ELEVEN

Dark hair, dark eyes; these I noticed at once. The wind took her hair back from her face, exposing the rather wide forehead, the eyes sunk beneath. Gracia had always been too thin, and the wind was not flattering her. She had her old fur coat on, the one we had bought from a stall in Camden Lock one Saturday afternoon in summer, the one with the torn lining and the rents beneath the sleeves. This had never buttoned, and she held it closed in front of her by keeping her hands in the pockets. Yet she stood erect, letting me see her, letting the wind knock her. She was as she had ever been: tall, angular of face, untidy and casual, unsuited to open air or countryside, more at home in London flats and streets, the basements of cities. There she blended, here she was incongruous. Gypsy blood, she once had told me, but she rarely left London, she had never known the road.

I went across to her, surprised as much by how familiar she looked as by the fact she was there. I was not thinking, only noticing. There was an awkward moment, when we stood facing each other by her car, neither of us saying anything, then spontaneously we moved quickly and put our arms around one another. We held tight, pressing our faces together without kissing; her cheeks were cold, and the fur of the coat was damp. I felt a surge of relief and happiness, a marvelling that she was safe and we were together again. I held on and held on, unwilling to let the reality of her frail body go, and soon I was crying with her. Gracia had never made me cry, nor I her. We had been sophisticates in London, whatever that meant, although at the end, in the months before we parted, there had been a tautness in us that was just a suppression of emotion. Our coolness to each other had become a habit, a mannerism that became self-generating. We had known each other too long to break out of patterns.

Suddenly, I knew that Seri, by whom I tried to understand Gracia, had never existed. Gracia, holding me as tightly as I held her, defied definition. Gracia was Gracia: fickle, sweet-smelling, moody, unpredictable, funny. I could define Gracia only by being with her, so that through her I defined myself. I held her more tightly still, pressing my lips against her white neck, tasting her. The fur coat had opened as she raised her arms to take me, and I could feel her thin body through her blouse and skirt; she had been wearing the same clothes when I last saw her, at the end of the previous winter.

At last I stepped back from her, but held her hands. Gracia stood looking down at the ground, then let go of my hands, blew her nose on a tissue. She reached into the car for her shoulder bag, then slammed the door. I held her again, arms around her back, but not pressing her to me. She kissed me, and we laughed.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” I said.

“Neither did I. I didn’t want to, for a long time.”

“Where have you been living?”

“I moved in with a friend.” She had looked away, briefly. “What about you?”

“I was down in the country for a time. I had to sort things out.

Since then I’ve been with Felicity.”

“I know. She told me.”

“Is that why you—?”

She glanced at James’s Volvo, then said: “Felicity told me you’d be here. I wanted to see you again.”

Felicity had arranged the meeting, of course. After the weekend I had spent in Sheffield with Gracia, Felicity had gone out of her way to befriend her. But the two women were not friends, in the usual sense. Felicity’s gestures towards Gracia had been political, significant to me. She saw Gracia as a victim of my shortcomings, and helping Gracia was her way of expressing disapproval of me, and something more general; responsibility, and sisterhood between women. It was revealing that Felicity had not arranged the meeting at Greenway Park. She probably despised Gracia without knowing it. Gracia was just a wounded bird, someone to be helped with a splint and a spoon of warm milk. That I had done the wounding was where her concern began, naturally enough.

We started walking into the village, holding hands and pressing shoulders, heedless of the cold and the wind. I had become alive in my mind, sensing a further move forward, I had not felt like this since before my father died. I had been obsessed with the past too long, too concerned with myself. All that I had been damming up in me now flowed towards an outlet: Gracia, part of my past yet returning.

The main street of the village was narrow and winding, pressed in by the grey houses. Traffic went through noisily, throwing up fine spray with the tyres.

“Can we find somewhere for coffee?” Gracia said. She had always drunk a lot of cheap instant coffee, made too weakly and with white sugar. I squeezed her hand, remembering a stupid argument.

In a tiny side street we found a café, the front room of a terraced house, converted with a large pane of plate glass and metal topped tables. Little glass ashtrays rested exactly in the centre of each one. It was so quiet as we went in that I assumed the place was closed, but after we had been seated for a minute or two, a woman in a blue gingham kitchen overall came to take our order. Gracia ordered two poached eggs, as well as coffee; she had been driving since half-past seven, she said.

“Are you still staying with your friend?” I said.

“At the moment. That’s one of the things I want to talk to you about. I’ve got to move out soon, but there’s a place coming up. I want to know whether to take it or not.”

“How much is it?”

“Twelve pounds a week. Controlled rent. But it’s a basement, and not a very good area.”

“Take it,” I said, thinking of London rents.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Gracia said, and stood up. “I’ll go now.”

“What?”

I watched her in amazement as she turned towards the door. But I had forgotten Gracia’s odd sense of humour. She leaned forward against the condensation-covered window, made a squiggle with her fingertip, then came back to the table. She ruffled my hair as she passed. Before sitting down again she shrugged off the fur coat and let it fall over the back of the chair.

“Why didn’t you write to me, Peter?”

“I did… but you never answered.”

“That came too soon. Why didn’t you write again?”

“I didn’t know where you were. And I wasn’t sure your flatmate was forwarding mail.”

“You could have found me. Your sister did.”

“I know. The real reason is… I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”

“Oh, I did.” She had the ashtray in her fingers, turning it around. She was smiling slightly. “I think I wanted the chance to throw you out again. At least, I did at first.”

“I really didn’t know how upset you were,” I said, and the devil of conscience reminded me of those hot summer days, obsessively writing about myself. I had had to put Gracia from my mind, I needed to find myself. Was this the truth?

The woman came back then, and put down two cups of coffee. Gracia heaped in the sugar, stirred the liquid slowly.

“Look, Peter, it’s all passed now.” She took my hand across the top of the table, gripping it firmly. “I got over it. I had a lot of problems, and it was difficult for a while. I needed a break, that’s all. I saw some other people, talked a lot. But I’m over it all now. What about you?”

“I think so,” I said.

The fact was that Gracia exerted an irresistible sexual influence over me. When we split up, one of the worst things about it was the thought of her in bed with someone else. She had often used that as an unstated threat, one used to hold us together yet one which eventually drove us apart. When I had finally convinced myself that we had reached the end, the only way I knew of coping was to close my mind to her. My possessiveness was irrational, because in spite of the sexual magnetism we had not often been good lovers for each other, but nonetheless my awareness of her sexuality pervaded everything I did with her and every thought I had of her. I was aware of it now, sitting there in the bleak café with her: the unbrushed hair, her loose and careless clothes, colourless skin, vagueness behind the eyes, tension within. Above all, perhaps, the fact that Gracia had always cared for me, even when I did not deserve it, or when her neuroses came like radio interference to our attempts to communicate.

“Felicity said you weren’t well, that you’ve been acting strangely.”

“That’s just Felicity,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Felicity and I don’t get on too well,” I said. “We’ve grown apart. She wants me to be like her. We’ve got different standards.”

Gracia was frowning, looking clown at her cup of coffee.

“She told me frightening things about you. I wanted to see you.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“No… just a part of it.”

What sort of things was she telling you?”

Still avoiding my eyes, she said: “That you were hitting the bottle again, and not eating properly.”

A sense of relief that that was all. “Does that seem as if it’s true?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look at me and tell me.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

She had glanced at me, but now she kept her eyes averted as she drained her cup. The woman arrived with Gracia’s eggs.

“Felicity’s materialistic,” I said. “She’s full of wrong ideas about me. All I wanted to do after we split up was get away somewhere on my own, and try to work things out.”

l stopped talking because I had suddenly been distracted by the kind of stray thought that had come so often in the last few weeks. I knew that I was not telling Gracia the whole story; somehow that kind of wholeness had been sucked out of me by my manuscript. Only there lay the truth. Would I one day have to show it to her?

I waited while Gracia finished her meal—she ate the first egg quickly, then picked at the second; she had never had a long attention span for food—and then I ordered two more coffees. Gracia lit a cigarette. I had been waiting for that, wondering if she still smoked.

I said then: “Why couldn’t you have seen me last year? After the row?”

“Because I couldn’t, that’s all. I’d had enough and it was still too soon. I wanted to see you but you were always so critical of me. I was just demoralized. I needed time to put things right.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said those things.”

Gracia shook her head. “They don’t mean anything now.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“I’ve sorted things out. I told you, I’m feeling a lot better.”

“Have you been with another guy?”

“Why?”

“Because it matters. I mean, it would have mattered.” I sensed myself heading into danger, disrupting something.

“I was with someone for a while. It was all last year.”

Last year: the words made it sound as if it was a long time ago, but last year was still only three weeks ago. Now it was I who looked away. She knew the irrationality of my possessiveness.

“He was just a friend, Peter. A good friend. Someone I met who’s been looking after me.”

“Is that who you’re still living with?”

“Yes, but I’m moving out. Don’t be jealous, please don’t be jealous. I was on my own, and I had to go into hospital, and when I came out you weren’t there, and Steve came along just when I needed him.”

I wanted to ask her about him, but at the same time I knew I wanted to ask to stake territory, not to hear answers. It was stupid and unfair, but I resented this Steve for being who he was, for being a friend. I resented him more for arousing in me an emotion, jealousy, that I had tried to rid myself of. Leaving Gracia had purged me of that, I thought, because only with her had it been so acute. Steve became in my mind everything I was not, everything that I could never be.

Gracia must have seen it in my eyes. She said: “You’re being unreasonable about this.”

“I know, but l can’t help it.”

She put down her cigarette and took my hand again.

“Look, this isn’t about Steve,” she said. “Why do you think I’ve come here today? I want you, Peter, because I still love you in spite of everything. I want to try again.”

“I do too,” I said. “But would it go wrong again?”

“No. I’ll do anything to make it work. When we split up, I realized that we had to go through all that to be sure. It was me that was wrong before. You made all that effort, trying to repair things, and all I did was destroy. I knew what was happening, I could feel it inside me, but I was obsessed with myself, so miser able. I started to loathe you because you were trying so hard, because you couldn’t see how awful I was being. I hated you because you wouldn’t hate me.”

“I never hated you,” I said. “It just went wrong, again and again.”

“And now I know why. All those things that caused tension before, they’re gone. I’ve got a job, somewhere to live, I’m back in touch with my own friends. I was dependent on you for everything before. Now it really is different.”

More different than she knew, because I had changed too. It seemed she possessed all the things that once were mine. My only possession now was self-knowledge, and that was on paper.

“Let me think,” I said. “I want to try again, but…”

But I had lived for so long with uncertainty that I had grown used to it; I rejected Felicity’s normality, James’s security. I welcomed the unreliability of the next meal, the morbid fascinations of solitude, the introspective life. Uncertainty and loneliness drove me inwards, revealed me to myself. There would be an imbalance between Gracia and myself again, of the same type but weighted the opposite way. Would I cope with it any better than she had?

I loved Gracia; I knew it as I sat with her. I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone, including myself. Especially myself, because I was explicable only on paper, only by fictionalization and faulty memory. There was a perfection to myself as shaped by the manuscript, but it was the product of artifice. I had needed to re-invent myself, but I could never have invented Gracia. I remembered my faltering attempts to describe her through the girl, Seri. I had left out so much, and in making up for the omissions I had made her merely convenient. Such a word could never be applied to Gracia, and no other would describe her exactly. Gracia resisted description, whereas I had defined myself with ease.

Even so, making the attempt had served its purpose. In creating Seri I had failed, but then I had discovered something else. Gracia was affirmed.

Minutes passed in silence, and I stared at the table-top as I felt my complicated emotions and feelings turn within me. I experienced again the same sort of instincts that had driven me to my first attempt at the manuscript: the wish to straighten out my ideas, to rationalize what perhaps would be better left unclear.

Just as from now I should always be a product of what I had written, so too would Gracia be understood through Seri. Her other identity, the convenient Seri of my imagination, would be the key to her reality. I had never been fully able to understand Gracia, but from now Seri would be there to make me recognize what I did comprehend of her.

The islands of the Dream Archipelago would always be with me; Seri would always haunt my relationship with Gracia.

I needed to simplify, to let the turbulence subside. I knew too much, I understood too little.

At the heart of it all was an absolute, that I had discovered I still loved Gracia. I said to her: “I’m really sorry everything went wrong before. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Well, it was.”

“I don’t care about that. It was my fault too. It’s all in the past.” Distractingly, the thought came that it too, the split-up, had been somehow defined by my writing. Could it all have been as easy as that? “What are we going to do now?”

“Whatever you like. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’ve got to get away from Felicity,” I said. “I’m only staying with her because I’ve nowhere else to go.”

“I told you I’m moving. This week, if I can manage it. Do you want to try living with me?”

As I realized what she had said I felt a thrill of sexual excitement; I imagined lovemaking again.

“What do you think about that?” I said.

Gracia smiled briefly. We had never actually lived together, although at the height of the relationship we would often spend several consecutive nights together. She had always had somewhere of her own to stay, and I had mine. In the past we had resisted the idea of moving in together, perhaps because both of us feared we might tire of each other. In the end it had taken less than that to split us up.

I said: “If I lived with you because I had nowhere else to go, it would fail. You know that.”

“Don’t think of it like that. It invites failure.” She was leaning towards me across the table, and our hands were still clenched.

“I’ve worked this out on my own. I came up here today because of what I decided. I was stupid before. It was my fault, whatever you say. But I’ve changed, and I think you’ve grown too. It was only selfishness that made me react away from you before.”

“I was very happy,” I said, and suddenly we were kissing, reaching awkwardly towards each other across the table-top. We upset Gracia’s coffee cup, and it fell on the floor, breaking into pieces. We started trying to mop up the spilled coffee with paper serviettes, and the woman came with a cloth. Later, we walked through the cold streets of Castleton, then followed a path that led up one of the hills. When we had climbed for about a quarter of an hour we came to a place above the tree line where we could see down over the village. In the car park the back door of the Volvo was open. A few more cars had driven in since we were there, and these were parked in a line beside it. Amongst them was Gracia’s; she had told me she could drive, but in all the time I had known her she had never owned a car.

We stared down at Felicity’s little family group huddled around their car.

Gracia said: “I don’t really want to meet Felicity today. I owe her too much.”

“So do I,” I said, knowing it was true, yet nevertheless continuing to resent her. I would as soon never see Felicity again, so troubled were my feelings about her. I remembered James being smug, Felicity being patronizing. Even as I took advantage of them, and sponged off Felicity, I resented everything they stood for and rejected anything they offered me.

It was cold on the hillside, with the wind curling down from the moors above, and Gracia held close to me.

“Shall we go somewhere?” she said.

“I’d like to spend the night with you.”

“So would I… but I haven’t any money.”

“I’ve got enough,” I said. “My father left me some, and I’ve been living off it all year. Let’s find a hotel.”

By the time we had walked down to the village, Felicity and the others had gone off again. We wrote a note and left it under the windscreen wipers, then drove to Buxton in Gracia’s car.

The following Monday I went with Gracia to Greenway Park, collected my stuff, thanked Felicity effusively for everything she had done for me, and left the house as quickly as I could. Gracia waited in the car and Felicity did not go out to see her. The atmosphere in the house remained tense all the time I was there. Resentments and accusations were suppressed. I had a sudden, eerie feeling that this would be the last time I should ever see my sister, and that she knew it too. I was unmoved by the idea, yet as we drove down the crowded motorway to London my thoughts were not of Gracia and what we were about to start, but of my ungracious and inexplicable resentment of my sister. I had my manuscript safe in my holdall, and I resolved that as soon as I had the time in London I would read through the sections dealing with Kalia, and try to understand. As we drove along it seemed to me that all my weaknesses and failings were explained to me in the manuscript, but that in addition there were clues to a new beginning.

I had created it by the force of imagination; now I could release that imagination and channel it into a perception of my life.

Thus, it seemed to mc now that I was moving from one island to another. Beside me was Seri, behind me were Kalia and Yallow. Through them I could discover myself in the glowing landscape of the mind. I felt that at last I saw a way to free myself from the confinements of the page. There were now two realities, and each explained the other.