Minutes passed in silence, and I stared at the table-top as I felt my complicated emotions and feelings turn within me. I experi_ enced again the same sort of instincts that had driven me to my first attempt at the manuscript: the wish to straighten out my ideas, to nationalize what perhaps would be better left unclear.
Just as from now I should always be a product of what I had written, so too would Gracia be understood through Seri. Her other identity, the convenient Seri of my imagination, would he the key to her reality. I had never been fully able to understand Gracia, but from now Seri would he there to make me recognize what I _did_ comprehend of her.
The islands of the Dream Archipelago would always be with me; Seri would always haunt my relationship with Gracia.
I needed to simplify, to let the turbulence subside. I knew too much, I understood too little.
At the heart of it all was an absolute, that I had discovered I still loved Gracia. I said to her: 'I'm really sorry everything went wrong before.
It wasn't your fault.'
'Well, it was.'
'I don't care about that. It was my fault too. It's all in the past.'
Distractingly, the thought came that it too, the split-up, had been somehow defined by my writing. Could it all have been as easy as that? 'What are we going to do now?'
'°Whatever you like. That's why I'm here.'
'I've got to get away from Felicity,' I said. 'I'm only staying with her because I've nowhere else to go.'
'I told you I'm moving. This week, if I can manage it. Do 'you want to try living with me?'
As I realized what she had said I felt a thrill of sexual excitement; I imagined lovemaking again.
'What do you think about that?' I said.
Gracia smiled briefly. We had never actually lived together, although at the height of the relationship we would often spend several consecutive nights together. She had always had somewhere of her own to stay, and I had mine. In the past we had resisted the idea of moving in together, perhaps because both of us feared we might tire of each other. In the end it had taken less than that to split us up.
I said: 'If I lived with you because I had nowhere else to go, it would fail. You know that.'
'Don't think of it like that. It invites failure.' She was leaning towards me across the table, and our hands were still clenched. 'I've worked this out on my own. I came up here today because of what I decided. I was stupid before. It _was_ my fault, whatever you say. But I've changed, and I think you've grown too. It was only selfishness that made me react awa from you before.'
'I was very happy,' I said, and suddenly we were kissing, reaching awkwardly towards each other across the table-top. We upset Gnacia's coffee cup, and it fell on the floor, breaking into pieces. We started trying to mop up the spilled coffee with paper serviettes, and the woman came with a cloth.
Later, we walked through the cold streets of Castleton, then followed a path that led up one of the hills. When we had climbed for about a quarter of an hour we came to a place above the tree line where we could see down over the village. In the car park the back door of the Volvo was open. A few more cars had driven in since we were there, and these were parked in a line beside it.
Amongst them was Gracia's; she had told mc she could drive, but in all the time I had known her she had never owned a car.
We stared down at Felicity's little family group huddled around their car.
Gracia said: 'I don't really want to meet Felicity today. I owe her too much.'
'So do I,' I said, knowing it was true, yet nevertheless continuing to resent her. I would as soon never see Felicity again, so troubled were my feelings about her. I remembered James being smug, Felicity being patronizing.
Even as I took advantage of them, and sponged off Felicity, I resented everything they stood for and rejected anything they offered me.
It was cold on the hillside, with the wind curling down from the moors above, and Gracia held close to me.
'Shall we go somewhere?' she said.
'I'd like to spend the night with you.'
'So would I . . . but I haven't any money.'
'I've got enough,' I said. 'My father left me some, and I've been living off it all year. Let's find a hotel.'
By the time we had walked down to the village, Felicity and the others had gone off again. We wrote a note and left it under the windscreen wipers, then drove to Buxton in Gracia's car.
The following Monday I went with Gracia to Greenway Park, collected my stuff, thanked Felicity effusively for everything she had done for me, and left the house as quickly as I could. Gracia waited in the car and Felicity did not go out to see her. The atmosphere in the house remained tense all the time I was there. Resentments and accusations were suppressed. I had a sudden, eerie feeling that this would be the last time I should ever see my sister, and that she knew it too. I was unmoved by the idea, yet as we drove down the crowded motorway to London my thoughts were not of Gracia and what we were about to start, but of my ungracious and inexplicable resentment of my sister.
I had my manuscript safe in my holdall, and I resolved that as soon as I had the time in London I would read through the sections dealing with Kalia, and try to understand. As we drove along it seemed to me that all my weaknesses and failings were explained to me in the manuscript, but that in addition there were clues to a new beginning.
I had created it by the force of imagination; now I could release that imagination and channel it into a
