Anna agreed vaguely, groping again in the past. “It must have some connection for me—a garden like this, picking fruit in season, all the things you do as a matter of course. Perhaps I did this sort of thing once.” She stood by the open door, surveying Ruth’s garden with the pain of a deep longing in her eyes, the trim lawn and the neat borders, and the thick berberis hedge that closed them in and made a screen between them and the nurses’ home across the way. “Will I ever know?” she breathed passionately. “Will it ever be any different for me?”

  “Of course it will!” Ruth spoke lightly to banish that look. “Will you carry the tray for me and I’ll scrounge round for some more biscuits?”

  Anna went down the short path with the tray in her hands, thinking how peaceful it was in the garden, warm and sunny and sheltered, shut off from the rest of the world and the world’s problems.

  At the end of the path she came to a narrow stream, its banks stepping down in a small rockery where purple arabis spilled its wealth of color over the stones and lay reflected in the cool water. She could imagine Ruth spending much of her day here, tending the plants or just sitting with her sewing, and perhaps Noel Melford found time to come there, too.

  She thought of the doctor with a sudden intensity, aware that he was the king-pin in her problem, that his keen, analytical brain was the means by which she might return to normality, and her pulses began to beat more quickly at the thought. If anyone could help her he could. His sure, cool approach of the evening before had given her the confidence she needed to fight this thing, and she felt that he would not let go unless he believed the struggle was irretrievably lost.

  “Hullo!” A shadow had fallen between her and the sun, and she turned to find him standing on the path above her, hands thrust deeply into his trouser pockets, a whimsical smile curving his handsome mouth. “It’s certainly an encouraging sign to find one’s patient up and sun-bathing instead of lingering in bed!”

  “It would have been malingering on a day like this!” she answered quickly, rising from the water’s edge.

  “Don’t get up,” he commanded. “You look—natural sitting there.” His deep, almost gentle voice was in no way formal. “You like gardens, I see.”

  “Yours is beautiful,” she said eagerly. “I’ve always loved flowers, and here they grow in such profusion.”

  “Yes?” he prompted.

  “They must have grown somewhere—in a garden I knew.”

  Her voice had become troubled again and some of the light had gone out of her eyes.

  “What sort of flowers?”

  “Pinks, and fuchsia and rock roses—” She hesitated, her brow puckering with the effort she was making. “I seem to remember heather, too—great stretches of it, as purple as your arabis.”

  He was not looking at her directly, but he seemed to know all that was going on in her mind and he was leaving her to go on or give up as she willed.

  “That’s all,” she said flatly. “I don’t seem to get any further than that.”

  “You will,” he told her confidently. “There’s something I want to ask you, Anna,” he continued after a pause, willing her to meet his eyes this time. “The ring you are wearing—your wedding ring. Will you let me take it from you for a time? You see, there may be some way of tracing the markings on it.”

  She drew back, fear sharpening her expression, a reluctance to part with the ring plain in her eyes. It held some meaning for her that was perhaps linked with fear.

  Confusion rushed in upon her as she remembered that Noel Melford had called it her wedding ring, a veritable panic of confusion, and she could not answer him.

  She hesitated for barely a second, and then she held out her hand to him and he drew the wedding ring from her finger. He did not release her hand at once, however, holding it palm upwards in his to examine her finger for the tell-tale mark which a ring usually leaves on the soft flesh after a reasonable period of wear, but there was nothing to see, and his dark eyebrows went up a little in surprise. He made no comment on his findings, however, smoothing away her distress by talk of other things.

  “We’ve had quite an event across the way this morning in the hospital maternity wing,” he told her. “Quads, no less! Four girls as alike as peas in a pod and all weighing over three pounds.”

  “Poor Nurse Craven!” Anna smiled, forgetting her own problems. “She hoped she was going to have a quiet night!”

  “Oh, Topsy wouldn’t have missed it for the world! She’s named them all already in her own inimitable way. One O’clock, Two O’clock, Three-five and Better-Late-Than-Never! Topsy makes us smile when sometimes we would be in despair,” he declared.

  “She did that for me yesterday, I think,” Anna acknowledged gratefully. “I hope I shall see her again to thank her.”

  “I’ve no doubt you will,” he said. “Which brings me to the second thing I want to ask.”

  “Yes?”

  “I have a friend I should like to bring to see you.”

  “Doctor Tranby?”

  He nodded, surprised that she should have heard of Dennis.

  “Miss Melford told me this morning that you wanted me to see him,” Anna said. “Is he an expert on—cases like mine?”

  “Not exactly, but sometimes it is advisable to work on the theory that two minds are better than one,” Noel explained. “Co-operation often produces miracles.”

  She raised clear, resolute eyes to his.

  “Is that what we must hope for—a miracle?” she asked. “Is that what we need?”

  “No.” The grey eyes held hers, something in their depths demanding her absolute trust. “Miracles are not everyday things and I think we might be able to do without one in your case.”

  She bit her lip to stop its trembling.

  “Why are you so wonderfully patient with me?” she asked. “We are perfect strangers and I may be—any sort of person.”

  He rose abruptly, thrusting her ring into his pocket, out of sight. “I don’t think you are—any sort of person,” he said. “I’m a doctor, and I am trying to do my duty as I see it.”

  Ruth came out then, carrying the coffee percolator and an extra cup for her brother.

  “You’ll stay, Noel?” she asked. “You’ll only go back to the hospital and drink inferior coffee there, anyway!”

  “I’ll settle for your particular brew any day!” he laughed, stretching his long length out on the grass at Anna’s feet. “This may mean half an hour extra on the other end of my day, but it will have been well worth it!”

  He accepted his cup from Ruth and was stirring a second spoonful of brown sugar into it when a short, thick-set young man came towards them round the gable end of the house, swinging a stethoscope in his hand.

  “Anna, I want you to meet a great friend of mine, Doctor Tranby,” he said, smiling down at her. “Dennis, this is Anna.”

  It could not have been said more naturally if they had met at a party, Anna thought, trying to conceal her nervousness because she knew that Noel demanded it, and because he had made everything so easy for her.

  “You’ve heard our news, of course?” Tranby asked, including Ruth in his expansive smile. “Quads, no less! Of course, all the credit will go to the hospital now! We poor, long-suffering G.P.s don’t come into it at all, though we do all the spade work!”

  “I’ll see that you get full mention in despatches this time!” Noel laughed. “You can even have your picture in the Press! They’ll be on to it right away, I should think.”

  “Heaven forbid that I should ever adorn the pages of any newspaper!” Tranby groaned. “How would you like to have four squalling infants at once, Anna?” he asked.

  “It would be something of a handful, wouldn’t it,” she agreed, “especially if one wasn’t used to babie
s. But Nurse Craven will cope with them!”

  “So you’ve already met our Topsy!” he grinned. “Wonderful girl, that, and a wonderful nurse into the bargain! Topsy isn’t all fun and frolic, believe me. She can be as reliable as the next one in an emergency—probably more so than most.” He turned back to Noel. “She tells me you’re taking her into the theatre, old man. Good work! I’m perfectly sure she’ll repay your confidence.”

  “Topsy’s head is screwed on quite firmly,” Noel returned, accepting a second cup of coffee from his sister which he drank down quickly with an eye on his watch. “One couldn’t do much better than Topsy and I dare say Sara will come to appreciate the fact in time.”

  Sara! She would be on duty again, Ruth thought, going her rounds of the wards, ordering, checking up, seeing that everything ran smoothly and efficiently, waiting for Noel to come in to do the specials with her. Waiting for Noel ...

  Her eyes lingered on her brother’s face, seeing him preoccupied with the girl she had brought into their home, and a sudden apprehension ran through her like a chill foreboding. She dismissed it instantly as foolish and theatrical in the extreme. Of course Noel would be interested in such a case as this one! It was all part of his work, a challenge to his skill, and she knew that both he and Dennis Tranby had always been deeply interested in amnesia.

  Dennis was keeping the conversation going, realizing that Anna must be laboring under considerable strain at this meeting with yet another doctor, and Ruth knew that Noel would be grateful to him for his effort.

  Dennis rose to his feet.

  “Ah, well, this doesn’t give the Press a fair chance, does it?” he demanded.

  “Don’t overdo it!” Ruth laughed. “Think of the proud father. No stealing all his thunder!”

  “Fathers don’t come into this at all!” Dennis informed her. “It’s only mother and the quads who make the front page!”

  The front page! Anna thought. Will they put my photograph in the newspapers, splashed all over the front page? The girl who has forgotten the past! The girl who does not know who she is!