FOUR

The drought had at last broken, and it had been raining continuously for the past week. The lane leading to the house was an almost impassable morass of deep puddles and squelching mud. I heard the car before I saw it: the revving engine and the tyres sucking out of the sticky mud. I hunched over the typewriter, dreading an interruption, and I stared down at the last words I had written, holding them there with my eyes lest they should slip.

The car halted outside the house, beyond the hedge and just out of sight. I could hear the engine running slowly and the wiper-blades thwacking to and fro across the windscreen. Then the engine was turned off, and a car door slammed.

“Hello? Peter, are you there?” The voice came from outside, and I recognized it as Felicity’s.

I continued to stare at my unfinished page, hoping that by silence I could fend her of?. I was so nearly finished. I wanted to see no one.

“Peter, let me in! It’s pouring with rain!”

She came to the window and tapped on the glass. I turned to look at her because she had dimmed the daylight.

“Open the door. I’m getting soaked through.”

“What do you want?” I said, staring at my unfinished page and seeing the words recede.

“I’ve come to see you. You haven’t answered my letters. Look, don’t just sit there. I’m getting wet!”

“There’s no lock,” I said, and waved my hand in the general direction of the front door.

In a moment I heard the handle turn and the door scraped open. I knelt on the floor, scooping up my neatly typed pages, sorting them into a pile. I did not want Felicity to read what I had written, I wanted no one to see it. I seized the last page from the typewriter, and placed it at the bottom of the pile. I was trying to sort the pages into my carefully devised sequence when Felicity came into the room.

“There’s a heap of mail out there,” she said. “No wonder you haven’t replied. Don’t you ever look at your post?”

“I’ve been busy,” I said. I was checking through the numbered pages, fearing that some might have gone out of order. I was wishing I had taken a carbon copy of my work, and kept it in some secret place.

Felicity had come right into the room, and was standing over me.

“I had to come, Peter. You sounded so strange on the phone, and James and I both felt something must be wrong. When you didn’t answer the letters, I telephoned Edwin. What are you doing?”

“Leave me alone,” I said. “I’m busy. I don’t want you interrupting me.”

I had numbered each page carefully, but 72 was missing. I searched around for it, and some of the others slipped to the side.

“God, this place is a mess!”

For the first time I looked straight at her. I felt an odd sensation of recognizing her, as if she were somebody I had created. I remembered her from the manuscript: she was there and her name was Kalia. My sister Kalia, two years older than me, married to a man named Yallow.

“Felicity, what do you want?”

“I was worried about you. And I was right to be worried. Look at the state of this room! Do you ever clean it?”

I stood up, holding my manuscript pages. Felicity turned away to go into the kitchen. I was trying to think of somewhere I could hide the manuscript until Felicity left. She had seen it but she could have no idea of what I had been writing, nor how important it was.

There was a clattering of metal and crockery, and I heard a gasp from Felicity. I went to the kitchen door and watched what she was doing. She was standing by the sink, moving the plates and pans to one side.

“Have Edwin and Marge seen the mess you’re making of their house?” she said. “You never could look after yourself, but this is the limit. The whole place stinks!”

She forced open the window and the room filled with the sound of rain.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I said, but Felicity just glared at me.

She rinsed her hands under the tap and looked around for a towel. In the end she wiped her hands on her coat; I had lost my towel somewhere. Felicity and James lived in a modern detached house in what had once been a field outside Sheffield. Now it was an estate, with thirty-six identical houses placed in a neat circular avenue. I had been to the house a few times, once with Gracia, and there was a whole chapter of my manuscript describing the weekend I spent there after they had their first child. I had an impulse to show Felicity the relevant pages, but then I thought she might not appreciate them.

I held the manuscript tight against my chest.

“Peter, what’s been happening to you? Your clothes are filthy, the house is a tip, you look as if you haven’t eaten a proper meal in weeks. And your fingers!”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“You never used to bite your nails.”

I turned away. “Leave me alone, Felicity. I’m working hard and I want to finish what I’m doing.”

“I’m not going to leave you alone! I had to sort out all Father’s business, I had to sell the house, I had to wet-nurse you all through all that legal business you wanted to know nothing about… and run my own home and look after my family. You did nothing! And what about Gracia?”

“What about her?”

“I’ve had her to worry about too.”

“Gracia? How have you seen her?”

“She got in touch with me when you left her. She wanted to know where you were.”

“But I wrote to her. She didn’t answer.”

Felicity said nothing, but there was anger in her eyes.

“How is Gracia?” I said. “Where is she living?”

“You selfish bastard! You know she nearly died!”

“No she didn’t.”

“She overdosed herself. You must have known!”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Her flatmate told me.”

I remembered then: the girl’s pale lips, her shaking hands, telling me to go, not to bother Gracia.

“You know Gracia’s got no family. I had to take a week in London, because of you.”

“You should have told me. I was looking for her.”

“Peter, don’t lie to yourself! You know you ran away.”

I was thinking about my manuscript, and suddenly I recalled what had happened to page 72. When I was numbering the pages one evening I had made a mistake. I had been meaning to renumber the other pages ever since. I felt relieved that the page was not lost.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, of course.”

Felicity pushed past me and returned to my white room. Here she opened both windows, admitting a cold draught, then went noisily up the wooden stairs. I followed her, feeling a stir of alarm.

“I thought you were supposed to be decorating the place,” Felicity said. “You’ve done nothing. Edwin will be furious. He thinks you’ve nearly finished.”

“l don’t care,” I said. I went to the door of the room I had been sleeping in, and closed it. I did not want her to look inside because my magazines were all over the place. I leant against the door to stop her entering. “Go away, Felicity. Go away, go away.”

“My God, what have you been doing?” She had opened the door of the lavatory, but immediately closed it again.

“It’s blocked,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to clear it.”

“You’re living like an animal.”

“It doesn’t matter. No one’s here.”

“Let me see the other rooms.”

Felicity advanced on me and tried to grab my manuscript. I clutched it tighter against me, but she had been feinting. She seized the door handle and had the door open before I could stop her.

She stared past me into the room for several seconds. Then she looked at me with contempt.

“Open the window,” she said. “It stinks in there.” She walked across the landing to inspect the other rooms.

I went into my bedroom to clear up what she had seen. I closed the magazines and shoved them guiltily beneath my sleeping-bag, and kicked my soiled clothes into a heap in one corner.

Downstairs, Felicity was in my white room, standing by my desk and looking down at it. As I walked in she glanced in a pointed way at my manuscript.

“Can I see those papers, please?”

I shook my head, and clutched them to me.

“All right. You don’t have to hold them like that.”

“I can’t show them to you, Felicity. I just want you to go away. Leave me alone.”

“O.K., just hold on.” She pulled the chair away from the desk, and placed it in the middle of the floor. The room looked suddenly lopsided. “Sit down, Peter. I’ve got to think.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing here. I’m all right. I’m fine. I need to be alone. I’m working.”

But Felicity was no longer listening. She went through into the kitchen and ran some water into the kettle. I sat on the chair and held the manuscript against my chest. I watched her through the door to the kitchen as she held two cups under the tap, and looked around for where I kept the tea. She found my instant coffee instead, and spooned some of it into each cup. While the kettle sat on the gas she started clearing my unwashed pots and pans to one side and filled the sink with water, holding her fingers in the flow.

“Is there no hot water?”

“Yes… it’s hot.” I could see the steam cascading around her arms.

Felicity turned off the tap. “Edwin said an immersion heater had been installed. Where is it?”

I shrugged. Felicity found the switch and clicked it on. Then she stood by the sink, her head bowed. She seemed to be shivering.

I had never seen Felicity like this before; it was the first time we had been alone together in years. Perhaps the last time was when we had been living at home, during one of my vacs from university, when she was engaged. Since then James had always been with her, or James and the children. It gave me a new insight into her, and I recalled the difficulty with which I had written of Kalia in my manuscript. The scenes of childhood with her had been amongst the most difficult of all, and those for which the greatest amount of background invention had been necessary.

I watched Felicity as she stood there in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and I silently urged her to leave. Her interruption made my need to write even greater than before. Perhaps this had been her unintended role in coming to the house: to disturb me to help me. I wanted her to leave so I could finish what I was doing. I even saw the possibility of yet another draft, one driven deeper into the realms of invention in my quest for a higher truth.

Felicity was staring through the window towards the garden, and some of the tension in the room had faded. I put the manuscript on the floor by my feet.

Felicity said: “Peter, I think you need help. Will you come and stay with James and me?”

“I can’t. I’ve got to work, I haven’t finished what I’m doing.”

“What are you doing?” She was looking at me now, leaning back against the window sill.

I tried to think of an answer. I could not tell her everything. “I’m telling the truth about myself.”

Something moved in her eyes, and with a precognitive insight I sensed what she was going to say.

Chapter Four in my manuscript: my sister Kalia, two years older than me. We were close enough in age to be treated as a twosome by our parents, but far enough apart for real differences between us to be felt. She was always that little bit ahead of me, in school, in staying up late, in going to parties. Yet I caught her up because I was clever at school while she was just pretty, and she never forgave me. As we went through our teens, as we became people, a dividing rift became apparent. Neither of us tried to bridge it, but took up positions within striking distance of each other, the ground falling away between us. Her attitude was usually an assumed knowingness about what I was doing or thinking. Everything was said to be inevitable, nothing I could do would ever surprise her, because either I was completely predictable in her terms or else she had been there before me. I grew up loathing Kalia’s knowing smile and experienced laugh, as she tried to place me forever two years behind. And as I told Felicity what I had been writing in my manuscript, I anticipated the same smile, the same dismissive click of the tongue.

I was wrong. Felicity merely nodded and looked away.

“I’ve got to get you out of this place,” she said. “Is there nowhere you can go in London?”

“I’m all right, Felicity. Don’t worry about me.”

“And what about Gracia?”

“What about her?”

Felicity looked exasperated. “I can’t interfere any more. You ought to see her. She needs you, and she’s got no one else.”

“But she left me.”

Chapter Seven in my manuscript, and several chapters that followed: Gracia was Seri, a girl on an island. I had met Gracia on the Greek island of Kos one summer. I had gone to Greece in an attempt to understand why it represented an obscure threat in my life. Greece seemed to me the place other people went to, and fell in love. It was somewhere that was like a sexual rival. Friends returned from package-tour holidays and they had become enraptured, their dreams charged with the thrall of Greece. So I went at last to confront this rival, and there I met Gracia. We travelled around the Aegean islands for a time, sleeping together, then returned to London, where we lost touch with each other. A few months later we met again by chance, as one does in London. We were both haunted by the islands, the pervasive distant rapture. In London we fell in love, and slowly the islands faded. We became ordinary. Now she had become Seri and would be alone in Jethra at the end of the manuscript. Jethra was London, the islands were behind us, but Gracia had overdosed on sleeping tablets and we had split up. It was all in the manuscript, translated to its higher truth. I was tired.

The kettle boiled and Felicity went to make the coffee. There was no sugar, no milk, and nowhere for her to sit. I moved the manuscript pages to the side and gave her the chair. She said nothing for a few minutes, holding the cup of black coffee in her hands and sipping at it.

“I can’t keep driving down to see you,” she said.

“I’m not asking you to. I can look after myself.”

“With blocked-up plumbing, no food, all this filth?”

“I don’t want the same things as you.” She said nothing, but glanced around at my white room. “What are you going to tell Edwin and Marge?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“I don’t want them here either.”

“It’s their house, Peter.”

“I’ll clean it up. I’m doing it all the time.”

“You haven’t touched the place since you’ve been here. I’m surprised you haven’t caught diphtheria or something, in this mess. What was it like in the hot weather? The place must have stunk to high heaven.”

“I didn’t notice. I’ve been working.”

“So you say. Look, where were you ringing me from? Is there a call-box?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m going to telephone James. I want him to know what’s going on here.”

“Nothing’s going on here! I just need to be left alone long enough to finish what I’m doing.”

“And then you’ll clean up and paint the house and clear the garden?”

“I’ve been doing bits of it all summer.”

“You haven’t, Peter, you know you haven’t. It hasn’t been touched. Edwin told me what you agreed with him. He was trusting you to get the place cleaned up for them, and it’s worse now than it was before you moved in.”

“What about this room?” I said.

“This is the worst slum in the place!”

I was shocked. My white room was the focus of my life in the house. Because it had become what I imagined, it was central to everything I was doing. The sun dazzled against the newly painted walls, the rush matting was pleasantly abrasive against my naked feet, and every morning when I came down from sleeping I could smell the freshness of paint. I always felt renewed and recharged by my white room, because it was a haven of sanity in a life become muddled. Felicity threw this in doubt. If I looked at the room in the way she obviously did… yes, I had not yet actually got around to painting it. The boards were bare, the plaster was cracked and bulging with fungus, and mildew clung around the window frames.

But this was Felicity’s failure, not mine. She was perceiving it wrongly. I had learnt how to write my manuscript by observing my white room. Felicity saw only narrow or actual truth. She was unreceptive to higher truth, to imaginative coherence, and she would certainly fail to understand the kinds of truth I told in my manuscript.

“Where’s the call-box, Peter? Is it in the village?”

“Yes. What are you going to say to James?”

“I just want to tell him I got here safely. He’s looking after the children this weekend, in case you were wondering.”

“Is it a weekend?”

“Today’s Saturday. Do you mean you don’t know?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

Felicity finished her coffee and took the cup to the kitchen. She collected her handbag, then went through my white room towards the front door. I heard her open it, but then she came back. “I’ll get some lunch. What would you like?”

“Anything at all.”

Then she was gone, and at once I picked up my manuscript. I found the page I had been working on when Felicity arrived; I had written only two and a half lines, and the white space beneath seemed recriminatory of me. I read the lines but they made no sense to me. The longer I worked I had found that my typing speed increased to the point where I could write almost as fast as I could think. My style was therefore loose and spontaneous, depending for its development on the whim of the moment. In the time Felicity had been at the house I had lost my train of thought.

I read back over the two or three pages before my enforced abandonment of it, and at once I felt more confident. Writing something was rather like the cutting of a groove on a gramophone record: my thoughts were placed on the page, and to read back over them was like playing the record to hear my thoughts. After a few paragraphs I discovered the momentum of my ideas.

Felicity and her intrusion were forgotten. It was like finding my real self again. Once I was submerged in my work it was as if I became whole again. Felicity had made me feel mad, irrational, unstable.

I put the unfinished page to one side and inserted a clean sheet in the typewriter. I quickly copy-typed the two and a half lines, and I was poised ready to continue.

But I stopped, and it was in the same place as before: “For a moment I thought I knew where I was, but when I looked back—”

When I looked back at what?

I read back over the preceding page, trying to hear the recording of my thoughts. The scene was the build-up to my climactic row with Gracia, but through Seri and Jethra it had become distanced. The layers of my realities momentarily confused me. In the manuscript it was not an argument at all, more an impasse between the way two people interpreted the world. What had I been trying to say?

I thought back to the real row. We were in Marylebone Road, on the corner with Baker Street. It was raining. The argument blew up from nowhere, ostensibly some trivial disagreement about whether to see a film or spend the evening at my flat, but in reality the tensions had been there for days. I was cold and feeling angry, and disproportionately conscious of the cars and lorries accelerating away from the lights, their tyres noisy on the wet road, The pub by Baker Street Station had just opened, but to get there meant we had to cross the road by the pedestrian underpass. Gracia was a claustrophobe; it was raining, we started shouting. I left her there and never saw her again.

How had I been intending to deal with this? I would have known that before Felicity arrived; everything about the text spoke of an anticipated continuity.

Felicity’s arrival had been doubly intrusive. Apart from interrupting me, she had imposed different ideas about perceived truth. For instance, she had brought new information about Gracia. I knew that Gracia had taken an overdose after our row, but it had not been important. Once before in our relationship, Gracia had taken a small overdose after an argument; even she had said later that it was a way of drawing attention to herself. Then during that chilling doorstep argument with her flatmate, the importance of it had been diminished by the girl. Through her dislike of me, through her evident contempt, the bitter information had been passed, but minimized somehow; it was not for me to worry about it. I took it at face value. Perhaps even then Gracia had been in hospital. Felicity told me she had nearly died. But the truth, the higher truth, was that I had evaded it. I had not wanted to know. Felicity made me know. Gracia had made what was probably a serious attempt on her life.

I could, in my manuscript, describe a Gracia who drew attention to herself; I did not know a Gracia who would make a serious effort to kill herself.

Because Felicity had revealed a side of Gracia’s character I had never detected before, did it also mean that there were other parts of my life where I made similar failures of judgement? How much truth was I capable of telling?

Then there was the source, Felicity herself. In my life she was not an impartial figure. It was part of her tactic to me, as it always had been, to present herself as maturer, wiser, more sensible, more practised in life. From the time we had played together as children she had always sought dominance over me, whether it was the temporary advantage of being slightly bigger than me, or the knowingness, assumed or otherwise, of being in adulthood that little bit more experienced. Felicity arrogated to herself a normality that was deemed superior to mine. While I remained unmarried and lived in rented rooms, she had a family, a house, a bourgeois respectability. Her way of life was not mine, yet she assumed I aspired to it, and because I had not yet achieved it she gave herself the right to be critical.

Her manner since her arrival was entirely consistent with her normal attitude to me: a curious mixture of concern and criticism, misunderstanding not only me but what I was trying to do with my life.

It was all there in Chapter Four, and I thought I had at last dealt with it by writing of it. Yet she had done her damage, and the manuscript had been halted a few pages from the end.

She threw into question everything I had tried to do, and there, at the actual interface, the last words I had written, was the evidence. The sentence lay unfinished on the page: “…but when I looked back—”

But what? I typed in, “Seri was waiting”, then promptly crossed it out. It was not what I had intended to say, even if, ironically, those actual words were what I had been going to write. The motivating impulse had died with the sentence.

I glanced back through the bulk of the manuscript. It made a satisfactorily heavy pile: well over two hundred pages of type written script. It felt solid in my hand, a proof of my existence.

Now, though, I had to question what I had done. I sought the truth, but Felicity reminded me of its tenuous nature. She could not see my white room.

Suppose someone disagreed with my version of the truth?

Felicity certainly would, even assuming I allowed her to read it. And Gracia too, from what Felicity said, would probably remember a different version of the same events. My parents, were they still around, would probably be shocked by some of the things I had said about childhood.

So truth was subjective, but I had never pretended otherwise. The manuscript aspired to be nothing more than an account of my own life, honestly told. I even made no claim for the quality or originality of my life. It was not unusual in any way, except to me. It was all I knew of myself, all I had in the world. No one could disagree with it because events were portrayed in the way I alone had perceived them.

I read the last completed page again, and scanned the two and a half lines once more. I began to sense what I was about to say. Gracia, in her guise as Seri, was at the street corner because—

The outside door banged, as if a shoulder was being rammed against it. I heard the handle rattle, and sounds from outside poured in. Felicity came into the room, laden with a rain-sodden paper carrier bag which she cradled in her arms.

“I’ll cook lunch, but after that you’d better pack. James says it’s best if we go back to Sheffield tonight.”

I stared at her incredulously, not because of what she said but in amazement at her timing. It beggared belief that she should twice interrupt me at precisely the same place.

I looked down at the retyped page. It was in every way identical to the one it had replaced.

Slowly, I wound it out of the typewriter carriage, and put it in its place at the bottom of the manuscript.

I sat silently while Felicity moved about the kitchen. She had bought an apron in the village. She washed the dirty dishes, put some chops on to cook.

When we had eaten I sat quietly at the table, retreating from Felicity with her plans and opinions and concern. Her normality was an infusion of madness into my life.

I would be fed and bathed and brought back to health. It was Father’s death that had done it. I had flipped. Not much, according to Felicity, but I had nevertheless flipped. I was not able to care for myself, so she would take over. I would see by her example what I was denying myself. We would make weekend forays to Edwin’s cottage, she and I and James, and the children too, and we would bustle about with brooms and paint brushes, and James and I would clear the overgrown garden, and in no time at all we would make the house habitable, and then Edwin and Marge would come and see it. When I was better we would all visit London, she and I and James, but perhaps not the children this time, and we would see Gracia, and the two of us would be left together to do whatever the two of us needed to do. I would not be allowed to flip again. I would visit Sheffield every two or three weeks, and we would go for long walks on the moors, and perhaps I should even travel abroad. I liked Greece, didn’t I? James could get me a job in Sheffield, or in London if I really wanted it, and Gracia and I would be happy together and get married and have—

I said: “What are you talking about, Felicity?”

“Were you listening to what I said?”

“Look, it’s stopped raining.”

“Oh God! You’re impossible! “

She was smoking a cigarette. I imagined the smoke drifting about my white room, settling on the new paintwork, yellowing it. It would reach the pages of my manuscript, discolouring those too, setting down a layer of Felicity’s influence.

The manuscript was like an unfinished piece of music. The fact of its incompleteness was bigger than its existence. Like a dominant seventh chord it sought resolution, a final tonic harmony.

Felicity started to clear away the plates, clattering them in the kitchen sink, so I picked up my manuscript and headed for the stairs.

“Are you going to pack?”

“I’m not coming with you,” I said. “I want to finish what I’m doing.”

She appeared from the kitchen, suds of washing-up liquid dripping from her hands.

“Peter, it’s all been decided. You’re coming back with me.”

“I’ve got work to do.”

“What is it you’ve been writing?”

“I told you once.”

“Let me see.” Her soapy hand extended, and I clutched the manuscript tightly.

“No one is ever to see this.”

Then she reacted the way I had expected before. She clicked her tongue, tilted her head quickly back; whatever it was I had done had not been worth doing.

I sat alone on the shambles of my sleeping-bag, holding the manuscript to me. I was near to tears. Downstairs, Felicity had discovered my empty whisky bottles, and was shouting up at me, accusing me of something.

No one would ever read my manuscript. It was the most private thing in the world, a definition of myself. I had told a story, and had crafted it to make it readable, but my intended audience was myself alone.

At last I went downstairs, to discover that Felicity had lined up my empty bottles in the small hallway at the bottom of the stairs. There were so many I had to step over them to get into my white room. Felicity was waiting there.

“Why did you bring in the bottles?” I said.

“You can’t leave them in the garden. What have you been trying to do, Peter, drink yourself to death?”

“I’ve been here for several months.”

“We’ll have to get someone to take them away. Next time we come here.”

“I’m not leaving with you,” I said.

“You can have the spare room. The children are out all day, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“You never have yet. Why should you start now?”

She had already taken some of my stuff and put it in the back of her car. Now she was closing windows, turning off taps, checking the plugs, I watched her mutely, holding the manuscript to my chest. It was spoiled now forever. The words would have to stay unwritten, the thought remain unfinished. I heard imaginary music in my head; the dominant seventh rang out, forever seeking its cadence. It began to fade, like the run-off track on a gramophone record, music replaced by unplanned crackle. Soon the stylus in my mind would settle in the final, central groove, indefinitely stuck but clicking with apparent meaning, thirty-three times a minute. Eventually someone would have to lift the pick-up arm away, and silence would fall.