Psyche (47 page)

“For someone who doesn't know anything about it, you're doing very well. You've picked last year's national champion from amongst some very close contenders.”

“Have I? It's the way she moves. She makes it seem so easy.” The boys and girls at the school had made it look easy, too. A delusion. It was not easy at all.

“Change your mind about a cigarette?”

Relaxed now. Psyche nodded. “Yes, thank you. Can you skate?”

“I used to. But not this kind of thing. Hockey.”

“You were probably very good,” Psyche said, as she leaned toward the light he held for her. He would, she thought, be good at anything he did. If she were to continue to walk the tight-rope of a present with no admissible yesterdays, she would have to be very careful.

“Well, that's it,” he said. “They seem to have finished for today. We can go now.”

Rather than being relieved. Psyche found that she was disappointed, a reaction she could not have credited in advance. Unconsciously wistful, she watched the gaily clad figures glide one by one toward the exit from the ice, as she and the man descended a flight of steps.

They were almost at the rail, when she stopped, and said, “Look, there are more coming on now.”

“Locals,” Steve told her. “Using the ice for an hour or so before it is flooded again.”

“How lucky they are!”

Something in her expression, as she said this, made Steve think of a waif with her face against the glass of a shop filled with toys forever beyond her reach. The impression was so vivid that he spoke almost without thinking. “Would you like to skate for half an hour before we go?”

“I can't skate,” Psyche said abruptly.

“Why not?”

“My ankles are too weak.”

One of the first things that had struck him about her was the co-ordinated grace with which she walked. “I don't believe it. We'll see if we can rent some skates.”

“No! I don't want to!”

If she had not opposed the idea he would have been glad enough to withdraw from it. Now, his curiosity about her again fully aroused by a refusal much too emphatic for its context, he turned to a rink attendant standing near them, and said, “Can we rent skates here?”

“Yes, sir,” the man said. “If you'll just come with me, I'll see what I can do for you.”

“Steve—please!” Psyche said frantically. “I told you I can't skate!”

“You'll have to convince me,” he said calmly.

Psyche, as they walked along a corridor beneath the tiers of seats from which they had just come down, knew without being told that his light clasp on her arm would tighten at once if she tried to pull away from it. In agony, she saw that she had three alternatives.

She could flatly, and if necessary, rudely refuse to go any further with this idea of his. In which case she might never see him again.

She could explain, and it would have to be in detail, why she recoiled from the very thought of putting on a pair of skates. The
truth would find him sympathetic, she was certain, but it was the last thing she wanted to tell him.

The final, and it seemed only possible alternative was to suffer a re-enactment of humiliation she had never been able to forget, and live through it as best she could.

Without another word, she allowed herself to be led into a windowless room lined with benches and lockers.

As if from a great distance, she heard Steve talking to the attendant. Then she was sitting down, and her shoes were being gently but deftly removed from her feet.

“You won't have much difficulty in fitting me,” the newspaperman said. “The lady, however, as you can see, has a very slender foot.”

“I think we can find something for her,” the attendant said. “We buy, second-hand, what are originally very expensive boots and skates.”

“Good.”

“I have an eight triple, sir, that might be just right.”

For Psyche the immediate present could no longer be clung to. Only the past remained. It was like a nightmare in which, after having struggled with terrible effort up a steep mountain slope, one begins to slide inexorably backwards and downwards, one's brief glimpse of the mountain top no longer a spur but a symbol in itself of its unattainability.

The stars, glittering, cold, immeasurably remote in a navy-blue sky, drew a pale radiance from snow that crunched harshly beneath her boots, a sharp, dry tearing
of
a frozen silence broken by no other sound
.

Her breath making small frosty clouds that crystallized along the edges of the parka-hood framing her face, she thought, “I'll have a whole hour before the others gets here. I'll have learned to do it good by then.”

Not until she was walking up a wooden ramp, trapped equally by the skates on her feet and the firm hand on her elbow, was she able to make a partial return to the present. That it should be only a partial return was something she was quite unaware of as,
a glassy surface directly in front of her, she clung to the rail and refused to let go of it. “I can't not do it—I can't not do it!” she said piteously.

Astounded, Steve heard diction and grammar so at variance with anything with which the husky voice had so far presented him, that he could not at first credit it. The one thing that was quite clear was that he had somehow precipitated an emotional crisis stretching far beyond this moment, and, in doing so, assumed the responsibility of deciding whether it would be better to let her withdraw, or make her go on. Either way he might make a bad mistake. With only instinct and the little he knew of her to guide him, he made his decision.

“You must trust me,” he said quietly. “You're not going to fall down. I promise you.”

“I ain't afraid of fallin' down. It's just—it's just that it's happenin' all over again!”

He put aside the familiar, sharp excitement he always felt when he first found confirmation of a story whose existence he had previously only suspected, in order to concentrate wholly on the problem at hand.

“What I am objecting to is that nothing is happening at all,” he said, and placing his arm securely around her waist, lifted her bodily onto the ice.

Forty-five minutes later, he closed the left-hand door of his car and went around to the driver's seat and got in beside her. “Well,” he said casually, “none of your fears were justified, were they? Lord, it's a hot afternoon. They should have a decompression chamber in that place.”

He had started the motor, and was reaching into the glove compartment for a fresh packet of cigarettes, when he saw that Psyche, her face in her hands, was weeping uncontrollably.

With only the briefest hesitation, he cut the motor, and drew her to him. “What's troubling you now?” he asked gently.

“I—I—I
was
like a bird, wasn't I?” Psyche said. And, her face hidden against his shoulder, she wept harder than ever.

4

S
TEVE
, when he let psyche out of the car in front of oliver's at a little before five o'clock, made no reference to any possible future meeting between them.

Although she had told him nothing factual, she had, he knew, betrayed more of herself than she had intended to, or would ever be likely to again. If he were to solve the complex mystery that intrigued him as much as, or more than, any he had ever come across before, his only hope of doing so now lay in staying away from her, and searching, undistracted, for a memory that had yet to come clear.

For he would, he was reasonably sure, know a great deal—if not all—about her past, once he had pinned that memory down. And this was something he intended to do if he had to stay up all night in order to do it.

After a makeshift dinner prepared on a one-burner hot plate, he stretched out in a deck-chair on the verandah of his cabin and lit the first of what was, as the night wore on, to be a long succession of cigarettes. Blind to the black-and-silver enchantment of the moonlit night, he moved slowly backward in time across every lead that he saw as at all pertinent.

The moon had set, and the first light of dawn was sharpening the serrated pattern of pines on the farther shore of the lake, when he came across the clue for which he had searched without any thought of sleep through more than nine hours.

Slowly he stood up, and pulled himself to his full height to ease stiffness from both his shouders and his legs.

That the clue he had finally found should point in a direction that seemed to make no sense at all, perplexed him even while he could not doubt its validity.

His first decision was to get in his car and follow up his lead as fast as possible. On second thoughts, he saw that it would be better to reach his destination toward the close of the working day rather than in the middle of it. This particular quest was one that he very much preferred not to advertise until he had a few of the answers.

When he reached the city in the late afternoon, he drove straight to the towering stone building that housed the offices of his own newspaper. Avoiding the city room, where he would have been forced to stop and talk, he took an elevator directly to the eighth floor and the newspaper's morgue.

He had known and liked the tall, dark-haired woman at the desk inside the door for a long time. “Wyn,” he said, without other greeting, “have you got some off-the-record time to spare?”

They were always in a hurry, these men and women who came to her department to look through files that dated back across more than fifty years, who needed yesterday's ashes in order to kindle to-morrow's fires. Quite often they wasted her own time as well as theirs; but when Steve Ryerson came looking for something, the search was rarely fruitless.

“All right,” she said. “What are we looking for?”

“Theatre news.”

“Who, or what?”

“It's damn vague this time. A picture of a fair-haired girl in a white evening dress.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Is that all you can tell me?”

“That's all I can tell you because it's all I know,” he said.

“What year?” she asked resignedly.

“We're starting four years back, and working forward.”

“Oh, my God!”

It was, Steve felt, farther back than he needed to go, but he was thorough in anything he did.

Four hours later, in the vault-like silence peculiar to a large office building after closing time, he looked up from a table stacked with clippings, ran both hands through his thick hair in a gesture of irritated frustration, and said, “You better get the hell out of here, Wyn. We're arriving nowhere, fast.”

She had already given him three hours of unpaid overtime, but she simply shrugged. “I'm staying if you are.”

He stubbed a cigarette in an overflowing ash-tray. “All right. But we'll eat before we go on.”

They went to a restaurant in the same block, and the pavement under their feet was still warm even thought it was long after sundown.

They were waiting for coffee at the end of a meal during which he had maintained a preoccupied silence, when he brought the flat of his hand down on the table with a force that made the china rattle. “By God, I think I've got it! Right church, wrong pew! Come on, you don't want any of that rotten brew they call coffee here, do you? You can exchange it for a case of the best Scotch whiskey. Name your own brand.”

She was too used to newsmen to be particularly surprised, but she said dryly, “You mean a bottle, not a case, don't you, Steve?”

“I said a case, and I mean a case. Don't waste time.”

She picked up her purse, and attempted to smooth the wrinkles from a black cotton dress wilted by the unseasonable heat. “This must be quite a story.”

“I'm beginning to think it is,” Steve told her quietly. He had his elusive memory placed now. All he needed were names to go with it.

Back in the deserted morgue, he was no longer at all vague.

“Three years ago I covered a theatre fire,” he said crisply. “It was in early October. A first night, and all the best people out in their glad rags. I don't want the story. I want the full-page spread of pictures that went with it. Think you can find that?”

“What you mean is, do I think I can find it in thirty seconds flat?”

His smile was momentarily devoid of all tension. “You're a bright girl, Wyn. Thirty-five seconds.”

Three minutes later she laid, not a full page, but a single clipping in front of him. “This is what you want, isn't it?”

Photographs did not always do Sharon justice, but this flash picture, taken against the background of a soot-blackened brick wall, might have been a studio portrait. Her fur coat lost somewhere inside the theatre, she had stood in the cold October night, composed and quiet, waiting for Dwight to get their car. Her blonde hair framing her face, her white evening dress as unruffled as her manner, she could have been ready to be presented at court.

Steve, staring transfixed at a picture of Psyche that yet could not possibly be Psyche, began to whistle softly under his breath while he fitted guesswork with fact.

Looking up abruptly, he said, “Do you know anything about this woman, Wyn?”

“A little. Not much.”

“Would she, and/or her husband, rate a separate file?”

“Quite possibly. I'll go and look.”

The file, when he had it in his hands, was not large, and for the most part failed to interest him. He was nearing the last of the items when he came on the one that sent excitement crackling through him. Swiftly computing dates, he saw that it could fit. Looking back at the picture of the lovely woman in white, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it did fit.

Wyn, who had been studying Sharon's picture, said slowly, “It may be just a coincidence, but I think”

“What do you think?”

“I'm not sure. Just a minute.”

Leaving him, she was back almost immediately with still another clipping, which she laid side by side with the one they had been looking at. “Oh,” she said, disappointed. “They're very much alike, but they aren't the same, are they?”