Then and Always (17 page)

“Miss Rachel Wiltshire to see Mrs. Louise Kendall,” provided Jimmy smoothly while I was still scrabbling with an indecent lack of reverence within the cavernous Gucci bag. “She is expecting us.”

We were instructed to take a seat on an impossibly low red leather settee situated directly opposite the bank of lifts. I fidgeted nervously as we waited to be met, half rising each time the lift doors slid open and a woman came out. This was ridiculous. The building was vast and there was a constant stream of people flowing out into the reception area. My boss could be any one of them.

In fact it was fifteen more minutes before a woman no more than ten years older than me came walking swiftly over to us clad in a designer suit and unbelievably impractical heels.

“Rachel!” she cried out when she was halfway across the foyer. I got to my feet and held out my hand. This she ignored and swooped in like a hawk to air-kiss the space beside my head, enveloping me in a haze of expensive perfume.

“How are you, you poor old thing? We’ve been
so
worried.”

Something in her voice made me seriously doubt that. She’d wasted no time on further greetings and had already pivoted on her killer heels and was making her way back over to the lifts. As she had completely ignored Jimmy up to that point, I thought it only polite to offer an introduction.

“Mrs. Kendall, this is an old friend of mine, Jimmy Boyd. He’s brought me into London today to see if anything here might jog my memory.”

She turned to flash the briefest of smiles at the man beside me, but it was only her mouth that moved, none of it reached her eyes. I’d already seen the top-to-toe appraisal she had raked over him when we had risen to greet her. I only hoped Jimmy hadn’t noticed it too.

“Not ‘Mrs. Kendall,’ just Louise,” she corrected as she jabbed a perfectly manicured finger on the lift call button. “Your darling young man Matt called on Monday and explained all about the dreadful mugging. How terrible that must have been. And they got your beautiful ring?” Her eye dropped to my left hand as if to verify it was really gone. “What a
tragedy
.”

As we followed her into the lift I couldn’t help but feel it was losing my diamond that my boss deemed more tragic rather than any physical peril I’d been in. There was something about her that reminded me of Cathy, or how Cathy could turn out to be in another ten years or so.

We exited the lift on the ninth floor and Louise was instantly accosted by a junior member of staff dashing down the corridor carrying a sheaf of papers. As she stopped to sort out the crisis, Jimmy and I both took a polite step backward and surveyed our surroundings. We were in a large open-plan office, brightly lit by long fluorescent tube lighting. There
were innumerable desks to both sides of the lift, divided up into workstations by blue felt-covered partitions. It looked like one of those experimental things you see in laboratories: the ones that rats run around in.

“Nice woman, your boss,” commented Jimmy, whispering low into my ear so he couldn’t be overheard. “Very sincere.”

“Shhh,” I giggled back, but was pleased I wasn’t alone in my assessment.

Crisis averted, Louise sent the junior on his way and turned back to us saying, “I’m not quite sure what you want to do next. Would you just like to wander about and say hi to people or do you want to have a poke around at your desk?”

“Er, just the desk, please, I think.”

“All right then. Well, good luck. I’m sure I’ll see you again before you leave.” And with that she turned to walk away.

“Um, Louise.”

She turned back and was a fraction too slow in sliding the smile across the look of irritation on her face. The I’m-a-busy-woman-and-I-really-don’t-have-time-for-this look was just peeking out from beneath.

“Which one
is
my desk?”

A look of almost delighted astonishment filled her face.

“Oh my God. You really
do
have amnesia! How bizarre! Matt said you did … But, well, it’s just so utterly unusual.”

Her fascination with my condition lasted all the way to my desk as we wove around and between the cubicles of my coworkers. Some dismissed me with a fleeting glance, but many of them looked up and smiled. I smiled at everyone, just in case I knew them well.

Eventually she stopped in front of an area where two desks sat face-to-face. A young woman sat in one, banging furiously away at the keyboard in front of her.

“Dee, can you spare some time to show Rachel a few things?” And then, as though imparting the most delicious of secrets, she stage-whispered, “She really
does
have amnesia!”

We waited until she had gone, then the young woman got up from her chair and held out her hand in greeting.

“Hi. I’m Dee Ellis and we both joined the magazine at about the same time.”

I nodded, and smiled back at her, unable to think of anything to say.

“And we both can’t stand Louise.”

I grasped her extended hand warmly. I didn’t know who the heck she was but I felt I had just found a friend.

Dee was extremely patient but I could tell from the surreptitious glances at the wall clock and her computer that we were keeping her from her work.

“Look, I can see you’re busy, please don’t feel you have to babysit me here.”

She smiled ruefully.

“I’m sorry,” she said apologetically. “Big deadline coming up. You know how it is.”

I didn’t actually.

“Is there anything Rachel can look at while she’s here? Perhaps something she was working on last week that might help her to remember anything?”

Dee looked directly at Jimmy, and I could see that she, unlike Louise, had warmed to him in an instant. I liked her even more.

“Well, there’s nothing that she was in the middle of.” She frowned as though searching for a key to unlock a door. “You’d been working really hard to get everything done before your friend’s wedding. How was that, by the way?”

“I missed it.”

“Bummer.” She bit her lip in concentration. “Oh, I know. Would it be useful if you looked through some of the articles you’ve worked on in the last few months? Is that the sort of thing that might help?”

“That would be great,” I assured her.

She disappeared from us then, murmuring something about “archives,” and while we waited I sat down at the vacant desk. There were no personal items cluttering up its surface and nothing to be found in either of the two drawers except the expected stationery. I shut the drawers with a guilty slam when Dee returned carrying a stack of magazines, feeling like I’d been caught snooping.

“Here we are. You can see which ones you were involved with from the indexes. And I’ve just checked that the conference room is free, so if you like you can browse through them in comfort in there.”

Although constructed of wall-to-wall glass, the conference room at least gave us some degree of privacy from the open-plan office. Jimmy laid the stack of magazines he had taken from Dee’s arms down on the polished oak table and pulled out a couple of the comfortably padded chairs. I checked out the dates of the issues and dragged the earliest one toward me. Jimmy plucked a random one from the pile, and when I raised a questioning eyebrow, he gave a boyish shrug.

“I thought I could do the quizzes while I’m waiting.”

We sat in silence, reading the back issues for several hours. Twice Jimmy left and returned with Styrofoam cups of something hot and brown from the nearby vending machine. The room was filled with nothing but the sound of turning pages.

“You know, some of my stuff is really quite good,” I observed,
closing another magazine and placing it on the completed pile on the table.

“And she’s so modest with it,” Jimmy teased.

I felt my cheeks grow pink.

“I’m not being big-headed,” I corrected, “I’m just surprised I was good enough at this to actually achieve my dream.”

He gave my hand a friendly squeeze. “I never expected anything less.”

TWO MAGAZINES LATER
my perception of reality exploded in smithereens in front of my face.

I hadn’t noticed the title of the article at first. My attention had been drawn to the small color photograph occupying the top right-hand corner of the page.

“Oh my God!” I gasped, feeling the color draining from my face.

“What? What is it? What’s wrong?” exclaimed Jimmy, getting instantly out of his chair to stand beside me.

Unable to find my voice, I pointed with a trembling finger at the photograph. Jimmy bent lower to read the caption out loud.

“ ‘Dr. James Whittaker of the Hallingford Clinic.’ ” He turned to me, confused. “So?”

“It’s Dr. Whittaker,” I said, my thoughts buzzing around my head like angry bees. “Dr. Whittaker is
my
doctor,” I went on, knowing I was sounding increasingly annoyed at his lack of comprehension. “He’s the specialist I was under after the accident. He’s the person who has been treating me for my headaches for the past six months!”

We both read the article through twice. It was only when we were done that our eyes met and the silence was broken.

“It doesn’t mention that he treats head trauma cases,” Jimmy ventured in a quiet voice.

“I know.”

“In fact, from the sound of it, he doesn’t seem to treat patients at all anymore.”

“I know.”

“He seems more involved in these clinical trials and research.”

I stayed silent.

“It’s a good article,” offered up Jimmy at last, as though that might be some consolation.

“Thanks.”

I turned the magazine toward me as though I wanted to read the title again, but I didn’t need to, I had already committed it to memory.

Multiple Personality Disorder: Medical Fact or Fiction?

And there in smaller italicized writing was the byline:

By Rachel Wiltshire
.

I don’t remember leaving the building. Jimmy took charge, returning the magazines to Dee and then steering me smoothly toward the bank of lifts. Once we were inside the carriage and heading back to the ground floor, the other occupants gave us a wide berth when they saw my deathly white complexion and Jimmy’s supporting arm hooked around my waist. I guess I did look sick, but not in the way that they imagined.

The cold wind outside took my breath away and I gave a huge gasp as I inhaled it, like a drowning person coming up for air.

“Just breathe slowly,” Jimmy said. “There’s no rush, just take it easy.” He had switched automatically into his professional role; he was trained to deal with someone in shock. And I guess that
shock
was a pretty accurate description of what I was feeling.

The jigsaw pieces were suddenly all fitting together, but
instead of the clarification and explanation I had sought, the puzzle was coming together all wrong and the picture it was revealing filled me with terror.

“It’s all true. It’s all true. How can it all be true?” I hadn’t realized I was speaking so loudly until I saw the wary stares being cast my way from passersby. I must have looked a little unhinged.

“Come on, hon, let’s get out of here,” Jimmy recommended, and I numbly allowed him to lead me to the underground car park where we had left the car.

He settled me in the seat as though I were a child, before shutting the passenger door and walking around to the driver’s side. I watched him through the windscreen, wondering how he could appear so calm. Shouldn’t he be on the phone to the nearest hospital to have me committed? But he didn’t look worried. Perhaps he was as insane as I was. He started the car and we slid out into the busy London streets before either of us spoke.

“Well,” he finally broke the ice with, “that was a bit of a surprise.”

“That’s the understatement of the century.”

We drove on for a further ten minutes before he spoke again. “I’m going round in circles here.”

“Welcome to my world,” I replied darkly.

“No, Rach, literally. I’m going round in circles; we’ve driven round this block half a dozen times. Where do you want to go now? Do you still want to find the other flat and the engineering company?”

I turned to look out the window, hoping to hide the despondency in my eyes.

“What’s the point? We both know what we’ll find when
we get there. I can’t be living in two places at once, holding down two jobs simultaneously. I guess it’s time I stopped being so pigheaded and started listening to what everyone has been telling me all along.”

He took his eyes off the road for a moment to glance at his watch.

“It not all that late yet. Would you like to head back to Great Bishopsford tonight?”

I sighed unhappily and considered the options for a moment. Our original plan had been to spend the night in London, believing that we would need that time to explore the two locations in the city where I appeared to reside and the two separate places where I was believed to be employed. In my stupid optimism I had envisioned our quest ending with us spending the evening in my small flat, perhaps sharing a bottle of wine and a take-away, piecing together at last the final mystery of my broken memories. Now there would be no such ending to the day, but the thought of going back and facing my father with this new revelation seemed too hard to bear.

“I don’t want to go back tonight.” I spoke in a quiet determined voice. “I need time to think this all through properly: time to get it all straight in my head, before I’m ready to deal with what will happen next.”

Jimmy gave an understanding nod of his head, and I was pleased he wasn’t about to insist on driving me straight back to my father’s.

“I think I’d be better off alone tonight,” I ventured.

He kept his attention on the road as he negotiated our passage through a narrow gap, before he turned to me with a smile.

“Absolutely. Of course. Couldn’t agree more. As long as you realize that my definition of ‘alone’ incorporates me staying right by your side. I have absolutely no intention of leaving you by yourself tonight, Rachel.”

We compromised in the end.

Yes, we would stay in London and not attempt the journey back while there was still so much to think through.