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 typewritten 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 Iliad said about childhood.
So truth was subjective, but I had never pretended otherwise. The manuscript aspired to he 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 seilse 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 sonic 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 he happy together and get married and have--