She was, unquestionably, Liora. Her appearance had not been modified even by such little changes of emphasis as one expects to encounter in a woman of fashion after a two-months’ absence. The brown suit was familiar to him, the bracelet disguising a watch, the emerald pendant. Her modish Sassoon haircut had grown out to an unmodish length, and he remembered her telling him, during their dinner at the Connaught, that she’d decided to let it grow long again. By all the signatures of identity–her carriage, her speech, the small transitions between two almost identical expressions–she declared herself to be Liora.
“Do you find the light better in here?” he asked.
“The implication being that I should recognize you? I don’t, of course, but I expect you’ll want to carry on with whatever little masque you’ve gotten up for the occasion.”
Even that “gotten” was hers, a declaration of her origins as convincing as any stamped on a passport. (In her case, he recalled, even more convincing, for she had traveled usually as a citizen of a long-defunct banana republic.)
“Is this a game, Liora, and if so whose side have you taken? Or am I being punished for having declined your recentest proposal?”
“Shouldn’t you offer me a seat before you open the script? Evidently, the plot is elaborate. And Iam tired, as you know.”
“By all means, sit where you like. I’m sorry I can’t offer you a Scotch. The last two members of the committee that was here to inform me of my mayoralty left just before you arrived. You can see from the debris that they were thorough.” He lifted the empty green bottle to the light.
“I never drink Scotch.”
“There’s gin.”
“Gin-and-ginger. Thank you.”
“When I was in London last week,” he said, uncapping a Schweppes, “I tried to call you. Your line had been disconnected. A month before that I reached a bookshop when I dialed the number. Where have you been this month?”
“So, for all your mummery, this is only to beanother interrogation?”
He handed the drink to her. “You think I’m one of them?”
“The alternative would seem to be thatI am. Or that I’m unhinged.”
He considered other possibilities.
“Or,” he added after a long pause, “that I am. Unhinged, that is. They do tamper with people’s heads.”
“If it’s to be this complicated, I shall need pencil and paper to keep it all straight. Let us, for the sake of proper exposition, define our presumptive identities. First, my name is not Liora, it’s Lorna. I’ve been told that so long as I’m detained here that I’m to answer to the name of Number 41, though if you care to tell me now that I’m another number entirely I won’t protest that. I was abducted on the seventh of July, from my flat in Bayswater. It was done with something like ether, I suppose, unless there’s some more contemporary drug that accomplishes the same thing. I don’t know how long I was kept unconscious. I woke in the hospital here, feeling unaccountably weak and quite accountably confused. At first I thought I’d had an accident. I’ve always been terrified that some day I’d injure my brain. A woman doctor with unmatched eyes ran me through an interminable battery of tests. I cooperated for some time, since the tests gave me a sense of security, of being undamaged. Then the hospital staff became inquisitive about things that ought not to interest hospitals, and I stopped cooperating. Some imbecile of a male nurse released me this morning. Of course I immediately tried to get out of the Village. When it had been demonstrated that one does notleave this Village, that one mustescape from it, I went to the local restaurant and enjoyed the view from the Tarpeian Rock. The imbecile from the hospital found me there and gave me a slip of paper with your name–your number, rather–and a sketch of how I was to find your house. And there you have it, everything I know. Now lay downyour cards and let’s see if you have a canasta.”
“Do you know the Connaught in London?”
“A hotel?”
“And a restaurant. Near the American Embassy. You’re still an American, aren’t you, in your new identity?”
“It’s a relief to know you’re not going to try and persuade me I’m actually Turkish. As for the Connaught, I’m certain I’ve never done more than walk past it, if that. The only hotel I know in London is the Savoy, and that was ages ago.”
“Then let me begin my story by telling you about the dinner we ate at the Connaught on the evening of June 6th.”
“And then,” she said, ending his tale for him, “the door-bell rang, and it was me, the girl of your dreams.”
“Was it? I’m still trying to decide. You’ll admit that my story is no more improbable than yours?”
“Only somewhat more ornamented. It remains, however, a story. You, on your side of the mirror, will claim the same thing. It was a long way to go to reach the same impasse. Again we see that either I am lying or you are lying.”
“Or neither,” he added.
“Or we are both Cretans, but we can’t consider that possibility with any pretense to consistency, though dramatically it would be the most appealing.”
“If I’m lying, it would mean that you’re of interest to our jailers on your own account. Are you?”
“Hopefully, I’m interesting to all kinds of people. Contrariwise, ifI’m lying, my arrival would be part of the general plot against your sanity, yes?”
“Yes. And if neither of us is lying, it’s a plot against both our sanities.”
“It’s a nice theory,” she said, if only on account of allthemachinery that would have to be involved. If one of us is lying, then we must act out a simple melodrama of innocence pitted against iniquity. While, if we’re both perfectlysincere in contradicting each other, then it’s a matter ofour much larger innocence andtheir enormous iniquity. There would be ambiguities, in every glance and clues buried in every commonplace. So if we’re to continue in our roles, stagecraft as well as etiquette seems to demand that we assumethat to be the case. Do you agree?”
“For the time being.”
“So it stands thus–that we both think we’re telling the truth. Now, Mr. Pirandello, resolve that.”
“Either I did know you and you are Liora, or I didn’t and you aren’t. If the second case obtains, then I’ve been brainwashed into thinking otherwise, and the brainwashing would have to have been donebefore I was brought here, since I tried to call you within hours of my arrival.”
“Possibly while those other memories were being amputated, these were being grafted on.”
“Possibly,” he said. “But I’m inclined to believe that it wasn’t anyone connected with the Village who arranged my amnesia. If they had, why would they be bothering with me now? They’d have what they wanted.”
“Perhaps they want you to work for them.” A tinselly laugh underlined her irony.
“Then why set me loose after they’d ordered my brain to their liking? Simply sowe could dine at the Connaught?”
“Let’s grant that Occam’s razor won’t slice that, though we’re alreadymiles from the simplest solution. You think we must posit another set oftheys to account for your amnesia?”
“I think so. If there is someone who is desperate toobtain information, there must also be someone equally desperate to keep it to themselves. Couldn’t you imagine your own people doing the same thing, if they thought there was a likelihood of your telling their secrets to, for instance, our jailers?”
“I can imagine it all too easily. So, I’ll allow you both sets oftheys . The problem then arises, why would these othertheys want to make you believe you knew me? After all, it was thesetheys , here in the Village, who have arranged our meeting.”
“And it’s a problem I have no solution for. Unless boththeys have interlocking Boards of Directors.”
“The mind boggles.”
“That’s what they’re hoping, Liora–that the mind will boggle.”
“Lorna, please.”
“There’s one other reason why I don’t think the manufacturers of my amnesia could also be the engineers of the presumed ‘false memory’–and that is the clear recollection I have of our dinner. They could have inserted false memories into our past, but how could they have dibbled with my future? That dinner took placeafter they’d done their work, and immediately after the dinner I set off from Paddington. The next morning–or to be precise, the next time I woke–I was here.”
“This dinner that you harp on–just how distinctlydo you recall it? Most of the dinners inmy memory are jumbled into one big stewpot of leftover scraps.”
“I remember what the waiter looked like, the ring on his hand, the wax on his mustache. It was you, in fact, who pointed out those two details. I remember the bouquet on our table, a single rose in a silver vase. I remember howyou looked and things you said. I remember thetaste of each dish, the wines that accompanied each course. With the bisque we had a Solera, Verdalho Madeira, 1872. With the salmon, Coindreu—”
“I’m certain if Ihad had dinner with you and you’d played the wine-snob so grossly, I would have laughed in a most memorable way.”
“My snobbery took me in the other direction: I didn’tmention the wines then. But, as the dinner set me back almost fifty pounds, I do recall the vintages quite well.”
“It strikes me that this scene isunnaturally clear. Especially since the backdrop to it, your whole pastbefore that, is as misty as the moors in November. Didn’t it bother youthen that there were these blank spots?”
“My entire past isn’t gone, just key areas, and I can only say that I didn’t notice their absence then. One doesn’t miss something, after all, until one begins looking for it. Possibly I’d been specifically instructed not to go delving where they had excavated. By . . .” He smiled wryly. “I’ve blocked the word.”
“By post-hypnotic suggestion?” she suggested.
He nodded, saying no more.
“Yes. Yes, there would have had to have been something like that, if your story is to make any sense. Even so, I’m still suspicious about that evening. The focus is too sharp, and the colors are too clear. It’s like a good Hollywood movie where everything is more real than reality. What I would suggest is this–that the whole thing, all that you think you remember about me, including the dinner, was fashioned right here in this Village, either on the day you arrived (for you admit to waking in the station withoutquite knowing how you’d got there), or else you never left the Villageat all . The whole interlude in London was a dream, an illusionthey manufactured. You’ll notice that my theory doesn’t require two sets oftheys .”
“Why stop there? An even simpler theory would be that my entire life has been a dream.”
“And mine as well. Or we may both be figures in some larger dream, though that won’t solve our problems, for surely the dreamer dreaming us will require us to solve his conundrums as though we were real. But whimsy aside, I’m serious in suggesting that the false memories were graftedhere .”
“To what end?” he asked.
“We’d have to know to what larger end we are their means in order to answer that. Perhaps it’s enough that we should be asking ourselves questions like these. What is real? Who am I? Do I wake or dream? Then, when we’re hopelessly muddled, they’ll tell us the answers they’ve already prepared.”
“All right, that takes care of my case. I’ll agree that if my memory of you is false, it was falsified here.Now , what if it is your memories that have been remodeled?”
“In principle it would amount to the same thing. There’s no problem, in my case, as to when they could have gone to work on me, since I did wake up in the hospital. However, with me they’d have had to revise a lifetime’s memories; for you they need only insert a chapter entitled ‘Liora’ here and there. How importantwas she to you? Were you in love?”
“In and out. We see-sawed very skillfully, so that we seldom were both in at the same time, or out.”
“That much sounds like me, at least. What particulars can you tell me about her? For instance, was she married or single?”
“We tried not to be inquisitive. When we were alone, we would pretend that our lives were uncomplicated. I believed you were single.”
“I’m divorced, twice over. When did you meet her? What things did you do together?”
“I remember our first meeting quite well. But I should remind you that we probably have listeners. There are more bugs in this cottage than in an embassy in Washington. It must have been in order that one of us should start answering such questions that this interview was arranged. I can answer indirectly by asking you a question: have you ever been in Bergamo?”
“Bergamo . . . I wasthrough Lombardy at different times, but eventually all those churches and palaces and piazzas, they blur. Isn’t it likely that we were all in Bergamo at one time or another?”
“We?”
“People in our line of work.”
“Then you admit that much at least.”
It was as though he’d seen across these endless mists of speculation a single, real, hard-edged object, a bicycle with a dented fender, a kiosk papered with the morning’s headlines.
“It’s a trifling admission. You–or they–had to havesome reason for abducting me. Even if my charms rivaled Helen’s, I could have been raped without all thisequipment .”
“Then there’s nothing in my story that relates to the worldyou know? If you’re Liora, they can’t have reshaped your entire past. The easiest thing would have been forthem to chop out the scenes where I appear and fill up any cracks with putty. But they can’t have filled all the cracks. Life, even when it seems fragmented, is too much of a piece to allow such operations not to leave scars.”
She sighed. “We have to do this, don’t we? God, if I’d thought when I began my life of sin, that I’d be spending an evening like this some day, hearing the whole thing played back at the wrong speed, I’d have stayed at the University and taught courses in Pound and Eliot. Well, if we must we must, but do try and act more like the bewitched, bewildered lover you claim to be and bring me another drink, that’s a mercy.”
He described, for Lorna, the Liora he remembered: her flat on Chandos Place, and its furnishings; the names and characters of maids she had employed; her preferences in art and music. He recounted the day, years before, that he had accompenied her to the V & A to have a teapot identified: she’d been told it was New Hall and quite valuable.
“Thatcouldn’t be me,” she protested. “I know nothing about porcelain and care less.”
“And cathedrals? You were always driving off to the cathedral towns.”
She shrugged. “I go into any great pile of masonry when it’s put in my path, but I wouldn’t drive ten miles out of my way for St. Peter’s itself.”
“You don’t know Salisbury? Or Winchester? Or Wells?”
“I know Americans used to be hot for such cultural plums, but that was acentury ago. This Liora of yours sounds like a heroine in Henry James.”
“Liora couldn’t read James. She said he was antiquated.”
“And I’ve readall of him. Also, I gather from your account of the dinner that she fancied herself a gourmet.While my friends have been known to say behind my back thatI have a wooden palate. But continue with your portrait: eventually you’ll have to see it doesn’t represent me.”
He inventoried, as best he could, clothes he’d seen Liora wearing, and Lorna contradicted each blouse, slip, and scarf on his list.
“And,” she added, “the most damning evidence, as I see it, is that you say you’re familiar with everything I’m wearingnow . I’m reminded of the way ducklings learn to know their mother. There’s a crucial moment just after they hatch when their brains areprinted with the image of any large moving thing about them, and that thing, whatever it may be, becomes ‘Mother.’ I’m beginning to believe that there was a Liora, once, somewhere. Your description is too circumstantial to be entirely fanciful. Whatthey’ve done is to erase the face in the portrait; then, when I arrived, they triggered theprinting mechanism, so that my face, the physical me including the mannerisms and tricks of speech you say are hers, became your new definition of ‘Liora.’ They might have selected me on account of some point of resemblance, or, as I’d prefer to think, they rummaged in your past for the woman who most resembledme . I have enough vanity to want to be the focus of their scheming, rather than a convenient rack to hang your memories on.”
“I’ll admit that the evidence, as it piles up—”
“As it doesn’t,” she corrected.
“I’ll admit it looks damning,” he went on. “But who does it damn?I don’t know.”
“You really do want to find a way out for both of us, don’t you? You don’twant to think ill of me.”
“Yes, I’m that big a fool. I like you too much, even—” Heturned away from her angrily, though his anger was not with her.
She caught hold of his hand. “Even as Lorna?”
The hands tightened about each other.
“So. You like me too much. And love . . . does that come into it? No, don’t answer, just let me see your eyes.”
Once more they stared at each other in the incandescent glare, and this time each of them supposed he saw, behind the masks, a kind of truthfulness, the real face of the other person.
“Yes,” she said, lowering her eyes, “somethingregisters. Not a memory, though. Only a kind of sadness. I wish, I really do, that Icould remember you. I wish . . . if we could justignore the past. No, I see we can’t.”
“Isn’tthis a kind of proof?” he insisted. “You don’t strike me, even doubly divorced, as someone who falls headlong in love.”
“A proof? Even if I let myself believe your story, Number 6, I’d have to doubt your intentions. Lovers can commit treason. Especially lovers.”
Her hand had grown slack in his. He placed it on the arm of her chair.
“They can,” he admitted. “I’ve seen it happen.”
“Though even then, a kind of love survives. Judas, for instance, might have felt a terrible tenderness at the moment of that kiss.”
“He might have. Though he forfeited, with the same kiss, any claim to have its sincerity believed.”
“Belief! All my life I’ve wanted tobelieve things. Knowledge always gets in the way. I want to believe you knew me, that we were in love. I want to believe I was theprincess you described, with my own–what kind of teapot was it?”
“New Hall. You found it on Portobello Road for just ten pounds.”
“How clever of the person I wish I’d been. I want to have had a posh flat just off the Strand, and a number that isn’t listed in the Directory. What was it, by the way? It’s details like that will make me really belive in your Liora.”
“COVentry-6121.”
The hands tensed; fingers knotted about the slender bowed mahogany. Her face froze into a sudden mask of disinterested curiosity; terror swirled beneath the brittle surface. “You called me at that number . . . often?”
“Often, off and on.”
“When was the last time you rang it?”
“When I was in London last Friday. It had been disconnected.”
“But you said, before, something about a wrong number. You talked to someone at a bookshop. What did they say to you?”
“Only that I had a wrong number.” The memory rested, invisible, on a high shelf: by streching, his fingertips could brush its edges.
“What bookshop? Who spoke to you?”
It tumbled off the shelf and shattered: a stain spread across the carpet. “A woman. And it wasn’t a wrong number, exactly. The first three letters of the exchange were the same, but I’d given it a different name. It was you?”
“It was me. I’d completely forgotten that. I only remember how you made me go to some sort of trouble. You said you were calling from out of town.”
“From here. It was the day I arrived. But–why did you pretend to be a bookclerk?”
“Iwas at Better Books. Look in the directory–that’s it’s number.”
“But you’renot a bookclerk!”
“A friend of mine was to give a reading there that evening, a poet. He’d gone into the basement with the manager and left me to look after the counter. The shop was empty. That’s how Ihappened to answer the phone. My God, I can remember almost every word of it now! I thought it was some tedious practical joke. You made me look down the list of exchanges to make certain there wasn’t a COVentry exchange somewhere in the suburbs.”
“How long were you in the shop, altogether?”
“Not five minutes. That was the only call I answered. How did you pick just that moment to call?”
“It was completely spontaneous. Completely, Liora. I’d been sitting at the—”
“Damn it, don’t call me Liora!”
“But this means you are Liora. It’s the link we were looking for. It’s the one crack they forgot to putty.”
“It’s nothing of the sort. My presence in the shop was just as unpremeditated. We’d been up and down Charing Cross all that afternoon, and we only stopped in to pick up posters for the reading. I didn’t even return that evening. Only someone who’d followed me would have known I was there.When you called .”
“It’s not possible. We couldn’t both justhappen to—”
“No, we couldn’t. It’s certain that one of us is lying. It’s certain.”
“But why would either of us tell such a foolish lie? Whywould I have mentioned making the call, if I’m lying? Just to be proven a liar?”
“No, Iwon’t go through all this again. I refuse to. I’m very tired. I was told that you’d show me where I’m supposed to stay. Needless to say, I can’t accept the offer of yourprivate hospitality.”
“Liora, or Lorna if you prefer–Ibelieve you now. That is—”
“That is, you believe I’m sincere in my delusions. And you want to help me become my old self again. And when you’ve restored me to my former glory, what then, eh? How do you intend touse me?”
“Believe me, I—”
“Believe you? I understand that if you torture a person long enough, you can make them believe anything. We don’t call it torture now, though. What is the pleasanter term they’ve adopted? Behavior therapy. I suggest you try that.”
“I want to help you. I’ll do anything I can help you. I can’t be plainer than that.”
“There’s one thing you can do to help me, Number 6–set me free.”
“I’m not your jailer, Liora. I am . . . a prisoner.”
He had refused, before, to say this in just so many words. Now, the proposition seemed inarguable: hewas a prisoner. He could not set another free when he was not free himself.
And he was not free.
“Then,” she said scornfully, “if you’re determined to keep up your role of ‘prisoner,’ help me to escape. You say you’ve managed one escape for yourself. Manage one for me.”
“Yes, I’ll do that. We can’t discuss it, here, for the reasonI explained. But I have another notion, and we should be able to bring it off. With a little help.”
“Notwe , my would-be-darling–me. You’ll help me escape, all by myself. If I left here with you, how would I ever know I’d escaped?”
“I’ll go that far too. I’ll help you escape by yourself.”
“And, if you do, and you succeed, I might even come to believe you. Eventually.”
“When, later on, I get out of here myself . . .”
She shook her head sadly. “A rendezvous?” As she spoke it, the word took on an almost tangible quality, as though what he’d offered her as a diamond she’d handed back to him in an envelope, a powder of paste.
“Not immediately,” he assured her. “We could let a year go by.”
“An entire year? And where should we celebrate the anniversary of my escape? At the terrace restaurant? In the hospital? Then we might invite the pretty white-haired doctor.”
“All right, we’ll make no plans. It may come about by chance.”
“I don’t know, after this evening, if I’ll ever believe in chance again. Enough! Take me to my hotel now. I’m sure the warden is beginning to worry about me.”
She rose from the chair. They stood beside each other, close enough to embrace, without embracing, yet without moving apart.
“I’ll have to call one of their taxis,” he said. “We aren’t permitted to walk the streets after curfew. The patrols are not friendly.”
But he did not go toward the telephone, nor did she seem to expect him to.
“You’ll have your memories, at least,” she said, in a softer voice. “I’ll have nothing. Not even my own identity, if what you say is true.”
“You’ll have your freedom. You want it, don’t you?”
“Yes.” She smiled bittersweetly, touching the emerald pendant on her throat. “And at any price.”
Had she, that long ago, meant it to?