We are all fictions—you, Susan, to a lesser extent myself. You are a fiction in the special sense of having been a different voice, which I used to speak for me. I have made you, Grey. You disbelieve in me, but not as much as I disbelieve in you. You are real enough in your own life, but when you impinged on mine I took you and used you. You are “real” only so far as it pleases me to make you seem “real,” and from the day you met Susan you gave me no pleasure.
Why should you resist this? We all make fictions. Not one of us is what we seem. We rearrange our memories to suit our present understanding of ourselves, not to account accurately for the past. When we meet other people we try to project an image of ourselves that will please or influence them in some way. When we fall in love we blind ourselves to what we do not wish to see.
The urge to rewrite ourselves as real-seeming fictions is present in us alclass="underline" in the glamour of our wishes we hope that our real selves will not become visible.
This is all I have done. You are not you, but how I have made you seem to be. Susan is not Sue. I am not Niall, but Niall is a version of myself; once again I have no name. I am only I.
So you are denied the conclusion you thought you wanted. None of this tells you what you think you want to know, but I owe you no explanations. Susan has already told you the truth and you can and should believe her, even though I have taken her words and written them down myself. The facts in this are hers, but the fictions are mine.
What remains for you of Susan? Because I have frozen you in mid-action, and you cannot even turn your head, you will not see her as we leave. You will feel no bitterness at losing her—you have already reached your own decision about her. But I will ensure that you never see her again, because that much is in my power.
I could leave you here, stuck forever in this moment, a fiction abandoned without an ending … but that would not be right. Your own real life continues, and it is time I released you to that. Your life will now be tidy, your body will heal, matters will improve. I doubt you will every know why. You will forget, induce your own negative hallucination. You are no stranger to this, because for you forgetting is a way of failing to see.
X
The summer was hot that year, and with the breaking of the warm weather came the prospect of a full-time job for Richard Grey. His friend at the BBC put him in touch with the head of films at Ealing, the place where his film career had begun, and after an interview he was told that a staff job would be his from the first week in September.
Given the long summer to fill, Grey was stricken with his customary restlessness. He did a freelance camera job in Malta, but the trip was a short one and afterward he was more at a loose end than before. Cash compensation at last came through: it was less than he had expected, but more than enough to cover his immediate needs. Although he was no longer in pain and could use his hip normally, Grey bought a new car, one with automatic transmission. The old one had begun giving him trouble, starting with the annoyance of a flat battery. When Alexandra returned from Exeter to complete her dissertation, he waited around for a week or two, then suggested a holiday.
They took the new car across to France, driving slowly from place to place, following whim and a certain curiosity of memory. They visited Paris, Lyons, Grenoble, then drove south to the Riviera. It was still early in the summer, and the later crowds had not yet arrived. Grey found Alexandra’s company delightful, even though she was several years younger than he was. They never spoke of the past, or how they had met, or of anything that was not their immediate world of the holiday and each other. They spent a long time in the south, sunbathing, swimming, visiting museums and landmarks, touring around to see the sights. They visited SaintTropez only briefly, but here Grey came across a little shop that sold reproduction postcards. There was one he particularly liked: a photograph of the harbor while it was still used for fishing. He bought a copy of it for Sue. “Wish you were here,” he wrote, in a studiedly elaborate handwriting, and he signed it with an X.