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 hit 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 typingspeed 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.