He did not feel about it. Memories of sorts now came from his lost weeks, but they were fragmentary and disconcerting, appearing from some subconscious or nearconscious level of his mind.
Real memories are a muddle of overlooked experience; odd and irrelevant facts lurk in the mind, stubbornly unforgotten after a period of years; snatches of forgotten tunes appear unsummoned in the head; strange associations exist—a smell will evoke a particular event, a color will be an inexplicable reminder of a place visited long ago. Grey had such normal memory capabilities concerning most of his past life, but his amnesiac period was still closed to him.
What memories he had of that time came to him with a superficial accuracy that he sensed was unreliable. His mind told him stories, gave him anecdotes and sequences that had a shallow plausibility. The analogy he made for it was a film that had been edited, so that narrative continuity was already there.
The rest of his memories, his old life, were like uncut rushes, unsorted, unassembled, hanging around in the can of his mind for order to be edited into them.
He now recognized that his memories of France were mostly false, projected onto his mind from some quirk of the unconscious. He knew he had not been to France—or not, at least, at the time he remembered. Some parts of the story were true: he had met Sue, there was the business with Niall, there had been a holiday together, he had been filming in Central America, there had been a final row.
But then there was Sue’s account of their past together, and here the real gap appeared.
While she indirectly confirmed his edited memories, her story was something he had only heard. He could accept what she said in the way he might read and accept something in a book or a newspaper. She obviously believed that once she told her story some buried unconscious memory would be triggered, and his real memories of the same incidents would leap into his mind. He had wanted to believe that too, and throughout had waited for something he could identify, a resonant image, some moment of psychological conviction opening the way to the rest. It had not come. Her story remained a story, and it was as yet remote from him.
If anything, it had deepened the problem of his forgotten period. She had in a sense shown him another edited film, ready-made, complete in itself.
The muddle of reality still eluded him.
His present misgivings, though, centered on two other areas. There was Sue’s emphasis on her claims to invisibility, and her obsessive and destructive relationship with Niall.
Once before in his life Grey had been briefly involved in a triangular situation. Although he had genuinely cared for the woman at the center of that, and had tried not to put pressure on her, the constant indecision, the to-ings and fro-ings of loyalty and his own unavoidable feelings of sexual jealousy had ultimately poisoned the affair. He had sworn afterward never again to get involved with someone leading a double life, yet this was exactly what he appeared to have done with Sue. Something very powerful must have drawn him to her.
Sue said that Niall was no longer bothering her, and that she had not seen him since the day he gave her the copy of The Times. It certainly appeared to be true that there was no one else in her life at the moment.
Niall remained a factor, though.
It was as if she was holding something in reserve about him, as if, should he suddenly reappear, he would again demand a place in her life. Niall had become a subject neither of them raised, and by not being discussed he remained distant but omnipresent.
Invisibility deepened the division.
Grey was a practical man, trained to use eye and hand. His vocation was with visual images, lit and seen and photographed. What he saw he believed in; what he did not see was not there.
Listening to Sue’s account of her life, he thought at first that her endless talk of invisible people was allegorical in some way, a description of an attitude to life. Maybe this was so, but he knew she also meant it literally and physically. She maintained that some people could escape being seen through the failure of others to notice them. That he, Grey himself, was of the same condition was frankly incredible to him.
Yet Sue’s account of this was that she had awakened him to it, that she had demonstrated to him the talent he had. Now, she claimed, it was latent in him again, shocked out of him by the assault of his injuries. If he remembered how, she said, he would rediscover it.
Listening to her, the doubts she frequently expressed, the talk of madness and delusion, he wondered if the explanation lay there. The sheer obsession of Sue’s insistence was itself close to delusion—a mad jargon, the desperation of persistent but illogical belief.
His was the sort of mind that demanded proof, and, failing that, evidence. It seemed to him that it would be simple to settle the matter one way or another, but Sue was maddeningly imprecise. Invisible people were there, they could be seen, but unless you knew how to see they would not be noticed.
They went out one day to Kensington High Street, mingling with the crowds of shoppers on a busy afternoon. Sue pointed out a number of people, claiming that they were invisibles. Sometimes Grey could see who she meant, sometimes he could not. He photographed them all. The results were inconclusive: when the prints came back from the processor, the crowds were just crowds, and he and Sue could only argue whether this person had been visible at the time, or that couple was invisible.
“Make yourself invisible,” Grey said. “Do it now, while I watch.”
“I can’t.”
“But you said you could.”
“It’s different now. It’s not easy for me anymore.”
“You can still do it, though.”
“Yes, but you know how to see me.”
Nevertheless, she tried. After much frowning and concentration she declared herself to be invisible, but as far as Grey was concerned she was still there, noticed in the room. She accused him of disbelieving her, but it was not as straightforward as that. He believed, for instance, in the fact of her appearance.
She had always attracted him with the neutrality of the way she looked. Everything about her was plain: her skin was fair, her hair was light brown, her eyes were hazel, her features were regular, her figure was slim. She was of average height, and her clothes sat naturally on her body. When she moved, she did so quietly. Her voice was pleasant but unremarkable. A disinterested glance at her might dismiss her as dull and mousy, but to Grey, interested in her and involved with her, she was unusually attractive. What he perceived in her was hidden by the plainness of the surface; something electric came from within. When they were together he was always wanting to touch her. He liked the way her face changed when she smiled, or was preoccupied. When they made love he felt that their bodies blended without touching, an imprecise sensation that he experienced every time but which he could never define. It was as if she were a complement to him, someone who responded to his immediate needs.
She claimed that by disbelieving her invisibility he was rejecting everything she had told him, but in fact this concealed quality of her intrigued him.
She was not invisible to him, or not in any way he understood the word, but she was for all that an inexact person. This did persuade him that her claims had an inner truth, and he believed he was a long way from rejecting her.
Even so, the trip to Liverpool gave him the opportunity to reflect.
II
The sea could always be felt in Liverpool; the great riverfront with the view across to Birkenhead, the glimpse of the Irish Sea to the west, the self-confident architecture of the Victorian shipping offices, the smell of water on the gusting wind. Away from the center, but not far away, where the buildings were meaner and the streets were narrower, the sea evidenced itself differently: a grim redlight district of slum houses, empty warehouses where bonded goods had once been stored, pubs with maritime names, cleared areas fronted with advertising posters selling Jamaican rum and airlines to America.