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 he 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 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.
