"I had no idea," I said. "How on earth did you manage to make sense of this?"
"I'm not sure we have. We've had to leave a lot of it out. Lareen was extremely angry with you."
"Why? It's hardly my fault."
"She wanted you to fill out her questionnaire, but you refused. You said that everything we needed to know about you was in this.''
I must have sincerely believed that at the time. At some stage of my life I had written this incomprehensible manuscript, devoutly believing that it described myself and my background. I tried to imagine the sort of mentality that could have held such a belief, against all reason. Yet my name was on the first page. Once, before the treatment, I had written this and I had known what I was doing.
I felt a poignant loneliness for myself. Behind me, as if beyond an unscalable wall, was an identity, purpose and intelligence that I had lost. I needed that mind to explain to me what had been written.
I glanced through the rest of the pages. Seri's deletions and substitutions continued. What _had_ I intended?
The question was more interesting to me than the details. In answering it I should gain an insight into myself, and thus into the world I had lost.
Had it been these fictitious names and places--the Felicitys, the Manchestens, the Gracias--that had come to me in my delirium, haunting me afterwards? Those delirious images remained a part of my consciousness, were a fundamental if inexplicable pant of what I had become. To ignore them would be to turn my back on understanding more.
I was still mentally receptive, still urging to learn.
After a while I said to Seri: "Can we go on?"
"It doesn't become any clearer."
"Yes, but I'd like to."
She took a few pages from me. "Are you sure this means nothing to you?"
"Not yet."
"Lareen was certain you would react wrongly to it." She laughed, shortly. "It seems a bit silly now, when I think of all the trouble we went to."
We read a few more pages together, but Seri had spent too long with the manuscript and she grew tired.
"I'll go on by myself," I said.
"All right. It's not going to do any harm."
She lay down on the other bed, reading a novel. I continued with the manuscript, working painstakingly through the inconsistencies, as once, several times, Seri must have done. Occasionally I asked for her help, and she told me what she had had in mind, but each new interpretation only made my curiosity greaten. It confirmed what I knew of myself, but it also confirmed my doubts.
Later, Seri undressed and went to bed to sleep. I read on, the manuscript nesting on my lap. In the warm evening I was shintless and barefoot, and as I read I could feel the rush mat abrading pleasantly against the soles of my feet.
It struck me that if there was any truth at all in the manuscript, then it could only be the truth of anecdote. There seemed to be no deeper pattern, no sense of metaphor.
It was the anecdotes that Seri had most frequently deleted. One or two of them she had pointed out to me, explaining that she found them incomprehensible. So they were to me, but because I was making no headway against the shape of the story, I began to look more closely at the details.
One of the longest deleted passages, occupying several pages of the text, dealt with the sudden arrival in "my" childhood life of a certain "Uncle William". He entered the stony with all the bravado of a pirate, bringing a scent of the sea and a glimpse of foreign lands. He had captivated me because he was disgraceful and disapproved of, because he smoked a vile pipe and had warts on his hands; yet he also fascinated me while I read of him, because the passage was written with conviction and humour, a plausible-seeming account of an influential experience. I realized that Uncle William, on Billy, as I seemed to remember him, was as attractive a personality to me now as he had been when I was a child. He had really existed, he had really lived.
Yet Seri had deleted him. She knew nothing of him, so she had tried to destroy him.
So far as I was concerned it would take more than a few pencil strokes to remove him. There was a truth to Uncle William, a truth that was far higher than mere anecdote.
I remembered him; I remembered that day.
Suddenly, I knew how to remember the rest. It was not whether the material could he crossed out, on whether names could be substituted. What mattered was the text itself, its shapes and patterns, those meanings that were only alluded to, the metaphors that until then I had been incapable of seeing. The manuscript was full of memories.
I went to tile beginning of the text, and started to read it through.
Then of course I remembered the events that had taken nie to my white room in Edwin's cottage, and all that had gone before. As I remembered I became reassured, united with my real past, but then I became scared. In remembering myself, I discovered how profoundly lost I had become.
Outside the white-painted chalet the grounds of the clinic were quiet.
The nipple of my awareness spread outwards: to Collago Town, to the nest of the island, to the Midway Sea and the innumerable islands, to Jethra. Yet where were they?
I read to the end, to the unfinished scene between Gracia and myself on the corner by Baker Street Station, and then I collected the typewritten sheets and shaped them into a tidy stack. I found my holdall beneath the bed and packed the manuscript at the bottom. Quietly, so as not to wake Seri, I packed my clothes and other possessions, checked that I had my money, then prepared to leave.
I looked back at Seri. She was sleeping on her stomach like a child, her head turned to one side. I wanted to kiss her, gently stroke her naked back, but I could not risk waking her. She would stop me if she knew I was leaving.
I watched her for two or three silent minutes, wondering who she really was, and knowing that once I left I should never meet her again.
The door eased open quietly; outside was darkness, and the warm sea wind. I returned to my bed to collect my holdall, but as I did so I kicked something that lay on the floor by Seri's shoulder bag, and it clinked against the metal leg of her bed. She stirred, then settled. I crouched down to pick up whatever it was I had kicked. It was a small bottle, made of dark green glass, hexagon shaped. The cork was missing and the label had been removed, but I knew instinctively what it must once have contained, and why Seri had bought it. I sniffed at the neck of the bottle and smelled camphor.
Then I nearly did not go. I stood beside the bed, looking sadly down at the sleeping girl, innocently tired, selfless to me, vulnerably naked, her hair folded untidily across her brow, her lips slightly parted.
At last I put down the empty elixir bottle where I had found it, collected my holdall, then left. In the dark I got through the gate and walked down the hill into Collago Town. Here I waited by the harbour until the town woke up, and as soon as the shipping office opened I inquired when the next steamer would be departing. One had left only the day before; the next would not he for another three days. Anxious to leave the island before Lareen or Seri found me, I took the first small ferry that came, crossing the narrow channel to the next island. Later that day, I moved again. When I was sure no one would find me--I was on the island of Hetta, in an isolated tavern--I bought some timetables and maps, and started to plan my return journey to London. I was haunted by the unfinished manuscript, the unresolved scene with Gracia.
21
The fact was that Gracia had brought me to an ending. Hen suicide attempt was too big to be contained in my life. She swept everything aside, admitting of nothing else. Hen drastic act even overshadowed the news that she was not to die as a result. Whether or not she had seriously intended to die was secondary to the gesture she made. She had succeeded in shocking me out of myself.
I was obsessed by an imagined picture of her at that very moment: she would be lying semi-conscious in a hospital bed, with bottles and tubes and unwashed hair. I wanted to be with her.