TEN

It was raining in Sheffield. I had been given the small front bed room in Felicity’s house, and when I was there I could be alone. I would sometimes stand for hours at the window looking across the roofs at the industrial scenery beyond. Sheffield was an ugly, functional city, fallen from its great days of steelworking, now an untidy urban mess that flowed up to the Pennine Hills in the west and blended under the arches of the motorway viaduct with the smaller town of Rotherham to the east. It was on this side of Sheffield that Felicity and James had their house.

Greenway Park was an island of clean middle-class houses and gardens, surrounded by the older and gloomier suburbs of the city. In the centre of the estate the planners had left an open space of about half an acre, in which young saplings had been planted, and into which the residents took their dogs to defecate. Felicity and James had a dog, and his name was Jasper or Jasper-boy, depending.

From the moment I arrived at the house, I entered a complicated, withdrawn state of mind. I acknowledged that Felicity was doing me a favour, that I had made a mess of my life in Edwin’s cottage, that the time had come for a form of recuperation, and so I became submissive and compliant. I knew that my obsessive interest in my manuscript was responsible for my errors, so I tried to put it out of my mind. At the same time, I continued in the belief that the work I had been doing was crucial to my sense of identity, and that Felicity had dragged me away from it. I was therefore deeply resentful and angry, and I withdrew from her.

I became detached from life in her house, and was obsessed with trivia. I could not help but notice everything. I was critical of the house, their habits, their attitudes. I disliked their friends. I felt suffocated by their closeness, their normality. I watched the way James ate, the fact that he had a little paunch, that he went jogging. I noted the television programmes they watched, the sort of food Felicity cooked, the things they said to their children. These two, Alan and Tamsin, were for a time allies, because I too was treated like a child.

I suppressed my feelings. I tried to join in with their life, to show the gratitude that I knew I ought to feel, but Felicity and I had simply grown apart. Everything about her life grated on me. Many weeks went by. Autumn passed and winter came; Christmas was a brief respite because the children became more important than me. But in general we were irritants for each other.

On alternate weekends all five of us would drive down in James’s Volvo to the house in Herefordshire. These were expeditions I dreaded, although Felicity and James seemed to look forward to them. It gave the children a taste for the countryside, Felicity said, and Jasper-boy enjoyed the exercise.

The house was shaping up well, James said, and often telephoned Edwin and Marge to give them what he called progress reports. I was always made to work in the garden, clearing the tangle of overgrown shrubs and making them into compost. James and Felicity and the children concentrated on the decorating. My white room, still intact until these visits, was the first to be done: magnolia emulsion made a tasteful background for the curtain material Marge had described on the phone to Felicity. James hired local electricians and plasterers, and soon the simple cottage was turned into just what Edwin and Marge wanted.

Felicity helped me in the garden one weekend, and while I was on the other side of the house she uprooted the honeysuckle and dumped it on the huge new heap that would one day decay into garden compost.

I said: “That was a honeysuckle.”

“It was dead, whatever it was.”

“Plants lose their leaves in winter,” I said. “It’s called nature.”

“Then that proves it wasn’t a honeysuckle, because they’re evergreen.”

I rescued the plant from the heap, and stuck its roots back in the soil, but when we returned two weeks later it had mysteriously vanished. I was extremely saddened by this vandalism, because the honeysuckle was something I had loved. I remembered those evening scents while I was writing in my white room, and it was this incident that at last returned me to my manuscript. As soon as we were back in Greenway Park I took it from my holdall where I kept it hidden, and started to read through it.

I had difficulty with it at first, because I was disappointed with what I found. It was as if, during the weeks I had been away from it, the words had decayed or diminished. What I found seemed like a synopsis for the real thing. Later pages were better, but I was unhappy.

I knew I ought to go through the manuscript yet again, but something held me back. I shrank away from the prospect of renewing Felicity’s interest in what I had been writing; while the manuscript was hidden in my bag I could forget it, and so could Felicity. Everyone said how well I was doing.

The manuscript was a reminder of my past, what I might have been. It was dangerous to me; it excited me and seduced me, charged me with imagination, but the reality of it was a disappointment.

So I stared at the unsatisfactory pages spread on the table in my room, and for a while I stood at the window and looked across the city at the distant Pennines, and then at last I bulked the pages and squared them off and returned them to the holdall. Afterwards, I stood by the window for the rest of the afternoon, playing idly with the macramé plant holder that hung from the ceiling, and watched the city lights come on as the Pennines receded into the mist.

With the coming of the New Year the weather deteriorated, and so too did the atmosphere in the house. The children no longer wanted to play with me, and although James remained superficially friendly to me, Felicity became almost overtly hostile. She served my food at mealtimes in a glaring silence, and if I offered to help around the house I was told to keep out of the way. I spent more and more time in my room, standing by the window and looking at the snow on the distant hills.

The Pennine Chain had always been an important part of my mental environment. Childhood in the Manchester suburb: safe houses and streets with neighbours and gardens, school close at hand, but always a few miles to the cast, dark and undulating and wild, the Pennine Hills. Now I was to the other side of them but the hills were the same: a barren wilderness bisecting England. It seemed to me they were a symbol of neutrality, a balance, dividing my past life from my present. Perhaps there, in the steep curving valleys between the limestone moors, was some more abstract clue to where I had failed in my life. Living on a small island like Britain, modern and civilized, one felt the elements less. There were just the sea and the hills, and in Sheffield the hills were nearer. I needed something elemental to clarify me.

One day, following an idea, I asked the children if they had ever been to the caves in Castleton, deep in the Pennines. Before long they were pestering their parents to take them to see the Bottomless Pit, the Blue John Caves, the pool which could turn things to stone.

Felicity said to me: “Have you put them up to this, Peter?”

“It would be nice to go up in the hills.”

“James won’t drive up there in the snow.”

Fortunately, the weather changed soon after this, and a spell of warm wind and rain melted the snow and once again sharpened the dark silhouette of the Pennines. For a few days it looked as if the children had forgotten my idea, but then, entirely without my prompting, Alan brought up the subject again. Felicity said she would see, frowned at me and changed the subject.

I turned again to my manuscript, feeling that something was beginning to move in me.

I made a resolution that this time I would read it through to the end, suppressing criticism. I wanted to discover what I had written, not how I had written. Only then would I decide whether another draft should be undertaken.

Stylistically, the early pages were the worst, but as soon as I was past them I found it easy to read. My strongest impression was an odd one: that I was not so much reading as recalling. I was still virtually word-perfect, and I felt that all I had to do was hold the pages in my hand and turn them one by one, and the story would spring spontaneously to mind.

I had always believed that I had put the essence of myself into the pages, and now that I was again in touch with the preoccupation of the long summer I experienced the most extraordinary feeling of security and reassurance. It was as if I had wandered away from myself, but now I was returning. I felt confident, sane, outward-looking and energetic.

Downstairs, while I read, James was putting up some book shelves, even though the house was almost devoid of books. Felicity had some pot plants and ornaments that needed a place. The sound of the electric drill interrupted the reading, like incorrect punctuation.

I had taken my work for granted. During the weeks I had been languishing in Felicity’s house I had neglected my identity. Here, in the pages, was all I had missed. I was in contact with myself again.

Certain passages were astonishingly acute in their observation. There was a roundness to the ideas, a consistency to the whole. With each revelation I felt my confidence return. I started to live again, as once before I had lived vicariously through my writing. I recognized the truths, as once I had created them. Above all, I identified strongly with the fictions I had devised and the landscape in which they were set.

Felicity, in real life changed beyond recognition by her children, her husband, her attitudes, became explicable to me as “Kalia”. James featured, in shadow, as “Yallow”. Gracia was “Seri”. I lived again in the city of Jethra, by the sea, overlooking islands. I sat at my table by the window in Felicity’s house, staring across Sheffield at the bleak moors beyond, as in the closing passages of the manuscript I stood on a rise in Jethra’s Seigniory Park, staring across the roofs at the sea.

Those islands of the Archipelago were as the Pennine Hills: neutral territory, a place to wander, a division between past and present, a way of escape.

I read the manuscript through to the end, to that last unfinished sentence, then went downstairs to help James with his carpentry. My mood was good and we all responded. Later, before the children went to bed, Felicity suggested we could all visit Castleton at the weekend; it would make a nice day out.

I remained in high spirits until the day. Felicity packed a picnic lunch in the morning, saying that if it rained we could eat in the car, but there was a picnic area just outside the village. I anticipated freedom, a lack of direction, a wandering. James drove the Volvo through the crowded centre of Sheffield, then headed up into the Pennines, following the road to Chapel-en-le-Frith, climbing past sodden green hill pasture and by scree slopes of fallen limestone. The wind buffered the car, exhilarating me. These were the horizon hills, the distant shapes that had always been on the margin of my life. I sat in the centre of the back seat, between Alan and Tamsin, listening to Felicity. The dog was crouched in the baggage space behind.

We parked in a small open space on the edge of Castleton village, and we all climbed out. The wind blustered around us, spotting us with rain. The children burrowed deeper into their weatherproof anoraks, and Tamsin said she wanted to go to the lavatory. James locked the car, and tested the handles.

I said: “I think I’ll go for a walk by myself.”

“Don’t forget lunch. We’re going to look at the caves.”

They headed off, content to be without me. James had a walking stick, and Jasper bounded around him.

Alone, I stood with my hands deep in my pockets, looking around for a walk to take. There was only one other car in the park: a green Triumph Herald, spotted with rust. The woman sitting behind the wheel had been regarding me, and now she opened the door and stood where I could see her.

“Hello, Peter,” she said, and at last I recognized her.