* * *
The next time he catches up with Margaret Shenton-Stevens, some time after supper, she is back in a modest skirt and top, sitting alone by the window; her thin hands cupped in her lap, eyes staring out way beyond the back lawn. Without makeup, she looks sallow-faced, the deep-etched lines confessing not so much to old age but to that lifetime of denied happiness.
“Good evening, Daniel,” she says, without redirecting her gaze.
“Mrs Shenton-Ste…”
“It’s Margaret, dear boy. As well you know.”
“Okay, Margaret. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m really not who you think I am.” Already his heart is pounding. Why this woman has the power to so totally liberate his tongue he can’t fathom.
“Don’t be absurd, my dear.” She chooses to scrutinise him now, as intensely as on their first meeting. “Why are you so afraid to accept who you are?”
The clouded grey of her eyes brings him out in a cold sweat. “But I’m not. It was my brother, my identical twin, you danced with on New Year’s Eve, not me. Only… I’ve been ill. Daniel tracked me down, looked after me – well, tried to. But it didn’t work out. That’s why they brought me here.”
Mrs Shenton-Stevens guffaws. “And where were you found? Do you remember how you got there? Do you remember anything of who you say you are?”
He tries to swallow, but his mouth has lost its saliva. “They found me at a…” He suddenly thinks better of talking about graveyards. “Well, no, not yet. But only because the doctors believe I’d taken something that…”
“Doctors! You can’t trust doctors! No, no, no, the only memories you’re ever going to have are of the things he’s seen and done, or has yet to see and do. Because his memories are your memories. Because he is you.”
Alex takes a step back. This woman is giving him the creeps.
“Sit down, my dear,” she insists. “You and I need to talk.”
His hands are shaking now, the sticks broadcasting the fact.
“And for heaven’s sake, get rid of those things. You won’t be needing any kind of crutch after our little chat.”
Why is Mrs Shenton-Stevens talking like this? Her behaviour doesn’t fit at all with Gulnaz’s portrait of her. She has a screw loose, no doubt about that, but this isn’t the wildly distraught, cuckolded victim that was painted for him. Her interrogation is disturbingly clear-headed, and for all her dementia, is somehow probing further beneath his skin than even Gulnaz has managed to do.
The deep facial lines rearrange themselves into a mischievous smile. “They all think I’m barmy, you know,” she chuckles. “They think I live in a fantasy world of gala balls and ocean cruises.”
“And you don’t?” he asks carefully, reaching for the chair next but one to hers. He has decided to stay with this for now. Her eyes, he notices, remain fixed and cold.
“Of course not. I know exactly what this place is. Care home. Nursing home. Old people’s home. Loony bin. Asylum. They invent many names.”
“So, what was all that ‘Young soldier’ stuff earlier, all that ‘Service to the King’?”
“Why, that was just for effect. One has to keep up the pretence, my dear.”
Alex frowns. “You want them to keep you here?”
“But of course! Don’t you see? It is the perfect cover. Where else could he and I be together without raising an eyebrow? Anywhere else, and they’d lock me up!!”
“Together with who, your fiancée?”
“My husband, dear boy! And it’s whom: together with whom, not who. Let’s not forget our grammar.” By leaning forward, she can just reach his knee with her fingertips. “You see, he kept his promise. He comes to me. When he’s here, of course I want to dance. Of course I want to dress up. When he’s here, I am the happiest woman alive.
“But alas, he cannot stay forever. It isn’t allowed.”
“He… goes back.”
She nods.
“To the ‘other side’. You said I was from the other side.” A light-headedness hits him as he repeats the very words that compelled him to seek her out tonight. He feels oddly like a child, willingly surrendering to the hands of a loved and loving grandparent, a wise old mystic. “You’re saying I’m dead, right? That I’m some kind of a ghost, come back to haunt myself.”
Mrs Shenton-Stevens stares at him wide-eyed for a second and then begins to laugh, at first to herself and then more hysterically. “Dead? Dead?? My darling boy, I danced with you. I touched you. I kissed you! Dead, you most certainly are not!”
And suddenly Alex is laughing too. He sniffles loudly. For a moment there, he’d been swept up into her make-believe world, petrified she would say yes, he was back from the dead, put here expressly to punish himself for a lifetime of wrongdoing. And in that state he might even have believed her. But this funny little woman has just managed to argue herself completely up in knots, showing her state of mind to be only marginally at odds with official medical opinion.
And yet, how indescribably comforting, the ease with which she can talk of such impossible things, as though they were as commonplace in Newlyn House as afternoon tea and a little tub of pills.
“And how else would you explain the birthmark?” she asks.
Alex freezes. “What?”
“The birthmark in your hair. Not even identical twins can share the same birthmarks.”
The birthmark.
Oh Jesus, she’s right. He’d seen it in Daniel’s hair when they held each other on the cliff top. It was exactly like the mark he’d studied in the mirror. Only, its significance then had escaped him. He isn’t sure if what she says about all twins is true, but he remembers something now. The birthmark had been the only way their school friends had ever been able to tell them apart. Only Daniel had had it.
The old lady studies his face. “I can see that in your heart you already know,” she says.
Cold logic demands that he protest further, but Mrs Shenton-Stevens is now slipping into a world of her own.
“You see, we’re blessed, my dear. Like my husband, you came back. He and I weren’t ready to say goodbye. And neither are you. We’ve both been given a second chance at love; a second chance to confront loss. I dare say someone very dear to your heart has been taken from you: this twin brother you pretend to be – a mother, a father, a sweetheart – a child of your own? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. But whoever you’ve lost, Daniel, now is your chance to reach out to them and make your peace.”
She leans forward again and waggles a spindly finger. “And for goodness sake, go and confess your love to Miss Gulnaz!”
Anyone else listening might already have laughed this deranged old maid out of court. But Alex doesn’t find her ludicrous in the slightest. Baffling, cryptic, enigmatic, yes, but not laughable.
“Now, I’m afraid all this has made me very tired, Daniel. I need my beauty sleep.”
She sinks back in the chair and closes her eyes, a slight smile pinned to her thin lips, a veil of serenity falling softly around her. She expects him to go now. But before he can take hold of the crutches, an impulse stays his hands, places them instead on the arms of the chair and gives the order to push. He feels himself rising easily, legs taking the full weight of standing. Unsteady at first, relearning the art of balance, in the same way his tongue had had to relocate itself, he ventures a foot forward, and then another. Just as she foretold it, for the first time since waking from the coma, Alex discovers he can walk unaided.
* * *