TWENTY FOUR

There was one last island before Jethra: a high, grim place called Seevl, approached at evening. All I knew of Seevl was that Seri told me she had been born there, that it was the closest island to Jethra. Our call in Seevl seemed unusually long: a lot of people disembarked and a considerable quantity of cargo was loaded. I paced the deck impatiently, wanting to finish my long journey.

Night fell while we were in Seevl Town, but once we had left the confined harbour and rounded a dark, humping headland, I could see the lights of an immense city on the low coastline ahead. The wind was cold and there was a considerable ground swell. The ship was quiet; I was one of the few passengers aboard.

Then someone came and stood behind me, and without turning I knew who it was.

Seri said: “Why did you run away from me?”

“I wanted to go home.”

She slipped her hand around my arm and pressed herself against me. She was shivering.

“Are you angry with me for following you?”

“No, of course not.” I put my arm around her, kissed her on the side of her cold face. She was wearing a thin blouson over her shirt. “How did you find me?”

“I got to Seevl. All the ships for Jethra stop there. It was just a question of waiting for the right one to come.”

“But why did you follow?”

“I want to be with you. I don’t want you to be in Jethra.”

“It’s not Jethra I’m going to.”

“Yes it is. Don’t delude yourself.”

The city lights were nearer now, sharply visible over the blackly heaving swell. The clouds above were a dark and smudgy orange, reflecting the glow. Behind us, the few islands still in sight were indistinct, neutral shapes. I felt them slipping away from me, a release from the psyche.

“This is where I live,” I said. “I don’t belong in the islands.”

“But you’ve become a part of them. You can’t just put them behind you.”

“That’s all I can do.”

“Then you’ll leave me too.”

“I had already made that decision. I didn’t want you to follow.”

She released my arm and moved away. I went after her and held her again. I tried to kiss her, but she turned her face away. “Seri, don’t make it more difficult. I’ve got to go back to where I came from.”

“It won’t be what you expect. You’ll find yourself in Jethra, and that’s not what you’re looking for.”

“I know what I’m doing.” I thought of the emphatic nature of the manuscript: the inarguable blankness of what was to come.

The ship had hove to a long way from the entrance to the harbour. A pilot cutter was coming out, black against the city bright sea.

“Peter, please don’t go on with this.”

“There’s someone I’m trying to find.”

“Who is it?”

“You’ve read the manuscript,” I said. “Her name is Gracia.”

“Please stop. You’re going to hurt yourself. You mustn’t believe anything written in that manuscript. You said at the clinic that you understood, that everything it said was a kind of fiction. Gracia doesn’t exist, London doesn’t exist. You imagined it all.”

“You were with me in London 0nce,” I said. “You were jealous of Gracia then, you said she upset you.”

“I’ve never been out of the islands!” She glanced at the glowing city, and the hair flattened across her eyes. “I’ve never even been there, to Jethra.”

“I was living with Gracia, and you were there too.”

“Peter, we met in Muriseay, when I was working for the Lotterie.”

“No… I can remember everything now,” I said.

She faced me, and I sensed something new. “If that was so, you wouldn’t be looking for Gracia. You know the truth is that Gracia’s dead! She killed herself two years ago, when you had a row, before you went away to write your manuscript. When she died you couldn’t admit it was your fault. You felt guilty, you were unhappy… all right. But you mustn’t believe that she’s still alive, just because your manuscript says so.”

Her words shocked me; I could feel the earnestness in her.

“How do you know this?” I said.

“Because you told me in Muriseay. Before we left for Collago.”

“But that’s the period I can’t remember. It’s not in the manuscript.”

“Then you can’t remember everything! “ Seri said. “We had to wait a few days for the next ship to Collago. We were staying in Muriseay Town. I had a flat there, and you moved in with me. Because I knew what would happen when you took the treatment, I was getting you to tell me everything about your past. You told me then… about Gracia. She committed suicide, and you borrowed a house from a friend and you went there to write everything out of your system.”

“I don’t remember,” I said. Behind us the pilot cutter had come alongside, and two men in uniform were boarding the ship. “Is Gracia her real name?”

“It’s the only name you told me… the same as in the manuscript.”

“Did I tell you where I went to write the manuscript?”

“In the Murinan Hills. Outside Jethra.”

“The friend who lent me the house… was his name Colan?”

“That’s right.”

One of Seri’s insertions: pencil above typewritten line. Underneath Colan’s name, scored through lightly, Edwin Miller, friend of the family. Between the two names a space, a blankness, a room painted white, a sense of landscape spreading out through the white walls, a sea filled with islands.

“I know Gracia’s alive,” I said. “I know because every page of my story is imbued with her. I wrote it for her, because I wanted to find her again.”

“You wrote it because you blamed yourself for her death.”

“You took me to the islands, Seri, but they were wrong and I had to reject you. You said I had to surrender to the islands to find myself. I did that, and I’m free of them. I’ve done what you wanted.” Seri seemed not to be listening. She was staring away from me, across the heaving water to the headlands and moors black behind the city. “Gracia’s alive now because you’re alive. As long as I can feel you and see you, Gracia’s alive.”

“Peter, you’re lying to yourself. You know it isn’t true.”

“I understand the truth, because I found it once.”

“There’s no such thing as truth. You are living by your manuscript, and everything in it is false.”

We stared together towards Jethra, divided by a definition.

There was a delay on the ship, a hoisting of a new flag, then at last we moved forward at half speed, steering a course, avoiding hidden underwater obstacles. I was impatient to land, to discover the city.

Seri went to sit away from me, on one of the slatted deck benches facing to the side. I stayed in the prow of the ship, watching our approach.

We passed a long concrete wall near the mouth of the river and came to smooth water. I heard the ringing of bells and the engines cut back even further. We glided in near silence between the distant banks. I was looking eagerly at the wharves and buildings on either side, seeking familiarity. Cities look different from water.

I heard Seri say: “It will always be Jethra.”

We were passing through a huge area of dockland, a major port, quite unlike the simple harbours of the island towns. Cranes and warehouses loomed dark on the bank, and large ships were tied up and deserted. Once, through a gap, I saw traffic on a road, moving silently and quickly; lights and speed and unexplained purpose, glimpsed through buildings. Further along we passed a wildly floodlit complex of hotels and apartment buildings standing about a huge marina, where hundreds of small yachts and cruisers were moored, and dazzling lights of all colours seemed directed straight at us. People stood on concrete quays, watching our ship as we slid by with muted engines.

We came to a broader stretch of river, where on one bank was parkland. Coloured lights and festoons hung in the trees, smoke rose multicoloured through the branches, people clustered around open fires. There was a raised platform made of scaffolding, surrounded by lights, and here people danced. All was silent, eerily hushed against the rhythm of the river.

The ship turned and we moved towards the bank. Ahead of us now was an illuminated sign belonging to the steamship company, and floodlights spread white radiance across a wide, deserted apron. There were a few cars parked on the far side, but they showed no lights and there was no one there to greet us.

I heard the telegraphy bell ringing on the bridge, and a moment later the remaining vibrations of the engines died away. The pilot’s judgement was uncanny: now without power or steerage, the ship glided slowly towards the berth. By the time the great steel side pressed against the old tyres and rope buffers it was virtually impossible to detect movement.

The ship was still; the silence of the city spread over us. Be yond the wharf, the lights of the city were too bright to be properly seen, shedding radiance without illumination.

“Peter, wait here with me. The ship will sail in the morning.”

“You know I’m going ashore.” I turned back to look at her. She was slumped on the seat, huddling against the river winds.

“If you find Gracia she’ll only reject you, as you reject me.”

“So you admit she’s alive?”

“It was you who first told me she wasn’t. Now you remember differently?

“I’m going to find her,” I said.

“Then I’ll lose you. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

In the dazzle from the city I saw her grief. “Whatever happens, you’ll always be with me.”

“You’re just saying that. What about all the things we were planning to do together?”

I stared at her, unable to say anything. Seri had created me on Collago, but before then, in my white room, I had created her. She had no life independent of mine. But her desolate unhappiness was real enough, a truth of a poignant sort was there.

“You think I’m not really here,” she said. “You think I live only for you. An adjunct, a complement… I read that in your manuscript. You made me with a life, and now you try to deny it. You think you know what I am, but you can’t know anything more than what I made you into. I loved you when you were helpless, when you depended on me like a child. I told you about us, that we were lovers, but you read your manuscript and believed something else. Every day I saw you and remembered what you had been, and I just thought of what I had lost. Peter, believe me now… you can’t live in a fiction! Everything we talked about, before you ran away—”

She wept then, and I waited, staring down at the top of her head, rolling my arms around her thin shoulders. In the night her hair was darker, the wind had tousled it, the salt spray had curled it. When she looked up her eyes were wide, and there was a deep, familiar pain behind them.

For that moment I knew who she really was, who she replaced. I held her tight, repenting of all the pain I had caused. But when I kissed her neck she twisted in the seat and faced me.

“Do you love me, Peter?”

She was hurting because of the tenderness I was taking from her. I knew she was an extension of my wishes, an embodiment of how I had failed Gracia. To love her was to love myself; to deny her was to inflict needless pain. I hesitated, bracing myself for an untruth.

“Yes,” I said, and we kissed. Her mouth on mine, her lithe body pressing against me. She was real, just as the islands were really there, as the ship was solid beneath us, as the shining city waited.

“Then stay with me,” she said.

But we walked aft and found my holdall, then went down through the metal-echoing passages to the place where a gang plank had been slung across from the shore. We walked down, stepping over the raised wooden slats, ducking under one of the hawsers that held the ship to the quay.

We crossed the apron, passed through the line of parked ears, found an alley that led to steps. and these to a road. A train went past in silence.

I said: “Have you any idea where we are?”

“No, but that tram was going to the centre.”

I knew it was Jethra, but knew it would change. We set off in the same direction as the tram. This street that served the docks was draughty and ugly, giving an impression that daylight would only underline its dilapidation. We followed it for a long way, then came to a wide intersection where a white marble building, with a pillared edifice, stood back on lawns.

“That’s the Seigniory,” Seri said.

“I know.”

I recognized it from before. In the old days it had been the seat of government, then when the Seignior had moved into the country it had become a tourist attraction, then when the war came it was nothing. For all my life in Jethra it had been nothing, just a pillared edifice, its significance gone.

Beside the Palace was a public park, and a pathway bisected it, lit by lamps. Recognizing a short cut, I led the way. The path climbed the hill in the centre of the park, and soon we were looking down across much of the city.

I said: “This is where I bought my lottery ticket.”

The memory was too vivid to be lost. That day, the wooden franchise stall, the young soldier with the neck brace and the dress uniform. Now there was no one about, and I stared across rooftops to the mouth of the river and the sea beyond. Somewhere out there was the Dream Archipelago: neutral territory, a place to wander, an escape, a divisor of past and present. I felt the dying of island rapture, and sensed that Seri was staring too. She was forever identified with the islands; if the rapture died, would she become ordinary?

I glanced at her, with her drawn face and her wind-blown hair, the thin body, the dilated eyes.

We went on after a few minutes, now descending the hill, joining one of the main boulevards that ran through the heart of Jethra. Here there was more traffic; horse-drawn and automobile, following lanes marked away from the tramlines. The silence was dying. I heard a tram bell, then metal-rimmed wheels grating on the surface of the street. A door to a bar flew open, and light and sound spilled out. I heard glasses and bottles, a cash register, a woman laughing, amplified pop music.

In the street a tram swished past, clattering over an intersection.

“Do you want anything to eat?” I said as we passed a pavement café. The smell of food was irresistible.

“It’s up to you,” she said, so we walked on. I had no idea where we were going.

We came to another junction, one I dimly recognized without understanding why, and by unspoken accord we came to a halt. I was tired, and the holdall was weighing on my shoulder. Traffic roared past in both directions, making us raise our voices.

“I don’t know why I’m following you,” Seri said. “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?”

I said nothing until I had to: Seri looked exhausted and miserable.

“I’ve got to find Gracia,” I said at last.

“There is no Gracia.”

“I’ve got to be sure.” Somewhere here was London, somewhere in London was Gracia. I knew I would find her in a white room, one where blank paper lay scattered across the floor, like islands of plain truth, auguring what was to come. She would be there, and she would see how I had emerged from my fantasy. Now I was complete.

“Don’t go on believing, Peter. Come back to the islands with me.”

“No, I can’t. I’ve got to find her.”

Seri waited, staring at the litter-strewn pavement.

“You’re an athanasian,” she said, and it seemed to me that she said it in desperation, a last attempt. “Do you know what that means?”

“I’m afraid it means nothing to me now. I don’t believe it ever happened.”

Seri reached up to me, touched me high on my neck, behind my ear. There was still a sensitive place there, and I winced away. “In the islands you will live forever,” she said. “If you leave the islands you become ordinary. The islands are eternal, you will be timeless.”

I shook my head emphatically. “I don’t believe any more, Seri. I don’t belong.”

“Then you disbelieve in me.”

“No, I don’t.”

I tried to embrace her but she pushed me away.

Seri said—”I don’t want you to touch me. Go and find Gracia.”

She was crying. I stood there indecisively. I was scared that London was not there, that Gracia would have gone.

“Will I find you again?” I said.

Seri said—When you have learnt where to look.

Too late I realized she had receded from me. I stumbled away from her and stood by the side of the road, waiting for a gap in the traffic. Carts and trams rushed past. Then I saw there was a pedestrian underpass, so I went through, losing sight of Seri. I began to run, clambering up to the surface on the other side. For a moment I thought I knew where I was, but when I looked back