At this point, conscience struck me about the neglect in the house. I was disillusioned by my writing, and by my inability to cope with it, and I took the opportunity to take a break. I spent a few days in the garden, during the last hot days of September, cutting hack the overgrown shrubbery and plucking what fruit I could find still on the trees. I cut the lawn, dug over what remained of the dehydrated vegetable patch.
Afterwards, I painted another of the upstairs rooms.
Because I was away from my failed manuscript, I started to think about it again. I knew I needed to make one last effort to get it right. I had to bring shape to it, but to do so I had to straighten out my daily life.
The key to a purposeful life, I decided, lay in the organization of the day. I created a pattern of domestic habit: an hour a day to cleaning, two hours to Edwin's redecoration and the garden, eight hours for sleep. I would bathe regularly, eat by the clock, shave, wash my clothes, and for everything I did there would be an hour in the day and a day in the week. My need to write was obsessive but it was dominating my life, probably to the detriment of the writing itself.
Now, paradoxically liberated by having constrained myself, I began to write a third version, more smoothly and more effectively than ever before.
I knew at last exactly how my story must be told. If the deeper truth could only be told by falsehood--in other words, through metaphor--then to achieve total truth I must create total falsehood. My manuscript had to become a metaphor for myself.
I created an imaginary place and an imaginary life.
My first two attempts had been muted and claustrophobic. I described myself in terms of inwardness and emotion. External events had a shadowy, almost wraith-like presence beyond the edge of vision. This was because I found the real world imaginatively sterile; it was too anecdotal, too lacking in story. To create an imagined landscape enabled me to shape it to my own needs, to make it stand for certain personal symbols in my life. I had already made a fundamental step away from pure autobiographical narrative; now I took the process one stage further and placed the protagonist, my metaphorical self, in a wide and stimulating landscape.
I invented a city and I called it "Jethra", intending it to stand for a composite of London, where I had been born, and the suburbs of Manchester, where I had spent most of my childhood. J ethra was in a country called
"Faiandland", which was a moderate and slightly old-fashioned place, rich in tradition and culture, proud of its history but having difficulty in a modern and competitive world. I gave Faiandland a geography and laws and constitution. Jethra was its capital and principal port, situated on the southern coast. Later, I sketched in details of some of the other countries which made up this world; I even drew a rough map, but quickly threw it away because it codified the imagination.
As I wrote, this environment became almost as important as the experiences of my protagonist. I discovered, as before, that by invention of details the larger truths emerged.
I soon found my stride. The fictions of my earlier attempts now seemed awkward and contrived, but as soon as I transferred them to this imaginary world they took on plausibility and conviction. Before, I had changed the order of events merely to clarify them, but now I discovered that all this had had a purpose that only my subconscious had understood. The change to an invented background made sense of what I was doing.
Details accumulated. Soon I saw that in the sea to the south of Faiandland there would be islands, a vast archipelago of small, independent countries. For the people of Jethra, and for my protagonist in particular, these islands represented a form of wish, or of escape. To travel in these islands was to achieve some kind of purpose. At first I was not sure what this would be, but as I wrote I began to understand.
Against this background, the story I wanted to tell of my life emerged.
My protagonist had my own name, but all the people I had known were given false identities. My sister Felicity became "Kalia", Gracia became "Seri", my parents were concealed.
Because it was all strange to me I responded imaginatively to what I was writing, but because everything was in another sense totally familiar to me, the world of the other Peter Sinclair became one which I could recognize, and inhabit mentally.
I worked hard and regularly, and the pages of the new manuscript began to pile up. Every evening I would finish work at the time I had predetermined on my daily chart, and then I would go over the finished pages, making minor corrections to the text. Sometimes I would sit on my chair in my white room, with the manuscript on my lap, and I would feel the weight of it and know that I was holding in my hands everything about me that was worth telling or that could be told.
It was a separate identity, an identical self, yet it was outside me and was fixed. It would not age as I would age, nor could it ever be destroyed. It had a life beyond the paper on which it was typewritten; if I burned it, or someone took it away from me, it would still exist on some higher plane. Pure truth had an unageing quality; it would outlive me.
This final version could not have been more different from those first tentative pages I had written a few months before. It was a mature, outward account of a life, truthfully told. Everything about it was invention, apart from the use of my own name, yet everything it contained, every word and sentence, was as true in the high sense of the word as truth could attain.
This I knew beyond doubt or question.
I had found myself, explained myself, and in a very personal sense of the word I had _defined_ myself.
At last I could feel the end of my story approaching. It was no longer a problem. As I worked I had felt it take shape in my mind, as earlier the story itself had taken form. It was merely a question of setting it down, of typing the pages. I only sensed what the ending would be; I would not know the actual words until the moment came to write them. With that would come my release, my fulfilment, my rehabilitation into the world.
But then, when I had less than ten pages to go, everything was disrupted beyond any hope of retrieval.
4
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 off. 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.