I worked hard and regularly, and the pages of the new manuscript began to pile up. Every evening I would finish work at the time I had predetermined on my daily chart, and then I would go over the finished pages, making minor corrections to the text. Sometimes I would sit on my chair in my white room, with the manuscript on my lap, and I would feel the weight of it and know that I was holding in my hands everything about me that was worth telling or that could be told.
It was a separate identity, an identical self, yet it was outside me and was fixed. It would not age as I would age, nor could it ever be destroyed. It had a life beyond the paper on which it was typewritten; if I burned it, or someone took it away from me, it would still exist on some higher plane. Pure truth had an unageing quality; it would outlive me.
This final version could not have been more different from those first tentative pages I had written a few months before. It was a mature, outward account of a life, truthfully told. Everything about it was invention, apart from the use of my own name, yet everything it contained, every word and sentence, was as true in the high sense of the word as truth could attain.
This I knew beyond doubt or question.
I had found myself, explained myself, and in a very personal sense of the word I had _defined_ myself.
At last I could feel the end of my story approaching. It was no longer a problem. As I worked I had felt it take shape in my mind, as earlier the story itself had taken form. It was merely a question of setting it down, of typing the pages. I only sensed what the ending would be; I would not know the actual words until the moment came to write them. With that would come my release, my fulfilment, my rehabilitation into the world.
But then, when I had less than ten pages to go, everything was disrupted beyond any hope of retrieval.
4
The drought had at last broken, and it had been raining continuously for the past week. The lane leading to the house was an almost impassable morass of deep puddles and squelching mud. I heard the car before I saw it: the revving engine and the tyres sucking out of the sticky mud. I hunched over the typewriter, dreading an interruption, and I stared down at the last words I had written, holding them there with my eyes lest they should slip.
The car halted outside the house, beyond the hedge and just out of sight. I could hear the engine running slowly and the wiper-blades thwacking to and fro across the windscreen. Then the engine was turned off, and a car door slammed.
'Hello? Peter, are you there?' The voice came from outside, and I recognized it as Felicity's.
I continued to stare at my unfinished page, hoping that by silence I could fend her off. I was so nearly finished. I wanted to see no one.
'Peter, let me in! It's pouring with rain!'
She came to the window and tapped on the glass. I turned to look at her because she had dimmed the daylight.
'Open the door. I'm getting soaked through.'
'What do you want?' I said, staring at my unfinished page and seeing the words recede.
'I've come to see you. You haven't answered my letters. Look, don't just sit there. I'm getting wet!'
'There's no lock,' I said, and waved my hand in the general direction of the front door.
In a moment I heard the handle turn and the door scraped open. I knelt on the floor, scooping up my neatly typed pages, sorting them into a pile. I did not want Felicity to read what I had written, I wanted no one to see it. I seized the last page from the typewriter, and placed it at the bottom of the pile. I was trying to sort the pages into my carefully devised sequence when Felicity came into the room.
'There's a heap of mail out there,' she said. 'No wonder you haven't replied. Don't you ever look at your post?'
'I've been busy,' I said. I was checking through the numbered pages, fearing that some might have gone out of order. I was wishing I had taken a carbon copy of my work, and kept it in some secret place.
Felicity had come right into the room, and was standing over me.
'I had to come, Peter. You sounded so strange on the phone, and James and I both felt something must be wrong. When you didn't answer the letters, I telephoned Edwin. What are you doing?'
'Leave me alone,' I said. 'I'm busy. I don't want you interrupting me.'
I had numbered each page carefully, but 72 was missing. I searched around for it, and some of the others slipped to the side.
'God, this place is a mess!'
For the first time I looked straight at her. I felt an odd sensation of recognizing her, as if she were somebody I had created. I remembered her from the manuscript: she was there and her name was Kalia. My sister Kalia, two years older than me, married to a man named Yallow.
'Felicity, what do you want?'
'I was worried about you. And I was right to be worried. Look at the state of this room! Do you ever clean it?'
I stood up, holding my manuscript pages. Felicity turned away to go into the kitchen. I was trying to think of somewhere I could hide the manuscript until Felicity left. She had seen it but she could have no idea of what I had been writing, nor how important it was.
There was a clattering of metal and crockery, and I heard a gasp from Felicity. I went to the kitchen door and watched what she was doing. She was standing by the sink, moving the plates and pans to one side.
'Have Edwin and Marge seen the mess you're making of their house?' she said. 'You never could look after yourself, but this is the limit. The whole place stinks!'
She forced open the window and the room filled with the sound of rain.
