I said nothing, looking back into her earnest eyes.
She said: "The questionnaire becomes the basis for your new life. You become what you wrote. Doesn't that scare you?"
I remembered the long months in Golan's villa in the hills near Jethra, my quest to tell the truth, the various devices I had used to discover that truth, the certainty that I had succeeded, and, finally, the sense of renewal I had felt when I finished. That manuscript, presently lying in my hotel room in Muriseay Town, contained my life as surely as words contained meaning. I had already become what I had written. I was _defined_ by my work.
I said: "No, it doesn't scare me."
"It does me. That's why I want to be there with you. I don't believe what they claim, that the patients recover their identities."
I hugged her, and although she resisted at first she soon relaxed and lay down beside me again.
"I haven't made up my mind yet. But I think I'll go to the island, and decide when I'm there."
Seri said nothing, holding herself against me.
"I've got to find out for myself," I said.
Her face buried in my side, Seri said: "Can I come with you?"
"Yes, of course."
"Talk to me, Peter. While we travel, tell me who you are. I want to know you."
We drifted off into sleep soon after that. During the night I dreamed I was hanging on a rope beneath a waterfall, spinning and bobbing in the relentless torrent. Gradually my limbs became stiffer and my mind became frozen, until I shifted in my sleep and the dream died.
10
It was raining in Sheffield. I had been given the small front bedroom in Felicity's house, and when I was there I could be alone. I would sometimes stand for hours at the window looking across the roofs at the industrial scenery beyond. Sheffield was an ugly, functional city, fallen from its great days of steelworking, now an untidy urban mess that flowed up to the Pennine Hills in the west and blended under the arches of the motorway viaduct with the smaller town of Rotherham to the east. It was on this side of Sheffield that Felicity and James had their house.
Greenway Park was an island of clean middle-class houses and gardens, surrounded by the older and gloomier suburbs of the city. In the centre of the estate the planners had left an open space of about half an acre, in which young saplings had been planted, and into which the residents took their dogs to defecate. Felicity and James had a dog, and his name was Jasper or Jasperboy, depending.
From the moment I arrived at the house, I entered a complicated, withdrawn state of mind. I acknowledged that Felicity was doing me a favour, that I had made a mess of my life in Edwin's cottage, that the time had come for a form of recuperation, and so I became submissive and compliant. I knew that my obsessive interest in my manuscript was responsible for my errors, so I tried to put it out of my mind. At the same time, I continued in the belief that the work I had been doing was crucial to my sense of identity, and that Felicity had dragged me away from it. I was therefore deeply resentful and angry, and I withdrew from her.
I became detached from life in her house, and was obsessed with trivia.
I could not help but notice everything. I was critical of the house, their habits, their attitudes. I disliked their friends. I felt suffocated by their closeness, their normality. I watched the way James ate, the fact that he had a little paunch, that he went jogging. I noted the television programmes they watched, the sort of food Felicity cooked, the things they said to their children. These two, Alan and Tarnsin, were for a time allies, because I too was treated like a child.
I suppressed my feelings. I tried to join in with their life, to show the gratitude that I knew I ought to feel, but Felicity and I had simply grown apart. Everything about her life grated on me.
Many weeks went by. Autumn passed and winter came; Christmas was a brief respite because the children became more important than me. But in general we were irritants for each other.
On alternate weekends all five of us would drive down in James's Volvo to the house in Herefordshire. These were expeditions I dreaded, although Felicity and James seemed to look forward to them. It gave the children a taste for the countryside, Felicity said, and Jasper-boy enjoyed the exercise.
The house was shaping up well, James said, and often telephoned Edwin and Marge to give them what he called progress reports. I was always made to work in the garden, clearing the tangle of overgrown shrubs and making them into compost. James and Felicity and the children concentrated on the decorating. My white room, still intact until these visits, was the first to be done: magnolia emulsion made a tasteful background for the curtain material Marge had described on the phone to Felicity. James hired local electricians and plasterers, and soon the simple cottage was turned into just what Edwin and Marge wanted.
Felicity helped me in the garden one weekend, and while I was on the other side of the house she uprooted the honeysuckle and dumped it on the huge new heap that would one day decay into garden compost.
I said: "That was a honeysuckle."
"It was dead, whatever it was."
"Plants lose their leaves in winter," I said. "It's called nature."
"Then that proves it wasn't a honeysuckle, because they're evergreen."
I rescued the plant from the heap, and stuck its roots back in the soil, but when we returned two weeks later it had mysteriously vanished. I was extremely saddened by this vandalism, because the honeysuckle was something I had loved. I remembered those evening scents while I was writing in my white room, and it was this incident that at last returned me to my manuscript. As soon as we were back in Greenway Park I took it from my holdall where I kept it hidden, and started to read through it.
I had difficulty with it at first, because I was disappointed with what I found. It was as if, during the weeks I had been away from it, the words had decayed or diminished. What I found seemed like a synopsis for the real thing.
Later pages were better, but I was unhappy.
I knew I ought to go through the manuscript yet again, but something held me back. I shrank away from the prospect of renewing Felicity's interest in what I had been writing; while the manuscript was hidden in my bag I could forget it, and so could Felicity. Everyone said how well I was doing.
The manuscript was a reminder of my past, what I might have been. It was dangerous to me; it excited me and seduced me, charged me with imagination, but the reality of it was a disappointment.
So I stared at the unsatisfactory pages spread on the table in my room, and for a while I stood at the window and looked across the city at the distant Pennines, and then at last I bulked the pages and squared them off and returned them to the holdall. Afterwards, I stood by the window for the rest of the afternoon, playing idly with the macrame plant holder that hung from the ceiling, and watched the city lights come on as the Pennines receded into the mist.
With the coming of the New Year the weather deteriorated, and so too did the atmosphere in the house. The children no longer wanted to play with me, and although James remained superficially friendly to me, Felicity became almost overtly hostile. She served my food at mealtimes in a glaring silence, and if I offered to help around the house I was told to keep out of the way. I spent more and more time in my room, standing by the window and looking at the snow on the distant hills.
The Pennine Chain had always been an important part of my mental environment. Childhood in the Manchester suburb: safe houses and streets with neighbours and gardens, school close at hand, but always a few miles to the east, dark and undulating and wild, the Pennine Hills. Now I was to the other side of them but the hills were the same: a barren wilderness bisecting England. It seemed to me they were a symbol of neutrality, a balance, dividing my past life from my present. Perhaps there, in the steep curving valleys between the limestone moors, was some more abstract clue to where I had failed in my life. Living on a small island like Britain, modern and civilized, one felt the elements less. There were just the sea and the hills, and in Sheffield the hills were nearer. I needed something elemental to clarify me.