The Infinite Moment (19 page)

"Well?" she repeated.

"It's difficult to explain," I temporised, but truthfully enough.

"I'm sure it is," she replied, without encouragement, and added: "Would it perhaps be easier if you didn't look at me like that? I'd prefer it, too."

"Something very odd has happened to me," I told her.

"Oh, dear, again?" she said. "Do you want my sympathy, or something?"

I was taken aback, and a little confused.

"Do you mean it's happened to him before?" I asked.

She looked at me hard.

"Him? Who's him? I thought you were talking about you. And what I mean is last time it happened it was Dickie, and the time before that it was Frances, and before that it was Lucy... And now you've given Dickie a most peculiar kind of brushoff... Am I supposed to be surprised...?"

I was learning about my alter ego quite fast, but we were off the track. I tried: "No, you don't understand. This is something quite different."

"Of course not. Wives never do, do they? And it's always different. Well, if that's all that's so important..

She began to get up.

"No, please..." I said anxiously.

She checked herself, looking very carefully at me again. The halffrown came back.

"No," she said. "No, I don't think I do understand. At least, II hope not..." And she went on examining me, with something like growing uncertainty, I thought.

When you plead for understanding you can scarcely keep it on an impersonal basis, but when you don't know whether the best address would be "my dear," or "darling," or some more intimate variant, nor whether it should be prefaced by first name, nickname, or pet name, the way ahead becomes thorny indeed. Besides, there was this persistent misunderstanding on the wrong level.

"Ottilie, darling," I triedand that was clearly no usual form, for, momentarily, her eyes almost goggled, but I ploughed on: "It isn't at all what you're thinkingnothing a bit like that. It'swell, it's that in a way I'm not the same person..."

She was back in charge of herself.

"Oddly enough, I've been aware of that for some time," she said. "And I could remind you that you've said something like that before, more than once. All right then, let me go on for you; so you're not the same person I married, so you'd like a divorceor is it that you're afraid Dickie's husband is going to cite you this time? Oh, God! How sick I am of all this..

"No, no," I protested desperately. "It's not that sort of thing at all. Do please be patient. It's a thing that's terribly difficult to explain..." I paused, looking at her. That did not make it any easier. Indeed, it was far from help in the rational processes. She sat looking back at me, still with that halffrown, but now it was little more uneasy than displeased.

"Something has happened to you..." she said.

That's what I'm trying to tell you about," I told her, but I doubt whether she heard it. Her eyes grew wider as she looked. Suddenly they avoided mine.

"No!" she said. "Oh, no!" She looked as if she were about to cry, and wound her fingers tightly together in her lap. She halfwhispered: "Oh, no!... Oh, please God, no!

Not again... Haven't I been hurt enough?... I won't... I won't... Then she jumped up, and, before I was halfway out of my chair, she was out of the room.

Cohn Trafford paused to light a fresh cigarette, and took his time before going on. At length he pulled his thoughts back.

"Well," he went on, "obviously you will have realised by now that that Mrs Trafford was born Ottilie Harshom. It happened in 1928, and she married that Cohn Trafford in 1949. Her father was killed in a plane crash in 1938. I don't remember her ever mentioning his first name. That's unfortunatethere are a lot of things that are unfortunate: had I had any idea that I might be jerked back here I'd have taken more notice of a lot of things. But I hadn't... Something exceedingly odd had happened, but that was no reason to suppose that an equally odd thing would happen, in reverse "I did do my best, out of my own curiosity, to discover when the schism had taken place. There must, as I saw it, have been some point where, perhaps by chance, some pivotal thing had happened, or failed to happen, and finding it could bring one closer to knowing the moment, the atom of time, that had been split by some random neutron to give two atoms of time diverging into different futures. Once that had taken place, consequences gradually accumulating would make the conditions on one plane progressively different from those on the other.

"Perhaps that is always happening. Perhaps chance is continually causing two different outcomes so that in a dimension we cannot perceive there are infinite numbers of planes, some so close to our own and so recently split off that they vary only in minor details, others vastly different. Planes on which some misadventure caused Alexander to be beaten by the Persians, Scipio to fall before Hannibal, Caesar to stay beyond the Rubicon; infinite, infinite planes of the random split and resplit by the random. Who can tell? But, now that we know the Universe for a random place, why not?

"But I couldn't come near fixing the moment. It was, I think, somewhere in late 1926, or early 1927. Further than that one seemed unable to go without the impossible data of quantities of records from both planes for comparison. Something happening, or not happening, about then had brought about results which prevented, among other things, the rise of Hitler, and thus the second world warand consequently postponed the achievement of nuclear fission on this plane of our dichotomyif that is a good word for it.

"Anyway, it was for me, and as I said, simply a matter of incidental curiosity. My active concerns were more immediate. And the really important one was Ottilie...

"I have, as you know, been marriedand I was fond of my wife. It was, as people say, a successful marriage, and it never occurred to me to doubt thatuntil this thing happened to me. I don't want to be disloyal to Della now, and I don't think she was unhappybut I am immensely thankful for one thing: that this did not happen while she was alive; she never knew, because I didn't know then, that I had married the wrong womanand I hope she never thought it...

"And Ottilie had married the wrong man... We found that out. Or perhaps one should put it that she had not married the man she thought she had. She had fallen in love with him; and, no doubt, he had loved her, to begin withbut in less than a year she became torn between the part she loved, and the side she detested.

"Her Cohn Trafford looked like meright down to the left thumb which had got mixed up in an electric fan and never quite matched the other side indeed, up to a point, that point somewhere in 1926/27 he was me. We had, I gathered, some mannerisms in common, and voices that were similarthough we differed in our emphases, and in our vocabularies, as I learnt from a tape, and in details: the moustache, the way we wore our hair, the scar on the left side of the forehead which was exclusively his, yet, in a sense, I was him and he was me. We had the same parents, the same genes, the same beginning, andif I was right about the time of the dichotomywe must have had the same memory of our life, for the first five years or so.

But, later on, things on our different planes must have run differently for us. Environment, or experiences, had developed qualities in him which, I have to think, lie latent in meand, I suppose, vice versa.

"I think that's a reasonable assumption, don't you? After all, one begins life with a kind of armature which has individual differences and tendencies, though a common general plan, but whatever is modelled on that armature later consists almost entirely of stuff from contacts and influences. What these had been for the other Cohn Trafford I don't know, but I found the results somewhere painfulrather like continually glimpsing oneself in unexpected dis torting mirrors.

"There were certain cautions, restraints, and expectations in Ottihie that taught me a number of things about him, too. Moreover, in the next day or two I read his novels attentively. The earliest was not displeasing, but as the dates grew later, and the touch surer I cared less and less for the flavour; no doubt the widening streaks of brutality showed the calculatd development of a sellingpoint, but there was something a little more than thatbesides, one has a choice of sellingpoints... With each book, I resented seeing my name on the title page a little more.

"I discovered the current "work in progress," too. With the help of his notes I could, I believe, have produced a passable forgery, but I knew I would not. If I had to continue his literary career, it would be with my kind of books, not his. But, in any case, I had no need to worry over making a living: what with the war and. one thing and another, physics on my own plane was a generation ahead of theirs. Even if they had got as far as radar it was still someone's military secret. I had enough knowledge to pass for a genius, and make my fortune if I cared to use it..."

He smiled, and shook his head. He went on: "You see, once the first shock was over and I had begun to perceive what must have happened, there was no cause for alarm, and, once I had met Ottilie, none for regret. The only problem was adjustment. It helped in general, I found, to try to get back to as much as I could remember of the prewar world. But details were not difficult: unrecognised friends, lapsed friends, all with unknown histories, some of them with wives, or husbands, I knew (though not necessarily the same ones); some with quite unexpected partners. There were queer moments, tooan encounter with a burly cheerful man in the bar of the Hyde Park Hotel. He didn't know me, but I knew him; the last time I had seen him he was lying by a road with a sniper's bullet through his head. I saw Della, my wife, leaving a restaurant looking happy, with her arm through that of a tall legallooking type; it was uncanny to have her glance at me as at a complete strangerI felt as if both of us were ghostsbut I was glad she had got past 1951 all right on that plane. The most awkward part was frequently running into people that it appeared I should know; the other Cohn's acquaintanceship was evidently vast and curious. I began to favour the idea of proclaiming a breakdown from overwork, to tide me over for a bit.

"One thing that did not cross my mind was the possibility of what I took to be a unique shift of plane occuring again, this time in reverse.

"I am thankful it did not. It would have blighted the three most wonderful weeks in my life. I thought it was, as the engraving on the back of the watch said: "C. forever 0."

"I made a tentative attempt to explain to her what I thought had happened, but it wasn't meaning anything to her, so I gave it up. I think she had it worked out for herself that somewhere about a year after we were married I had begun to suffer from overstrain, and that now I had got better and become again the kind of man she had thought I was... something like that... but theories about it did not interest her muchit was the consequence that mattered...

"And how right she wasfor me too. After all, what else did matter? As far as I was concerned, nothing. I was in love. What did it matter how I had found the one unknown woman I had sought all my life. I was happy, as I had never expected to be... Oh, all the phrases are trite, but "on top of the world" was suddenly half ridiculously vivid. I was full of a confidence rather like that of the slightly drunk. I could take anything on. With her beside me I could keep on top of that, or any, world... I think she felt like that, too. I'm sure she did. She'd wiped out the bad years. Her faith was regrowing, stronger every day... If I'd only knownbut how could I know? What could I do... Again he stopped talking, and stared into the fire, this time for so long that at last the doctor fidgeted in his chair to recall him, and then added.

"What happened?"

Cohn Trafford still had a faraway look.

"Happened?" he repeated. "If I knew that I could perhapsbut I don't know... There's nothing to know It's random, too... One night I went to sleep with Ottilie beside mein the morning I woke up in a hospital bedback here again... That's all there was to it. All there is Just random..."

In the long interval that followed, Dr. Harshom unhurriedly refilled his pipe, lit it with careful attention, assured himself it was burning evenly and drawing well, settled himself back comfortably, and then said, with intentional matteroffactness: "It's a pity you don't believe that. If you did, you'd never have begun this search; if you'd come to believe it, you'd have dropped the search before now. No, you believe that there is a pattern, or rather, that there were two patterns, closely similar to begin with, but gradually, perhaps logically, becoming more variantand that you, your psyche, or whatever you like to call it, was the aberrant, the random factor.

"However, let's not go into the philosophical, or metaphysical consideration of what you call the dichotomy nowall that stuff will keep. Let us say that I accept the validity of your experience, for you, but reserve judgment on its nature. I accept it on account of several featuresnot the least being as I have said, the astronomical odds against the conjunction of names, Ottilie and Harshom, occurring fortuitously. Of course, you could have seen the name somewhere and lodged it in your subconscious, 130 but that, too, I find so immensely improbable that I put aside.

"Very well, then, let us go on from there. Now, you appear to me to have made a number of quite unwarrantable assumptions. You have assumed, for instance, that because an Ottilie Harshom exists on what you call that plane, she must have come into existence on this plane also. I cannot see that that is justified by anything you have told me. That she might have existed here, I admit, for the name Ottilie is in my branch of the family; but the chances of her having no existence at all are considerably greaterdid not you yourself mention that you recognised friends who in different circumstances were married to different wivesis it not, therefore, highly probable that the circumstances which produced an Ottilie Harshom there failed to occur here, with the result that she could not come into existence at all? And, indeed, that must be so.

"Believe me, I am not unsympathetic. I do understand what your feelings must be, but are you not, in effect, in the state we all have knownsearching for an ideal young woman who has never been born? We must face the facts: if she exists, or did exist, I should have heard of her, Somerset House would have a record of her, your own extensive researches would have revealed something positive. I do urge you for your own good to accept it, my boy. With all this against you, you simply have no case."