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.
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
