At last I stepped back from her, but held her hands. Gracia stood looking down at the ground, then let go of my hands, blew her nose on a tissue. She reached into the car for her shoulder bag, then slammed the door.
I held her again, arms around her back, but not pressing her to me. She kissed me, and we laughed.
"I didn't think I'd see you again," I said.
"Neither did I. I didn't want to, for a long time."
"Where have you been living?"
"I moved in with a friend." She had looked away, briefly. "What about you?"
"I was down in the country for a time. I had to sort things out. Since then I've been with Felicity."
"I know. She told me."
"Is that why you--?"
She glanced at James's Volvo, then said: "Felicity told me you'd be here. I wanted to see you again."
Felicity had arranged the meeting, of course. After the weekend I had spent in Sheffield with Gracia, Felicity had gone out of her way to befriend her. But the two women were not friends, in the usual sense. Felicity's gestures towards Gracia had been political, significant to me. She saw Gracia as a victim of my shortcomings, and helping Gracia was her way of expressing disapproval of me, and something more generaclass="underline" responsibility, and sisterhood between women. It was revealing that Felicity had not arranged the meeting at Greenway Park. She probably despised Gracia without knowing it. Gracia was just a wounded bird, someone to be helped with a splint and a spoon of warm milk. That I had done the wounding was where her concern began, naturally enough.
We started walking into the village, holding hands and pressing shoulders, heedless of the cold and the wind. I had become alive in my mind, sensing a further move forward. I had not felt like this since before my father died. I had been obsessed with the past too long, too concerned with myself. All that I had been damming up in me now flowed towards an outlet: Gracia, part of my past yet returning.
The main street of the village was narrow and winding, pressed in by the grey houses. Traffic went through noisily, throwing up fine spray with the tyres.
"Can we find somewhere for coffee?" Gracia said. She had always drunk a lot of cheap instant coffee, made too weakly and with white sugar. I squeezed her hand, remembering a stupid argument.
In a tiny side street we found a café, the front room of a terraced house, converted with a large pane of plate glass and metaltopped tables.
Little glass ashtrays rested exactly in the centre of each one. It was so quiet as we went in that I assumed the place was closed, but after we had been seated for a minute or two, a woman in a blue gingham kitchen overall came to take our order. Gracia ordered two poached eggs, as well as coffee; she had been driving since half_past seven, she said.
"Are you still staving with your friend?" I said.
"At the moment. That's one of the things I want to talk to you about.
I've got to move out soon, but there's a place coming up. I want to know whether to take it or not."
"How much is it?"
"Twelve pounds a week. Controlled rent. But it's a basement, and not a very good area."
"Take it," I said, thinking of London rents.
"That's all I wanted to know," Gracia said, and stood up. "I'll go now."
"What?"
I watched her in amazement as she turned towards the door. But I had forgotten Gracia's odd sense of humour. She leaned forward against the condensation-covered window, made a squiggle with her fingertip, then came back to the table. She ruffled my hair as she passed. Before sitting down again she shrugged off the fur coat and let it fall over the back of the chair.
"Why didn't you write to me, Peter?"
"I did . . . but you never answered."
"That came too soon. Why didn't you write again?"
"I didn't know where you were. And I wasn't sure your flatmate was forwarding mail."
"You could have found me. Your sister did."
"I know. The real reason is ... I didn't think you wanted to hear from me."
"Oh, I did." She had the ashtray in her fingers, turning it around. She was smiling slightly. "I think I wanted the chance to throw you out again. At least, I did at first."
"I really didn't know how upset you were," I said, and the devil of conscience reminded me of those hot summer days, obsessively writing about myself. I had had to put Gracia from my mind, I needed to find myself. Was this the truth?
The woman came back then, and put down two cups of coffee. Gracia heaped in the sugar, stirred the liquid slowly.
"Look, Peter, it's all passed now." She took my hand across the top of the table, gripping it firmly. "I got over it. I had a lot of problems, and it was difficult for a while. I needed a break, that's all. I saw some other people, talked a lot. But I'm over it all now. What about you?"
"I think so," I said.
The fact was that Gracia exerted an irresistible sexual influence over me. When we split up, one of the worst things about it was the thought of her in bed with someone else. She had often used that as an unstated threat, one used to hold us together yet one which eventually drove us apart. When I had finally convinced myself that we had reached the end, the only way I knew of coping was to close my mind to her. My possessiveness was irrational, because in spite of the sexual magnetism we had not often been good lovers for each other, but nonetheless my awareness of her sexuality pervaded everything I did with her and every thought I had of her. I was aware of it now, sitting there in the bleak café with her: the unbrushed hair, her loose and careless clothes, colourless skin, vagueness behind the eyes, tension within. Above all, perhaps, the fact that Gracia had always cared for me, even when I did not deserve it, or when her neuroses came like radio interference to our attempts to communicate.
"Felicity said you weren't well, that you've been acting strangely."
"That's just Felicity," I said.
"Are you sure?"
"Felicity and I don't get on too well," I said. "We've grown apart. She wants me to he like her. We've got different standards."
Gracia was frowning, looking down at her cup of coffee.
"She told me frightening things about you. I wanted to see you."
"Is that why you're here?"
"No . . . just a part of it."
"What sort of things was she telling you?"
Still avoiding my eves, she said: "That you were hitting the bottle again, and not eating properly."
A sense of relief that that was all. "Does that seem as if it's true?"
"I don't know."
"Look at me and tell me."
"No, it doesn't."
She had glanced at me, but now she kept her eyes averted as she drained her cup. The woman arrived with Gracia's eggs.
"Felicity's materialistic," I said. "She's full of wrong ideas about me.
All I wanted to do after we split up was get away somewhere on my own, and try to work things out."
I stopped talking because I had suddenly been distracted by the kind of stray thought that had come so often in the last few weeks. I knew that I was not telling Gracia the whole story; somehow that kind of wholeness had been sucked out of me by my manuscript. Only there lay the truth. Would I one day have to show it to her?
I waited while Gracia finished her meal--she ate the first egg quickly, then picked at the second; she had never had a long attention span for food---and then I ordered two more coffees. Gracia lit a cigarette. I had been waiting for that, wondering if she still smoked.
I said then: "Why couldn't you have seen me last year? After the row?"
"Because I couldn't, that's all. I'd had enough and it was still too soon. I wanted to see you but you were always so critical of me. I was just demoralized. I needed time to put things right."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I shouldn't have said those things."
Gracia shook her head. "They don't mean anything now."
"Is that why you're here?"
"I've sorted things out. I told you, I'm feeling a lot better."
"Have you been with another guy?"