Free Crooked Wreath by Christianna Brand Page A

Unconsciousness, fugues, automatism … “You mean I could sort of walk about and do things, Doctor, and not know what I was doing?” The doctor had said that that was possible and had added that he must be careful about not glancing upwards too quickly and so bringing on an attack. And only yesterday … He had tried these little experiments for many years, now. Unconsciousness was easy; from childhood he had been able to faint almost at will, until at last the thing had become outside his own control and he fainted when it was expected of him, whether he consciously wanted to or not. But had the experiments gone further than that? For after all–would he know? Wasn’t that the whole point of a fugue, that you passed into and out of this condition and had no idea that anything had been wrong? Yesterday morning, for example, just before lunch–the wreath over the picture had been hanging crooked; it had caught his eye and he had glanced up at it, and it had reminded him of what the doctor had said. He had, accordingly, dropped the tray with the glasses and waited for unconsciousness to follow. Had it in fact followed? He thought definitely not. He had stood staring up at the chandelier, waiting for the family to come in and find him there and make a fuss over him; and a jolly long time they had been about it, too–he had got quite tired and no wonder he had fainted so easily afterwards. But last night? He had not gone into the drawing-room last night. He had come in from the terrace and gone to the ground-floor cloakroom and tried to make himself sick, because Peta had upset him dreadfully about the horse meat in the biscuits and he had felt he owed it to himself to be sick; but he hadn’t been able to, and rather than go back and confess that he was less injured, that his nerves and stomach were less delicate than he had supposed, he had wandered out on to the front terrace and had sat there on the edge of the balustrade, fiddling with his camera, until someone should come and express anxiety about him. He remembered towards the end seeing Brough with a barrow and some tools passing across the drive towards the lodge, though because of a hedge in the way, he could not see exactly where he went with them. After about a quarter of an hour, during which the family remained most heartlessly undisturbed, he had gone into the drawing-room and fetched the portable radio and had taken it out to them, without reproach.
    Into the drawing-room!
    But he had just told himself that he had not been in the drawing-room yesterday evening. He had forgotten, of course, about fetching the radio; anybody might forget a little thing like that. And yet … He had told the family, just now, that he hadn’t been in the drawing-room; none of them had noticed that he must have been to have got the radio–or had they noticed, had they said nothing to him, had they only pretended to believe? They had glanced at each other uneasily, wretchedly, and said that a–a vase had been found knocked over in the drawing-room; and they asked him if he remembered, if he thought he had had another of his “little turns …” “Like yesterday, darling … I mean, before lunch yesterday you did–you did drop the tray and the sherry glasses, and you fainted afterwards and didn’t–didn’t know anything about it all until we told you …” How could he explain to them that of course he remembered, of course, he had known all about it, that he had done it all purposely, or sort of purposely, that he had been staging these things for years; staging things until they had become half real, even to him. But were they only half real? Had they not grown quite real, had some of them always been real, things that he didn’t remember, that he had never known anything about? He knew that the family were afraid, in their hearts, that he had killed Grandfather. At half-past seven, Ellen had