Betrayal by Lamb Charlotte

Author:Lamb, Charlotte [Lamb, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

CATHY came out of the front door of the cottage and paused

to inhale the drenching fragrance of the roses, her eyes

lazily following a tiny copper-coloured butterfly as it flew

past. It was a fine August morning; the sky blue, the air clear

and hot, the hills veiled in a shimmering heat haze.

She had been home for almost a week. She had not

recovered her memory, the lost month remained lost,

although she had spent a number of hours with the hospital

psychiatrist, having tests on the electro-encephalograph

machine, lying back like someone in a space age

hairdresser's, while her brain waves were monitored on

unrolling streams of white paper. The process had been very

tedious and time-consuming, involving lengthy preparations

while the electrodes were carefully fixed to her scalp. Her

hair had been sticky with the glue they had used; it had

been a terrible job getting rid of it afterwards. The result had

revealed nothing except that so far as could be seen she had

suffered no brain damage.

'Then why can't I remember?' she had asked the

psychiatrist, who had picked up a pencil and made bizarre

doodles on his blotting paper as he spoke, his brow creased.

'The simple answer to that is that you don't want to

remember.'

'Why don't I?'

‘I couldn't tell you,' he said without looking up. 'You will have

to tell me.'

'But I can't when I don't know what it is I've forgotten,' Cathy

protested with a flicker of impatience and he smiled to

himself, annoying her even more. He was a man whose most

usual expression was one of superiority. 'Why won't anyone

tell me what happened? What sort of accident did I have?'

'We want you to remember naturally,' he explained. 'The

mind is a very curious machine—if we told you what we

thought had happened, your mind might start to construct a

story that fitted what you've been told, and then we might

never find out what really happened. We have to wait for you

to bring the truth out of wherever you've hidden it.' He

looked up, smiling blandly, and Cathy eyed him with dislike.

She got the feeling that he saw her as some sort of

laboratory white mouse on whose brain he was conducting

an experiment. Cathy did not like being an experiment.

'When can I go home?' she asked, and he surprised her by

saying: 'Tomorrow. You're more or less fit now. Stay off

work, of course, and rest as much as you can. I'll see you in

Outpatients in a week's time.'

Next day her father had arrived at the hospital with a

suitcase full of clothes and she had dressed and driven home

with him. They had talked like strangers, but then how else

had they ever talked? Her father had always been distant

from her, she had always known she had failed him, she was

not the child he wanted. For as long as she could remember,

Cathy had felt guilty because she couldn't live up to the

standard her father set for her. When she was younger she

had often felt, like Alice in Looking-Glass Land, that she had

to run very fast to stay in the same place. Living up to her

father had been very tiring. A sense of guilty failure was very

depressing to carry around with you all the time.

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