‘Do you? Well, those who know don’t. You see, this isn’t your first lapse, is it?’

‘Isn’t it? Do you mean that while I was at Walwyk, all that I remember now – my childhood and youth, my years in Africa – were as lost to me as Walwyk now is?’

Miss Ellison took a cigarette and lighted it in her peculiarly gross, clumsy way.

‘That’s not for me to say. All we know is that you’d had what was called a breakdown before. And you’d never mentioned it. Canon Thorby had to find that out for himself.’

Miss Mayfield closed her eyes for a moment.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Almost the last thing I can remember is my friend telling me that I was threatened with a breakdown, and that was why I had to come home to England.’

‘There you are, then. In Walwyk you’d forgotten that. Now you’ve forgotten Walwyk. It’s like a see-saw. And we don’t want you wandering round Hove like a lost dog, do we?’

Miss Mayfield hurried from the room; she didn’t wish Miss Ellison to see her in tears. Safe in her own room she cried. It was all more complicated and horrible than she had known. She had thought that her loss of memory was due to the blow on the head, but apparently it had another cause, something not very far from a form of mental illness.

Having cried herself out, she knelt by her bed and prayed for courage and for faith and for help. She wondered whether, in this Walwyk, she had ever prayed. The simple faith which she now held linked her with Rose, with all the work at Entuba; did it, like the physical acts of eating, breathing, sleeping, run back through the lost years? Your soul, she cried to herself almost despairingly, shouldn’t be susceptible to a knock on the head.