evening, I can talk to you about it.'
'How long is it?'
'Quite long. More than two hundred pages, but it's typewritten. It shouldn't take too long.'
'Where is it?'
I passed it to her.
'Why don't you just talk to me, like you did on the boat?' She was holding the manuscript loosely, letting the pages spread. 'I feel this is, well, something you wrote for yourself, something private.'
'It's what you've got to use.' I started to explain my motives for writing it, what I had been trying to do, but Seri moved away to the other bed and began to read. She turned the pages quickly, as if she was only skimming, and I wondered how much of it she could take in with such a superficial reading.
I watched her as she went through the first chapter, the long explanatory passage where I was working out my then dilemma, my series of misfortunes, my justification for self-examination. She reached the second chapter, and because I was watching closely I noticed that she paused on the first page and read the opening paragraph again. She looked back to the first chapter.
She said: 'Can I ask you something?'
'Shouldn't you read a bit more?'
'I don't understand.' She put down the pages and looked at me oven them.
'I thought you said you came from Jethra?'
'That's right.'
'Then why do you say you were born somewhere else?' She looked again at the word. ' 'London' . . . where's that?'
'Oh, that,' I said. 'That's an invented name . . . it's difficult to explain. It's Jethra really, but I was trying to convey the idea that as you grow up the place you're in seems to change. 'London' is a state of mind. It describes my parents, I suppose, what they were like and where they were living when I was born.'
'Let me read,' Seri said, not looking at me, staring down at the page.
She read more slowly now, checking back several times. I began to feel uncomfortable, interpreting her difficulties as a form of criticism. Because I had defined myself to myself, because I had never imagined that anyone else would ever read it, I had taken for granted that my method would be obvious.
Seri, the first person in the world to read my book, frowned and read haltingly, turning the pages forward and back.
'Give it back to me,' I said at last. 'I don't want you to read any more.'
'I've got to,' she said. 'I've got to understand.'
But time passed and not much was clear to her. She started asking me questions:
'Who is Felicity?'
'What are the Beatles?'
'Where is Manchester, Sheffield, Pinaeus?'
'What is England, and which island is it on?'
'Who is Gracia, and why has she tried to kill herself?'
'Who was Hitler, what war are you talking about, which cities had they bombed?'
'Who is Alice Dowden?'
'Why was Kennedy assassinated?'
'When were the sixties, what is marijuana, what is a psychedelic rock?'
'You've mentioned London again . . . I thought it was a state of mind?'
'Why do you keep talking about Gracia?'
'What happened at Watergate?'
I said, but Seri did not seem to hear: 'There's a deeper truth in fiction, because memory is faulty.'
'Who _is_ Gracia?'
'I love you, Seri,' I said, but the words sounded hollow and unconvincing, even to me.
16
I love you, Gracia,' I said, kneeling on the threadbare carpet beside her. She was sprawled against the bed, half on, half off, no longer crying but silent. I was always uncomfortable when she said nothing, because it became impossible to comprehend her. Sometimes she was silent because she was hurt, sometimes because she simply had nothing to say, but sometimes because it was her way of taking revenge on me. She said my own silences were manipulative of her. Thus the complexities doubled, and I no longer knew how to behave. Even her anger was sometimes false, leading me to a response that she would call predictable; inevitably when her anger was real I took her less seriously, infuriating her more.
A declaration of love was the only common language left, yet it was spoken more by me than by her. The context of our rows made it sound hollow, even to me.
Tonight's now had been genuine, albeit trivial in origin. I had promised to keep the evening free to go with her to see some friends for dinner.
