"Why?"
"Because it matters. I mean, it would have mattered." I sensed myself heading into danger, disrupting something.
"I was with someone for a while. It was all last year."
Last year: the words made it sound as if it was a long time ago, but last year was still only three weeks ago. Now it was I who looked away. She knew the irrationality of my possessiveness.
"He was just a friend, Peter. A good friend. Someone I met who's been looking after me."
"Is that who you're still living with?"
"Yes, but I'm moving out. Don't be jealous, please don't he jealous. I was on my own, and I had to go into hospital, and when I came out you weren't there, and Steve came along just when I needed him."
I wanted to ask her about him, but at the same time I knew I wanted to ask to stake territory, not to hear answers. It was stupid and unfair, but I resented this Steve for being who he was, for being a friend. I resented him more for arousing in me an emotion, jealousy, that I had tried to rid myself of. Leaving Gracia had purged me of that, I thought, because only with her had it been so acute. Steve became in my mind everything I was not, everything that I could never he.
Gracia must have seen it in my eyes. She said: "You're being unreasonable about this."
"I know, but I can't help it."
She put down her cigarette and took my hand again.
"Look, this isn't about Steve," she said. "Why do you think I've come here today? I want _you_, Peter, because I still love you in spite of everything. I want to try again."
"I do too," I said. "But would it go wrong again?"
"No. I'll do anything to make it work. When we split up, I realized that we had to go through all that to be sure. It was me that was wrong before. You made all that effort, trying to repair things, and all I did was destroy. I knew what was happening, I could feel it inside me, but I was obsessed with myself, so miserable. I started to loathe you because you were trying so hard, because you couldn't see how awful I was being. I hated you because you wouldn't hate me."
"I never hated you," I said. "It just went wrong, again and again."
"And now I know why. All those things that caused tension before, they're gone. I've got a job, somewhere to live, I'm back in touch with my own friends. I was dependent on you for everything before. Now it really is different."
More different than she knew, because I had changed too. It seemed she possessed all the things that once were mine. My only possession now was self-knowledge, and that was on paper.
"Let me think," I said. "I want to try again, but . . ."
But I had lived for so long with uncertainty that I had grown used to it; I rejected Felicity's normality, James's security. I welcomed the unreliability of the next meal, the morbid fascinations of solitude, the introspective life. Uncertainty and loneliness drove me inwards, revealed me to myself. There would be an imbalance between Gracia and myself again, of the same type but weighted the opposite way. Would I cope with it any better than she had?
I loved Gracia; I knew it as I sat with her. I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone, including myself. Especially myself, because I was explicable only on paper, only by fictionalization and faulty memory. There was a perfection to myself as shaped by the manuscript, but it was the product of artifice. I had needed to re-invent myself, but I could never have invented Gracia. I remembered my faltering attempts to describe her through the girl, Seri. I had left out so much, and in making up for the omissions I had made her merely convenient. Such a word could never be applied to Gracia, and no other would describe her exactly. Gracia resisted description, whereas I had defined myself with ease.
Even so, making the attempt had served its purpose. In creating Seri I had failed, but then I had discovered something else. Gracia was affirmed.
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."